Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The first person to identify what we may call ‘cultural nationalism’ was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), though the great German historian Friedrich Meinecke said that Friedrich Karl von Moser had first found signs of a ‘national spirit’ in 1765 ‘in those parts of Germany where 20 principalities could be seen during a day’s journey’. The stage had been set, as we saw in Chapter 24, with the emergence (not just in Germany) of a self-conscious ‘public’ in the late seventeenth century. ‘Nature,’ Herder said, ‘has separated nations not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but most particularly by languages, inclinations and characters, that the work of subjugating despotism might be rendered more difficult, that all the four quarters of the globe might not be crammed into the belly of a wooden horse.’²⁶ For Herder the Volk

was irreducible, incompatible with the idea of empire, which he said went against the grain of the ‘natural plurality’ of the world’s peoples.²⁷ The Germans wanted unification, a nation-state, and this had to be ‘cultivated’ because they had for too long been the theatre of war for the European powers, where ‘today’s ruler might turn out to be tomorrow’s enemy’.²⁸

In place of the ‘jumbled patchwork’ of states that had occupied central Europe for centuries, the nineteenth century saw two massive powers come into being. The nature of this change cannot be overestimated.

The other European nations responded to these German and Italian sentiments with what Hagen Schulze has called ‘patriotic regeneration’.²⁹ This was especially true in France, for example, where the entire education system was placed in the service of the nationalist cause. The teaching of history and national politics was to be the cause of national regeneration after revolution and repeated defeat. The most obvious – one might say the most lurid – example of this was G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: devoir et patrie. This was the story of a fourteen-year-old boy, André Valden, and his brother Julien, aged seven. The story is set in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War after the two boys have been orphaned and stranded in their home-town of Phalsburg, which has been annexed by Germany. They escape and journey throughout France in the course of their adventures, ultimately finding a new home in the country, which, thanks to those adventures, they now see in all its glory. Appearing first in 1877, the book went through twenty reprints in the next thirty years. Another example of the fervent nationalism of the times is that while Jules Ferry (1832–1893) was education secretary, every classroom was required to display a map of France with Alsace and Lorraine shown surrounded by black mourning crepe. Jules Michelet (1798–1874) wrote about France as the ‘pontificate of modern civilisation’, meaning that it was the pioneer of the modern enlightened state: ‘the French idea of civilisation had thus become the very core of a national religion.’ (The Marseillaise

was adopted as the national anthem in 1879.)³⁰

England responded too, but in a different way. The colonial expansion of the British empire achieved unprecedented dimensions between 1880 and the First World War, as this table makes clear:

Colonial dependencies (in thousands of square kilometres)

Here are some contemporary comments, quoted at length, to show not only their tenor but how widespread they were. ‘Imperialism has become the very latest and the highest embodiment of our democratic nationalism. It is a conscious expression of our race’ (the Duke of Westminster). ‘The British are the greatest governing race the world has ever seen’ (Joseph Chamberlain.) On seeing the port of Sydney, Charles Darwin wrote ‘My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’ ‘I claim that we are the leading race in the world, and the more of the world we populate, the better it will be for mankind . . . Since [God] has obviously made the English-speaking race the chosen instrument by which He means to produce a state and society based on justice, freedom and peace, then it is bound to be in keeping with His will if I do everything in my power to provide that race with as much scope and power as possible. I think that, if there is a God, then He would like to see me do one thing, that is, to colour as much of the map of Africa British red as possible’ (Cecil Rhodes).³²