Nationalism and internationalism in Europe’s ‘Spring of Nations’ (1848) and its impact on British literary culture

Abstract

The Revolutions of 1848 may have ended in failure, exile, imprisonment, even death, but their momentum represented a seismic wave to European administrations, changing structures and ideas, reframing political debates (Clark, 2019). Though the Victorians were by nature conservative, they felt that constitutions should be conferred from above and not extracted by force from below; hence their violent reaction to the Chartist challenge in 1848. Not surprisingly, in responding to the revolutions on the continent, Great Britain resolved to remain neutral and insist on the preservation of law and order. Carlyle (1850) attacked hereditary aristocracy but saw democracy as a quasiutopian ideal, unworkable and ultimately heralding complete social collapse. Within Britain there was, nevertheless, considerable sympathy for some of the liberal movements on the continent. The poets of the mid-nineteenth century lived in a time of 'nation-building' and the Italian Risorgimento raised questions about community and individual liberty that were especially problematic for subjects of the multi-national United Kingdom (Reynolds 2005). These questions are at the heart of the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, and Clough, which investigates the symbolic and actual interactions between personal union and national unity, and exploits correspondences between political government and poetic form. Clough’s The Bothie and Amours both come to grips with nationalism and nationalist rhetoric. Later poets who openly espoused republican political ideals sought to embody and advance those principles: Landor, Meredith, Thomson and Swinburne connect the formal strategies of republican poems to the political theory and expressive cultures of republican radicalism (Weiner, 2005). The general understanding was that the foundational basis of politics was the nation, and that it was towards the national state that the forces of history were inexorably drifting (Dengate, 2017). The Democracy, therefore, was usually imag(in)ed as a European order characterised by a confederation of free nations. Nationalism and internationalism were not viewed as opposing forces: a true patriot was imagined an internationalist, a supporter of universal liberty and the claims to nationhood.