Sociology of mobilisations and emotions

At one time, emotionality was associated with the unscientific nature of crowd psychology and therefore viewed with suspicion. More recently it has become a favourite target for specialists in the analysis of collective mobilisation.Footnote ² However, this sudden burst of research interest in emotions needs to be tempered by extreme epistemological and methodological caution. To refute the idea that ‘emotion’ is intangible and hence unworthy of scientific attention, the terms of the analysis must be defined and empirically indexed with the greatest possible precision. It will therefore be illuminating to begin the analysis with a sort of ethnography of the sensitising devices which underlie the mobilisation processes to be examined. By ‘sensitising devices’ I mean any material means, dispositions of objects or staging used by activists to provoke the sort of affective reaction that produces involvement with, or support for, the cause.Footnote ³ These analytical concepts have the advantage of enabling a praxeological analysis of the objects and behaviours activists use to exhibit their own affective reactions and test those of others. In other words, we need to scrutinise the ways in which affective states are inscribed on material objects intended to encourage oneself and others to act in a way that are deemed appropriate. By appealing to the senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell), sensitising devices are supposed to force the initially indifferent public to react as desired by supporters of the cause. Putting these sensitising devices at the core of the analysis will thus place in the foreground the materiality and corporality of emotions which cannot be reduced to their discursive dimension. Bodily reactions go far beyond what can be expressed through language, whether before, during or after the action. Unlike a straightforward textual analysis, or a semantics of emotional terminology, the concept of ‘sensitising devices’ requires an analysis of the material that activists use to incite an affective reaction in bodies that leads to commitment.

The point is thus to treat the expression and testing of emotions as a kind of social praxis. Such practices follow changing norms deriving from types of preliminary socialisation which are more or less common to the contexts under scrutiny.Footnote ⁴ With regard to the history of animal protection, a study of sensitising devices is the key to tracing how successive generations of activists have invented, or reinvented, a range of different emotional registers in order to win public support for their cause.Footnote ⁵ Before even attempting to explain these twists and turns in the history of animal protection, however, we must draw attention to a number of methodological precautions.

First of all, sensitising devices must be linked to the meanings intended to be conveyed by those who use them. Insofar as they aim to express and arouse emotions, the effectiveness of such devices depends on what William Reddy calls emotives, i.e. the social conventions which, in a given context, enable the definition, expression, and mutual understanding of affective states such as ‘disgust’, ‘shock’, ‘hostility’, ‘benevolence’, ‘tenderness’, etc.Footnote ⁶ Thus an analysis of the way sensitising devices are put to work must adopt a semiological perspective, which is fairly common in the social sciences when it comes to studying how social actors come to terms with the language, codes and grammatical rules of their society. The risk of misinterpretation is small, unless of course the social or historical distance between the subjects and the observer is so great that it encourages misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the meanings the individuals under observation assign to the emotions they express.

While it is essential to make some such attempt to re-create the perception of emotions by those concerned to express them, it is only part of the overall sociological analysis. The affective states aroused by sensitising devices are never strictly confined to the meaningful intentions and effects anticipated by the users of such devices. In other words, a semiological analysis of the expression of emotions can tell us nothing about what has actually been felt, either by the activists or by the heterogeneous audiences that they succeed in reaching. Even if our enquiry focuses on the defenders of the cause, we must not forget that the relative reflexive control that a person exercises over the more or less spontaneous expression of an emotion leading to commitment to a cause may overlie affective states that are diffuse, complex, equivocal, partly inexpressible, and sometimes incomprehensible even to the person feeling the emotion.

