Over the course of the nineteenth century, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church made no secret of their antipathy to nationalism.1 In June 1887, shortly after his appointment as Vatican Secretary of State by Pope Leo XIII, Cardinal Rampolla circulated to papal nuncios an instruction warning of the dangers of the ’so-called nationality right’. ‘If’, he wrote, ‘an attempt were made to apply it
... [Show full abstract] [the nationality principle] to existing states it would become the source of universal disturbance. Society would revert again to the era of barbarian invasions accomplished under the exclusive reign of material force.’2 This hostility to ‘bottom-up’ nationalism - the claims of putatively sovereign people - was, of course, especially vociferous in relation to Italian unification, which had dismantled the Papal States and put an end to the temporal power of the popes. But the Church’s legitimist stance was expressed with striking severity even in cases such as the Polish insurrection of 1831, where a majority-Catholic national movement, invoking the memory of an earlier state that had itself been dismantled by force, challenged a non-Catholic monarch.3
