(a) Explain Romanticism as a cultural movement in Europe.

(i)Romantic artists and poets generally criticized the glorification of reason and science and focused instead on emotions, intuition and mystical feelings.

(ii)Their effort was to create a sense of a shared collective heritage, a common cultural past, as the basis of a nation.

(iii)Other Romantics such as the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder claimed that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people – das volk.

(iv)It was through folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation (volksgeist) was popularised.

(v)Collecting and recording these forms of folk culture was essential to the project of nation-building.

(b)Explain Frédéric Sorrieu’s dream in the context of democratic and social republics in France during 1848.

(i)In $\displaystyle 1848$, Frédéric Sorrieu, a French artist, prepared a series of four prints visualising his dream of a world made up of ‘democratic and social republics’.

(ii)The first print of the series, shows the peoples of Europe and America – men and women of all ages and social classes – marching in a long train, and offering homage to the Statue of Liberty as they pass by it.

(iii)Personified Liberty as a female figure – with the Torch of Enlightenment in one hand and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the other.

(iv) It was against the symbols of absolutist institutions.

(v) In Sorrieu’s utopian vision, the people of the world are categorised as distinct nations.

(vi)The groups of categories are identified through their flags and national costume.

(vii)He believed that from the heavens above, Christ, saints and angels gaze upon the scene.

(viii)Leading the procession, way past the Statue of Liberty, are the United States and Switzerland, which by this time were already Nation-States.

(viii)These symbols have been used by the artist to symbolise fraternity among the nations of the world.