Abstract
The dominant image of the German response to Napoleon has been that his conquest and exploitation of the country stimulated strong nationalism.1 This is partly the work of a national historiography which assumes what it should be seeking to establish, namely a propensity amongst ‘Germans’ to respond on a national basis against ‘foreign’ conquest. This historiography has been sharply criticised to make the point that nationalism was rather less important than other concerns, such as material deprivation or dynastic interest. However, both national historiography and its critics assume that ‘nationalism’ can be seen as an alternative to these other concerns. That in turn implies that nationalism and its alternatives are the same kinds of thing — perhaps a set of motives or a political ideology or a sense of identity. However, this is rarely made explicit.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a debunking account in English see M. Hughes, Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945 (London, 1988).
A collection of essays considering the role of ‘nationalism’in various countries for the period is O. Dann and J. Dinwiddy (eds.), Nationalism in Europe in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1987).
I develop this argument in J. Breuilly, ‘Culture, Doctrine, Politics: Three Ways of Constructing Nationalism’, in J. Beramendi et. al. (eds.), Nationalism in Europe. Past and Present (Santiago de Compostela, 1994), pp. 127–134.
There is a large and fast growing literature on this debate. For judicious accounts from rather different perspectives see U. Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism (London, 2000)
A.D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (1st edition, London, 1998).
A particular German variant of this approach concerns the notion of a Kulturnation as a community or at least a sentiment of community that could exist in the absence of matching political institutions. The idea is especially associated with the work of F. Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the Nation State (Princeton, NJ, 1970).
The argument is developed generally in J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (2nd edition, Manchester, 1993).
I seek to relate it in a general way to nineteenth-century German history in J. Breuilly, The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800–1871 (London, 1996).
Finally I have related some of the arguments about modernisation, though not specifically nationalism, to Napoleonic Germany in my ‘Napoleonic Germany and State-formation’, in M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State-Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1800–1815 (London, 2003), pp. 121–52
And to modernisation as a longer term process in nineteenth-century Germany in J. Breuilly, ‘Modernisation as Social Evolution: The German Case, c.1800–1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 15 (2005), pp. 117–147.
See E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (2nd edition, Oxford, 2006). This second edition includes a 50-page introduction by myself which develops these critical points about Gellner.
H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte I: 1700–1815 (Göttingen, 1987). The subtitle of this volume is ‘from the feudalism of the Old Empire to the defensive modernisation of the reform era’.
Gellner’s essay on List entitled ‘Nationalism and Marxism’ is in E. Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (1st edition, Oxford, 1994), pp. 1–19.
For the German text I have used J.G. Fichte, ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808)’, in J.H. Fichte (ed.), Fichte: Sämmtliche Werke, Vol 7: Zur Politik, Moral, und Philosophie der Geschichte, (Leipzig, 1845).
For an English translation see J.G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (1808), R.F.Jones & G.H.Turnbull trans. (Westport, CT, 1922).
E. Kedourie, Nationalism (2nd edition, London, 1961).
I consider Kedourie’s general arguments in the Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture of 1999, published as John Breuilly, ‘Nationalism and the History of Ideas’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 105 (2000), pp. 187–223.
J. Breuilly, ‘On the Principle of Nationality’, in G.S. Jones and G. Claeys (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2008), forthcoming.
I draw here on the arguments of B. Giesen, Intellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a German Axial Age (Cambridge, 1998).
The notion of the nation as an imagined community goes back, of course, to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (2nd edition, London, 1991).
K. Hagemann, ‘Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre’. Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn, 2002).
is still under-researched and the principal work remains W. Langsam, The Napoleonic Wars and German Nationalism in Austria (2nd edition, New York, 1969; 1st edition 1930).
More recently on the possible combining of national enthusiasm with military resistance to Napoleon see E. Zehetbauer, Landwehr gegen Napoleon: Oesterreichs erste Miliz und der Nationalkrieg von 1809 (Vienna, 1999).
The literature on Prussia is, by contrast, vast. For a recent English language work which provides much information on the account of the war and the role of reforms see C. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006), especially chapters 10 and 11.
From a large and growing literature on the commemoration and memory of war, see K. Hagemann, ‘German Heroes: The Cult of Death for the Fatherland in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, in S. Dudink et al (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, (Manchester, 2004), pp. 116–34;
K.A. Schäfer, ‘Die Völkerschlacht’, in E. François and H. Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Errinerungsorte (3 vols, Munich, 2001), vol. 2, pp. 187–201;
K. Wenzel, ‘Befreiung oder Freiheit: Zur politischen Ausdeutung der deutschen Kriege gegen Napoleon von 1913–1923’, in H.-A. Winkler (ed.), Griff nach der Deutungsmacht. Zur Geschichte und Geschichtspolitik in Deutschland (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 67–84.
