While Napoleon was celebrating the birth of his heir,
his problems throughout Europe were on the rise. In particular,
nationalist sentiments emerged all over the continent, as people
again desired the British goods the Continental System deprived
them of, and became increasingly disgusted with Napoleon's egomania.
In Britain, opposition to Napoleon ("Old Boney") became almost
a national religion. While the British lower classes were suffering
during the Industrial Revolution and might have rebelled otherwise,
the opposition to Napoleon's control of almost all of Western Europe
greatly unified Britain and prevented such a rebellion from happening.
While Britain was helped along a liberal path, Spanish resistance took
the form of conservatism, as the Spanish fought to restore the old
Bourbon family to the Spanish throne.
In Germany (the Confederation of the Rhine), hatred of
Napoleon and the French also began to mount. The reaction against Napoleon
was so great that many intellectuals started to reject French Enlightenment
Rationalism in favor a new intellectual trend called "Romanticism."
One German Romantic, Herder, contradicted the Enlightenment ideal
that all nations progressed toward one goal. Rather, Herder claimed,
each nation had its own particular "genius." Napoleon thus touched
off a new school of thought in Germany. Furthermore, Napoleon
showed the Germans the kind of power that could be achieved through
a strong centralized state. Napoleon thus helped to inspire the
previously loosely federated Germans to form a nation-state; some
scholars speculate that memories of Napoleonic order and unity
may have contributed to the German people's acceptance of Nazism.
