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he felt strongly, but felt to be so new, so modern, that he could not claim to define it. Indeed, that very ­inability to say neatly and precisely who he was added to his sense of freedom. In this, he became the first, the emblematic, and in the very qualities of his introspection and questioning of his condition, perhaps the greatest of foreigners. n a way it is always a temptation for individuals who are displaced to idealize their roots as solid and secure, to make still photographs of the past while the present unfolds like a film composed of abruptly shifting scenes. It was no accident that the passion of nationalism that swept through Europe in 1848 took such an anthropological form. This year marked a turning point in which large numbers of people were beginning to feel the unsettling effects of industrialism and rapid urban migration. The overt targets of the national upheavals were the dynasties of the ancien régime: the Habsburgs, (especially its cadet branch in the House of Savoy), the Hohenlohes, the Hohenzollern and Hohenstaufen penetration of the Russian aristocracy. But those who took aim at the past in 1848 were people disturbed by a present whose terrors they could feel but not clearly name. The Italians who rose against the Habsburgs were northerners, living in cities like Milan in which significant beginnings of manufacturing had occurred; the Poles, Bohemians and Bavarians who rose against their monarchs lived in places where small farms 90
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were, throughout the 1830s and 1840s being closed or incorporated into large estates, lands in which massive numbers of young people were leaving the land. From the onset of mercantile development after 1815, the cities to which immigrants came were less and less places of a settled ‘native’ population, settled in its position, habits, or domiciles; the imagery of ‘native’ versus ‘foreign’ was used by people who were themselves constantly migrating within the nation, ‘restless unto death’ as Tocqueville described them. t was under these conditions that the ideal of a national being appealed to those who were displaced. Urban migration and its attendant economics was one of the forces which created nationalism, an image of some fixed place necessary for those who were experiencing displacement. ‘A world dissolving into chaos’: against it the land stands as a measure of the enduring; its being is set against the trials of one’s own becoming. he ‘chaos’ of economic redeployment and the migration of labour which began in the ­midnineteenth century seems unlikely to abate in a globalizing world. The motives for cultural idealization will be as strong for us, perhaps stronger, than they were for the people who lived through the first great age of industrial capitalism. The era of the ‘universal citizen’ celebrated by Kant was an era which could not conceive of mass migration, and which imagined capital as comfortingly stationary 91

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he felt strongly, but felt to be so new, so modern, that he could not claim to define it. Indeed, that very ­inability to say neatly and precisely who he was added to his sense of freedom. In this, he became the first, the emblematic, and in the very qualities of his introspection and questioning of his condition, perhaps the greatest of foreigners.

n a way it is always a temptation for individuals who are displaced to idealize their roots as solid and secure, to make still photographs of the past while the present unfolds like a film composed of abruptly shifting scenes. It was no accident that the passion of nationalism that swept through Europe in 1848 took such an anthropological form. This year marked a turning point in which large numbers of people were beginning to feel the unsettling effects of industrialism and rapid urban migration. The overt targets of the national upheavals were the dynasties of the ancien régime: the Habsburgs, (especially its cadet branch in the House of Savoy), the Hohenlohes, the Hohenzollern and Hohenstaufen penetration of the Russian aristocracy. But those who took aim at the past in 1848 were people disturbed by a present whose terrors they could feel but not clearly name. The Italians who rose against the Habsburgs were northerners, living in cities like Milan in which significant beginnings of manufacturing had occurred; the Poles, Bohemians and Bavarians who rose against their monarchs lived in places where small farms

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