It is easier to understand the importance of analytical distinctions if we refrain from confusing affective states as expressed with affective states as experienced. Reddy was one of the first to point out the need to distinguish between‘emotive’ and ‘emotion’.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, the sociologist Deborah B. Gould distinguishes between ‘affect’ (‘an unspecified and unstructured bodily sensation’) and ‘emotion’ (‘what is actualized through language or gesture from social convention’).Footnote ⁸ My approach here is very similar to Reddy's and Gould's insofar as I shall attempt to preserve a clear distinction between what in French would be called émotions, and sentiments.Footnote ⁹ However, I shall add some further terms by dividing affective states, as experienced, into ‘feelings’ and ‘sensitivities’. By ‘feelings’ I mean the corporeal effects produced by affective reactions arising from a situation, clearly located in time and space, which a sociologist may attempt to re-create from subsequent accounts by witnesses, or by direct ethnographic observation. ‘Sensitivities’ are more permanent inclinations to react affectively and predictably to objects and situations that are perceived to be similar. In contrast to sociobiologists who tend to postulate a priority of impulses inescapably inscribed into human nature, the notion of sensitivity emphasises that the affective states that underlie the conduct of individuals cannot be separated from their social history. In this view, sensitivities are like sediments – the accumulated traces that recurring feelings deposit on a body until they can dictate how it reacts to subsequent events. Since sensitivities are laid down by every experience of the social actors under scrutiny, an observer cannot seek to re-create them without a far greater amount of hypothetical interpretation than would be required for a semiological analysis of the emotions expressed. As we shall see, these distinctions do not refer simply to different dimensions of the object under scrutiny; rather they refer to expressed affective states versus experienced affective states, either in a single situation or repeatedly. The same analytical distinctions emerge from two epistemological systems that have left their mark on the history of the social sciences. The analysis of social behaviours calls for the kind of twofold interpretation that Anthony Giddens calls the ‘double hermeneutic’.Footnote ¹⁰ On the one hand, scholars have learned from the sociology of interpretative understanding inspired by Weber the need to understand the meaningful goals of actions performed by social actors. Anthropologists have further taught them that significant interpretative efforts are necessary to understand the world of shared meanings in which the observed individuals live. From this perspective, it is necessary to pay attention to how social actors inform each other, discursively or otherwise, about their affective states. Sociologists thus have to get as close as possible to the life-world of the actors they study. On the other hand, a different branch of social science, notably French sociology from Durkheim to Bourdieu, has taught us that a scientific analysis of social data cannot be reduced to a mere reproduction of the actors’ viewpoints. We cannot be content with an understanding of their language and praxis while avoiding secondary analysis based on the specific interpretations and metalanguages that scientists deploy when seeking their own brands of knowledge.

We shall see how an enquiry into the affective states that underlie successive protests against animal experiments highlights this twofold analytical movement. On a preliminary semiological reading, the sensitising devices and emotional registers evoked through these mobilisations seem virtually identical, however widely separated historically. A second reading aims at discovering what makes those sensitising devices work. It is an attempt to explain how far the emotions displayed are a continuation of the (sometimes very heterogeneous) sensitivities both of the activists and of the publics they address. To understand mobilisations and interpret what impels protesters to commit themselves to the cause, it is necessary to assemble a broad variety of often fragmented evidence both on the micro- and macro-level. In other words, the approach here is partly to do an objectivising analysis, partly to carry out a genealogical and conjectural endeavour to reconstitute processes that cannot be observed except indirectly, through a tangle of clues.Footnote ¹¹ More precisely, I shall attempt to reconstruct socially constructed sensitivities which renew themselves through the emotions that are expressed and evoked by activists.

The emotional registers of an old and multifarious cause

If we want to understand how the history of animal protection movements has been influenced by changes in the emotional registers preferred by activists, the best way is to look at the evolution of animal protection since the early nineteenth century. The oldest campaigning organisations developed in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, following in the wake of the London activists who, in 1824, founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. By 1869 Great Britain had 33 societies of this type, Germany 44, and Austria 21. France had three, including the Société Protectrice des Animaux, founded in Paris in 1845. The membership of these numerous societies came from the ranks of the clergy, the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Throughout the nineteenth century these moral entrepreneursFootnote ¹² strove to mitigate the brutality inflicted by uneducated workers on the animals in their charge. Sermons, exhortations to kindness, rewards for the meritorious, votes in favour of legal definitions of cruelty, punishment of offenders, were the sensitising devices used to support the demopedic emotional register which inspired the first generation of activists. They reacted to brutality with indignation, while feeling a degree of benevolence towards those who acted more out of ignorance than definite cruelty. Carters, coachmen, farm workers and butchers were seen as deviants who could be led back to the right path by the teachings of the protection societies. This comparative benevolence towards deviants, and the gratitude of such deviants towards the benefactors who had re-educated them, were added to the emotions intended to be aroused by sensitising devices so that animal protection could become a familiar issue among the lower classes.

