The revolution in people's minds was perhaps the most potent force unleashed in this period, even if we must always stress the relatively small numbers involved. The French Revolution confronted all the East European empires with the spectres of republicanism, popular sovereignty, the overthrow of the existing order and the nation in arms. This in turn provoked a reaction, in that these conservative monarchies abandoned what modest plans they had hitherto envisaged for both political reform and economic modernisation. Concepts such as popular sovereignty and political rights were now associated with red revolution.
The problem for the rulers of Eastern Europe was that reaction was not enough. Not only were their armies not proof against the revolutionary elan of the French Republic, but the ideas that drove the Revolution had been abroad for too long. The revolutionary wars threatened the eastern empires in an obvious territorial sense, but also morally, in that the entire edifice of monarchical absolutism, noble privilege and serfdom was potentially at risk. The impact of this was felt in Eastern Europe for generations.
An essential role in consolidating and deepening the effects of the revolutionary period was played by Napoleon. His wars 'helped expurgate the European system by eliminating many small, but non-viable states'.1 His redrawing of the international map, however ephemeral, created aspirations towards a later unity. Thus, the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine and the Kingdom of Italy is commonly held to have generated later nationalist demands for 'unification'; this example had force elsewhere. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw, while patently a Napoleonic satellite, was nevertheless a partial reconstitution of the Polish state. The Illyrian provinces, briefly carved out of the South Slav territories of the Habsburg Monarchy, were the first experience these peoples had of a unitary government and furnished the kernel for later concepts of 'Yugoslavism'. In the Balkans the fact that such territorial units were created at all served as a powerful incentive to self-help.
Even more unsettling was Napoleon's demonstration of the efficiency of the modern nation-state, with its 'centrally-controlled, hierarchical and uniform administration', regular tax collection, emphasis on legal equality and security of property, and above all its ability to project its power by virtue of a citizen army.2 The contrast with even the most advanced of the enlightened absolutist monarchies of the ancien regime was painful. Throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, the Napoleonic state was very much the template for East European rulers and elites. All saw the centralised, bureaucratic state as the key to modernisation.
Napoleon's opponents were particularly fearful of the appeal of liberal ideas. True, by 'liberal' Napoleon meant 'enlightened' and 'rational', as opposed to our modern usage of the word; in this sense he was heir to the absolutist, not the democratic, strand of the Enlightenment. This may account for the enthusiasm with which in the early years of his reign Alexander I of Russia experimented with projects for enlightened, even constitutional, reform: such limited projects were not, after all, incompatible with autocracy. Yet the rulers of the old Europe rightly mistrusted even the facade of liberalism. Even in Napoleon's time the conviction spread that the rights of man and a constitution and a representative assembly should really mean something, or could be made to do so; in the post-Napoleonic period, liberalism as a political ideology assumed increasing coherence.
The architects of the so-called 'restoration' following the fall of Napoleon were consequently alert to the stirrings of liberalism as a revolutionary, subversive force, however feeble the threat was in reality. As Prince Clemens von Metternich, Austrian chancellor and the self-appointed architect-in-chief of this conservative order, put it, liberal ideas were a sort of 'moral gangrene', issuing from the excessive and 'presumptuous' application of reason and corrupting the body politic.3 Fortunately, in Metternich's view, this malady affected only the middling or 'agitating' classes, since the masses were innately conservative. For Metternich this meant in domestic terms the maintenance of monarchical control and a rigid control of the press and public opinion. In international affairs it implied a balance of power agreed among the great powers and the suppression of any sign of revolution.
This immobile attitude was futile in the long run. First of all the interests of these conservative powers conflicted. Secondly, governments found it impossible to resist availing themselves of the more useful elements of the revolutionary and Napoleonic legacy: centralised administrative control, the codification of laws and an educated populace were all as tempting as ever. Francis I, on visiting the newly regained Dalmatia in 1815 and being told that the excellent roads were French built, famously quipped, 'Four years, I wish they had been here for four centuries.'4 It was an apt, if sublimely unreflective, comment on the irreversible impact of the preceding period.
