The Rhine Crisis of 1840 and German Nationalism: Chauvinism, Skepticism, and Regional Reception*
The Rhine Crisis began with French imperialism. Aiming to expand its influence to Egypt and the Levant, France lent its support in 1839 to Mehmet Ali, Egypt’s pasha, whose ambition to seek hereditary rule in Egypt and Syria challenged Ottoman suzerainty. After Egyptian-led troops pushed theOttoman army beyond Syria’s border in April 1839, Adolphe Thiers, the French president, envisioned a new sphere of influence in the Orient. He thus played with the fragile equilibrium of the Eastern Question, Western diplomacy’s contest to fill the power vacuum of a reduced Ottoman Empire. The démarche stalled, however, during the opening months of 1840, culminating in dramatic failure on July 15with the London Convention: a four-power treaty ðwithout the consultation of FranceÞ that supported the sultan’s retention of his imperial territories. Isolated and humiliated by this diplomatic loss, Thiers’s government and the Chamber of Deputies sought an honorable retreat through compensation elsewhere and therefore reasserted the claim that France’s frontier extended to the Rhine. The French state thus compounded a diplomatic setback with a political dispute over “natural borders.” In
The Austrian Empire, German Nationalism, and the Rhine Crisis of 1840 1
The Rhine Crisis of 1840 has traditionally been understood as an important moment in the rise of German nationalism, when France's appeals for conquests on the Rhine were answered by the Germans in a negative way, surprising in its strength and extent. The defense of this “most German river” united people from various parts of the German Confederation as well as the various social classes, and support for the defense of the Rhine became a matter of national duty and honor. According to widespread opinion still shared by the majority of historians, the Rhine Crisis (Rheinkrise) was a national experience of crucial importance that transformed German nationalism into a mass and more aggressive movement.
First steps in literacy: The reading and writing experiences of the humblest seventeenth‐century spiritual autobiographers
The spiritual autobiographies of the seventeenth century include the first subjective accounts, written by men from the countryside from yeoman parentage or below, of childhood, education, the importance of literacy and the importance that their religious convictions had for them. They therefore contain first-hand accounts, or rather fragments of accounts, of the amount of education available, and its effects, by the relatively humble. They thus provide insight into the effects of literacy which is not provided by any other source. There are very, very few of these accounts, and those which do exist suffer from the disadvantage of the genre. The spiritual autobiographers were Puritans and dissenters,' and therefore were socially slanted in whatever way Puritans and dissenters were socially slanted. They must also be considered even more a-typical than Puritans and dissenters in general, because the urge to write autobiography in itself defines an exceptional man.2