European Politics 1815–1848 by Frederick C. Schneid

Author:Frederick C. Schneid [Schneid, Frederick C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351938419
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

II Popular Protest and Öffentlichkeit

For popular protest in Prussia, Manfred Gailus’s Strasse und Brot (1990) is to date the most signficant broad-based study. Organizing 1,486 riots in the period from 1847 to 1849 into sixteen basic categories, Gailus provides a sophisticated analytical framework and extensive empirical documentation that amply attests the popular dimension of the Revolution of 1848/49.39 His research advanced historiography, for it emancipated social-protest research from the confines of modernization theory and, in so doing, valorized the actions and experiences of plebian life on their own terms. Notwithstanding Gailus’s imposing body of research, this essay questions one of his study’s central themes: the assertion of autonomous popular politics uninfluenced by bourgeois political reformism.

In his examination of bread riots, charivaris, agrarian revolts, throne-and-altar riots, artisanal demonstrations, and other manifestations of street politics, Gailus argues that popular street protest was parallel to, but disconnected from, bourgeois politics. Overall, he characterizes popular protest in 1848 as the ‘last great rebellion’ of a pre-industrial society based upon ‘preindustrial aims and anticapitalistic norms and values.’40 Ascribing the actions of common people to the ‘massive repositories of traditional folk cultures,’ he sees an ‘autonomous and folk-cultural Eigensinn.41 Gailus speaks of a ‘Gegenöffentlichkeit’ and the ‘eigenen Platz’ of popular protests, suggesting two disconnected stories of political development: whereas the bourgeoisie developed associational and print networks for its political public sphere, the popular classes sought to ‘occupy’ public space and oppose state power directly and violently in actions that have other ‘forms, motives, and goals’ than those of middle-class reformers.42 Gailus characterizes Strassenpolitik as neither ‘backward looking’ nor ‘unpolitical’ but, rather, as reflecting an Eigensinn, the political dimension of which draws on tradition-bound Lebenswelt: the ‘self-assertion of material needs, social opportunities and cultural identity within the means and within the horizons of their perceived and lived world.’43 This political mentality asserted a sociocultural independence and autonomy of common people against state authority, but it provided no long-term political perspective. It was, he affirms, regional in focus and had little to do with Grosse Politik, though correlates with the latter are documented.44

Gailus’s emphasis on local conditions for explaining political behaviour during the Revolution of 1848/49 follows a recent consensus emphasizing the revolution’s regional and stratified character.45 Yet his claims that Strassenpolitik constituted a form of Gegenöffentlichkeit must be examined with greater care. By positing a ‘fundamental incompatibility’ between the direct street actions of popular classes and the political impulses of bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Gailus’s research implies that quotidian elements of town and country in no way participated in developing the political visions of civil society, whose radical component had advocated democratic and constitutional forms of government since 1789.46 Gailus’s thesis, then, implicitly sets apart Prussian popular politics from those of popular classes in France, England, Belgium, Italy and other west European states, in which popular classes gradually joined their political nations over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.47 While it is certainly incontestable that large segments of bourgeois society saw no common elements between themselves and

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