In the decades following the Congress of Vienna, therefore, it became increasingly apparent that the tide of revolutionary ideas could not be turned back; this was especially true of the range of political values commonly termed liberalism. In the Ottoman Balkans, for instance, by some calculations the most backward region on the continent, the ideas and literature of the Enlightenment had long circulated among the Greek population. Rigas Velestinlis was the most striking exponent of liberal as well as nationalist ideas, publishing in 1797 a bill of rights and a draft constitution for liberated Greece, consciously modelled on the French constitutions of 1793 and 1795. Secret societies dedicated to revolt and independence flourished across the Levant. And when, in 1821, the Greek revolt against the Ottomans began, there was no shortage of learned Greeks who justified the uprising with reference to Rousseau's theory of the general will. The Greek war of independence became a cause celebre in Western Europe and attracted the support of famous 'Philhellenes' like Lord Byron, who died at Mesolongi in 1824, precisely because it was seen as a struggle for basic freedoms and human dignity.
What was true of the Greeks held true for most of the rest of Eastern Europe. Thus, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was endowed by Napoleon with a constitution and legal code, which proclaimed legal equality and personal liberty and abolished serfdom. Although the Napoleonic system was replaced by Russia, the memory of it survived. Some, if not all, Polish patriots began to argue that, until the concept of Polishness was extended to include burghers and peasants as well as nobles, in short became truly popular, there could be no hope of reconstituting a Polish state.
The Polish diaspora, after 1831, was another important factor in spreading subversive ideas. Polish exiles kept turning up in odd corners of Eastern Europe for decades and joined the Hungarian struggle for independence in significant numbers. Most gravitated to Paris, where Czartoryski spent the next 30 years encouraging plans for a confederation of East European peoples which would somehow supplant the Romanov and Habsburg empires. Czartoryski also funded, from his considerable private fortune, a chair in Slavonic literature at the College de France, where in the early 1840s Poland's most acclaimed poet, Adam Mickiewicz, preached a Romantic message of 'a universal war for the freedom of peoples', influencing not only his fellow Poles but also a whole generation of Romanian students.5
One could multiply examples of the spread of ideas in Eastern Europe; the basic point here is the permeability of the divide between Western and Eastern Europe when it comes to ideology. Quite apart from the legacy of 1789 and Napoleon, the power of the example set by France in particular is hard to exaggerate. This was especially strong among Romanians, whose language, like French, is Latin-based. Romanians studied in Paris; some fought on the barricades during the July Revolution of 1830; and one, Ion Bratianu, attempted to assassinate Napoleon III, in 1853, because the latter was not supporting the union of Moldavia and Wallachia more actively. Serbs, Greeks, Poles and others also flocked to Paris, and when, in February 1848, the July Monarchy succumbed to revolution, the news triggered revolution in Hungary, which in turn sparked events in Vienna and elsewhere.
The essential lure was that of westernisation, and from the 1820s an increasing number of East Europeans sought a university education in the West. The first generation of Serbian students to study abroad, for instance, left for Austria and Saxony in 1839; some completed their studies in Paris, although the majority gravitated to Austrian and Prussian universities, as did generations of Bulgarians from as early as the 1840s.6 Once back in their native lands, such men (and some women) as often as not became exponents of political as well as economic modernisation. They founded newspapers, campaigned for constitutions and started to form embryonic parties. Underlying much of their discourse was the perception that Eastern Europe was backward in comparison with Western Europe and, given the onset of industrialisation in the West, was likely to become more so. These first East European liberals might have differed over which should come first, economic development or national liberation, but they agreed that representative institutions, and government by progressive, moderate figures like themselves, were preconditions for either. They were far from being democrats; on the contrary, most liberals in this period were opposed to universal suffrage.
Liberals in Eastern Europe, for all their essential moderation, were seen by their rulers as dangerous subversives. Conservative regimes down to 1848 kept a tight lid on freedom of expression, with the partial exception of Hungary, where the need to reconvene the Diet in 1825 provided a forum for moderate reform proposals. More radical critics of the system, however, paid for their temerity with prison sentences. The revolutions of 1848 were thus a flashpoint, which prompted a whole range of demands for constitutional government, for autonomy, for political rights generally, and once this genie had been released from its bottle, often attracting mass support in the process, it proved extremely difficult to put it back in again. The very fact that, in the Austrian' half of the Habsburg Monarchy, or in Prussia, constituent assemblies were convened represented a momentous development in itself. Despite the suppression of the revolutions, the whole issue of representative government had been raised in such a way that it could never subsequently be ignored.
