The Rise of Nationalism in Europe

This is the first chapter of Section I, Events and Processes, in India and the Contemporary World – II. NCERT opens with a print by the French artist Frédéric Sorrieu (1848) and asks what a nation-state is: unlike older states, where a central power ruled a defined territory, a nation-state is one in which the majority of citizens, not only rulers, develop a sense of common identity and shared history. That commonness, NCERT stresses, ‘did not exist from time immemorial’ — it was forged by leaders and ordinary people. The chapter then follows six steps: the French Revolution; the making of nationalism (classes, liberalism, conservatism, revolutionaries); the age of revolutions, 1830–48; the making of Germany and Italy (and the ‘strange case’ of Britain); visual symbols of the nation; and the turn from nationalism to imperialism.

• Links within this book: Chapter 2, Nationalism in India, shows how anti-colonial nationalism developed its own forms (NCERT ends this chapter with that point); Chapters 3–5 (global world, industrialisation, print culture) explain the economic and print changes behind nationalism. Class 9's The French Revolution is the background NCERT keeps recalling.
• Live pages to pair with: Themes in World History — the chapters on the Industrial Revolution and on paths to modernisation (kehs106 and neighbours); Indian national movement chapters in Themes in Indian History III (lehs303 on Gandhi); Political Theory on nationalism and citizenship.
• UPSC: GS1's world-history syllabus covers the 18th–20th centuries, including the French Revolution, the redrawal of national boundaries and their effects on society. Mains asked about the French Revolution's enduring relevance (2025). Prelims has touched this chapter only indirectly — e.g. the Indian leader who wrote biographies of Mazzini and Garibaldi (2018, Lala Lajpat Rai, linked with the national-movement pages). Essay and GS4 draw on the ideas of nation, liberty and citizenship.

• A nation-state: most citizens, not only rulers, share an identity and history — forged through struggle, not timeless. Renan (1882): a nation is ‘a daily plebiscite’.
• French Revolution (1789): sovereignty to citizens; la patrie, le citoyen, tricolour, National Assembly, uniform laws, Parisian French. Napoleonic Code (1804): no birth privilege, equality before law, property rights.
• Liberal nationalism: constitution, government by consent, free markets (Zollverein, 1834) — but votes only for propertied men. Conservatism after Vienna (1815): restore monarchies, censor dissent.
• 1830–48: July Revolution, Belgium, Greece (independent 1832); Romanticism — Herder's volksgeist, the Grimms, Polish language; hunger revolts. 1848: Frankfurt parliament fails; women excluded.
• Germany: Prussia, Bismarck, three wars → Empire proclaimed at Versailles, 18 January 1871. Italy: Sardinia-Piedmont, Cavour, Garibaldi → kingdom 1861, Rome 1870. Britain: 1688, 1707, 1801.
• Allegories Marianne and Germania. After 1871 nationalism turns narrow and imperialist; the Balkans explode → 1914; anti-colonial nationalisms follow their own paths.

The first clear expression of nationalism came with the French Revolution of 1789. France was already a territorial state under an absolute monarch; the Revolution transferred sovereignty from the monarchy to the body of French citizens, proclaiming that the people would constitute the nation. To create a collective identity the revolutionaries promoted the ideas of la patrie (fatherland) and le citoyen (citizen) — a united community with equal rights under a constitution; replaced the royal standard with the tricolour; renamed the elected Estates General the National Assembly; composed hymns, took oaths and commemorated martyrs in the nation's name; built a centralised administration with uniform laws; abolished internal customs duties and adopted uniform weights and measures; and discouraged dialects in favour of French as spoken and written in Paris. They also declared it France's mission to liberate Europe's peoples from despotism. Students and middle-class people abroad set up Jacobin clubs, preparing the way for French armies in Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and much of Italy in the 1790s.

