National Sentiment: Nation Building and Emotional Language in Nineteenth-Century Finland

During the course of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the term “national sentiment” was coined and subsequently established in several European languages. The emergence of the term in several different languages at roughly the same time is indicative of changes both in the experiences of nationhood and of emotion. This chapter explores the development of the term “national sentiment” in Finnish public discourse and argues that it was transformed during the course of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, it denoted an individualistic feeling that romantic intellectuals hoped people would turn to, whereas it later became a description of a collective emotion. It was used to describe the atmosphere among one of the nationalities in Finland in particular, or the Russian empire in general. In this process, the term became more restrictive and lost its links to performing emotions relating to the nation.