The most explosive ideological development of this period was undoubtedly the emergence of nationalism among most of the peoples of Eastern Europe. This was a complex process, but in a regional context a number of general observations are in order. The spread of nationalism was limited by three factors. Firstly, in the cases of the Hungarians and Poles, the rhetoric of nationalism was to begin with the preserve of the nobility. Secondly, the extent to which nationalism spread was, with two significant exceptions, dependent on a people's level of socio-economic development; without an educated elite, some peoples' nationalism was slower to emerge than others'. Thirdly, not just literacy but the extent to which a literary language existed was also crucial, given that many East European languages at the start of the nineteenth century still had no agreed alphabet, formal grammar or common dialect for literary usage.
The two exceptions were the Serbs and the Greeks, or rather the non-urban Greeks of the Greek mainland. Among these largely illiterate peasant or pastoral peoples, who were among the first to revolt against the Ottoman Empire, it is clear that much of the impetus for revolt lay in their inferior socio-economic status and in the religious differences between them, as Orthodox Christians, and their Ottoman Muslim overlords. (The same was not true of urban and mercantile Greeks, who were more typical of an emerging nationalist elite.) Both Serbs and non-urban Greeks nevertheless demonstrated a consciousness of themselves as distinct groups, derived in part from the survival of their respective Orthodox churches throughout the Ottoman period. As a result these two groups have been singled out as the exceptions that prove the rule, peoples who developed nationalism without possessing an educated native elite.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period provided a powerful long-term stimulus to nationalism across Europe. The spectacle of the French nation in arms, sweeping the old Europe before it, was an object lesson in the mass-mobilising appeal of nationalism, not least because it was conflated in most people's minds, in this early period, with the concepts of liberty, equality and political rights. Just as individuals were liberated by these principles, it was argued, so too were other nations — and the French Republic made it its business to ensure this. This force of example was felt even in Eastern Europe.
The Poles' response to the French Revolution has already been alluded to. Elsewhere the results were less obvious. Napoleon, invading the Habsburg Monarchy in 1809, issued a 'Manifesto to the Hungarian Nation', drafted by a lifelong admirer of the French Revolution and former Hungarian 'Jacobin'. It fell sadly flat. The Hungarian nobility, having seen off Joseph Il's centralising reforms in 1790 and regarding the French influence as dangerously subversive of the social order, rallied around the Habsburgs instead. In the Illyrian provinces, the evidence suggests a negative rather than positive reaction to the French. Among German speakers in the Habsburg Monarchy, as in Prussia, there was certainly something of a reactive nationalism produced by hostility to the French, which the Habsburg government in 1809 tried to whip up, with indifferent success. But in societies where the overwhelming majority of the population were peasants and illiterate, it was unlikely that the immediate response to the French example would be widespread.
The real effect could be discerned only after some decades, and here the work of the 'awakeners' in each society was crucial. Herder's thinking in this respect was the starting point for many, in that it stressed the centrality of language as the 'soul' of the nation and the importance of recording and studying popular culture as an artefact of the nation's history. Herder particularly singled out the Slavonic peoples as peaceful and industrious and, as a result of these virtues, likely to dominate the region. Equally notorious was Herder's warning to the Hungarians that they risked extinction as a people if they allowed themselves to be Germanised or failed to preserve their uniqueness in a sea of other nationalities.
