Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830–1850)Jo TollebeekThe transformation of the Ancien Régime society of estates into the modern state system as it exists in Europe today was concluded during the “long nineteenth century.” This process of transformation came about in two waves. In a first wave—during the decades preceding and following the French Revolution, roughly the years 1780-1848—the framework for the nation-state was created. It was mainly the liberal bourgeoisie which stood at the forefront. After the Congress of Vienna, where the “ante bellum” situation had been restored, it led more or less successful national revolutions in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Poland. In a second wave, starting with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and ending with the First World War, the framework of the nation-state was filled in. In those years a growing number of social groups found accommodation in the liberal house, which they also managed thoroughly to rebuild. This period can be described as the phase of integrated nationalism.Together with the nation-state came the rise of modern national his-toriography. The most well-known exponents of this typically nineteenth-century genre were the monumental outlines of national pasts which started appearing from 1890 onward. Karl Lamprecht in Germany (Deutsche Geschichte, 1890–1909), Pieter Jan Blok in the Netherlands (Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, 1892–1908), Henri Pirenne in Belgium (Histoire de Belgique, 1900–1932), and Ernest Lavisse and his collaborators in France (Histoire de France, 1901–11) all gave their respective countries’ pasts an impressive, scholarly design. The first phase of the emergence of the nation-state, however, was also ac-companied by a stream of national histories. Johannes von Müller in Switzerland (Geschichten Schweizerischer Eidgenossenschaft, 1786–1808), Simonde de [End Page 329] Sismondi in Italy (Histoire des Républiques italiennes du Moyen Age, 1807–18), Augustin Thierry in France (Lettres sur l’Histoire de France, 1820–27), and Willem Bilderdijk in the Netherlands (Geschiedenis des Vader-lands, posthumously 1833–53) all became authors of patriotic and romantically tinted surveys and studies of (fragments from) their own national history.The work of this second group of historians fits with the cultural nationalism which took root during the last decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries and which is sometimes considered to have been the heart of romantic nationalism. 1 The supporters of this nationalism were con-vinced that culture, lifestyle, and social institutions could only be understood as the expression of the “soul,” the “spirit,” or the “character” of a people or nation. They tried to deduce this individual character through the language, popular literature, art, and “national” (as opposed to Roman) law, as is demonstrated by the Gaelic revival in Ireland. 2 History, however, also attracted their interest; the nation and the people were after all considered to be dynamic entities which developed along the lines of a multiple causal process. In England, for example, where nationalism arose as a protest against excessive foreign—French—cultural influence, a group of historians, among them Catherine Macaulay and John Pinkerton, started publishing nationalistic histories during the early years of George III’s reign, paying special attention to the origin of the English people. 3 Such cultural nationalism could, however, easily take on political overtones, especially when it was the nationalism of a people who were either stateless or dispersed throughout different states, or whose state was still young.These earliest national histories were meant as a contribution to the formation, consolidation, and confirmation of a national identity. Their writers had to lend unity, specificity, and continuity to the national past. They had to, as Novalis observed in 1798, “organize historical essentials.” 4 Their work was less a matter of reconstruction than of construction. It not only required the exploration of a hitherto unknown field, but first and foremost the resolution of new problems of representation inherent in the writing of “national biographies.” In this essay, I shall discuss some of these problems in the light of Belgian national historical writing from 1830 through 1850. The year 1830 constitutes an important watershed in the history of national movements...