Romantic nationalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Romantic nationalism begins with a simple but explosive idea: that a nation is not something invented by kings or decreed from courts, but something alive in the people themselves, in their language, their stories, their customs, and their soil. When a riot broke out in Brussels in August 1830 after a performance of an opera depicting doomed love under foreign oppression, it did not stay a riot. It ignited the Belgian Revolution of 1830-31 and became the first successful revolution in the model of Romantic nationalism. That a single opera could topple a political order tells you how charged the atmosphere had become.

  The doctrine goes by several names: national romanticism, organic nationalism, identity nationalism. What they all share is the conviction that a state earns its legitimacy not from a monarch's bloodline or a god's mandate, but from the unity of the people it governs. Language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and inherited custom are not incidental features of a people. They are, in this view, the very substance of political authority.

  By the watershed year of 1848, this idea had spread across Europe with the force of a revolutionary wave, touching fragmented regions like Italy and multinational empires like Austria. Operas, fairy tales, national epics, and folk poetry all became instruments of political awakening. The questions that follow are: where did this idea come from, how did it reshape the map of an entire continent, and what did it leave behind?

• 2. Revolution and the Arts

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  Gioachino Rossini completed William Tell in 1829, setting the national myth of Swiss unity to music and marking the onset of what came to be known as Romantic opera. Two years before that, the Greek War of Independence of 1821-30 had been charged with Romantic energy, including the idealization of ancient Greece that drove Philhellenism and drew the poet Lord Byron to fight alongside Greek forces, where he died of high fever. These were not separate phenomena. Romanticism gave political rebellion an aesthetic vocabulary, and the arts gave nationalism an emotional vocabulary it had previously lacked.

  Giuseppe Verdi's opera choruses about oppressed peoples inspired two generations of Italian patriots. The chorus "Va pensiero" from his 1842 opera Nabucco became particularly galvanizing. In Norway, the Romantic spirit expressed itself not in literature but in a push for a national style in architecture and cultural ethos. Across the Atlantic, a Romantic nationalist element had already mixed with Enlightenment rationalism in the rhetoric of the American colonists' declaration of independence from Great Britain and in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

  The same impulse traveled south through the Americas. A wave of rebellions swept the Spanish colonies one after another, driven by new senses of localized identity, beginning with the May Revolution of Argentina in 1810. Romantic nationalism, as one formulation later put it, was "the celebration of the nation, defined in its language, history and cultural character, as an inspiring ideal for artistic expression; and the instrumentalization of that expression in political consciousness-raising." The Belgian Revolution of 1830-31 was only the most dramatic early proof of that formula in action.

• 3. Folk Culture and the Brothers Grimm

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  Romantic nationalism inspired the systematic collection of folklore, and no collectors became more famous for it than the Brothers Grimm. Their underlying conviction was that fairy tales, if uncontaminated by outside literary sources, had been preserved in the same form across thousands of years, carrying in them something primordial about a people.

  Yet the Grimms' editorial choices reveal how political this supposedly natural collection really was. Their first edition was criticized as insufficiently German, and they responded to that pressure. They rejected tales they had gathered because of resemblances to stories by the French writer Charles Perrault, on the reasoning that similarity proved the tales were not authentically German. Sleeping Beauty survived their cuts only because the figure of the sleeping princess also appeared in the Norse legend of Brynhildr, which convinced them of its genuine German roots.

  The language itself was reshaped. The Grimms changed every "Fee" (fairy) to an enchantress or wise woman, every "prince" to a "king's son", every "princess" to a "king's daughter". In their third edition, they singled out Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone as the first national collection of fairy tales and praised it for capturing the Neapolitan voice. Their influence spread quickly: the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegian pair Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, and the Australian Joseph Jacobs all followed their lead, each working to assemble the tales of their own people and treating those tales as distinctively national rather than cross-cultural.

• 4. National Epics and Lost Manuscripts

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  The concept of a "national epic" is itself a product of Romantic nationalism: an extensively mythologized work of poetry of defining importance to a particular people. The hunt for such epics produced remarkable recoveries and remarkable fabrications.

  Beowulf had lain as an ignored curiosity in scholars' collections for two centuries before its first transcription in 1818, under the impetus of Romantic nationalism. The poem was felt to give people who identified as Anglo-Saxon a missing national epic precisely when the need for such a thing was first being felt. The fact that Beowulf himself was a Geat was easily set aside. The Song of Roland had become a dim memory until the antiquary Francisque Michel transcribed a worn copy held in the Bodleian Library and published it in 1837, reviving French interest in the national epic for the Romantic generation. In Greece, the Iliad and Odyssey took on new urgency during the Greek War of Independence.

  Not all recoveries were genuine. The pseudo-Gaelic literary forgeries known as "Ossian" had failed to satisfy the first Romantic generation's desire for a Celtic national epic. Among the world's Jewish community, early Zionists considered the Bible a more suitable national epic than the Talmud. In the Russian Empire, national minorities resisting Russification produced new national poetry by various means: composing original verse, assembling folk poetry, or reviving older narrative works. The Estonian Kalevipoeg, the Finnish Kalevala, the Polish Pan Tadeusz, the Latvian Lacplesis, the Armenian Sasuntzi Davit by Hovhannes Tumanyan, the Georgian The Knight in the Panther's Skin, and the Persian Shahnameh all belong to this tradition.

