Visualising the Nation, Nationalism & Imprealism

 Visualising the Nation

• Female figure became an allegory of the nation.
• During the French Revolution artists used the female allegory to portray ideas such as Liberty, Justice and the Republic.
• In France she was christened Marianne, a popular Christian name, which underlined the idea of a people’s nation.
• Statues of Marianne were erected in public squares to remind the public of the national symbol of unity and to persuade them to identify with it.

Nationalism & Imprealism

• Last quarter of the nineteenth century nationalism no longer retained its idealistic liberal-democratic sentiment of the first half of the century, but became a narrow creed with limited ends.
• During this period nationalist groups became increasingly intolerant of each other and ever ready to go to war.
• Most serious source of nationalist tension in Europe after 1871, area called Balkans. broadly known as the Slavs.
• Balkans was under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
• Ottoman Empire had sought to strengthen itself through modernisation and internal reforms but with very little success.
• Balkan peoples based their claims for independence or political rights.
• The Balkan area became an area of intense conflict.
• The Balkan states were fiercely jealous of each other and each hoped to gain more territory at the expense of the others, scene of big power rivalry.
• Each power – Russia, Germany, England, Austro-Hungary – was keen on countering the hold of other powers over the Balkans, and extending its own control over the area.
• Led to a series of wars in the region and finally the First World War.
• Nationalism, aligned with imperialism, led Europe to disaster in 1914.
• Colonised oppose imperial domination, all struggled to form independent nation-states, and were inspired by a sense of collective national unity, forged in confrontation with imperialism.
• The idea that societies should be organised into ‘nation-states’ came to be accepted as natural and universal.