.
had been the site of the Dukes of Brabant and of Habsburg plenipotentiaries, but became a state capital only in 1830.
Pre-Nation Cities
It has already been hinted at that there was no straight road from the rise of capital cities to national capitals. The city was in a sense also part of the prehistory of the nation. The City Belt, from the Italian peninsula up through the Swiss Alpine passes into the Rhineland and to the North Sea, was the European pièce de résistance to the formation of territorial states.10 The cities on the southern shores of the Baltic succumbed earlier, but as long as they could, the Hanseatic cities fought the rise of sovereign territories. In the period of transition from the Middle Ages and the New Age, cities, rather than territorial states, were often the main sites of power and wealth: Florence, Venice, Genoa, Lübeck, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Antwerp and Amsterdam are, perhaps, the most famous examples.
Among European capitals today, London is unique in being both an ancient, indeed Roman, trading hub and the old medieval capital of a dynastic territorial state. No wonder that it took some time for its two parts, the City (of London) and Westminster, to coalesce.
The wealthy and powerful trading cities coming out of Europe’s Dark Ages had their own pre-national monumentality. Their grand town halls and guild halls, the most splendid of which were built by Flemish cloth-makers, their magnificent town gates and sometimes a prominent weigh-house and/or exchange represented a specific urbanity: autonomous, proud, capitalist and rich. The main buildings of the city and its commerce were generally laid out at or around the main square – typically called in Germanic Europe the ‘big market’ (grosse/grote markt), which often but not always also had the main church.
Amsterdam was special in the Calvinist austerity which wrapped its enormous wealth, but its huge mid-seventeenth-century city hall in the main square (the Dam) highlights well its pre-national monumentality. Amsterdam was then the capital of the United Provinces and of its major part, the province of Holland. The city is still officially the capital of the Netherlands, although the Hague is the site of the monarchy and the government. But it is the city hall – now formally a royal palace – that is Amsterdam’s most monumental piece of architecture.
Brussels, another part of the City Belt, still testifies eloquently to a rich pre-national urban iconography. In spite of the national trimmings after 1830, to which we shall return below, the symbolic centre of Brussels is still its grande place/grote markt, dominated by its mid-fifteenth century Gothic town hall and surrounded by various guild halls, mostly in Flemish baroque save for one in reconstructed Gothic, all with nicknames out of the city argot. The topological city centre, Place de Brouckère, is named after a mayor.
The Peace of Utrecht in 1713, ratifying the eclipse of the United Provinces by Great Britain, signalled the beginning of the end for the city republics. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna did the rest. The United Provinces were reconstituted as the Realm of the Netherlands under the Orange dynasty, and Venice was handed over to the Habsburgs as part of a package. Only the now rather marginal Swiss city cantons kept most of their autonomy, for another thirty-five to sixty years, and Lübeck still lingered on in a shadowy existence until the unification of Germany.
Royal Absolutism
The European power configuration preceding the national state was usually the dynastic territorial state, governed with royal absolutism. This general rule had one major exception, though, apart from the decaying city-states, which were ruled by closed commercial oligarchies. There was the ascending, post-absolutist Kingdom of Great Britain, governed in the name of the king by a land-owning aristocracy while dominating world trade and starting an Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, the major style was that of absolutism, set since the time of Louis XIV at Versailles, from which it radiated to the Habsburg Schönbrunn and to the peripheries of absolutist Europe.
The centrepiece of royal architecture and monumentality in general was the royal palace – in eastern Europe initially built as a fortified castle – or palaces plural, then regularly at least a winter and a summer palace. Versailles (and, in imitation, Karlsruhe) was laid out as a radial city, beaming out from the royal palace. A huge, well-sculptured park became an important feature of a truly royal seat in the course of the seventeenth century, a sine qua non for palaces outside city centres. In addition, there might be some other palaces of royal power and largesse, of organization for war, a mint perhaps, or a veterans’ hospital or nursing home, like the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris or the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. The European absolutist monarch was not a god on earth nor some other power floating above the earth. He or she stood at the apex of an aristocratic pyramid.11 Aristocratic palaces, then, also contributed significantly to the royal townscape, as in Saint Petersburg.
There was a royal ritual rhythm that played an important part in the life of dynastic capitals, of royal births, birthdays, marriages, coronations and funerals, with public ceremonies and popular festivities as well as court protocol and temporary monuments of arches and tribunes at coronations and royal marriages. There could also be military parades, and some cities, such as Berlin, Potsdam and Saint Petersburg, had very centrally located parade grounds.
Extra-palatial monumentality was less thought about and developed, but it did exist. The equestrian statue was an ancient Roman monument, although perhaps secondary. Charlemagne was enthralled when he saw one of Theoderic in Ravenna and brought it to Aachen, but it seems to have passed into medieval obscurity. The custom was revived with the Italian Renaissance and developed by French seventeenth-century absolutism. In Paris, Henry IV got a statue by the Pont Neuf in 1614; Louis XIV got a number in France and several in Paris.12 In London, Charles II was put up in King’s (now Soho) Square and outside Chelsea Hospital. Before his deposition, James II was elevated in Whitehall.13 In Vienna, the oldest equestrian statue – or at least the oldest still standing – dates only from late eighteenth century. It portrays Emperor Franz Stephan (1708–65) and was founded in 1781 and first put up in 1797; it is now to be found in the Burggarten, né Kaisergarten.14
There was also the royal square, with a name referring to some royalty or royal exploit and, usually, with a statue. The Paris of Henry IV provided the model, the Place Dauphine (Crown Prince Square) on the Île de la Cité, beside the statue of the king, and Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), successfully built to become the centre of elegant life in town, with a statue of Louis XIII. In spite of his personal move to Versailles, Louis XIV did invest in the royal grandeur of Paris as well. The more ephemeral Place des Victoires, with an extremely triumphalist statue of Louis XIV, was a private initiative by a rich admirer, whereas the almost simultaneous Place Louis le Grand (today’s Place Vendôme, after the old palace of the Duke of Vendôme), was somewhat more restrained in the symbolism of its equestrian statue of the Sun King. The Throne Square got its name from the city entry of Louis XIV and the temporary throne then installed there. What is now known as the Place de la Concorde started out in the last third of the eighteenth century as Place Louis XV, with a royal statue.15
Saint Petersburg was the absolutist city par excellence, a magnificent manifestation of pre-national monarchical and of royally derived court aristocratic wealth and will, built by imported Italian architects, to Russian taste. War, religion, monarchy and aristocracy set their first imprints upon the city. The Palace Square was shaped by the Tsar’s Winter Palace and the General Staff opposite it. Nearby, somewhat back, was the hulk of the Senate and Synod, the heads of the civilian and the ecclesiastical administration. The grandiose long boulevard Nevsky Prospekt ran from the Admiralty to the Nevsky monastery.
Moscow became less imperial and less aristocratic and, with late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century textile industrialization, embourgeoised. But it retained a central role of pre-modern Russia. Tsars were crowned in the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral and after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the city became a proto-national symbol due to its sacrificial burning, forcing the Grande Armée to its disastrous retreat.
The Nation versus the Prince(s)
The European nation-states built their capitals upon these pre-national traditions of Greco-Roman antiquity, medieval churches, town and guild halls and monarchical and aristocratic palaces, all still