The emergence of mass politics was arguably the defining circumstance of late nineteenth-century Europe. Historians have tended to explain it with reference to developments of the same period, such as rises in rates of literacy and education, nationalism, and new emancipatory movements. The study under consideration here opens up a fascinating new temporal perspective on the politicization—in the broader sense—of common people. It picks up the story during the French revolutionary era and brings it down through the Vormärz. The well-known thesis from the 1960s of the German sociologist, Jürgen Habermas, on the rise of the “public sphere,” which had great impact in the German-speaking world but was already a well-studied phenomenon for eighteenth-century Britain, provides the conceptual starting point. Where Habermas and his followers have emphasized the importance of the print and associational culture of the bourgeoisie, this work proposes defining the public sphere “less as a fixed set of institutions and social groups than as an elusive communicative phenomenon” (p. 6). This shift in meaning has significant implications, not least as it raises the question of how ordinary men and women came to participate in the larger political life around them, hitherto seen in most accounts as the preserve of burghers before mid century. Throughout the book, the author demonstrates the interconnectedness of bourgeois and plebeian worlds in the formation of opinion. How did common people come by political information, learn to grasp post-revolutionary ideas and ideologies, and become part of civil society? What was the process by which they became citizens in the classical political sense?

An impressive array of archival and published material from the formerly French Rhineland has been marshalled to answer these questions, with the considerably larger territories awarded to Prussia in the settlements of 1814/15 given more attention than those that went to Bavaria or Hesse-Darmstadt. The analysis focuses on six aspects of popular culture grouped and then broken down further in six corresponding chapters: “reading,” “singing,” “public space,” “carnival,” “tumult,” and “religion.” A leitmotif of the presentation is how traditional elements of ordinary life acquired new meaning in the transition to political modernity. Folk calendars containing practical information on matters from weather to market days to current events had been the most common secular reading matter by the end of the early modern period. The author shows how the “value of calendars as a tool to politicize popular constituencies” (p. 41) was far from lost on early nineteenth-century liberals. Popular songs conveyed continued loyalty to the Napoleonic legacy, sympathy for the Polish uprising against Russia (1830/31) (and veiled, concomitant criticism of conditions at home), anti-Prussian sentiment, and a yearning for religious freedom (by Catholics). Beyond the famous and much-explored Hambach Fest (1832), parish festivals, markets, fairs, and the region's famous carnival acquainted people with the tenets and symbols of bourgeois politics: cockades; politicized trinkets such as snuffboxes, handkerchiefs, and mugs; and lithographs. In this context, issue is taken with Habermas's notion that the commodification of politics through advertising and mass print culture debased the liberal public sphere: “[c]onsumerism did not corrupt the public sphere but, rather, constituted it” (p. 304). Charivaris were adapted from their original function of enforcing moral codes to expressing new kinds of political discontent. An extensive, final chapter explores how religious tension between Prussian authority and Rhenish Catholics, which culminated in the so-called Cologne Troubles beginning in 1837, reframed the relationship between politics and common people defending their beliefs. Processions, pilgrimages, and sermons all served the formation of a popular confessional political identity not necessarily beholden to the Church's ecclesiastical hierarchy. These sections balance out the volume's general concern with liberal politicization.

The question of “actual reception” (p. 87) constitutes this study's most difficult methodological issue. To what extent did ordinary folk in fact sing the songs and read and discuss the brochures and pamphlets composed or written by liberal (or Catholic) publicists? The author himself scrupulously addresses this issue throughout the text. If it cannot be resolved with absolute certainty in most cases, the evidence presented, for example, on rates of circulation of calendars and popularity of songs strongly tends to support the conclusions reached. More problematic is the old-fashioned narrative of official “repression” in Prussia and the other German states that provides a too convenient foil for the discussion of politicization. Christopher Clark's recent history of Prussia has convincingly called such a narrative into question, and the author himself repeatedly contradicts it with reference to the ineffectiveness of the censorship, “the insufficient policing in Rhenish provinces” (p. 159), and the authorities' respect for the law. That the citizens of Aachen played a politically charged melody in 1833 in the presence of a Prussian prince (p. 198) recalls how the Milanese only a few years later (1838) put on part of Rossini's Wilhelm Tell on the occasion of a visit by the Austrian emperor in La Scala during a stay in his province of Lombardy-Venetia. To what extent was the politicization of the population in the Rhineland representative of broader German and European trends at the time? This is a question admittedly difficult to answer satisfactorily in a study of such depth. Given its experience with French occupation and administration and a relationship with Vienna—minus the confessional problem—in ways not unlike what the Prussian Rhineland had to Berlin, Lombardy-Venetia might offer a useful comparative perspective on the fine scholarship of this work.