Topics: Nations

The most important republican experiments of the nineteenth century happened in France, Great Britain, and the United States. Many of the European nationalities we recognize today had no national unity or freedom-for example, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Greece. Their citizens, however, also yearned to make the experiment with republican liberty or at the very least to throw off imperial chains, and political cartoons and public discourse of other European nations or proto-nations displays the iconography of Liberty. Switzerland is invoked by progressives, liberals, and Romantics as a model of national liberty, though its liberty was achieved as far back as 1291 and defended resoundingly against the Austrians in 1386. In the nineteenth century, Germany's states were not unified; Prussia, a German state, was first among equals, and was allied with Austria, ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty. Eastern Europe was ruled by the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires; when Poland tried at various points during the century to revolt against its Russian overseer, it was brutally suppressed, most thoroughly in 1832 and 1865. Italian city-states were ruled by kings whose rule was ratified by the 1815 Congress of Vienna, though northern Italy was governed by Austria. Movements for Italian national independence grew through the century; Austria put down the first major revolt by the Carbonari in 1820. The cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman empire famously lured Byron to join the armed conflict, though he died of fever in 1824 before he ever took arms against the Turks, who suppressed Greek revolt thoroughly by 1827. And throughout the century, nationalist movements in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales continued to call for their liberty from England's imperial rule.

• Italy

• Poland

• Russia

• Spain

• Switzerland

• Wales