I think the French Empire has potential to go both ways. Certainly plenty of Italians and Poles saw the Empire as a way to fulfill nationalist aspirations, and the Rhineland and Belgium were quiescent until the end.
If Napoleon won, would 1848 still happen?
- Thread starter Achaemenid Rome
- Start date
You're probably correct. Unless Napoleon and his successors behave differently from OTL.
Yes. It will be superficially similar, but less of a class struggle against the reaction of 1815 and more directed against France and the House of Bonaparte. France's victory will have undermined the conservative order to a great deal already, making the revolutionaries' job easier.
It will happen in Germany out of the desire, or need, of the rising bourgeois class to be a counterweight to France. Germany would successfully unite under a republic, or at least a constitutional monarchy, probably in the 1830s. Prussia and Austria will likely collapse, meaning Grossdeutschland can be achieved under a liberal republic. The Dutch will want their independence. Italians will want rid of the Bonaparte monarchy and will resent France for occupying Italian territory in the northwest.
I see a wave of revolutions in central Europe and Italy followed by a war like that of the 1790s, only with France trying to reassert its hegemony. Britain and what's left of Russia are the wild cards.
It won't be a perfect analogue to OTL's 1848, but a mix of 1848 and 1989.
It will happen in Germany out of the desire, or need, of the rising bourgeois class to be a counterweight to France. Germany would successfully unite under a republic, or at least a constitutional monarchy, probably in the 1830s. Prussia and Austria will likely collapse, meaning Grossdeutschland can be achieved under a liberal republic. The Dutch will want their independence. Italians will want rid of the Bonaparte monarchy and will resent France for occupying Italian territory in the northwest.
I see a wave of revolutions in central Europe and Italy followed by a war like that of the 1790s, only with France trying to reassert its hegemony. Britain and what's left of Russia are the wild cards.
It won't be a perfect analogue to OTL's 1848, but a mix of 1848 and 1989.
Kingdoms in personal union like Italy, or under cadet Bonapartes.
But certainly, I suspect that the Bonapartes would do a much better job of weathering the rise of liberal nationalism.
I'm not as convinced as the British posters that Napoleon will be a dictator if peace is established. He wanted to be loved and would be worried about his legacy, which is a wild card for this.
Edit: The other thing is that the good liberals weren't that successful at launching Nationalist uprisings on their own, as 1848 showed.
Napoleon really did a great job of spurring local nationalism and attracting liberals to his cause. In this scenario, I strongly suspect that the Kingdom of Holland would be restored though perhaps in personal union with France. Illyria would be given full independence rather than being autonomous French departments, and Naples may very well be united with the Kingdom of Italy. The area of the First French Empire would decrease, but the regions under Napoleonic control would not.
It is quite hard for anyone to screw up as much as OTL Europe in the Vormarz, and it’s rather silly to think that it would just be OTL 1848 except with more Napoleon. The main distinction would be that liberals would be working within most countries rather than outside it, as the same fear of liberalism would not exist at all in a Napoleonic Europe except for in Austria, Prussia, et cetera.
Interesting points. Perhaps he would try to establish a chain of allied rather than puppet states?
Nationalism is the rising force. If liberal elements can't achieve nationalist goals, then illiberal elements will. It's not a question of whether nationalism wins, but only what kind of nationalism.
I am leery of presuming that nationalism is inevitably going to win, anymore than communism would inevitably win.
The difference is that communism depended on the strength of communist parties and the political left. Nationalism was on both sides of the political spectrum.
I agree that any revolutionary wave after Napoleonic victory would be unlike OTL 1848. The balance of power between conservative, aristocratic forces and the middle classes would be completely different. That does nothing to stem the rise of pan-nationalism. By the 1840s, it is simply an idea whose time has come despite whatever structures are in its way, whether Europe is dominated by Napoleonic France or stifled by the consensus of 1815. This was all set in motion long before Napoleon rose to power. It was already a rising force in the 1810s.
The system and regimes that Napoleon created throughout Europe were designed to be beneficial to France. They were incompatible with the goals of German or Italian nationalists, who would see what it accomplished for France, but would be denied the same thing themselves. As a result, they will turn on France. And while Napoleon was able to keep the support of most nationalists and liberals while France was fighting the coalitions, without that war the dynamic becomes one of French hegemony or self determination, and a resurgent Britain begins to look like a friend.
Basically, I don't think that:
1. liberal support for France in the war translates to support 20 or 30 years later.
2. liberalism will settle for democracy without nationalism for the sake of France.
3. the European zeitgeist will skip nationalism for some kind of pan-European unionism, much less one dominated by Paris.
Exactly. Anyone who does consider any of these possible is just dreaming.
Liberalism was successful only in conjunction with nationalism. If they get at cross purposes it is liberalism, not nationalism, which will go under.
Maybe, but it perhaps depends on how nationalism develops. Various Marxist historians like Geller and Hobsbawn (sic) consider that industrialization in a capitalist society led to nationalism being promoted by the bourgeois to bind together a workforce drawn from disparate regions within pre existing or new states. The ideal of a single culture for a single market and a state that reflected that culture were consequences.
