The Invention of National Languages

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a qualified kind of ethnogenesis can be observed among the educated classes of the Western world. In the course of their social emancipation a new political identity emerged, one orientated towards the fatherland, the state, and its population. This new ethnic consciousness bridged older identities such as estate, profession or religion. It originated in connection with the great eighteenth-century social movement of patriotism, which became more and more politicised. The philosophical discourse about the nature of language, which had existed since antiquity, intensified immensely during the eighteenth century. John Locke and George Berkeley in Britain and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in France provided important stimuli in this respect. Johann Gottfried Herder was the first to take vernacular languages and popular poetry seriously as expressions of the culture of illiterate peoples. This chapter examines how national languages were invented and looks at the divergent situations in which the first national languages were used in Europe.

The Idea of National Opera, c. 1800*

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of many composers who, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, thought more and more about a German-language opera. The idea of a German national opera was intensively discussed in Mannheim, and also put into practice with Ignaz Holzbauer's setting of Anton Klein's libretto Günther von Schwarzburg (1777). The idea of the national opera took hold in Europe during the nineteenth century. Is the German national opera, which composers and writers on music from Richard Wagner to Hans Pfitzner see as starting with Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz, a historical reality or a historiographical construct? In order to answer this question, this chapter takes a brief look at the situation of opera around 1800, for only in Germany, and not in the other two leading opera nations, Italy and France, can a development at this time be observed in which the idea of a national opera takes shape.

The Debates about Universal History and National History, c. 1800: A Problem-oriented Historical Attempt*

Friedrich Rühs outlined the problems in the complicated relationship between national history and universal history around 1800. The change in theory from universal to national history, from the totality to the individual, was not only the result of methodological or intra-disciplinary consistency, but reflected nationalisation. The background was provided by the particular historical experiences of the time around the turn of the century: the French Revolution and, even more, changes in the German states and the impact of Napoleon Bonaparte's rule. The debates about the relationship between universal history and national history began during the heyday of Enlightenment history-writing. The switch from, in simplified terms, ‘Enlightenment history’ to ‘historicism’, it seems, also took place in these debates, which were, for a time, its primary setting. The authors involved were historians, philologists, philosophers, theologians and men of letters; the names ranged from Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig von Schlözer, and Johann Gottfried Herder to Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen.

The Invention of German Music, c. 1800

Arnold Schoenberg once spoke famously of his invention of ‘the method of composition with twelve tones related only to one another’, as the discovery of ‘something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years’. How did the generally inclusive habits of composers in German-speaking countries in the eighteenth century, who did not hesitate to adopt diverse musical styles from other countries in Europe, turn into something called German music in the nineteenth century that was decidedly exclusive? And who were its inventors? This chapter argues that German music took its bearings from non-German countries in a spirit of assimilation or opposition — and vice versa. Public ritual and predictable cycles most memorably marked by German music began in Germany in the nineteenth century with the inauguration of the annual Lower Rhine Music Festivals founded in the late 1810s. The marked suitability of German music to do cultural work in the name of the past in order to stabilise uncertain life in the present is not without precedent in Britain too.

Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism

With the French Revolution, the ‘nation’ entered a new phase as a model for political order that replaced corporate societies and triggered a large-scale process of emancipation and modernisation in European societies. Until the eighteenth century the political order in central Europe was organised along other lines, such as the state, the Reich, the monarchy, or the republic. That changed dramatically between the Seven Years War and around 1800. Despite its thorough universalism, Enlightenment in Germany combined universalism with patriotism, a rather unlikely combination in the twentieth century. For most educated authors in the age of Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism and patriotism were not opposites, but complementary. How, then, did contemporaries in the late eighteenth century conceptualise cosmopolitanism, patriotism, and nationalism, and relate them? How did they explain the complicity of cosmopolitanism and patriotism? This chapter outlines different answers to these questions relating to the period between the Seven Years War and around 1800.

