Emotions and Everyday Nationalism in Modern European History

Andreas Stynen, Maarten Van Ginderachter, Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, Andreas Stynen, Maarten Van Ginderachter, Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429756481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

This volume examines how ideas of the nation influenced ordinary people, by focusing on their affective lives. Using a variety of sources, methods and cases, ranging from Spain during the age of Revolutions to post-World War II Poland, it demonstrates that emotions are integral to understanding the everyday pull of nationalism on ordinary people.

1 Feeling nationhood while telling lives

Ego-documents, emotions and national character during the Age of Revolutions

Raúl Moreno Almendral

Introduction: emotions and personal approaches to nationhood

In late 1812, the Napoleonic army that had invaded the Russian Empire some months before was in a disastrous retreat. Being chased down by the enemy, a band of French soldiers was lucky enough to come across a Polish baron who gave them shelter in his estate near Białystok.¹ According to the memoirs of one of them, former sailor Henri Ducor, the nobleman could speak French fluidly and, while feeding the group, enthusiastically informed them of Napoleon’s victories at Lutzen, Bautzen and Wurschen (May 1813). The baron spoke of the Russians as though they were animals and barbarians. Apparently, they had offered him a position in the imperial administration of Poland, but he had refused.

I would like them [the Russians] to be properly penetrated by the cordial hatred that my fellow-countrymen and I have for their nation. That would be a sort of revenge and compensation. This hatred, we know how to instil it into our children, because it must survive us, it must be everlasting, and, thank God, our children will understand us. Sooner or later, they will be their parents’ avengers, and the liberators of their country.²

Ducor seemed to be unbothered by the oxymoron “cordial hatred” and went on to write: “We could only applaud the baron’s generous feelings.” It is not clear whether the adjective ‘generous’ is intended to be applied to the hatred itself, or rather to its employment towards the emancipation of an oppressed nation, which was a morally elevated cause for allegedly rational enlightened and first-generation liberals.

This way of talking and thinking belongs to a fundamental period in the history of nationalism and raises basic questions about the relation between nations and emotions. Almost intuitively many claims of national belonging are expressed in emotional terms: love for the country, pride of one’s nation and its achievements, shame when one’s nation or one of its members does not live up to the imagined standards, contempt for other supposedly inferior peoples, etc. Conversely, if emotions are shaped by cultural frameworks and mindsets, nationalism would definitely have had an impact on the way human beings have felt for at least the last few centuries. Ducor’s words also uncover other issues, such as the coexistence of apparently contradictory emotions and the individual/collective tension that is familiar to any nationalism scholar.

The history of emotions and the history of nationalism have recently gone through major transformations that reinforce the possibility of an analytical interaction between both fields of enquiry. As Jan Plamper outlines in his introductory survey, the recent academic interest in emotions constitutes a serious attempt to overcome the old debate between universalism (emotions are essentially the same over time and space) and culturalism (emotions are profoundly shaped by societal ideas and practices about feelings, so variations in time and space can be critical).³ Concepts such as Barbara Rosenwein’s ‘emotional communities’ and William Reddy’s ‘emotional regime’ have gained traction and have been widely debated. These scholars do not deny the biological basis of emotions, but they assert the existence of different systems of feeling. Clearly, this has implications for every scholar working with phenomena that are based in perceptions of community: how do these emotional communities relate to more classic, ‘identitarian’ communities, based on nationhood, race, gender, social class, etc.? When analysing how these perceptions of commonality are created and reproduced, do emotions explain how identities work and/or do identities explain how emotions are felt? Are they imbricated, identical or separate?

Within nationalism studies, there has been an even more fundamental transformation. Object and agent are no longer conflated, at least in theory. Thus, nations are not the actors of their own formation, but the result of a process in which individuals and their asymmetric interactions should be studied as its actual agents. Reified abstractions such as ‘nation’, ‘people’ or ‘State’ are no longer unquestioned analytical tools. Historians and social scientists have started to develop specific concepts in what we can call the ‘cognitive’ and ‘agency turns’ within nationalism studies.⁴ Thus, concepts such as ‘personal nationalism’, ‘experiences of nation’, ‘nationhood from below’, ‘everyday nationalism’ and ‘national indifference’ are being extensively explored and discussed.⁵ Equally, more scholars are trying to gauge the thoughts and feelings of non-elite groups.⁶

This chapter hinges on personal or self-narratives as a way of addressing these issues. Self-narratives and ego-documents are separate but at the same time overlapping source types.⁷ A letter or a recorded conversation can be classified as an ego-document, but not as a personal narrative. Conversely, every self-narrative is an ego-document. In this chapter, I will only draw on self-narratives, which usually have a more elaborate narrative structure, a more emphatic presence of memory processes, and an explicit but problematic claim of correspondence between author and narrator and/or main characters.⁸

In concreto, this chapter draws on a corpus of 170 British, French, Spanish and Portuguese diaries, journals, memoirs and travel books written from the 1780s to the 1830s, compiled in the course of my PhD research on personal nationhood during the Age of Revolutions. In this period the concept of nation received its modern content. Although the term ‘nation’ is very old, it was usually employed as an exonimic of ‘tribe’ until early modern times. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some intellectuals started to talk of nations as the basic organizational units of human diversity. They drew more and more systematized charts of peoples to which specific ‘national characters’ were associated. By the late Enlightenment, these features included a link between psychology, morality and political institutions. Individuals from the Age of Revolutions, especially the most educated ones, had this in mind when faced with what has been called ‘modern nationalism’.⁹

