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Europe was a world pioneer of modernist breaks with past authorities, wisdom and aesthetic canon. However, in a global context, the most striking aspect of European nation-states and their capitals is historical continuity as well as continuity of territory, language, religion, art, architecture and urban layout. This paradox of pioneer modernism combined with de facto conservationism is mainly explained by European imperialism. Europe was the only part of the world which did not have its pre-modernity conquered, shattered or fatally threatened and humiliated. Therefore, its pre-national, pre-modern background and legacy matter more than to capitals coming out of other national pathways. With respect to cities, this background had two main features: a particular urban system and form of urbanism, and a historically evolved repertoire of architectural language and symbolic forms.

The core of European civilization was uniquely urban in a specific sense; it developed in sovereign cities, in city-states which were part of regional systems of exchange, rivalry, competition, warfare and alliances. City-states developed on other continents, too, but nowhere else did they constitute political and cultural systems of comparable significance. This was ancient Greece, succeeded by ancient Rome, a city building an empire; by Byzantium, another city holding an empire; and, after the collapse of the Mediterranean urban powers of antiquity, ancient civilization revived in Florence and the other city-states of the Renaissance.

European cities were distinctive legal-political entities, characterized by the civic, in Germanic languages Bürger, rights of its free men.* Even when not sovereign states, European cities and towns usually had institutions of collective self-governance, in the big and wealthy cities represented by magnificent city halls. They had their own legal system which spread around the urban networks from certain nodes, such as Magdeburg law eastwards to Kyiv, among others, and Lübeck law northwards into Baltic towns. A key element of European urban form was a central public space: the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the Italian piazza, the Romance place/plaza, the German Platz, the Russian ploshchad.

Architectural Greek and Roman antiquity defined classicism in European building. It was a form of language which, in spite of its ups and downs in the cycles of taste, never left European – and overseas migrated – architecture until the mid-twentieth-century victory of the modernist movement. It could even blend with modernism, as in some of the best architecture of Italian fascism – for instance, EUR, the exhibition complex built in Rome for the World Exhibition that never was. Indeed, modern nationalism, first of all French Revolutionary and Napoleonic symbolism, drew more heavily on the classical heritage than the ancien régime preceding it, in pageantry, painting, nomenclature – the Temple of Reason, the Field of Mars, the Pantheon and, in monumental architecture, the Vendôme Column and the Triumphal Arch. The new United States was very much part of the early-nineteenth-century so-called Greek Revival, as the public buildings of Washington, D.C., testify. Pre-modern European architecture developed a whole repertoire of styles, which in the nineteenth century were often blended into something known as Historicism or Eclecticism. Classicism apart, the most important element of the repertoire was the medieval Gothic, from the French ‘era of the cathedrals’. It made a powerful comeback in the nationalist age.

Before the Nations

The paradigmatic European nation-state grew out of an existing prenational state, and its capital evolved out of a long pre-national history. Although our proper story begins with nation-states and national capitals, because of the strong pre-national legacy in most of Europe, some prologue history might be helpful.

The Church, the land, the city and the king sum up the prehistory of nation-states and of national capitals. The Church was the decisive conduit of the classical heritage in the Dark Ages. The Classical Pantheon, built under Agrippa just before the Christian era and reconstructed by Hadrian around 130 CE, was consecrated as a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and All the Martyrs in 609. When the popes started to rebuild Rome after their return from Avignon (in the late fourteenth century), one of their contributions was to add a Christian statue and/or an inscription of themselves to the imperial columns. Two famous examples are the columns of Trajan and of Marcus Aurelius Antonius (at what is now Piazza Colonna), then provided with statues of Saints Peter and Paul, respectively, on top, and an inscription commemorating the contribution by Pope Sixtus V.

The Church was the monumental builder of the Middle Ages and also later, from Renaissance and Baroque Rome to seventeenth-century London after the Great Fire. The Cathedral of Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey and the later Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint Stephen and the Basilica of Saint Peter were the unrivalled pre-modern constructions of Paris, London, Vienna and Rome. So was the Matthias Corvinus Church in Budapest. El Escorial outside Madrid was both a monastery and the most awe-inspiring of the royal palaces. Only the Kremlin of the Muscovy Tsars and the city hall of the rich merchants and manufacturers of provincial Brussels indicated overwhelming secular power or wealth.* Berlin was not a medieval city of significance and became architecturally ambitious only in the second half of the eighteenth city. In other words, Berlin had no important pre-modern centre of monumentality, but there was the castle of the Hohenzollern, electors of Brandenburg-Prussia.†

The Church organized the rituals of the collectivity, from Mass to royal coronations and funerals, and church buildings provided the most important space for homage and remembrance of worldly figures: royal, aristocratic and occasionally even poetical tombs, statues and busts.* London’s Westminster Abbey, since Tudor times, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral seem to have harboured a larger number and, more certainly, a wider range of commemorative monuments than most major churches of Europe.† On the whole, tombs had a very important place in dynastic monumentality, most famously, perhaps, in the abbeys of Saint-Denis and of Westminster and the Viennese Kapuzinergruft of the Habsburgs.

Occasionally – and in papal Rome frequently – the townscape was also adorned with saintly statues and votive monuments, such as the early-eighteenth-century Plague Columns in Vienna and in Buda (now part of Budapest), or the Charles Church in Vienna, also built in gratitude for relief from the plague.‡ In the seventeenth century, Christopher Wren built not only a new Saint Paul’s Cathedral but fifty other churches in the City of London.¹

Papal Rome, from its height to the end of its full splendour, contributed two further features to urban monumentality, the Cathedral of Saint Peter apart. One was the straight axial road with its long urban vista, the Via Pia, from the Quirinale to Porta Pia, constructed from 1561 to 1562, long antedating the wider Nevsky Prospekt, the Champs-Élysées and all the others.² The second was the grandiose piazza in front of Saint Peter’s, capable of receiving in a grand manner the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims coming to Rome. It got its final shape with Bernini’s colonnades from the years around 1660, becoming arguably the most elegant monumental public space in the world.

The Rise of Territorial Capitals

Before any central urban monumentality could emerge, there had to be a capital city. The European Middle Ages started out as a massive reruralization of social and political life. The idea of a capital city passed away.³ Even the greatest of early medieval rulers, Charlemagne, did not need one, although Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) was his preferred residence in the latter part of his reign. Paris became caput regni only in the first half of the fourteenth century.⁴ And that was not irreversible. In the last decades of the long and powerful reign of Louis XIV, Paris became a huge suburb of Versailles. In his last twenty-two years, Louis visited Paris only four times. Until the revolution, the relationship of Paris to Versailles was never quite clear.⁵

London assumed permanent capital functions by the twelfth century. Before that, Winchester was the modest political capital of England, where the regalia and the royal treasure were kept and where the survey results for the Domesday Book were returned.⁶ However, the capital functions centred around Westminster, that is, around the royal palace and the Abbey, which was the coronation church. The City of London was still for some time rather a twin city to Westminster, some kilometres down the river to the east.

Vienna became the permanent capital of the Habsburgs in the course of the seventeenth century – Prague was the major alternative – and definitely only when the Ottomans began to be rolled back, after their failed siege of Vienna in 1683.⁷ Russia grew out of Muscovy, but Peter I moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg after his decisive victory in the Northern War at Poltava in 1709. After the October Revolution, Moscow became again the main capital: ‘main’ because in Tsarist Russia, the USSR and post-Communist Russia, the two cities both have both a special standing as stolitsy, capital cities (originally meaning ‘throne cities’).

