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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | History-writing : Introductory survey essay

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Texts and stories History-writing Europe (general) 1850 – Michelet, Jules: The genesis of the Marseillaise 1870 – Michelet, Jules: Preface to the completed Histoire de France Jules Michelet (1843) Logo of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica Baár, Monika

Time, change, diversity, archive

The study of history enjoyed exceptional prestige in the Romantic era. It was frequently considered to offer future-oriented wisdom from the past, and accordingly, historians themselves were cast into the role of “backward-looking prophets”. Romantic historiography grew out of the Enlightenment tradition of secular philosophical history, but Romantic historians tended to place themselves in opposition to earlier generations, emphasizing specificity and uniqueness (rather than general principles), and the ambition to uncover the authentic and special national trajectories of the distant past (as opposed to the universalism and rationalism of the Enlightenment). As the German historian Heinrich Luden (1778–1847) put it, “the historian has to dedicate his attention to the history of the fatherland above all else”. According to the Romantic conception, in the history of mankind each nation followed its own historical mission, contributed to the greater whole in accordance with its individual character. Thus, nations played a natural role in counterbalancing the indistinctness of civilization: they added variety and colour to the world.

This emphasis on variety and distinctiveness had been developed by Johann Gottfried Herder, who considered nations not just as aggregates of individuals, but as organisms with their own growth-pattern, spirit and moral profile. Herder’s cultural relativism and preoccupation with popular culture was formulated within the context of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism; he emphasized that national sentiment joined nations together rather than dividing them. It was not any particular culture or language in its own right, but their mutual differences and variation as such which Herder found valuable within them.

Herder’s thought had significant political impact: it was anti-elitist, challenged ingrained notions or valorizations concerning the “backwardness”, “civility” or “refinement” of certain societies or countries (“nations”) and subverted any form of cultural hegemonism within or between societies. Herder held folk songs in particularly high esteem as reminders of an age antedating “high culture”. But the high value that Herder attached to language and folk songs implied more than the celebration of ethnic characteristics; it demonstrated his provocative assertion that belonging to the nation was not identical with membership of the state. On the basis of these tenets, it does not come as a surprise that Herder’s message proved to be particularly attractive for historians of nations seeking emancipation, especially in Scandinavia and in Central and Eastern Europe.

One generation later, Johan Gottlieb Fichte followed Herder in emphasizing the ethnic and cultural particularity of nations. However, writing in a Napoleon-dominated milieu and against the French claims of universalism, he went further by asserting that those nations which had maintained their particularities most purely were morally superior. Fichte used this valorization to oppose Germany and its individuality against French universalism: an enthusiastic celebration of German history was therefore needed to strengthen the German spirit against the homogenizing universalism of the French Revolution. In this stance, Fichte resembles anti-revolutionaries elsewhere, such as Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke.

Historical research in the Romantic period covered a variety of genres and subjects, but a great number of historians showed affinity first and foremost with the history of their own nation from its origins until recent times. The Romantic scholars’ intention was to renew historiography by abandoning its traditional focus on dynasts and monarchs. They believed that the nation’s true history needed to take the life of the common people into account. Concomitantly, they felt the true causes of historical change might be obscure long-term shifts rather than evenemential crises. As Thomas Babington Macaulay put it, the historian must not confine his observations to palaces, but must see the ordinary men and should not shrink from exploring even the retreats of misery.

