ABSTRACT
Nationalism, like Romanticism, is a word with so many associations that it can change its meaning according to the context in which it is used. At its simplest it is a sentiment or belief. It has been succinctly defined by Ernest Gellner as
Prior to the French Revolution France, Great Britain, Spain and Portugal might broadly be said to have satisfied this test of legitimacy (though with some exceptions, notably the Irish and the Basques). But in eastern and southern Europe the principle was barely recognised, and as we have seen it was blithely ignored at the Congress of Vienna. The French Revolution gave a new impetus to nationalism in two particular ways. First, there is the emergence of what has been called ‘civic nationalism’. Loyalty to the state was enhanced by the extension of natural rights to all its citizens. The French Declaration of Rights in 1789 stated ‘The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body and no individual can exercise authority if it does not take its origin from the nation’ (A.J. Grant and H. Temperley, Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, Longmans, Green and Co. 1947, p. 30). To the question ‘Who constitutes the nation?’ the French revolutionaries would have replied that all who subscribed to its political creed had the right to belong, whether they lived in the departments annexed to France or in Paris itself. ‘This nationalism is called civic because it envisages the nation as a community of equal,
rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political values and practices’ (M. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, London, Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 3-4). When France was invaded in 1792 the people flocked willingly to the country’s defence and nationalism gained a new emotional appeal. The opening words of ‘La Marseillaise’, composed to inspire the armies assembling on France’s eastern frontier in the summer of 1792 were ‘Aux armes citoyens!’. This physical expression of civic nationalism, first in defence of the French republic and then in the wars to extend its goals to the rest of Europe, made nationalism into a much more potent force.
