N

Nagy, Imre (see under HUNGARIAN RISING OF 1956)

Nansen, Fridtjof (1861–1930), Norwegian explorer, scientist and diplomat, influential in the LEAGUE OF NATIONS. Having studied zoology at Oslo University, he undertook a series of scientific voyages, sailing around Greenland in 1882, and attempting to reach the North Pole in 1895, an expedition which caught the public's imagination. He interrupted his adventures in 1905 to support dissolution of the union with SWEDEN, and became NORWAY'S envoy to Britain (1905–8). The outbreak of war in 1914 curtailed further scientific travels and Nansen concentrated on his diplomatic career. A strong humanitarian, in 1917 he went to Washington to negotiate a relaxation of the Allied blockade of Germany (see WORLD WAR I). In 1919 he urged the formation of the League, and then became Norway's delegate to it until his death. Under his guidance, the League assisted with the repatriation of prisoners of war, and established in 1921 the High Commission for Refugees which inaugurated the so-called “Nansen Passport,” an internationally recognized document which afforded identification and legal protection to stateless civilians. In 1921–2 Nansen organized relief for millions left starving after the RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1922), he continued his humanitarian efforts, providing support for Greek and Armenian refugees abandoned after the break-up of the Ottoman empire (see TURKEY AND EUROPE).

Naples and Sicily, Kingdom of (see TWO SICILIES)

Napoleon I (1769–1821), Emperor of the French (1804–14), and previously First Consul (1799–1802) and Consul for Life (1802–4). During the opening years of the nineteenth century he was the dominant figure in the political, institutional, and military affairs of Europe at large, and thus had a deep influence on many later developments too. This soldier-statesman's extraordinary career amounted in some ways to a continuation, and in others to a betrayal, of the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789; it was also entwined with the course of the FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS and then of the eponymous NAPOLEONIC WARS (see also Map 2).

Born at Ajaccio in Corsica into an impoverished noble family, Napoleon Bonaparte was sent by his father to the Military College at Brienne in 1779, and five years later to the École Militaire at Paris. Commissioned as an artillery lieutenant in 1785, he would probably have experienced a modestly successful career in this unfashionable branch of the army had it not been for the Revolution. The shortage of officers (6,000 had emigrated by the end of 1791) opened up opportunities to those with military ability, good political connections, and luck. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Bonaparte returned to his native island but, after a dalliance with Corsican NATIONALISM, moved with his family back to France. He attached himself to the JACOBINS, though he was no populist and detested the disorder associated with the great journées of the Revolution. He came to prominence in the autumn of 1793 for his handling of the artillery at the siege of Toulon which led to the port's recapture from the British, and gained promotion to brigadier-general and commander-in-chief of the artillery of the Army of Italy at the age of only 24. Fortune appeared to desert him the following year, when his links with ROBESPIERRE'S younger brother led to a brief spell of imprisonment following the coup of THERMIDOR. Furthermore, in 1795, his name was removed from the officer list after he refused a commission to serve in the VENDÉE, believing it to be beneath his dignity to fight domestic rebels when France faced foreign enemies. He showed no such scruples in October of that year. He had secured the patronage of Paul Barras, an adroit if unscrupulous politician, who tasked him with defending the CONVENTION against the royalist rising known (by reference to the Revolutionary calendar) as that of Vendémiaire. Bonaparte demonstrated his ruthless commitment to public order by dispersing the largely unarmed crowd with the famous “whiff of grapeshot.” With the assistance of Barras, now the most prominent member of the five-man DIRECTORY, he was rewarded with command of the Army of the Interior. In March 1796 he married Barras's former mistress, Josephine Beauharnais. It is unclear whether Barras was pleased to be relieved of an encumbrance, but a week before the marriage Bonaparte had been given a new appointment: commander of the Army of Italy. It was in his first Italian campaign that he would really make his name.

Though the Directory had not intended Italy to be the main theater of operations at this stage in the Revolutionary Wars, Bonaparte transformed a bedraggled force and led it to a series of spectacular victories, made all the more impressive by the artfully-crafted reports in his bulletins and army newspapers. In October 1797 the Austrians were forced to sign the Peace of CAMPO FORMIO. Soon terms were also imposed upon the papacy; the Venetian republic was dissolved; and sister republics were carved out of territories in the north of the peninsula. It was significant that, while sending a steady stream of looted treasures back to Paris, the young general made these political arrangements without reference to his masters in the Directory. “I have tasted supremacy and I can no longer renounce it,” he commented. His triumphs in Italy and the death from tuberculosis of his rival, Hoche, left him as the Revolution's pre-eminent soldier. At the end of the year he was given charge of troops assembled for an invasion of England. Correctly judging the project to be impracticable, he extricated himself from this command and instead, in 1798, led an army of 36,000 men (together with scientists and scholars) into Egypt. Part of a longstanding dream of establishing a French outpost in North Africa, the expedition now had the additional objective of striking a blow against British commercial power along the route to India. Though the campaign began well with the capture of Alexandria and victory at the battle of the Pyramids, the local population remained restive and disaster struck when NELSON destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, isolating the expeditionary force. Despite continuing to win local victories, Bonaparte recognized the game was up and slipped away in August 1799, well before the final surrender of his forces.

When he arrived back at Paris in October his reputation was still intact, and indeed bolstered by his shrewd use of propaganda and his focus upon the expedition's intellectual and cultural achievements (including discovery of the Rosetta stone). Moreover, the spell in Egypt had left him untainted by the increasingly evident failings of the unpopular Directory. With crucial assistance from his brother Lucien, Bonaparte now assumed the role of military strong man and overthrew the government in the coup of BRUMAIRE (November 9–10, 1799). This created a three-man CONSULATE, but one in which he, as First Consul, became the effective ruler of France – a situation consolidated in 1802 by his appointment as Consul for Life. Always concerned about the legitimacy of his rule, he had these changes of government approved by plebiscite. Meanwhile, as the international warfare of the epoch moved into its more distinctively “Napoleonic” phase, he had also strengthened his position by launching a second Italian campaign. This had brought victory over the Austrians at MARENGO in June 1800 and eventually the advantageous LUNÉVILLE Treaty of February 1801. Even Britain, now confronted by the break-up of the Second Coalition, had then found it prudent to accede to the Peace of AMIENS early in 1802.

The Consulate proved to be the most productive period for his domestic reforms, aimed at restoring stability to France. The army was employed to extinguish the last embers of revolt in the Vendée, using drumhead courts-martial against the CHOUANS. A CONCORDAT with the papacy partially restored the position of the Catholic Church (see also PIUS VII; CATHOLICISM), albeit under close government supervision, and thereby drew the religious sting out of counter-revolution. By denying any return of expropriated lands to the church, the religious settlement reassured the many purchasers of biens nationaux and secured their support for the regime. The administrative structures established by the Revolution were centralized, and many elements of a police state were introduced under FOUCHÉ'S direction, thus enabling Bonaparte to tap more efficiently the country's wealth and manpower (between 1800 and 1813 France furnished him with 2 million recruits). His CODE CIVIL provided France with a long-desired unified law-code. He replaced the Revolution's paper ASSIGNATS with a metallic currency, established the Bank of France, and reformed tax collection – measures which, alongside ruthless exploitation of occupied territories, stabilized the state's finances. In EDUCATION he established state secondary schools (lycées) that produced a cadre of future officials and military officers. Then, in 1804, Bonaparte used the excuse of a royalist plot against his life to justify the establishment of a so-called “empire” (soon buttressed by its own new order of privileged nobility), thus repudiating the republican thrust of the 1790s. His coronation in the cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris on December 2, was meant to evoke memories of Charlemagne – and, while Pius VII duly attended, it was not the pope but the restyled Emperor Napoleon himself who performed the crowning. Although his eventual abdication marked the defeat of these imperial and dynastic pretensions, which were only temporarily revived at mid-century by NAPOLEON III (see also BONAPARTISM; IMPERIALISM), the other innovations promoting state centralism were more enduring.

Napoleon's domestic initiatives were imposed on occupied territories beyond French frontiers, though here their implementation and persistence were patchier: generally speaking, the closer such regions were to France the more thoroughgoing was the overhaul of their institutions and structures. He was more ruthless in redrawing political boundaries, annexing some territories (such as the Kingdom of Holland, Piedmont, Tuscany, and parts of the PAPAL STATES), creating in the pre-imperial phase certain “sister republics” (for example, the BATAVIAN, Helvetic, Cispadane, and Ligurian ones), or establishing satellite structures (most notably the CONFEDERATION OF THE RHINE and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw), so that the map of Europe changed with bewildering rapidity. The empire reached its greatest territorial extent in 1810–11 when some 44 million people in 130 départements were under direct imperial rule. Most of these territorial changes did not survive the post-Napoleonic settlement negotiated at the VIENNA CONGRESS of 1814–15, though even this eschewed any reversal of his abolition of the HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE or of the Genoese and Venetian republics. As a voracious reader influenced by ENLIGHTENMENT ideas, Napoleon was a firm believer in rational government (see also BUREAUCRACY). But his willingness to implement such radical political and institutional change probably owed more to his Corsican origins, which made him something of an outsider (he retained the Italian spelling of his name, Napoleone Buonaparte, until 1796), who remained suspicious of established structures. This Corsican background certainly imbued him with a strong sense of the importance of family and loyalty. Accordingly, he engaged in a dynasticism that made extensive use of his relatives to rule conquered territory, even if they enjoyed little scope for independent action. Yet he was also meritocratic enough to promote others from a variety of backgrounds, including former members of the ANCIEN REGIME nobility as well as Jacobin terrorists such as Fouché, so long as they demonstrated sufficient talent and personal loyalty.

Napoleonic rule was always contingent upon the continuing superiority of French arms. The Peace of Amiens fractured in May 1803, and warfare against a series of five further coalitions then continued. The campaigns of 1805–6 revealed Napoleon at his military best, and by the time of the Treaties of TILSIT in 1807 he stood at the height of his power. Yet it was then that Napoleon's fortunes began to unravel. The decision to invade Portugal to strengthen a weak link in the CONTINENTAL SYSTEM led to the debilitating PENINSULAR WAR. This drained the empire of men and money, and caused growing anti-Napoleonic resentment even inside France where the conflicts had hitherto impacted relatively lightly. Austria was encouraged to re-enter the fray, and Napoleon's relations with Russia worsened over her failure to enforce his schemes of blockade against Britain. The upshot was the ill-fated invasion of 1812 that eventuated in an ignominious withdrawal (see MOSCOW, RETREAT FROM). This was the prelude to defeat in 1813–14 at the hands of the Seventh (and final) Coalition. Advised by his war-weary marshals, Napoleon initially attempted to abdicate in favor of his son (the product of a second and by then quite predictably “dynastic” marriage, contracted in 1810 with the Habsburg emperor's daughter). When this was rejected, he abdicated unconditionally in April 1814 and went into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. Bizarrely, however, the relevant PARIS TREATY had not explicitly banned him from leaving it. Encouraged by reports of the unpopularity of the restored BOURBON DYNASTY, he returned to France the following March. During the ensuing HUNDRED DAYS Napoleon sought to recover power, raising an army and, less successfully, offering a more democratic constitution in the hope of rallying political support. Although his campaign against the combined Allies began promisingly, he was defeated at WATERLOO in June 1815 and permanently exiled to St Helena. With hindsight, his defeat in the face of superior forces may seem to have been inevitable. However, the coalitions against him were always unstable before 1813, and it was mainly his own repeated unwillingness to accept settlements and his insistence on humiliating his opponents at the conference table that at last brought his enemies to a determined accord.

As an operational commander and charismatic leader Napoleon had no peer, and, though he was ultimately defeated, he won most of his 50 pitched battles. His record in WARFARE ensured that he would fascinate and inspire military thinkers and practitioners from CLAUSEWITZ to MOLTKE and beyond. More controversially, he used his remaining years in exile to create, through dictated comments and conversations duly transcribed, the self-image of a liberal reformer who had sought to unify Europe by creating a “Grand Federation of Free Peoples”– a claim that would have sounded hollow to those populations who had groaned under the oppression of French occupation. In reality, Napoleon's principal legacies lay not in LIBERALISM but in his largely authoritarian institutional reforms, as well as in mass carnage and in the unintended fostering of a NATIONALISM that developed across much of Europe directly as a rejection of his imperialistic ambitions.