This period also saw the increasing professionalization and institutionalization of history, a process which was facilitated by the growth of state-administered public archives and libraries, the establishment of history as a university discipline and the emergence of numerous historical associations, museums and journals. In an age of intensifying national sentiment, the increased emphasis on methodological rigour and the foundation of professional institutions was concurrent with the instrumentalization of history to legitimize national aspirations. Historians showed political partisanship and social awareness, not only in their historical writings but also in public life: many historians were highly committed politically and saw writing history as a way of practising politics. Although the political instrumentalization of history by scholars committed to improve professional standards may appear paradoxical to present-day observers, most historians at the time saw their political involvement not as an obstacle to understanding the past, but, on the contrary, as a catalyst of genuine, empathetic historical insight. The merger of professional and national aspirations becomes manifest in the work of Leopold von Ranke, whose name has become a byword for the new ambition to produce histories based on archival sources and dispassionate non-valorization. Ranke’s intellectual mindset owed much to Friedrich Hegel’s metaphysics, which saw the rational, law-based state as the manifestation of a transcendent entelechy progressively working towards freedom. This translated into a stadial view of history, whose four great epochs (from the Oriental to the German) were informed by a progressive growth of cultural individuality and variety. History should consider the nation’s past in the framework of each of its successive periods, both illustrating and documenting the peculiarities of each particular age. Thus for Ranke, as for historians of the Romantic era in general, the archives were more than just documentary repositories. Jules Michelet saw documents not as papers, but as the lives of men, of provinces and of nations; for him archives were “catacombs of manuscripts, a wonderful necropolis of national monuments”. The most influential source edition of the age, a prototype for future ventures, was the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, launched in 1819 under the direction of the archivist Georg Heinrich Pertz. Its intentions were clearly revealed in its motto: Sanctus amor patriae dat animum (“The sacred love of the fatherland inspires”). Ranke was particularly interested in the early-modern military history and foreign policy of European states in order to demonstrate the emergence of national coherence. Ranke’s approach prioritized political history, but also emphasized the state’s moral quality as a topic for historical reflection. For Ranke history took its course amidst dualistically opposing forces: religion and politics, spirit and body, the universal and the national. The historian’s craft involved primarily the ability to critically engage with primary sources, aided by the mastery of auxiliary disciplines such as chronology, palaeography, statistics and genealogy. Such skills distinguished trained scholars from amateur historians, and in the course of the 19th century drove a process of academic institutionalization and professionalization. Ultimately, this in turn was to lead, in the closing decades of the the century, to a positivistic factualism which brought the “Romantic” paradigm in history-writing to an end.

Historicism

Cultural fields like language, literature and law, studied by neighbouring disciplines such as philology and jurisprudence, were part of the Romantic historian’s purview. The Danish-German Barthold Niebuhr, Professor of Ancient History in Berlin, studied German history with particular emphasis on political and legal institutions, applying the philological-critical method to the study of textual and material remains. The authoritative legal scholar Friedrich Carl von Savigny applied Niebuhr’s philological method to his historical-comparative studies of German law. Against the new Napoleonic legal system, which he rejected as a rigid and mechanical set of rules, Savigny argued that national law systems like the German one had developed organically and in parallel with the nation’s moral outlook through history (much as language and literature had). This continuous developmental process from the past into the present ensured the law’s status as expression and instrument of German morals, culture and identity (Volksgeist); in order to properly understand and apply the law, it was necessary to see it as the outcome of these antecedents. This organic historicism in Savigny’s legal thought reverberated back into the methodology of philology and historiography. Grimm’s study of language and folklore applied Savigny’s method to understand “what is” in terms of “how it had developed”. Accordingly, Grimm’s investigation into the root-system of German folklore led to the mythology of the Germans’ pre-Christian belief system; in Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, legal historicism was fused with a Herderian interest in popular culture.

Grimm’s evolutionary historicism found eager followers, particularly in northern and eastern Europe, where the master narrative of the nation was typically found in poetry and folk culture, rather than in the history of the state. (For example, the publication of Kalevala in 1835 marked a crucial juncture in the history of Finnish historicism and nation-building.) Similarly, the search for authentic literary canons and the intention to codify the national language meshed with the agenda of national historiography; witness one of the most influential German “national histories” of the period: the five-volume Geschichte der Poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (1835-42) by Georg Gottfried Gervinus; beyond mere textual analysis, it studied German cultural and social history by means of the literary corpus. Indeed, the rise of literary history-writing in the course of these decades is a Europe-wide phenomenon. Spanning the gap between social-political history and philology, literary historiography played an important role in articulating notions of national culture, character and identity, as expressed in literature across the ages.

