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Preprint - not for citation

forthcoming in Nations and Nationalism, 2015

The nation and the city:

Urban festivals and cultural mobilization

Joep Leerssen University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract. This article, which was delivered as the 20th Ernest Gellner Lecture at the LSE in 2013, attempts to map the relations between nation-building processes in 19th-century Europe and city cultures with their urban sociability. Three patterns are surveyed: [1] the modern-national assimilation of medieval and early-modern city cultures (sample case: Orléans and the French cult of Joan of Arc); [2] the modular replication across cities of urban festivals as cultural mobilizers (sample case: the spread of Floral Games festivals in Southern France and Northern Spain); [3] the reticulation of city-based practices into a nationwide and nation-building network (sample cases: the role of choral societies in German cultural nationalism; and its transnational knock-on effect in the Baltic Provinces). By choosing the city as our social focus and placing it (or rather, its ideal-type ‘Urbania’) alongside Gellner’s ideal-types of ‘Megalomania’ and ‘Ruritania’, we can avoid the finalism of studying regionalist and nationalist movements in the analytical framework of the post-Versailles state system, and we gain a better understanding of the granulated, localized social basis of such movements and the translocally homogenizing role of culture.

Great scholarship is often remembered anecdotally. Newton was about a falling apple,

Archimedes about a bathtub, Berkeley about provoking Dr. Johnson into kicking a stone in

order to prove the materiality of things. So too the work of Ernest Gellner has stuck in the

mind mostly for the soundbytes ‘nations maketh man’ and ‘do nations have navels?’. It is

indicative, perhaps, of the frequency with which pithy phrases and nugget insights peppered

his more sustained analyses and typological models. One remembers Gellner’s work, not only

for the brave and necessary insistence that without modernization process there would have

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been no nationalism, but also for the nuggets along the way: the concept of exo-education, or

some razor-sharp obiter dicta on the nature of diaspora nationalism.

I want to take as my cue a Gellnerian anecdotal soundbyte: his allegorical juxtaposition of the

empire of Megalomania and the emerging nation of Ruritania. It still stands as a useful ideal-

typical blueprint for many Central- and East-European national movements and late-imperial

conditions, from Prague and Budapest to Kiev and Sofia, and its heuristic value is enhanced

by that ironic wink at Anthony Hope’s high-Victorian romance The Prisoner of Zenda and,

beyond that, perhaps, the operetta state of Franz Léhar’s The Merry Widow - representatives

of that cheerful pre-1914 Mitteleuropa which was Gellner’s own, lost fatherland.

In the following pages I wish to add a third element to Gellner’s Central- and East-European-

based duality. Alongside the Empire and the Region, I would like to place the City. No single

city in particular, any more than Ruritania is a specific region or Megalomania a specific

empire, but the essence of urbanity, and indeed something that links different cities into

something larger: a concatenation of cities, a Hanseatic urban league we can call Urbania.

Foregroundedly, the importance of the city in national movements lies in its role as trans-

territorial hub. Gellner’s notion of exo-education already implies that Ruritanian national

movements often take shape outside the traditionalist rusticity of the region itself, in

metropolitan centres where disaffected provincials (or, as Anderson 2005 points out,

disaffected colonials) find a platform and an ambience for their national consciousness-

raising. I want to stress that one city can play such a hub role for a plurality of rustic

Hinterlands, and that it can bring representatives of different Ruritanias together, allowing for

exchanges, influences and modes of cooperation. Bucharest as a hub where Albanian, Greek

and Romanian activists met and interacted; London for Welsh and Irish; Paris for Bretons and

Catalans; Odessa for Bulgarians and Greeks, Venice for Croats and Serbs, Buda/Pest for

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almost all the ethnic minorities of the Habsburg empire: the list could be expanded and

indicates that in the comparative study of national movements this hub function needs to be

placed on the research agenda.1 Jernej Kopitar’s Stammtisch at the White Wolf Inn in Vienna

serving as a congregation point for people like František Čelakovský, Hoffmann von

Fallersleben, Josef Jungmann, Vuk Karadžić, František Palacký and P.J. Šafárik, is an

exemplary case in point (Leerssen 2011).

In what follows here, however, I want to look at the interaction between city culture and

nationalism in three other modalities, each to be exemplified by a different city of set of cities.

To begin with, there is national assimilation: the way in which a city’s culture is assimilated

into the nineteenth-century national ‘cultivation of culture’ (Leerssen 2006). One could think

of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Nürnberg, Venice or Florence; but my chosen example will be

Orléans. Secondly, there is modular reduplication: the spread of national ideas, practices or

gestures from one city to another, or to others. My chosen example will take us from Geneva

by way of Toulouse to Barcelona, and from there to other cities: Valencia, San Sebastián, La

Coruña. Thirdly, there is a process we can call national reticulation: the tendency of cities to

link up into federative networks. My example here could have been the growth of the Welsh

eisteddfod (or indeed that of modern football competitions), but I shall concentrate on the

spread of male choirs in, and beyond, Germany.

National assimilation

In the course of the nineteenth century, as the state develops towards the nation-state, it

increasingly wraps itself in cultural identity. By the same token, that cultural identity

becomes a national identity. Languages become, by default, national languages; history

becomes national history; education becomes national education. The process - which is aptly

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summarized in Gellner’s definition of nationalism as the desire to achieve congruence

‘between the political and the national unit’ – occurs both at the level of the state (which

attempts to impose cultural uniformity and sees itself as its instrumentality) and at the level of

the Ruritanian national movements (whose ambition is to rise above the subaltern level of the

regional or provincial, and to achieve for their culture and their homeland the status of full-

fledged nationality). All parties agree that for culture to be taken seriously it has to operate

‘major-league’, at national level.