Berlin had housed the main residence of the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns since the 1440s, but that meant more a feudal manor than a national centre. In the eighteenth century, when Brandenburg-Prussia was becoming a great power, Potsdam was alongside Berlin the official ‘residence city’, the one much preferred by Frederick II (the Great). To the Hohenzollerns, Potsdam was a possible capital even of the German Reich; Bismarck had to push the new German emperor into accepting Berlin.⁸

The Spanish royal court moved to Madrid in 1560 and the city soon became very dominated by the court and its needs, but the former kept an ambulatory life for another good half-century, with El Escorial as the grandest and most important alternative in the surrounding region. Even when a permanent royal palace was built in the 1630s, the Buen Retiro Palace, it was actually (just) outside the city. This led to the symbolic and highly ceremonial entry into Madrid of a new king or queen through one of the city gates, the Puerta de Alcalá.⁹

Ofen, or Buda, had gathered most of the capital functions in Hungary after the abortive revolution in 1848, at the onset of which the Hungarian Diet met in Pozsony, currently Bratislava. It became Budapest only in 1873, uniting the three cities of traditionally German Buda (Ofen), the rapidly growing economic centre Pest across the Danube and ancient and aging Obuda, a bit to the north, where the Roman Aquincum had once been. Brussels, finally, had been the site of the Dukes of Brabant and of Habsburg plenipotentiaries, but became a state capital only in 1830.

Pre-Nation Cities

It has already been hinted at that there was no straight road from the rise of capital cities to national capitals. The city was in a sense also part of the prehistory of the nation. The City Belt, from the Italian peninsula up through the Swiss Alpine passes into the Rhineland and to the North Sea, was the European pièce de résistance to the formation of territorial states.¹⁰ The cities on the southern shores of the Baltic succumbed earlier, but as long as they could, the Hanseatic cities fought the rise of sovereign territories. In the period of transition from the Middle Ages and the New Age, cities, rather than territorial states, were often the main sites of power and wealth: Florence, Venice, Genoa, Lübeck, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Antwerp and Amsterdam are, perhaps, the most famous examples.

Among European capitals today, London is unique in being both an ancient, indeed Roman, trading hub and the old medieval capital of a dynastic territorial state. No wonder that it took some time for its two parts, the City (of London) and Westminster, to coalesce.

The wealthy and powerful trading cities coming out of Europe’s Dark Ages had their own pre-national monumentality. Their grand town halls and guild halls, the most splendid of which were built by Flemish cloth-makers, their magnificent town gates and sometimes a prominent weigh-house and/or exchange represented a specific urbanity: autonomous, proud, capitalist and rich. The main buildings of the city and its commerce were generally laid out at or around the main square – typically called in Germanic Europe the ‘big market’ (grosse/grote markt), which often but not always also had the main church.

Amsterdam was special in the Calvinist austerity which wrapped its enormous wealth, but its huge mid-seventeenth-century city hall in the main square (the Dam) highlights well its pre-national monumentality. Amsterdam was then the capital of the United Provinces and of its major part, the province of Holland. The city is still officially the capital of the Netherlands, although the Hague is the site of the monarchy and the government. But it is the city hall – now formally a royal palace – that is Amsterdam’s most monumental piece of architecture.

Brussels, another part of the City Belt, still testifies eloquently to a rich pre-national urban iconography. In spite of the national trimmings after 1830, to which we shall return below, the symbolic centre of Brussels is still its grande place/grote markt, dominated by its mid-fifteenth century Gothic town hall and surrounded by various guild halls, mostly in Flemish baroque save for one in reconstructed Gothic, all with nicknames out of the city argot. The topological city centre, Place de Brouckère, is named after a mayor.

The Peace of Utrecht in 1713, ratifying the eclipse of the United Provinces by Great Britain, signalled the beginning of the end for the city republics. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna did the rest. The United Provinces were reconstituted as the Realm of the Netherlands under the Orange dynasty, and Venice was handed over to the Habsburgs as part of a package. Only the now rather marginal Swiss city cantons kept most of their autonomy, for another thirty-five to sixty years, and Lübeck still lingered on in a shadowy existence until the unification of Germany.

Royal Absolutism

The European power configuration preceding the national state was usually the dynastic territorial state, governed with royal absolutism. This general rule had one major exception, though, apart from the decaying city-states, which were ruled by closed commercial oligarchies. There was the ascending, post-absolutist Kingdom of Great Britain, governed in the name of the king by a land-owning aristocracy while dominating world trade and starting an Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, the major style was that of absolutism, set since the time of Louis XIV at Versailles, from which it radiated to the Habsburg Schönbrunn and to the peripheries of absolutist Europe.

The centrepiece of royal architecture and monumentality in general was the royal palace – in eastern Europe initially built as a fortified castle – or palaces plural, then regularly at least a winter and a summer palace. Versailles (and, in imitation, Karlsruhe) was laid out as a radial city, beaming out from the royal palace. A huge, well-sculptured park became an important feature of a truly royal seat in the course of the seventeenth century, a sine qua non for palaces outside city centres. In addition, there might be some other palaces of royal power and largesse, of organization for war, a mint perhaps, or a veterans’ hospital or nursing home, like the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris or the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. The European absolutist monarch was not a god on earth nor some other power floating above the earth. He or she stood at the apex of an aristocratic pyramid.¹¹ Aristocratic palaces, then, also contributed significantly to the royal townscape, as in Saint Petersburg.

There was a royal ritual rhythm that played an important part in the life of dynastic capitals, of royal births, birthdays, marriages, coronations and funerals, with public ceremonies and popular festivities as well as court protocol and temporary monuments of arches and tribunes at coronations and royal marriages. There could also be military parades, and some cities, such as Berlin, Potsdam and Saint Petersburg, had very centrally located parade grounds.

Extra-palatial monumentality was less thought about and developed, but it did exist. The equestrian statue was an ancient Roman monument, although perhaps secondary. Charlemagne was enthralled when he saw one of Theoderic in Ravenna and brought it to Aachen, but it seems to have passed into medieval obscurity. The custom was revived with the Italian Renaissance and developed by French seventeenth-century absolutism. In Paris, Henry IV got a statue by the Pont Neuf in 1614; Louis XIV got a number in France and several in Paris.¹² In London, Charles II was put up in King’s (now Soho) Square and outside Chelsea Hospital. Before his deposition, James II was elevated in Whitehall.¹³ In Vienna, the oldest equestrian statue – or at least the oldest still standing – dates only from late eighteenth century. It portrays Emperor Franz Stephan (1708–65) and was founded in 1781 and first put up in 1797; it is now to be found in the Burggarten, né Kaisergarten.¹⁴

There was also the royal square, with a name referring to some royalty or royal exploit and, usually, with a statue. The Paris of Henry IV provided the model, the Place Dauphine (Crown Prince Square) on the Île de la Cité, beside the statue of the king, and Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), successfully built to become the centre of elegant life in town, with a statue of Louis XIII. In spite of his personal move to Versailles, Louis XIV did invest in the royal grandeur of Paris as well. The more ephemeral Place des Victoires, with an extremely triumphalist statue of Louis XIV, was a private initiative by a rich admirer, whereas the almost simultaneous Place Louis le Grand (today’s Place Vendôme, after the old palace of the Duke of Vendôme), was somewhat more restrained in the symbolism of its equestrian statue of the Sun King. The Throne Square got its name from the city entry of Louis XIV and the temporary throne then installed there. What is now known as the Place de la Concorde started out in the last third of the eighteenth century as Place Louis XV, with a royal statue.¹⁵

Saint Petersburg was the absolutist city par excellence, a magnificent manifestation of pre-national monarchical and of royally derived court aristocratic wealth and will, built by imported Italian architects, to Russian taste. War, religion, monarchy and aristocracy set their first imprints upon the city. The Palace Square was shaped by the Tsar’s Winter Palace and the General Staff opposite it. Nearby, somewhat back, was the hulk of the Senate and Synod, the heads of the civilian and the ecclesiastical administration. The grandiose long boulevard Nevsky Prospekt ran from the Admiralty to the Nevsky monastery.

