Napoleon Makes Europe

Bilington again: The nationalist ideal spread throughout Europe through Napoleon, “the first ruler to base a political regime exclusively upon the nation . . . the most powerful purely national symbol that any nation has had.” Poles and Italians were inspired by the French example; Spaniards and Prussians cultivated their own nationalist movements in opposition to Napoleon. Billington comments, “By the end of his career Napoleon’s grande armee had in effect supplanted the revolutionary grande nation . That army was two-thirds foreign by the time of its decisive defeat in the ‘Battle of the Nations’ in 1813 by a coalition of nationalists he had awakened throughout Europe.”