Crowds in History Research Paper

For research purposes, crowds can be defined as relatively short-term gatherings of large groups of people (on streets or squares or in the countryside—in any event, in the open air), whose actions are goal-oriented and, as a rule, conflictual. Crowds are assemblages that interrupt the regular course of everyday life and disturb the public order, or at least threaten to disturb it. Under certain circumstances, of course, an everyday or routine crowd can also trans-form itself into one that will be conflictual.

Crowd history was (and will likely remain) primarily indebted to the social history paradigm: theory-oriented, but seldom fixated on theory—in fact, with a fair bit of skepticism regarding theory; and utilizing a variety of empirical methods, singularly or in combination, from ‘thick description’ to extensive statistics on protest. Central concerns are the precise reconstruction of crowd events, the involved groups and their identities, and a micro-historical embedding in local contexts. Dominating questions concern exact times, size, duration, frequency, and topography or geography of crowds. Research topics are their physical composition (social status, ethnic identity, religion, age, sex) and the—considerably heterogeneous— behavior of individuals or smaller groupings in these events.

Other focuses are the forms and motives of action (violent tendencies, emotionality, resentment, mentalities, visions), in addition to occasions and possible structural reasons for common action. Furthermore, crowd history investigates the targets of crowd action, as well as the presence and function of peacekeepers in such confrontations. And last but not least, crowd history discusses the results and long-term con-sequences of crowd events in consideration of high politics and society.

1. Phases And Schools: Changing Images Of Crowds

Academic crowd research was first begun toward the end of the nineteenth century, and its beginnings are conspicuously multidisciplinary: philosophy, psychology, criminology, sociology, and anthropology occupied themselves with the phenomenon; only gradually did historical studies turn their attention to the subject. Against the background of opposing political– ideological positions, several academic schools disputed the ‘true essence’ or the ‘actual character’ of crowds. Depending on one’s position, interpretations ranged from an extreme damning of crowds as purely negative and regressive destroyers of civilization, to their enjoying an idealized historical–philosophical role as genuine creative agents, as essential driving forces of historical progress. From the historian’s perspective, there are at least four important phases.

The starting point was the so-called ‘Latin School’ of mass psychology around 1900, represented by such authors as the Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele (La Folla Delinquente, 1891), the French popular scientist Gustave LeBon (La Psychologie des Foules, 1895), and the French criminologist and sociologist Gabriel Tarde (L’Opinion et la Foule, 1901). Relying for their historical evidence primarily on one-sided studies of the French Revolution by the conservative historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, their speculative theories concerning crowds were a projection of bourgeois-conservative fears of social subversion at the fin de siecle: ‘Their crowds loomed as violent, bestial, insane, capricious beings whose comportment resembled that of mentally ill, women, alcoholics, or savages’ (Barrows 1981 p. 5).

The emerging social–historical school of French Revolution research opposed the conservative LeBon mass psychology by de-demonizing the crowd debate through empirical case studies addressing the character and role of crowds during the French Revolution. One of this school’s path-breaking authors was Georges Lefebvre. In La Grande Peur (1932) and especially in Foules Revolutionnaires (1934), he showed how rebellious groupings were stimulated through various types of oral communication (e.g., spreading of rumors, suspicions, and mental images), and how the foules pures of everyday life transmogrified into the foules revolutionnaires when seized by a ‘collective mentality.’

After the World War II, a modern classic school of crowd research was constituted that traced its ancestry partly to the social–historical school of French Revolution research. The classic school’s first important propagator was an occasional student of Lefebvre’s, George Rude, whose 1950 doctoral dissertation treated the Paris workers and their uprisings of 1789–91. In his studies on crowds in the French Revolution and on crowds generally in France and England from 1730–1848 (Rude 1964), he identified for the first time the ‘faces in the crowd.’ Together with Eric J. Hobsbawm’s early studies of the pre-and early-industrial workers groups whose rebellious behavior was plausibly labeled ‘collective bargaining by riot’ (Hobsbawm 1952), as well as the related work of Edward P. Thompson, especially his paradigmatic study of The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century (Thompson 1971), the classical canon of a new history from below emerged. These historians understood themselves to be an open and undogmatic variant of a Marxist historiography of the West. At first an oppositional subdiscipline, from the 1960s to the 1990s it quickly gained a wide reputation in academic circles, inspiring numerous other studies.