Moscow became less imperial and less aristocratic and, with late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century textile industrialization, embourgeoised. But it retained a central role of pre-modern Russia. Tsars were crowned in the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral and after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the city became a proto-national symbol due to its sacrificial burning, forcing the Grande Armée to its disastrous retreat.

The Nation versus the Prince(s)

The European nation-states built their capitals upon these pre-national traditions of Greco-Roman antiquity, medieval churches, town and guild halls and monarchical and aristocratic palaces, all still visible historical layers of the modern national cities. 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’ and a transcontinental model was seen particularly in Latin America.²⁰

However, the main enduring capital-city effect of the revolutionary French route to political modernity and a nation-state is this: national Paris has never had the time and/or money to construct monumental buildings of national institutions, although from the very beginning of the Revolutions there were grandiose plans.²¹ The Palais de l’Élysée, the Presidential Palace, is an ordinary aristocratic town palace in a side street of the Rive Droite, once belonging to Madame de Pompadour, the most notorious of royal mistresses. The National Assembly has a nice location by the river, but is no more than a former palace of a minor Bourbon royalty. During the Paris Commune of 1871 it had to move to Versailles, and in 1875 it decided on this principal site of the ancien régime as its permanent location (a permanence reversed after four years). France did not have an official prime minister (then called Président du Conseil) until 1946, but this position existed de facto from 1934, lodged in Palais Matignon, another former aristocratic townhouse, on the Rive Gauche. The last royal palace, the Tuileries, was burnt down during the Paris Commune.²²

Instead of institutional landmark buildings, Paris has a set of places de ruptures, heavily invested with meaning to this day. The eastern Places de la Bastille, de la République and de la Nation all refer to domestic French history, and they all have a left-of-centre connotation and a similar function of gathering or demonstrating arrival.

Correspondingly, the French right have their places of assembly and destination to the west, mainly commemorating external wars, from the Jeanne d’Arc statue and Place de la Concorde along the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, or, at the Rive Gauche, les Invalides. To this day, French politics is much better at mass demonstrations and short strikes than at building institutions and organizations.

When did Britain become a nation-state, a multinational one of (at least) the English, the Scots and the Welsh, and London a national capital? These are questions rarely raised in British historiography, in contrast to questions of national identity and nationalism.²³ Terminus ab quo is the ‘Revolution’ of 1688, which, whatever its unintended modern consequences, was basically a revolution in the pre-modern sense, literally a ‘rolling back’^* to the Tudor times of ‘free-born Englishmen’ and Protestant monarchs. No section of a nation-state, and no party wanting to create a nation-state, can possibly invite a foreign prince to conquer the country and rule the state, like the seven ‘gentlemen and aristocrats’† who invited the Dutch stadhouder Prince William of Orange on 7 June 1688, did. The official motivation of ‘the Great Restorer’, as John Locke aptly called William, ‘to appear in Arms’ was ‘Preserving of the Protestant Religion, and for restoring the laws and liberties of the ancient kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland’.²⁴ Through his marriage to the daughter of King James II, William also had a claim to the succession. The year 1688 was part of a two-centuries-long armed and religiously impassioned dynastic rivalry and inter-state princely power game over the British crown – also involving the French and the Spanish monarchs – that went on until 1746, when the army of a new Hanoverian Protestant dynasty finally defeated that of the Catholic Stuarts.

Terminus ad quem would be the 1830s. Iconographically, 1830 was a crucial year, when the new central square in London was in the end not called King William Square as expected. With the king’s consent, it became instead Trafalgar Square,²⁵ on which the National Gallery was soon built and Nelson’s Column erected. Parliamentary reform – now meaning looking forward and not back to some pure past – in 1832 made at least the House of Commons less a medieval privilege and more of a modern representation of the nation. Its new monumental landmark building, the Westminster Parliament, was decided upon in the late 1830s and began to open in 1847 (starting with the House of Lords).

The eighteenth century saw a gradual nationalization in Britain, of state power as well as of public monumentality. Wars were no longer financed by grants and loans to the king but by a ‘national debt’, a neologism of the 1730s, guaranteed by Parliament. In 1760 the king traded his property and income from it for a parliamentary Civil List grant.^* By the time of the Hanoverian invitation to the throne in 1714, the power of Parliament to install a proper Protestant succession to the throne was established.²⁶ The power of the former grew steadily and that of the monarch faded gradually into ritual respect; 1834 was the last time a British monarch could appoint a prime minister against the opposition of the House of Commons.²⁷

Somewhat bewilderingly, British patriotic celebrations during the Napoleonic Wars ‘subsumed national achievements in glorification of the monarch’.²⁸ Characteristically, the new elegant main street of London’s West End was named Regent Street, though it ended in Waterloo Place, where the prince regent then resided. (Below, we shall encounter some similar national monarchism in Japan.) Enthusiastic and very profitable Scottish investment in the empire furthered national Britishness.

Around Chaucer’s tomb monument, there developed in the eighteenth century a Poets’ Corner of national memorials in Westminster Abbey, including Shakespeare, Milton and others. In the 1790s, the main church of the City of London, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, put up statues of four national benefactors: the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the Orientalist William Jones, the painter Joshua Reynolds and the prison reformer John Howard. Linda Colley ends her great work Britons with a conclusion around a prominent 1822 Royal Academy painting, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo, displaying diverse representatives of a victorious British nation.

Final British victory in the Napoleonic Wars shaped the new national iconography of London, generating Waterloo Place, Waterloo Bridge, Trafalgar Square, the Wellington Arch and Nelson’s Column. The latter, including its reliefs of Nelson’s four major victories and his guard of lions, took three decades to complete (in 1867), even though the column and the statue upon it were visible from November 1843. The government was reluctant to put any money into celebrating the nation’s hero.† No domestic event or hero has ever been commemorated with such grandeur. No national building of worship was added to, not to mention ever replaced Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but the latter expanded its function as a national pantheon with an extraordinarily pompous tomb monument to the Duke of Wellington.

London grew as an imperial city, the world’s largest by 1800. Apart from national-imperial iconography – including its majestic new Parliament – nation-state London was little nationalized. The old duality of the commercial and financial City of London, with its own Lord Mayor and guild institutions, and, on the other side, the royal and aristocratic Westminster and West End continued, although the two were increasingly connected by new land transport rather than by river boats. Before the nineteenth century, the City (with a capital C), had been a kind of sober, Protestant, liberal area of mercantile residence as well as offices, a sort of ‘Amsterdam’ in contrast to the more luxurious and exorbitant ‘Venice’ of the aristocratic West End. In the nineteenth century it was largely emptied at night, while opening in the morning, filled up with offices of world trade and finance.²⁹

National London was in the grip of parliamentary power, which did pay attention to the functionality of the capital, establishing (in 1855) the Metropolitan Board of Works, which, overdue, produced the most extensive sewer system in the world and a metropolitan police force, while the City of London maintained its own. It also funded extensions and embellishments of a rather second-rate aristocratic palace (Buckingham), which in the eighteenth century became the townhouse of the Hanoverian kings, without ever allowing a royal presence in London on par with that in Paris of the Louvre or Tuileries, in Vienna of the Hofburg, in Berlin of the Stadtschloss, or of smaller capitals like Stockholm and Oslo. Street layout remained largely traditional, on the whole without parade axes similar to those of Paris, Vienna and Berlin. London was a city of imperial wealth and power, but not of royal or national splendour.