However, in studying national movements and nationalist ideological currents in the Low

Countries, I became aware that in some cases at least the nationalization of cultural identities

– as Dutch, Belgian, Flemish – proceeded by co-opting an older, pre-national stratum of city

cultures (cf. Leerssen 2013 a,b). The formation of modern states in this part of Europe was a

slow process punctuated by regime changes and repeated territorial upheavals and

realignments rupturing the century 1795-1892. What provided a sense of historical continuity

resided (alongside church institutions and the dynasty of Orange-Nassau) most of all in city

cultures. In Flanders, the glories of the medieval and early-modern past were a matter of

urban pride and inter-urban rivalry in cities like Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp; in Holland, the

memory of the Spanish Revolt was remembered in the civic ambience of Amsterdam,

Haarlem, Leiden. The public events; the printing houses; the remembrance of historical

heroes and villains; the schools and Latin Schools; the public institutions: these were all

organized at the city level; and at that municipal level they had maintained, across all regime

changes, an unbroken continuity, providing 19th-century national historicism both with its

repertoire and with its institutions.

My chosen example, however, comes from France. There, Jeanne d’Arc has been a national

saint, a cherished icon of miraculous heroism in adversity, since her canonization in 1920 at

the latest.2 Her figure is replicated around the country in dozens of large open-air statues,

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church altars and election posters for the Front National. It amounts to a typical case of ‘banal

nationalism’ which, without taking from Billig’s original analysis (1995) we may define as

the lingering twentieth-century after-effects of nineteenth-century cultural consciousness-

raising: the present-day lieu de mémoire was infused into the French public sphere between

1840 and 1890. The trajectory, typical for that process which I identify as the ‘cultivation of

culture’, leads from literature by way of academic scholarship to the world of politics.

Schiller’s play Die Jungfrau von Orléans (1801) is the starting point for a wave of

vindications of Jeanne d’Arc against the ribald cycnicism of Voltaire and his notorious La

pucelle d’Orléans of 1762. Pierre Caze in 1802 produced a play entitled La mort de Jeanne

d’Arc; in 1817 Philippe-Aleandre Le Brun de Charmettes published his Histoire de Jeanne

d’Arc, surnommée la Pucelle d’Orléans, tirée de ses propres déclarations, de cent quarante-

quatre dépositions de témoins oculaires, et des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du roi et de la

Tour de Londres, followed in 1819 by his epic poem L’Orléanide, Poème national en vingt-

huit chants. Hector Jubinal edited, in 1838, a medieval vindication of Joan, Le ditié de Jeanne

d’Arc by Christine de Pisan, and submitted this to Minister Guizot. Two years later, the

Société de l’histoire de France decided that Joan’s trial records should be given a scholarly

edition and entrusted the task to Jules Quicherat, whose Procès de condamnation et de

réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc dite la Pucelle appeared between 1841 and 1849. Michelet’s

lyrical celebration Jeanne d’Arc appeared in 1853, and history-writers repeatedly returned to

the topic, by now a classic centrepiece of the French past, in the following half-century. In the

period 1850-1900 Jeanne was also taken out of the conflict between Voltairean secularists and

reactionary Catholics, and came to represent, especially after the defeat of 1871, the

transcendence of Church-State divisions. The Third Republic made her feast day a national

holiday in 1884; murals celebrating her life, by Jules Lenepveu, were added to the Paris

Panthéon in 1889; as early as 1871, Gaston Serpette’s cantata Jeanne d’Arc, on a text from

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Jules Barbier’s play (for which Gounod had written incidental music), had won the Prix de

Rome. No less than six operas on her life and death were produced in these decades

culminating, in 1909, in her beatification as ‘Blessed’; the church beatification process having

been instigated by the leader of the French Catholic party, Bishop Dupanloup, in 1869

(Jeanne’s full canonization as ‘Saint’ followed, eventually, in 1920).

Indeed, it had been that prelate, Bishop Dupanloup, who had not only initiated the

canonization process but had also propelled her figure into the arena of national symbol

politics; and his launching pad for this had been his episcopal see of Orléans. It was in that

city, that her first monument had put up, as early as 1458 – four centuries before the first

national statue (Paris, 1874), almost half a millennium before she became a saint, only a few

years after she had been cleared of the charge of heresy. The city of Orléans maintained her

memory in a municipal cult across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only in the

form of a statue or statuary fountain, but also by the recurring event of having an annual

eulogy preached in her honour on her death day, 30 May. Like any ‘named lecture’, the

eulogy was a prestigious affair for which leading personalities were invited. – In 1855, the

year he was inducted into the Académie française, and six years after his own appointment to

the episcopal see of Orléans, Dupanloup himself delivered the annual homily in praise of

Jeanne; and in 1869 he did so again, launching the canonization process. In fact, therefore, the

national saint was a nineteenth-century transfiguration of an older municipal hero. The pattern

is not unique: cities prided themselves from the late Middle Ages onwards on their viri

illustres or uomini illustri (or, in Joan’s case, a virgo illustra): Petrarch in Arezzo, Erasmus in

Rotterdam, Gutenberg in Mainz, Luther in Wittenberg, Gundulić in Dubrovnik. Such figures

were later, in the nineteenth century, promoted to national heroes (Rigney & Leerssen 2014).

Many of the cultural traditions we now frame as simply and unquestionably ‘national’ turn on

closer inspection out to have urban origins; from the Moros y cristianos festivals in Southern

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Spain to Guy Fawkes’ day in England. Nation-building in nineteenth-century Western Europe

is in many cases the conglomeration of city cultures into a new, national frame.

This process is most noticeable in that portion of Europe which had the strongest city cultures:

the Low Countries; the German Free Imperial and Hanseatic cities; and the Italian city-

republics. Florence, for instance, became a cultural jewel in the Italian crown, and its city

academy got to play a national role. Florence’s Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1583,

had promoted the works and the language of Dante and had published a dictionary of purified

Italian, which incidentally inspired Richelieu’s scheme for the dictionary of the Académie

française. In 1808, Napoleon returned the favour and charged the Accademia della Crusca to

prepare a new edition of its Vocabolario. That work was completed in the 1860s, and

appeared with a glowing dedication to King Vittorio Emmanuele celebrating the

Risorgimento. It had become Italy’s national dictionary.