In comparison with these early animal protection societies, protests against cruelty inflicted on animals by scientists constituted a later wave of specific mobilisiations.Footnote ¹³ In 1875, in London, Frances Power Cobbe founded the world's first society pledged to combat animal experiments, the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection.Footnote ¹⁴ Just one year later, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), founded in 1824, listed no fewer than ten anti-vivisection organisations in Great Britain. They set about spreading their cause in European countries, which were sometimes described as missionary territory. Germany and Austria were favourable ground for the anti-vivisection cause – ground which had been prepared by the numerous animal protection societies that had been created in previous decades on the model of the RSPCA. Two similar organisations appeared in France in 1883: the Ligue Populaire contre la Vivisection and the Société Française contre la Vivisection. Hence it is no exaggeration to speak in terms of an international anti-vivisection movement. In 1885 the Bulletin de la Société Française contre la Vivisection listed no fewer than 26 anti-vivisection societies in eight countries: 15 in Great Britain, 3 in Switzerland, 2 in Germany, 2 in France, 1 each in America, Belgium, Italy and Sweden.Footnote ¹⁵ The transnational character of this movement is clear from the promoters’ efforts to take their struggle across frontiers. Thus Cobbe's commitment appears to have had a determining influence on the intense public campaign launched in Florence against the German physiologist Moritz Schiff.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, not satisfied with promoting the International Association for the Total Abolition of Vivisection in England, Anna Kingsford travelled all over Europe encouraging the foundation of anti-vivisection societies. The one she created in Geneva attracted severe censure in 1883, in an article by Henri Kleffler whose title pulled no punches.Footnote ¹⁷ Perusal of the Bulletin de la Société Française contre la Vivisection shows how extensively denunciations of the practice drew on translations from British pamphlets. They were also translated into German, although German anti-vivisectionists also produced a copious pamphlet literature of their own, some of which, like Ernst von Weber's Torture Chamber of Science, were quickly translated into French and Italian.Footnote ¹⁸

The anti-vivisection societies were innovative not only in their aims, but also in their use of sensitising devices to nourish a new kind of emotional register. No longer did they rage at the improper brutality perpetrated in public by uneducated and marginal people. Rather they exposed the atrocious practices that men who saw themselves as an elite, at the forefront of progress, were engaging in out of public view, hidden in their laboratories. There was no room here for the sort of sermons and promised rewards doled out to repentant offenders. Rather, the anti-vivisectionists abstracted and commented on plates taken from vivisection manuals; they quoted horrified witness accounts from activists who had found their way into laboratories, told edifying tales about children or wives of vivisectionists unexpectedly coming upon animals being ripped apart while still alive, and invited the reader to imagine himself as a cherished dog delivered up to vivisectionists by traffickers. These new sensitising devices formed an emotional register of exposure thrust before the senses and sensitivities of the public. Thus in 1883 Frances Power Cobbe, founder of the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, published Light in Dark Places. Translated into French the following year, it included a large number of engravings taken straight from physiology textbooks: knives, scalpels, pincers and scissors; devices for holding down dogs or rabbits with a series of incisions in their sides; a frog's nerves attached to a measuring instrument; a machine to produce artificial respiration in guinea pigs, etc. This kind of material encouraged readers to judge the horror of vivisection based on the instinctive reactions aroused by seeing a body violated. In case that was not enough, some sensitising devices sought to stimulate the reader's imagination by encouraging him to place himself as close as possible to the stigmatised practice. Eyewitness reports showed how painful a visit to a laboratory was to a person of ordinary sensitivities: the sight of a ‘little poodle, bloody, mutilated, fully conscious and seeming to suffer horribly’; background noises combining into a ‘long and agonised moan’; ‘cries and screams of pain mingling with the voices of the torturers commanding silence’; and the inappropriate scent of the tobacco being smoked by ‘operators cheerfully smoking and chatting’.Footnote ¹⁹

Emergence of an emotional register of exposure

At times, this new-fangled militant material called on sympathisers to imagine themselves as laboratory animals, particularly by likening the latter to human patients who are supposed to be cared for by doctors. In every case, the idea is to arouse suspicion as to the real motives of scientists seeking access to the bodies of men or, worse, women:

Figure 1.

Source: Frances Power Cobbe, Lumière dans les ténèbres, issued in 1884 by the Société Française contre la Vivisection and the Lausanne-based Société Vaudoise contre les Abus de la Vivisection Bibiliothèque nationale de France.

Like detectives – who crime novelists were celebrating at about the same time – anti-vivisectionists pursued the criminals wherever they tried to conceal their crimes; they showed no mercy for these monsters in the shape of men. The aim was to arouse emotions leading to a desire to put an immediate end to the intolerable suffering being inflicted on defenceless animals. Shock, disgust, pity for the victims immobilised on the table, anger and a thirst for vengeance on the cold-blooded torturers: all in all, the emotions expressed, and solicited from the public, justified action, even violence, to put an immediate end to a practice so horrible that it could claim no possible legitimacy.