In some sense the London equivalent of the royal and national-imperial landmark planning of Paris – and the alternative to the grands boulevards – are the West End squares, laid out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by wealthy aristocrats who were also big urban property owners, with homogenous architecture for aristocratic or gentlemanly townhouses, usually with an enclosed garden in the middle. The squares usually carry the names of their creator-owners, Grosvenor (the family name of the wealthiest of them all, the Dukes of Westminster), Bedford, Russell, Sloane and so on, still bearing witness to the unique British blend of landed aristocracy and urban capitalism. The similar Parisian Place Royale was a royal precedent, discontinued.

Even if they did not finish the anciens régimes, the French Revolution and Napoleon’s armies rattled or challenged their iconostases, from London to Saint Petersburg, from Madrid to Berlin. In the fissures, new national imagery began to emerge. The Napoleonic invasions spawned ferocious nationalisms, from the guerrillas of Spain to the ‘Patriot’ (or ‘Fatherland’) War in Russia, via the Prussian Wars of Liberation. On the literary front, what the latter-day German historian Hagen Schulze has called Hass-und Totschlagspoesie (poetry of hatred and killing) was unleashed. Saint Petersburg got its first national monuments after the war: statues of the two major Russian commanders Barclay de Tolly and Kutuzov were erected outside the Kazan Cathedral, and Russian folklore motifs were added to the triumphal Narva Gate. The only major capital of Europe where nothing national was allowed – for the time being – was Vienna, the base of the oldest and proudest of the royal dynasties.³⁰

By the 1830s, the nation-state situation in Europe may be summed up as follows. The two leading states, Britain and France, had become consolidated nation-states by steady evolution and by the failure of the counter-revolutionary Restoration, respectively. The oligarchic confederation of the Low Countries had become a national monarchy and so had, by an 1830 revolution, Belgium. End of the list of nation-states.

Sweden, in its rustic and modest way, had an evolution rather similar to that of the British, an eighteenth-century post-absolutist, quasi-parliamentary, Estates-governed Age of Liberty, and in the early nineteenth century the Estates deposed a king and asserted their right to make a new constitution before electing a new king. But the Swedish polity was still of four historical estates, not one nation, and coupled to Norway by a personal monarchical union. Denmark was still under absolutist rule, with a king who was also ruling German dukedoms, and as such a prince of the German Confederation. In Spain and Portugal the national banner had been planted, but the battles with royal absolutism had not yet been finally won. Switzerland was an oligarchic confederation of local urban and rural provincial polities, coming together as a nation-state only in 1847. The whole of central and eastern Europe was under princely domination, including the curious case of Greece: a state carved out of the Ottoman Empire by foreign powers on religious, ethnic and geopolitical grounds and put under the absolutist rule of a German prince.

The nationalization of Europe took more than a century. Only by 1920 were pre-modern patrimonial states gone from the sub-continent. The final blow was the defeat and ousting of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman and Romanov dynasties. Out of this protracted, complex, by no means linear history, we shall here only pick up a few themes bearing upon the capital cities.

The European national capitals were previous centres of their part of Old Europe, with – except for the Balkans – strong cultural and architectural legacies of Greco-Roman classicism and of the Baroque, the Renaissance and the medieval Gothic. The exceptions were relatively marginal. Before the nineteenth century, Iceland did not have a single city, but the few ecclesiastic and administrative central functions there were had gathered in the area where Reykjavik emerged from the beginning of the twentieth century. The Hague, before the nation, and Berne, for the nation, were chosen by deliberation: the Hague because of its insignificance as a neutral meeting place of the Estates-General of the United Provinces,* Berne as the most central of the major cantonal cities, ethnically – straddling the border between French and German speakers – as well as geographically.

As its full Dutch name – ’s-Gravenhage (the Count’s Wood) – indicates, the Hague has an aristocratic origin as the seat of the medieval counts of Holland and during the federal republic also of the stadhouder (commander-in-chief), when there was one. The Estates gathered in its Ridderzaal (Knights’ Hall), where Parliament now assembles. Berne had been a small oligarchic city republic before becoming, in 1831, the capital of the strong canton of Berne and, in 1848, the permanent seat of the Federal Assembly of the Swiss nation-state. A modest assembly house was built in the 1850s in a square dominated by a casino.^* In the 1890s the latter was replaced by a new parliament building, gradually accompanied around the quiet Bundesplatz by the National Bank, the Kantonalbank and the Crédit Suisse.

Balkan Ruptures

The ancient cities of Athens and Sofia (originally Roman Serdica) had shrunk radically and were no longer even regionally dominant, but were soon chosen by the new states: Athens for historical reasons – although the new Bavarian authorities originally planned to demolish the Parthenon and install a new royal palace there† – and Sofia in a complex geopolitical game with several somewhat larger Bulgarian cities.³¹ To Greek nationalists, Athens was for many decades a provisional capital, a kind of Bonn to the prosperous diaspora while Constantinople was still Ottoman.

Athens and Sofia also exemplify the limitations of the sovereignty of the new Balkan states. Greece and Bulgaria both owed their statehood to foreign armies and navies: the former to an alliance of Britain, France and Russia, the latter to Russia. Greece not only got an absolutist Bavarian king – as neutral between the three big powers – but also a Bavarian administration, and Athens got German architects.³² All this generated two revolutions in Athens, in 1843 and in 1862, leading to a national constitution and a new dynasty. The square in front of the Bavarian Royal Palace became Syntagma (Constitution) Square. From 1909 until its demise, the monarchy had to keep up with a more laid-back mansion, first intended for the crown prince of the new dynasty; the palace was, after lengthy renovation, taken over by Parliament in 1934. As far as I know, this is only the second example in the world of a single building representing the change from royal absolutism to parliamentarism.^*

Sofia too got a German king, Alexander von Battenberg – of the family later known in Britain as Mountbatten – and a heavy input of Viennese architecture. It is one of the two European capitals whose main street is named after a foreign prince – the other is Oslo, still paying homage to the ex-Napoleonic marshal who was elected king of Sweden and who, under the name of Karl Johan, conquered Norway in 1814. Sofia dedicates its principal avenue to the Tsar Osvoboditel (the Tsar Liberator), meaning Alexander II of Russia, who conquered Bulgaria for the Bulgarians. The Tsar himself stands in a semi-circle in front of the national parliament at one end of the avenue. He is still there, and also remained during Communist times. The first monument erected in ex-Ottoman Sofia was to a national independence hero, though, Vasil Levski.³³

In the Balkans, the national was first of all anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim. The national was largely centred around Orthodox churches, for which grand new cathedrals were built – in Belgrade, in Habsburgian Baroque, already in the 1830s after Ottoman recognition of Serbian autonomy;† in Athens, Bucharest and Sofia in neo-Byzantine splendour. Another priority building was a royal palace, at a time when royalty was still more anti-Ottoman than national. More genuinely national was the Bucharest Academy, where Romanian was first taught and which soon turned into a university.‡ Serbian Belgrade built its parliament on the former site of the main mosque,³⁴ and in Sofia the main mosque was turned first into a Russian military hospital, then a national library and finally a national museum.³⁵ The Muslim population fled en masse after the defeat of the Ottoman troops. Another thrust was de-Orientalization and Europeanization, for which architects and city planners were invited from Germany, Austria and sometimes France (especially to Bucharest) and other parts of Western Europe, from Italy in the case of Tirana.