There was a parallel development in the American social sciences, using modernization theory and quantitative measurements in historical–sociological re-search on crowds. Crucial was a more systematic investigation of possible causal connections between large processes such as industrialization, urbanization, or social crises, and the frequency and geography of crowd occurrences. In a critical test of theory, then-current concepts of collective behavior and of social movement research (relative deprivation, among others) were checked against historical evidence. This led to more refined methods of crowd event analysis, accumulating more precise protest statistics over longer periods and/or testing its geographic diffusion for strategically chosen regions. Exemplary is the work of Tilly et al., in particular the comparative study of France, Italy, and Germany in The Rebellious Century (1975), or the strictly quantitative and simultaneously Thompsonian case study of English riots 1790–1810 (Bohstedt 1983).

2. The Unwritten Program: ‘Subsistence’ And ‘Liberties’

For the longest time, European societies of the early-modern period, including the nineteenth century, figured as the classic time frame for the bulk of crowd research. The essential scope of crowd activities was above all defined by the secular processes of state centralization and national state-building, the expansion of market economies, social polarization, and proletarianization. Viewed from the lower-class angle, one is able to speak of a European age of persistent material shortages. Under conditions of subjection and/or political immaturity, the lower classes found themselves in permanent conflict with authorities and social elites for subsistence guarantees, communal rights and freedoms, and cultural autonomy.

Rude’s and Hobsbawm’s ‘new picture of the crowd’ was and remains largely a counter-image to the previously dominant LeBon tradition. Crowds, it was now shown, were not—as a rule—criminal rabble but people of established residence, average working men and women, poor but orderly folk. Their motivations were a frequent mixture of Jacobin egalitarianism and conservative monarchism. Their collective behavior was one of direct action, and they pursued their thoroughly rational goals with fitting means, this sometimes translating into violence. However, it is said that their violence was predominantly symbolic and a question of efficacy. Moreover, their successes were of limited nature, particularly as their actions were so short-lived and lacking of far-reaching visions. Thus, conflict crowds were to be considered fore-runners of later social and political movements with lasting organizational structures and long-term social–political programs.

These and related studies established a solid canon of conflicting crowds, a European repertoire of riots. These included: peasant uprisings against noble estates, anti-tax protests against mounting state prerogatives, religious riots between competing con-fessions, subsistence-based actions of the rural and urban lower classes, moral rebukes in the tradition of chari ari (rough music), strikes and boycotts of artisans and workers, machine-wrecking, but also aggressive acts of popular monarchic loyalty against alleged enemies of king and church, and xenophobic outbursts against ‘strangers.’ As the latest research for the UK, France, and Germany has shown, in no other early-modern conflict of any duration were crowds so involved as in food riots.

More than 3,000 food riots have been documented for France between 1560–1860. At their center were the blockades of inter-regional grain trade to prevent scarce resources from leaving their place of origin. Participating in these blockades were mainly the rural and urban lower classes from the highly commercialized farming regions of the far-reaching agrarian hinterlands of Paris. For four decades, ever since 1760, the power struggle over access to limited food resources became permanent in France. The attempt of Controller General Turgot in the fall of 1774 to deregulate the national grain trade according to physiocratic liberal doctrines, ended in the fiasco of the Guerre des Farines (Flour War) of 1775, when over 300 food rebellions forced the government to back down its policy (Bouton 1993).

There have been about 1,000 food riots documented for England in the period 1530–1820, the majority of them taking place in the last 80 years of that time span. With regard to the years around 1800, Bohstedt speaks of a communally anchored ‘protocol of riot,’ of ‘orderly disorders,’ with widely accepted public rules for all of the participants. With crowd action as an essential element of community politics, poorer consumer groups, especially in small and medium-sized market towns, participated successfully in the creation of reasonably tolerable living conditions (Bohstedt 1983).