Emotions and social anchorage of precursors of the Cause

It would be very reductive to attribute all the effectiveness of sensitising devices to the ingenuity of the activists using them and to their expertise in techniques of communication. Sensitising devices cannot affect the public unless they actualise and prolong pre-existing sensitivities arising from social experiences, which scholars may identify by making use of what Carlo Ginzburg has described as a ‘conjectural paradigm’.Footnote ²¹ Towards the end of the nineteenth century, protests against scientific cruelty cannot be dissociated from competition between forms of authority – those in decline and those in the ascendant. In the following century, the activists who carried on the cause were responding rather to a day-to-day confrontation with impersonal technocratic logic.

From the end of the nineteenth century, indignation against vivisection sprang from a feeling of hostility among traditional elites – old aristocratic families, clergy and the legal profession – which had produced the individuals who began the protest movement, particularly in countries like Britain, Germany and Austria. Among these old elites, repugnance at vivisection was a prolongation of the mingled hostility and anxiety inspired by the rise of an empowered bourgeoisie that was monopolising science in order to exploit a new source of authority. The prestige associated with scientific experiments was a challenge to the prestige that previously came with distinguished names, rank, or membership of a noble family acknowledged by the highest echelons of society.Footnote ²² This increasing competition between different forms of authority is also apparent from denunciations of scientific arrivisme. Frances Power Cobbe was particularly prone to describe doctors as ‘a class of parvenus, caring nothing for patience or compassion, motivated more by the desire for gain and the advancement of science than a desire to improve the condition of their fellow men’.Footnote ²³ Speaking in France in 1885, Maria Deraismes similarly declared that the practice of vivisection arose mainly from an unbridled desire for social advancement: ‘Torture and horrible sufferings count for nothing. Scientists are not men of the world [Desraismes's emphasis].’ Claude Bernard wrote:

This struggle between those climbing and those descending the social ladder was sometimes accompanied by anxiety arising from the devaluing of an older system for the transmission of knowledge: ‘The “spirit of scientific inquiry” was driving out of the schools “the old and long-established ideals of collegiate training” and destroying the willingness of students “to accept facts upon others’ testimony”’.Footnote ²⁵ This encouraged another kind of public to join the anti-vivisectionists: doctors and physicians too old to profit from recent developments in experimental method. Some of these older doctors found the indeterminate discoveries of the vivisectionists all the more repugnant in that these young scientists rejected as obsolete the knowledge that their elders had painfully acquired through long years of clinical observation. Rising appreciation of the experimental method was all the more worrying in that it reduced doctors from persons of importance in their own neighbourhood to anonymous dependents of the laboratories.

As time progressed, however, the majority of anti-vivisectionists seem to have been marked by a quite different set of social and affective experiences: the militant wing of the movement was becoming noticeably feminised. Numerous bourgeois women who devoted their time to running dogs’ homes were enthusiastic anti-vivisectionists, particularly as there were many rumours to the effect that laboratories were using unfortunate pets that had momentarily strayed away from their owners. Thus the Société Française contre la Vivisection used the distress of losing a pet as a powerful sensitising device to foster commitment to the cause.Footnote ²⁶ However, this feminisation was not due solely to the fact that protecting dogs was one of the few ways available to women of being active in the public space without betraying the vocation of protecting the weak which was assigned to them in the private sphere. The emotions aroused by anti-vivisectionists’ sensitising devices also awoke fears and unpleasant feelings arising from incompatible social trends. On the one hand, this fin-de-siècle was the apogee of prudishness. On the other, women were encountering the beginnings of gynaecology – a medical domain run by men but centring on the reproductive function of women's bodies. In those circumstances vivisection seemed all the more horrible in that certain analogies could be perceived between the fate of the animal and that of a woman being scrutinised by a medical practice that might seem to be animated by unhealthy and intrusive curiosity.Footnote ²⁷ It must be admitted that this inference – that women at the turn of the century were particularly sensitive – can only be inferred from a set of clues pointing to the kind of second-order interpretation mentioned earlier, with the accompanying interpretive risk.Footnote ²⁸ What are these clues? For example, a leading figure in the movement, Anna Kingsford, was one of the first Englishwomen to gain a medical degree and start a medical practice, which was enthusiastically patronised by women happy to find that they would not have to be examined by a man. In France, similarly, the Ligue Populaire contre la Vivisection was founded in 1883 by Marie Huot, inventor of the ‘womb strike’ slogan which was one of the first public assertions of women's right to control their own bodies.