Napoleon, NCERT says, destroyed democracy in France by returning to monarchy, yet incorporated revolutionary principles in administration to make it more rational and efficient. His Civil Code of 1804 (the Napoleonic Code) ended privileges based on birth, established equality before the law and secured the right to property; it was exported to French-controlled regions. In the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany he simplified administrative divisions, abolished feudalism and freed peasants from serfdom and manorial dues; guild restrictions went; transport and communications improved. Businessmen saw that uniform laws, weights and measures and a common currency would help trade. But reactions were mixed: welcomed at first as ‘harbingers of liberty’ (Holland, Switzerland, Brussels, Mainz, Milan, Warsaw), the French were soon resented, as administrative reform did not bring political freedom — and came with higher taxes, censorship and forced conscription.

In mid-18th-century Europe there were no ‘nation-states’. What became Germany, Italy and Switzerland were divided into kingdoms, duchies and cantons; Eastern and Central Europe were ruled by autocratic monarchies over diverse peoples who did not share a language or identity. The Habsburg Empire was a patchwork: the Alpine regions (Tyrol, Austria, Sudetenland), Bohemia with a German-speaking aristocracy, the Italian-speaking provinces of Lombardy and Venetia, Hungary (half Magyar-speaking), Galicia with a Polish-speaking aristocracy, and subject peasant peoples — Bohemians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Roumans. The only bond was allegiance to the emperor.

Socially, a small landed aristocracy dominated, united across regions by a way of life, French as the language of diplomacy and high society, and marriage ties; most people were peasants — tenants and small owners in the West, serfs on vast estates in the East. Industrialisation (England from the later 18th century; France and parts of Germany in the 19th) created towns, commercial classes, a working class and middle classes of industrialists, businessmen and professionals. Among the educated, liberal middle classes, national unity and the end of aristocratic privilege became popular ideas.

Liberalism (from liber, free) meant, for them, individual freedom and equality before the law; politically, government by consent, the end of autocracy and clerical privilege, a constitution and representative parliament; and the inviolability of private property. It did not mean universal suffrage: revolutionary France gave the vote to property-owning men (all adult men only briefly under the Jacobins); the Napoleonic Code restored limited suffrage and made women legal minors under fathers and husbands. Economically, liberalism meant free markets. In the German lands, Napoleon's measures had produced a confederation of 39 states, each with its own currency and weights: a merchant going from Hamburg to Nuremberg in 1833 crossed 11 customs barriers, paying about 5 per cent at each, and even the cloth measure, the elle, varied from town to town. In 1834 a customs union, the Zollverein, formed at Prussia's initiative and joined by most German states, abolished tariff barriers and reduced currencies from over thirty to two; railways added mobility. Economic nationalism strengthened national feeling.

After Napoleon's defeat, European governments were driven by conservatism: monarchy, the Church, social hierarchies, property and the family should be preserved. Most conservatives, NCERT notes, did not want to return to pre-revolutionary society: they saw that modernisation — a modern army, efficient bureaucracy, dynamic economy, the end of feudalism and serfdom — could strengthen autocratic monarchies. In 1815 Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria met at Vienna, hosted by the Austrian chancellor Metternich, and drew up the Treaty of Vienna to undo most Napoleonic changes: the Bourbons were restored in France, which lost its annexations; states were set up on France's borders — the kingdom of the Netherlands (including Belgium) in the north, and Genoa added to Piedmont in the south; Prussia gained western territories and part of Saxony; Austria got northern Italy; Russia part of Poland; the German confederation of 39 states was left in place. The aim was to restore monarchies and a conservative order. These regimes were autocratic, intolerant of dissent, and imposed censorship on newspapers, books, plays and songs; liberal-nationalists made freedom of the press a major demand.

Fear of repression drove liberal-nationalists underground into secret societies; to be revolutionary meant opposing the monarchies of 1815 and fighting for liberty — usually through creating nation-states. Giuseppe Mazzini, born in Genoa in 1805, joined the secret society of the Carbonari; exiled in 1831 at 26 for attempting a revolution in Liguria, he founded Young Italy in Marseilles and Young Europe in Berne, with members from Poland, France, Italy and the German states. He believed God intended nations to be the natural units of mankind, so Italy must become a single unified republic within an alliance of nations. Secret societies on his model spread to Germany, France, Switzerland and Poland. Metternich called him ‘the most dangerous enemy of our social order’.