For German regions (1700–1870) over 400 food conflicts have been substantiated. They culminated in the 1840s (shortly before and during the Revolution of 1848), a decade that has been characterized as the ‘angry forties.’ Particularly in Prussia’s East-Elbian provinces, the eighteenth-century myth of a paternalistic ‘social monarchy’ quickly faded. Market-driven resource scarcities, not least the result of agricultural exports to Western Europe, forced a sharp internal ‘dissent about markets.’ Even more so than the urban lower classes, the rural poor frequently saw themselves robbed of whole food entitlements (Gailus 1990).

All in all, these recurring pre-and early-industrial mass conflicts attested to not only a simple struggle for calories among the abject poor and hungry, but symbolized a central conflict of values and goals. On the one side were liberal principles and Utopias envisioning abundant markets and property for all, while opposed to it were nontransferable subsistence rights and the blows to the human dignity of rapidly expanding market-dependent classes in an increasingly urbanizing market society.

Probably no other model has so persuasively explained the social and cultural meaning of pre-and early-industrial crowd activities as Edward P. Thompson’s classic notion of moral economy, which he developed through an analysis of the rebellious behavior of the working poor in eighteenth-century England. According to his study, the customs and rituals practiced by the crowds in their numerous food riots, their angry outbursts and anxious visions, their claims and demands, were embedded in ‘a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This [consensus] in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’ (Thompson 1971 p. 79). For Thompson the word ‘riot’ is too narrow a concept to adequately describe all the issues at stake in these confrontations. In order to assure their ‘way of survival,’ crowds (or people) were in permanent collective negotiations with aristocracy and gentry, with officials and the middle classes. The crowds would typically remind the authorities of their traditional paternalistic duties vis-a-vis the weaker members of the community. In the ritualized forms of conflict with ruling elites, in expressive and symbolic confrontations of political ‘theatre’ and ‘counter-theatre,’ they actively participated in the social organization of their own living conditions and thus functioned as an influential collective subject. Crowds were exercising direct influence on the epoch’s balance of power, which was shaped by the political hegemony of the gentry (Thompson 1991). One can with good reason speak of ‘participation by riot’ or of popular ‘participation before participation.’ Despite some critical objections, the moral economy model has asserted itself as the most successful interpretive concept for historical studies of conflict crowds—and not solely for food riots and for European conflict patterns. More recent work attest to its yet fertile analytic potential (Randall and Charlesworth 1996).

Focusing the implications of these old European crowds on a few essential aspects would above all include ‘subsistence’ (entitlements to food, rights of social share) and ‘liberties’ (in the sense of additional rights and popular customs). This collective establishing of values was both asserted and defended against outside ‘disturbances’ and all actual and imagined threats to existence through dynamic penetration of the two great powers, the national state and the expanding modern market. This culture of resistance of conflicting crowds has contributed in manifold ways to the formation of basic political and social rights of modern constitutional states.

3. Conceptual Constrictions—Widening Of Perspectives

The advance of the modern social–historical school (1960–90) had a lasting effect on the historical image of crowds: the ‘bad crowds’ of the older conservative orthodoxy turned into the ‘good crowds,’ possessing a predominantly positive, emancipating function. How-ever, completely or partially obscured were other aspects of crowd history: aggressive, conservative, and nationalistic or chauvinistic mass events, as well as excessively violent and ethnically motivated outbursts. Also criticized has been crowd history’s exclusive concentration on rebellious crowds. Too little attention has been given to other forms of nonconflicting crowds. In addition, the ‘great watershed’ of 1850, allegedly occasioning a transformation of crowds, has hardly been proven. Despite a sneaking institutionalization of crowds over the following decades, they have remained critically important in the industrial societies of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Holton 1978, Harrison 1988).

Crowd history has to pay more attention to violent actions against minorities and outsiders. Excessive crowd violence was mostly reserved for pogrom-like persecutions of the Jewish minorities. These assumed an almost nation-wide character at least twice in nineteenth-century Germany: in the form of ‘Hep-hep riots’ (1819) against the political emancipation of the Jews, and the forcible expulsion of south German village Jews within the wider context of the rural mass movements of the 1848 revolutions (Rohrbacher 1993). As of the second half of the nineteenth century, pogroms established themselves in eastern Europe with much greater militancy—in Russia, especially the Ukraine, and in parts of Poland—its chief phases encompassing the periods 1881–84, 1903–06, and 1919–21. Until the end of the nineteenth century these actions were perpetrated by crowds of similar compositions to those in other riots (Klier and Lambroza 1992).