In this chapter I will only use the British, French and Spanish narratives from my broader corpus.¹⁰ These materials are very heterogeneous: archival or published, amounting to dozens or thousands of pages, written by people from different walks of life in terms of profession, education, gender, literacy and provenance. Out of the forty-seven British accounts, 49 per cent can be considered elites, 38 per cent had a professional link to the military, 38 per cent were from peripheral, i.e. non-English, regions and 13 per cent were women.¹¹ The figures in the forty-five French narratives are 62 per cent elites, 44 per cent non-central origin (not raised in the Île-de-France and nearby departments), 69 per cent military and 13 per cent women. In the Spanish case, 60 per cent elites, 22 per cent military, 62 per cent non-Castilian and 9 per cent women.¹²

As the three major European transoceanic monarchies in the Early Modern Period, Britain, France and Spain shared the systemic political crisis that shook the status quo during the Age of Revolutions and all of them played significant roles in the so-called Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Nonetheless, there were three important differences: first, Britons did not experience the large-scale total war and revolutionary breakdown of the state which continental French and Spanish subjects/citizens did. Second, Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century presents a specific political culture where the notions of ‘people’ and ‘nation’ were shaped by the seventeenth-century parliamentary revolution’s legacy. Thus, while the French and Spanish liberals proclaimed the nation as sovereign during their revolutions, ‘nation’ was a much more cultural and flexible concept in Britain as sovereignty was attached to “the people in Parliament” together with the King. Obviously, the power of the King and the force of absolutism were much stronger in Spain than in France. In fact, while Louis XVI was killed, the Monarchy in Spain as an institution was never seriously questioned.

Drawing on these sources I will explore how the political intensification brought about by the Age of Revolutions produced parallel evolutions in nationhood semantics and emotional displays. Then I will look at how those situations created by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars provided some of my corpus individuals with situations of boundary-making where emotions played a shaping role. Finally, I will turn from the ‘external other’ to the ‘internal’ one, discussing tensions within the nation that were also framed in emotive terms. I conclude my chapter with a reflection on whether nations and emotional communities are the same thing.

A changing world of nations: from moral sentiments to (anti)revolutionary passions

The idea of the world as a mosaic of nations that are collective subjects endowed with specific and distinctive traits, agency and, in the case of Britain, France and Spain, a political entity, was already in place by 1780. This was no longer the original ancient-medieval natio’s meaning or, arguably, the early modern ‘ethnotypes’. However, its role and even inclusion in the history of nationalism is and will always be disputable. I argue that the Enlightened, Liberal and Romantic ways of imagining the nation (as a public spirit, as a sovereign community, as a cultural reflection of genuineness and mystic distinctiveness) are decisive turning points in the rise of modern and contemporary nationalism.

The evidence of the first and second usages is clear and consistent for highly educated subjects and for memoirs and self-narratives that were meant to be published. The situation is more debatable and ambiguous for other social groups and for diaries and more private memoirs, but the case is still strong. It is also clear that the experience of revolution introduces decisive qualitative and quantitative changes (especially regarding French and Spanish experiences). It is, for instance, common to find the image of the British as a superior people because they had attained the best institutional system that granted them true liberties without bloodshed and the destruction of valuable traditions, while the French imagined themselves as superior because they were the supposedly most civilized nation and, with the Revolution, they truly conquered freedom. Both of these tropes lean on the kind of liberal universalism that would shape the political history of the first half of the nineteenth century. By contrast, this was very unlikely in Spanish sources, which relied more on the defence of Catholic and Monarchist authenticity and national independence.

The presence of the emotive element in picturing that world of nations and explaining the nature of its bonds is undeniable. For instance, the English painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary entry of the 12th of April 1799 about that day’s dinner table conversation. His interlocutor spoke of “the wretched state of France”, but he deemed its destruction unlikely because, contrary to the situation in other countries, “the French are a very national people”. According to Farington, he told him that the English were “the most national people in Europe”, and after them, the French and the Swiss. “The Germans, the Italians have no national feeling, – Prussians, Austrians etc only feel for those they are associated with, viz. for their neighbours, – they do not feel for the Country, – like Englishmen & Frenchmen.”¹³

In the self-narratives, being national was often associated with “feeling for the coun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: emotions and everyday nationalism in modern European history
• 1. Feeling nationhood while telling lives: ego-documents, emotions and national character during the Age of Revolutions
• 2. So close and yet so far: degrees of emotional proximity in pauper letters to Dutch national power holders around 1800
• 3. ‘Lou tresor dóu Felibrige’: an Occitan dictionary and its emotional potential for readers
• 4. Learning to love: embodied practices of patriotism in the Belgian nineteenth-century classroom (and beyond)
• 5. Performing and remembering personal nationalism among workers in late Russian Poland
• 6. In search of the true Italy: emotional practices and the nation in Fiume 1919/1920
• 7. Bringing out the dead: mass funerals, cult of death and the emotional dimension of nationhood in Romanian interwar fascism
• 8. Feeling the fatherland: Finnish soldiers’ lyrical attachments to the nation during the Second World War
• 9. Emotional communities and the reconstruction of emotional bonds to alien territories: the nationalization of the Polish ‘Recovered Territories’ after 1945
• Conclusions: national(ized) emotions from below
• Index