The Insurgent Barricade by Traugott Mark;

Author:Traugott, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

ON THE PERSISTENCE OF BARRICADES

We have seen that the effectiveness of barricade combat has been tied to changes in repressive strategies, advances in military technology, improvements in transport and communications, and even transformations of the physical layout and demographic makeup of nineteenth-century cities. The odds of an insurgent victory, hardly encouraging during the first half of the nineteenth century, generally became more remote after 1848. From the purely pragmatic viewpoint that Engels adopted in 1895, “the spell of the barricade was broken.”150 Yet miraculously, barricades did not disappear. To understand their persistence will require that we look beyond purely pragmatic considerations and consider the more abstract functions that barricades also perform.

The wonder is, after all, that barricades—unlike the food riot, the charivari (i.e., serenading the unpopular with “rough music”), and other early-modern routines of contention with which they once co-existed—did not vanish, once their utility as a tactic of physical confrontation had waned. Though the frenzy of barricade construction that occurred in 1848–49 would never be matched for sheer intensity, the technique not only outlasted the “age of revolution” but somehow managed to broaden its appeal over the course of the twentieth century, with insurgents on every inhabited continent adapting it to their own struggles. In the European context, this was achieved despite the tactic’s gradual loss of efficacy and the erosion of the legitimacy of popular direct action once the rise of political parties, the adoption of universal suffrage, and the elaboration of reformist modes of political participation gave the advocates of social change alternative avenues to pursue.151 The counterweight to these attenuating forces was the emergence of the barricade’s role as symbol.

It may initially seem curious that the same period that saw a sharp decline in the barricade’s military value witnessed the expansion of its figurative significance, but E. J. Hobsbawm has hinted at the reasons why the two developments should be seen as systematically rather than coincidentally related. In explaining how traditions originate, he postulated that the practical utility of an object or practice acts as a fetter or constraint which has to be relaxed or eliminated in order for the object to be appropriated for symbolic or ritual purposes. By way of example, he mentions the spurs that are a conspicuous element of the dress uniforms of British cavalry officers, noting that they acquired symbolic significance only once they had become purely ornamental, thanks to the corps’ shift from horses to mechanized vehicles as a mode of transport.152 In much the same way, as barricades began to relinquish their value as a method of combat, their resonance as symbols of an insurrectionary tradition became more profound.

Of course, the analogy goes too far if it seems to suggest that in the process, the barricade was relegated to the status of a useless relic of merely antiquarian interest, for it continued to perform a vital political and moral role. For Bronisław Baczko, the purpose of a symbol is “not just to make distinctions but also to introduce values and model conduct, both individual and collective.

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