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NATION, ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT, AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL IN AUSTRIA: TYROL IN THE 1790s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2000

LAURENCE COLE
LAURENCE COLE
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, London
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Abstract

By taking the Austrian province of Tyrol as a case-study, the article explores the relationship between Enlightenment, anti-Enlightenment, and national sentiments in and around the 1790s. Characterized by economic crisis and political turbulence, this period had profound consequences for the formation of national and regional identities amongst the region's German-speaking majority. In reaction to the challenges posed first by the centralist reforms in the Habsburg monarchy, and secondly the experience of the French Revolutionary Wars, the local nobility and clergy articulated a greater Tyrolian provincial consciousness, and also a stronger sense of their German identity. The mobilizing experience created by Tyrol's fight against the invading French armies meant that these sentiments were disseminated among and articulated by broader sections of the German-Tyrolian population as well. The article assesses the meanings and nuances of regional consciousness, local patriotism, German identity, and dynastic loyalty, and argues that national feeling in Tyrol was strongly influenced by anti-Enlightenment political and social forces.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 475 - 497
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Prof. Richard J. Evans and the two anonymous referees for their comments on draft versions of this article. My grateful thanks go also to the Volkswagen-Stiftung for funding the research and to the British Academy for its financial support during the writing and revision of the work. I have left some quotations untranslated in the text, in order to convey some of the character of the original languages; translations appear in the footnotes.