Napoleon III (1808–73), ruler of the French Second Empire (1852–70), and previously President of the SECOND REPUBLIC (1848–52). Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of NAPOLEON I, was raised in Bavarian and Swiss exile before joining the CARBONARI in Italy. After the death of the Duc de Reichstadt (claimant to the title Napoleon II) in 1832, he considered himself the rightful heir to the legacies of BONAPARTISM. He wrote propaganda pamphlets, and in 1836 attempted a coup at Strasbourg. Having moved to England, he published Des Idées Napoléoniennes (1839), a manifesto arguing that only a Napoleonic restoration could harness the progress promised by the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789. This hokum sold well, yet a second putsch at Boulogne in 1840 was another fiasco. Now imprisoned at Ham in northern France, he continued to write pamphlets. The most notable, L'Extinction du paupérisme (1844), called for government intervention and a military restructuring of society to tackle the problems of INDUSTRIALIZATION.

In 1846 Louis Napoleon escaped to London. The overthrow of the JULY MONARCHY in the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848–9 offered new opportunities. He travelled briefly to Paris before returning to London and enrolling as a special constable to patrol the Chartist demonstrations. This, he declared, signaled his commitment to order, an issue increasingly important in France where Bonapartism was mounting. In autumn he returned again to his homeland and became the overwhelming victor in the December presidential elections. There he outperformed CAVAIGNAC who had blood on his hands following the JUNE DAYS. Though Louis Napoleon was little known and lacked personal charisma, both his name and his emphasis on law and order played well among the newly-enfranchised peasantry which harbored suspicions of the Republic, while his writings on poverty garnered working-class votes. He also won support from conservatives who believed he would be putty in their hands.

The president proved he was his own man by appointing acolytes who fulfilled his reactionary wishes, clamping down on democratic socialists and strengthening the position of the Catholic Church (see FALLOUX LAW; CATHOLICISM). He also endeavored to extend his period of office. Unable to effect constitutional reform enabling him to stand for a second term, he resorted to a coup executed on December 2, 1851. Despite meeting with some fierce resistance, his action won swift and decisive endorsement through plebiscite. The new constitution promulgated in January 1852 gave Louis Napoleon ten years of further tenure, together with sweeping executive powers that marginalized parliamentary processes. These developments reached their logical conclusion at the end of the year, when another plebiscite approved his transformation into “emperor of the French.”

The Second Empire is often misleadingly divided into two phases: “authoritarian” during the 1850s, and “liberal” during the 1860s. Such a division hides the fact that a liberal empire was only briefly promised under OLLIVIER in 1869–70, and obscures the constants that dominated Napoleon III's reign. His was “a personalist regime,” essentially characterized by its leader's contradictory impulses. Two things never changed: the emperor was determined on exercising personal power, and also on perpetuating his dynasty – hence marriage in 1853 to Eugénie de Montijo, who soon bore him a son. In the business of government, Napoleon III led from the front, but relied heavily on ministers who had been previously inclined towards ORLEANISM yet who now rallied around him through fear of disorder. Never so repressive as sometimes depicted, the Second Empire nonetheless strengthened prefectoral and police powers, promoted clientelism, and valued a close relationship with the church. Much effort also went into Bonapartist propaganda. It was partly the failure to quell opposition that led, in the 1860s, to concessions over parliamentary powers and the right to strike. However, the emperor genuinely wanted to improve the lot of the lower classes. HAUSSMANN'S rebuilding of Paris may have demolished the old Revolutionary districts, but it was also accompanied by a public works program, the championing of workers' cooperatives, and the modernization of industry, supported by an elaborate credit and BANKING system. Some historians argue, indeed, that the Second Empire was crucial to France's economic takeoff.

Though often marked by contradictions, Napoleon III's approach to foreign affairs also reflected certain guiding principles. As a Bonapartist, he wanted revision of the 1815 settlement (see VIENNA CONGRESS), and recovery of French glory by making his nation the “arbiter of Europe”; as a populist, he was also concerned about the domestic reception of external policies. These considerations were evidenced by involvement in the CRIMEAN WAR, which had the bonus of reconciling France and Britain. Napoleon III had no wish to follow his uncle into making an enemy of Britain, and in 1860 signed commercial treaties with London. By then, however, his foreign policy was unraveling. His promotion of ITALIAN UNIFICATION via the FRANCO-AUSTRIAN WAR of 1859 was rewarded by the acquisition of Nice and Savoy; but it also created a larger Italy than he had intended, and one whose designs upon the PAPAL STATES necessitated stationing a French garrison to protect Rome. In order to assuage clerical sentiments he backed a scheme to establish a Catholic regime in Mexico, but this ended disastrously in 1867 when rebels executed its new Habsburg emperor. Napoleon III had also failed to initiate a European congress at the time of the 1863 revolt in POLAND, and three years later had miscalculated in his belief that the impending AUSTRO-PRUSSIAN WAR would enhance France's standing as Europe's arbitrator. During the later 1860s his regime proved unable to exert significant influence on the reconfiguration of central Europe being undertaken by BISMARCK, and particularly to frustrate the emergence of a Prussian-dominated version of GERMAN UNIFICATION. That process culminated in the FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR which, having been triggered by the EMS TELEGRAM affair of July 1870, precipitated the collapse of the Second Empire itself after Napoleon III's defeat at SEDAN on September 1–2. It is generally agreed that his regime, though facing increased domestic opposition, might well have survived had it not been for this military disaster. He fled into a final three-year spell of English exile, and what little remained of the Bonapartist cause was then extinguished in 1879, when his heir, the prince imperial, was killed while accompanying British troops in Zululand. As for Napoleon III himself, historians have struggled to make sense of his enigmatic personality. Some view him as a precursor of twentieth-century dictators; others as a role model for DE GAULLE, notably in the use of plebiscites and technocrats. He has perhaps been best described as “an unpredictable maverick.”

NapoleonicWars Following on from the FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS of 1792–9, these campaigns associated with the name of NAPOLEON I then continued until his second abdication in 1815. Thus they occupied the latter part of a sustained period of generalized European WARFARE (see also Map 2).

When in November 1799 the BRUMAIRE coup overthrew the DIRECTORY and Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul (see CONSULATE), the outcome of the conflict between France and the so-called Second Coalition – in which, after Russian withdrawal, the Habsburg Empire and Britain were left as the principal elements – remained in the balance. During 1800, however, the threat to the French from this alliance was blunted, particularly through the defeats inflicted on the Austrians at MARENGO and Hohenlinden which led to the LUNÉVILLE treaty of February 1801. Early the following year Britain, now isolated as well as severely strained by the toll that a decade of war had imposed on finances and commerce, made its own accommodation with France via the Treaty of AMIENS. The ensuing peace proved to be a mere interlude before Anglo-French hostilities resumed in May 1803. Evidence of continuing Napoleonic ambitions, illustrated by Bonaparte's self-promotion to the rank of emperor in the course of 1804, then provoked the formation of a Third Coalition, which brought Austria, Russia, and Sweden into common cause with Britain against France and her Spanish ally. This configuration had caused Napoleon to abandon plans for a cross-Channel invasion of England, even before NELSON'S victory of October 1805 at TRAFALGAR confirmed the formidable strength of the British navy. On land, however, the French forces that had become free to concentrate on fighting the Austrians and Russians now registered their own triumphs, first at ULM a few days before Trafalgar and then at AUSTERLITZ six weeks later. While the tsarist army was limping home in December 1805, the Habsburg regime accepted peace under the humiliating terms of the PRESSBURG treaty. Napoleon's reorganization of the German states into the CONFEDERATION OF THE RHINE for his own military purposes prompted the formation of the Fourth Coalition. However, French forces rapidly occupied Saxony and eliminated the Prussian army as an effective military force at the battles of JENA-AUERSTLSQUÄDT in October 1806.

From occupied Berlin, the French emperor then issued the decrees that inaugurated the CONTINENTAL SYSTEM, devised so as to wage economic warfare against Britain with a view to bringing her to the negotiating table. Meanwhile, Napoleon would advance further eastwards, and, after bloody tactical draws at Golymin, Pultusk, and Eylau, in June 1807 he won a victory at Friedland that enabled his troops to push on as far as the river Niemen. There, early in July, he held the upper hand as he imposed the two TILSIT peace treaties, one upon ALEXANDER I of Russia and the other upon FREDERICK WILLIAM III of Prussia. Soon the Fourth Coalition was not so much dissolved as reversed, with Russia, Prussia, and Austria all now siding against Britain. However, the latter's defiance continued. In September the British navy made a pre-emptive strike against COPENHAGEN to prevent the large Danish fleet falling into French hands. In November 1807 Napoleon reacted by taking one of his most fateful decisions. In order to secure full implementation of the Atlantic blockade required by the Continental System, he began an invasion of Portugal – something that soon escalated into a broader, and crucially debilitating, Iberian conflict which became known as the PENINSULAR WAR. The deployment of British forces under Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of WELLINGTON), together with the rising tide of Spanish guerrilla resistance, forced France to divert increasing resources to this area. One result was to encourage an Austrian return to the fray in spring 1809, as part of a Fifth Coalition that also included Britain and Spain. Napoleon used German troops to repulse an initial Habsburg advance into Bavaria, and then marched on the Danube where he suffered reverses at Aspern-Essling before narrowly prevailing at the battle of WAGRAM early in July. The Treaty of VIENNA (or Schönbrunn), concluded in October, compounded the Austrian losses previously registered at Pressburg. In April 1810 this peace was further consolidated when METTERNICH, the foreign minister of Austria, helped to arrange Napoleon's second marriage – to Marie-Louise, daughter of the Habsburg emperor. The position of the French was again strengthened during the summer of that year when they annexed Holland, in response to its king's attempt to avert economic ruin by withdrawing from the Continental System. Such a solution seemed less immediately available when, at the end of 1810, the tsarist regime signaled similar intent to resume trade with Britain. Like his pursuit of the Peninsular War (where the French position was now worsening), Napoleon's eventual reaction to Alexander's move amounted to a major blunder. Having secured Prussian support early in 1812, the French emperor – now at the peak of his hubristic IMPERIALISM – launched in June an invasion of Russia, linked since March with Britain and Sweden in a Sixth Coalition. Though the inconclusive battle of BORODINO (the bloodiest encounter of the Napoleonic Wars, fought early in September) did not prevent his continuing advance on Moscow, it turned out to be the prelude to disaster. Napoleon proceeded to capture a largely deserted and fire-ravaged city, from which by mid-October, as the cold set in, he was forced to conduct full withdrawal (see MOSCOW, RETREAT FROM). His Russian campaign that had begun with 700,000 men ended with most of them lost to him through combat, illness, or desertion, and with only 100,000 or so still available in December to march back across the Niemen.

By early 1813 a Seventh Coaliton was forming against France. Though in the face of this final Grand Alliance the forces of Napoleon registered a number of victories (for example, at Lützen and Bautzen against the Russians and Prussians in May), the main tide had turned. This was all the more clearly evident after Wellington's Spanish campaign had led to Marshal Jourdan's defeat at Vittoria in June, and after Austria had come to fill in August the one remaining gap in the roster of major powers aligned against the French. Even Marshal BERNADOTTE, chosen by Swedes as their regent, had now committed troops to the anti-Bonapartist cause. In October 1813 Napoleon was defeated at the battle of LEIPZIG in the face of superior Russian, Prussian, and Austrian numbers; and in November, while this part of the French army was following him back across the Rhine, other units were also retreating over the Pyrenees after finally losing the Peninsular War. Even now, Bonaparte was spurning Allied peace-feelers that might have left France with boundaries along the Alps and the Rhine, and was striving (not altogether unsuccessfully) to stimulate a renewed enthusiasm for patriotic warfare against the invaders violating French soil. Eventually, in March 1814, the Allies concluded among themselves the Treaties of CHAUMONT whereby each forswore the making of any separate peace with him. Shortly after the fall of Paris at the end of that month, Napoleon abdicated unconditionally and entered into exile on Elba.