Language, writing, vision

Romantic historians wrote not just about the people but also for the people. Not only did they choose “the nation” as the protagonist of their narratives (as opposed to the older tendency to organize historical accounts around monarchs and high affairs of state), they also sought to educate their audience and aimed their histories at increasingly wide circles of readership. This ambition to reach out to the people meant that their writing had to be readjusted to the requirements of their new, wider audience. In many cases, even the choice of language was far-reaching: accounts in foreign languages almost necessarily imposed a foreign or more detached perspective on the topic, and language was now increasingly considered a fundamental carrier of national identity and continuity. In many parts of the continent (Eastern Europe, Scandinavia), earlier histories had usually been in learned languages (German, Latin, Greek) which were unintelligible to the majority of the population. Choosing to write history in the national language was a deliberate stance in such cases. It also involved a great deal of linguistic groundwork such as the standardization of the language, the creation of a new scientific terminology and the enhancement of the linguistic repertoire by means of translations and neologisms.

Reaching out to the people involved, besides the use of the vernacular language, also a new attitude to the reading public. Authors in the Enlightenment era had cultivated a dispassionate and aloof (“philosophical”) style. By contrast, historians of the Romantic era were anything but detached narrators; they identified both with their subject matter and with their audience. Unlike their predecessors who appealed only to the intellect, their aim was to offer a history which addressed the heart as well as the mind. Thus, a national history could only be considered successful if scholarly content was combined with popular appeal, making readability and lucidity of paramount importance. Not yet the academic professional of later decades, the historian of the Romantic school was the people’s teacher and educator. He attuned his narrative to the conditions of the readers: presentation was not highly technical as readability was a crucial consideration. This stance led to the subsequent discrediting of many a Romantic historian by their more factualist, positivistic successors in later decades. A similar tendency for later scholars to disavow the work of the Romantic generation, rejecting it as “enthusiastic”, “speculative” or  “amateurish” is found in fields like linguistics, philology and folklore studies.

Historians’ reputations in the Romantic era rested in large part on their literary style, rather than the depth of their archival research or professional skills. Novelists and poets provided the template for appealing narratives; indeed, it was not uncommon for a historian to be simultaneously a novel-writer. For example, the first official historiographer of the Russian Empire, Nikolaj Karamzin, appointed by Tsar Alexander I in 1803, was a novelist. It was in particular Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel that served as a model and inspiration for several historians of the Romantic generation. Many Romantic historians subscribed to Augustin Thierry’s assessment of Scott as “the greatest master of historical divination that has ever existed”. Macaulay was no less deeply inspired by Scott’s novels and romances. While no historian could take account of the entirety of the past and all its transactions, the most faithful historian, like a great historical novelist, was the one who could render the “character and spirit of the age […] in miniature” by “exhibiting such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole”. The third chapter of Macaulay’s History of England, which offers a portrayal of the country’s social and cultural conditions in 1685, exemplifies the tenets of his essay “History” (1828): that to do the past justice, the “truly great historian” must, in addition to narrating battles and dynastic manoeuvres, also reclaim for his readers the material of everyday life that heretofore only “the novelist has appropriated”. Another Scott-inspired instance of the importance of narration and style in retrieving the past was Jules Michelet’s use of vivid and picturesque detail in order to recall the past “from the dead”. Explaining his approach in relation to that of his contemporaries, Michelet famously declared that “Guizot analyses, Thierry narrates, I resurrect”.

The unfailing belief in progress that characterized Michelet and many historians of the Romantic generation presupposed a specific vision of the past,  primarily the conviction that the march of history militated against inequality, hierarchy and political privilege by birth. Diversity was seen as the source of progress and historical dynamism and counted, as such, as a distinctive characteristic of modern Europe. The search for a “spirit of the age” or Zeitgeist came also to justify, in almost religious terms, an idea of historical necessity or transcendent entelechy: Thierry stated that the rise of the tiers état was the work of divine providence, and many of the more visionary Romantics believed that a new historical dispensation was drawing nigh.

