Like the words ‘history’ and ‘revolution’, the word ‘nation’ underwent a dramatic process of semantic inflation. People used it ‘with an almost universal confidence in its legitimizing power’.[139] It didn’t seem to matter that it signified contradictory things. It became a word through which time flowed. The path towards a fuller form of nationhood seemed for many people the only imaginable way into the future. In a commentary published on 22 April 1848, the Helsinki-based Finnish newspaper Suometar captured this sense of movement and destiny. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the
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