For these reasons, the Balkan national capitals do not share the urbanistic continuity of the rest of Europe. Indeed, their rupture with the previous layout of space and architecture is unique in modern times, without any equivalent among the capitals of the ex-colonial zone, among the capital changes of those of reactive modernization, nor among any of the later Communist capitals (except for American-bombed-out Pyongyang). The avidly imported European ideas of public space – wide streets and open places, grid planning and exterior-oriented (instead of inward-turned) residential and public buildings – clashed totally with the Ottoman tradition. Even the architecture of the buildings of Ottoman power was seen as unattractive. Only as a temporary stopgap could the Bulgarian king think of living in the konak of the Ottoman governor, and Romanian Bucharest had no use for the fortified caravanserais which had been the landmarks among the vineyards and gardens of the semi-rural city.

Though facilitated by the massive flight of the ‘Turks’, the whole cities were, of course, not transformed over a decade or two. But certain central areas were, in a dramatic way. In Athens three new avenues were laid out in the centre, with the ‘academic trilogy’ of impressive neoclassical buildings along one of them: University Street, for the university, the Academy and the National Library, designed by the Danish architect Hans Christian Hansen and his brother Theophil. Bucharest gave priority to building and widening a set of boulevards, which after the 1877 war (which won Romania total independence) were all named after events or heroes of the war, fronted by Calea Victoriei with a triumphal arch.³⁶ I have already mentioned Sofia’s Tsar Liberator Avenue. Poor Belgrade changed more slowly, but the street joining it with the road to Istanbul became the main boulevard. Zagreb and Ljubljana were never under Ottoman rule and could therefore follow the European mainstream of continuist change. Tirana became the permanent capital of Albania only in 1925, fifteen years after a proclamation of independence during the first Balkan War, as a small town of 10,000. It was not purged of mosques and Muslims like the other Balkan capitals of the time, but came under strong influence from Italy and Fascism in the 1930s.

Ethnic Change in the East-Central Strip

The ethnic national character of the East-Central European capitals had luckily been decided before the nation-state came onto the top of the agenda. By and large it was decided by immigration from the countryside, driven by rural proletarianization, urban industrialization and rail transport. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnic city government and impact was a hot issue in almost all the future national capitals of East-Central Europe. Only three or four among twenty future capitals had by the mid-nineteenth century an ethnic majority from their coming nation: Warsaw, Ljubljana, Zagreb and perhaps tiny Tirana. Helsinki was mainly Swedish-speaking, Tallinn (known as Reval) and Riga were German-dominated, Vilnius was Jewish (and Polish), Minsk was Jewish and Yiddish-speaking, Prague was primarily German and Bratislava was called Pozsony and was until the 1840s the coronation city of the Hungarian crown and the most frequent seat of the Magyar Estates. Budapest consisted of Buda, Obuda and Pest, all three predominantly German in the early nineteenth century. Belgrade was Muslim; Bucharest was Greek-dominated; Skopje more Muslim than Macedonian; and Sofia a multi-ethnic, largely Muslim city. In Sarajevo the Muslims, today’s ‘Bosniaks’, remained a (large) minority until sometime between 1948 and 1991, while in 1926 Ukrainians were less than half of Kyiv’s population and Romanians less than half of Chişinău’s.³⁷

Inter-ethnic friction and conflicts festered in East-Central Europe throughout the twentieth century and even after, but the character of the nation-state capitals was never in doubt, except for Vilnius, which was not the capital of the inter-war Lithuanian Republic because it was ruled by Poland and got a Lithuanian ethnic majority only late in Soviet times.

The bitter inter-ethnic conflicts which accompanied Eastern European nationalism have been best chronicled with respect to Prague, which does not necessarily mean that they were sharper there than elsewhere. But with that qualification, the fate of Mozart in Prague in 1913 is a good illustration of rival symbolic nationalism. The Prague Society for the Promotion of German Sciences, Arts and Literature wanted to put up a statue of Mozart in front of the (German) Estates Theatre, where Don Giovanni was first performed in 1787. However, this required the use of a small piece of municipal land outside the theatre. The city council, Czech-dominated since 1861, rejected the petition, officially for traffic reasons.³⁸

However, the modern history of East-Central Europe should not be reduced to national conflicts. It too was part of the European route of continuisme and class. The new Balkan states of Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, with their powerful German kings, exemplified an eventful but nevertheless gradual transition from princely absolutism to the nation-state, although not to democratic monarchies. The modern history of East-Central Europe is much more dramatic than that of north-western Europe, with the gradual national evolution of its capitals inter-foliated by moments of revolution.

For all its national/ethnic complexity and conflicts, the Strip also experienced the typical European modern primacy of class. Its major intra-state violent conflicts were structured not by ethnicity or religion but class. The Finnish Civil War of 1918 pitted Red industrial workers and crofters against the White yeomanry and professional-managerial strata. The Baltic post–World War I wars had a triangular shape, pitting Balto-German landowners (with German troops); Estonian-Latvian farmers (with a tiny professional stratum), helped by British military; and Estonian-Latvian-Lithuanian workers and worker-soldiers against each other. The Budapest Commune of 1919 rallied urban workers (and a large part of the Jewish intelligentsia) against the upper and middle classes. The Greek post-post–World War II civil war had perhaps a more ideological character, dividing the popular classes, but its poles were the Communistled popular resistance against the Nazi occupation, on one side, and on the other the collaborationist turned Anglophile upper and middle classes.

The Pre-National Central Powers

During World War I, Austria-Hungary and Germany were, in neutral speech, often referred to as the Central Powers for their location in the middle of Europe. The Habsburg monarchy never became a nation-state, but from its stiff neo-absolutism, after 1860 it gradually came to accommodate national elements. With Russian help and under some able military commanders it finally survived and crushed the revolution of 1848. What started its decline and increasingly accommodationist stance was the loss of its Italian lands in 1859 to French and Piedmontese armies, and the decisive blow came in 1866 with its defeat to Prussia at Königgrätz (also known as Sadowa).