The intention of historians to redefine the scope of history was both political and academic. Whereas the concept of nationhood in early-modern Europe had been associated less with common ethnicity than with certain feudal privileges, the Romantic period equated the “nation” increasingly with the “people at large”. (Witness the idea that the British extension of the franchise in 1832 and 1867 was seen to bring Parliament “in harmony with the nation”). In France, most Romantic historians saw the nation in liberal-bourgeois terms: as a political unity superseding older dynastic principles, and distinguished from both the aristocracy and the lower classes; as such, the nation was invoked both against feudalism and against socialism. Even Jules Michelet, who considered himself a democrat, identified the lower strata of the French nation with the peasantry and artisans rather than with the modern urban proletariat.

This made the French Revolution a key test-case for Romantic historicism and its implied politics. One of its outstanding chroniclers, Thomas Carlyle,  saw it as the tumultuous advent of Democracy, the manifestation of divine justice meted out to a debauched aristocracy. This tendency to see the events as the manifestation of colliding higher principles (Democracy, Justice, Force, always written in capital letters)) was central to the Romantic world-view as such, and also determined the  interpretation of Michelet and his generation (though their political sympathies differed, as did, consequently, their evaluations and even representations of specific events). Carlyle’s originality in his writing lay above all in his dramatization and narration of those events. Particularly his crowd scenes are remarkable. Dickens’s A tale of two cities (1859) was written under the direct influence of Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, showing how the influence of the historical novel on history-writing (as per Walter Scott) could work in the other direction as well.

While, in this intermedial back-and-forth, the cataclysmic experience of the French Revolution remained a point of reference throughout the entire century, another important watershed was the revolutionary year of 1830. Revolutions spread across Europe, which, anti-absolutist in nature, were all in some manner “national”. While in France the July revolution ended the reactionary Restoration monarchy of Charles X, the Italian risorgimento entered a new phase; Poland’s national revolution, while unsuccessful on the ground, had a long cultural afterlife; and the southern part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, Belgium, gained independence. Historians were not unaffected by these events and changes. For Belgium to be taken seriously internationally, a historicist legitimation was needed to the effect that the new country had a respectable pedigree. Conversely, in the truncated northern Netherlands, scholars lavished their attention on the 17th-century Republic and on the Protestant revolt against Spain. The increased sensitivity to faultlines within the state (along religious lines in Ireland or the Netherlands, along linguistic lines in Belgium and, again, Ireland) was of direct relevance to the historical treatment of the national past.

The genre of national history was the predominant, albeit not the only type of historical writing in the Romantic era. Notwithstanding obvious, significant divergences, a considerable degree of similarity in world-view and narrative-rhetorical style tended to inform these accounts and characterize them as “Romantic”. One can speak of a certain template of historical writing, with dominant themes appearing in countless variations. These themes (to be addressed in some detail in what follows) include the nation’s claims to antiquity, continuity, unity and uniqueness. It is not difficult to detect contemporary national ideals in these claims: historians read history “backwards” and their arguments were set against the backdrop of the contemporary nation-building agenda. But to deliver a history in this mode often required from a historian a great deal of manipulative engineering. Elements that shored up Romantic ideals were sought and found in the history of law, language, literature, religion, institutions and also in customs and folklore.

