No new capital was built, except for Reykjavik in Iceland, which harboured no pre-modern city at all. Athens had to be rebuilt as a city, and some other Balkan capitals were tiny and rustic. The European tradition did include a separate city government, but by the end of royal state power, most capital cities had lost most of their civic autonomy. Modern London had no unified city government at all, and both London and Paris got fully elected city governments only in the 1970s.
The nation entered Europe’s capital cities in two big and two smaller waves. One centred on the French Revolution, its vicissitudes and its (largely Napoleonic) repercussions, spanning the continent from the British Isles – where important changes had started earlier – to Russia, from Norway to Spain and the Balkans. The carapace of medieval traditions, urban oligarchies and royal power cracked, either wide open with a bang or stealthily ajar. The second wave rolled in from the mid-nineteenth century, including but not peaking in the European Spring of 1848 until Albanian independence just before World War I, bringing national Belgrade, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Copenhagen, Rome, Sofia, Tirana and national-cum-imperial Berlin. Here the people-prince conflict was embedded in a range of large-scale processes of social change and transformation of rural-urban relations population growth, railway connections and industrialization, in a complex geopolitical power game among the big powers of the continent.
After that, there was a third brief wave in 1919 and 1920 along the East-Central strip between Russia and Germany, upon the final break-up of all the remaining pre-national regimes in Europe, Romanov Russia, Hohenzollern Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary. The Ottoman Balkans had been nationalized just before the Great War. Finally, a fourth wave surged in the 1990s, with the end of the multinational Communist states of the USSR and Yugoslavia, a wave which also included a ripple in the United Kingdom, with Scottish and Welsh devolution and corresponding new national Scottish and Welsh institutions and buildings. National issues have been revived in the 2010s, with the Scottish referendum and the Eastern Ukrainian semi-secession in 2014, the continuous restiveness of Flanders and the rise of Catalan sovereignty claims. What will come of this is unclear.
The first three waves all centred on conflicts between peoples, constituting themselves as nations, and monarchical power – in the Netherlands and Switzerland against hereditary Regenten or regiments-fähigen Familien. The fourth was a rejection of multi-national nation-states.
This is not the place to theorize or explain the rise of nation-states. The task here is to locate them in time and to grasp their impact on the capital city. However, we do need some clear criteria. First of all, we are not dealing with questions of nationalism and national identity here, but with the constitution of state power.
A state is a nation-state when its sovereignty and power are claimed to derive from a nation (or people). Although claims to being a nation are often, particularly in Europe, derived from an interpretation of the past, the power of a sovereign nation is open to the future, unbound by descent and custom. The sovereign power of the nation is modern. Because of its radiation of power into the whole society of its rule, the establishment of a nation-state may be seen as a country’s tipping point into modernity.16 Its polar opposites are states which belong to a prince by ‘divine right’ or the ‘mandate of heaven’, by legitimate succession or by conquest. These two poles do not exhaust the historical roster of human polities, but their opposition largely defines the field in which nation-states had to establish themselves. In Europe, though, there did develop very early a conception of a territorial realm, belonging to one prince or another but separable as a geographical concept from its ruling family. In Asia, this was often not the case; the Ottoman (Osmanli) and Mughal Empires were dynastic names, and so was Choson (today’s Korea). China, Zhongguo, did have a territorial meaning, while also, for instance in Korea, being referred to as a dynasty.17
When does a state become a nation-state? The continuities of European state history complicate the task, often necessitating indicating a timespan of variable length. A very important aspect of this continuity was the unique European process whereby princely rule could gradually evolve into a purely symbolic monarchy. Even the French case is not without possible options. Clearly, the revolution from 1789 onwards made France into a nation-state, but the crucial date, or even year, has been debated. For instance, in 1880 when the National Assembly was to decide the Day of the Nation, it had at least eleven alternatives in front of it.18 The alternatives considered included the one most proper in my eyes, 20 June 1789, when the Third Estate of the Estates-General turned itself into a Constituent National Assembly. The date finally chosen, 14 July 1789 (the storming of the Bastille), was arguably a wise compromise, a moderate way of commemorating the revolutionary people of Paris.
In Parisian iconography, an embryonic national streak was visible already under the monarchical hegemony of the ancien régime. When major streets started to get official names in the seventeenth century, some were given to non-royal statesmen, like Richelieu, Colbert and Mazarin; later they were given to the provost of the merchants and to city aldermen and, finally, in the 1780s, to famous writers such as Racine and Molière.19
One of the first urbanistic conquests of the revolutionary nation was ending the duality between Paris and the royal court city of Versailles. The Estates had been convoked to Versailles, and it was there that the French nation constituted itself as such. It was in buildings around the royal castle of Versailles that the Third Estate turned itself into the National Assembly, in the Hall of Minor Pleasures (Salle des Menus-Plaisirs), and swore the Oath of the Tennis Court (Jeu de Paume) not to part before providing the nation with a constitution. This spatial duality ended abruptly in October 1789, when a very angry procession of Parisian market women and an only slightly less angry march of Parisian National Guards forced the king and the court to return to Paris, to the Tuileries. The National Assembly followed, and installed itself in the Riding House (Salle du Manège) of the same royal palace.
The revolution unleashed a huge iconoclasm, not quite unprecedented,* similar to that of later Communist revolutions and anti-Communist counter-revolutions. As the revolution did end the ancien régime – after a short counter-revolutionary Restoration of 1815 to 1830 – the pre-revolutionary toponymy and monumentality did not return, unlike in parts of post-Communist Europe, but nor did the revolutionary thrust endure. Place Louis XV became Place de la Révolution, the site of the guillotine and the execution of Louis XVI. In 1795 the Directory gave it its present name, Concorde, briefly interrupted by the Restoration. The Place du Trône became the Place du Trône Renversé (the Square of the Toppled Throne) and then finally settled down as the Place de la Nation. The Place Royale lost the statue of Louis XIII and, after a brief stint dedicated to the ‘Fédérés’ (the army and the National Guard) became the sedate Place des Vosges in honour of the first province to contribute to the military campaign of 1799. The Restoration, of course, restored its monarchist original, but then lost out. Place Louis le Grand became definitively Place Vendôme, and Louis XIV was replaced by the Column of Austerlitz, modelled after Trajan’s column of ancient Rome. The victorious commander of the battle (Napoleon) was taken down from the top during the Restoration, but was restored there afterwards. The Bastille prison was demolished. Instead came the Place de la Bastille, with its July Column topped by the Spirit of Liberty, erected in the 1830s, commemorating the martyrs of the July Revolution.
Already the national Orléans monarchy coming out of the 1830 revolution tried to bask in Napoleonic glory, completing the Arc de Triomphe with its recording of tri-continental imperial French victories. The battlefields of Napoleonic victories are all over the streets of central Paris: Aboukir, Austerlitz, Eylau, Friedland, Iéna, Pyramides, Ulm, Wagram and so on, commemorated by three republics as well as by the Second Empire. The early victories of the Second Empire and the two world wars then added to the extraordinary war-path character of the streets of central Paris.
During the mid-nineteenth-century Second Empire and the power and design of the imperial Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Paris got a largely new spatial layout of long, wide boulevards lined with homogenous architecture and long horizontal lines of wrought-iron balconies, all testifying to a wealthy authoritarian power unrestrained by any parliament or by individualist property rights. This Paris became what Walter Benjamin called the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, and David Harvey the ‘capital of modernity’