What cities handed to the new nation-states, besides viri illustres and academies, is a form of

public culture and sociability constituting the institutional outlines of a Habermassian public

sphere: playhouses, associations, coffee houses, printing presses – things that are neither

Ruritanian nor Megalomanian. The municipal awareness of the citizens of those urban centres

foreshadowed republican thought even in the ancien régime, witness Jean-Jacques Rousseau

calling himself a citoyen de Genève on the title page of his Du contrat social. The word bears

pondering: the notion of citizenship, now unquestionably a national political category, was

calqued on the urban notion of being an enfranchised corporate member of a city.

Modular replication

It was in Rousseau’s city, Geneva, that an influential historian was active during the Romantic

period: Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842).3 He had a close interest in democratic and

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republican traditions and a special affinity with the Southern climes of Western Europe -

Southern France and Northern Italy. He wrote a literary history of that area, highlighting the

glories of the troubadours, and was among the first to draw attention to the Albigensian

Crusades as a genocidal exercise in feudal brutality. Sismondi also turned his spotlight on city

cultures and city academies in the Midi.

One of the oldest surviving city academies, older even than the Italian ones, was spotlighted

by Sismondi in the course of his literary history: the Académie des Jeux Floraux of Toulouse

(Sismondi 1813 1:226-230). Founded in 1323, this had been an association of poets dedicated

to the pursuit of literary elegance and the refined expression of courtly love – what was called

le gai savoir, something we may approximately translate as ‘the elegant craft’. The Académie,

founded (as Sismondi saw it) to give an urban continuance to the receding aristocratic

tradition of courtly-love poetry, subsisted across the centuries, as part of Toulouse’s city

culture, and maintained its prestige by bestowing its honours periodically on famous literati

from further afield: we encounter names like Ronsard, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Alfred de

Vigny, Victor Hugo, down to Maréchal Pétain. These honours traditionally took the form of a

flower wrought in precious metal: a rose, or eglantine; hence the literary festivals were known

as the Jeux Floraux or ‘Floral Games’. The Académie could also bestow on an especially

accomplished author the title of ‘Master of the elegant craft’, Maître en gai savoir – or maître

ès jeux, ‘master of the Games’.

Victor Hugo’s literary career was more or less launched by the fact that, as an aspiring

adolescent in 1819-22, his poems won him prizes and the title of maItre ès jeux at successive

Floral Games.4 It marks the beginning enmeshment between the Floral Games and

Romanticism. At that time, when Sismondi drew attention to the institution, it was a harmless

literary vanity, briefly suppressed during the revolution, now catching the tide of the

Restoration (cf. the dedication in Poitevin-Peitavi 1815). In the climate of the day, it achieved

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fresh interest for being such an unusual survival of the medieval cult of courtly love.

Following Sismondi, the poetry of the Troubadours was being rediscovered by scholars like

François Raynouard (Choix de poésies originales des troubadours, 6 vols., 1816-26),

Grimm’s pupil Fredrich Diez (Die Poesie der Troubadours 1829) and Claude Fauriel

(Histoire de la gaule méridionale sous la domination des conquérants germains, 4 vols.,

1836) as the country’s first flourish of vernacular literature. Myths proliferated about the

amorous origins and refined literary flirtations at the Academy’s roots. The woman who

putatively gave the first flower-awards to charming poets, Clémence Isaure, was depicted in

many a medievalist painting and statue from the mid-to-late 19th century, in a taste called, in

French, the style troubadour (Pupil 1985). With the French rediscovery of the troubadours,

Toulouse was put into the historical spotlight. But the pattern was not that of Orléans;

Toulouse, after the prizes given to Chateaubriand, Vigny and Victor Hugo, remained

unassimilated, a fly in the ointment of French national culture. While Jeanne d’Arc was part

of a French myth, Toulouse remembered, alongside Clémence Isaure, the Albigensian

Crusades and the persecution of the Cathars (witness Claude Fauriel’s edition, in 1837, of the

Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois); a historical narrative gained ground (once again

prepared by Sismondi, with firebrand descriptions in his Histoire des Français of 1821) to the

effect that the old, rich cultural tradition of the South of France had been snuffed out by

ruthless Northern feudal power. Indeed, a linguistic policy of 300 years standing was

reversed: whereas, in 1539, French had replaced Occitan as the official language of the

contests, a tendency developed after 1839 to readmit Occitan and even to reserve a special

prize to poetry written in the langue d’Oc.

To be sure, this did not become an Occitan Risorgimento. The Toulouse Floral Games

remained a regionalist variant within an overwhelmingly French embeddedness. When a

revival of the Occitan language was undertaken, the centre of that movement was, as we shall

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see, in the Provence, around Frédéric Mistral - in Arles, not in Toulouse. Even so, Toulouse

made Mistral maître ès jeux in 1895, nine years before he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Thus, the story of this Toulouse institution seems paradigmatic for many city cultures in the

periphery of Europe’s emerging nation-states – Venice or Sevilla, Bremen or York,

Maastricht, Iaşi, Dubrovnik or Novi Sad: cities that half-heartedly feed their historical culture

into a state in which they find themselves on the periphery, feebly cultivating their local

distinctness in order to console themselves for their provincialism.

But the story does not end here. Across the Pyrenees, in Barcelona, Sismondi had also been

read, and Catalan-speakers felt themselves as different from Madrid as Occitan-speakers felt

different from Paris.5 It was recalled by Barcelonese intellectuals that in the 14th century there

had briefly been a Floral Games in Aragon. As the Toulouse Floral Games were attracting

fresh interest in the 1840s, part of that interest came from Barcelona and focused on

Barcelona. Intellectuals in and around that city were in a special position: the constitutional

framework of the Spanish monarchy was feeble, the city was beginning to catch the tide of

industrial modernity, with a great increase in print media and theatre life.

