The Undivided Past Read online

  But no national animosity in Europe during an age of growing rivalries could rival that between the English and the French. In his chronicle of the reign of Louis VI, the abbot Suger of Saint-Denis recorded that in 1214 the king had appealed to “tota Francia” to protect the nation against the English (and the German) invaders, and celebrated his subsequent victory at Bouvines as follows: “neither in our days, nor in far-gone ancient times, has France achieved anything more illustrious than this, nor has she with the united forces of her members proclaimed more gloriously the honour of her power than she at one and the same time triumphed over the [Holy] Roman Emperor and the English king.” The Hundred Years War between England and France further cemented these solidarities, as victories (especially Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt for the English, and Orléans and Castillon for the French) became defining moments in the developing national narratives, from which each side anointed its emblematic heroes and heroines (respectively the Black Prince and Henry V, and Joan of Arc and King Charles V). But this was merely a violently intensified version of a now familiar pattern: national identity defined not only intrinsically, in terms of one nation’s special virtues, but also relationally, in opposition to the negative characteristics and stereotypes ascribed to “the other,” which must be confronted and fought and vanquished, as in earlier times.30

  As royal authority was solidified across large parts of western Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, collective national feelings and awarenesses seemed correspondingly to strengthen.31 “All nations,” wrote the German theologian and astrologer Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim in 1526, “have their own special customs and habits that distinguish them from one another, and can be recognized by their discourse, manner of speaking, conversation, favourite food and drink, the way they go about things, the way they love and hate or show anger and malice, and in other ways besides,” and he went on to enumerate natural characteristics in a manner reminiscent of the emperor Frederick II nearly three hundred years before. Unusually, Agrippa von Nettesheim tended to be least charitable toward his own nation, but it was more common to sing the praises of one’s own homeland, as did the Englishman Richard Mulcaster in 1582: “I love Rome, but London better,” he wrote. “I favour Italy but England more, I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.… I do not think that any language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, whether with more pith or greater pleasure, than our English tongue is.”32 This cultural sense of competing national superiority was complemented by growing notions of separateness and uniqueness, as well as by feelings of providential approval. The result, as the Frenchman Claude Seyssel remarked in the early sixteenth century, was that “all nations and reasonable men prefer to be governed by men of their own country and nation—who know their habits, laws and customs, and share the same language and life-style as them—rather than by strangers.”33

  As in medieval times, war was a major means of firing national consciousness and its shared sense of identity, by demonizing a belligerent and predatory “other.” During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the enemy of England ceased to be the French and became the Spanish, and Gloriana identified herself personally with the English nation in battle, as in her stirring “Armada speech” at Tilbury, when she poured “foul scorn” on any foreigner who would dare to try to invade her borders, and in what became known as her “Ditchley” portrait, which depicts the monarch standing over a map of her realm. At the same time, Shakespeare’s history plays promoted an enhanced sense of English national identity: John of Gaunt in Richard II, acclaiming “this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,…this blessed plot, this earth, this realm this England”; and in Henry V, the eponymous monarch, looking back on the earlier wars with France, urging “cry God for Harry, England and St George!”34 Henry V was also full of the anti-Celtic stereotypes in existence since the twelfth century: traitorous and opportunistic Scots, garrulous Welshmen, and drunken, brutal Irishmen.35 In the same way, and in response, the Spanish came to feel their own intensified sense of collective identity, well expressed in these words spoken at the time of the Armada: “if the honour of Spain is at stake, what Spaniard would fail to seek the fame and glory of his nation?” By the reign of Philip II, such feelings were widely shared among Spaniards.36

  Under the secular Great Power system ushered in by the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, this sense of nations in conflict became both more geographically widespread and emotionally charged. Beginning in 1688, and following the Glorious Revolution, there had been a “Second Hundred Years War” between England and France, a succession of increasingly far-flung conflicts fed by the bitter personal animosity between King William III and King Louis XIV, and culminating in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which pitted the venerable Hanoverian George III against the upstart emperor. Military aggression fed mutual stereotyping, with the French depicting the British as vulgar, uncultured, perfidious, and anarchic, and the English (and increasingly the British) regarding the French as the cringing, overtaxed, frogs-legs-eating subjects of a diminutive despot. The result was that for every virtue a nationalist might claim for his own side, a corresponding vice was ascribed to the other.37 But these Franco-British antagonisms were only the most intense and protracted instances of a development overspreading the continent, as Prussia, Russia, and Spain were caught up in conflicts during the eighteenth century, with the result, in each case, of a heightened sense of national identity, focused on the person of the sovereign, whether Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, or the Spanish Bourbons.38

