Resumen de The nation and the city: urban festivals and cultural mobilisation

Joep Leerssen

• This article attempts to map the relations between nation-building processes in 19th-century Europe and city cultures with their urban sociability. Three patterns are surveyed: [1] the modern-national assimilation of medieval and early-modern city cultures (sample case: Orléans and the French cult of Joan of Arc); [2] the modular replication across cities of urban festivals as cultural mobilizers (sample case: the spread of Floral Games festivals in Southern France and Northern Spain); [3] the reticulation of city-based practices into a nationwide and nation-building network (sample cases: the role of choral societies in German cultural nationalism; and its transnational knock-on effect in the Baltic Provinces). By choosing the city as our social focus and placing it (or rather, its ideal-type �Urbania�) alongside Gellner's ideal-types of �Megalomania� and �Ruritania�, we can avoid the finalism of studying regionalist and nationalist movements in the analytical framework of the post-Versailles state system, and we gain a better understanding of the granulated, localized social basis of such movements and the translocally homogenizing role of culture.