Name of the social body generated by the bourgeoisie when it effectively leads the whole of society in a given territory. From a materialist point of view the nation emerges in parallel to the constitution of a national market and is oriented towards the consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie through a national state.
The birth of the nation
Before the bourgeois revolution, and contrary to the glowing hagiography the bourgeoisie makes of itself, the nation as a social body forming a united people was incomprehensible.
Absolutist kings had been adding regions to their domains through the comings and goings of the seemingly endless European dynastic conflicts, regions which for the most part still retained their charters (fueros) and were strictly divided into classes and groups on the basis of legal privileges. These conflicts followed no national logic; rather, they responded to the infighting between the dynastic houses scattered throughout Europe. Sumptuary laws (restricting the type of clothing each class could wear and the activities in which it could take part), linguistic variation and feudalizing festivals continually insisted on the local particularities of the division of power in each society.
When the death of the old feudal mode by material and productive suffocation, as well as the outlines of a new mode of production arising from agrarian "improvement" and mercantilism, became evident, the bourgeoisie and the thriving agrarian petty bourgeoisie applied themselves to the idea of "constituting" the nation out of the "third estate" on the ruins of the old fractured and hierarchical society. The first European constitutions do not only establish the state, they establish the nation. Maps change, a more or less explicit "civil religion" is created, cults of the flag and the fatherland are instituted, and the military career is opened to the bourgeoisie and, to a lesser degree, to the petty bourgeoisie and sections of the artisans.
The detachments of national guards from the various regions which between 1789 and 1790 declared their loyalty to the French nation did not do so out of divine illumination, but because the cult of the nation turned into its priests a mass of civil servants, soldiers and concession-holders from the non-noble classes such as had never existed before. The new liberal state would be the main avenue of social advancement for the petty bourgeoisie and the main tool for accelerating the accumulation of the brand-new national bourgeoisie. The national "spirit", which from Herder onwards would claim to be eternal and ancestral, was beginning to emanate forcefully from its material reality: the new bourgeois state.