Crowd studies and studies of ‘social protest’ – food riots, rough music and charivari, iconoclasm and religious violence, rick-burning and machine-breaking, but also insurrections, contentious gatherings, and all forms of tumultuous assembly – became one of the earliest achievements of social history during the 1960s. Inspired by George Rudé and Charles Tilly, soon to be joined by Edward Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis, a wealth of new research began accumulating, concentrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rapidly expanding across periods and societies. Recuperating the coherence behind seemingly irrational collective actions, this work profoundly changed how the forms of popular politics can be understood, shaping varied repertoires of inquiry that have continued to unfold ever since.
In defining the distinctiveness of this fine collection of essays, Matthias Reiss sees a key break in the 1990s, with the end of the dominance of social history, suggesting that interest then shifted from an older ‘focus on class and social conflict’ and ‘the often limited direct sociopolitical impact of organized public protest’ to a ‘new focus … on its various forms and meanings’. As he puts it, ‘The interest of those who still did research in this field shifted from the instrumental aspects of public protest to the use of symbols, rituals, space, and narratives to create and foster social identity’ (p. 4). Yet the sharpness of the separation of ‘the social’ and ‘the cultural’ can easily be overdrawn. The best of the earlier work was always already cultural in its approach. Davis's essays collected in Society and culture in early modern Europe (1975) or Thompson's in Customs in common (1991) inscribed the complexities marked by Reiss right from the very beginning. In other words the literatures on collective action and social protest, in sociology as well as in social history, have shown far greater capacity for renewal than Reiss allows. Toward the end of his career even Tilly began writing interestingly about culture.
These reflections somewhat relativize the stronger claims this volume makes for itself. Its contents are actually concerned with a very specific category of collective actions, namely organized protest marches and their varying place in the gradually democratizing liberal-constitutionalist polities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, overwhelmingly located in central and western Europe, with two additional essays on Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (Nikola D. Dimitrov's ‘Streets of anger: opposition protests in Belgrade and Sofia during the winter months of 1996–1997’) and the United States (Simon Hall's ‘Marching on Washington: the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s’). The three opening essays charged with framing the volume's methodological assumptions and implications in cross-disciplinary terms (Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott from psychology, David Gilbert from geography, and Dieter Rucht from sociology) do something to situate the topic internationally, notably in Gilbert's brief treatment of the Narmada Bachao Andolan ‘Rally for the Valley’ protests in northern India in 1999. Danielle Tartakowsky's valuable reflection on the contemporary erosion of a long-established ‘national repertory of collective action’ in France (‘Is the French manif still specific? Changes in French street demonstrations’) also invokes the growing salience of transnational contexts for the staging of popular political interventions. But though important, these gestures remain merely suggestive. The interest of the volume remains European.
The contents are distributed into four parts. Three essays deal with the now obligatory ‘long nineteenth century’ (which, however, begins only in 1832): Pia Nordblom's vignette of the early-nineteenth-century rhythms of ‘resistance, protests, and demonstrations’, which she constructs around the Hambach Festival; Hugh LeCaine Agnew's excellent ‘Demonstrating the nation: symbol, ritual, and political protest in Bohemia, 1867–1875’, and Birgitta Bader-Zaar's suggestive but too brief comparative analysis of pre-1914 women's suffrage demonstrations in Britain, the United States, Germany, Austria, and France. Another three contributors deal with the interwar years, focusing on the street politics of Manchester and Munich during the instability surrounding the end of the First World War (Adam R. Seipp), the protest marches of the British unemployed (Reiss himself), and the street violence of the Italian Fascist and Nazi combat formations before the respective seizures of power (Sven Reichardt, in an especially outstanding essay). A third section, titled ‘Marches in the city’, provides a miscellany of contributions on Zurich between 1830 and 1940 (Christian Koller), Washington D.C. in the 1960s (Hall), Belgrade and Sofia in 1996–1997 (Dimitrov), and Northern Ireland during the peace process of the mid-1990s (Neil Jarman), but while each provides a consistently high quality of analysis, the larger conceptual issues concerning urban political space are only unevenly engaged. The same foreshortening characterizes the final section of the volume, which in addition to Tartakowsky's essay includes Holger Nehring's sovereign comparison of the British and West German anti-nuclear movements during 1958–1964 and Fabian Virchow's study of the contemporary street marching of the German extreme Right. Despite the illuminating intelligence of the individual contributions, in other words, this collection betrays the too-familiar limitation of the conference-volume form. Almost inevitably, in the absence of any essay specifically pulling the contents together, the volume ends inconclusively.