In Vienna, what became the grandiose Ringstrasse around the Baroque inner city out of the open military grounds around the city wall, the glacis, was announced by the Emperor in 1857: ‘It is My will that …’³⁹ The original plan was for new military barracks as well as cultural institutions and a dynastic votive church.⁴⁰ The plan included a city hall – elective municipal government was being adopted in Austria – but no parliament.^*

With the defeat at Königgrätz, Habsburg absolutism was doomed and the Ringstrasse changed its character in a bourgeois national direction. The liberal city of Vienna built itself a majestic Gothic city hall, which was interpreted as referring to the proud and autonomous Flemish cities, once part of Habsburg lands. Nearby, Theophil Hansen designed a new version of his Athens Academy as an impressive Reichsrath (Council of the Realm, in fact Parliament), but without any national symbolism. Already, in the early 1860s, a society for the promotion of the arts had petitioned for a monumental programme in honour of non-royals, but mostly of aristocrats connected to the city; it was effectuated in 1867. The liberal city leadership then expanded the programme, primarily with respect to great artists.⁴¹

1867 was also the year of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the establishment of Austria-Hungary under a double monarch: emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Financed by rich land rents and soaring wheat exports, the ruling Hungarian aristocrats embarked on a very ambitious national course, peaking in the millennium celebration in 1896 of the Magyar conquest of Hungary, including a World Exhibition and the world’s second underground line (after London’s). The emperor and his Vienna government had to acquiesce. In 1882 a statue of the poet and 1848 revolutionary initiator Sándor Petőfi was erected in Budapest. In 1894 the remains of the exiled national revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth were brought back to the city and given a grand official burial. In 1904 the world’s largest parliamentary building, the Országház (House of the Nation), was opened on the Pest side of the Danube, a duel in stone with the Habsburg Castle on the Buda Hills across the river. In location and in layout it refers to the Palace of Westminster, but it is built in a hotchpotch of historical styles, crowned by a gilded dome.

Prague was part of the Austrian half of the double monarchy and since the 1860s under Czech city government, with the support of which the Czech community built its own national institutions, from the neo-Renaissance National Museum towering over central Wenceslas Square to the Art Nouveau Obecní Dům (Municipal House), an entertainment centre meant to overshadow the German casino. The last national challenge the Catholic emperor had to swallow before the war was the city’s decision to put up a huge monument in Old Town Square to the heretic Czech preacher Jan Hus for the quincentenary of his burning at the stake in 1415.

Berlin is another capital where, beneath a dramatic history, there is a strong streak of continuity between the pre-modern and the modern, between the pre-national and the national. The latter does not constitute a fateful German Sonderweg (special path) in contrast to an enlightened ‘Western’ mainstream. It is a variant of the pathway of London, for example. In contrast to Habsburg Vienna, Hohenzollern Berlin did take on a few national features out of the Napoleonic Wars, which unleashed a Prussian/German nationalism similar only to the Spanish. Post-Napoleonic Berlin got a national monument, an off-stage temple-like structure on a hill topped by an iron cross, the new rank-independent medal for military valour. When the quadriga on top of the Brandenburg Gate was brought back to Berlin (having been looted by Napoleon and taken to Paris), the peace goddess Eirene was replaced by Prussian Victoria with an iron cross on her spear. Non-dynastic military commanders Bülow and Scharnhorst flanked the exquisite Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) in the city centre. Urban hubs were renamed after Prussian victories against Napoleon: Leipziger Platz (after the battle in 1813) and Pariser Platz (after the city it conquered and occupied in 1814).⁴²

Nevertheless, Prussia remained a dynastic state. Nor did German unification in 1871 create an unambiguous nation-state. In fact, its act of creation was almost provocatively dynastic and non-national. The German Reich was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (after the crushing defeat of the Second French Empire) by assembled German princes. No elected representatives of the nation or of Berlin were invited.

The Wilhelmine capital of the Reich rapidly developed into the national centre of Germany, with fast population growth and economic as well as cultural concentration. Although it never reached the national dominance of London or Paris, it was the main node of Germany’s railway system, its main industrial city, its culturally leading city. But the realm was a federated monarchy with a substantial set of princes, from kings to dukes, under the emperor. Symbolically, the dynastic maintained the upper hand in Berlin. The main city centre (east of the big Tiergarten park) was dominated by the Imperial Palace, outside of which there was a monumental ensemble with an equestrian statue of the first emperor, appropriately carrying the double name of Emperor Wilhelm–National Monument. Off centre stage in the east was the monumental Reichstag, whose dedication the Emperor had finally agreed to after about a decade of wrangling: ‘To the German People’. The square in front of it was still Königsplatz (Kings’ Square, referring to the kings of Prussia). The imperial family pushed the construction of sixty-six Protestant churches in Berlin, including a new neo-Baroque cathedral in the front of the Imperial Palace and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. In the Tiergarten the Emperor had in 1902 ‘donated’ to the city a dynastic Victory Avenue (Siegesallee), with twelve Hohenzollern rulers arranged like medieval pilgrimage stations.^*

Scandinavia

The exact dating of the Swedish nation-state may be argued over. It may be seen as a protracted, almost bicentennial process. The starting point was the end of absolutism with the death in battle of Charles XII (in 1718), issuing into a quasi-parliamentary, but Estates-based, ‘Age of Liberty’. Royal autogolpes in 1772 and in 1789 put an end to the former, without quite restoring absolutism. After the catastrophic war of 1808 and 1809, when Finland was conquered by Russia, the army deposed the king, and the Estates ensured that a new constitution was adopted before a new prince was elected. But the Estates remained the base of the polity until 1866, and the country was part of a personal monarchical union with Norway until 1905. Royal power was gradually waning in the course of the nineteenth century, but a new national polity freed from the entrapments of the medieval Estates and of a deferential royal administration was slow in developing.

By 1905 and the Norwegian union crisis, at least it was there, and government by national politicians rather than by court-connected civil servants began. In the 1890s, provoked by Norwegian nationalism, the Swedish flag had become a popular symbol, not just a royal and official ensign. The national character of Stockholm developed with this calendar. The city got its first significant national institution in 1866, a National Muserum (of art), housing the former royal art collection.* In 1905, the Diet at last got its own building, in heavy North German granite, close to and clearly subservient in size to the royal castle. In 1923, Stockholm had its new city hall, this time clearly challenging the royal castle across the water, as an alternative icon of urban glory – it is currently the site of the Nobel Prize banquets.

Denmark was another old monarchy, absolutist until 1848. Constitutional Denmark did not immediately become a nation-state, though. The king of Denmark was also duke of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, with their distinctive political arrangements, including, in the case of the two latter, membership in the German Confederation. Only after the disastrous war against Prussia in 1864 did Denmark become a nation-state, shed of the king’s German possessions.

Copenhagen was the one royal residence city which celebrated its new status as a national capital, after a belated end to royal absolutism, by recentring itself around a new city hall which overshadowed everything else in the city. It was inspired by the city of hall of medieval Italian Siena and Verona: in front of it a vast City Hall Square was laid out, becoming the new public centre of the city. The burghers of Copenhagen had been a potent force even under (and in support of) royal absolutism, and its representatives played a central role in ending it in 1848. Ironically, the new centring of the city was brought about by a city council exclusively composed of the royalist right, in the wake of the 1864 discredit of the National Liberals.

Norway became a nation-state in 1905, peacefully seceding from the union with the Swedish monarchy. For two decades its capital kept its Danish name, Kristiania (after a Danish king), and its main street is still named after the country’s first Swedish king, Karl Johan.* Finland seceded from Soviet Russia in December 1917. Its national self-determination was recognized by Lenin’s government, but the country plunged into an internal class war, won by the bourgeois Whites, with significant but hardly decisive support of German troops. The fifth Nordic nation-state, Iceland, under British protection, left Denmark, then occupied by Nazi Germany, in 1944.

