Politics and Culture of the Nation-State
221850–1870
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Aïda PosterAïda (1871), Giuseppe Verdi's opera of human passion and state power among people of different nations, became a staple of Western culture, bringing people across Europe into a common cultural orbit. Written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, Aïda also celebrated the improvement of Europe's access to Asian resources provided by the new waterway. The opera was a prime example of the surge of interest in Egyptian styles and objects that followed the opening of the canal.(Madeline Grimoldi.)
In 1859, the name VERDI suddenly appeared scrawled on walls across the disunited cities of the Italian peninsula. The graffiti seemed to celebrate the composer Giuseppe Verdi, whose operas made him a special hero among Italians. His stories of downtrodden groups struggling against tyrannical government seemed to refer specifically to them. As his operatic choruses thundered out calls to rebellion in the name of the nation, Italian audiences were sure that Verdi was telling them to throw off Austrian and papal rule and unite in a nation—the ancient Roman Empire reborn. The graffiti had a second political message: VERDI, an acronym for Vittorio EmmanueleRe d'Italia (Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy), summoned Italians to join together under Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia and Piedmont—the one Italian leader with a nationalist, modernizing profile. The graffiti did its work, and the very next year a united Italy emerged, formed by warfare, popular uprisings, and hard bargaining by realist politicians.
In the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, European statesmen and the politically conscious public increasingly abandoned the politics of idealism in favor of Realpolitik—a politics of tough-minded realism aimed at strengthening the state and tightening social order. Realpolitikers rejected the romanticism and high-minded ideologies of the revolutionaries. Instead, they believed in power politics and even the use of violence to attain their goals. Two particularly skilled practitioners of Realpolitik, the Italian Camillo di Cavour and the Prussian Otto von Bismarck, succeeded in unifying Italy and Germany, respectively, not by romantic rhetoric but by war and diplomacy. Most leading figures of the decades 1850–1870, enmeshed like Verdi's operatic heroes in violent political maneuverings, advanced state power by harnessing the forces of nationalism and liberalism that had led to earlier romantic revolts. Their achievements changed the face of Europe.
Nation building was the order of the day, but unifying people or territory was not just about winning wars. Economic development was crucial, as was using government policy and culture to create a sense of national identity and common purpose. As productivity and wealth increased, governments took vigorous steps to improve the urban environment, monitor public health, and promote national sentiment. State support for cultural developments ranging from public schools to public health programs made the citizenry as a whole better off, established a common fund of knowledge, and produced shared political beliefs and loyalties. Authoritarian leaders such as Bismarck and the new French emperor Napoleon III believed that a better quality of life would not only calm revolutionary impulses and build state power but also silence liberal reformers.
Shared culture helped build shared identity. Reading novels, viewing art exhibitions, keeping up-to-date at the newly fashionable world's fairs, and attending theater and opera performances gave ordinary people a stronger sense of being French or German or British. Also, the public consumed cultural works that increasingly rejected romanticism and portrayed harsher, more realistic aspects of everyday life. Artists painted nudes in shockingly blunt ways, eliminating romantic hues and poses. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy depicted the bleak life of soldiers in the Crimean War, which erupted in 1853 between the Russian and Ottoman empires, while his countryman Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote of ordinary people turning to crime in urban neighborhoods.
Alongside the tough-minded nation-building policies there arose tough-minded art, not just mirroring Realpolitikbut encouraging it. Western politicians sent armies to distant areas to stamp out resistance to global expansion. At home, Realpolitikers destroyed people's neighborhoods to construct public buildings, roads, and parks. The process of nation building was thus often brutal, bringing arrests, protests, and outright civil war—all of these the centerpieces of Verdi's operas as well. In response to the pressures of nation building, an uprising of Parisians in 1871 challenged the central government's violent intrusion into everyday life and its failure to count the costs. Thus, for the most part, the powerful Western nation-state did not take shape automatically. Instead, national policymakers used warfare, the creation of new institutions, and often brutal uprooting of people around the world to create the modern nation-state. The Realpolitik approach to nation building also created a general climate of modern opinion that valued realism, hard facts, and tough-minded deeds.
The End of the Concert of Europe
The revolutions of 1848 had weakened the concert of Europe, forcing its architect, Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, to resign and flee to England and allowing the forces of nationalism to flourish. Clashing national ambitions made it more difficult for countries to act together. In addition, the revival of Bonapartism in the person of Napoleon III destabilized international politics as France's Second Empire sought to reassert itself. One of Napoleon's targets was Russia, formerly a mainstay of the concert of Europe. Taking advantage of Russia's continuing drive to expand, France helped engineer the Crimean War. The war took a huge toll in human life and weakened Russia and Austria. Russia's defeat not only led to substantial reforms in the country but also changed the distribution of European power.