Golden Ages: Antiquity, medievalism, hero-worship

Even for long-established states, it would be hard to date their foundation back to before the Middle Ages. The history of the people was more ancient than that of the state; and the period of national antiquity was identified with a pre-state “original”, “natural” situation, usually characterized by primeval freedom. In their appeals to antiquity, Romantic historians historicized the Enlightenment myth of the “state of nature”, and their first assertion was the liberty of their nation from time immemorial. This provided a valuable rhetorical trump card for historians who sought to support their nation’s claim to emancipation; it implied that liberty was not something granted by third parties but an original inherited right. It also implied that a subject condition must be the result of a historical aberration. Importantly, national antiquity was not idealized as a paradise lost: although historians might lament the loss of certain ancient virtues (such as a sense of communal belonging), they did not advocate a return to primitive primeval conditions. For example, Stojan Novaković, the founder of Serbian historiography, declared that his intention was not to revive what was left from the ancient (in his case medieval) past, but instead to learn from its mistakes and not to repeat them. Novaković’s interest in the Middle Ages lay in the fact that they immediately preceded the Ottoman conquest and the downfall of independent Serbia – a process which was being reversed in his own time.

In the absence of archeological and linguistic data from prehistoric times, scholars habitually relied on ancient authors such as Tacitus when portraying primordial societies. Tacitus’s characterization of the Germans, which included freedom from time immemorial, tribal democracy, racial and moral purity, frugality, fortitude and natural nobility, was appropriated by almost all nationally-oriented historians. English scholars assumed that the roots of the British political system had originally been introduced by Germanic  settlers from the forests of Germany. The Anglo-Saxons’ representative institutions and flourishing primitive democracy were subsequently, so it was thought, crushed by the Norman conquest. This myth of the “Norman yoke”, adapted by Walter Scott from older sources to provide the basic framework of Ivanhoe, was eagerly taken up by Augustin Thierry. In France, the master narrative of noble-savage natives and despotic conquerors was applied to Gallo-Romans/Franks. Thierry’s adept Kervyn de Lettenhove subsequently adapted it to the Belgian context in his History of Flanders.

Another vision of pre-historic antiquity drew on the Nordic renaissance which European culture experienced in the 18th century. Paul-Henri Mallet’s treatise on ancient Scandinavian mythology and literature (which also included portions of the Icelandic Eddas in French translation) proved particularly influential. Historians expressed admiration for the allegedly uncorrupted liberties of uncivilized times, and asserted that the primitive virtues of love of freedom, unspoiled independence and civic uprightness were needed for a regeneration of modern Europe. The Nordic theory, too, was adapted to different  national contexts. The Pole Joachim Lelewel is a case in point: he insisted that the virtues associated with the Northern peoples were most fully developed in the egalitarian community of the early Poles.

Another origin-hypothesis looked to the Orient, which, following the rise of the Indo-European paradigm in linguistics, counted as the cradle of modern civilizations and as the common point of origin for Europe’s languages and cultures. Several historians derived their nations’ ethnogenesis, through the web of language and religion, from ancient India, e.g. the Lithuanian Simonas Daukantas. Conversely, Romanian scholars portrayed their nation as the sole surviving representative of Latin culture in the “Slavic sea”.

Historical accounts were often positioned against other, “foreign” interpretations. Against Danish/Norwegian sources which saw Iceland as a western outrider of Scandinavia, Icelandic scholars asserted the superior veracity and historical trustworthiness of their own, homegrown saga material, which also supported a more autonomist reading of the early Icelandic past. In the saga-based view of the Icelandic historian Bogi Thorarensen Melsteð, a golden age of Icelandic autonomy was lost to the Norwegian king in 1262-64. Another nationally agonistic version of antiquity was propounded by the Bulgarian Georgi Rakovski, who (not unlike his Lithuanian counterpart Daukantas) derived Bulgarian from Sanskrit, and went on to claim that it was Sanskrit’s closest living relative. This view was pitted against the dominant Hellenic view of antiquity in the Balkans. Rakovski’s model was also directed against the decadence of modern urban culture, and glorified an idealized version of the village-community, which he associated with archaic and communitarian structures, and with primitive democracy.