The authors who made use of the new cultural ambience and media used the Catalan

language, first in a subsidiary position alongside Spanish, and later in overt competition with

it; in many cases they deployed it as a precious connection with a medieval Golden Age,

under the independent Crown of Aragon, or when the Counts of Barcelona reigned supreme

as monarchs within their own fief. The language was called ‘Limousin’, and seen as a dialect

variant of the Occitan sister language North of the Pyrenees. All these variants were

considered a cultural and historical continuum, and could proudly claim droit de cité in the

tradition of gai savoir and of troubadour poetry. Troubadour fever was in the air: in 1836 the

Spanish playwright Antonio García Gutierrez, an adept of French Romanticism, wrote a

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popular history play called El trovador; it became lastingly famous because it was used as the

libretto for Verdi’s opera Il trovatore; and that opera was first performed in Barcelona in

1854. Meanwhile, in 1841, Antonio Rubio wrote a cycle of verse in troubadour style and in

the ‘Limousin’ language of Barcelona under the pseudonym Lo gayter de Llobregat ‘the piper

from the Llobregat River’.

Barcelona, in one and the same process, developed an empowering sense of modernity and a

growing medievalist nostalgia. Rubio’s Romantic historicism was followed through with

more national focus by Antoni de Bofarull; an archival worker, he published historical dramas

and historical legends in the mode of Walter Scott. He, like Rubio, affected the use of the

troubadour self-image: his collection of new verse in the local language appeared in 1858

under the telling title ‘The modern troubadours’ (Los trobadors nous). That local language,

however, got a fresh name from Bofarull, who rejected the use of the term Limousin and

instead proposed Catalan. He did so in a public lecture held in 1857 on the topic of ‘The

Catalan language from a historical perspective’, arguing that Catalan was not a side branch of

Occitan but an independently-descended successor language to Latin, as such could stand as

an equal in the Romance language family besides Spanish, French and Occitan, and was an

independent, fully-fledged vehicle, not only for daily intercourse but also for troubadour

poetry old and new.6

Bofarull had in these years been contemplating a ‘competitive imitation’ of the newly

burgeoning Jeux Floraux in Toulouse, arguing in repeated press articles that in the Middle

Ages Barcelona and the Crown of Aragon had also had their Floral Games, and that

Barcelona owed it to itself to reactivate this dormant tradition. In 1859 the scheme was

launched and the first revived Jocs Florals were held in Barcelona. All the National-Romantic

writers competed, saw their various works crowned with various precious-metal flowers, and

the most prominent saw themselves elevated to the status of Mestre en gai saber. Barcelona

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went modern and medieval in one and the same gesture. The Jocs Florals became the most

important cultural event of the metropolis and a galvanizing point for Catalan cultural

nationalism well before the rise of political autonomism; indeed, although the authors

involved were fully bilingual between, their decision to make the Jocs Florals a Catalan-only

affair was all the more pregnant with meaning, creating a prestigious and public-official social

ambience for the language.

From Barcelona, the formula proliferated further: in 1868, a newly-founded literary journal,

called Lo gai saber, proposed to seed the Barcelona event in other parts of the Catalan lands

so as to spread the message of Catalanist activism and mobilize new poets into what was now

becoming known as a Renaixença (Domingo 2012). In fact, Floral Games had been held in

1859 in Valencia, and would re-emerge in the 1880s, but that city half-drifted back into the

ambit of the Barcelona event afterwards.7 Galicia followed soon after: in 1861, xogos froraes

were held in La Coruña, marking the beginning of the Galego cultural revival. In San

Sebastián, the journal Euskal Erria organized successful Floral Games in 1879, giving the

event the Basque name of Itz-jostaldiak and involving literary, musical and sporting

competitions modelled both on the Toulouse and the Barcelona examples; these Basque

events were consolidated into a standing organisation in 1882 (the ‘Consistory of Basque

Floral Games of San Sebastián’), which, as its statutes put it, aimed ‘to ensure by all the

means within its reach the preservation and propagation of the Basque language and to

stimulate the cultivation of its special literature [and] as far as its resources permit, to preserve

and propagate our popular music’.8

There was even a backwash North of the Pyrenees – not to Toulouse itself, but to the

Provence, where the revivalists around Frédéric Mistral were flourishing. Mistral had

published his great masterpiece, Mirèio, in 1859; that same year, In Barcelona, Bofarull’s

opening address to the first Floral Games held up Mirèio as an example to the Catalans. But in

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the event, it was Barcelona that provided the role model: the Jocs Florals themselves were

taken up by the group around Mistral, who began holding their own Jeux Floraux in Apt in

1862, and in other cities in the years after.9

From La Coruña to Arles, the pattern of all these Floral Games is quite different from that of

Jeanne d’Arc. The cult of Joan, first locally rooted in Orléans, becomes generally French -

much as the game of Rugby from its local roots in the public school of that name ramifies to

become a national and even international game. The place of origin is a launching pad, lost

from sight as the cult takes flight.

In the case of the Floral Games, such an assimilation into the state’s (French or Spanish)

national cultivation of culture never occurs. The events there remained rooted in the civic

ambience of peripheral municipalities, and if anything, were used to underscore the city’s

exceptionalism, its non-participation in the national frame. A mobilizing formula migrates

from one provincial city to another without becoming an integral part of either the French or

the Spanish national frame: indeed what these cities share is their stand-offishness against the

central capital. The end result of that shared stand-offishness and that shared mobilizing

institution is not a homogenized cultural space but rather a granular constellation of linked

cities. That is what I call Urbania; and the tendency of cities to concatenate into such

networks I call reticulation.

The reticulation process is not a new one in Europe; it antedates the rise of the centralized

state and is often in competition with it. The Lombard League and the Hanseatic League are

obvious medieval examples, and the fact that such leagues of inter-city civic solidarity were

fervently celebrated by Sismondi may indicate that the possibility of a reticulating spread was

never far removed from the mindset of Floral Games once they were revived after the

appearance of Sismondi’s work on city-republics and Southern Romance literatures.

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To be sure, the reticulation between La Coruña, San Sebastián, Barcelona, Valencia and

Toulouse was a weak one. Each city remained a centre within its own separate region; the fact

that they worked alongside each other rather than in concert amongst each other means that

they never meshed fully into something like a Hanseatic League or a ‘Midi nationalism’.