Latin Europe: Nation-States and Organized Religion

All the main religions of the world are ancient. Their clash with modernity is therefore not very surprising. Astonishing, however, is the rarity of their confrontation with nationalism and the nation-state. Important conflicts between nation-state and organized religion are basically confined to Latin Europe. In the internal struggles of emergent modern national Europe, the high clergy, of all the Christian denominations, tended to side with the forces of conservatism and anti-modernity, laying the ground for the unique twentieth-century secularization of Europe. But nations in their emergence were culturally ambiguous, and the European clergy also sometimes played a significant part in national movements, above all in multi-religious states where the ruling prince adhered to a different religion – be it Islam in the Ottoman Balkans, Orthodoxy in Tsarist Poland and the Baltics, Catholicism in Habsburg Bohemia or Protestantism in British Ireland. Above, I have paid attention to the de-Islamization of the Balkans, and it may be added that after World War I the new Polish state blew up the Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in central Warsaw.

Its (then) militant conservatism apart, the Catholic Church had two major liabilities in the eyes of the builders of new nation-states. First, it was a supra-state power and hierarchy demanding obedience to a supra-state leader, the pope. Second, it was extremely wealthy, the largest feudal landowner and owner of built real estate. Along with theological disputes, opposition to this had gone a long way in accounting for the Reformation in countries from Sweden to England, thereby laying the basis for resourceful Renaissance monarchies enriched by expropriated Church wealth. The French Revolution came ideologically out of the Enlightenment, with its strong rationalist and deist currents. The rupture of the revolution with the Church started with the former’s demand that the French clergy pledge allegiance to the national constitution, which the pope refused to allow.

The historical conflict of nation-state and Church are visible today in two landmark buildings in Paris, the Pantheon and the Sacré-Cœur basilica. The Pantheon, ‘To Great Men: A Grateful Fatherland’, was originally built at the end of the dynastic regime as a votive church to Saint Geneviève and was turned into a national mausoleum in 1791. Voltaire, Mirabeau and Rousseau were the first entrants. The building was reconsecrated by Napoleon I, who ended the revolution’s war with the Church, then became a national necropolis again under the July Monarchy; reconsecrated by Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III; and finally de-sacralized by the Third Republic on the occasion of the state burial of Victor Hugo. The blazing white Sacré-Cœur on the top of Montmartre was built by the Church (originally with state approval) as a penitence for and sign of revival from the moral decline of France since the revolution, punished by its defeat against the Prussians and expressed in the sins of the Paris Commune, a radical insurrection in 1871, starting on Montmartre.

The clash between nation-state and Catholic Church was most frontal in Italy, part of which was directly ruled by the pope, including the city of Rome. The French army had saved papal rule from the 1849 revolution and from the unification of Italy in 1860. But in the face of defeat by the Prussians, the French troops withdrew in 1870, and Italian ones entered Rome after a short bombardment of the Pious Gate. The nation-state took over the palaces of the papal court and administration as well as a large number of the many convents and monasteries. The pope’s main palace, the Quirinale, became the Royal Palace and, after World War II, the presidential one. The national Senate and the Chamber of Deputies were (and are still) lodged in Renaissance palaces used by the papal government. New national offices were built along a new street, Via XX Settembre (20 September), the date of the armed Italian entry into papal Rome.

The pope retreated to the Vatican by the Basilica of Saint Peter, the smaller part of a now deeply divided city. ‘To their [the national] congresses and society, [we put forward] other societies and congresses’, declared the pope.⁴³ Guelph (pro-papal) forces remained important in Rome, but the anti-clericals had the backing of the national government. In 1889, the latter scored a major symbolic triumph: a monument to Giordano Bruno was unveiled in Campo de’ Fiori, where in 1600 the Inquisition had burnt him as a heretic.⁴⁴

The fact that the national parliaments of Portugal and Spain are housed in former convents and monasteries has a historical context of its own. Both monarchical states were devastated by French invasions and British interventions in the Napoleonic period, leaving the legacy of a half-century (Spain) to a full century (Portugal) of dynastic rivalries, civil wars between royal absolutists and liberal constitutionalists, military coups and counter-coups. In the mid-1830s the liberals and anti-clericals were in power in both countries. For fiscal as well as for political reasons, the national governments abolished the religious orders, freed their vast lands to the market and expropriated a large number of convents and monasteries in Lisbon and Madrid. Through all the political vicissitudes, these measures stuck. They had the most impact on Lisbon, where the dissolved religious orders provided housing not only for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies but also for army offices, law courts, the prefecture, the national conservatory, the national library, the academy of sciences and the site of the main railway station, the Santa Apolónia.⁴⁵

City Politics and City Space

National capitals were much more national than municipal, but some kind of municipal self-government was part of the post-absolutist programme of the nineteenth century, and even papal Rome, since the mid-century, had a partly elected municipal government.⁴⁶ As the capital of national revolutions from 1789 to 1871, the city of Paris had an eminent role, and in the beginning of revolutions its Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) was an important meeting and brokering place. But the city never became a major institutional player. Brussels belonged to the pre-national City Belt of Europe, running from Italy to the Low Countries, where territorial state centralization never coalesced.⁴⁷ In its Grande Place, the Gothic city hall towers over the building of the Habsburg imperial representative at the opposite side of the square. Belgian Brussels maintained what was probably the most powerful capital-city mayoralty of nineteenth-century Europe.* The two most significant mayors, Jules Anspach and Charles Buls, have their names inscribed in the boulevards of the city’s north-south axis. The Rathaus of Vienna is one of the most impressive city halls of the era, built by a wealthy bourgeois elite. Vienna also got Europe’s first rabble-rousing or ‘populist’ mayor, for two years vetoed by the emperor: the Christian-Social Party’s Karl Lueger, still remembered in part of the Ringstrasse as Karl-Lueger-Ring.†

The spatial layout of the old European capitals changed substantially. In some cities, Vienna and Copenhagen in the late 1850s particularly, restructuring was a compound of national politics and changes of situated military technology and considerations, making city walls and the glacis, the open field of shooting range in front of them, obsolete. In Paris a similar de-fortification took place at the same time, but further out from the centre, bringing suburban villages like Belleville, Bercy, Montmartre and La Villette into the city and little directly affecting the layout of the latter.⁴⁸ In Paris, the process of turning ‘bulwarks’ into ‘boulevards’ had started already in the late seventeenth century.⁴⁹ However, in the 1840s, a new defence ring around Paris was built, which stayed until 1919 and was only in the 1960s turned into the Périphérique ring road. In London, the walls had been torn down by the mid-eighteenth century. In Berlin, dismantling started at about that time too, but an ‘excise wall’ began to be built for fiscal reasons.⁵⁰ The wall around Rome was not regarded as a barrier to the expansion of the national capital, although it had prevented the emergence of a suburban periphery around the papal city.⁵¹

The rise of national politics of variable kinds transformed the urban space more consistently with its demands for representational spaces, the need to control unruly crowds and the need for open arteries for the circulation of commodities and people. The homo- or heterogeneity of the resulting built environment depended on the planning powers and the control of the land rent. In Europe, there have been, in modern history at least, four pertinent planning regimes. The strictest one was that of Haussmannian Paris, manifested in its boulevards of buildings of the same height and style, with long horizontal rows of wrought-iron balconies. Another one is the Berlin Bauordnung prescribing rules of height, proportions of building size and street width, but not style. The London one is a third example, of insular planning by individual (mainly aristocratic) investors of clusters of homogenous buildings around a square and for the rest a free-for-all, with some restrictions of height (until recently). Fourth, there is the thoroughly liberal Athenian pattern, largely followed in Ringstrasse Vienna, mainly depending on big individual investors, their taste and their choice of architect. National governments dominated the planning of most national capitals, with some exceptions: Brussels, Copenhagen, Rome, Stockholm. The active interest of the Berlin and Vienna national governments was limited.⁵²

