1871 and After: Nationalism, Extremism and the Rise of the Nation-State

A new French government had been set up and it seemed to be doing fairly well until Napolean arrived in the 1790s. He led a coup d'état and declared himself to be emperor. It was a betrayal to the French Revolution, but he did manage to conquer new places and set up states there. He creates civil servants, the metric system, weights and measures, new dates and times, taxations, conscription, and a common currency.

Napolean then travelled to Egypt and expanded his state there. He brought many different types of people with him like linguists and cartographers. He conquered parts of Egypt, at least militarily, but he didn't do this very well and ended up leaving.

He was eventually defeated and sent off to exile. He returned for 100 days but was then defeated again by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. The Congress of Vienna (1814/15) established the post-Napoleonic settlements, and the victors (mainly British, Prussians and Russians) established how the international system (treaty system) would work. This continued until 1848 when a whole series of revolutions began all over Europe, mainly in Western Europe.

Nationalism was growing all over Europe with people wanting more of a say in their governments, and the states left behind by Napoleon were particularly affected by this. There was a rise in national figures and mythologies, like Britannia and Germania, creating a national identity. These figures can be seen as the beginnings of the nation-state.

By 1871, the states across Europe, particularly the Napoleonic ones, became increasingly associated with the idea of a German nation. So, many came together (although German unification actually occured in the 1860s principally by war) and that year was the declaration of the German Empire. The King of Prussia became the Emperor of Germany.

As Germany was beginning to unify (so still Prussia), Bismarck went to war with the emperor of France, Napoleon III. France was defeated in September 1870, and a new republican democratic government returned to France. France lost 2 of its very important Easten provinces to Germany, and so for generations to come, France's political history became concerned with revenge on Germany.

Paris never surrendered to the Prussian army, and so the army surrounded and besieged them. Paris declared their independence from France for 2 months during 1871 and thus the Paris Commune was created. They continued to fight the war with Prussia and erected barricades around the city. Signs of the old order (Napoleonic) were destroyed by the communards and they argued they should press freedoms, abolish the death penalty, end conscription, restore the Republican calendar, introduce pensions, and insist on anti-clericalism. Paris played around with what a state should be. They thought the state should serve the people and that the notions 'nation' and 'state' should be brought together. Gender and wage equality, workers’ rights, cooperatives, food banks, medical care etc were all rooted in the Paris commune. But, the commune was defeated. The French government sent troops to conquer Paris and defeat the communards.

France continued to be deeply unstable during the 1870s and 1880s, e.g. Patrice MacMahon launched a coup d'état in May 1877 to overthrow the French Republic and return it to a presidential or monarchical system of government. At the end of the 1880s, General Boulanger launched a coup d'état to overthrow the French Republic. Some believed the people weren't able to rule themselves and needed a strong leader.

In 1871, Italy was also developing ideas of a nation. Before this, there were only kingdoms of Italy, but in 1870-71, they unified with the only big opposition being the Pope who was defeated in 1870. The capital was moved to Rome and Italy was now ruled by one king. This shows a triumph of the nation-state over papal authority. In 1871, the process of Italian unification was essentially completed.

Renan gave a lecture called 'What is a nation?' and defined it as an act of wilful forgetting.He argued that France should be more of a conservative and reactionary power and was very against the commune. He believed France shouldn’t be focusing on giving pensions and medical care, but should be focusing on the older system of international relations and its retaliation on Germany. His key themes involved:

• Seeing nation-states as constructions rather than a natural order of people. They emerged as a series of historical processes.
• Unity can come through violence, and a forgetting of this violence e.g. the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre (massacre of French Protestants by French Catholics).
• Nations can exist through a mix of factors like race, ethnicity, language, religion and geography. But, none of these are sufficient to explain what a nation is as there's always variation.
• A nation is a soul or spiritual principle. It's created when a group of people decide they want to be in a group.
• Nation-states are good, even if they are fake (just mental work in our head).

He wrote about the idea of gift exchange and that communities are formed through this. He called societies that weren't yet nation-states 'poly-segmentary', and those that were 'integrated societies'. Things like the industrial revolution were the way-points to achieving integration from segmentary states.

Ernest Gellner said nation-states appeared when you have a state that's harmonised with a group of people who feel like they have something in common. They were also functions and products of modern life.

Benedict Anderson stated that nation-states depended on the peoples' wilful thought processes, their desire to be a nation. He states that the societies had become too large and people were afraid of this. So, to feel a sense of affinity, imagining oneself as part of a larger society is required.

Anthony D. Smith believed ethnicities were very important in forming nation-states. People need something in common, like common myths of ancestry. These don't actually need to be real, as long as they're percieved to give a shared history then that's all that's needed.