Liberalism and nationalism became associated with revolution in the Italian and German states, the Ottoman provinces, Ireland and Poland, led by the educated middle-class elite — professors, schoolteachers, clerks and the commercial classes. The first upheaval was in France in July 1830: the restored Bourbons were overthrown and a constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe installed. ‘When France sneezes,’ Metternich remarked, ‘the rest of Europe catches cold’: the July Revolution sparked an uprising in Brussels and Belgium broke away from the Netherlands. The Greek war of independence (from 1821) mobilised educated Europeans: Greece had been Ottoman since the 15th century; Greeks in exile and West Europeans who admired ancient Greece — ‘the cradle of European civilisation’ — supported a struggle framed against a Muslim empire. The poet Lord Byron raised funds, went to fight and died of fever in 1824. The Treaty of Constantinople (1832) recognised Greece as independent.

Culture mattered as much as war. Romanticism criticised the glorification of reason and science, valuing emotion, intuition and mystical feeling, and sought a shared cultural past as the basis of the nation. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) held that true German culture lay among the common people — das volk — and that folk songs, poetry and dances expressed the national spirit (volksgeist), so collecting them was nation-building. Vernacular language and folklore also carried the nationalist message to largely illiterate audiences — notably in Poland, partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria at the end of the 18th century. Karol Kurpinski made the polonaise and mazurka into national symbols through opera and music; after Russian occupation forced Russian into schools and an armed rebellion was crushed (1831), Polish clergy used Polish in church and religious teaching — many were jailed or sent to Siberia. Using Polish became a symbol of resistance.

The 1830s were years of great hardship. Population soared; there were more job-seekers than jobs; rural migrants crowded into city slums; small producers, especially in textiles made at home or in small workshops, faced cheap machine-made imports from England; where aristocrats still ruled, peasants bore feudal dues. Rising food prices or a bad harvest brought widespread pauperism. In 1848 food shortages and unemployment brought Parisians onto the streets; barricades went up and Louis Philippe fled. A National Assembly proclaimed a Republic, gave the vote to all adult men over 21, guaranteed the right to work and set up national workshops. Earlier, NCERT recounts, Silesian weavers had revolted against contractors who slashed payments for finished cloth.

Alongside the revolts of the poor, a revolution of the educated middle classes was under way. In France, February 1848 brought the king's abdication and a republic based on universal male suffrage. Where nation-states did not yet exist — Germany, Italy, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire — liberal men and women combined demands for constitutionalism with national unification, using popular unrest to demand a nation-state on parliamentary principles: a constitution, freedom of the press and freedom of association. In the German lands, political associations of professionals, businessmen and prosperous artisans met in Frankfurt and voted for an all-German National Assembly. On 18 May 1848, 831 elected representatives marched to the Frankfurt parliament in the Church of St Paul. They drafted a constitution for a German nation headed by a monarchy subject to parliament, and offered the crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia — who rejected it and joined other monarchs against the assembly. As aristocratic and military opposition grew, the parliament's social base eroded: dominated by the middle classes, it resisted workers' and artisans' demands and lost their support. Troops finally forced it to disband.

Women's political rights divided the liberal movement, though women had formed associations, founded newspapers and joined meetings and demonstrations. They were denied the vote in the Assembly elections and admitted to the Frankfurt parliament only as observers in the visitors' gallery. Though conservatives suppressed the liberal movements of 1848, they could not restore the old order: monarchs saw that cycles of revolution and repression could only end through concessions. After 1848 the autocracies of Central and Eastern Europe introduced changes the West had made before 1815: serfdom and bonded labour were abolished in the Habsburg lands and Russia, and the Habsburgs granted more autonomy to the Hungarians in 1867.

After 1848 nationalism moved away from democracy and revolution; conservatives mobilised it to promote state power. In Germany the liberal initiative of 1848 was repressed by the monarchy and military, backed by Prussia's landowners, the Junkers. Prussia then led unification under its chief minister Otto von Bismarck, using the Prussian army and bureaucracy: three wars over seven years — with Denmark, Austria and France — ended in Prussian victory. On the bitterly cold morning of 18 January 1871, princes, army officers and ministers gathered in the unheated Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to proclaim the German Empire under Kaiser William I of Prussia. The new state stressed modernising currency, banking, law and the courts; Prussian practices became the model.