There were, to be sure, attempts to bring the troubadours from both sides of the Pyrenees

together: in the early years, there were fervent fraternal meetings, mutual verse-dedications

and poetic exchanges between the poets of the Provence and the Catalan ones of Barcelona:

minorities from different countries recognized their common culture and their common

marginality, like Czechs and Slovaks, Serbs and Croats, yet unlike them in that they never

joined forces politically. On some occasions, there were events to celebrate a pan-Latin spirit

anchored around the symbolical mountain-tops of the Ventoux and the Canigou: gestures of

solidarity from Mistral to his Catalan fellow-poets in the troubled climate of Spanish politics;

an invitation from the Bishop of Perpignan to host Barcelona’s Floral Games in Roussillon; a

pan-Latin Petrarch centenary in Avignon in 1874, and a follow-up festival in 1878. But even

during those festivals it was already becoming clear that the two branches of troubadours

were drifting apart (Zantedeschi 2013b, 2014).

Barcelona had profited from the Floral Games to effect its Catalan ethnogenesis: it had

rediscovered its medieval Golden Age; it had re-branded its local Romance dialect into an

autonomous, Catalan language; and as a cultural metropolis it could now, within its own

gravitational field (which reached as far as Valencia and the Baleares), challenge the

hegemony of Madrid. Indeed, if the Jocs Florals had emerged from Barcelona’s city culture,

with supporting urban institutions like the Academy of Belles Lettres and the municipality,

their success helped to give that city a national-metropolitan standing in a Catalan-wide (and

decidedly non-Spanish10) framework. The city’s trajectory of intense modernization also took

it away from troubadour nostalgia and towards an intensifying anti-Spanish nationalism.

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North of the Pyrenees, however, the trend was, rather, one of a subsidiary localism within the

French framework: Toulouse remained content with its provincial status and Arles became the

haunt of French painters in search of bright colours, the setting of León Daudet’s rustic tales

and Bizet’s Arlésienne. The difference, indeed, is that between the development of

nationalism and of regionalism; the case of the Floral Games cities shows all the degrees in

which regionalism can, or may not, intensify into nationalism: there is a sliding scale from

Toulouse to Valencia and La Coruña to Barcelona and San Sebastián.

There are other cases, however, in which a strongly reticulated network of cities becomes the

carrying platform of a coordinated national movement; and this brings me to my third

Urbanian variant.

National reticulation

Various European examples of strongly networked cities or towns come to mind.11 But my

main example of this type of Urbania comes from Germany, and is centered, not on quasi-

medieval revivals of troubadourism or bardism, but around the modern bourgeois sociability

of the male choir.

This is, of course, a trans-European phenomenon, as ubiquitous as the sports club. At first

sight, two basic European types appear to have been operative: that of the French-style

Orphéon, and that of the German-style Gesangverein or Liedertafel. Both types proliferated

vigorously across Europe, including, of course, Wales and Catalonia.12

Such proliferation is not, or almost never, a matter of spontaneous generation – as if all over

the map fresh wheels are being invented all the time by different people, coincidentally taking

similar form; or as if we develop callouses on our knees because we do hard-rubbing work

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with our hands. The spread of male choirs is not a matter of parallel responses to similar

circumstances; it is to a large extent a matter of diffusion, of communicative procreation. For

that reason, understanding the emergence of choirs purely in terms of context and

circumstances is insufficient. Choirs were spawned, not just by the social conditions of the

time, but also by each other, by going viral: following the example of other choirs, and in turn

setting the example for other ones again.

This institutional self-replication is relatively straightforward within a single societal setting.

The case of the Lower Rhine is an example. This area (the left bank of the Rhine between

Krefeld and the Dutch border), had been annexed by Prussia in 1815, and the establishment of

no less than 120 Liedertafel and Männergesangvereine in that small, but densely populated

region can be considered as a single, sustained, non-granular process.13 But for that very

reason it would not do to see this simply as a representative sample of Germany at large.

Germany as a whole was a much less homogeneous space; and this might blindside those

historians who unquestioningly assume that the state in which we work nowadays is the

categorical unit for the tracing of historical developments. Germany at the time was, of

course, divided over different autonomous states with different constitutional structures and

different political regimes, with different religious confessions, different degrees of

urbanization and industrialization, different party-political landscapes. Nonetheless, the choral

movement proliferated from town to town within each German state and indeed from one

German state to another; and for all its diversity in social infrastructure, the German lands as a

whole all were as deeply immersed in the choral movement as the sample from the Lower

Rhine seems to indicate.

This proliferation followed the pattern outlined earlier on, of modular replication, emanating

from two points of origin (generally Elben 1887). In the North, and in the Prussian Rhineland,

it was in particular the private Liedertafel established by Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin in

17

1808 that became a prototype; in the South, the first initiative by Hans Georg Nägeli in Zürich

(1810) found widespread dissemination through the relay station of Stuttgart, which Nägeli

had visited on a lecture tour in 1819-1820 (which also included Karlsruhe, Darmstadt, Mainz,

Frankfurt and Tübingen) canvassing the male choir as the ideal interface between popular

sociability (Volksleben) and artistic education.

The Stuttgart Liederkranz was founded in 1824 and in turn inspired copycat initiatives in Ulm

(1825), Munich (1826), Esslingen (1827), Frankfurt/Main (1828), Schweinfurt (1833) and

elsewhere. Meanwhile, Berlin spin-offs had already taken root in the north: foundations in

Frankfurt/Oder, Leipzig, Göttingen, Weida, Thüringen, Magdeburg, Dessau, Münster,

Hamburg, Danzig and Minden all date from between 1815 and 1824.

Between the Berlin and Stuttgart hives, there was a zone where the spreading Zelter and

Nägeli models encountered and overlapped: Franconia and the southern part of the Prussian

Rhine Province. Some of the more notable foundations in the post-1824 decades include

Koblenz 1824, Bremen 1827, Nuremberg 1829, Bielefeld 1831, Aachen 1832, Trier 1835,

Paderborn 1838, Mannheim 1840, Cologne 1842.