There has been an increasing shift of focus to nonconflicting crowds, a development promising to greatly expand the field of research. Dynastic govern- mental ceremonies, middle-class-inspired national festivals, traditional celebrations, religious feast days, and new-style leisure activities could easily assume the form of mass events, though in different guises and in radically transformed public functions: staged by the ruling class and social elites and hierarchically structured; composed of a mixture of social groups, neither exclusively nor primarily from the lower classes; symbolically strengthening the existing rule and its established social order, as opposed to rebellious behavior protesting destitution and political impotence; in their effects, socially integrative rather than polarizing. The lower classes, usually self- determining actors at the very nucleus of crowd activities, figured here primarily as public, as mere backdrop.

A study of Bristol 1790–1835 shows that next to peaceful ‘election crowds,’ ‘royal and military crowds,’ and ‘recreational crowds,’ unruly ‘crowd riots’ were among those events occurring with the highest frequency in the city. However, at the same time, ‘crowd riots’ formed only a minority (22 percent) of a sample that covered all types of crowd occurrences taking place within the city. The local elites of Bristol had ample skill and experience in successfully mobilizing large crowds onto the main streets and squares for purposes of their own (Harrison 1988).

The general European ‘nationalization of the masses’ in the nineteenth century included a wealth of identity-forming national celebrations and mass manifestations.

A comparative study of middle-class movements for national memorials in France and Germany has demonstrated the precarious and paradoxical strategy of including the lower classes in the mythical ‘nation,’ while simultaneously drawing sharp social distinctions over and against these very same lower classes. It was above all through the militarization of the bourgeois festival culture that the elites were able to overcome their deep-rooted fear of the masses (Tacke 1995).

Expanded political participation, as well as trans- formations within the public sphere in industrial and post-industrial societies of the twentieth century in no way contributed—as often asserted—to the disappearance of protesting crowds. Rather, one can speak of modifications, and of coexistence of direct action with newly learned and more organized and representative political forms. After 1850, aside from periodic recurrences of crowd activity in line with the older model (for example, food riots in France, and especially in Italy and Spain), one finds numerous newly-invented forms of crowd action, above all strikes, boycotts, mass manifestations and the like. However, soon after 1900 the power potential of crowds began to appear less threatening to the established order (in the sense of general overthrow). Crowds were governable, crowds could be manipulated—this was the new slogan of ruling elites.

An empirical study of Berlin 1900–14 shows the high presence of crowd events in early twentieth-century streets. The events fell into three major categories—405 street disorders, 74 violent strikes, and 61 political mass manifestations. The ongoing struggle for the city streets is interpreted as conflict between a ‘street politics from below’ and a restrictive ‘street politics from above’ carried out by the state power and its police. It was on the political terrain of the street that exaggerated fear of subversion, strict anti-revolutionary measures, and socially discriminatory police practice clashed with collective demands for greater social justice and expanded political participation (freedom of assembly, the right to demonstrate, universal suffrage). In a much wider sense, these were demands for respect and self-determination fought out by the proletarian majority in the public forum of the street, the traditional political arena of the common people (Lindenberger 1995).

For the extremely crisis-ridden interwar period, one can even speak of a culmination of ‘street politics,’ increasingly transformed (militarized) through the advent of radical political–ideological movements from both the left and the right. In this civil war atmosphere of rabid party-political action, with the air filled with bellicose slogans such as ‘self-help’ and ‘self-defense,’ authentic collective crowd action threatened to be instrumental zed and finally suffocated in the battle of totalitarian movements bent on the conquest of state power (for a comparative study of Berlin and Paris 1919–33 39, see Wirsching 1999).