The preliminary terms of peace with the restored BOURBON monarchy of LOUIS XVIII were agreed in May (through the first of the two PARIS TREATIES of 1814–15), and the wider issues of the postwar European settlement were remitted to the VIENNA CONGRESS. Its proceedings began in October 1814, only to be dramatically interrupted at the beginning of March 1815 by Napoleon's landing near Fréjus. There followed the extraordinary achievement of the so-called HUNDRED DAYS, when he raised a new army that proved capable of severely testing the Allies during what proved to be the former emperor's final campaign. This concluded in June with his defeat by Wellington and BLÜCHER at WATERLOO, after which a second and far more distant exile to St Helena at last marked a definitive end to the Napoleonic Wars. The campaigns had been immensely damaging. They had cost the lives of over 900,000 Frenchmen, to say nothing of the many thousands of others from the occupied territories, conscripts and civilians alike, who had died, nor of the widespread physical devastation that had been caused. Indeed, so great was the scale of the fighting between 1792 and 1815 of which the Napoleonic Wars form a key part that it was referred to as the “Great War” until 1914–18 when that dubious accolade was bestowed upon a shorter but even more destructive round of international conflict.

Narodniks (see under POPULISM)

nation-state (see under NATIONALISM)

National Guards Civilian militias, most commonly associated with France. Early in the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789, after the fall of the Bastille and the outbreak of random violence, better-off elements of the Third Estate bandied together so as to protect property and maintain law and order. The National Guard in Paris was first commanded by LAFAYETTE, who had directly witnessed similar civilian initiatives in North America, and who now urged members to fight for “political liberty” and “social revolution.” Soon most major French towns boasted a National Guard, and from 1791 all “active” citizens over the age of 18 were enlisted. Until that point, the National Guard was closely associated with the bourgeoisie and support for a constitutional monarchy; thereafter, its social make-up and political leanings were varied. Disbanded by NAPOLEON I, it was re-established as an elitist force under LOUIS XVIII only to be abolished once more by CHARLES X. It reappeared after the revolution of 1830, when its members sided with the moderate revolutionaries, but they were then neglected by Louis Philippe's JULY MONARCHY and declined to offer him support upon the outbreak of the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848–9. Under the SECOND REPUBLIC various attempts were made to democratize and expand the Guard's recruitment. During the JUNE DAYS of 1848 it was divided, some of its members assisting the repressive action taken by the army, others abstaining from involvement. Elsewhere in Europe, notably in Austria, Galicia, and Hungary, one of the first demands of revolutionaries was often for the creation of a National Guard as a counterweight to the forces of repression, though these initiatives were generally short-lived. Aware of its symbolism, NAPOLEON III retained a French National Guard but kept it under close surveillance and restricted its recruitment to the middle classes so as to emasculate its revolutionary potential. Something of that resurfaced, however, in the PARIS COMMUNE when the Guard again opened its ranks to all-comers, effectively becoming a revolutionary army. It was crushed, along with the Commune, in the so-called bloody week of May 1871.

National Socialism (see NAZISM)

nationalism Advocacy of the political rights of a particular people, whose identity is asserted on the basis of claims to some form of common descent and shared cultural tradition. The word was coined in the 1770s, and already widely current by the 1830s. It has subsequently continued to denote attempts to achieve maximum congruence between national units and state frontiers. These efforts have constituted a major and persistent force in European history over the last 200 years or so. Towards the end of the nineteenth century nation-states were already rivaling multi-ethnic empires as foci of group loyalty, and by the end of the twentieth it was equally plain that, under conditions of MASS SOCIETY, appeals to national allegiance had proved over the long term to be more effective even than those focused on CLASS (see also COMMUNISM; SOCIALISM).

Depending on the particular period and context of their various campaigns, nationalist movements operating in Europe since the late eighteenth century have aimed sometimes for greater autonomy within an existing governmental structure, sometimes for full independence, and sometimes for expansion of the power and influence of a state that they already controlled. Their endeavors have also revealed considerable confusion about the principal criteria for nationhood. Among the various factors opportunistically cited in justification of whom to include (and conversely exclude) one encounters language, religion, physical geography, cultural or biological ethnicity, and shared patterns of law and custom. Not least, there have been repeated appeals to the authority of a common historical memory – often unduly dependent on readings of the past that involve collective amnesia, convenient invention, and other distortions. In some instances, it is tempting to accept a largely “primordialist” explanation – that is, viewing nationalist movements as springing mainly from preconditions already strongly favorable to this brand of group identification. But other cases might suggest that, as Ernest Gellner contended, “it is nationalism which engenders nations, not the other way round.” This second and more “instrumentalist” approach (often used, for example, regarding twentieth-century YUGOSLAVIA) involves putting less emphasis on the nation-state than on the “state-nation.” The latter term has been employed to cover the kind of regime that already possesses de facto sovereignty even prior to using its authority actively to construct (and not merely to reflect) some sense of a unifying national identity. It is, however, also wise to heed the argument that many versions of nationalism in modern Europe – including those associated with ITALIAN UNIFICATION and GERMAN UNIFICATION, or even with the THIRD REPUBLIC'S efforts at “turning peasants into Frenchmen” (Eugen Weber) – combine both “primordialist” and “instrumentalist” features.

Nationalism's rise in early-nineteenth-century Europe was aided by ideas of popular sovereignty asserted through the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 and by the ensuing military conflicts (see FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS and NAPOLEONIC WARS). By 1815 many continental countries had experienced at least one cycle of invasion, occupation, and liberation, when the established order was shaken. Heightened pressure for change stemmed not simply from sympathy for “the RIGHTS OF MAN” but also from resentment against foreign armies – for example, among Russians, Poles, Spaniards, Italians, and the inhabitants of the Germanic lands. At the VIENNA CONGRESS of 1814–15 the peacemakers did not so much overlook nationalist aspirations as consciously resist their fulfillment. Most particularly it was METTERNICH, principal statesman of the multi-ethnic HABSBURG EMPIRE, who sought to mold a system capable of combating LIBERALISM and nationalism alike. He believed these forces to be inseparable – but so too did those who, often inspired by ROMANTICISM, conversely welcomed them as twinned manifestations of “progress” towards greater freedom. This was the spirit in which liberals greeted the achievements registered by nationalists through the GREEK WAR OF INDEPENDENCE (which ended in 1829) and the secession of BELGIUM from Dutch rule (1830). However, the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848–9 soon demonstrated that the patterns of relationship – negative as well as positive – between freedom and the cult of the nation-state were far more dependent on particular contingencies of circumstance than most liberals could readily appreciate while their heroes such as MICKIEWICZ, MAZZINI, or LAMARTINE were preoccupied with denouncing the reactionary system of Metternich or the more starkly repressive Romanov and Ottoman regimes. For example, during the debates of the popularly elected FRANKFURT PARLIAMENT of 1848–9 concerning areas of mixed ethnicity, it became plain that the Germans in the majority cared less for the liberalism they regularly professed than for securing nationalistic advantage whenever their territorial control over Poles, Czechs, or Danes came under challenge.

From the mid-nineteenth century onward these harsher aspects of nationalism became increasingly evident. The seeming purity of previous intellectual and cultural evocations of nationhood was badly tarnished by encounters with harsher political realities. Mazzini was deeply disillusioned by the many illiberal features attaching to the ill-unified Italy, first proclaimed in 1861 and then enlarged in 1870. Early the following year a new GERMAN EMPIRE was inaugurated, as BISMARCK secured a version of national unity strongly imbued with the Prussian militaristic ethos. Meanwhile, his marginalization of Habsburg authority had prompted the settlement of an Austro-Hungarian AUSGLEICH that gave the Magyars not simply increased autonomy but also greater scope to oppress the Romanians, Slovaks, Croats, and other minority nationalities within their portion of the “Dual Monarchy.” By the 1880s, across the Romanov domains, ALEXANDER III was pursuing ruthless policies of “RUSSIFICATION” that fomented ANTISEMITISM in particular. More generally still, the varieties of nationalism most notable in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century were characterized by a growing cult of SOCIAL DARWINISM and a greater emphasis on racial factors as key criteria for ethnic identification (see RACISM) – a combination that also featured prominently in the surge of expansionist rivalries now being focused on colonial IMPERIALISM. For reasons such as these, nationalism bulked large in the causation of WORLD WAR I. Though the reckless pursuit of German ambition became particularly significant after 1890, the disruptive effect of nationalist aspirations and frustrations was still more widely pervasive. Their influence on the conduct both of larger and of smaller powers during the pre-1914 era became most sharply evident in the BALKANS. There, in a region of highly complex ethnic rivalries, the waning authority of Turkey (see TURKEY AND EUROPE) had produced an increasing clash of interests between two other multi-national empires, those of Russia and Austria-Hungary. Equally, however, it had encouraged constant eruptions of hostility between the smaller indigenous groupings within the Balkans. Some of these had already achieved forms of independent nation-statehood before 1914 (BULGARIA, MONTENEGRO, ROMANIA, and SERBIA in 1878, and ALBANIA in 1912–13), but had done so under circumstances where frontiers would continue to be contested and ethnic minorities would remain vulnerable.

When general European warfare broke out in 1914, even the international socialist movement had to concede that appeals to class solidarity had been trumped by those aimed at stirring patriotism, or indeed xenophobia. Although the ensuing conflict increasingly revealed the negative features of nationalist passion, President Wilson of the USA sought to promote (on the basis of the FOURTEEN POINTS initially announced in January 1918) a reordering of postwar Europe along lines embodying the more positive aspects of the Mazzinian tradition. His efforts (more fully examined elsewhere, with reference to the PARIS PEACE SETTLEMENT OF 1919) to turn national self-determination into a force for freedom and felicity yielded only an incomplete and inconsistent outcome. This involved a reconfigured framework for ethnic tensions, especially amid imperial collapse in central and eastern Europe, but removed little of their substance. During the next 25 years the newly-shaped sovereignties of Yugoslavia, HUNGARY, “rump” Austria, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, POLAND, FINLAND, and the BALTIC STATES would all fall victim to the eventual resurgence of German and/or Soviet Russian ambitions. While MUSSOLINI played upon the nationalistic discontent produced by Italy's failure to gain the full fruits of victory, HITLER exploited the humiliation of defeat as the launching-point for a campaign centered on antisemitic and anti-Slav propaganda as well as on regenerative PAN-GERMANISM. These two dictators set the tone for a politics of FASCISM widely imitated by other movements of authoritarian nationalism from the 1920s until the end of WORLD WAR II.

After 1945 most western European governments showed an understandable distrust of nationalist enthusiasm. Instead, the running was increasingly made by advocates of EUROPEAN INTEGRATION aiming to remove the destructive animosities which had long marked Franco-German relations in particular. However, under the new conditions of COLD WAR division, Westerners were apt to praise any manifestations of nationalistic dissent or resistance that might appear (for example, in the “deviationism” of Yugoslavia, or in the HUNGARIAN RISING OF 1956 or the PRAGUE SPRING OF 1968) to challenge the SOVIET UNION'S hegemony in eastern Europe. Even if native nationalism, often reinforced by specifically anti-Russian sentiment, was only one of the causes prompting the eventual collapse of the “satellite” system and indeed of the USSR itself, the REVOLUTIONS OF 1989–91 certainly produced an environment within which ethnically-based passions could be given fuller rein. The resulting map (see Map 12) showed only one area where territorial consolidation had occurred, through a GERMAN REUNIFICATION which involved a nation-state of some 80 million people and which underlined the need to preserve the new spirit of a European Germany rather than revive the older threat of a German Europe. Elsewhere, however, there was cartographic fragmentation – on a scale far exceeding 1919. The break-up of post-communist Yugoslavia, amid civil war, was the most dramatic example. More broadly, during the last decade of the twentieth century the state-system of central and eastern Europe (including western portions of the former Soviet Union) generated frontiers that were, overall, many thousands of kilometers longer than before. For nationalists especially, many of these borders continued to be contestable – almost forming linear minefields, rendered hazardous by historical memory.

