The nation and the city: urban festivals and cultural mobilisation

This article attempts to map the relations between nation‐building processes in 19th‐century Europe and city cultures with their urban sociability. Three patterns are surveyed: 1] the modern‐national assimilation of medieval and early‐modern city cultures (sample case: Orléans and the French cult of Joan of Arc); 2] the modular replication across cities of urban festivals as cultural mobilizers (sample case: the spread of Floral Games festivals in Southern France and Northern Spain); 3] the reticulation of city‐based practices into a nationwide and nation‐building network (sample cases: the role of choral societies in German cultural nationalism; and its transnational knock‐on effect in the Baltic Provinces). By choosing the city as our social focus and placing it (or rather, its ideal‐type ‘Urbania’) alongside Gellner's ideal‐types of ‘Megalomania’ and ‘Ruritania’, we can avoid the finalism of studying regionalist and nationalist movements in the analytical framework of the post‐Versailles state system, and we gain a better understanding of the granulated, localized social basis of such movements and the translocally homogenizing role of culture.