Racist views remained strong, right up to and beyond the time slavery was finally abolished. William Wilberforce was just one of the abolitionists who could not dispel his belief that European Christian culture was a civilising force. At one point he confessed that the emancipation of the slaves ‘might actually be less important than that the reign of light and truth and happiness might be brought among them through Christianity and British laws, institutions and customs’. But Wilberforce did join the sponsors of an experimental colony, Sierra Leone, founded in 1787 to ‘introduce civilisation among the natives and to cultivate the soil by means of free labour’. Sierra Leone flourished and its capital, Freetown, became one of the bases for the new Royal Navy anti-slaving squadron.16 In the event, it was Denmark which, in 1792, became the first European nation to outlaw the slave trade. Britain took action to end the trade in 1805 and slaving had become a hanging offence by 1824. But elsewhere it went on for another half-century – the last landing was made in Cuba in 1870.17
The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, had created one set of European states. The Congress of Vienna, called in 1815, to decide the shape of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, created another. Attitudes were very different then from now. For the British Foreign Minister Lord Castlereagh, one of the architects of the new Europe, Italy was no more than a ‘geographical concept’, and its unification as one state ‘unthinkable’.18 A German at the congress had much the same view about his own country. ‘The unification of all the German tribes in a single, undivided state,’ he said, was no more than a dream that had ‘been refuted by a thousand years of experience and ultimately cast aside . . . It is incapable of realisation by any operation of human ingenuity, nor can it be enforced by the bloodiest of revolutions; it is an aim pursued only by madmen.’ He concluded that if the idea of national unity gained the upper hand in Europe, ‘then a wasteland of bloody ruins will be the only legacy that awaits our descendants’.19
The main aim of the Congress of Vienna was to prevent there ever again being a revolution in Europe, and to that end the assembled diplomats and politicians set about recreating much the same landscape as had existed immediately after 1648. ‘Spain and Portugal were restored under the former ruling families, Holland was enlarged by the former Austrian Netherlands, later to become Belgium, Switzerland was reconstituted, Sweden stayed united with Norway, and since the Pentarchy, the club of five major European powers, was unthinkable without France, the latter was left intact with its 1792 border.’20 But this carefully balanced European system depended on central Europe remaining fragmented, diffuse and powerless.21 Many of the Europeans at the Vienna Congress were very disturbed by the so-called ‘Germanophiles’, who were determined to unify Germany and turn her into a nation-state. As the French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord wrote to Louis XVIII from Vienna: ‘They are attempting to overturn an order that offends their pride and to replace all the governments of the country by a single authority. Allied with them are people from the universities, youngsters who have been primed with their theories, and all those who ascribe to German particularism all the sufferings that have been inflicted on the country in the course of the wars that have been fought there. The unity of the German fatherland is their slogan, their faith and their religion, they are ardent to the point of fanaticism . . . Who can calculate the consequences, if the masses in Germany were to combine into a single whole and turn aggressive? Who can say where a movement of that kind might stop?’22
At that point, in other words, the principle of nationality was acknowledged, as Hagen Schulze has pointed out, only where it was linked to the legitimate rule of a monarch: in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Sweden – north and western Europe. The German-speaking lands, and Italy, were left out. This helps explain why nationalism, cultural nationalism, began as a German idea. The political fragmentation of the region was actually the logical outcome of the European order. One only has to look at the map to see why. ‘From the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, it was Central Europe that kept the great powers apart, kept them at a distance and prevented head-on collisions.’23 No one wanted an undue concentration of power in central Europe, for if anyone should take control, they could easily become ‘mistress of the entire continent’.24 For many, the minuscule Italian and German states guaranteed freedom. Although Italy and Germany were in a similar situation, in this regard, much of Italy was occupied by a foreign power (Austria in the north, the Bourbons in the south), and this too explains why modern nationalism began in Germany. In fact, the unification of Germany, and of Italy, were two of the seminal political events of the nineteenth century which – together with the Civil War in America – did so much to bring about the great industrial rivalry in the last decades of the 1800s, fashioning our modern world, but which also led eventually to the First World War, setting the stage for the calamitous twentieth century. How prescient Talleyrand was.25
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