In the early twenty-first century it was still an open question as to whether these tensions could be adequately contained by ongoing enlargements of membership in such organizations as the European Union and NATO. Even in western Europe, the relationship between the nation-state and the transnational or supranational structures generated by “integration” remained contentious. So too did the claims upon enhanced autonomy or formal independence increasingly voiced by nationalist movements based on areas still accorded only “regional” or “provincial” status. Relevant examples included Corsica, CATALONIA, and the BASQUE country. The overall structuring of the United Kingdom stood similarly at issue, particularly as challenged by Scottish nationalist pressures from a second parliament in Edinburgh. As for Brussels, this city seemed more likely to survive as the chief administrative center of the “new” Europe than as the capital of a Belgium whose formal unity was now increasingly imperiled by confrontation between the Flemish and Walloon versions of politico-cultural allegiance. In sum, nationalism is a phenomenon whose convoluted history remains – in Europe, as well as farther afield – anything but complete.

NATO Acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The relevant agreement was signed at Washington in April 1949 to secure mutual defense arrangements amongst the countries of Western Europe and North America. There was some truth in the quip that the organization was designed to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. NATO built upon the BRUSSELS TREATY of 1948, and was stimulated also by developments in the emerging COLD WAR. These included the TRUMAN DOCTRINE, the MARSHALL PLAN, the BERLIN BLOCKADE, and the SOVIET UNION'S progress in atomic weaponry. The USSR's eventual response was to formalize its own eastern European military alliance in 1955, via the WARSAW PACT. Back in 1949 the founder-members of NATO itself had been the USA and Canada together with 10 European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Three years later they were joined by Greece and Turkey (whose mutual suspicion generally continued to loom larger than their shared membership, even to the point where the Greeks withdrew during the period 1964–79). The Federal Republic of Germany entered in 1955, and Spain in 1982. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO found itself operating in a radically new situation. The organization now extended its ambit across much of eastern Europe. In 1999 the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland became the first participants drawn from the ranks of those who had earlier subscribed to the Warsaw Pact. NATO was further enlarged in 2004, through the accession not only of the BALTIC STATES of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but of Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia as well. Albania and Croatia entered in 2009, bringing the membership to 28. That was also the year in which France reversed a much earlier decision (made in 1966 by DE GAULLE) that had led to its self-exclusion from the organization's integrated military command system.

The alliance did not engage in any direct military action until the paradoxical stability of cold war confrontation gave way to the confusions of the era following the European REVOLUTIONS OF 1989–91. It was the BALKAN crisis triggered by the dissolution of Yugoslavia that supplied the context within which NATO forces became involved (under UNITED NATIONS authorization) in restraining Serbian actions within Bosnia during 1994–5. The treaty organization then acted on its own initiative in 1999, when, after deadlock in the UN Security Council, it proceeded to bomb parts of Serbia as a means of ending the genocide occurring in Kosovo. As the new century began, many questions remained to be resolved concerning the kind of relationship that ought now to be developed between the alliance and the enlarging European Union (see EUROPEAN INTEGRATION) in matters of defense, peacekeeping, and humanitarian intervention. Similarly, much uncertainty still surrounded the nature of future dealings between NATO and a post-communist RUSSIA. Tensions were particularly evident as further ex-communist states (including Georgia and Ukraine) considered seeking entry into the organization. (See also Map 12)

naturalism Although embracing a wider sprawl of philosophical and other meanings, this concept is most regularly used by modern European historians to denote a literary and artistic movement which was particularly prominent during the period from the 1840s to the 1880s. Naturalism's significance around that epoch can best be grasped by appreciating not only its congruence with the cult of POSITIVISM but also its rejection of much that ROMANTICISM had previously championed. As the French novelist Émile Zola declared, “The wind is blowing in the direction of science … We are pushed towards the exact study of facts and things.” Thus the theory and style of the naturalistic movement aimed at achieving accurate and objective representation, especially of detail. The resulting works often concentrated on contemporary life, but did so without idealizing it. In CLASS terms, the main focus of treatment often concerned precisely that bourgeoisie which itself now formed an increasingly prominent part of the market for art and literature. The writers and artists involved also rejected previous limitations of scope to themes and motifs that had been deemed conventionally attractive or traditionally appropriate (for example, those drawn from the ancient world that had hitherto been central to neoclassical “history painting”). Naturalism's claim to be “contemporary” was further reflected in a SECULARIZATION of the settings towards which its quasi-scientific techniques were principally directed: for example, the everyday life of bars and boulevards, mines and factories, railway stations and department stores. With such an emphasis, the products of literary and artistic naturalism were not significantly different from those of nineteenth-century “realism.” Thus it seems wise to view the former category as encompassing the latter rather than to talk of two substantially distinct movements.

Whereas romanticism registered its principal literary achievements in lyric poetry, those of the naturalistic movement centered on prose. This shift of modes was apparent, for example, within the long career of the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. It was, however, the novel that provided prose-naturalism with its principal expressive genre. Early on, an especially crucial figure was Honoré de Balzac, who pursued a finely-detailed anatomization of pre-1848 French society through the huge sequence of novels and shorter stories, known collectively as La Comédie humaine, which he published during the 1830s and 1840s. As an enthusiast for all that was most fashionable in the latest scientific advances, he believed his “studies” to be consistent with the aims of the positivistic philosophy and sociology being developed by Auguste Comte, his almost exact contemporary. Over the three or four decades following Balzac's death in 1850, prose fiction's potential to dissect the “reality” of a whole society or epoch was exploited by significant novelists in all the major European literatures. These included Gottfried Keller (a Swiss) and Theodor Fontane in German, as well as Benito Pérez Galdós in Spanish and Giovanni Verga in Italian. It was, however, in English, Russian, or French that certain other authors wrote the most influential naturalistic novels of the century. The British contributors included William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot (Mary Anne Stevens), and Anthony Trollope – represented, respectively, by such works as Vanity Fair (1847–8), Hard Times (1854), Middlemarch (1871–2), and The Way We Live Now (1875). As for accomplished naturalism in the Russian novel, salient examples are Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev; War and Peace (1863–9) and Anna Karenina (1873–7) by Leo Tolstoy; together with Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

On the French scene, the figure of Gustave Flaubert looms similarly large. Though he was reluctant to be pigeon-holed, his writings included at least two major novels – Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1869) – which encouraged contemporaries to view him as following Balzac's aspiration to bring literature and science into ever closer alignment. The earlier of these books led Flaubert to be tried for offending public morality, and then to obtain an acquittal which itself greatly boosted the standing of fiction created in the naturalistic-realist mode. Its most unequivocal French champion was, however, Zola himself. The characters in his early and startlingly violent Thérèse Raquin (1867), who appear dominated by animal instinct and devoid of moral sense, already seemed to be mere pretexts for quasi-physiological observation. Yet it was Zola's 20-volume cycle of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), which eventually constituted his principal contribution. As its general sub-title indicated, this series presented “A Natural and Social History of a Family” – the ideal grouping within which to pursue a quasi-experimental investigation of hereditary weakness being transmitted between generations. The afflictions of the Rougon-Macquart clan reflected, in microcosm, the features of a society much more generally diseased. Here Zola chose Paris of the recent Second Empire – its slums and brothels, its shops and finance houses – as the main environment with which heredity must interact. Yet there were also scenes portraying the harshness of provincial life, as presented above all in Germinal (1885) which explored the miseries of the mining communities near the Belgian border.

By the 1860s, when Zola's Paris also served as the major capital of European painting, it was French art in particular that promoted naturalism. The polite frequenters of the official salon exhibitions had already been shocked by the visual realism produced by such figures as Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet, and Édouard Manet. It was, moreover, from Paris that in 1874 a new artistic epoch opened with a show that included works by Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. The fact that “impressionism” began as a term of abuse symbolizes the hostile reaction of critics who perceived here little more than blob and smudge. Zola, however, championed these paintings as a complement to literary naturalism. For him, “this study of light in its thousand decompositions and recompositions” was essentially an experiment in conveying accurately the complexity of optical perception, especially as pursued under the changing conditions of the open air and in the face of challenges from the new techniques of (as yet simply black-and-white) photography. With hindsight, it is clear that the scientific pretensions originally embraced by, or thrust upon, the impressionists were doomed to failure. Paradoxically, their eventual success, including their huge influence across Europe and beyond, stemmed not from any prosaic ability to imitate scientific procedure but from a more poetical capacity to suggest mood and atmosphere. In this sense their aesthetic provided a crucial bridge between the main epoch of naturalism and that of the cultural MODERNISM[2] which asserted itself towards the century's end.

Navarino, Battle of (see under GREEK WAR OF INDEPENDENCE)

Nazi–Soviet Pact Ten-year non-aggression treaty signed by RIBBENTROP and MOLOTOV on August 23, 1939. Its public clauses committed Germany and the Soviet Union to NEUTRALITY if either found itself at war with a third party. Secret protocols, not exposed until 1945, permitted STALIN to pursue his territorial designs on Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Bessarabia, and eastern Poland, and enabled HITLER to act similarly over western Poland and Lithuania. Another undisclosed agreement, on “Friendship, Co-operation, and Demarcation” (signed on September 28, shortly after the start of WORLD WAR II), was a natural extension of the pact. It transferred Lithuania to the Russian orbit, while enlarging the German share of Poland. Given the enmity between Berlin and Moscow, the announcement of mutual non-aggression had taken the world by surprise, yet each had much to gain. Both sought revision of the PARIS PEACE SETTLEMENT, and especially the destruction of independent Poland. Hitler knew that Stalin would never allow him an entirely free hand regarding the Poles, and thus welcomed the Pact even though it meant risking immediate war with Britain and France and involved deferring other plans for eastern LEBENSRAUM. It is generally thought that Stalin saw the treaty as a means of buying time, to prepare the Soviet Union, ravaged by his GREAT PURGES, for the inevitable war with Germany and to protect further territorial ambitions in southeastern Europe. Relations between the two powers thus remained edgy, and the pact was decisively breached when Hitler launched Operation BARBAROSSA in June 1941.

Nazism Derived from Nationalsozialist as pronounced in German, this term denotes the theory and practice of the movement led by HITLER from 1921 until its dissolution in 1945. This was founded in 1919 as the German Workers' Party, but known from 1920 onward as the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). So long as Nazism's distinctive features are acknowledged, it also bears analysis as part of the broader phenomenon of FASCISM that developed in Europe between the two world wars. The extreme authoritarianism of Hitler's movement, including the complete merging of state and party interests, has also made it central to a more controversial concept of TOTALITARIANISM that highlights similarities of oppressive control shared with STALIN'S dictatorship in particular. Much ink has further been spilled in controversy over “intentionalist” and “structuralist” interpretations of Nazism, where the division lies between those who see the movement as implementing a program largely predetermined by Hitler at an early stage and those who tend to stress the “polycratic” and constantly improvised nature of policy-making under his regime.

Nazism originated in the atmosphere of national humiliation and politico-economic crisis that beset Germany after defeat in WORLD WAR I. Condemning the WEIMAR REPUBLIC for its acceptance of the VERSAILLES TREATY, Hitler first attempted to subvert this post-Wilhelmine regime through the abortive BEER HALL PUTSCH of November 1923 in Munich. This resulted in a spell of imprisonment during which he began to write Mein Kampf (published 1925–6). Though as personal or party history the text was in many ways misleading, this product of what Donald Watt called “a second-rate mind of immense power” succeeded in setting out most of Hitler's central ideas. Here hostility to democratic LIBERALISM was accompanied by denunciation of Marxism (see MARX; COMMUNISM) too. In so far as some commitment to SOCIALISM was hinted by the movement's title, Hitler sought to strip the word of its usual internationalist connotations and to promote a sense of fraternal comradeship whose application was concentrated strictly within the circle of the “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft). The criteria for inclusion and exclusion were essentially racial (see RACISM), and structured according to a hierarchy that privileged above all the Teutonic peoples of “Aryan” stock. Conversely, Europe's inferior breeds were deemed to include the Slavic hordes, together with smaller ethnic groupings such as the “gypsy” Sinti. As for the JEWS, the Nazi leader drew on the extensive traditions of European ANTISEMITISM to denounce them as nothing less than an “anti-race” plotting the total destruction of civilization. Thus, using the language of a debased SOCIAL DARWINISM, the Austrian-born Hitler called upon the whole Germanic Volk to wage a racial war of survival against them, whether as finance capitalists or as crypto-BOLSHEVIKS.

