and to the peripheries of absolutist Europe.
The centrepiece of royal architecture and monumentality in general was the royal palace – in eastern Europe initially built as a fortified castle – or palaces plural, then regularly at least a winter and a summer palace. Versailles (and, in imitation, Karlsruhe) was laid out as a radial city, beaming out from the royal palace. A huge, well-sculptured park became an important feature of a truly royal seat in the course of the seventeenth century, a sine qua non for palaces outside city centres. In addition, there might be some other palaces of royal power and largesse, of organization for war, a mint perhaps, or a veterans’ hospital or nursing home, like the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris or the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. The European absolutist monarch was not a god on earth nor some other power floating above the earth. He or she stood at the apex of an aristocratic pyramid.11 Aristocratic palaces, then, also contributed significantly to the royal townscape, as in Saint Petersburg.
There was a royal ritual rhythm that played an important part in the life of dynastic capitals, of royal births, birthdays, marriages, coronations and funerals, with public ceremonies and popular festivities as well as court protocol and temporary monuments of arches and tribunes at coronations and royal marriages. There could also be military parades, and some cities, such as Berlin, Potsdam and Saint Petersburg, had very centrally located parade grounds.
Extra-palatial monumentality was less thought about and developed, but it did exist. The equestrian statue was an ancient Roman monument, although perhaps secondary. Charlemagne was enthralled when he saw one of Theoderic in Ravenna and brought it to Aachen, but it seems to have passed into medieval obscurity. The custom was revived with the Italian Renaissance and developed by French seventeenth-century absolutism. In Paris, Henry IV got a statue by the Pont Neuf in 1614; Louis XIV got a number in France and several in Paris.12 In London, Charles II was put up in King’s (now Soho) Square and outside Chelsea Hospital. Before his deposition, James II was elevated in Whitehall.13 In Vienna, the oldest equestrian statue – or at least the oldest still standing – dates only from late eighteenth century. It portrays Emperor Franz Stephan (1708–65) and was founded in 1781 and first put up in 1797; it is now to be found in the Burggarten, né Kaisergarten.14
There was also the royal square, with a name referring to some royalty or royal exploit and, usually, with a statue. The Paris of Henry IV provided the model, the Place Dauphine (Crown Prince Square) on the Île de la Cité, beside the statue of the king, and Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), successfully built to become the centre of elegant life in town, with a statue of Louis XIII. In spite of his personal move to Versailles, Louis XIV did invest in the royal grandeur of Paris as well. The more ephemeral Place des Victoires, with an extremely triumphalist statue of Louis XIV, was a private initiative by a rich admirer, whereas the almost simultaneous Place Louis le Grand (today’s Place Vendôme, after the old palace of the Duke of Vendôme), was somewhat more restrained in the symbolism of its equestrian statue of the Sun King. The Throne Square got its name from the city entry of Louis XIV and the temporary throne then installed there. What is now known as the Place de la Concorde started out in the last third of the eighteenth century as Place Louis XV, with a royal statue.15
Saint Petersburg was the absolutist city par excellence, a magnificent manifestation of pre-national monarchical and of royally derived court aristocratic wealth and will, built by imported Italian architects, to Russian taste. War, religion, monarchy and aristocracy set their first imprints upon the city. The Palace Square was shaped by the Tsar’s Winter Palace and the General Staff opposite it. Nearby, somewhat back, was the hulk of the Senate and Synod, the heads of the civilian and the ecclesiastical administration. The grandiose long boulevard Nevsky Prospekt ran from the Admiralty to the Nevsky monastery.
Moscow became less imperial and less aristocratic and, with late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century textile industrialization, embourgeoised. But it retained a central role of pre-modern Russia. Tsars were crowned in the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral and after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the city became a proto-national symbol due to its sacrificial burning, forcing the Grande Armée to its disastrous retreat.
The Nation versus the Prince(s)
The European nation-states built their capitals upon these pre-national traditions of Greco-Roman antiquity, medieval churches, town and guild halls and monarchical and aristocratic palaces, all still visible historical layers of the modern national cities. No new capital was built, except for Reykjavik in Iceland, which harboured no pre-modern city at all. Athens had to be rebuilt as a city, and some other Balkan capitals were tiny and rustic. The European tradition did include a separate city government, but by the end of royal state power, most capital cities had lost most of their civic autonomy. Modern London had no unified city government at all, and both London and Paris got fully elected city governments only in the 1970s.
The nation entered Europe’s capital cities in two big and two smaller waves. One centred on the French Revolution, its vicissitudes and its (largely Napoleonic) repercussions, spanning the continent from the British Isles – where important changes had started earlier – to Russia, from Norway to Spain and the Balkans. The carapace of medieval traditions, urban oligarchies and royal power cracked, either wide open with a bang or stealthily ajar. The second wave rolled in from the mid-nineteenth century, including but not peaking in the European Spring of 1848 until Albanian independence just before World War I, bringing national Belgrade, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Copenhagen, Rome, Sofia, Tirana and national-cum-imperial Berlin. Here the people-prince conflict was embedded in a range of large-scale processes of social change and transformation of rural-urban relations population growth, railway connections and industrialization, in a complex geopolitical power game among the big powers of the continent.
After that, there was a third brief wave in 1919 and 1920 along the East-Central strip between Russia and Germany, upon the final break-up of all the remaining pre-national regimes in Europe, Romanov Russia, Hohenzollern Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary. The Ottoman Balkans had been nationalized just before the Great War. Finally, a fourth wave surged in the 1990s, with the end of the multinational Communist states of the USSR and Yugoslavia, a wave which also included a ripple in the United Kingdom, with Scottish and Welsh devolution and corresponding new national Scottish and Welsh institutions and buildings. National issues have been revived in the 2010s, with the Scottish referendum and the Eastern Ukrainian semi-secession in 2014, the continuous restiveness of Flanders and the rise of Catalan sovereignty claims. What will come of this is unclear.
The first three waves all centred on conflicts between peoples, constituting themselves as nations, and monarchical power – in the Netherlands and Switzerland against hereditary Regenten or regiments-fähigen Familien. The fourth was a rejection of multi-national nation-states.
This is not the place to theorize or explain the rise of nation-states. The task here is to locate them in time and to grasp their impact on the capital city. However, we do need some clear criteria. First of all, we are not dealing with questions of nationalism and national identity here, but with the constitution of state power.
A state is a nation-state when its sovereignty and power are claimed to derive from a nation (or people). Although claims to being a nation are often, particularly in Europe, derived from an interpretation of the past, the power of a sovereign nation is open to the future, unbound by descent and custom. The sovereign power of the nation is modern. Because of its radiation of power into the whole society of its rule, the establishment of a nation-state may be seen as a country’s tipping point into modernity.16 Its polar opposites are states which belong to a prince by ‘divine right’ or the ‘mandate of heaven’, by legitimate succession or by conquest. These two poles do not exhaust the historical roster of human polities, but their opposition largely defines the field in which nation-states had to establish themselves. In Europe, though, there did develop very early a conception of a territorial realm, belonging to one prince or another but separable as a geographical concept