The urge to assert a nation’s ancient roots naturally inspired the production of forgeries whenever real documentation was lacking. Most forgeries followed the prototypical pattern of James Macpherson’s editions (in the 1760s) of what was claimed to be the ancient poetry of Ossian, a putative 4th-century Highland-Scottish bard. Some of these forgeries proved so convincing that even eminent and critically-minded scholars were taken in – thus in the case of the Bohemian manuscripts “discovered” in 1817 and 1818. Other instances, covering the entire range from wilful fraudulence to erudite prank, abound, from the South Slavic Veda Slovena to the Old Frisian Oera Linda book. In some cases the Macphersonian model (reconstituting a coherent epic from disjointed oral fragments, possibly also supplemented by fresh interpolations) was followed in good faith, or in an avowed attempt to provide the modern replica of a lost primordial original, retrieved piecemeal and incomplete from folklore. Cases in point are the Finnish Kalevala and its Estonian offshoot, the Kalevi poeg.

Historians in the Romantic era wanted to establish lines of continuity in reaction to the constant ruptures which they encountered in the form of foreign invasion, social turmoil and changing borders. The assertion of the nation’s continuous existence was in many cases a crucial necessity given the absence of continuous statehood. Typically, it was argued that however discontinuous or disrupted the history of their state might have been, “underneath” the people had always possessed a continuous history. French historians saw a permanent France across all migrations and regime changes from Vercingetorix to Louis-Phillippe; English historians traced, across the centuries, the continuing afterlife of Ango-Saxon institutions or the Magna Charta of 1215; and the ancient Roman Empire was perceived as the precursor of the Italian nation-state.

The medieval period, stretching from the end of primeval antiquity to the beginning of early modernity, provided a privileged era for the forging of continuities. Historians often reassessed the legacy of medieval crisis events, battles and  movements, and also identified exceptional heroes, whose prominent role was seen as a mission in the service of the nation’s (or even humanity’s) destiny. Jules Michelet’s treatment of Joan of Arc is a case in point. Similarly, Michelet’s Czech colleague František Palacký canonized the medieval reformer Jan Hus into an ideal representative of the Czech nation’s quest for liberty.

A moral continuity between past events and present ideals was also created in the idealized treatment of medieval towns and their proto-democratic self-government. Urban liberties were celebrated by opponents of autocratic rule. The legacy of medieval municipalities was thus aligned with the struggle against feudalism, the rise of the middle class and the origin of democracy. Augustin Thierry saw in the medieval townsmen the predecessors of the French people’s quest for freedom in his own century; and Simonde de Sismondi, in his Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge  (1807-18), glorified, for the benefit of modern political sensibilities, the freedom of municipally constituted Italian cities and their ability to defeat the might of Emperor Barbarossa.

The immediate and palpable public manifestation of this historicist search for continuities between past and present was a cult of national-historical commemorations and commemorative celebrations; this commemorative fever spread rapidly across Europe in the course of the Romantic century.

National unity, the nation’s uniqueness and cultural identities

Given the nature of 19th-century political ideals, it is not surprising that the cause of national unity became a veritable historical myth. The pursuit of unity cut across social, geographical, ethnic-linguistic and sometimes religious divides, advocating reconciliation while also creating the illusion of the country’s geographical cohesion by moulding various lands and provinces into a synoptic history. At the same time, the ethno-linguistic definition of national identity provided criteria for determining not only who belonged, but also who did not belong, to the nation. This threw doubt on the status of divergent ethno-linguistic groups within the national community.

To be sure, not all historical projects prioritized national unity and centralization; supporters of regionalism, federalism and various pan-movements also made eager and grateful use of the past to support their views. Carlo Cattaneo, a risorgimento historian condemning the subordination of liberty to unity, argued that liberty should be decentralized so that variety could flourish in a multiplicity of places. Again, taking their cue from the Catalan and Galician cultural revivals, various regionalist historiographies of Spain emerged to intervene in the political dispute between centralism and federalism. In Ireland, Thomas Davis, inspired by the glories of Gaelic antiquity, propagated the Romantic ideal of lost nationhood and advocated a history of Ireland in various genres, including balladry. An emphasis on common characteristics informed the writings of the Scandinavist movement in the 1840s; initially cultural in orientation, it became politicized after the Danish wars of 1844 and 1864. Tracing common traits and contacts across the Scandinavian lands back as far as the Viking era, the Dane Carl Ferdinand Allen produced his History of the three Nordic realms between 1864 and 1872.