In the years immediately following the failed putsch of 1923 Nazi efforts to exploit popular discontent with Weimar enjoyed only limited success. However, the worsening economic conditions stemming from the GREAT DEPRESSION[2] triggered by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 provided Hitler with new opportunities. Though tending to transcend conventional class categories, his movement was now making a particular appeal to those who felt threatened by the trade unions on one side or by the major commercial cartels on the other. Peasants, craftsmen, state officials, and owners of small businesses became central pillars of Nazi support, and Hitler's party, like other fascist movements, also made especially notable gains amongst the young. The NSDAP won 107 seats in the Reichstag elections of September 1930, and then emerged from the polls of July 1932 with 230 deputies and 37.3 percent of the popular vote. They remained the largest single party grouping even after further elections in November had reduced their parliamentary representation to 196 seats. The Weimar regime was now staggering from crisis to crisis, facing increasing violence both from the Nazi and the Communist parties. In these circumstances President HINDENBURG found himself under pressure to concede the chancellorship to the Nazi leader. This eventually occurred on January 30, 1933, after urgings by conservative nationalists such as PAPEN who wrongly believed that they could manage Hitler for their own purposes.

The Nazi Third Reich (so-called to evoke memories not simply of the GERMAN EMPIRE of 1871–1918 but also of the HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE created by Charlemagne even more than a millennium earlier) began with a whirlwind of GLEICHSCHALTUNG, or enforced “coordination.” The REICHSTAG FIRE of February 27 provided an early opportunity for a purge of opponents. The fact that the parliamentary elections of March 5 (when Hitler's candidates took 288 seats and 43.9 percent of the popular vote) did not give the Nazis an outright majority barely mattered, if only because of the rapidity with which all rival parties were banned and the Reichstag itself was deprived of effective restraining powers (see ENABLING ACT). Other elements – such as the trade unions, the civil service, big business, the universities, and the COMMUNICATIONS media – were brought similarly to heel. Purging affected the Nazis' own ranks too, as the SA (see STURMABTEILUNG) discovered in the NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES. The churches survived the worst of the onslaught but, partly because of their sympathies with the Nazis' anti-communist campaign, they proved incapable of offering any coordinated opposition to the new regime. By the time of Hindenburg's death on August 2, 1934 the Weimar Republic was a mere shell. In that sense, a Nazi reich was already firmly entrenched even before Hitler promptly proclaimed himself the successor head of state under the new title of Reichsführer.

During the mid-1930s Germany enjoyed a large measure of economic recovery. Employment opportunities were enhanced particularly by large-scale investment in rearmament and in public works (often with a militarily-related dimension, such as motorway construction). Though its popularity was never tested in free elections, the new Nazi regime clearly attracted substantial mass enthusiasm. This was mobilized by GOEBBELS'S propaganda ministry, along lines which the Führer had cynically but astutely sketched in Mein Kampf. However, the dictatorship was also sustained by the threat, and reality, of state terror (see TERRORISM). The activities of the GESTAPO and the SICHERHEITSDIENST (SD) made a mockery of the rule of law. Increasing numbers of political opponents were herded into CONCENTRATION CAMPS (the earliest being developed at Dachau from 1933), whose well-publicized existence served as an open warning to dissidents. Jews constituted the clearest category of victims under assault from the regime. Already barred from many forms of employment, they suffered in September 1935 from the NUREMBERG LAWS which decreed their loss of citizenship and prohibited them from marrying (or having any other form of sexual liaison with) Aryans. In November 1938, moreover, Jewish businesses and synagogues were particularly targeted during the wave of violence associated with KRISTALLNACHT.

Successes in foreign policy also sustained the Nazi regime. The dynamism with which Hitler pursued revision of the Versailles settlement was a vital element in the cult of the Führerprinzip (leadership principle) that surrounded him. He ignored the prohibitions on conscription and rearmament, and withdrew Germany from the LEAGUE OF NATIONS in October 1933. In March 1936 he re-established a military presence in the Rhineland (see RHINELAND CRISIS), and later that year formed the Rome–Berlin AXIS with MUSSOLINI. During 1937–8 he ensured that the most senior military positions were taken over by officers supportive of his increasingly ambitious expansionist aims. By March 1938, when he secured the ANSCHLUSS with Austria, the Führer was able to begin fulfilling his hopes for the creation of some “Greater Germany” – a goal which BISMARCK had once spurned even before the victor-powers sought to condemn it in 1918–19 (see GERMAN UNIFICATION; PAN-GERMANISM). Further gains were made in September, when the MUNICH AGREEMENT forced the Czech government to cede the SUDETENLAND with its ethnic German population of some three million. The first clear confirmation that the Nazi concept of LEBENSRAUM involved an extension of “living space” into non-Germanic territories came with the invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. By late August Hitler's foreign minister, RIBBENTROP, had negotiated with MOLOTOV a NAZI–SOVIET PACT, whose “secret protocol” left the Reich free to proceed in September with the annexation of western Poland.

The military action facilitated by this temporary accommodation with STALIN'S regime was the immediate trigger for WORLD WAR II, during which the horrific implications of Nazism's attempt to build the quintessential “racial state” and to buttress this with a wider imperial NEW ORDER similarly structured on supposed principles of biological hierarchy eventually became plain. Towards the end of 1940 – by which time Hitler had won control over most of continental western Europe, though not over Britain – Hitler began the detailed planning of Operation BARBAROSSA, focused on an eastern campaign that would violate the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression agreement. Launched in June 1941, this invasion of the Soviet Union directly reflected Nazi ideas about the linkage between race and space – the need to expand Aryan territorial control, especially at the expense of the Slavic masses. The attack on Russia also stemmed from Hitler's obsession with Bolshevism as a product of Jewish conspiracy. In that sense, the eastern war cannot be viewed simply as the accidental occasion for the implementation of Nazism's so-called FINAL SOLUTION to the threat allegedly presented by the Jews. Rather, the possibility of undertaking such genocide was an essential part of the motivation behind the extension of the conflict deep into Soviet territory.

As the German armies advanced, the accompanying Einsatzgruppen (special security detachments) embarked on a process of mass murder. This was soon benefiting from the gassing techniques which had already been developed between 1939 and 1941 through the program of involuntary euthanasia that was inflicted on inmates of asylums holding those who suffered from chronic physical or mental illness. Especially after the WANNSEE CONFERENCE of January 1942, the killings became centered on a number of extermination camps purpose-built in Poland. It was, above all, the name of Auschwitz that came to symbolize those death-factories, to which Jews (and other supposed racial and political enemies, albeit in lesser numbers) were transported from all the countries of Europe over which Hitler had direct or indirect control.

At the apogee of Nazi power towards the end of 1942 (see Map 10), the Third Reich dominated an enlarged Greater Germany, held many further regions of western and eastern Europe under military occupation, and also controlled “satellite” regimes in countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Finland. Both in the operation of the extermination camps and in the overall administration of this extensive “New Order” an increasingly central role was played by the SCHUTZSTAFFEL (SS). Led by HIMMLER and supposedly constituting a racial elite, this was intended to form the vanguard for the triumph of the Nazis' continental, and potentially global, hegemony. Despite parading eugenic and other scientific or cultural pretensions, Himmler's organization became the main driving force behind a new barbarism. As the Reich itself seemed to be turning into “the SS state,” the Führer promised that, following victory, his colleague was destined to take over Burgundy as the heartland of a supranational Aryan order. This may have been the product of delusion, but not necessarily of any greater degree of dementia than that afflicting those genocidal aspects of Nazi racism that were indeed largely implemented.

Hitler's conception of Nazism ultimately focused not so much on an Aryan superiority that had already been achieved as on the concept of Volkwerdung – the challenge of eventually becoming a master race through long struggle. In that context, his reaction as the tides of war turned against him suggests a belief on his part that it was the German people who had failed him, rather than vice versa. Following his suicide and the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, the victorious Allies dissolved and banned the Nazi Party. At the NUREMBURG TRIALS they adjudged its leadership corps to have been an essentially criminal organization. While imitative xenophobic cults subsequently surfaced in Germany and elsewhere from time to time, such neo-Nazism (as distinct from some arguably less radical movements of broadly fascist style) failed to feature as anything more than a marginal force in European political development down to the early years of the twenty-first century.

Necker, Jacques (1732–1804), banker from Geneva and minister under LOUIS XVI of France. His Protestant origins prevented him from holding the post of controller-general of finances: instead, a “straw man” held that position while Necker exercised the functions of the post with the title Director-general of the Royal Treasury. During this first ministry (1776–81) he established a reputation for financial wizardry. His expertise in BANKING enabled him to fund French involvement in the American War of Independence not by raising taxes but by means of loans. His Compte-rendu of 1781, the first published account of royal finances, purportedly demonstrated a budgetary surplus. He resigned when the king refused his demand for a place on the Conseil du roi. In the troubled financial circumstances leading up to the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 he was recalled as the one man commanding investors' confidence. However, he dealt ineffectively with the growing political crisis during his second ministry (August 25, 1788–July 11, 1789), failing to provide clear direction to the ESTATES GENERAL. His dismissal by the king helped provoke the popular uprising on 14 July (see BASTILLE, FALL OF THE). Louis was forced to recall him for a third period in office (July 21–September 8, 1790), but Necker's initial popularity was waning and he found himself marginalized as the Revolution became more radical. He left France for Coppet near Geneva, where he spent his final years together with his daughter, the distinguished writer Madame de Staël.

Negrin, Juan (1892–1956), Prime Minister of SPAIN (1937–9). Born of wealthy parents, Negrin practiced as a doctor before being elected to the Cortes as a Socialist deputy in 1931. In September 1936, as part of the POPULAR FRONT now defending the SECOND REPUBLIC in the context of the SPANISH CIVIL WAR, he became finance minister. As such, he authorized the transfer of gold reserves to the Soviet Union, thus prompting allegations that he was a satrap of STALIN. A year later, as premier, he welcomed elements of the far left into his government and forged close links with the Communist Party that lost him support among moderate republicans. Acting also as minister of defense in 1938, he had little idea about how to save the military situation. He remained in Spain, however, until the very eve of FRANCO'S victory. Negrin then fled to France, where he attempted to create a government in exile and where (after a period in Britain during World War II) he spent his remaining years.

Nelson, Vice-Admiral Horatio, Viscount (1758– 1805), British naval hero. The son of a Norfolk clergyman, he entered the naval service in 1770 and benefited from the patronage of his uncle, a Controller of the Navy. His career rapidly advanced after Britain became involved in the FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS in February 1793. Initially commanding the 64-gun Agamemnon, he proceeded to serve in a series of engagements where he distinguished himself by his heroism and sometimes reckless behavior. These included Corsica (1794) where he lost his right eye; Cape Noli (1795); Cape St Vincent (1797) where he led a boarding party in person; Tenerife (1797) where he lost his right arm; Aboukir Bay (1798), where the destruction of the French fleet left the army of the future NAPOLEON I stranded in Egypt; COPENHAGEN (1801), for which he was advanced to Viscount; and TRAFALGAR (1805) where he was killed. In an era of tactical innovation, Nelson proved himself open to new ideas. His greatest attribute was as a leader of men, capable of inspiring and encouraging subordinates of all ranks by his accessibility, easy manner, self-confidence, and humane concern. Combined with his conspicuous bravery, disregard of personal safety, and devotion to a patriotic cause, this has secured his place within the pantheon of British national heroes. Particularly notable among his foreign honors was the dukedom of Brontë, conferred by Ferdinand I of Naples for services to the defense of the TWO SICILIES in 1798–9. (See also NAPOLEONIC WARS)

NEP (see NEW ECONOMIC POLICY)

Nesselrode, Karl Robert, Count (1780–1862), Russian diplomat and Foreign Minister (1817–56). Born at Lisbon to parents of Saxon origin, he followed his father's example and after a spell in the army entered the diplomatic service. In 1807 he helped ALEXANDER I to negotiate the treaties of TILSIT, and in 1814–15 served as the tsar's principal adviser at the VIENNA CONGRESS, where he successfully opposed the dismemberment of France. A close associate of METTERNICH, whose CONSERVATISM he shared, Nesselrode favored Russo-Austrian cooperation as a way of achieving the aims of the HOLY ALLIANCE. Accordingly he signed the MÜNCHENGRLSQUÄTZ CONVENTION in 1833 and sent troops to help Austria suppress the Hungarian rising in 1849 (see REVOLUTIONS OF 1848–9). In 1856, at the conclusion of his exceptionally long ministerial tenure, Nesselrode was influential in encouraging ALEXANDER II to end the CRIMEAN WAR by suing for peace.