Italy too was fragmented. In the mid-19th century it was divided into seven states, of which only Sardinia-Piedmont had an Italian princely house; the north was under the Austrian Habsburgs, the centre under the Pope, the south under Bourbon kings; even the language varied by region. After Mazzini's uprisings failed in 1831 and 1848, the task fell to Sardinia-Piedmont's King Victor Emmanuel II, through war; for its ruling elite, unity promised economic development and political dominance. Its chief minister Cavour — ‘neither a revolutionary nor a democrat’, who spoke French better than Italian — arranged an alliance with France, and Sardinia-Piedmont defeated Austria in 1859. Armed volunteers under Giuseppe Garibaldi marched into the south in 1860, winning peasant support to drive out the Bourbon rulers of the Two Sicilies. In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of united Italy. Yet many Italians, largely illiterate, knew nothing of liberal nationalism: peasants in the south who had backed Garibaldi thought ‘La Talia’ was Victor Emmanuel's wife.

Britain, some scholars argue, is the model nation-state — but it was made through a long process, not an upheaval. Before the 18th century there was no British nation: people were English, Welsh, Scots or Irish. As England grew in wealth and power, its parliament — which had seized power from the monarchy in 1688 — forged a nation-state with England at the centre. The Act of Union (1707) with Scotland created the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’, in effect letting England impose its influence; Scotland's culture and institutions were suppressed — Catholic Highland clans were repressed, forbidden their Gaelic language and national dress, and many driven out. In Ireland, divided between Catholics and Protestants, England backed Protestant dominance; after Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen failed (1798), Ireland was forcibly incorporated into the UK in 1801. A ‘British nation’ was propagated through English culture: the Union Jack, the anthem, the English language — older nations survived as subordinate partners.

A ruler can be shown in a portrait; a nation needs personification. In the 18th and 19th centuries artists portrayed nations as female figures that stood for no real woman but gave the abstract nation a concrete form — an allegory. During the French Revolution, female allegories stood for Liberty (red cap, broken chain), Justice (blindfolded, with scales) and the Republic. In France the nation was christened Marianne, a popular Christian name underlining a people's nation; her attributes — red cap, tricolour, cockade — came from Liberty and the Republic. Statues of her stood in public squares, and her image appeared on coins and stamps, so that people would identify with the national symbol. Germania became the German allegory, wearing a crown of oak leaves, since the German oak stands for heroism.

By the last quarter of the 19th century nationalism lost its idealistic liberal-democratic spirit and became a narrow creed with limited ends; nationalist groups grew intolerant and ready for war, and the great powers manipulated subject peoples' aspirations for their own imperialist aims. The most serious tension after 1871 was the Balkans — a region of geographical and ethnic variety (modern Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro) whose inhabitants were broadly known as Slavs, largely under Ottoman control. Romantic nationalism and Ottoman disintegration made the region explosive: the empire's reforms failed, and its European subject nationalities broke away one by one, using history to claim they had once been independent and were winning back ‘long-lost independence’. The Balkan states were jealous of one another and each wanted more territory; and the region became the scene of big-power rivalry over trade, colonies and naval and military might — Russia, Germany, England and Austria-Hungary each sought to counter the others. The result was a series of wars and finally the First World War.

Nationalism aligned with imperialism ‘led Europe to disaster in 1914’. Meanwhile many colonised countries began to oppose imperial domination. Their anti-imperial movements were nationalist — struggling for independent nation-states, inspired by a collective unity forged in confrontation with imperialism. NCERT stresses that European nationalism was nowhere simply replicated: each people developed its own variety; but the idea that societies should be organised as nation-states came to be accepted as natural and universal.

NCERT gives one classic answer in a source box. In an 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, published as ‘What is a Nation?’, the French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823–92) rejected the idea that a nation is formed by a common language, race, religion or territory. A nation, he argued, is the culmination of a long past of endeavour and sacrifice — a shared heroic past — plus a common will in the present to live together and do great deeds: a ‘large-scale solidarity’ whose existence is ‘a daily plebiscite’. A nation has no real interest in holding a province against its inhabitants' will; nations are a necessity, a guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had one law and one master. This fits NCERT's own claim that nations are forged, not timeless.