In this diffusion of choral foundations, we see that such institutions, locally anchored though

they are, and fed by the social ambience of city life, operate trans-locally and are involved in

regional and transregional communicative dynamics. The foundation of regional, and,

ultimately, national federations, developed in tandem with the regular organization of mutual

visits and regional festivals for a variety of choirs from different places: thus, an association

between the choirs of Hannover and Bremen formed the nucleus of the ‘League of United

North-German Choirs’ in 1831; it attracted other local choirs and organized a series of

regional festivals.14 Similar patterns were at work in Bavaria, Thuringia and Franconia; and

these federations in turn entered into a nationwide meta-federative league in 1860. Thus the

18

organizational history of these choirs in a sense offered a template of Germany’s political

unification.

The choirs themselves, in their repertoire and in their public manifestations, also constituted

themselves as platforms and proclaimers of a nationally German identity. As Dietmar Klenke

has shown in his study Der singende deutsche Mann (1998), the repertoire was to a large

extent patriotic, and intensified in its patriotism from the 1840s onwards. Songs like Die

Wacht am Rhein, spawned in the famous Rhine crisis of 1840, were disseminated by virtue of

being placed on the repertoire of student fraternities and male choirs, and by being performed.

They were spread, literally, by word of mouth, by being sung convivially in what one may

call embodied communities, people in face-to-face proximity (Rigney 2011) - a bit like the

performative spread of Auld Lang Syne, or the Spanish Wave in a football stadium. And vital

for that performative spread was the city ambience and indeed the existence of a reticulated

urban network, cities brought into contact by the shared pursuit of common cultural interests.

The National Urbania of German male choirs had crystallized around formative places and

events, notably in trans-local and trans-regional Federal Choral Festivals. Such gatherings like

the ones in Cologne in 1840, Würzburg 1845, Nürnberg 1861, or Breslau 1906, always

mentioned proudly the arrival of delegations from far-flung borderland and outlying cities

such as Schleswig or Gent (in Flanders), celebrating their own power of reticulation and of

riveting the German space together by the co-presence of all these cities in one place, and

culminating in the massed-choir grand-finale fusing all these voices and origins into one

resounding chorus. The choirs were all rooted locally in different urban communities - but

they shared a repertoire that was pan-German both in its availability and in its rhetoric. The

sheet music was generally available from the Alps to the Baltic coast, the words and music

offered their allure to all Germans, regardless of domicile. Unlike the localized granularity of

19

the reticulated choral societies, their repertoire was a cultural continuum smoothly overlaying

all German-speaking communities.

The repertoire is nowadays forgotten or at best enjoys an a-specific notoriety as chauvinistic

kitsch: the verse of nationalist stalwarts like Arndt and Massmann; Rückert or Schenkendorf;

Geibel or Felix Dahn, set to four-part harmony; anthems like Die Wacht am Rhein, Freiheit,

die ich meine, Der deutsche Mann, or Julius Otto’s Soldatenleben. It was an important corpus

in the mobilization and nationalization of the middle classes, but it is neglected both by social

and by cultural historians, known only generically but not in its actual content. Yet the

rhetoric was enthusiastically belted out by hundreds of fervent petit-bourgeois amateurs,

tenors from Kiel, baritones from Danzig, basses from Mannheim. Even in 1861, a year

without much at all by way of a real political threat, the assembled German choirs at the

National Song Festival of Nuremberg were working themselves up into a formulaic

fortissimo: ‘And if the foe approaches, then a united Germany will march to the Rhine, to do

battle for the Fatherland!’. The line ‘Hurrah! We Germans, we march to the Rhine!’ was

drowned in loud acclamations (which probably expressed a combined appreciation of both the

musical performance and the patriotic sentiment). The Franco-Prussian War was as yet 10

years in the future; but it was culturally foreshadowed and emotionally pre-programmed

through this self-stoking, self-amplifying choral flag-waving.15

The Rhine repertoire had become popular in the wake of the Rhine crisis of 1840 (Leerssen

2008, 178), but it did not die out as that crisis receded. Rather, the choral movement got stuck

in its Rhine groove. The songs were still sung, and if the occasion that inspired them was no

longer topical, their abiding presence on the repertoire perpetuated their fervour. The rhetoric,

as it diminished in topical relevance, increased in intensity; the songs were formulaic gestures,

hackneyed tropes, vacuous grandstanding; but in their relentless performance and re-

performance, they established a Pavlovian link between anti-French warfare over the Rhine

20

(as ‘unfinished business’) and German unification. Much as the repertoire created a common

performative reservoir for choirs in different parts of the country, so too it enshrined specific

events into endlessly-repeated, open-ended tropes. In sum, the repertoire did what culture,

typically, does: it permeated and homogenized space (the various lands, all of them united in

the German-musical stance) and time (the song-echoing decades after 1840).

The cultural perpetuation and trans-regional homogenization of a ‘German Rhine’ was

eventually solidified into the humongous Niederwald monument overlooking the Rhine

(Mazón 2000), celebrating the victory over France, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and

imperial unity. Begun in the flush of victory in 1871, it gave on its plinth the entire text of Die

Wacht am Rhein, the 1840 evergreen, cast in bronze.

The lasting, deep penetration of this nationalist propaganda into the furthest reaches of

German society is demonstrated by the reminiscences of a soldier in the Bavarian army on his

way to the Western Front in 1914. Although his army is on the offensive towards Paris by

way of Flanders, he still believes he is rushing to the defence of the Rhine; and the entire

army spontaneously activates a shared, ingrained, immediately available cultural repertoire

and becomes a male choir:

Finally, the day came when we left Munich in order to start fulfilling our duty. Now

for the first time I saw the Rhine as we were riding towards the west along its quiet

waters, the German river of all rivers, in order to protect it against the greed of the old

enemy. When through the delicate veil of the dawn's mist the mild rays of the early

sun set the Niederwald monument shimmering before our eyes, the ‘Watch on the

Rhine’ roared up to the morning sky from the interminably long transport train and I

had a feeling as though my chest would burst.16

21

The ex-volunteer wrote down his reminiscence about this 1914 summer morning some years

after the war, in 1925, in a book entitled Mein Kampf. Some years later again, he would

organize festivities in Nürnberg that were, and were not, reminiscent of the old choral

meetings. Urbania had become Megalomanian.

