Concept:
- Most people in nineteenth century Europe could not read political pamphlets, so nationalism had to reach them through pictures, statues, songs and dances.
- Artists were therefore not decorating the national movement, they were carrying it.
Step 1: The problem artists were solving.
A nation cannot be photographed. To make people feel loyalty towards something they cannot see, it had to be given a body, a face and a set of recognisable signs. That task fell to painters and sculptors.
Step 2: The solution, a person who stands for the country.
Artists represented nations as female figures, deliberately not modelled on any real woman, so that the figure stood for the whole people rather than for an individual.
France gave her the ordinary Christian name
Marianne, which stressed that the nation belonged to the people, and the German states gave her the name
Germania.
Step 3: A shared code of symbols that anyone could read.
Each idea was attached to an object. The red cap and the broken chain meant Liberty, the blindfold and the weighing scales meant Justice, and the crown of oak leaves worn by Germania meant heroism, since the German oak stood for it.
A villager who could not read a newspaper could still read these signs.
Step 4: Putting the symbols where people would meet them.
Statues of Marianne were raised in public squares, and her image was stamped on coins and on postage stamps. The nation thus entered daily life through objects passing from hand to hand.
Step 5: Music and folk culture as the final step.
The Romantic movement turned away from reason and science towards emotion, intuition and a sense of shared heritage. Where politics was banned, art continued the work: in Poland, Karol Kurpinski used operas and music to celebrate the national struggle, and made folk dances such as the polonaise and the mazurka into nationalist symbols.
Final Answer: Artists turned an idea into something people could see, hold and sing. Through Marianne and Germania, through a fixed code of symbols on statues, coins and stamps, and through Romantic music and folk dance, they carried nationalism to people whom written politics could never have reached.