Despite these very promising beginnings, anti-vivisection protests soon went into a marked and rapid decline. The successes of experimental science and the spectacular advances which it afforded to medicine had effectively silenced the few scientists who still doubted its utility. Moreover, the response to the anti-vivisection campaign in English legislation, particularly in 1876, triggered a counter-movement among physiologists. In 1882 British scientists founded the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research and launched a violent campaign against their detractors. Their strategy was to discredit anti-vivisectionist criticism by attributing it to an excessive sensitivity typical of women. The argument was the more credible in that the anti-vivisection movement had indeed been heavily supported by the bourgeois women who, at the time, were creating the earliest dogs’ homes. This feminisation of the anti-vivisection movement was a convenient starting point for counter-moves by some male scientists, who used both scientific and sexist arguments to discredit their opponents.Footnote ²⁹ In 1884 the French psychiatrist Valentin Magnan attributed anti-vivisectionism and other, more general and dubious feelings towards animals on the part of certain women, to a kind of hereditary insanity.Footnote ³⁰ Thus anti-vivisectionism was methodically undermined, with results that lasted into the second half of the twentieth century. And for many decades there was no sign of a resurgence in protests, not only against the sufferings of laboratory animals but also against the legitimacy of scientific experimentation itself.

Advances in communications technology and reactivation of the emotional register of exposure

More than a century later, in the late 1970s, a new generation of activists took over not only the theme of scientific cruelty to animals, but also the emotional register of exposure. In this context the advances in information and communication technology cannot be ignored. Communication technology, in particular, made it possible to appeal far more directly to the senses than could be done through the reports and anatomical plates used by earlier activists. It was now possible to expose the horrors lurking behind laboratory doors by using photographs – and colour photographs at that – which notably extended the potential for disgust and shock: pictures of tattered bodies, terrified animals crouching at the back of their cages, bodies being mutilated by instruments, etc. Audio-visual recording was even better suited to developing the emotional register of exposure. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF), founded in Great Britain in 1976, adopted a kind of action that was doubly unprecedented. Its young activists not only infiltrated laboratories so as to free animals destined for scientific experiments, but also made films to show the public the intolerable conditions being imposed on guinea pigs. These videos were far more effective, as sensitising devices, than the appeals to the imagination of nineteenth-century readers; they did a great deal to bring new adherents to the cause. In 1984, as part of their campaign against the University of Pennsylvania, ALF activists took some horrific pictures of experiments on baboons.

These pictures were used by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in the film Unnecessary Fuss, which paved the way for numerous audio-visual sensitising devices used subsequently by opponents of animal experimentation. Technical progress extended the repertoire to include multiple visual and sound elements which acted together to intensify the shock effect: pictures of experiments on monkeys; the noise of machines and tools in use; experimenters talking among themselves; voice-overs by a PETA activist; accusing texts at the beginning and end of the film. In the following decades, films uploaded to the Internet by anti-experimentalists made much more sophisticated use of audio-visual montage than was seen in Unnecessary Fuss.

PETA, founded in 1980 in the USA, can be seen as the prototype of a new generation of associations in the USA and Europe which assumed a much more confrontational and radical stance. (This, of course, was inseparable from their heavy reliance on the emotional register of exposure.) This new radicalism surely owed a great deal to moral philosophers such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan.Footnote ³¹ It cannot, however, be considered in isolation from the resources for the dissemination of sensitising devices that were now available to those anxious to reveal the hidden violence being visited on innocent animals. Audio-visual communication enabled the opponents of animal experiments to find support more easily beyond the closed, educated circles to which cyclostyled pamphlets had previously been confined. The dissemination of photos and films too horrible – and controversial – for publication in traditional media successfully aroused the sort of intense emotions that were likely to rally a potentially much larger audience to the cause.

There are several indications that anti-experiment protests revived in the last quarter of the twentieth century. First, the increasing international dissemination of modes of action advocated by the Animal Liberation Front, which liberally exploited the new channels of distribution offered by audio-visual media and subsequently, from the late 1990s onwards, by the Internet. In just one year, 2010, ALF's website recorded 369 illegal operations against laboratories and breeding farms in no fewer than thirty countries. In the vanguard were Sweden (68 operations, Italy (50), Germany (46), the USA (43) and Mexico (40); France came ninth with 13 operations.Footnote ³² Another indicator of the diffusion and intensification of opposition to animal experiments is the creation of new associations protesting against the treatment of laboratory guinea pigs. In France alone, the 1990s saw the creation of several associations which listed protests against animal experiments among their priorities. They included the journal Cahiers antispécistes: Réflexion et action pour l’égalité animale (1991); Pro-Anima, a scientific committee (1994); the association One Voice: Pour une Éthique Animale et Planétaire (1995); the association Droit des Animaux (2002); and the Collectif Libération Animale de Montpellier (2005). Not only these new associations, but also big organisations dedicated to animal protection in general latched on to the theme. In 1991 Samir Mejri's book Victimes silencieuses: Deux années dans un laboratoire d’expérimentation animale was published with the support of the Fondation Brigitte Bardot (set up in 1986). The book, narrated by a young man who chanced to get a job as an animal technician in a laboratory, purported to expose the horrible details of what went on in a medicines production unit. Written as an eyewitness account of a sojourn among horrors, and aimed at a wide public, this militant publication is a remarkable illustration of the approach to the expression and testing of emotion that is characteristic of the register of exposure.Footnote ³³

