Organizing Democracy by Henk te Velde & Maartje Janse

Author:Henk te Velde & Maartje Janse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Conclusion

Although 99% of the population of Belgium was excluded from citizenship and suffrage in the Age of Revolution between 1830 and 1848, ordinary people engaged in politics in diverse ways. My contribution focused on the impact of the language of civil and constitutional rights in that process. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, we saw how people without formal representation started appropriating the language of civil rights and liberties in order to make their claims and grievances heard. The struggle for and the enforcement and constitutional guarantee of civil rights was a major precondition for the emergence of civil society in Belgium. This struggle generated well-organized forms of popular protest long before the formation of the organized workers’ movement and mass parties at the end of the nineteenth century. Even though the protest forms themselves were not necessarily new, the way they were legitimated—through references to constitutionally guaranteed civil rights—was a sign of adaptation to the new forms of democratic politics of the nineteenth century. In line with Charles Tilly’s WUNC-acronym of demonstrating Worthiness, Unity, Numbers and Commitment, most radicals and workers refrained from any language or protest form that could be associated with violence and revolution, opting instead for disciplined behaviour and rights-based discourse.

The fact that the demands and complaints of ordinary people could be legally brought into the public sphere was an important element that legitimized their actions. The examples in this contribution show how the dynamics of appropriation and subversion of the civil rights discourse in nineteenth-century politics acted as a lever for protest and popular assemblies. Since the proclamation of the liberal Belgian Constitution in February 1831, we can see how the constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties were deftly subverted by taking the language on liberty and equality literally. Precisely because of their universal ambition, the founding texts of democracy, the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen and its derivatives, like the basic set of rights and liberties in the Belgian Constitution, generated new frames of protest and organization that aimed at bridging the gap between the universal ideals of democracy and the harsh reality of deprivation and disenfranchisement. On various occasions, ordinary people and the radical movement that claimed to speak in their name referred to the gap that existed between the ‘legal’ and the ‘real’ country. No matter how short lived their organizations often proved to be, they oriented people without suffrage to the basic structures of civil society by evoking rights whose exercise was guaranteed by the constitution: most importantly, the right to petition and the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly.

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