(Part 1)

Hi! First off, Nationalism is very complicated. Very very very complicated. Super duper uber mega complicated. I love it. So I'm just going to go ham here in explaining it!

There are going to be three parts to my answer here, focusing mainly on the French-German distinction of early Nationalism.

1. Common traits of nationalism as they developed

2. Common Events of nationalism as it appears (spoiler: they're very different)

3. I'm going to do something weird and END my explanation with some backdrop and further examples once we have established the basics.

(The following is pulled VERY LIBERALLY from a paper I wrote a few years back but it's from the final segment, so some stuff I may have assumed makes sense because I wrote about it earlier in the paper)

To determine what nationalism is we must examine what the experiences are of countries in which it appears. Nationalism is always associated with a sense of duty and belonging towards a larger group, often an ethnic group or central state, rather than a traditional community, family, region or tribe. It also typically has intense emotions with this sense of duty, a larger calling for unity and ‘love of the Fatherland’. 

Nationalism is also associated with a rationalization of society and the development of new allegiances to these larger groups than the traditional communities and tribes. This rationalization does not necessarily mean that the society is governed by rational thought, rather it is an attempt to intentionally simplify and understand the way that the society functions.

For example, in France this manifested as the fall of the Ancien Regime and the systemic restructuring that took place over the course of the French Revolution.

In Germany and Italy, this rationalization of society manifested as an attempt to gather all those who spoke a common language into a single country.

These aspects of nationalism, sense of duty, emotional love of the group, and a rationalization of society in defiance of tradition developed over the course of the 18th century in Europe.

In addition to the traits of the nationalist movements, there are also common events which can instigate the development of these movements. Frequently the sense of duty and call to unity are associated with the establishment of an enemy. This ‘other’ appeared in Western Europe and helped establish nationalism in Germany. When Napoleon invaded Germany he established a common enemy for all the German people. This common enemy is traditionally considered to have contributed to the development of national consciousness among the Germans. The writings of the time strongly suggest that the common dislike of the french while still admiring their governance changes played a strong role in the development of German style nationalism.

French nationalism emerged first amongst the burgeoning, well-educated, typically urban middle class and pushback to this came from more traditionally rural areas such as the Vendees.  In Germany, however, support for Nationalism was broad. Not only was there support amongst the elites in cities such as Baden but support was also present in the countryside of more rural regions such as Aachen and Prussia, demonstrated through shifts in the song choice of men’s choral groups towards more overtly German songs and away from religious ones. This represents a later more developed form of Nationalism.

Now that I have overlaid the broad trends, now we get to cover what this actually means. The common dividing labels used in understanding 18th century Nationalism is Civic vs Ethnic Nationalism. Also called the French Model vs the German Model. During the late 18th century, as the Ancien Regime entered its final days and before the French Revolution blew up the old world, France was more fragmented than we think of it today. It had a robust and developed central bureaucracy, but the long tradition of feudal obligations, internal borders, barriers, and trade laws meant that locality was still the dominant force in your average Frenchmans life. This was broadly seen as a negative by the burgeoning intellectual class of the late enlightenment, and especially so by the earliest of the Romantic thinkers. When the French revolution swept aside the Ancien Regime, they tried to sweep these away as well and initiated a set of policies which would be enacted on and off for the next 150 years, culminating in the France of today where everyone speaks French(was not a given at the beginning) and sees themselves as French. Examples include common education policy taught in "Parisian French", in an attempt to sweep away all the local dialects into a single unified force.