Social anchorages and reawakened sensitivities

We have shown that a semiological analysis of sensitising devices makes it possible to detect not only the continuity of the emotional register of exposure, but also its adaptability to advances in communications technology. However, our chosen approach cautions that we should not be satisfied with merely noting an apparent continuity of indignation, fostered by successive generations of activists. In fact, the protests against scientific cruelty that developed in the second half of the twentieth century rested on a social anchorage and a range of sensitivities quite different from those of the late nineteenth century. The social position of the activists who contributed to the resurgence of protests against scientific cruelty was clearly different from that of the old elites – doctors clinging to their clinical knowledge or bourgeois women confined to the private sphere – who had spearheaded the mobilisations of the previous century. From the 1970s onwards, most activists seem to have emerged from an ever more highly educated middle class. Ronnie Lee, founder of the ALF, was a law student, originally a member of the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) that was set up in 1962 to hamper the quintessentially aristocratic practice of foxhunting. Our own recent study of French animal protection activists shows that protests against animal experiments are commonly conducted by middle-class, comparatively well-educated young people. Obviously our qualitative approach, coupled with the inevitably limited number of interviewees, makes it impossible to treat this characteristic as an objective statistic. However, even such scattered and fragmented clues show a clear enough set of contrasts with the previous century – enough to support the idea that a change had taken place in the social anchorage of the sort of sensitivities that generate protest against scientific abuses. Moreover, the new profiles of persons committed to the cause make it possible to discuss both the relevance and the limits of Hans-Peter Kriesi's general arguments relating to the new social cleavages which underlay mobilisations during the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁴

Kriesi, a specialist in social movement studies, argues that changes in post-industrial society generated a new social gulf between groups with the means to exercise control, and groups without them. This, he argues, meant that social conflicts no longer occurred between classes, that is between the bourgeoisie (upper middle-class) and the working class, but within the new middle class that had emerged after the Second World War itself. As a result, many social movements are now sustained not by the middle class as a whole, but by a specific category of ‘socio-cultural specialists’. Though highly educated, they are not in a position to use their skills to control the functioning of the organisations, public or private, for which they work (mostly in teaching, the arts, journalism, social work or the health services). Unlike technocrats and managers, socio-cultural specialists, according to Kriesi, organised themselves in order to demand greater empowerment – more control – not only in the workplace but in society generally. Many emerging movements, particularly in the 1970s, were inextricably linked to this ever-growing question of autonomy and control over the circumstances of existence: the anti-nuclear lobby, political ecology, regional autonomy, gay rights, women's rights, revival of regional languages, etc. While Kriesi's hypothesis may seem very general, it provides new insights into the transformation of the social and affective substrata of the protests against animal experiments. In the first place, the social and professional origins of the activists, where they can be determined, seem to fit the category of ‘socio-cultural specialist’ quite neatly: doctors rejecting the industrialisation of their profession; artists who have shared a squat with autonomists; professionals unable to find a job commensurate with their university degrees; and, above all, secondary school teachers.

