Reconfiguring Nationalism: The Roll Call of the Fallen Soldiers (1800–2001)

Abstract

Devastating tragedies, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the massacre during the Polish protests of 1970, are still commemorated with a roll call of the victims’ names, which is publicly pronounced. As a matter of civil or political religion, this ritual is studied by political scientists and sociologists and restricted to a specific national context. For the first time, a comparative method of history of religions is applied in order to retrace the transnational diffusion of this nationalist ritual from the Napoleonic era, passing through the fascist European experience, to the present day. The changing of the aesthetic forms in which the ritual took and takes shape, by producing images of the community gathered, outlines an aesthetic realization of ‘imagined communities.’ This outline will be examined with reference to Benedict Anderson’s theory on the origin and spread of nationalism.

Patriotism as a Political Religion: Its History, Its Ambiguities, and the Case of Hungary

“…The very word "ceremony" indicates, however, that the feast had its own liturgy, and similar liturgies were held for the commemoration of those who died for the "immortal fatherland" (patria immortale, another explicitly religious reference). The "roll call" of fallen soldiers is but one example of the new political religion of the nation-state (Severino 2017), and many other symbolic manifestations would appear in later decades, the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument, which was also called the "Altar of the Fatherland" (Altare della Patria) just like its French counterpart in 1790, until Mussolini could confidently declare in the early 20th century that despite all its allegedly secular features, fascism treated "Italy as a religion" (Rohe 1922).…”