Napoleon III and the Quest for French Glory[X]
Napoleon III and Eugénie Receive the Siamese Ambassadors, 1864 At a splendid gathering of their court, the emperor Napoleon III, his consort Eugénie, and their son and heir greet ambassadors from Siam, whose exoticism and servility before the imperial family are the centerpiece of this depiction by Jean-Léon Gerome. How might a middle-class French citizen react to this scene?(Bridgeman- Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.)
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) encouraged the cult of his famous uncle and the revival of French grandeur as part of nation building. “A man of destiny,” he called himself. Napoleon III acted as Europe's schoolmaster, showing its leaders how to combine economic liberalism and support from the people with authoritarian rule. To the public, he claimed to represent “your families, your property—rich and poor alike,” but cafés where men might discuss politics were closed, and a rubber-stamp legislature (the Corps législatif) muffled the actual voices of the people. Imperial style replaced republican rituals (see the illustration on this page). Napoleon's opulent court dazzled the public, and the emperor (like his namesake) cultivated a masculine image of strength and majesty by wearing military uniforms and by conspicuously maintaining mistresses. Napoleon's wife, Empress Eugénie, however, followed middle-class conventions, playing up her domestic role as devoted mother to her only son and as volunteer worker in many charities. The authoritarian, apparently old-fashioned order imposed by Napoleon satisfied the many peasants who feared a flare-up of the urban radicalism of 1848.
Napoleon III was nonetheless a modernizer. He promoted a strong economy, public works programs, and jobs, luring the middle and working classes away from radical politics with the promise of employment. International trade fairs, artistic expositions, and the magnificent rebuilding of Paris helped make France prosper as Europe recovered from the hard times of the late 1840s. Empress Eugénie wore lavish gowns, encouraging French silk production and keeping Paris at the center of the lucrative fashion trade. The Second Empire also reached a free-trade agreement with Britain and backed the establishment of innovative investment banks. Such new institutions led the way in financing railroad expansion, and railway mileage increased fivefold during Napoleon III's reign. During the economic downturn of the late 1850s, he changed course by allowing working-class organizations to form and introducing democratic features into his governing methods. Although some historians have judged Napoleon III to be enigmatic and shifty because of these abrupt changes, his maneuvers were hardheaded responses to the fluid conditions.
On the international scene, Napoleon III's main goals were to overcome the containment of France imposed by the Congress of Vienna and acquire international glory like a true Bonaparte. To fracture the concert of Europe, Napoleon pitted France first against Russia in the Crimean War, then against Austria in the War of Italian Unification, and finally against Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Beyond Europe, Napoleon encouraged the construction of the Suez Canal to connect the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, while his army continued to enforce French rule in Algeria and Southeast Asia. His attempt to install Maximilian, the brother of Habsburg emperor Francis Joseph, as emperor of Mexico and ultimately of all Central America brought on rebellion in Mexico and ended with Maximilian's execution in 1867. Despite this glaring failure, Napoleon's foreign policy succeeded in breaking down the international system of peaceful diplomacy established at the Congress of Vienna. The consequences were the Crimean War, the end of serfdom in Russia, and the birth of new nations.
The Crimean War, 1853–1856: Turning Point in European AffairsNapoleon first flexed his diplomatic muscle in the Crimean War (1853–1856), which began as a conflict between the Russian and Ottoman empires but ended as a war with long-lasting consequences for much of Europe. While professing to uphold the status quo, Russia had been expanding into Asia and the Middle East. In particular, Tsar Nicholas I wanted to absorb much of the Ottoman Empire, fast becoming known as “the sick man of Europe” because of its disintegrating authority. Napoleon III encouraged Nicholas to be even more aggressive in his expansionism—a maneuver that provoked war in October 1853 between the two eastern empires (Map22.1). The war disrupted the united Austrian and Russian front that kept France—and Napoleon III—in check.
Map22.1 The Crimean War, 1853–1856 The most destructive war in Europe between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, the Crimean War drew attention to the conflicting ambitions around territories of the declining Ottoman Empire. Importantly for state building in these decades, the war fractured the alliance of conservative forces from the Congress of Vienna, allowing Italy and Germany to come into being as unified states.