The chapter's side questions in order. Short outlines follow.

‘Write in brief’ (five questions, the first with five parts) and ‘Discuss’ (five questions), page 28.

Numbers

One-liners

• In a nation-state, most citizens — not only rulers — share an identity and history.
• National commonness was forged through struggle, not inherited from time immemorial.
• The French Revolution of 1789 was the first clear expression of nationalism.
• The Napoleonic Code ended birth privileges and established equality before law.
• Liberalism meant equality before law, not universal suffrage.
• The Zollverein of 1834 bound the German states economically.
• The Vienna settlement of 1815 restored monarchies and built a conservative order.
• Mazzini wanted Italy as a unified republic; it became a kingdom.
• Romantics located the nation's spirit in the volk — folk songs, tales and language.
• In 1848 the liberals' Frankfurt parliament failed, and women were kept in the gallery.
• After 1848, conservatives harnessed nationalism to state power.
• Germany was unified by Prussia under Bismarck through three wars.
• Britain became a nation-state through a long English-dominated process.
• Marianne and Germania were allegories that gave the nation a face.
• After 1871, nationalism allied with imperialism made the Balkans explosive.

Traps to avoid

• The German Confederation of 39 states was organised by the Congress of Vienna (1815); Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine (1806).
• Metternich was a prince and Austrian chancellor, not a 'duke'.
• Young Europe was founded in Berne in 1834 (Fig. 7 caption: 1833); Young Italy in Marseilles in 1831.
• The Silesian weavers' revolt is usually dated June 1844 (NCERT: 1845).
• The Frankfurt National Assembly opened on 18 May 1848; the March 1848 meeting was the pre-parliament.
• Bismarck's wars: Denmark 1864, Austria 1866, France 1870–71 — NCERT's list is not in order.
• Southern Italy was ruled by the Bourbons of the Two Sicilies, a branch of the Spanish Bourbons — not by Spain.
• Italy: kingdom 1861; Rome joined only in 1870. Germany: Empire 18 January 1871, proclaimed at Versailles, not Berlin.
• Mazzini (republican idealist), Cavour (diplomat-minister), Garibaldi (volunteer Red Shirts), Victor Emmanuel II (king) — don't swap roles.
• Marianne = France (red cap, tricolour, cockade); Germania = Germany (oak-leaf crown).
• Renan: a nation is not language, race, religion or territory but a 'daily plebiscite'.
• Napoleon's Italian campaign began in 1796 (NCERT's box: 1797).

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Pairs and dates: Mazzini–Young Italy/Young Europe; Cavour–Sardinia-Piedmont; Garibaldi–Red Shirts/Thousand (1860); Bismarck–Prussia, Versailles (1871); Metternich–Vienna (1815); Herder–volksgeist; Grimms–folktales; Renan–‘daily plebiscite’; Zollverein (1834); Greece (1832); Act of Union (1707). Indian links are the likelier Prelims format — e.g. 2018 asked who wrote biographies of Mazzini and Garibaldi (Lala Lajpat Rai; linked on the national-movement pages).
• Use the trap list: Vienna versus Napoleon on the German confederation, the 1844 Silesian revolt, 18 May 1848, and the order of Bismarck's wars are the details most often mis-stated.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 world history: the French Revolution's enduring relevance (2025) — use the idea of the nation (sovereignty of citizens), equality before law (Napoleonic Code), liberal rights and their limits (suffrage, women), and its export across Europe and later to anti-colonial movements; balance with the costs (conquest, conscription, narrowed franchise). ‘Redrawal of national boundaries’: unification of Germany and Italy from above, the Balkans and the road to 1914.
• Frames for answers and essays: liberal versus conservative nationalism; nationalism from below (Romantic culture, popular revolt) versus from above (Bismarck, Cavour); inclusion and exclusion (women, minorities, Scots and Irish); the debate on what a nation is (Renan, Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Smith); and NCERT's point that anti-colonial nationalisms were never mere copies. Attribute every view.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.