• 5. German Nationalism and Its Shadow

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  Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivered his Addresses to the German Nation in 1808, in the immediate aftermath of Prussia's defeat to Napoleon at the Battle of Jena in 1806. Those addresses, alongside Heinrich von Kleist's patriotic stage dramas and Ernst Moritz Arndt's war poetry written during the anti-Napoleonic struggle of 1813-15, were all instrumental in shaping German nationalism for the following century and a half toward a racialized ethnic rather than civic direction.

  Romanticism also helped popularize myths that would prove durable and dangerous. The Kyffhauser myth held that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa slept atop the Kyffhauser mountain, expected to rise and save Germany at a given time. The legend of the Lorelei, worked on by Brentano and Heine among others, entered the cultural bloodstream. These were not merely aesthetic phenomena. They were political tools that could be picked up by later movements.

  The Nazi appropriation of Romantic nationalism followed directly. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue, wrote that German Romanticism was "welcome as rain after a long drought" but needed to be followed to its racial core and freed from "certain nervous convulsions." On the 8th of May 1933, just two days before the Nazi book burnings in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels told theatre directors: "German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be like steel, it will be Romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos, and at once obligatory and binding, or it will be nothing."

  The Soviet literary scholar Naum Berkovsky described the process precisely: German fascism extracted Romanticism from the past, established its ideological kinship with it, and absorbed it into its system after "some cleansing on racial grounds." The consequences were significant enough that scholars and critics including Fritz Strich, Thomas Mann, and Victor Klemperer, all of whom had supported Romanticism before the war, reconsidered their positions afterward. Heinrich Heine had already seen it coming. His 1844 poem Germany. A Winter's Tale parodied the Romantic modernization of medieval myths in its "Barbarossa" chapter, writing with corrosive irony about restoring the old Holy Roman Empire complete with its guild estates and its guillotine alternatives.

• 6. Poland as Messiah

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  Adam Mickiewicz gave Polish Romantic nationalism its most distinctive theological form. Writing after Russia's army crushed the Polish Uprising under Nicholas I, Mickiewicz developed the idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer as Jesus had suffered, and destined to save all people through that suffering. The self-image of Poland as a "Christ among nations" or the martyr of Europe drew on a long history of Christendom and of invasion, and during periods of foreign occupation the Catholic Church served as the primary custodian of Poland's national identity and language.

  Mickiewicz's patriotic drama Dziady was directed against the Russians and depicted Poland explicitly as the Christ of Nations. In another work, Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage, he elaborated the vision in full. He wrote that Poles should not learn civilization from foreigners, but teach civilization to them: "You are among the foreigners like the Apostles among the idolaters."

  Dziady has sustained multiple interpretations since. The moral concerns of Part II, the individualist message of Part IV, and the deeply patriotic and messianic Christian vision of Part III are the best known. The scholar Zdzislaw Kepinski, however, reads the drama differently, tracing hermetic, theosophic, and alchemical philosophy through the text, along with Masonic symbols, in his book Mickiewicz hermetyczny. The partitions of Poland came to be understood in this tradition not merely as a national catastrophe but as a Polish sacrifice for the security of Western civilization itself.

• 7. Arts, Architecture, and Ethnic Self-Determination

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  After the 1870s, national romanticism as an artistic movement took on a distinct character. Bedrich Smetana's symphonic poem "Vltava" became its musical emblem. When a church was built over the site in St Petersburg where Tsar Alexander II of Russia had been assassinated, the architects reached for a style that would best evoke traditional Russian features, producing the Church of the Savior on Blood.

  In Finland, the reassembly of the national epic the Kalevala inspired an entire school of paintings and murals in the National Romantic style, which stood in place of the international Art Nouveau styles that dominated elsewhere. The foremost practitioner of this Finnish school was Akseli Gallen-Kallela. By the turn of the century, ethnic self-determination had shifted from a revolutionary demand to an assumption held as progressive and liberal. Romantic nationalist movements for separation were active in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Czech and Serb nationalism continued to unsettle imperial politics. Welsh and Irish languages experienced a poetic revival. The Zionist movement revived Hebrew and began immigration to Eretz Yisrael.

  Yet the era also hardened the claims of primacy and superiority that Romantic nationalism had long carried. Richard Wagner argued that those who were ethnically different could not comprehend the artistic and cultural meaning inherent in national culture, specifically attacking Jews as being unwilling to assimilate into German culture and therefore unable to understand the mysteries of its music and language. Following the Panic of 1873, a new wave of antisemitism and racism rose in the German Empire, and the racialist volkisch movement that grew from Romantic nationalism in the late 19th century eventually found its most destructive expression in the 20th.