Ritual, symbols, public space, material culture

The world of learning shared what by the mid-century had become an all-pervasive dominance, in all sectors of public life, of nationalist commitment. Love of the fatherland, the celebration of one's nation, was proclaimed and practised everywhere as a fundamental precept in public morality.

In its rituals and ceremonies, the state itself cultivated a nostalgic pomp and circumstance, which in some cases dated back to the feudal-cum-religious protocol of the pious Middle Ages, and which in other cases was patently contrived – with many inbetween shades. The papacy in the Vatican was particularly tenacious in its maintenance of ancient forms and rites (which need not surprise us, since that is what churches are for), and in the course of the nineteenth century became more and more stringently opposed to all forms of ‘modern error’; in this opposition against modernity, and in particular against the formation of nation-states based on the idea of selfdetermination, the Popes fostered devotional movements across Europe, including the Marian cult which involved the noteworthy apparitions at Lourdes.

As we have noted, the Restoration King Charles X, in France, actually reinstated the medieval ritual of being anointed at Rheims Cathedral, and he performed the old, quasi-magical rite of touching scrofula patients in the belief that the King's touch could heal this disease. Authentic though these rituals were, they looked odd and anachronistic in the nineteenth-century context.

In many other cases, public ceremony was retrieved from a limbo of semi-oblivion, or even created out of nothing like a fictional ‘might-have-been’. The visit of King George IV to his Scottish capital of Edinburgh in 1822 (already briefly referred to, p. 134) is a good case in point. Under the stage management of Walter Scott, the occasion was used for a celebration of Highland Scottishness and its reconciliation with the modern British monarchy. Tartans, kilt and bagpipes, which had dropped out of fashion and in any case only belonged to the remote moors and glens of the Highlands, now inundated Edinburgh society; leading families were told that, if they wanted to join the social razzmatazz, they ought to retrieve their clannish roots and colours as soon as possible (these were provided by tartan manufacturers in case none were known).