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Posts Tagged ‘European History’

Chapter on the Politics of Acclamation in Early 19C Europe

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , on November 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »

After a remarkably smooth editing process, Popular Agency and Politicisation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Beyond the Vote, has now been published in the Palgrave Studies in Political History series. Edited by Diego Palacios Cerezales (Madrid) and Oriol Lujàn (Barcelona), the volume encompasses contributions on a wide variety of political practices and spaces, opening new perspectives on the politicization processes that shaped nineteenth-century Europe.

Most chapters were first discussed in the Conference Beyond the Vote: New Perspectives on 19th Century Politicisation, held in Madrid/online in January 2021.

My own chapter, titled

Plebiscites on the Streets: The Politics of Public Acclamation in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe

addresses the dynamics of performative displays of enthusiasm and disdain in public confrontations between rulers and ruled.

While acclamations remain a familiar phenomenon today, they tend to be understood as an atmospheric, rather than a functional, element of political life. In consequence, the historical variability of their practice and impact remains understudied. Building on a survey of current research, this contribution addresses the forms, functions and situations of acclamation in Europe during the Age of Revolutions.

Focusing on the tensions between the practice’s symbolic holism – suggesting a direct expression of the communities’ undivided will – and its underlying complexities as a mode of collective action, it argues that acclamations gained a historically unique impact during the (post-)revolutionary period. While other opportunities for political articulation and participation remained sharply constrained, these public vocalizations presented one of the very few available modes of regular political engagement. At the same time, public interactions between rulers and ‘the people’ gained new performative significance against the background of experiences of political upheaval and regime change.

A consideration of a wide range of case studies from across the continent shows how practices of acclamation and their reception became part of a transnationally entangled contestation of political legitimacy, constituting an ephemeral, but momentous mode of popular politics.

Many thanks to the editors for their hard work in getting this excellent volume together.

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Chapter on the Contrast of Talkative and Taciturn Nations

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , , on September 4, 2022| Leave a Comment »

For an interdisciplinary volume on silence edited by Mahshid Mayar (Cologne) and Marion Schulte (Bielefeld), I wrote a chapter on the way Europeans have historically framed the question of ‘talkative’ and ‘taciturn’ nations.

Even today, we often think of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in terms of ‘silence’, while parliamentary and democratic politics are linked to the category of ‘voice’. Retracing the historical emergence of such conceptualizations during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, my chapter aims at a reconsideration of these familiar, but reductive binaries.

Exploring French, German, and British discourses on the question why some nations are more talkative than others brings to light a fundamental shift in the understanding of communication around the turn of the nineteenth century, when explanations in terms of national character were gradually superseded by a point of view linking taciturnity and talkativeness to specific political regimes.

This gradual reorientation from a spatio-cultural to a temporal framing coincided with a distinct politicization of the question of communication (and its absence) which still resonates today. Placing our current understanding of the significance of voice and silence into a wider historical perspective thus contributes to a reconsideration of the meanings of communication in the modern world.

  • Talkative and Taciturn Nations. Ethnographic and Political Perspectives in European Discourses on Communicative Cultures (c. 1750–1850), in: Mahshid Mayar und Marion Schulte (eds): Silence and its Derivatives. Conversations Across Disciplines. London 2022, 87–108.

The chapter can be downloaded here. The whole volume is to be found here.

Many thanks to the editors for their meticulous organization of the publishing process.

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