Netherlands Towards the end of the eighteenth century the so-called Low Countries comprised the Habsburg-controlled AUSTRIAN NETHERLANDS to the south and an independent Dutch republic (also known as the United Provinces, and more loosely as Holland) to the north. While the former was predominantly Catholic, Protestantism prevailed on balance within the latter. The Dutch republic had developed as a major commercial and imperial power during the period before 1700, but then entered into decline amidst a series of conflicts won by its British and French rivals. There were domestic tensions too, as evidenced by the provincial revolt of 1787–8 abortively mounted against the centralizing ambitions of the republic's so-called Stadtholder. In the wake of “1789” and the eventual outbreak of general European warfare (see FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS; NAPOLEONIC WARS), the Dutch Netherlands fell under French control. This was manifest in the form first of the BATAVIAN REPUBLIC (1795–1806), and then of the kingdom of Holland which was ruled by NAPOLEON I'S brother Louis from 1806 to 1810 before being directly annexed into “Greater France.” After Bonaparte's final defeat in 1815, the VIENNA CONGRESS declined to restore the former Austrian Netherlands to Habsburg rule, and instead combined that southern region with the northern portion of the Low Countries. Headed by the House of Orange (whose dynastic authority also extended separately to LUXEMBURG until 1890), this United Kingdom of the Netherlands was one within which the Dutch community held the upper hand over the French-speaking Walloons to the south. However, in 1830 the latter rebelled, successfully seceding so as to create an independent BELGIUM.

Henceforth the term “Netherlands” came to denote simply the remaining Dutch area. In 1848 the country obtained a constitution broadly imitative of the British model, and eventually developed a distinctive and sophisticated politics of so-called PILLARIZATION to accommodate a growing diversity of religious and secular interest groups. Although Holland benefited from its maintenance of NEUTRALITY during the European conflict of 1914–18, it suffered five years of Nazi German occupation during WORLD WAR II. After 1945 the nation sought military and economic security through participation in such structures as NATO and the BENELUX grouping, and helped to promote EUROPEAN INTEGRATION as a founding member of “THE SIX.” Since the Dutch had retained certain parts of their earlier imperial conquests in the East Indies, the Caribbean, and Guiana (Surinam), they also became embroiled in the wider process of European DECOLONIZATION. Here their involvement was most painfully evident with regard to Indonesia. Valued particularly for its resources of oil and rubber, this was occupied by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. It then fought a successful four-year war of independence against Dutch attempts to re-impose colonial authority. However, by the early twenty-first century the Netherlands (with a current population of some 16.5 million) had recovered from such losses to develop a generally robust post-imperial economy. This was particularly strong in sectors such as electronics and petrochemical processing, as well as in agricultural exporting closely related to decades of investment in huge projects of sea-dyking and land reclamation. The country had also become notable for its internationalist approach to external affairs as well as for the subtleties of its “consociational” form of domestic multi-party political representation. It also had a reputation as a bastion of social toleration, as illustrated by generally “permissive” attitudes in matters of SEXUALITY and of drug usage. However, there were also signs of a tougher brand of populism, especially as cultivated by the so-called Freedom Party which argued in particular that Dutch culture and traditions now stood under threat from the increasing number of MUSLIMS (around 1 million by 2010) present in the Netherlands.

Neuilly, Treaty of Agreement concluded in November 1919 between the victor powers of WORLD WAR I and BULGARIA. As part of the PARIS PEACE SETTLEMENT, it penalized the defeated country through transfers of territory to GREECE, ROMANIA, and the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (see YUGOSLAVIA). Bulgaria lost its direct access to the Aegean, and was also compelled to make military reductions and REPARATION payments.

neutrality This concept is most regularly encountered by historians of diplomacy and WARFARE within the context of inter-state conflict, and as indicating the position taken by a country aiming at non-involvement. More precisely still, such neutrality is a form of non-belligerence that also entails strict impartiality as between the warring parties, though this requirement has tended to be more frequently acknowledged in principle than fully observed in practice. While reserving its rights to the “armed neutrality” of self-defense, a state may declare its neutral status with regard to a particular war, or otherwise to the conduct of wars in general. The latter and broader policy, often labeled “neutralism,” has sometimes reflected a country's own choice as to how best to protect its long-term interests, as instanced by the case of SWEDEN since 1814 or of IRELAND since 1939. However, such a generalized stance may also result from pressure imposed by stronger foreign powers, as exemplified in the stipulations about “permanent neutrality” accepted by SWITZERLAND since 1815, by BELGIUM in 1839 (but abandoned from 1919 until 1935–6, and then again since the 1940s), and by AUSTRIA since 1955.

From the eighteenth century onward, the relevant body of international law had been growing considerably. One significant humanitarian landmark was the first of the GENEVA CONVENTIONS, which in 1864 formalized the “neutralization” of all who might be engaged in aiding the wounded (see also RED CROSS). However, it was not until 1907 and the second of the HAGUE CONFERENCES that the rights and duties supposed to be mutually operative as between neutrals and belligerents (whether as states or as persons) were generally codified into something approaching their present form. One especially problematic area has always related to warfare on the high seas, where the protection of a neutral country's “territoriality” could not apply in any ordinary sense and other complexities have supervened instead. Prominent among them we find issues of commerce, such as those raising questions about the extent to which belligerents might be entitled to seize war-supporting “contraband” (often all too loosely defined) carried by neutral shipping towards enemy ports or even to mount indiscriminate “blockade.” These problems became particularly important whenever Europe engaged in maritime conflict that proved far-ranging and sustained, as was the case in the periods 1793–1814, 1914–18, and 1939–45 (see FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS; NAPOLEONIC WARS; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II).

In so far as the last of these epochs was one of “total war,” there can be little surprise that it should have witnessed the concept of neutrality coming under severe strain. For example, within the first year of World War II, the Soviet Union had violated the neutral status of FINLAND and the BALTIC STATES, and Nazi Germany had behaved similarly with regard to NORWAY, DENMARK, the NETHERLANDS, LUXEMBURG, and Belgium. Moreover, even where formal neutrality survived, the principle of impartiality was difficult to sustain: for instance, the survival of the UK during 1940–1 owed much to President Roosevelt's progressive weakening of the US Neutrality Act, while from 1940 to 1943 the Swedish government felt compelled to follow trading policies that contributed to the German war effort. Since 1945 the potentiality for nuclear conflict, particularly while it overshadowed COLD WAR confrontations in and beyond Europe, has further complicated the meaning and relevance of neutrality. So too, in a more constructive sense, has the advance of EUROPEAN INTEGRATION. MOLDOVA, SERBIA, and Switzerland feature among the states that currently profess some form of neutrality while remaining outside the European Union (EU). Even within it, however, variations of interpretation are no less evident among those members (Austria, Finland, Ireland, MALTA, and Sweden) whose desire to remain neutral prevents them from joining NATO as well. Only time will tell how far their different approaches to neutrality can be reconciled with the EU's supposed commitment to a common foreign policy.

New Economic Policy (NEP) This was introduced in 1921 by LENIN, as leader of Russia's new BOLSHEVIK regime. It was designed to replace the disastrous policies of so-called WAR COMMUNISM and signaled a partial retreat from state controls. Announced at the Tenth Party Congress, NEP permitted a mixed economy within the countryside. Peasants were required to meet state production targets of raw agricultural produce, as a tax-in-kind with quotas that were significantly smaller than those demanded in the days of War Communism. Anything the peasants produced beyond these levels they could keep for themselves and sell on the free market. Though always designed as a temporary expedient, enabling the state to focus on “the commanding heights of the economy” (namely heavy industry), the NEP worked well and rectified earlier food shortages. Yield levels soon reached and surpassed those of 1914. The NEP also facilitated the creation of state banks, the stabilization of the currency, and the availability of credit. However, it agitated the urban population which resented the prices set by rural traders. During the later 1920s it also increasingly worried STALIN, who had recently triumphed over TROTSKY and other rivals in the party leadership, and who sought to achieve his goal of “socialism in one country.” He believed that the NEP was reviving a form of bourgeoisie in the shape of the KULAKS, and that this threatened the new SOVIET UNION with a continuation of CAPITALISM. Stalin also feared that a partial free market in the countryside might serve to promote similar changes in industry and to widen opportunities for foreign investors. To reassert Bolshevik command of the economy, he abandoned the NEP at the 15th Party Congress in 1929, and replaced it with an emphasis on agricultural COLLECTIVIZATION and tighter state-planning of INDUSTRIALIZATION (see also FIVE-YEAR PLANS).

New Order HITLER'S vision of the future shape of continental Europe, once NAZISM had succeeded in dominating it from the Atlantic to the Urals (see also Map 10). The German defeat in WORLD WAR II meant that this scheme was never more than partially implemented; nor were its details ever definitively formulated. Nonetheless the broad outlines had become clear enough by the time that Nazi conquests were at their zenith late in 1942. Based directly on the ANTISEMITISM and the other forms of RACISM central to Hitler's ideology, the New Order (Neuordnung) was intended to be implemented across a Jew-free Europe (see FINAL SOLUTION). There the SCHUTZSTAFFEL (SS)) and other Reich authorities would turn the Slavs and other allegedly inferior breeds into the mere servants of a Teutonic (and, to a lesser degree, Nordic) hegemony, while also encouraging ethnic Germans to enlarge their own “living space” through schemes of resettlement particularly towards the east (see LEBENSRAUM; PAN-GERMANISM). Thus the vast expanses due to be seized from a defeated SOVIET UNION were destined essentially for a form of harshly exploitative colonial rule, exercised by means of military or para-military force wherever necessary. It was further envisaged that the overall European political structure would be dominated from a heartland based on the Greater German Reich, itself territorially expanded even beyond the version achieved by 1940. This would be buttressed by various degrees of more indirect Nazi control operating in northern, western, and southern Europe through allied or satellite states (such as Norway, Denmark, France, and Italy, as well as Slovakia, Hungary, and the countries of the BALKAN peninsula). Had the aerial assault on southern England (see BATTLE OF BRITAIN) produced a different outcome in 1940, the UK too would have been encompassed by some such framework. On the economic front, the New Order reflected notions of a single trading and currency bloc, whose material and labor resources would be coercively coordinated from Berlin, partly according to the model already developed by the state-owned Reichswerke and principally for the purposes of enhancing the prosperity and autarky of Greater Germany.

newspapers Forms of weekly or daily publication that probably originated in the seventeenth century, though it was not until the eighteenth that they became increasingly commonplace, at least in Britain and France. In both countries they were subject to censorship and a stamp tax, yet this did not stop them publishing gossip and licentious material. In France a “gutter press” has been seen as disseminating the ideas of a “low” ENLIGHTENMENT that paved the way for the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789. During that upheaval newspapers flourished, as they would at other phases of political crisis, for instance the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848–9 and the STUDENT REVOLTS OF 1968–9.

In Britain, concerns about a dissolute press led to the founding of The Times in 1785. Sympathetic to the Tories, it nonetheless exercised an independent influence on public opinion. This was illustrated in 1855 when its reporting of the CRIMEAN WAR helped topple the ABERDEEN government. Though radical, unregulated journals continued to appear alongside a strong working-class press represented by the Northern Star, the abolition of the stamp tax in 1855 paved the way for a series of new mainstream titles: the Daily Telegraph, Standard, and Morning Post. Provincial dailies first appeared at Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Manchester in the same year, the most influential of them being the well-established Manchester Guardian which converted from a bi-weekly. In continental Europe there was nothing to rival The Times and no national press as extensive as the British one. Censorship was generally severe, especially in Russia; yearly subscriptions were expensive; and titles tended to be urban-based. In RURAL SOCIETY, where LITERACY rates were low, peasants had little access to the printed word beyond the Bible, except for pamphlets (often tales of magic and the saints) sold by hawkers. Such sellers also operated in towns, though here people would tend to read newspapers in cafés and coffee shops. From the 1840s onward, newspaper editors sought to extend their readership by publishing novels in serial form, following the model of the Paris-based La Presse.