In this scenario French could be a lingua franca for the elite and become the language of business as well as culture and diplomacy, which latter pair it was already in the 18th century. Playing the role of English in today's global culture. Perhaps French rather than "Standard" German or Italian becomes the 'language of power', to misquote Anderson. And so people speak various Germanic or Italian dialects plus French or a Germanic-French emerges like Hiberno-English or even Singlish.
Pity nobody told the Habsburgs. It would have been nice for them had something like that (with German instead of French, of course, had happened in Austria. Needless to say nothing of the sort did.
Can the French Empire stabilise and sit down into peace? Or is it's entire function as a war machine? If Napoleon doesn't go for Russia, but remains sane and in charge, how long a peace can you realistically see? Isn't it more likely that France's energies get redirected, if not against Russia. The Barbary States or the Ottoman Empire are the obvious targets here. The former could be in alliance with the USA, the latter in alliance with Russia, both of which sort of stabilise a flank for France.
I think it´s a poor reflection on contemporary trends in political thinking that the statement that nationalism would always trump liberalism, socialism, Christianity or whatever has found no serious opposition in this thread.
A bit of background information on the Saar Referendum of 1935, which has been presented as an argument for the thesis: From 1920 up until 1933, ALL German parties and their Saar filiations had campaigned for the "Join Germany" option. From early 1933 to January 13th, 1935, the parties of the left changed their position and formed an alliance pro Status Quo. Yet, in contrast to the "Deutsche Front", they had next to no means to back their campaign with. Their "mother parties" were forbidden, their leaders and many party members thrown into concentration camps. No external power backed the Status Quo campaign. The Deutsche Front, on the other hand, was massively supported by the Nazis, both financially and, more importantly, psychologically. It was quite clear that if you didn`t fly the Nazi flag out of your window, you could well end up on the deportation list to the concentration camps (the "Angstfahnen" campaign) once the Saar would have joined the Reich. Also, with regards to the Catholicism of your worker: following the Nazi-Vatican Concordate, the bishops supported the Deutsche Front campaign, and I suppose the simple priests followed their lead.
And the anachronism:
Differentiating "nationalism" from "liberalism" in the 1810s is a questionable business. The political Nationalisms of the Germans and Italians were modelled after the French - both in imitation and in rejection at once.
I can indeed imagine, for example, Germany becoming divided between a pro-French (and pro-modern statehood, pro-liberal constitutions) and an anti-French movement, in which case the latter might blend Romanticism more unambiguously with a rejection of modernization, constitutions, mass states etc. The latter would not call itself Nationalist, though, and it would much rather come to identify either with the anti-French monarchies (Prussia, Austria), or with glorified pre-nationalist German entities of the past (primarily the Holy Roman Empire, which isn`t so long dead by that time), or with both. That would be an elitist philosophy, but it could be influential nonetheless.
Nationalism would look very different with a Napoleonic victory. (As would liberalism.)
A bit of background information on the Saar Referendum of 1935, which has been presented as an argument for the thesis: From 1920 up until 1933, ALL German parties and their Saar filiations had campaigned for the "Join Germany" option. From early 1933 to January 13th, 1935, the parties of the left changed their position and formed an alliance pro Status Quo. Yet, in contrast to the "Deutsche Front", they had next to no means to back their campaign with. Their "mother parties" were forbidden, their leaders and many party members thrown into concentration camps. No external power backed the Status Quo campaign. The Deutsche Front, on the other hand, was massively supported by the Nazis, both financially and, more importantly, psychologically. It was quite clear that if you didn`t fly the Nazi flag out of your window, you could well end up on the deportation list to the concentration camps (the "Angstfahnen" campaign) once the Saar would have joined the Reich. Also, with regards to the Catholicism of your worker: following the Nazi-Vatican Concordate, the bishops supported the Deutsche Front campaign, and I suppose the simple priests followed their lead.
And the anachronism:
Differentiating "nationalism" from "liberalism" in the 1810s is a questionable business. The political Nationalisms of the Germans and Italians were modelled after the French - both in imitation and in rejection at once.
I can indeed imagine, for example, Germany becoming divided between a pro-French (and pro-modern statehood, pro-liberal constitutions) and an anti-French movement, in which case the latter might blend Romanticism more unambiguously with a rejection of modernization, constitutions, mass states etc. The latter would not call itself Nationalist, though, and it would much rather come to identify either with the anti-French monarchies (Prussia, Austria), or with glorified pre-nationalist German entities of the past (primarily the Holy Roman Empire, which isn`t so long dead by that time), or with both. That would be an elitist philosophy, but it could be influential nonetheless.
Nationalism would look very different with a Napoleonic victory. (As would liberalism.)
Don't agree with this analysis. Even Prussia incorporated liberals in to its government post 1848 so the co-existence of Nationalism and Liberalism in an modern, mass electorate, anti-French state is clearly possible.
But that is OTL´s neutralised post-Viennese France and a nationalism which, until 1848, developed the idea of a Germany unifying even against the will of its princelings, and when this movement was mostly crushed, some of its more moderate proponents attempted to achieve at least something by playing nice again.
With Imperial France looming large in the West and propping up liberal regimes along the Rhine, everything is different in Prussia.