See for example Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg. Some of her arguments are now available in summary English form in U. Planert, ‘Conscription, Economic Exploitation and Religion in Napoleonic Germany’, in P.G. Dwyer and A. Forrest (eds.), Napoleon and His Empire: Europe, 1804–1814 (London, 2007), pp. 133–148.
C. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, California, 1990);
A. Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997).
For examples of such research see M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c.1800–1815 (London, 2003).
For a renewed emphasis on international relations as of primary importance and understood in terms of relationships between dynastic states see B. Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 (London, 1998).
For an English translation of this passage from the Appeal, see J. Breuilly, Austria, Prussia and Germany 1806–1871 (London, 2002), Document 19, pp. 118–19.
That is not to say that the values of this class were only national or were in some sense ahead of their time, whatever that phrase means. For a detailed sense of the self-images of the most articulate members of this group which brings out, amongst other things, the significance of a particular kind of Protestant sensibility, see M. Maurer, Die Biographie des Bürgers. Lebensformen und Denkweisen in der formativen Phase des deutschen Bürgertums (1680–1815) (Göttingen, 1996).
For overviews of the ideas and practices of the French and Rheinbund reformers, and the limits of their reforms, see P. Nolte, Staatsbildung als Gesellschaftsreform. Politische Reformen in Preußen und den süddeutschen Staaten, 1800–1820 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990);
H. Berding and H.-P. Ullmann (eds.), Deutschland zwischen Revolution und Restauration (Königstein/T. and Düsseldorf, 1981);
E. Weis, Reformen im rheinbündischen Deutschland (1st edition, Munich, 1984).
I follow the argument of D. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany (London, 2000).
For the Prussian reforms see Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947; and B. Vogel, Preussische Reformen (Königstein im Taunus, 1981).
This liberalism did also operate with a complex of ideas about cultural nationality as is well brought out by B. Vick, Defining German: the 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Harvard Historical Studies 143, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2002).
I outlined some of these arguments in J. Breuilly, ‘State-Building, Modernization and Liberalism from the Late Eighteenth Century to Unification: German Peculiarities’, European History Quarterly, 22 (1992), pp. 257–284.
See essays in D. Langewiesche and G. Schmidt (eds.), Föderative Nation. Deutschlandkonzept von der Reformation bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2000).
T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983).
For this idea see M. Broers, Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815 (London, 1996), and his contribution to this book.
For an introduction in English see L. Cole, Andreas Hofer: the Social and Cultural Construction of a National Myth in Tirol, 1809–1909 (EUI working paper 94/3, Florence, 1994).
See now E. Zehetbauer, Landwehr gegen Napoleon: Oesterreichs erste Miliz und der Nationalkrieg von 1809 (Vienna, 1999).
Quoted in M. Hughes, ‘Fiat justitia, pereat Germania? The imperial supreme jurisdiction and imperial reform in the later Holy Roman Empire’, in J. Breuilly (ed.), The State of Germany: the National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and Remaking of a Modern Nation-State (London, 1992), pp. 29–46, at p. 31.
M. Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: the Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (New York, 2000).
The classic study remains G. Ritter, Stein: eine politische Biographie (3rd ed., Stuttgart, 1958).
For Stein’s political role in the 1813–14 period see P. Graf von Kielsmansegg, Stein und die Zentralverwaltung 1813/14 (Stuttgart, 1964).
The Treaty of Riedl in September. Metternich was concerned to head off the radical nationalist threat from Stein and his reorganisation commission and one can already see the broad approach he would adopt at the Congress of Vienna. See E. Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy. Vol. 1: The Contest with Napoleon, 1799–1814 (Princeton, NJ, 1963), chapters 6–8;
P.W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), chapter 10.
For this distinction see M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD1760 (Cambridge, 1986), especially pp. 477–83;
M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States 1760–1914, 1st ed. (Cambridge, 1993), especially pp. 59–61.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2009 John Breuilly
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Breuilly, J. (2009). The Response to Napoleon and German Nationalism. In: Forrest, A., Wilson, P.H. (eds) The Bee and the Eagle. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236738_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236738_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28437-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-23673-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)