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The war drew in other states and upset Europe's balance of power. To block Russia and thereby protect its Mediterranean routes to East Asia, Britain prodded the Ottomans to stand up to Russia. With the Austrian government still resenting its dependence on Russia in putting down Hungarian revolutionaries in 1849 and feeling threatened by continuing Russian expansion into the Balkans, Napoleon III managed to gain Austria's promise of neutrality during the war. Austrian neutrality split the conservative Russian-Austrian coalition that had blocked French ambitions for greater influence since 1815. In the fall of 1853, the Russians blasted the wooden Turkish ships to bits at the Ottoman port of Sinope on the Black Sea; in 1854, France and Great Britain, enemies in war for more than a century, declared war on Russia to defend the Ottoman Empire's sovereignty and territories.
Faced with attacking the massive Russian Empire, the British and French allies settled for limited military goals focused on capturing the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, on the Crimea, a peninsula jutting into the Black Sea. Even so, the Crimean War was spectacularly bloody. British and French troops landed in the Crimea in September 1854, but it took a year of savage and costly combat before the fortified Sevastopol finally fell. Generals on both sides demonstrated their incompetence, and governments failed to provide combatants with even minimal supplies, sanitation, or medical care. Hospitals had no beds, no dishes, and no water. As a result, the war claimed a massive toll. Of the three-quarters of a million deaths, more than two-thirds were from disease and starvation.
In the midst of this unfolding catastrophe, Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) ascended the Russian throne following the death of Nicholas I, his father. With casualties mounting, the new tsar asked for peace. As a result of the Peace of Paris, signed in March 1856, Russia lost the right to base its navy in the Straits of Dardanelles and the Black Sea, which were declared neutral waters. Moldavia and Walachia (which soon merged to form Romania) became autonomous Turkish provinces under victors' protection, drastically reducing Russian influence in that region too.
Some historians have called the Crimean War one of the most senseless conflicts in modern history because competing claims in southeastern Europe could have been settled by diplomacy had it not been for Napoleon III's driving ambition to disrupt the peace. Yet the war was full of consequence. New technologies were introduced into warfare: the railroad, shell-firing cannon, breech-loading rifles, and steam-powered ships. The relationship of the home front to the battlefront was beginning to change with the use of the telegraph and increased press coverage. Home audiences received news from the Crimean front lines more rapidly and in more detail than ever before. Reports of incompetence, poor sanitation, and the huge death toll outraged the public, inspiring a few to go to the front to help. The English nurse Florence Nightingale became the best known of these sojourners: she seized the moment to escape the confines of middle-class domesticity by organizing a battlefield nursing service to care for the British sick and wounded. Through her tough-minded organization of nursing units, she not only improved the sanitary conditions of the troops both during and after the war but also pioneered nursing as a profession. (See Document, “Other Florence Nightingale”.)
More immediately, the war accomplished Napoleon III's goal of severing the alliance between Austria and Russia, the two conservative powers on which the Congress of Vienna peace settlement had rested since 1815. It thus ended Austria's and Russia's grip on European affairs and undermined their ability to contain the forces of liberalism and nationalism. Russia's catastrophic defeat forced it to embark on some long-overdue reforms.
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Defeat in the Crimean War not only thwarted Russia's territorial ambition but also made clear the need for meaningful reform. Hundreds of peasant insurrections had erupted during the decade before the Crimean War. Serf defiance ranged from malingering at forced labor to boycotting vodka to protest its heavy taxation. “Our own and neighboring households were gripped with fear,” one aristocrat reported, because of potential serf violence. Although economic development spread in parts of eastern Europe, the Russian economy stagnated compared with that of western Europe. Old-fashioned farming techniques depleted soil and led to food shortages, and the nobility was often contemptuous of the suffering malnutrition and hard labor caused. Artists made their own call for reform with their sympathetic portrayals of serfs and condemnation of brutal masters, as in the collection A Hunter's Sketches (1852) by novelist Ivan Turgenev. A Russian translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's U.S. antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was also a “must-read” for reformers. When Russia lost the Crimean War, the educated public, including some government officials, found the poor performance of serf-conscripted armies a disgrace and the system of serf labor a glaring liability.
Emancipation of the Serfs. Confronted with the need for change, Tsar Alexander II acted. Well educated and more widely traveled than his father, Alexander ushered in what came to be known as the age of Great Reforms, granting Russians new rights from above as a way of ensuring that violent action from below would not force change. The most dramatic reform was the emancipation of almost fifty million serfs beginning in 1861. By the terms of emancipation, communities of newly freed serfs, headed by male village elders, received grants of land. The community itself, traditionally called a mir, had full power to allocate this land among individuals and to direct their economic activity. Although emancipation partially laid the groundwork for a modern labor force in Russia, communal landowning and decision making meant that individual peasants could not simply sell their parcel of land and leave their rural communities to work in factories as laborers had been doing in western Europe.