This pamphlet from 1789 depicts how Enlightenment era ideas and tropes connected with the nation found their way into French political culture and were later articulated in the highly charged atmosphere of the Revolution. As tracts such as the above indicate, the ideas and meanings circulating in contemporary scholarly and lexicographical works were well represented in the intense constitutional debates of the day, the nation being rendered at some points as a linguistic entity and ‘moral’ being, capable of both debasement and regeneration, and at others in its less esoteric guise as a body of people governed by the same laws. Some extended this later point to further assert, following ideas present again in writings of earlier vintage, that the nation was not only a body of people subject to the same laws – it was the very source of the power to make laws and the arbiter of their rectitude. By declaring therefore in his famous manifesto that the ‘third estate’ or commoners were ‘the nation,’ Abbé Sieyès was making a still larger statement on the nature of sovereignty.

The second aim of this book has been to explore questions surrounding the status of these ideas in subsequent years and especially the extent to which they were capable of inspiring concerted, extra-legal challenges to the Restoration status quo. In doing so, there is the danger, to some degree unavoidable, that by focusing on national aspects of the rhetoric and outbursts of discontent expressed during the times one tends to inflate their standing and overdetermine the outcome.

The words above are taken from a work by the Hungarian statesman Jozsef Eötvös (1813-1871) published in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. Eötvös alludes to the novelty of the national ‘aspirations’ declared in the course of these and earlier upheavals, their diverse forms, and his difficulty in satisfactorily explaining the cause or causes of their relatively sudden appearance. Many of his contemporaries, including those with strong national convictions of their own, were similarly perplexed. As Adamantios Korais (1748-1833) wrote when trying to account for the rise of Greek national sentiment in his lifetime, ‘We see such a succession of cause and effect, such a concourse of varying circumstances, and yet all conspiring toward the same end, that it is quite impossible for me to assign to each its proper place in the sequence of events.’

The difficulties of these earlier figures may provide some consolation for modern researchers when struggling themselves to reconstruct how, and again in a rather short space of time, the nation became an object of major importance in questions of collective identity and power. So great in fact have been the changes rendered to the political geography of Europe in the intervening years that its modern history may simply be told, according to some, as the ‘history of nationalism.’ Still, analytical problems, not unlike those articulated by the figures mentioned above, continue to resonate in contemporary debates. These same dilemmas press heavily on the present work, which represents yet another attempt to lend some coherence to the story while avoiding the teleological lapses or faulty ‘methodological’ dispositions cited in connection with previous efforts.

In a well-known paper delivered at a conference commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of the 1848 revolutions, Ernest Labrousse argued that if the tempests of the period beginning in 1789 had ‘distant origins,’ each was immediately preceded by the sudden onset of ‘economic tensions.’ This was furthermore the ‘only force powerful enough’ for revolutions of the type 1789, 1830 and 1848, which he clarified as spontaneous, mass uprisings stemming from social grievances of an ‘endogenous’ nature. All were thus the product to a considerable degree of ‘hazard’ or chance, and ‘appeared to their contemporaries comme des révolutionssurprises.’ Labrousse's paper elicited a lively response from his listeners, some of whom pointed out that the hardships cited by the author were present elsewhere, and yet, did not have the same ‘explosive’ consequences. Labrousse's ruminations on the role and primacy of chance seemed in this case to be at odds with the conspicuous frequency of revolution in France, leading another to ask whether these results might be traced more precisely to ‘psychological’ factors (e.g., that the French people had come to regard revolution as a ‘phénomène normal’). Although Labrousse did not address this question directly in his essay, he believed that France's susceptibility to revolution in 1789, 1830 and 1848 accrued instead from the fact that certain economic and social imbalances persisted over the period and were even augmented by the emergence of new insecurities linked to the spread of industrialization.

The historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1815-1891) is best known for his multivolume History of the Hellenic Nation from Ancient Times to the Present (1860-1874). As the title of this work and the excerpt above suggest, the author sought to portray the Greek nation as a community of descent whose genetic continuity had remained largely unbroken over time. Although Paparrigopoulos did not deny that some mixing of ‘races’ had taken place throughout the eastern Mediterranean since antiquity, it was clear to him that in those areas where the Greek language prevailed, the Hellenes had absorbed rather than been absorbed by the others. The arguments of the Austrian philologist Jakob Fallmerayer (1790-1861) notwithstanding, the modern Greeks were exactly who they claimed themselves to be: the descendants of that storied race whose wisdom and works remained among the most sacred possessions of European civilization. If such a connection appeared doubtful, even ridiculous, given the state of material and moral destitution that long reigned over the lands once home to such a people, Paparrigopoulos would bid his readers to think again. Indeed, the regeneration of Greece proved, as Korais declared in his Mémoire sur l’état actuel de la civilisation dans la Grèce (1803), ‘that if unhappy circumstances can devastate the most fertile soil […] they cannot deprive it of its natural fecundity; a light rain and a little cultivation will suffice for all the riches which once covered it to germinate anew.’

In his account of how ‘the nation’ was represented in eighteenth-century thought, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that ‘the primary meaning’ of the term ‘and the one most frequently ventilated in the literature, was political.’ This conception was notably bereft, he continued, of those attributes of nation-ness ‘so hotly debated by the nineteenth-century theorists, such as ethnicity, common language, religion, territory and common historical memories.’ Hobsbawm's conception of the Enlightenment nation – with its corollary projection of a Western, civic original, and an Eastern, ethno-linguistic, successor – persists, though not without its critics. Many, such as Maria Todorova, have challenged the ‘dichotomy’ posed in such accounts; a product, she and others argue, of a surfeit of theoretical works over more detailed accounts of contemporary understandings and context. As these authors suggest, there remains a surprising shortage of empirical works documenting how ‘the nation’ was actually portrayed in eighteenth-century culture and thought.

In addition therefore to examining the political connotations of the term highlighted by Hobsbawm, the following pages reveal how the nation was also commonly employed to distinguish bodies of people on the basis of descent, culture and language: The language of a given nation was to be sure not only used to determine its ‘racial’ ancestry but was further held to convey certain truths about its ‘character’ and state of ‘progress.’

The words of the Serbian monk and educator Dimitrije Obradović (1743?-1811) echo the sentiments of other scholars and churchmen from Southeastern Europe whose appeals for new schools and books in the ‘popular language’ were at least partly inspired by the goal of preserving the integrity of Orthodox practice. Looming throughout and mingling with the otherwise hopeful messages found in these texts are darker references to the sad plight of peoples condemned to lives of poverty and superstition or left indefinitely to wander, in the words of a contemporary Greek cleric, in the ‘labyrinth of illiteracy and barbarism.’ Such documents help further to illustrate the variety of ways in which Enlightenment era actors portrayed the instrumentality of their educational initiatives and still larger quests for ‘national regeneration’; a cause which, as Obradović infers, was not free of controversy but often capable of arousing intense conflicts and ‘culture wars’ among various factions of patriots who each believed themselves best-placed to judge of the nation's true needs and interests.

The present chapter examines the revolutions that broke out in the second decade of the Restoration. As indicated by the comments of Tsar Nicholas I above, the major sites of conflict in this latest wave of unrest included Belgium, France, Switzerland, parts of Italy and Germany, and finally Poland. As might be expected, such an array of cases, virtually all of which have been portrayed as having a ‘composite nature,’ presents problems of typology and interpretation not unlike those encountered in the previous chapter. On one hand, the liberal dimension of these revolutions was prominent, in the sense that many were preceded by clashes of interest in which demands for civil liberties and representation were well-sounded and employed later as the rallying point for popular mobilization. Historiographical perspectives also place emphasis on the role of social grievances connected with the advance of the industrial revolution – a factor of still greater importance in appraisals of 1848. Finally, the revolutions of these years provide many new examples of how by-now familiar doctrines regarding the status and rights of nations figured into contemporary power struggles. As in the case of the revolutions of 1820, the elasticity of a concept like national sovereignty was of such an order that it could be implicated in a wide range of conflicts – from those of an internal constitutional nature, as in the case of France (and previously Spain) – to others, as in Belgium and Poland, that are more commonly associated with bids for secession and autonomy.