Major change came in the late nineteenth century. Rising literacy, new mechanical printing techniques, the growth of press agencies (Havas, Reuter, and Woolf), and mass-consumption advertising for the WORKING CLASS contributed to the emergence of a genuinely popular press. This often eschewed political reporting in favor of sensationalist news, replete with photographs and other illustrations. In Britain, the first of such titles was the Daily Mail, launched in 1896, cheaper than its rivals and soon boasting a circulation of 1.25 million. In France Le Petit Parisien, begun in 1876, had similar sales by 1902. In Germany papers were mainly regional, though the Berliner Morgenpost, established in 1896, had broad appeal. None of these journals had direct links to political parties, which tended to run their own organs, as did the Catholic Church. Governments too became more sophisticated in their ways of influencing content: either through the planting of disinformation (e.g. the EMS TELEGRAM) or through direct and indirect pressure on “press barons,” who had their own political axes to grind. In WORLD WAR I newspapers were an obvious propaganda instrument. Their value was similarly exploited in the contexts of FASCISM and COMMUNISM. In the Soviet Union Pravda became the official voice of the party, while the Völkischer Beobachter was similarly significant for the Nazis. Conversely, during WORLD WAR II, RESISTANCE organizations prized clandestine journals as a means of expressing a different view from that purveyed by the German-controlled media.

In post-1945 western Europe newspapers enjoyed a renaissance, with some Resistance journals (e.g. Combat within France) converting into dailies. They also became larger in size, eventually incorporating colored weekend sections. Such development reflected not only their readers' growing affluence but also a need to confront the rivalry from television. By the early twenty-first century another significant challenge, operative across Europe at large, was coming from the internet. Though this was killing off provincial titles in many regions, it did at least tend towards promoting freedom of expression – all the more precious in an age when printed newspapers were being absorbed into wider “media conglomerates” under ownership concentrated into ever-fewer hands. (See also COMMUNICATIONS)

Nice, Treaty of, 2001 (see under EUROPEAN INTEGRATION)

Nicholas I (1796–1855), Tsar of RUSSIA (1825–55). On coming to the throne after the unexpected death of his brother ALEXANDER I, Nicholas had immediately to deal with the DECEMBRIST CONSPIRACY which sought to remove him and initiate reforms. This plot confirmed him in his reactionary views and thereafter his policies were characterized by an increasing authoritarianism and resistance to change. Though he recognized the dangers posed by SERFDOM and established a number of investigatory committees, he repeatedly refrained from implementing reforms lest these destabilize the existing social and political order. Instead, he expanded the state's mechanisms of repression, including the army and the secret police. The latter, together with its network of spies and informers, comprised the notorious Third Section of the imperial chancellery, and was used to stamp out dissidence. Nicholas's enthusiasm for RUSSIFICATION prompted him to support the Orthodox Church (see ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY) and to discriminate against minority religious and ethnic groups including JEWS, MUSLIMS, Catholics, Ukrainians, and Tartars. Moreover, the VIENNA CONGRESS of 1814–15 had placed most of the former Polish territories under Russian rule, allowing the nineteenth-century tsars to style themselves kings of POLAND. There too Nicholas's repressive policies (nicely summed up by his minister of education as “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality”) caused particularly acute tensions that contributed to triggering the Polish uprising of 1830–1. The insurrection was ruthlessly suppressed, and Poland lost both its representative institutions and its autonomous status within the Russian Empire. Nicholas was equally prepared to use force against nationalist movements abroad, intervening to help the Habsburgs crush an uprising in Hungary during the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848–9. In 1853 he intervened against Turkey (see TURKEY AND EUROPE) in support of his claim to be recognized as protector of the Christians within the Ottoman empire, and thus helped provoke the CRIMEAN WAR. Russia's humiliation during that conflict highlighted the extent to which Nicholas's policies had prevented the modernization of Russia's institutions and economy, and led his successor, ALEXANDER II, to embark upon a series of reforms.

Nicholas II (1868–1918), Tsar of RUSSIA (1894–1917). He had little experience of government before succeeding his father, ALEXANDER III, in 1894. In that same year he married Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Though a staunch believer in the autocratic Romanov tradition, Nicholas himself was a weak character, unduly influenced by his wife and unwilling to trust his ministers. Any hint of political dissent was repressed, while in the frontier regions Nicholas pursued a policy of RUSSIFICATION. In 1904, in the quest for an empire to rival those being assembled by rival powers, Russia invaded Manchuria. This sparked the disastrous RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR of 1904–5. While being humiliated by a non-European power, Nicholas's regime was troubled at home by bad harvests and industrial discontent, which culminated in the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905. As a sop to the revolutionaries, the tsar issued the OCTOBER MANIFESTO, conceded the DUMA, and entrusted STOLYPIN with agrarian reform. The experience of revolution did not, however, shake his belief in autocracy, and from 1906 he increasingly trusted in the maverick RASPUTIN who claimed an ability to treat the hemophilia of crown prince Alexis. In 1914 Russia entered WORLD WAR I on the side of Britain and France. In the following year the Tsar made the fateful decision to take direct supreme command of his armies. Being wholly unsuited to this role and frequently away from the capital, he became associated with military setbacks and the economic stringencies of the war. In March 1917 Nicholas was forced to abdicate (see RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1917). His fate was effectively finalized when the BOLSHEVIKS seized power in November that year. Fearful that he would become the leader of the White counter-revolutionaries, his captors took him and his family to the Urals and eventually executed them at Ekaterinberg in July 1918. Not until eighty years later, in the post-communist epoch, did their remains receive ceremonial reburial in the city (once more named St Petersburg) from which the last of the Tsars had ruled.

Night of the Long Knives The purge of STURMABTEILUNG (SA) leaders that began in Germany on June 30, 1934, under HITLER'S orders. During the early months of Nazi rule (see NAZISM), RÖHM and other “brownshirt” chiefs who felt as yet inadequately rewarded became further discontented by the new regime's unwillingness to adopt tougher policies against the vested interests of industrialists and JUNKERS. They also resented Hitler's resistance to their urgings that the SA should become a real people's army, even to the point of absorbing the Wehrmacht. Once GOERING and HIMMLER had convinced Hitler that a putsch from Röhm was imminent, the retaliation was brutal and swift. In the course of three days some hundreds were murdered by the army and by Himmler's SCHUTZSTAFFEL (SS), including certain critics of the regime (such as Gregor Strasser and the ex-chancellor Kurt von Schleicher) who had little to do with the SA itself. This purge offered some reassurance to the Wehrmacht, but over the longer term it was no less significant for speeding the rise of the SS as a far more sinister rival force.

Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910). Generally recognized as a key figure in the development of nursing whose principles, initially gathered together in Notes on Nursing (1860), still inform the practice of the modern profession. Born into a well-to-do family, she trained at Kaiserswerth where the Protestant pastor Theodor Fliedner had recently founded an educational program for nurses. However, it was the CRIMEAN WAR that offered her the opportunity to break out of the stifling restrictions of Victorian middle-class female existence to which she would otherwise have felt condemned (see also FEMINISM). She was charged with nursing the troops, while based from 1854 at Scutari in Anatolia. She combated the appalling medical and hygiene conditions by reorganizing every aspect of hospital care, often in the face of opposition from the medical and army establishment but with the backing of the secretary of state for war, Sidney Herbert. On her return to England, and despite the ill health which dogged her for the remainder of her life, she used her national fame as “the Lady with the Lamp” to undertake further reform of the army's medical services and to raise funds for the establishment of a nursing school as part of St Thomas's Hospital in London.

nihilism While philosophers may be left to debate the cogency of such “belief in nothing,” historians encounter this label more concretely within the context of revolutionary ideas in RUSSIA during the second half of the nineteenth century. There nihilists such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Sergei Nechaev argued that prevailing familial and religious traditions, and indeed all other aspects of the tsarist social and political order, were entirely devoid of features worthy of approval or toleration. Even though their movement generally lacked organizational coherence, a group infused with these ideas of radical negation did succeed in 1881 in assassinating ALEXANDER II. As D. I. Pisarev had earlier declared, “What can be smashed, must be smashed.” As for the limitations of such a mindset, these were most acutely captured by Ivan Turgenev, through the character of Bazarov within his novel Fathers and Sons (1862). (See also ANARCHISM)

Nivelle, Robert Georges (1856–1924), French general of WORLD WAR I, best known for the disastrous Chemin des Dames offensive of 1917. A professional artilleryman, Nivelle saw service in the colonies, rising to the rank of colonel. His effective use of firepower at the battles of the MARNE and Aisne ensured promotion to general in October 1914. In 1916, at VERDUN, his name was associated with the recapture of the Douaumont fort. A persuasive talker, fluent in English because of his mother's background, he seemed in late 1916 the ideal replacement for JOFFRE as commander-in-chief. A believer in artillery fire, Nivelle developed a plan for a large-scale offensive due to bring success within 48 hours. While the British launched a diversionary raid on Arras, French infantry, under intense artillery cover, would attack the Arras–Soissons–Reims salient, a front coinciding with the Chemin des Dames highway. Launched on April 16, 1917, this assault was a disaster. The Germans knew of the plan beforehand; the attackers lacked the necessary firepower; and Nivelle never truly won over doubters among French politicians and generals who halted the assault at the end of the month. On May 15 Nivelle was replaced by PÉTAIN who had to deal with widespread mutinies among troops sickened at the senseless slaughter. Nivelle was sent to North Africa, not to return to France until after the war. He never wrote any memoirs to justify an offensive that cost the lives of 150,000 men.

NKVD Russian abbreviation for the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, one of the principal secret police organizations in the SOVIET UNION and a key element in the GREAT PURGES conducted by STALIN. Founded in 1934 out of the United State Political Administration (OGPU), which had earlier incorporated the CHEKA, it ran the GULAG, supervised the attack on the KULAKS, spied on ordinary citizens, and was prominent in the show trials of KAMENEV, ZINOVIEV, BUKHARIN, and others. During WORLD WAR II the NKVD conducted counter-intelligence, alongside a range of strategic, economic, and other tasks which it performed with exceptional brutality and ruthlessness (see also KATYN MASSACRE). After 1945 it underwent further name changes and internal reorganization, emerging as the KGB in 1954.

nomenklatura Russian term for a list of nominees. In the SOVIET UNION, and after 1945 more generally across Soviet-controlled eastern Europe, it could be formally applied to all of those whose jobs in the state apparatus remained essentially dependent on sponsorship and approval from the Communist Party (see COMMUNISM). Its commoner usage tended to be more restrictive, with a focus rather on some tighter ruling elite comprising the key state and party officials.

Nordic Council Inter-parliamentary consultative body formed in 1952 by the countries of SCANDINAVIA. The founding members were DENMARK, ICELAND, NORWAY, and SWEDEN, to whose number FINLAND was added in 1955. The Council set out to promote regional cooperation in economic and social policy, transport and COMMUNICATIONS, cultural affairs, and judicial matters. In recent times issues of environmental protection also have become more prominent. From the 1990s this Nordic grouping developed increasingly close links with the Baltic Council created by the re-established states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (see BALTIC STATES).

