The Influence of Romanticism and National Sentiment in the 19th Century

What was the National Sentiment in the 19th Century?

The nineteenth century was the century that was characterized by

• Attempting to final felling absolutism

• The affirmation of the ideas of nation (citizens felt themselves part of a community driven by popular sovereignty and thus was born a new collective feeling of identification with their own country).

• The spread of the concept of the Fatherland (Citizens were called patriots to claim their belonging to a home to love and to defend because it was created by popular consensus, and not by right of inheritance).

• The riots to affirm the right to independence, trampled by the Congress of Vienna.

Romanticism and German Resistance

In Germany, the national sentiment was formed at the time of the German resistance against Napoleon, thanks to the spread of Romanticism, a cultural movement that claimed:

• the inner strength of the spirit, the ideals of independence, the religion of the country, the individuality of nations, the concept of mission (every country has to implement a divine plan for all humanity).
With the exaltation of the individual (ego) the romantic culture brought to the fore passions, torments and aspirations of the inner life. Developed between men national sentiment and as a result there was a strong interest in the past and in particular to the Middle Ages (the time when the people had begun to coalesce into nations).

From Romanticism derived:

• A current reactionary (that supported the Restoration)

It opposed a return to the ideas of the Enlightenment wing past, an interest in the Middle Ages idealized as a happy, hence a social restoration of the upper classes (nobility and clergy), their political alliance and obedience to the legitimate sovereign.

• A progressive current.

It aspired to freedom and human dignity, to the exaltation of the role of the people and the nationalities while rejecting any revolutionary thrust. From this derived the current liberalism that is a movement that aimed to obtain legal liberal-constitutional absolutism was in force in the countries where the national independence and in those subject to foreign powers. The romantic-liberal culture fueled uprisings that broke out between the '20s and' 30s of the nineteenth century in Europe and in South America (liberal movements and national).

Romanticism in Italy and France

Romanticism spread throughout Europe with the publication of "De l'Allemagne" Madame De Stael.

In Italy he immediately opened a clash between

• Supporters of classicism (order, measure, rationality)

• Supporters of Romance (irrationality, recklessness, passion)

Italian Romanticism is directed towards the political commitment (Romance was synonymous with liberal) and is welded to the liberal Catholicism (doctrine which joined Rosmini, Manzoni, Gioberti, Mamiani) .There was then a radical current mold Jacobin who recalled the ideals revolutionaries (Republican state with popular sovereignty).

Romanticism derives from reflections of the philosopher Fichte (1762/1814) and his heroic conception of man, constantly striving towards the infinite and to places of high moral and spiritual. He recalls Friedrich Schlegel to whom we owe the first definition of "romantic mood" whose features are most relevant creative freedom, the exaltation of the imagination, the rejection of the rules, the interest in myth, dream, the supernatural and the unconscious. One of the most characteristic features of Romanticism is the revaluation of the instinctual side of man, the preference for the atmosphere dark, scary and full of mystery, the new image of the artist lover of thrills, attracted by the dreadful and sublime. It develops a strong interest in the Middle Ages, idealized as a happy and characterized by high moral values ​​such as piety, loyalty, industriousness.

• In France Chateaubriand revalued the Christian faith and Gothic art. Among other representatives of French Romanticism remember Stendhal and Balzac who in their works gave great importance to the feelings and passions.

• In Italy next battle to free art and literature from the cult of classical antiquity came alongside the political commitment of liberation from the oppression of foreigners.