National histories typically take pains to  demonstrate the nation’s unique heritage, which itself revolves around exceptional crisis events such as battles and wars. These can be glorious or tragic, as the case may be. The reconquista, and especially the taking of Granada in 1492, were defining moments for Spanish historical triumphalism; conversely, the Ottoman defeats of the Serbs in 1389 and of the Hungarians in 1526 were given tragic significance for those nations’ histories. Moreover, many scholars argued that their nation had performed a unique historical mission in the general cause of progress. The case of Polish Messianism is well known; various other Central and Eastern European countries cast themselves as “bulwarks of Christendom” against the onslaught of (Moorish or Ottoman) Islam. Michelet celebrated France as the world’s hatching-ground of liberty, equality and brotherhood. British historians like Macaulay saw in their country the European guardian of consensually negotiated civil liberty. Icelanders and Swiss alike celebrated their early institutionalization of grassroots democracy, Italian scholars were inclined to think of their homeland as the birthplace of European civilization, whereas Belgian national histories described the country variously as the crossroads or the battlefield of Europe. Resistance, including military resistance against foreign oppressors, was a crucial concern of national histories, for instance in Greece (against the Ottomans) and Ireland (against the English). Historical exceptionalism was general all over Europe.

Medievalism served to bolster the exceptionalist case of the nation’s uniqueness. While modern states were often caught up in the dreary business of international power shifts, the ancient nation offered a gloriously alternative vision. In Scandinavia, affected by the drastic re-drawing of the Danish and Swedish state borders, historians turned to medieval times: the Dane N.F.S. Grundtvig, the Swede Erik Gustaf Geijer and the Norwegians Rudolf Keyser and Peter Andreas Munch all participated in the rediscovery of the early medieval tradition of the North, Grundtvig even translating Icelandic sagas and Beowulf into Danish so as to claim them as national heirlooms.

A similar strategy appealed to the historians of minority nations. František Palacký, enjoying a solid reputation as a “Bohemian” historian, proclaimed his Czech, i.e. non-German identity in 1848 and shifted the writing of his Geschichte von Böhmen into the Czech language, with the title Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a v Moravĕ (“The History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia”). The revolutionary climate of 1848 suggested to historians the master narrative of the nation’s fervently cherished, long-maintained and often-asserted yearning for national liberation. This type of post-1848 historiography can be found in the writings of Irish nationalists (John Mitchel), of the Romanian Nicolae Bălcescu and of the Hungarian Mihály Horváth, who was forced into emigration in 1849.

The legacy of Romantic history extended well beyond the authors’ lifetimes. It is true that their successors in the new generation, many of them academically established professionals and adepts of factualist positivism, often denounced them in no uncertain terms for their ideological parti-pris and colourful embellishment of the facts. But as the historical discipline was attempting to impose on itself the methodological rigour of the empirical sciences, it remained deeply indebted to the work of the Romantics. The way history was taught in schools often perpetuated the Romantic emphasis on the emotional-patriotic allure of the national past, and imparted it to generations of pupils well into the 20th century. The Romantic view of history was given enduring presence in public space in the form of commemorative monuments which, erected from Romantic motives, lasted solidly into later decades and climes. The histories of the Romantic generation perpetuated their allure and vision through their lasting influence on a generalized cultural memory expressed in a variety of fields and media, from the novel and grand opera to the monumental and decorative arts. It has left lasting traces in the generalized historicism of late-Romantic culture, which, despite the advent of modernism, has maintained its presence in the public sphere unabated across the 20th century.

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