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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 | Collective memories, commemorative festivals

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Society Festivals Remembrance Europe (general) 1814 – Arndt, Ernst Moritz: (Ein Wort über die Feier der Leipziger Schlacht) Inauguration of the restored statue of Henry IV on the Pont-Neuf (1818) National eisteddfod, Chester 1866 (1866) Millennium (Heroes’) Square [Budapest (HU) 1929] Millennium of Russia Monument [Velikiy Novgorod (RU) 1862] Belgium legislates commemorative statues Leerssen, Joep

The century of Romantic Nationalism uniquely combines a high intensity of commemorative activities (looking back on the pre-1800 past) with a heavy commemorative canonicity (providing a repertoire of memorable events and personalities for post-1918 commemoration). Figures like Schiller and Walter Scott are both agents and objects of cultural memory. This double function results from the fact that the commemorative culture of Romantic Nationalism overlaps both with civic mobilization and associational festivities and with the intellectual mindset of historicism – both of which burgeoned in the 19th century. Public gatherings were made easier by improved (railway) connections, were more easily organized over long distances by increased media penetration, and could count on the participation of groups organized into leisure-time associations. Not only were spectators drawn in great numbers to expositions and fairs; the collective display of sports or choral singing could turn into large-scale mass-participation events of a truly national scale and intent. In some cases the events were multimedia cultural festivals designed to emphasize the nation’s collectivity and shared culture, as in the Swiss Festspiele of the later 19th century. Annual holidays such as the 14th of July in France, or the Oktoberfest in Munich (originally instituted to celebrate a royal engagement), likewise merged large-scale collective conviviality with a nationally assertive function.

Older (pre-1790) forms of celebration were usually dynastic, municipal, or, ultimately, religious in nature. The feast days of martyrs and saints had been marked by the Church from its early days onwards, and had in the course of the Middle Ages become the feast days of institutions (cities, guilds) under the patronage of such saints; the Valencian Falas festival, originally a guild feast for St Joseph, patron saint of carpenters, is a case in point. In the course of the later Middle Ages, prelates, princes, university doctors, and later the Church itself came to celebrate jubilees at 50-year intervals, and universities recalled their dies natalis with an annual ceremony; and the calendar of civic life became shot through with commemorative feast days. From the Moros y Cristianos festivals of southern Spain to Guy Fawkes’ Day in England or the celebration of the lifting of the Siege of Leiden, commemorative practices found root between 1400 and 1700 at municipal level where these secular cults of local heroes and of viri illustres co-existed and sometimes competed with religious ones. The classically inspired and municipally focused tradition of laus urbis was at work in the very early bicentenary celebration of Gutenberg in Leipzig (1640, organized by the printers’ guild) and his tercentenary commemoration in Mainz (1741). Around the same time papal plans to turn Rome’s pagan Pantheon (already housing the grave of Raphael) into a shrine for illustrious men, while abortive, proved internationally influential. This proto-Pantheon, in tandem with the example of Westminster Abbey, provided Europe with a template. The re-purposing of the Parisian church of St Genevieve into a nationally French Panthéon for the nation’s Great Men (beginning with Voltaire and Rousseau) crystallized the nascent concept of a commemorative shrine for the nation’s self-worship into a formula. In the following century, the Panthéon was copied, from Santiago de Compostela (Pantheon of Illustrious Galicians) to the Icelandic Þingvellir and the mountains of Georgia (the Mtatsminda Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures), by way of the Bavarian Walhalla and the Prague Vyšehrad cemetery. Much as monumental edifices and statues were shifting from the religious, dynastic, or municipal towards the national, so too did commemorations.

Pantheons, camposanti, and churches dedicated to the graves of the nation’s great men, monuments, sacred sites, and commemorative statues were not just pieces of real estate but also places of congregation and collective self-presentation. They attracted festive or otherwise performative gatherings, mobilizing the population to demonstrate their dedication to the nation’s collective identity and to the memorability of its past. Here, too, the French Revolution with its revolutionary feasts provided the kick-off point. A more historicist direction was developed from there by the anti-Revolutionary feasts of Romantic Germany. Ernst Moritz Arndt proposed, immediately after the Battle of Leipzig, that the days of that Völkerschlacht be made into an annual occasion of joyful remembrance, and that its battlefield be turned into a sacred grove. In the event, annual commemorations did take place with bonfires all around Germany, culminating in the Wartburg Feast of 1817. Everywhere the new, restored states staged large-scale solemnities to anchor their charisma in public participation. These solemnities often involved commemorative gestures like the erection of statues or the mnemonic consecration of places. Besides these state-run affairs, public funerals were often an occasion for the general populace to manifest their admiration for public men; in a political climate where freedom of assembly was a mere aspiration, such funerals were often nothing short of large-scale political demonstrations. The format of the mass demonstration had been used as a mobilizing and political pressure technique by Daniel O’Connell in his “monster rallies” – his own funeral in 1848 was perhaps the most effective of all. That was in part because what was at stake was in fact a re-burial, after the repatriation of his corpse following his death in Italy. That same, almost sacral-liturgical effect of the solemn re-interment of a dead hero (parallel to the religious tradition of raising a saint’s relics to the honour of the altars) had been premiered by the nationally electrifying return of Napoleon’s corpse from St Helena to the Invalides in 1840. It was echoed forty years later by the no less stupendous pomp with which Victor Hugo was interred in the Panthéon in 1885.