The national 'awakenings' can best be seen as taking place in two main phases. In the first phase were those peoples whose intellectuals had begun this process in the eighteenth century and continued it into the nineteenth; this includes the Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and Greeks. The second phase includes peoples such as the Slovaks, Serbs, Croats and Romanians, for whom this process got under way mainly in the early nineteenth century. The problem facing most of the peoples of the second wave of awakenings was that the main vehicle for national consciousness, their language, was spoken largely by illiterate peasants and was hence uncodified.7
A preoccupation with the history, real or imagined, of the nation and its language was characteristic of national revivals across Eastern Europe. Much of the literary and scholarly output among the Serbs, Slovaks, Czechs and others was focused on the collection of folk tales, epic poetry, historical records and any other evidence that reinforced the message that one's nation had a long and venerable pedigree. Often this involved claims, some of them spurious, that one's own nation had settled in its 'homeland' before another or, better still, had always been there. This sort of dispute was to bedevil relations between Czechs and Germans, for instance, or between Serbs and Croats, or Serbs and Albanians, for generations. History became a weapon on the nationality front, with German and Hungarian nationalists claiming
Precedence and superiority, on the basis that they at least had a history and a culture, whereas largely peasant nationalities were supposedly 'unhistorical', without culture and hence identity.
With linguistic and literary legitimisation, and with historicisation, came politicisation and conflict. In the case of the new Balkan states, nationalism made only a limited contribution to their formation, but was very much a consequence of this process. The very existence of an autonomous Serbia after 1815, of the Kingdom of Greece after 1832 and of a united Romania from the 1850s called for a whole panoply of institutions, all of which helped create the sense of belonging to a nation: a 'national' ruler (even if in most cases this was a foreign prince), a national government, an army, an educational system. With these new states there was the additional incentive of national liberation, of releasing from what was seen as bondage co-nationals still under Ottoman or Habsburg or Romanov rule. The foreign policy of the new Balkan states, therefore, and to a large extent their domestic priorities were heavily influenced by a nationalist agenda of expansion.
In the multinational empires a rising national consciousness inevitably implied political friction. The Polish revolts against Russia have already been mentioned. The Balkan nationalities remaining under direct Ottoman rule became the object of solicitude and propaganda by their national brethren in Serbia and Greece, and by the 1850s a Bulgarian nationalism was appearing too.
The consequences of nationalism were most striking in the Habsburg Monarchy. Hungarian liberal reformers who, as nationalists, also assumed that the language of state should be Hungarian, ran full tilt into the protests of Croats, Serbs, Romanians and Slovaks. Galician Poles discovered that the hitherto unregarded Ruthenes disputed their right to speak on behalf of the province they both inhabited. Bohemia by the 1840s could only with difficulty be defined as a German land. The conflict revolved everywhere around basic issues of education, administration and justice, and in the two decades prior to 1848 a plethora of cultural organisations sprang up, dedicated to promoting each nation's language and sense of identity and defending it against the pretensions of other nations.
Another politicising factor was the inspiration East European nationalists derived from their forerunners in Central or Western Europe. The influence here of the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini was incalculable. Mazzini was arguably the first modern nationalist, an ideologue who believed in the nation as in a religion and who spent his entire life not only fighting and scheming for Italian unification but also proselytising the cause of the nation to others. His importance lay in the realisation he spread that the nation required sacrifice and direct action, as typified by the programme of his conspiratorial organisation Young Italy, founded in 1831. Episodes such as the siege of the Roman Republic in 1849, or Giuseppe Garibaldi's thrilling expedition to Sicily in 1860, enthused a generation of nationalists. Some, like the Romanians driven into exile in Paris in 1848, associated themselves directly with Mazzinian revolutionary organisations. Others rejected Mazzini's republicanism but admired his vision and felt that 'all national movements in this period are expressions of one general aspiration'.8
The revolutions of 1848—9 demonstrated that East European nationalism had come of age. The demands of the Hungarian Diet for autonomy, and the war of independence, were about Hungary's vision of itself as a sovereign nation. By the same token the reaction of the national minorities within Hungary to this prospect was no less nationalistic. The final proof of the maturation of nationalism was the fact that blood was shed and events degenerated into an interethnic conflict, with Hungarians pitted against the rest.
In the immediate aftermath nationalism appeared to have been contained. The mass of the population remained peasants and hence on the whole indifferent to the new ideology. Yet hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary people had been politicised, if only by virtue of being dragged into conflicts which were, in some respects at least, about issues of nationality.
World History