  Beyond any doubt, some degree of collective national identity had periodically existed here and there across medieval and early modern Europe.39 But these national solidarities and antagonisms were often complicated by alternative claims upon people’s loyalties and identities.40 The universal church under the pontificates of Gregory VII or Innocent III, and the universal monarchy of such Holy Roman emperors as Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and Frederick Barbarossa, forcefully countered the competing claims of nascent nationhood, while the presence of the church in every town and village and in the fabric of individual lives surpassed the pull of any secular power or national attachment.41 And even if they did not engender a strong collective sense of religious identity, they may have occluded the development of an alternative secular solidarity. By the early modern period, these universalist claims had in practice (though not in theory) been given up, but the continued presence of the Holy Roman emperor in Germany and the pope in Italy were powerful restraints on the development of any strong sense of national identity in those parts of Europe. Moreover, while different versions and variants of the Christian religion may on occasion have helped to unify some nations and give them a sense of providential greatness and global destiny, as in the case of Catholic Spain under Philip II or Protestant Britain under the Hanoverians, Christianity also divided and undermined other nations from within, as in France during the second half of the sixteenth century, or in the Habsburg lands of Hungary and Bohemia during the first half of the seventeenth.42

  In medieval and early modern Europe, then, religious identities and national identities were elaborately and intricately interconnected, and while they were sometimes mutually reinforcing, they could also militate against each other. Moreover, and as the example of the Holy Roman Empire suggests, secular power was not so much national as dynastic in its geographical grounding and articulation. At one extreme, the greatest sovereigns held their many lands as personal fiefdoms, in extended and elaborate territorial agglomerations. The emperor Charles V was the classic exemplar of such a “composite monarchy,” holding dominions in what would become Austria, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as acquiring rapidly expanding possessions in the Americas, each with its own laws, languages, cultures, and traditions. The same was later true of the kings of Spain, the emperors of Russia and Austria, and even the king of Great Britain, none of whom were sovereig
ns of a single or unitary nation.43 In the “composite states” over which these monarchs ruled, and which had often been cobbled together by the accidents of succession or the imperatives of arranged marriages, or had been expanded thanks to victory in war, regional loyalties (and animosities) were stronger than national solidarities, as in the continuing division of ostensibly united Spain between the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile.44 At the other end of the territorial scale, in Italy and Germany there were many great cities and minor principalities that retained their independence down to the nineteenth century, as in Florence and Milan, or in Hamburg and Cologne.45

  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, five hundred such “political units” existed in Europe, and two hundred years later there were still enough of them to suggest that across much of the continent national identity was never more than feebly and unevenly developed.46 And while many of these “units” clashed across the centuries, they usually did so because of the dynastic rivalries and conflicting ambitions among their ruling houses rather than because of antagonistic national feelings. The Hundred Years War may have been between “France” and “England,” but the mainspring of these “national” confrontations was the royal claim made by the English monarch to the French throne. Most of the conflicts during the first half of the sixteenth century, especially those between King Francis I of France and the emperor Charles V, were fought to assert or to defend personal rights of property and succession.47 Even by the eighteenth century, “national” confrontations were still in practice between monarchs, furthering their dynastic claims and ambitions, as in the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) and of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). These conflicts were essentially the kings’ wars, and the armed forces involved were regarded as part of the royal household rather than as the embodiment of the nation. This in turn explains why lands and territories were so readily traded back and forth when peace treaties were negotiated, for they were primarily seen as bargaining counters and trophies, rather than as constituent and integral parts of a broader and more inclusive national solidarity that must be maintained at all cost.48

  Even the undoubted horrors of the Thirty Years War only involved a relatively small proportion of the continental population in military service and fighting battles. Moreover, from medieval times to the mid-eighteenth century, most Europeans were preoccupied either with the unrelenting imperative of mere survival or, at a higher level, with “commerce, travel, and cultural and learned intercourse.” Thus understood, life was (as Braudel had insisted in The Mediterranean World) either so localized and particular, or alternatively at such a remove, that the vague jurisdictions and often shifting boundaries of any nation rarely constrained or impinged on it.49 During the Middle Ages (and for centuries thereafter), most people lived and died in or near the locality of their birth, and acquired little if any notion of a distant if ultimate “national” authority. At the same time, Italian and German Hanseatic merchants established far-flung trading networks in the Mediterranean and the Baltic; most of them inhabited city-states, they were happy to trade wherever markets could be found; and they were essentially cosmopolitan in their outlook and activities. Thus the medieval West was united by trade as well as by religion, both undermining and transcending any claims to territorially grounded nationhood, and this continued across much of the continent for most of the early modern period.50

