364 THE EUROPEAN CONVULSION Peninsula. Marshal Victor, Massena, Marmont, tried their hands in turn against Wellington, only to be repulsed or to suffer complete rout, until the crushing blow was dealt to Jourdan at Vittoria in 1813. Throughout the whole period the Spanish regulars were of the least possible assistance to the British troops, whereas the irregulars carried on persistent guerilla warfare infinitely distracting and destructive to the French armies. But the Spanish defiance did much more than to lock up quarter of a million of French soldiers. Hitherto Napoleon had The Awaken- waged war against kings; in Spain he was waging ing of war against a people, and the example of Spain iona ism. awo k e j- ne S pi r it of passionate patriotism in the hearts of the peoples of Europe. The idea of nationalism had hitherto been exceedingly subordinate in European politics. For the heterogeneous peoples which made up the Austrian state — Netherlanders, Germans, Magyars in Hungary, Czechs in Bohemia, Italians in Italy — no common idea of patriotism was possible. Territories were transferred from one power to an- other, as the outcome of wars or marriages, without any sort of consideration for differences of race, language, or customs. German princes sent their German subjects to fight shoulder to shoulder with the French against German armies. Italy was parcelled out among dynasties which might be anything so long as they were not Italian. The uprising of Spain kindled the sense of common nationality wherever common nationality ex- isted in Europe, and bore fruit not only in the uprising of Germany against Napoleon, but in the liberation or unification of one after another of the nations of Europe during the nineteenth century. In Prussia, intolerably humiliated after Jena, which it owed to the unpatriotic incompetence of the aristocratic class which The Re- dominated the government, the foundations of a generation new national life were laid by the political reforms of Prussia. of gtein and the m i utary reorganisation of Scharn- horst, which gave every peasant and every citizen a consciousness of his own personal share in Prussia. But the time to strike had not yet arrived ; before it came, the gospel of nationalism