Normandylandings Beginning on June 6, 1944, these marked within the context of WORLD WAR II the launching of the Allied assault against German forces in northwestern Europe. Plans for a seaborne invasion had begun immediately after the DUNKIRK EVACUATION, and in August 1942 Canadian forces attempted an abortive raid on Dieppe. It was not, however, until the CASABLANCA CONFERENCE of January 1943 that the Allies thought seriously about an invasion, initiating a planning group, known as COSSAC (chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander). Various landing grounds were considered and dismissed, including the Low Countries and the Channel coastline, because they were too heavily defended and formed an integrated part of the Germans' Atlantic Wall. Instead, the Allies settled on Normandy where it was agreed that the priority was to seize a bridgehead which could be retained for at least three months so as to allow the passage of sufficient troops, armor, and supplies. As men and equipment were secretly built up in southern England, in February 1944 the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was established to supersede COSSAC, and assigned the task of making detailed preparations for the assault phase and for the wider invasion campaign (coded “Neptune” and “Overlord” respectively). Weather and surprise were regarded as all important, with June 5 being agreed upon as D-Day. In the event, heavy seas postponed the operation for 24 hours. Naturally enough, the Germans had been anticipating an assault, but false intelligence and diversionary tactics left them bemused as to the exact landing points. The German commanders Rundstedt and ROMMEL were also in disagreement as to how an invasion could be best repelled, and the flexibility of their response was hampered by a cumbersome command system. Rommel was especially aware that successive Anglo-American bombing raids meant the Allies had control of the skies. Meanwhile, on the ground, sabotage by partisan groups had disrupted German positions, though the Allies never entrusted the RESISTANCE with plans of D-Day for fear they would fall into enemy hands. Even as FREE FRENCH leader, DE GAULLE was not told the date of the landings. These started at dawn on June 6 when 23,000 paratroopers were dropped either side of the invasion beaches, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Here, British, American, Canadian, and Free French forces were disembarked shortly after dawn. Though German defenses had been softened up by an intense barrage launched by the invasion fleet, stiff resistance was met by the Americans at “Omaha,” and overall the Allies suffered 10,000 casualties. By that evening, however, with the assistance of artificial harbors (mulberries), the Allies had secured a precious foothold and had landed approximately 135,000 men, plus enormous quantities of armor. By early July, nearly a million men and yet more military material had followed. However, the Normandy campaign would be tough going, and months of further heavy fighting ensued before the Allies reached Germany itself.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (see NATO)

North German Confederation Supplanting the GERMAN CONFEDERATION founded in 1815, this union of 23 states north of the River Main was formally established in 1867, the year after BISMARCK'S victory in the AUSTRO-PRUSSIAN WAR. It confirmed Austria's removal from schemes of GERMAN UNIFICATION, thus prompting FRANZ JOSEPH I to undertake a separate reorganization of his own HABSBURG EMPIRE via the AUSGLEICH. The new Prussian-led confederation also excluded the other predominantly Catholic states of southern Germany, most notable BAVARIA, WÜRTTEMBERG, and Baden. Given the choice of creating their own union, they nonetheless retained close links with the north through the ZOLLVEREIN and were soon part of an elaborate set of offensive-defensive alliances orchestrated by Bismarck. As for the Confederation itself, this reflected certain annexations that enlarged Prussia's own territory and also featured a constitution weighted in favor of Berlin. Within the federal framework (see FEDERALISM[1]), the Prussian monarch was to be president and commander-in-chief, charged with the conduct of foreign policy and declarations of war. He was also entrusted with the appointment of the chief minister. So as to satisfy particularist sentiments, each member state retained its own government and sent representatives to the Bundesrat (Federal Council), but this was a body of limited authority with its voting fixed to ensure Prussian predominance. As a gesture towards LIBERALISM, Bismarck consented to the creation of a Reichstag elected on the basis of universal male suffrage, yet he allocated it few significant functions beyond budgetary debate. In the words of his king, WILLIAM I, the North German Confederation was little more than “the extended arm of Prussia.” It provided the vehicle for Bismarck to move towards challenging France in 1870. Victory in the FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR enabled him to dispense with the Confederation as such. However, its constitutional arrangements did influence the replacement structure. This still left Austria aside, but reintegrated the smaller southern states into what now became a federal GERMAN EMPIRE (further enlarged by annexation of ALSACE-LORRAINE), as inaugurated under Prussian leadership in January 1871.

Norway This country, with an estimated current population of 4.8 million, lies along the northern and western coastline of continental SCANDINAVIA and has borders with SWEDEN, FINLAND, and RUSSIA. Its sovereignty also extends to the Spitsbergen archipelago, deep inside the Arctic region. Having come under the rule of DENMARK in 1523, the Norwegians successfully claimed in 1807 the right to have their own parliament. When the VIENNA CONGRESS of 1814–15 endorsed a union of crowns involving transfer of sovereignty to Sweden (see also BERNADOTTE), Norway managed to preserve a significant measure of autonomy for its own liberal institutions. In the course of the nineteenth century it became the scene for a vigorous cultural NATIONALISM. By the 1880s parliamentary governance was firmly entrenched, and universal male suffrage was achieved in 1898. This served to fuel pressure for independence, and in 1905 the link with Sweden was peacefully dissolved. A dynasty of Danish origin now provided, in the person of Haakon VII, the first modern monarch of independent Norway. In 1913 his country was among the first to introduce universal female suffrage (see FEMINISM; GENDER). Having maintained NEUTRALITY during World War I, it hoped to avoid direct involvement in WORLD WAR II as well. However, in April 1940 Norway found itself under invasion from Germany, which was keen to control vital mineral resources and to exert a tighter strategic hold over neutral Sweden. HITLER'S forces swept aside an Anglo-French attempt at intervention, established a military occupation, and (with the ageing Haakon VII beginning a wartime exile in London) instituted a puppet regime nominally controlled by the Norwegian Nazi sympathizer, QUISLING.

After the war Norway abandoned its neutralist stance, and in 1949 became a founding member of NATO. Three years later it helped to create the NORDIC COUNCIL. In 1960 it participated in the inauguration of the EUROPEAN FREE TRADE ASSOCIATION, but in 1963 failed in its bid to join the European Community (EC). Thereafter the issue of deepening Norway's involvement in the project of EUROPEAN INTEGRATION continued to be a live one. However, in 1972 the Norwegians voted by quite a close margin against their government's recommendation to enter the EC, and in 1994 they produced a similar referendum result spurning the opportunity of admission into what had meanwhile become the European Union. By settling simply for association with the looser European Economic Area, they showed themselves content to follow policies divergent from those adopted by Denmark at the earlier point as well as by Sweden and Finland at the later one. The Norwegians' inclination to take this distinctive line was enhanced by the prosperity that had started to flow from the exploitation of major sources of oil and natural gas lying under their areas of the North Sea. This was the basis on which a marginal majority of voters hoped to maintain a higher degree of state intervention than “Brussels” seemed likely to allow – one which in Norway had become deeply influenced by models of social democracy and WELFARISM and which had proved capable of subsidizing the more traditional economic sectors of agriculture, fishing, and maritime trade.

Novara, Battles of Situated some 45 km (28 miles) west of Milan at a strategically significant COMMUNICATIONS point, Novara has been the site of several military engagements. In the nineteenth century two of these occurred in the context of an emerging Italian nationalist sentiment.

[1] 1821. Faced by a mutiny in the army of PIEDMONT-SARDINIA and by demands for a constitution, Victor Emmanuel I abdicated and his brother, CHARLES FELIX, became due to replace him. CHARLES ALBERT, his more liberal-minded cousin, stepped in as temporary regent but Charles Felix appealed to Austria for tougher help. On April 8 Austrian forces crushed the rebellion at Novara.

[2] 1849. The second engagement occurred during the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848–9 as part of the widening struggle for ITALIAN UNIFICATION. In 1849, following their victory the previous year at CUSTOZZA, Austrian forces under RADETZKY occupied Lombardy. A Piedmontese army, led by Charles Albert (king since 1831), opposed them but was roundly defeated at Novara on March 22–23. This battle brought to a close the first Italian War of Unification. Piedmont was obliged to pay an indemnity and Charles Albert abdicated in favor of his son VICTOR EMMANUEL II.

Novi Pazar, Sanjak of Administrative region (sanjak) of the Ottoman empire (see TURKEY AND EUROPE), forming a mountainous corridor of separation between MONTENEGRO and SERBIA. Though it remained under formal Turkish sovereignty even after the BERLIN CONGRESS of 1878, the Austrians were permitted to occupy the Sanjak as a strategically vital obstacle to the growing territorial ambitions of the newly-independent Serbs. Only after annexing BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA in 1908 did Austria withdraw. During the BALKAN WARS of 1912–13 Serbia and Montenegro at last managed to partition Novi Pazar between them, and following World War I it was incorporated into YUGOSLAVIA.

Novotny, Antonín (1904–75), First Secretary of the Communist Party of CZECHOSLOVAKIA (1953–68), and State President (1957–68). As an advocate of COMMUNISM, he was imprisoned during WORLD WAR II by the Nazis (see NAZISM) in the CONCENTRATION CAMP at Mauthausen. He joined his party's central committee in 1946, and participated in the successful Communist coup of 1948. After the internal purges of discredited comrades that started in 1951, he succeeded GOTTWALD as party leader. Having added the headship of state in 1957, he then dominated national politics for a further decade. He remained an unreconstructed Stalinist (see STALIN), but also opposed Moscow's demands for permanent stationing of Soviet troops within Czechoslovakia's borders. Novotny's rule was ended by the PRAGUE SPRING of 1968. Even when that brief period of liberalization was reversed by Soviet invasion, he was not reinstated.

Nuremberg laws Two decrees proclaimed by HITLER'S regime at the Nazi party rally on September 15, 1935. The first deprived Germany's JEWS of the full citizenship that was now reserved for “Aryans.” The second sought “protection of German blood and honor” by prohibiting marriage or any other sexual liaison between Jews and non-Jews. These laws, which provided early public confirmation of the centrality of RACISM to the practice as well as the theory of NAZISM, constituted a major landmark in the escalation of ANTISEMITISM under the Third Reich.

Nuremberg trials Criminal proceedings against the principal surviving representatives of the former Nazi regime (see NAZISM) that were conducted in Bavaria from November 1945 to April 1949. In the opening phase, lasting until October 1946, those cases accorded highest priority were amalgamated into a single set of hearings before a specially-constituted International Military Tribunal (IMT). The membership of this unprecedented body, like that of the prosecuting teams, was supplied by the four powers occupying Germany at the end of WORLD WAR II. Despite having begun by advocating merely some form of summary execution, the British government eventually agreed with the USA, the Soviet Union, and France about mounting a full-scale judicial action. Together they pressed charges concerning conspiracy, crimes against peace, and war crimes, as well as ones newly categorized as “crimes against humanity.” The final roster of 22 defendants included GOERING, HESS, RIBBENTROP, PAPEN, and SPEER, together with BORMANN who was tried in absentia. The concluding judgment produced twelve sentences of death and seven of imprisonment, together with three acquittals. The court also formally proclaimed the criminality of certain Nazi organizations (e.g. the SCHUTZSTAFFEL (SS) and the GESTAPO). During the hearings most of the accused had unconvincingly denied any significant knowledge of the worst excesses of the HITLER regime. They had also generally sought to exploit every opportunity of highlighting the unfairness of “victors' justice.” While there was certainly scope for embarrassing the Western allies (e.g. over Anglo-American saturation bombing of civilian targets), the defendants' counter-claims looked more plausible still when aimed at the Soviet Union over issues such as the KATYN MASSACRE and the secret protocol to the NAZI–SOVIET PACT. By late 1946 COLD WAR tensions had advanced to the point where there was no longer any real prospect of fulfilling earlier expectations about a continuing role for four-power judicial collaboration at Nuremberg. Thus the trials of the second phase were conducted there not by the IMT but simply by US military tribunals. The 12 separate sets of so-called “subsequent proceedings” focused on different areas of criminal conduct within the Third Reich (as perpetrated, for example, by industrialists, civil servants, military doctors, or SS units). Death sentences were implemented against 24 of the 185 charged by the US prosecutors, while 20 were condemned to jail for life and 87 to shorter terms of imprisonment. Viewed overall, the IMT and the American proceedings each did a great deal to illuminate the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship and thus to create better prospects for democratic stability in at least the western half of occupied Germany. In the wider context of aspirations to strengthen the mechanisms of global justice, however, much of the potential legacy of the initial four-power phase of collaboration was slow to be exploited. Not until the civil war of the early 1990s was well under way in YUGOSLAVIA would Europe witness the creation of another international criminal court, based at The Hague (see HAGUE TRIBUNALS), possessing at least some features comparable to those of the Nuremberg IMT.