National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements

Miroslav Hroch: National Romanticism

Miroslav Hroch: National Romanticism The end of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution revealed, and opened, viable as well as unviable roads for the future development of European society. In connection with the ideas of the Enlightenment it shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms that continued to stem from the basis of the old corporate society. The Napoleonic wars integrated Russia once and for all into the political and, indirectly, cultural history of Europe. The steam engine and other technical achievements signalled the advent of the industrial revolution. In arts and culture, a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism. At the same time, though with less success, it had pretences also of becoming a new ‘way of life.’ The civil service was rationalized and bureaucratized. And, above all, a new group identity was announced, which, partly on the basis of the existing structure of the European states, partly in opposition to it, elevated the nation as the supreme value and fundamental ‘centrum securitatis.’ Was it only coincidental timing or was there a causal relation, direct or indirect , that linked together all these changes? Our chief interest here will be the relation between Romanticism and national identity, even though, as we shall see, these two notions or, if you like, evolutionary trends cannot be understood without the context of the other great changes of the period. A consideration of the relationship between Romanticism and national consciousness suggests from the beginning two questions that we need to consider first if we wish to avoid misunderstanding and superficial models: 1. What is national about Romanticism? 2. What is Romantic about the nation? These clearly are questions that cannot be answered without some preliminary consideration of terminology. One cannot think of Romanticism MIROSLAV HROCH: NATIONAL ROMANTICISM 5 solely as a literary trend; in the main it is an approach to life, which was projected also into a value system and into conduct as well as into works of art. What was the nature of that approach to life? Usually, by ‘Romantic approach ’ one understands a strong emphasis on emotion, the subjectivization of attitudes, an attempt to be unconventional, the absence of a realistic approach to the world, and so forth. There is, however, no generally accepted definition of Romanticism, and when we do come across a consensus about it among experts, it tends to be in the negative definition: Romanticism is labeled a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and cool, restrained Classicism . Although even that is not an entirely unambiguous characterization (we find the emphasis on emotion even in the Sentimentalism of the eighteenth century), it is evident that it tends to apply more to art than to approaches to life. And it is the latter that are of particular interest to us for our topic, the relationship between national identity and Romanticism. I believe that what constitutes the common denominator of so-called Romantic approaches to life can be called a sense of social alienation, a feeling of loneliness, which stems from a sense of insecurity, from the disrupted harmony of the world. This feeling was not widespread: it was shared chiefly by men and women of letters, philosophers, and the educated on the whole. They sought a different way out of the situation and it cannot therefore be characterized without a certain, though probably simplistic, typology. We can distinguish at least five roads to a new sense of security, to a sense of belonging . These roads, which were meant to become ways out of the crisis, were not mutually exclusive; they may, depending on the case, also be complementary , and we do not therefore encounter them in pure forms. Nevertheless , we can usually say that in the approaches and views of this or that author , or this or that great figure, some of these ideas dominated and others occupied a secondary position, and though they do not appear in a pure form, some tended usually to predominate. The fundamental road that was meant to lead the Romantics to a new sense of security was the road of individualization and subjectivization: one could find this sense of security in a deep, intense personal relationship—in love, often unrequited, for someone of the opposite sex, who was usually idealized, and in friendship with someone of the same sex. The search for personal security by...