For some time now the broadening of perspectives has meant the inclusion of non-European regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which have a history of crowds of their own. Important basic forms resemble the European riot patterns: in the center stood collective claims of peasant producers who rebelled against landlords or large land-holding farmers, urban money-lenders or state organs for reasons of land scarcity, imposed duties, debts, or tax pressure. In the East Asian context, in a series of studies, James C. Scott has shown how peasant behavior was culturally embedded in an all-en-compassing subsistence ethic with precise norms regarding access to land, acreage, and a fair apportionment of their own produce. The threats posed to these cultural norms in the context of firmly established clientele relationships might have led to open collective resistance, even if—in consideration of the manifold covert and individual ‘weapons of the weak’—this remained more the exception than the rule (Scott 1976).

In some regions (particularly of China since the eighteenth-century, and to some degree of Japan and of India in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries) the food riot tradition was of considerable historical importance, thus offering comparisons with early-modern Europe (Wong 1983). At the same time, subsistence conflicts of many Third World regions continue to this day, as confirmed by many con-temporary eruptions since the 1970s in North and Central Africa (Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia) and Latin America (Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina). In several cases it was food-riot crowds—whose agitation came in the wake of reduced state food subventions and resulting higher prices—that shook and even toppled ruling governments.

4. Outlook

The long and hard-fought interpretive battle concerning crowds has been marked by a double dis-appointment: neither have crowds been shown to be the great negative power, an absolute culture-destroying evil; nor have they been—teleologically speaking—a collective subject to fulfill any historical missions. Crowds have always shown themselves to be multi-layered, ambiguous, and variously interpretable phenomena. And naturally, a certain ambivalence remains. For although emancipatory aspects in the sense of subsistence gains, political participation, and self-determination may dominate the phenomenon of crowds, dangerous exclusionary efforts at expulsion or even destruction of religious, ethnic, and other minorities can also be part of the crowd repertoire. The demythification of the crowd, the gradual opening of political structures to greater popular participation, the modification of collective behavior through historical experience (learning processes that include a growing self-control and adoption of the principle of nonviolence), and other factors may have contributed to crowds having increasingly forfeited their attractiveness as a catch-all for fearful visions or as an instrument for political and ideological agendas imposed from without.

As historical actors in their own right, crowds lay claim to a considerable degree of legitimacy. At the center of this legitimacy stood the collective demands for ‘subsistence’ (later on: social sharing) and ‘liberties’ (communal rights, cultural autonomy and, later, political participation) in the context of given govern-mental and living conditions. Insofar, conflicting crowds were always—more unconsciously than intentionally—indirect collective reformers. Obviously, this seemingly paradoxical role is part of the peculiarities of rebellion and revolution. The political culture of the West—with its human rights norms embodied in the welfare state and democratic institutions since the end of the nineteenth century— would have never attained to the stature it occupies today had it not been for persistent collective intervention from below. Crowds have helped to draw up the agenda for social and political human rights, and they continue to do so.

Where comprehensive systems of social sharing and political participation have been historically established and long in place, crowds tend toward a shift in their forms and motives. From a purely quantitative standpoint, protesting crowds in recent times have been anything but on the decline. To the contrary, they have been on the upswing, becoming a conventional part of political culture. Although violence has re-ceded, it has not fully disappeared. Rating high are questions other than elementary ones of subsistence and freedom. Demands for social and political egalitarianism have for some time taken a backseat to new values and fresh demands based on ‘new social movements.’ Those groups affiliated with crowd events are no longer predominantly or exclusively from the lower classes, but are a great mix of people with considerable representation from the public sector, education, science, and culture. Fitting in well with these trends is also the upsurge of class non-specific leisure crowds in the context of new event cultures.

As an elementary form of the public sphere (Versammlungsoffentlichkeit), crowds will endure. Certainly modern mass media have continued to occupy strongly the public arena, becoming them-selves more and more an embodiment of the entire public. But talk-shows have hardly rendered crowds superfluous. Albeit today’s media presence largely determines the public perception of crowd events, thereby heavily influencing their effectiveness. In their endless variety, crowds represent the unmediated, face-to-face public. Such gatherings of people for purposes of social and communicative self-awareness is apparently a deep-seated human need that—despite the relative dwindling of traditional conflicting crowds—will not soon disappear.

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