Art in a Cool Climate: The Cultural Policy of the British State in European Context, c. 1780 to c. 1850*

Is it possible to speak of a ‘cultural policy’ of the ‘State’ in this period without falling into anachronism? Patronage of the fine arts had been a traditional (self-selected) responsibility of individual nobles and princes. Although sovereign nobles and princes were taking on in this period more explicit responsibilities for police and for more of their people, it is often difficult to distinguish between their activities as individual patrons, their activities as courtly patrons, and their activities as States. This chapters examines what was distinctive about the British State and its cultural policies in the period during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It argues that both the British State and its posture towards culture carried certain features that put them in the Western European mainstream towards the end of the eighteenth century. It also assesses the extent to which Britain was also affected by events in Europe, by which the fine arts were yoked bureaucratically to education and religion in programmes of national integration.

Playing with the Nation: Napoleon and the Culture of Nationalism

In his time, Napoleon Bonaparte of France commanded the ideological environment which made nationalism grow and helped to turn the idea of the ‘nation’ into one of the most powerful political forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Napoleon's conquests, and the strong reactions they provoked in England, Spain, Germany, Poland, and Russia, intensified and diffused the civic ideas of national autonomy, unity, and identity across Europe and throughout Latin America. It is this aspect of Napoleon's historic impact which, more or less by accident, and only in a few instances deliberately, helped to spread a new political culture or, indeed, a new political cult whose origins can be traced back to the French Revolution. The new political culture which arose out of the Revolution focused on the concept of the democratic, sovereign nation as a novel political and social unit for the organisation of society. National aspirations turned against Napoleon and his rule over Europe, and helped substantially to bring him down, instead of lending him support in consolidating his overstretched empire.

Art and Its Publics, c. 1800

This chapter begins by sketching the principal ingredients of what Paul Kristeller called ‘the modern system of the arts’: the concept of art itself; art as created by an artist; and art as public. It then examines the condition of the visual arts at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that is, in the middle of the great revolutionary era that began in 1789. In talking about the arts, a Tocquevillian sense of continuity between old regime and revolution is wholly appropriate. The revolution changed the modern art world in several important ways. Three of these changes are discussed. The first has to do with the social setting of art and artists, and especially with artists' changing relationship to patrons and the public. The second concerns the geographical location of art, particularly the shift in the visual arts' centre of gravity away from Italy to Paris, which would remain the artistic capital of Europe for the next century. The third theme is about the complex relationship of national values and national themes to European art, especially painting.

Unity and Diversity in European Culture, c. 1800: Summary of Discussion

This chapter summarizes issues discussed during the conference on ‘Unity and diversity in European culture, c. 1800’, held in September 2003. Emma Winter opened the first discussion session by suggesting that the replacement of traditional patronage by the market place and the gravitation of the centre of the art world from Rome to Paris were more contested than would appear from the paper presented by James Sheehan. With reference to John Deathridge's paper, Siegfried Weichlein suggested a connection between the rise of German idealism and Germany's retrospective identification with abstract symphonic music, with which Deathridge agreed. Coming back to Sheehan's paper, one participant pointed out the irony that in the eighteenth century the opera was quintessentially Italian while at the same time uniquely cosmopolitan. Volker Sellin suggested that Napoleon Bonaparte hampered rather than fostered German nationalism by abolishing many of the smaller free imperial cities, ecclesiastical territories, and so on in favour of modern states. Other speakers discussed topics related to cultural university and diversity in Europe, including cosmopolitanism, patriotism, nationalism and the invention of national languages.

Views of the Past in Irish Vernacular Literature, 1650–1850

The Irish Magazine, published monthly between 1807 and 1815 and edited by Watty Cox, was perhaps the earliest periodical to articulate a consistently nationalist view of Ireland's history. Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies, like the Irish Magazine, evoked a strong response from the Irish public. Was their popularity an early manifestation of the romantic nationalism that would be so ubiquitous a generation later? It is hardly possible to open a discussion of historiography in Irish without referring to the synthetic history of Ireland entitled Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (‘A basis of knowledge about Ireland’) written by Geoffrey Keating around the year 1634. None of the factors that would have hindered the propagation of Keating's history applied to the poem Tuireamh na hÉireann. This chapter looks at a number of historical poems that strongly resemble Tuireamh na hÉireann and each other in both form and content, including those composed by Seán Ó Gadhra, Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín, Mac Cumhaigh, and Nicholas Kearney.