Prelude to Nation-States: The French and German Experience, 1789-1815

PrefaceThe quarter of a century between 1789 and 1815 was a crucial time in the history of Continental Europe. It brought the first break with the remnants of feudalism; it gave the people the knowledge that it could and was entitled to change the existing social and political order and it determined the character of nationalism and the rising nation-states in the two leading nations of the Continent. It explains much of their following history, and its influence has not ended yet. Since 1945 the two nations have lost their dominant position in Europe, but their different behavior and “ideas” were to set in the intervening time the model for the aspirations to form nation-states everywhere, outside the English- speaking nation-states which with their religious matrix and their late- seventeenth and mid-eighteenth-century background have remained incomprehensible to most European observers. For that reason Germany underestimated the strength and the intervention of Britain and the United States in both world wars.Within this late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century context, France and Germany set the often conflicting models for the emerging nation-states which evolved in the nineteenth century in Europe and in the twentieth century in other continents. This process is far from finished. Thus this historical study, like probably all historical studies, is of some importance for an understanding of our present-day world. For me personally it has been a work of many years. It establishes the bridge between the Idea of Nationalism and the various books which followed and which deal with nineteenth-century European and twentieth-century worldwide nationalism, books like Prophets and Peoples, The Making of the Modern French Mind, The Mind of Germany, Pan-Slavism, Its History and Ideology, and The Age of Nationalism.I have always loved teaching because, among other things, it has kept me in contact with young minds, which have now become half-a-century younger than mine. In that way I have remained in touch with living history. For real teaching is always a give and a take, and it is difficult to say who is more enriched by this partnership. Perhaps it has taken time away from my research and writing. I do not regret it. One (one, not the only but probably the most important) task of the university is to continue the long chain of learning which started with the ancient Greeks and which assures us of the continuity of our civilization. Naturally, and legitimately, each generation adds its own point of view, changes the tradition, “revolts” against the “burden of the past.” When we were young, we did it too. I am glad that the present generation follows this pattern, perhaps sometimes with greater consciousness than we did. Yet with many of them I always found a common language and a common ground, and with many of their complaints I have been in full agreement.