It will be readily understood that Kriesi's hypothesis assumes that the middle classes harbour a recurring feeling of a deficit in autonomy and control, and that this feeling nourishes a particular kind of sensitivity, quite unlike that which inspired the aristocratic or bourgeois (upper middle class) anti-vivisectionists of the preceding century. Indignation directed against animal experiments could be seen to extend beyond the animal victim, extending and formalising the feeling of being oneself the victim of a cold and inhuman technocracy which treated individuals as anonymous, interchangeable cogs. Commitment to opposing animal experiments, the expression of emotions aroused by the sufferings of laboratory animals, can thus be seen as a way of taking feelings aroused by social experience, in a society that seemed to allow very little autonomy to highly skilled individuals, and transmuting them into a principled basis for activism. This helps to explain why sensitising devices were now often used to compare the sufferings of animals and those of humans, equally subject to technocratic apparatus or technocratic thinking that prevented them from being masters of their fates. In 1985 a pamphlet issued by the Ligue Française contre la Vivisection, entitled Tortures sans frontière: Torture des hommes, torture des animaux, l’expérimentation sur les animaux, claimed indignantly that animal experiments were a form of torture: ‘torture is the crushing weight of a will to inflict suffering and death on creatures – human or animal – confined in a space where no resistance is possible’.Footnote ³⁵ Another of the Ligue's pamphlets, Les Transplantations en question, accentuates the horror of bodies being manipulated like coarse raw materials by showing photographs of mutilated dogs – and of Paraguayan babies allegedly sold to stock organ banks: ‘We started by massacring animals, we end by massacring babies. . . In this world of machinery and electronics, where mechanics have crushed the ethical and aesthetic side of life, it is a vast and disappointing endeavour to try to arouse consciences that are drifting towards an uncertain horizon.’Footnote ³⁶

Obviously the tragic history of twentieth-century warfare is another source of inspiration for this parallel between animal and human victims of experimental science. As we saw earlier, this kind of comparison had featured in the writings of anti-vivisectionists in the previous century. But its shock value was considerably intensified once it was possible to evoke the industrial organisation of Nazi concentration camps. In one of the Ligue pamphlets cited above, there is a photograph of a building with a high chimney, bearing the caption: ‘Cremation oven of the experimental surgery laboratory of the Salvator Hospital, Marseilles. How many dogs have gone up in smoke through this chimney? If Science and Technology must advance through the smoke from cremation ovens, the destiny of mankind will go up in the same smoke, as they are incinerated by the technology and science of nuclear, chemical and germ warfare.’ Similarly, in Animal Liberation (1975), often seen as the basic textbook of generations of ultra-radical activists, Peter Singer quotes the Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer who had claimed that ‘in their behaviour towards creatures, all men are Nazis’.Footnote ³⁷ Several decades later, the same argument is still heard from activists protesting against both animal experiments and meat-eating. As Kriesi's hypothesis would predict, since the 1990s the most radical wing of the animal protection movement has completely equated scientific cruelty with factory farming, accusing both of reducing animals to raw material to be processed along Taylorian lines. Indeed, activists express the same anger at blind cruelty to animals as at the way technocratic societies crush human freedom of choice and the spirit of revolt.

This unprecedented convergence of protests against, on the one hand, the abuses of science, and on the other, the way humans treat animals doomed to the butcher's hook, is a very significant clue in itself. It would have been inconceivable to the nineteenth-century anti-vivisectionists;Footnote ⁴⁰ it confirms the crucial importance of the desire to take control of one's own existence. Activists opposed to scientific cruelty now often adopt severe, sometimes very severe, dietary restrictions. While vegetarians simply refuse to eat meat, vegans also refuse to eat any the products of any other kind of animal exploitation: eggs, milk, cheese, honey, etc. Some of them even go so far as to boycott things like silk, wool and leather. These activist practices, which require hard effort and self-discipline, are a good way to test and consolidate the intensity of one's commitment to protest.Footnote ⁴¹ In particular, they give animal protection activists a sphere within which they can be autonomous, where they can pursue their eating habits without reference to the economics of markets dominated by the technical and commercial preferences of big companies. Their desire for autonomy emerges clearly through a cause which, at one and the same time, combats the horrible fate not only of guinea pigs and farm animals, but also of citizens reduced to the status of passive and constrained consumers.

Affective experiences, sensitivities and commitment to the cause

As we have just seen, Kriesi's hypothesis seems capable of explaining the growing expression of a desire for autonomy among people whose social status condemns them to a high degree of dependence. It is, however, too general to explain all the variables leading to commitment to the cause. Many sociologists specialising in mobilisations have stressed the limitations of approaches which assume that commitment follows mechanically from certain social positions.Footnote ⁴² Such positions can do no more than predispose individuals to commitment. The predisposition may never lead to anything unless it is brought to the surface, a process to which sensitising devices make an important contribution. While it may be true that most opponents of animal experiments are socio-cultural specialists, it must be remembered that the majority of such specialists have never been exhorted to commit to the cause of animal protection. If we are to account for the processes that lead some of them – rather than others – to find satisfaction in the emotions aroused by the register of exposure, other avenues of enquiry will be required. This means that interviews with activists are invaluable. Through them we can detect certain types of social experiences which lie behind the ‘sensitivities’ which activists owe to their socialisation in the family or in school, or to turning points in their early lives which left a stamp on their affective memory, often before they reached the age or professional status that would identify them as socio-cultural specialists. First and foremost, all animal protection activists stress the importance of special affective relationships with their pets, usually cats or dogs, beginning at a very early age. Other, more or less idiosyncratic affective experiences are reported by activists who belong to organisations which attach importance to the emotional register of exposure. Rejection of animal experiments often seems to be a prolongation of inclinations which the activists concerned developed as a result of experiencing vulnerability in situations that led them to identify with defenceless animals. The interviews reveal the diversity of these experiences, most of which go back to childhood: witnessing the killing of a rabbit they were fond of; disgust at a classmate who enjoyed cutting up insects or stoning birds; unjustified violence visited on them by their own parents, etc. As an example, here is a significant case involving strong identification with a laboratory guinea pig on the part of an activist with Agir Contre la Torture des Animaux (ACTA):