Conclusion: transnational reticulation, national function

Culture, as the German case shows, has three forms of social agency. It can unite a socially

diverse and politically divided landscape into a communicative, mnemonic and performative

(not merely an ‘imagined’) community; it can perpetuate transient events into persistent

tropes, symbols and lieux de mémoire; and it can aesthetically and rhetorically shape and

propagate ideals and agendas that will later on inspire and direct political choices and

practices.

I do not want to conclude on a note of intra-national analysis, however, and pen my analysis

of city culture into the framework of the state. Therefore, these final pages will take us back to

the Ruritanian-Megalomanian-Urbanian heuristic triangle in a transnational frame.

Much as the relationship between nation and state is a fluid and complex one, so too is the one

between city and nation, and between city and state. City culture can go regionalist, as we

saw in the case of Toulouse, or merge into the nation-building agenda of the state’s, as with

the case of Florence and Orléans, or else, again, become the platform of a separate assertion

of nationality, as in the case of Barcelona. There are, in other words, possible slippages

between those different modalities of the ‘cultivation of culture’, and one of the most

interesting tasks I see in the study of 19th-century national movements is in the negotiation of

the slippery transitions between regionalism and nationalism.17 Organizing that analysis

around the anchoring point of the city, rather than within the a priori framework of the state,

22

allows us to see that region- and nation-building processes took place within, across and

beyond the shifting and unstable borders of the state.

Much as the fashion of choral societies spread between German cities and states, it also

spread to cities on and beyond the outer edges of the German lands - Antwerp and Ghent, for

instance. And in other settings, the German format could spark unexpected developments. In

the Baltic Lands, for instance.

Although the Baltic Provinces had all come under Russian rule, city life there was still

dominated by the German townspeople and their culture. In 1851, German-style choirs were

founded as offshoots of the Königsberg Liedertafel (itself founded on the Berlin model in

1830) in Riga, Dorpat (Tartu) and Reval (Tallinn), and festivals were held in 1857 (Tallinn)

and 1861 (Riga). Significantly, these events occurred at precisely the time when Latvian and

Estonian cultural awakenings began to stir (stimulated, if anything, by the paternalist-

sympathetic interest of local Baltic-German intellectuals). The (as yet largely illiterate)

vernacular culture of the Estonian and Latvian populations was eminently suited to the social

practice of choral singing, with its ambience of performativity and face-to-face conviviality in

an ‘embodied community’. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, the song festivals

organized by Estonian and Latvian revivalists took flight. Six Latvian choirs with a total of

120 singers held a festival in Dikļi Parish, Livonia (near the present-day Latvian-Estonian

border) in 1864. A first all-Estonian song festival was held in Tartu in 1869 to commemorate

the fiftieth anniversary of peasant emancipation in Livland, with 845 singers and an audience

of 10.000-15.000. The movement gathered in strength with further festivals held in 1879,

1880, 1891, 1894, and 1896; and from 1873 (when the first National Song Festival was held

in Riga) the cue was taken up in Latvia as well (Brüggemann & Kasekamp 2014; Raun 1991

75-76; Tall 1985). The Baltic Germans had delivered the inspiration, the organizational

design, and the combined community-bonding and nation-mobilizing function; the native

23

populations fitted these made in Germany vehicles with their own ethnic payload, Estonian,

Latvian, or Lithuanian.

The Baltic choral movement became a very broadly based cultural mass rally, driving the

accelerating national movements of the post-1900 period, and remained an enduring social

presence throughout the twentieth century. This emerged in 1988 as the most powerful

survival of pre-Soviet public culture: it was above all in choral demonstrations (the so-called

‘Singing Revolutions’) that the power of the USSR was challenged publically and

collectively, and the nationalist mobilizing power of mass singing found its most

extraordinary manifestation (cf. Brüggemann & Kasekamp 2014, Ginkel 2002). At this

moment, the Baltic Song and Dance Celebrations (Vilnius adopted the pattern, and slotted

itself into the reticulation, in 1924) have been recognized by UNESCO as part of the

immaterial world heritage.18 Estonia and Latvia would at first sight seem a typical case of a

Gellnerian Ruritania inventing its identity against Megalomanian rule; in fact they fit

Gellner’s model to a T. But the hundreds of thousands of Latvians and Estonians joining into

a huge embodied community perpetuate in their cultural nationalism, and also in some of the

trappings (student fraternity uniforms, middle class tailcoats and stovepipe hats, and indeed

the praxis of convivial song in institutionally organized sociability) the unmistakable

hallmarks of its Urbanian roots.

24

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1 This would be a fruitful transnational extension of the valuable but francocentric work of Pascale

Casanova (1999); Casanova herself did go on to raise literary nationalisms as a comparatist issue

(Casanova 2011, largely based on Thiesse 1999), but in so doing dropped the urban focus from her

analytical framework.

2 For what follows, generally Krumeich 1998 and Winock 1997, with additional data gleaned from

Fauser 2001 and Ridoux 2001. The spread of Jeanne d’Arc statuary – some 20 statues between 1874

(Paris) and 1928 (Poitiers) – is documented in the imagebase of the Study Platform on Interlocking

Nationalisms, www.spinnet.eu, in particular http://spin.spinnet.eu/ui.p/statuary.

3 Recent studies concentrate on his work in political economy, and his importance as a forerunner of

Area Studies. In what follows, I draw in particular on Paulet-Grandguillot 2010, the still-useful

Pellegrini 1926, and Sofia 2001.

4 The poems, in sharp contrast to Hugo’s later radicalism, are replete with the sentimental-reactionary

royalism characteristic of these years and propitious to traditionalist institutions like the Jeux Floraux.

The ode on Les vierges de Verdun (which won the Golden Amaranth in 1819) celebrates the

martyrdom of three young women who, when Prussian and royalist troops conquered Verdun during

31

the 1792 wars, welcomed them with gifts and garlands; accused before a Revolutionary tribunal and

indicted by the notorious public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, they were guillotined for high treason.