  In the same way, the majority of people across most of Europe spoke local and regional dialects rather than a “national” language. Yet whether in universities or in monasteries, the intellectual life of the continent was being conducted largely in the lingua franca of Latin, while the social and diplomatic life that took place in royal courts or castles or in country houses was routinely carried on in French.51 Likewise, while vernacular architecture may have differed from place to place and region to region, the Gothic, the classical, and the baroque styles transcended political boundaries, whether local or national, and much the same was true in music, painting, and literature.52 Even monarchs and princes fighting one another for dynastic advantage and territorial gain also shared a sense of belonging to a cosmopolitan, continental cousinhood of royalty, beyond particular identities or national interests. Moreover, by the eighteenth century, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain had each acquired extensive transoceanic dominions, and for those who settled or worked overseas, the focus of their abiding metropolitan loyalty was the composite monarchy and the person of the sovereign, or an extended version of a “greater” nation encompassing the whole empire.53 So while national identities and antagonisms did develop in medieval and early modern Europe, they were nothing like as solid or as significant as they would later become.

  MODERN NATIONAL IDENTITIES

  The last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth witnessed a marked intensification of such national feelings and identities, as exemplified by the creation of the United States of America, by the renaming of the French Estates-General as the “National Assembly” in June 1789, and by the overthrow of Spanish imperial dominion in Latin America by the early 1820s.54 The United States defined itself against the British nation (and the British king); Revolutionary and Napoleonic France did the same; and the Latin American republics defined themselves against the Spanish nation (and the Spanish king). Thus did the “age of revolutions” usher in the “age of nationalism” (the word itself was first coined in the 1790s), an epoch of nation-building and the nation-state, as new countries were created in North and South America, as “old” nations consolidated (France, Spain, Russia) or evolved and emerged as new versions of themselves (England-Britain and Austria-Hungary), as two new nations were “belatedly” unified (Italy and Germany), and as the Balkan nations won their independence from the Ottoman Empire (Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania). With the exception of Spain and the Latin American republics, all these countries would be caught up in the First World War, when for the first time millions volunteered to fight out of a shared sense of national loyalty and identity, as wars of whole populations superseded the traditionally limited conflicts of armies, and when to die in battle for their country became the highest calling: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.55

  The Harvard historian Charles Maier identifies the heyday of the nation-state as beginning during the 1860s; it arose out of the notion of “territoriality,” by which he means the control of “bordered political space,” which created the essential framework for exploiting material resources, for wielding temporal power, and for nurturing common notions of national consciousness.56 This, he argues, was not just a European but a global development, taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War, in Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, in Germany with unification and in Italy with the Risorgimento, in the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Habsburg Empire, and also in countries such as Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Argentina. All across the globe, Maier contends, national societies were forged and reforged during the second half of the nineteenth century, often in a sudden and violent stroke. The result was the strengthening of central government at the expense of local or regional authority; the continued mobilization of internally and externally quartered military capacity; the official co-opting of new leaders of finance and industry, science and the professions into a ruling cartel alongside the still powerful, but no longer supreme, members of the landed elite; and the development of an infrastructure based on the technologies of coal and iron as applied to long-distance transport of goods and people and on the mass production of finished products assembled by a large and increasingly unionized labor force.57

  Hence the creation of the modern nation, as a coincidence and convergence of geographical specificity and human solidarity.58 One indication of this convergence was an unprecedented concern with delineating borders and securing boundaries: as Lord Curzon put it in 1907, in words more portentous than he could then have known, “frontiers are indeed the razor’s
edge on which are suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life and death to nations.”59 A second indication was that the lands within carefully defined and policed national borders were increasingly “pervaded” with prefectures and post offices, newspapers and telegraph networks, and, eventually, electrical power, all of which served political authority as well as everyday life. There was thus no area inside its frontiers that was beyond the state’s control, and this resulted in a correspondingly enhanced consciousness of national territoriality. Of particular importance were the railroads, not only in tying nations together, as in the United States, Canada, Russia, and Australia, but also in connecting national capitals more closely with the provinces that were integrated into the “national domain,” as in Germany, France, Spain, and Britain; and where the railways led, the personnel and bureaucracy of an increasingly intrusive state soon followed. Here were the acts and facts of that unprecedented process of “nation-building” to which Walter Bagehot, the journalist, commentator, and editor of The Economist, rightly drew attention.60