It must be stressed that this identification with vulnerable, unjustly persecuted creatures was only the first stage in a much more gratifying affective reaction, that of rebelling against people who bully those weaker than themselves. This becomes even clearer if we listen to another activist who, in 2007, founded the Coalition Anti Vivisection. Here she is remembering how she first felt the need to do justice by protecting the most vulnerable creatures:

This sort of statement confirms what is known about Ronnie Lee, who founded the Animal Liberation Front in 1976. In an interview kept at the British Library, Lee similarly links his determination to combat scientific abuse with a highly significant affective experience of his own. Ronnie, an undersized child, was constantly being tormented by a much bigger classmate. The bullying went on for days until, resolved not to let himself be intimidated, Ronnie used his fists and managed to knock down this boy who seemed to be a lot stronger and abused it. For Lee, people who exploited animals were like the bully he remembered from his childhood.Footnote ⁴⁵ Many of the activists involved in ALF's commando operations against laboratories were similarly prolonging feelings of justice and pride going back to childhood experiences of revolt against abuses of power. In other words, the desire for autonomy that is alleged to be typical of socio-cultural specialists is not, in itself, sufficient to explain the satisfaction that anti-experimentalists may find in the emotional register of exposure so characteristic of their cause. Certain early sensitivities, rooted in their personal histories, turn out to be much more decisive, insofar as such experiences led them to see animal protection as an ideal way to create self-esteem. This self-esteem is all the greater because it began with the overcoming of fear and timidity resulting from an initial self-identification as one of the weak. Here, an activist who, at the age of twelve, joined a club affiliated to the Ligue Française contre la Vivisection explains how animal protection taught him how to assert himself:

Without engaging in any psychologism, it is worth stressing that the sensitivities which distinguish the activists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century from their predecessors arise not only from different social status, but also from the many changes in norms and representations that brought them into contact with the affective experiences that shaped them. These included a lowering of the tolerance threshold for violence; a weakening of hierarchical distinctions; the increasing popularity of pet animals; an increased propensity to identify with other species thanks to cartoons and animal documentaries, and so on. This list cannot, of course, be exhaustive, because the crucial fact is that sociological explanations of commitment to the cause must be multi-factorial, leaving room for the description of idiosyncrasies in individual biographies which led the individuals concerned into protesting against the abuse of animal experiments.

Far from aiming to probe the full complexity of the history of protest movements against scientific cruelty, this article has pursued different complementary objectives. First, it has shown why it is important to study the emotions and sensitivities that underlie the protest movements. Second, making use of the concept of sensitising devices, it has highlighted the fact that mobilising support is not a simple matter of exploiting discourse, but rather operates by provoking affective reactions in the body. Third, it has stressed the importance of the analytical distinctions necessary to empirically identify various types of affective states which call for epistemological regimes that are both distinct and complementary. Finally, it has stressed – if it still needs stressing – that sociological research cannot do without the invaluable insights furnished by a historical perspective. A study of historical contrasts, however brief, is vital if we are to understand how far sensitivities and emotions – sometimes hastily attributed to allegedly invariable psychological mechanisms – depend on shifting socio-historical contexts whose effects are not always apparent to the individuals being studied. In other words, examining the social shaping and historical evolution of emotions is the best way to recognise some intrinsic requirements of the social sciences. Certainly we need to reconstruct the subjective perceptions of individuals, including their affective dimensions. Nonetheless, in historical or sociological research, this perspective coming from understanding (posture compréhensive) should not depart from the fundamental principle of non-consciousness which holds that explanations of social life cannot be confined to the concepts of those who participate in it but requires multiple viewpoints and changes of focus developed in the course of research.Footnote ⁴⁷