Le rétablissement de la statue d’Henri IV (which was awarded the Golden Lily in 1821) is an ode on

the recent placement at the Pont-Neuf of François-Frédéric Lemot equestrian statue (1818). That statue

replaced the original 1614 one, destroyed in the French Revolution, was cast from the bronze of

melted-down Napoleonic monuments, and thus celebrated the Bourbon restoration as much as its

ostensible subject (cf. Bresc-Bautier 1999).

5 The following account of the emergence of the Barcelona Jocs Florals is based on Domingo 2011

(and, within that collection, especially Freixes 2011 and Verdaguer & Domingo 2011) and Miracle

1960.

6 The various Romance languages on both sides of the Pyrenees, between Spanish and French, have a

problematic taxonomy and nomenclature. North of the Pyrenees, Provençal and Occitan are now

habitually used (sometimes interchangeably, sometimes with a semantic East-West differentiation) as

well as Limousin; South of the Pyrenees, Catalan is now the current term (with variants in the

Valencia region and the Balearic Isles, and a presence in the Roussillon region of France and on

Sardinia). All four names were used, especially in the 19th century, with great fluidity to denote the

neither-French-nor-Spanish language idioms dating back to the troubadours. Ballot’s Gramática y

apologí­a de la llengua cathalana of 1814 had called the language ‘Catalan’; ‘Limousin’ was used by

Aribau in his Oda a la Pàtria of 1830, which was also an early example of the invocation (in its

subtitle, Trobes) of troubadourism; on the role of that text, see Jorba 2013.

7 An association founded in 1878, Lo rat penat (‘The Bat’), has held Jocs Florals in Valencia since the

late 19th century; these carried a Valencian cultural revival occupying a subsidiary position within the

Catalan complex centered primarily on Barcelona.

8 Agirreazkuenaga 2004; Dávila & Eizagirre 1999. On the Basque-Catalan axis in particular, Conversi

1990, 1993, 1997. On the Galician-Catalan axis, Beramendi 2012.

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9 On the Provençal/Occitan revival, see Ripert 1917, Martel 2010, Zantedeschi 2012, 2013a. On

Mistral as inspiration for the Jocs Florals and on the Jocs Florals as inspiration for Mistral, see

Casanova 2012.

10 An attempt was made, during the Universal Trade Exhibition of 1888, to co-opt the Jocs Florals into

official Spanish nationalism, involving the presence of the Queen. The attempt was firmly resisted

among Catalan cultural activists and served to widen rather than to close the gap. Cf. Pinyol i Torrents

2012.

11 One can think of the impact of the eisteddfod festivals in Wales. An Eisteddfod may be described as

Floral Games for Celtic bards rather than for Romance troubadours; and a bard may be described as a

troubadour in a wet climate, whose gai savoir is correspondingly more earnest and less ‘gay’. Welsh

eisteddfods were revived in various localities in the 1820s, and became a moving festival taking place

now in this, then in that Welsh town, in the process bonding those towns together into a joint Welsh

cultural movement. After some decades of a polycentric local run-up, the eisteddfod became a

‘National’ Eisteddfod in 1861.

12 Besides Gumplowitz 1987 and Williams 2003, see the various European case studies collected in

Lajosi & Stynen 2014. The German case, explored in the following pages, is indebted above all to

Klenke 1998 and the contemporary documentation in Elben 1887.

13 Blommen 1960, 250-252, lists the foundations of some 120 choirs between 1840 and 1870 in the

Niederrhein region. The process appears to be fairly evenly distributed over the chosen region and

over the chosen period. The peak years, showing significantly more than the annual average of 4

foundations (1846-48, 1850, 1853, 1859-60, 1862, 1868), are fairly evenly spread over the period,

indicating a sustained process. On the social/cultural history of the (greater) Rhineland generally, see

Brophy 2007.

14 Affiliations came to include Nienburg, Osnabrück, Kinteln, Minden, Bückeburg and, ultimately,

some 25 others. Annual festivals were held at Nienburg 1831-33, Porta Westfalia 1834, Rehburg 1835,

Bremen 1836, Hameln 1839, Hildesheim 1840, Pyrmont 1841, Minden 1842, Osnabrück 1843,

Hameln 1844, Bielefeld 1845, Detmold 1846, Pyrmont 1847, Hannover 1851, Bremen 1852, Detmold

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1853, Braunschweig 1856 (celebrating the League’s 25th anniversary), Pyrmont 1857, Osnabrück

1858, Bielefeld 1860 and 1861. This list is, again, garnered from Elben 1887, and may serve as a

representative sample of patterns that also affected the other German regions.

15 On the massed-choir programme of the Nürnberg Festival, with its fervently anti-French militarism,

see Klenke 1998, 110-115. The quotation is on p. 114. In the original: ‘Und naht der Feind, dann zieht

ein einig Deutschland zum Rhein, zum Kampf für’s Vaterland!’ and ‘Hurrah! Wir Deutsche, wir

ziehen zum Rhein’. In the visual arts, too, the image of a Germania vigilantly guarding the Rhine was

a constant long-term iconographic trope, outlasting and reifying the evenemential crises of the day:

Lorenz Clasen’s ‘Germania auf der Wacht am Rhein’ (1860), Hermann Wislicenus, ‘Germania auf der

Wacht am Rhein’ (1873), and the cover illustration of Hermann Müller-Bohn’s patriotic geographical

album Des Deutschen Vaterland (1913).

16 Hitler 1941, 213. I am indebted to Professor Paul Stevens (Department of English, University of

Toronto) for drawing my attention to this passage and its significance.

17 The implication being that regionalism can be more than a simple nostalgic celebration of the

Heimat or petite patrie, predicated on rustic idyll; it, too, like nationalism, can emerge from city

culture. Cologne and Liège (regarding which, cf. Van Ginderachter & Leerssen 2012) are cases in

point.

18 A description of these extraordinary events, including photographic material and a video, is online at

the UNESCO website: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00087 .