As those names indicate, the cult of commemorative festivities was gravitating, from c.1840 on, to the field of culture. Although states and dynasties would still mark centenaries and jubilees of formative events with festivities and monuments, it was the nation-at-large that was muscling in on the public spectacle and public-space dedication of festive commemoration, and the most suitable representatives were usually the “Great Men” from the field of culture. The century shows a whole Pan-European series of national poets who were publicly commemorated as national heroes with centennial festivities and monuments. The series opened in 1769 with Shakespeare and went on to include, among many others, the centenaries of Goethe (1849), Schiller (1853, 1859), Tasso (1857), Burns (1859), Shakespeare again (1864), Dante (1865), Scott (1871), Hooft (1881), Petrarch (1875), Rousseau and Voltaire (1878), Thomas Moore (1879), Camões (1880), Puškin (1880), Runeberg (1904), Prešeren (1905), Wergeland (1908), and Körner (1913). Similarly, composers like Beethoven and painters like Rubens are among the cultural figureheads commemorated by the 19th-century nation-state by way of statues ceremonially unveiled (1845, 1843). There is still some overlap with city culture (often the location of such statues is linked to the birthplace or domicile of the figure in question) and with religion (as with the remarkable cults of Joan of Arc and Aleksandr Nevskij, or the nationalistically German celebrations of Luther); monarchs, too, try to get a piece of the action by positioning dynastic figureheads as the “pater patriae”; but the  centre of gravity becomes unmistakably middle-class, national, and embodied in representatives from the field of culture. (This same trend continued in the 20th century in the canonicity and iconography of Great Fatherlanders selected to be portrayed on banknotes.) After the achievement of state consolidation, an epidemic of political statues would, however, supplement this cultural vanguard: Garibaldi and Cavour in post-1862 Italy; Bismarck and Wilhelm I in post-1871 Germany; many nation-builders, cultural and political, in the new post-1919 states.

Even though Arndt’s call for a Leipzig commemoration only briefly sparked some festive activities, which died out for lack of official support, the celebration of that battle, and of the years 1810-1813 as the formative period of German nation-building, was kept alive in ballads and in informal cultural genres, to surface again in the huge official monument erected for the battle’s centenary in 1913. Thus, in the later part of the century, the cultural remembrance of collective-national events was condensed from a diffuse Romantic historicism into official general imprints on the landscape. The Hungarian Millennium commemorations are perhaps the most striking example.

It is in these commemorative practices that the historians and novelists of the Romantic generation obtain their most important influence. While in academic circles the writing of history moves away from the sweeping, nation-focused historical narrative, and the novel moves from the picturesque past to the contemporary peasantry, or towards social problems in the towns and villages, the public festivities are still deeply indebted to the Romantic historicism that was promulgated a generation earlier. Thus, in many countries the medieval battles where foot soldiers vanquished cavalry armies were celebrated by Romantic historicists as a victory of the nation-at-large over invading foreign tyrants. Following the pattern set by Shakespeare in his Henry V, such “national victories over aristocratic cavalries” dominate 19th-century historical mythologies of Russia (Aleksandr Nevskij’s Battle on the Ice, 1242), Scotland (Wallace’s Battle of Stirling Bridge, 1297), Switzerland (the Battle of Morgarten, 1315), and Flanders. There, the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs, initially celebrated by local historians, Belgian artists, Flemish writers, and in a Bruges monument, offers an exemplary case of how historical memory moves from cultural production to sociopolitical mobilization. In an intensifying build-up of commemorative feedbacks, the episode gave rise, from its sixth centenary in 1902 on, to what would ultimately become a national feast day and national anthem.

All this forms part of what in Nietzsche’s terms would be called “monumental history”. Another attitude to the past, as a place of unredressed grievances or even trauma, is noticeable in the later century, in Poland after the 1863 Uprising (where, however, the 1910 commemorations of the Battle of Grünwald, 1410, reverted to a more epic assertiveness), or in the Barcelona commemorations of the siege of 1713. This more mournful tone came to dominate commemorative culture after the Great War.

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