(i) The first clear-cut expression of nationalism came with the French Revolution in 1789. In 1789, France was under the rule of an absolute monarch.
(ii) When the revolutionaries came to power in France, they were determined to create a new sense of unit and nationhood. For this, they emphasized the concept of France being the father land (La Patrie) for all French people, who were from now on addressed as citizens (citoyen). They were given the tri-colour flag, the three colours representing liberty, equality and fraternity.
French revolutionaries introduced various other measures such as:
(a) The Estate General was elected by the body of active citizens and renamed the National Assembly.
(b) New hymns were composed, oaths taken and martyrs commemorated all in the name of the nation.
(c) A centralised administrative system was put in place and it formulated uniform laws for all citizens within its territory.
(d) Internal customs, duties and dues were abolished and a uniform system of weights and measures was adopted. (e) Regional dialects were discouraged and French, as it was spoken and written in Paris, became the common language of the nation.
(f) They further declared that it was the mission and the destiny of the French nation to liberate the people of Europe from despotism and help them to become nations.

The Balkan region during 1871 comprised modern-day states like Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro. Its inhabitants were known as Slavs.
(a) This region had various ethnic and geographical diversities and was under the Ottoman Empire for a long period. As the ideas of romantic nationalism spread in this region, it resulted in breaking up of the Ottoman Empire which made the situation even more serious.
(b) The Ottoman Empire could not do much to integrate these regions. As a result, most of the European subject nationalities broke away from the Ottoman Empire's control and declared their independence.
(c) The Balkan people based their claim to be independent on the basis of nationality. They referred to the examples from history as a proof that they were once independent and were subjugated by foreign powers. Therefore, they thought of their struggles as attempts to win back their long-lost independence.
(d) Because of this development, various other Slavic nationalities also struggled to define their identity and independence which made the Balkan a region of severe conflicts. At the same time they were jealous, of each other and wanted to gain more territory at the expense of the others.
(e) European powers like Russia, Germany, England, Austro-Hungary too fought with each other to control more colonies and establish their naval and military might. They were also keen to grab more of the Balkan region for expanding their trade. This made the situation more serious which ended up with the waging of the First World War.

In 1848 Europe, the poor, unemployed workers and starving peasants led many revolts. In France, the educated middle class too started a revolution for the abolition of monarchy and establishment of a  republic based on universal male suffrage. They took advantage of the growing popular unrest to put forward their demands for the creation of a nation-state based on parliamentary principles with an issue in which large number of women took active part. They formed political associations and published newspapers voicing their demands. Men and women from the liberal middle classes around Europe combined their demands for constitutionalism along with national unification.

Representatives of European powers-Austria, Britain, Russia and Prussia-after defeating Napoleon drew the Treaty of Vienna of 1815 to undo the changes initiated by him in Europe. The objective was to restore the monarchies overthrown by Napoleon and create a new conservative order in Europe.
(a) The Bourbon dynasty deposed during the French Revolution was put back in power.
(b) The territories annexed by Napoleon were taken back from France.
(c) To prevent any future expansion of France, a series of states were set up on French boundaries. Kingdom of Netherlands including Belgium came up in the north, while Genoa along with Piedmont placed in the south.
(d) Along with Saxony some new territories were given to Prussia on its western frontiers. Austria got the control of northern Italy.
(e) Russia got the control of Poland.

Conservatism was adopted by the European governments after defeating Napoleon in 1815. They favoured it to preserve the established traditional institutions of state and society like monarchy, church, social hierarchies institutions of state and society like monarchy, church, social hierarchies, property and family. There were some who did not want to adopt the pre-revolutionary system, rather they favoured Napoleonic changes and wanted to adopt modernisation as it would rather contribute to strength traditional institutions and state power and make it much more effective. Conservatives began to believe that aristocratic monarchies if Europe too would be strengthen from a modern army, an efficient bureaucracy, a dynamic economy and the abolition of feudalism and serfdom.

The new middle class in Europe advocated the concept of liberalism emphasising the concept of freedom and equality for all.
But at the same time, this was not visible in the political experiment around Europe. The right to vote was exclusively with the propertied class, that too only men. Women even with property rights were excluded from right to vote.
The Jacobins who stood for revolution for equality were also biased on this issue. They too granted right to vote to all adult male population only.
Napoleon who stood to end privileges too reduced women to the margin of the society with no political rights. For ling did these women and non-propertied male struggled to win political rights for themselves.

Industrialisation began in Europe during the 19th century and brought with it growth of towns and cities inhabited by strong commercial class which produced goods for domestic markets.
Along with it a class of people emerged called the new working class. It included professionals, businessmen and industrialists.
Though they were small in number, educated, liberal minded and believed in national unification. They strongly condemned aristocratic set up in the society. It was because of these ideals they gained popularity and emerged as a new social class. They stood for equality and freedom and stressed the formation of constitution given preference to representative from of government rather than established autocratic regimes.

There were no nation-states in Europe till the mid-eighteenth century. Germany, Italy and Switzerland were ruled by different rulers with their well-defined territories. Eastern and central part of Europe too had autocratic monarchies. People from different ethnic groups occupied these areas and spoke different languages. Sudetenland and Bohemia were dominated by German-speaking people. It also included the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia which had Italian-speaking people. In Hungary, the half of the population spoke Magyar and the other half of the population spoke different dialects. In the part of Galicia, the aristocratic class spoke Polish.
There was absence of collective identity or common culture among these groups. Apart from this, a large group of peasant people like-Romans to the east in Transylvania, Bohemians and Slovaks to the north, Slovenes in Carniola and the Croats to the south lived within the boundary. The only tie binding these different groups together was a common allegiance to the emperor.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, Italy was divided into seven states, of which only one, Sardinia-Piedmont, was ruled by an Italian princely house. The north was ruled by Austrian Habsburgs, the centre by the Pope and the southern regions by the Bourbon kings of Spain. Italian language had varieties of dialects; therefore, it was not stable in its form. During the 1830s, Giuseppe Mazzini had sought to put together a coherent programme for a unitary Italian Republic. He had also formed a secret society called 'Young Italy' for the dissemination of his goals. The failure of revolutionary uprisings both in 1831 and 1848 fell on Sardinia-Piedmont under its ruler King Victor Emmanuel II to unify the Italian states through war. A unified Italy offered them the possibility of economic development and political dominance. Chief Minister Cavour who led the movement to unify the regions of Italy was neither a revolutionary nor a democrat. With a tactful diplomatic alliance with France by Cavour, Sardinia-Piedmont succeeded in defeating the Austrian forces in 1859. In 1859, a large number of armed volunteers under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi joined the fray. In 1860, Sardinia- Piedmont's forces marched into south Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and drove out the Spanish rulers. In 1861, Victor Emmanuel was declared as the king of united Italy and Rome was declared the capital of Italy.