the Tiergarten the Emperor had in 1902 ‘donated’ to the city a dynastic Victory Avenue (Siegesallee), with twelve Hohenzollern rulers arranged like medieval pilgrimage stations.*
Scandinavia
The exact dating of the Swedish nation-state may be argued over. It may be seen as a protracted, almost bicentennial process. The starting point was the end of absolutism with the death in battle of Charles XII (in 1718), issuing into a quasi-parliamentary, but Estates-based, ‘Age of Liberty’. Royal autogolpes in 1772 and in 1789 put an end to the former, without quite restoring absolutism. After the catastrophic war of 1808 and 1809, when Finland was conquered by Russia, the army deposed the king, and the Estates ensured that a new constitution was adopted before a new prince was elected. But the Estates remained the base of the polity until 1866, and the country was part of a personal monarchical union with Norway until 1905. Royal power was gradually waning in the course of the nineteenth century, but a new national polity freed from the entrapments of the medieval Estates and of a deferential royal administration was slow in developing.
By 1905 and the Norwegian union crisis, at least it was there, and government by national politicians rather than by court-connected civil servants began. In the 1890s, provoked by Norwegian nationalism, the Swedish flag had become a popular symbol, not just a royal and official ensign. The national character of Stockholm developed with this calendar. The city got its first significant national institution in 1866, a National Muserum (of art), housing the former royal art collection.* In 1905, the Diet at last got its own building, in heavy North German granite, close to and clearly subservient in size to the royal castle. In 1923, Stockholm had its new city hall, this time clearly challenging the royal castle across the water, as an alternative icon of urban glory – it is currently the site of the Nobel Prize banquets.
Denmark was another old monarchy, absolutist until 1848. Constitutional Denmark did not immediately become a nation-state, though. The king of Denmark was also duke of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, with their distinctive political arrangements, including, in the case of the two latter, membership in the German Confederation. Only after the disastrous war against Prussia in 1864 did Denmark become a nation-state, shed of the king’s German possessions.
Copenhagen was the one royal residence city which celebrated its new status as a national capital, after a belated end to royal absolutism, by recentring itself around a new city hall which overshadowed everything else in the city. It was inspired by the city of hall of medieval Italian Siena and Verona: in front of it a vast City Hall Square was laid out, becoming the new public centre of the city. The burghers of Copenhagen had been a potent force even under (and in support of) royal absolutism, and its representatives played a central role in ending it in 1848. Ironically, the new centring of the city was brought about by a city council exclusively composed of the royalist right, in the wake of the 1864 discredit of the National Liberals.
Norway became a nation-state in 1905, peacefully seceding from the union with the Swedish monarchy. For two decades its capital kept its Danish name, Kristiania (after a Danish king), and its main street is still named after the country’s first Swedish king, Karl Johan.* Finland seceded from Soviet Russia in December 1917. Its national self-determination was recognized by Lenin’s government, but the country plunged into an internal class war, won by the bourgeois Whites, with significant but hardly decisive support of German troops. The fifth Nordic nation-state, Iceland, under British protection, left Denmark, then occupied by Nazi Germany, in 1944.
Latin Europe: Nation-States and Organized Religion
All the main religions of the world are ancient. Their clash with modernity is therefore not very surprising. Astonishing, however, is the rarity of their confrontation with nationalism and the nation-state. Important conflicts between nation-state and organized religion are basically confined to Latin Europe. In the internal struggles of emergent modern national Europe, the high clergy, of all the Christian denominations, tended to side with the forces of conservatism and anti-modernity, laying the ground for the unique twentieth-century secularization of Europe. But nations in their emergence were culturally ambiguous, and the European clergy also sometimes played a significant part in national movements, above all in multi-religious states where the ruling prince adhered to a different religion – be it Islam in the Ottoman Balkans, Orthodoxy in Tsarist Poland and the Baltics, Catholicism in Habsburg Bohemia or Protestantism in British Ireland. Above, I have paid attention to the de-Islamization of the Balkans, and it may be added that after World War I the new Polish state blew up the Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in central Warsaw.
Its (then) militant conservatism apart, the Catholic Church had two major liabilities in the eyes of the builders of new nation-states. First, it was a supra-state power and hierarchy demanding obedience to a supra-state leader, the pope. Second, it was extremely wealthy, the largest feudal landowner and owner of built real estate. Along with theological disputes, opposition to this had gone a long way in accounting for the Reformation in countries from Sweden to England, thereby laying the basis for resourceful Renaissance monarchies enriched by expropriated Church wealth. The French Revolution came ideologically out of the Enlightenment, with its strong rationalist and deist currents. The rupture of the revolution with the Church started with the former’s demand that the French clergy pledge allegiance to the national constitution, which the pope refused to allow.
The historical conflict of nation-state and Church are visible today in two landmark buildings in Paris, the Pantheon and the Sacré-Cœur basilica. The Pantheon, ‘To Great Men: A Grateful Fatherland’, was originally built at the end of the dynastic regime as a votive church to Saint Geneviève and was turned into a national mausoleum in 1791. Voltaire, Mirabeau and Rousseau were the first entrants. The building was reconsecrated by Napoleon I, who ended the revolution’s war with the Church, then became a national necropolis again under the July Monarchy; reconsecrated by Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III; and finally de-sacralized by the Third Republic on the occasion of the state burial of Victor Hugo. The blazing white Sacré-Cœur on the top of Montmartre was built by the Church (originally with state approval) as a penitence for and sign of revival from the moral decline of France since the revolution, punished by its defeat against the Prussians and expressed in the sins of the Paris Commune, a radical insurrection in 1871, starting on Montmartre.
The clash between nation-state and Catholic Church was most frontal in Italy, part of which was directly ruled by the pope, including the city of Rome. The French army had saved papal rule from the 1849 revolution and from the unification of Italy in 1860. But in the face of defeat by the Prussians, the French troops withdrew in 1870, and Italian ones entered Rome after a short bombardment of the Pious Gate. The nation-state took over the palaces of the papal court and administration as well as a large number of the many convents and monasteries. The pope’s main palace, the Quirinale, became the Royal Palace and, after World War II, the presidential one. The national Senate and the Chamber of Deputies were (and are still) lodged in Renaissance palaces used by the papal government. New national offices were built along a new street, Via XX Settembre (20 September), the date of the armed Italian entry into papal Rome.
The pope retreated to the Vatican by the Basilica of Saint Peter, the smaller part of a now deeply divided city. ‘To their [the national] congresses and society, [we put forward] other societies and congresses’, declared the pope.43 Guelph (pro-papal) forces remained important in Rome, but the anti-clericals had the backing of the national government. In 1889, the latter scored a major symbolic triumph: a monument to Giordano Bruno was unveiled in Campo de’ Fiori, where in 1600 the Inquisition had burnt him as a heretic.44
The fact that the national parliaments of Portugal and Spain are housed in former convents and monasteries has a historical context of its own. Both monarchical states were devastated by French invasions and British interventions in the Napoleonic period, leaving the legacy of a half-century (Spain) to a full century (Portugal) of dynastic rivalries, civil wars between royal absolutists and liberal constitutionalists, military coups and counter-coups. In the mid-1830s the liberals and anti-clericals
