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Monuments include ancient edifices such as earth mounds and pyramids, and also contemporary statues, plaques, obelisks, and other objects designed to commemorate dynasties and their rulers. In modern urban civilization, the monument is defined as a building that represents a symbolic idea or social heritage, or which symbolizes national unification. This chapter describes German national monuments, which include the Victory Column, erected in 1872 to celebrate German triumph over the French; the monument of Hermann the Cheruscan; the Neiderwald Monument; and the centenary monument for the Battle of Nations in Leipzig. The Germans also erected more than three hundred Bismarck monuments in commemoration of the Iron Chancellor, and more than three hundred statues and monuments for Wilhelm I. The appearance of national monuments in the German landscape serves as a key feature of national symbolism.

This chapter focuses on the Risorgimento's moral and political leaders: Vincenzo Gioberti, Giuseppe Mazzini, Camillo Benso Count of Cavour, and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Albeit in different ways, all of them lived by a religious conception that regarded Italy's liberty as the fundamental principle of life. They were aware that national emancipation required a religious sentiment. Gioberti, the main advocate of the project of national unification under the aegis of the pope, fought against the religion of idleness in the name of the religion of virtue. Mazzini, the most influential apostle of the religion of the fatherland, taught a theory of political emancipation based on the principle that a people can resurrect themselves only by means of virtue and the “religion of truth”—that is, not by means of Machiavellian devices or Jesuitical reticence. Cavour considered Christian religion a support for the construction of secure liberal institutions, but only if religion emancipated itself from the superstition and profound corruption that rendered it a prop for reactionary regimes.

This chapter considers Risorgimento patriots' concerns about the future of Italian liberty following national unification. They understood that the new state lacked a civil religion, and that liberal institutions were, as a consequence, fragile. The educational projects inspired by Mazzini were directed against clericalism and the power of the Catholic Church, but they also urged a religious revolution in the name of the ideal of “God and people.” La nuova Europa, a paper associated with the Associazione Democratica Italiana, affirmed in an article in 1862 that it was necessary to go to Rome and remain there in order to bring about a European revolution in the people's consciences capable of achieving the triumph of thought and reason over faith, thereby accomplishing “the next work of the Risorgimento, the Reformation, and Philosophy, inaugurating the divinity of thought in the basilica disencumbered of the Roman God.”

After 1848 the horizons of expectation of liberal politicians changed: the “innocence” of the early phases of national awakening was lost as national movements became aware that their programs of national unification could only be fulfilled at the expense of neighboring nations. A series of debates manifested the profound ambiguity of the liberal nationalist project. Simultaneously, the adaptation of socialist ideas to local conditions created fascinating ideological hybrids. The reception of Russian narodnik thought in contexts marked by national tensions produced discourses linking social radicalism with envisioned solutions to the national conflicts. Eventually, the loss of liberal initiative opened up the possibility of linking social demands to a new anti-liberal identity politics and set up strong symbolic and legal lines between ethnic insiders and outsiders. Indicative of this transformation, anti-Semitism became entrenched on the right of the political spectrum, linked to social conservatism, clericalism, organicism, integral nationalism, and political anti-liberalism.

This chapter examines the influence of Abraham Lincoln's principle of humanity on European politics, particularly in Italy and Germany, during the period from 1859 to1865. It explains that the issues of slavery, national unification, independence and democracy raised by the American Civil War has immediate relevance in contemporary European politics because patriots and revolutionaries in Italy, Germany, Hungary and Poland were then striving to secure independence and national unification. It also discusses how the democratic enthusiasm of the 1860s turned into the social imperialism of the 1890s and how Lincoln became militarism and the forcible suppression of secession and rebellion.

This chapter focuses on the story of Ingjald the Wicked, twenty-fourth king in the Yngling dynasty, whose oath serves as typological precedent for the one later used by Harald Fairhair when he was sworn in as king of Norway. It examines a text in Heimskringla—Ynglingasaga 36—and the methods and sources used in the text. Through the story of Ingjald, Ynglingasaga implies how national unification could be accomplished and what kind of king was capable of this project.