At the 19th century, the national liberalism (or national liberalism ) indicates a German political current, located at the center right of the political chessboard.

Formation of German nationalism at the beginning of the XIXe century

Often including in the first years of the E century the ideas of the French revolution (the nation like “community of citizens”, initially founded on the legal order of the State and adhesion with the same Constitution, the Staatsnation ), German nationalism will diverge from it quickly. The hand put by Napoleon i on the German States brings a reaction: German patriotism takes for engine resistance to this influence and appear the thinkers who center on the contrary their design of the nation on a historical singularity of the German people, the Volksnation : Joseph Görres or Johann Gottlieb Fichte is made the first cantors of the germanitude.

After the departure of the French, it is the influence of the Romantisme which will impregnate German nationalism. Idealization of the past, particularly of the the Middle Ages, and also of Luther in Protestant Germany: one is based on the large German heroes and one proposes the Kulturnation . Even if these designs are more carried at that time by the thinkers more the reactionaries the such Saxon Adam Müller and that a liberal as Badois Carl von Rotteck states to prefer freedom without unit with the unit without freedom, the romantic dreams impregnate also the forces more the progressists; thus the liberal essay writer French Saint-Marc Girardin writes it in 1835

German liberalism likes the philosophy of 89, the French revolution, the days liberators of July; at the same time he adores the Middle Ages with his nobility independent and proud, with its free cities (...)” whereas he should “be attached purely and simply to political philosophy that France promulgated into 89, he has tendernesses for local and petty freedoms of XIIIe and XIVe. centuries

The first German specificity thus, underlined per T. Nipperdey (it writes, in connection with the time of the Vormärz: “In Germany, nationalism and liberalism were not satisfied to go hand in the hand, they were in fact identical. ”), the ideologies liberal and national are both progressists; they attract those which want to make evolve/move the old order in the direction of autonomy - that they are individual freedoms to make thrive by liberal Constitutions or self-determination of the German people leading to his unit.

The second German specificity, alliance between a nostalgia reactionary that one would attach elsewhere to the only conservatism and the economic thinking or antiautoritaire of the capitalist middle-class, for which the German ideal national is attracting not only by its ideological facets but also by the potentialities of commercial development that it conceals (abolition of the customs borders).

Towards the constitution of a party national-liberal: Parliament of Frankfurt to the War austro-Prussian

The political boiling of 1848 will mark an important step in the formation in Germany of a system of parties, even if the historians diverge on the appreciation from the structuring from the political families within the Parlement from Frankfurt (H. Kaack judging that one cannot see there appearing parties with the modern direction, Dieter Langewische estimating on the contrary that the parliamentary fractions were clearly perceived like structuring, even by the contemporaries)

It is initially in 1847 that two gatherings of liberal politicians from all Germany will follow one another. The first, formed of “democratic” liberals, meets in Offenbourg the September 12th 1847; the second gathers 18 “moderated” liberals, convened by David Hansemann with Heppenheim the October 10th 1847: those will make German unit the paramount point of their program. One can see in this succession of two meetings the first manifestation of the division of the liberal family which will intervene twenty years later, and see in the Réunion of Heppenheim the first steps of the organization of a party national-liberal; other historians there see on the contrary an abusive analysis, primarily resulting from a Marxist analysis of East-German researchers, and defer to 1848 the primary symptoms of the division of the liberal family.

The year 1848 it is that of the Parlement of Frankfurt, an major event as well for the history of political liberalization as for that of the formation of the national unit. In this Parliament as well the liberals as the conservatives gather in “fractions”, kinds of abstract parliamentary groups and new stage towards the formation of political parties made up. It is the Fraction Casino, most of the Parliament with nearly 200 members politically located at the right-hand side of the liberal representation, which by its positioning undoubtedly approaches more the EC what one will name soon national-liberalism: a moderately democratic liberalism, attached by the restricted vote, and which makes question of the national unit its first priority.

After Frederic-Guillaume IV of Prussia refused in 1849 “to collect the crown in the gutter”, the hopes of the revolutionists of 1848 crumble, and a period of reaction opens. State after State one limits the right of association and meeting; and especially any federation of associations is prohibited, prohibiting any formation on the scale panallemande of political parties. During more than ten years, nothing exists which establishes a continuity between the fractions of the Parliament of Frankfurt and the first liberal political party which will be founded in 1861.

On the other hand in the field of the evolution of the main road-liberal doctrines, one must note in 1853 the invention by the publicity agent Ludwig August von Rochau in his test Grundsätze der Realpolitik of a term which will make fortune beyond the German-speaking world well: the word Realpolitik . Its ideas will thrive among the right wing of the liberalism, which will use it during decades to justify of its bringing together with the conservative right.

Internal bonds

• List of liberal national Parties, in the world

• Nationalism
• Liberalism

Sources