From the delights of the London Library, I’ve been reading The Street as Stage: Protest Marchs and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century edited by Matthias Reiss (Oxford 2007). It draws on a number of disciplines – history of course, but also social psychologists (interested in “the crowd” long before historians, historical geography and sociologists. It claims the march as initially a 19th-century Western phenomenon, one that travelled the world in the 20th.

It says that there’s nothing very new in the internationalised anti-globalisation movement – the Hambach Festival of 1832, seen as a key starting point, saw the involvement of marchers from all over the German states, as well as Poland, France and Britain. Cazech nationalists in Bohemia in the 1860s and 1870s modelled their mass meetings on the Irish efforts of the 1840s – even (almost) adopting the English word “meetingy”.

The suffragist tradition of marches – with particular iconography and symbols, started in Britain but spread around the world. Since women involved in public protest was considered particularly non-respectable, associated with mob rule, revolution, and invasion of “male” space, they were particularly keen to march in formation, sometimes in almost military style, to stress order and even social class in the arrangement of participants.

“The crowd” was often pathologised, and victimised by the state, which often worked out in the demonstrators’ favour. Police violence against the British Hunger Marchers of 1932 and the arrest of two of their leaders under a 600-year-old law led to the creation of the Council for Civil Liberties.

The survey of the shitory of the discipline of crowd psychology I found particularly interesting: Its founder on this account was Gustave Le Bon, whose The Crowd was published in 1895, arguing that within the anonymity of the crowd, people lose their individual identity and hence their capacity for reason and judgement, making them incapable of resisting any passing idea or, especially, emotion. The impulses that will take hold are primitive and violent. (His aim was to turn this passion from radicalism to nationalism.)

Reicher and Stott in this chapter write:
“Today… there remain many who share his assumptions without realising the consequences. Most fundamentally, Le Bon’s decontextualisation of the crowd is underpinned by a desocializd characterization of the human self. Thus, an individual identity is characterized as the sole basis of controlled action. The operaion of this identity may be affected by social factors … however the identity itself is sovereign and independent of society… Crowds can act only randomly and crowd action must be meaningless.” (p.28-9)

Yet the authors say, in everything from food riots to the barbarism of St Bartholomew’s Day in France in 1572, crowds act within ways that are “logical” – food is only seized from merchants and sources perceived to have broken “fair” rules; the methods of killing on the Day drew on the respective Catholic and Protestant theologies of heresy – the crowds behaved in ways they saw as right and proper.

Presented as an alternative to Le Bon is the idea of social identity, wchih “envisages a complex system of identity and a shift to a different level of identity in the group… we all have multiple social identities corresponding to the different social categories with which we identify.”

The writers suggest that to be the leader of a crowd, it is necessary to first convince people that he or she is typical of the group and hence able to interpret their social identity, or even better prototypical – “entrepeneurs of identity”. Both crowd and “leader” are determining the meaning of a common “we”. Both are actors.

And they note that while the focus tends to be on crowds that contribute to historical change, they also contribute to historical continuity (coronation, jubilee etc).

The chapter on suffrage marches notes that in addition to publicizing the cause, the suffragists were moulded into a collectivity by their participation.