Ensanche (widening) was the keyword of the changes of central urban space.* Haussmann used the dramatic verb éventrer (literally meaning ‘opening up the stomach’).⁵³ Improving the circulation of people, commodities and air was a major drive. The result was a new pattern of long, wide, tree-lined avenues, with ample sidewalks and showy buildings, and of large squares or roundabouts, usually displaying some national monument. These were not yet the motorized escape routes of twentieth-century American cities, for a while attractive also to European planners. The Balkans apart, the changes were most dramatic in Paris and in Brussels. The Vienna Ringstrasse was a landmark ring, but it left the inner city, imperial and ecclesiastical, intact. The widening of Madrid took a long time, due to political instability, but Lisbon and Budapest were soon recentred along Avenida da Liberdade and Andrássy út, respectively. Central Berlin was transformed in Prussian rather than German times by the master architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel around the Schlossplatz, with the Schlossbrücke connecting to the Unter den Linden, the Lustgarten and its museum. The Brandenburger Tor was then at the western end of the city. West of Tiergarten was another city, Charlottenburg, incorporated into Great Berlin in 1920. Already, under Bismarck, construction had started of the later main axis of West Berlin, Kurfürstendamm. Central London got its major facelift in the immediate post-Napoleonic era, with Regent Street and Trafalgar Square.

The nation-states required new, and more, public buildings, particularly in the Balkans, where few of the Ottoman edifices were deemed acceptable: parliaments, ministries, law courts, a roster of buildings for national cultural institutions, museums, theatre, opera, concert hall, library, university and, for communications, post, telegraph and telephone offices – the latter most splendidly housed in Madrid’s Palacio de Comunicaciones, recently recycled into seat of the city government – railway stations, with Paris’s Gare du Nord and London’s Saint Pancras arguably the most remarkable.

Surprisingly few new parliament buildings were constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting the deep historical roots of European modernity – London, Budapest and, on a small-state scale, Berne were the only capitals with landmark parliaments. In the Balkans, Berlin, Brussels, Kristiania/Oslo, Stockholm and Vienna they remained subordinated, or at least secondary, to the palaces of the monarchs. In the Hague, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and Rome, existing buildings were recycled for parliamentary use, and in Athens and Copenhagen the new parliamentarians first moved in as lodgers into the king’s palace. After constructing the first round of buildings for its new national kingdom, with the royal palace larger than the parliament opposite it, Brussels then built a huge Palace of Justice as a national monument.

Urban services – power, water, transport and so on – expanded greatly but unevenly. Particularly great efforts were made on sewage systems, which were heavily challenged by rapid population growth, as dramatized by the Great Stink of the Thames in 1858. Between 1860 and 1878, Paris built almost 400 kilometres of underground sewage networks, on top of 228 pre-existing ones.⁵⁴ The Parisian achievement is dwarfed, though, by that of Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the London Metropolitan Board of Works, who built a total of 1,300 miles of sewers.⁵⁵

The European national capitals were – with few exceptions, Rome being the largest – centres of their nations’ capitalism and of its increasingly prosperous bourgeoisie. This meant whole new residential areas, whole new beaux quartiers in western and north-western Paris or London, along new grands boulevards like Kurfürstendamm in Berlin or Andrássy út in Budapest, of luxurious apartment buildings with separate servants’ entrances, or townhouses in London or Amsterdam. The rise of European nation-states was intimately ‘correlated with’ – bracketing tricky questions of causality – the rise of large-scale industrial and banking capitalism. This meant new kinds of imposing private buildings – besides factories, which were sometimes also built for impression as well as for function, a stock exchange (Budapest built the largest), banking, industrial headquarters and department stores. Industrial capitalism also raised a new issue of urban policy: workers’ housing.

Capitalist economic development moved the de facto urban boundaries and transformed the totality of the urban space, if much less so the historical centres. Real estate speculation became a major economic activity in the nineteenth century. The City of London came to display its character as the hub of world finance and its Docklands gained the buzz of the world’s greatest port. Berlin got its Bankenviertel, in Behrenstrasse near Unter den Linden. The Stock Exchange, or Bourse, became the central buildings of Paris and Brussels. Huge working-class areas were sprouting in the peripheries, often slum-like in character, lacking most amenities and consisting of mainly self-built shacks, much like those of the Third World in the twentieth century.

The architecture of the national capitals remained, by and large, within the inherited European-style repertoire, with varying accents and combinations. Neoclassicism and neo-Gothic dominated the most central public buildings, but there was historicism of the nineteenth century itself, as well as neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque. Under nationalist auspices, the old styles were given national interpretations, as we have already noticed.

However, European bourgeois nationalism did bring forth or promote some new styles. The most significant was, ironically, an antidote to the emerging standardized, industrial machine age, with curvaceous lines, floral decorations and bright colours. It was rather a family of kindred styles under several different names in different parts of Europe: Art Nouveau in Belgium and France (where it is also known as modern style) modernisme in Catalonia, Secession in the Habsburg area, Jugendstil (Youth Style) in Germany and Scandinavia and Arts and Crafts, Free Style or Art Nouveau in Britain.

Around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this style became distinctively popular among nouveau-riche national bourgeois on the European periphery, most boldly in Barcelona and well represented in Brussels, Prague and Riga, and more limitedly in Glasgow. Mostly it was used for private residences, but it could also be employed for fashionable stores and occasionally for public buildings, such as the Maison du Peuple in Brussels and the Municipal House in Prague. In Finland there developed a National Romanticism in heavy, crude grey granite, mainly for public cultural buildings such as churches and museums. The swelling Hungarian nationalism was sometimes expressed in a Magyar Orientalism.^*

The European national capitals, spearheaded by Paris of the early Third Republic, succumbed to a ‘statue mania’. Between 1870 and 1914 Paris erected 150 statues, not counting other kinds of commemorative monuments.⁵⁶ This was a tradition from ancient Rome, largely forgotten during the medieval era and revived during the Renaissance as a monarchical self-celebration. Now it was devoted to the leaders, heroes and stars of the nation: politicians, generals, scientists and artists working in all genres.

The imperialist nations of Europe flaunted their empires as national exploits. The national museums displayed colonial loot and conquests, most famously the British Museum’s marble statues from the Athenian Parthenon. Many capitals had official colonial museums, among them Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. The World Exhibitions had special colonial pavilions, and in 1931 Paris staged a large-scale ‘International Colonial Exhibition’.⁵⁷ Trafalgar Square included two generals commanding British conquests in India (Charles Napier and Henry Havelock). Madrid installed a Plaza de Colón with a statue of Columbus in 1893 along the new south-north axis, Paseo de la Castellana. Murals in the Copenhagen City Hall boast of Danish colonies, from the West Indies to Greenland. In the twentieth century, between the two world wars, the authoritarian government of Portugal commemorated its maritime fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ‘discoveries’ and conquests in a major ensemble by the Tagus (Tejo) River; Mussolini’s Rome celebrated the fascist conquest of Ethiopia and laid out a grand Via dell’Impero. Street names remind us of colonial exploits: in Berlin’s Dahlem, of the German participation in crushing the Chinese Boxer Uprising, for instance. Colonial street naming, mainly geographical but also including some colonial governors and commanders, was particularly widespread, it seems, in the Netherlands. It started in the Hague, a favourite homeland retreat of Dutch colonialists in the 1870s, and later culminated in Amsterdam, which contains sixty-three colonial streets.⁵⁸