Brainstorming on Everyday life
Brainstorming meeting, Thurs 12 Oct 2023
- Welcome, introductions.
- Update on activities, noted.
- Discussion of pre-circulated paper on everyday life.
Joris said that he thought a democratic identity didn’t really become available in the Netherlands until after WW2, when it connoted willingness to see governments change as a result of elections and an appreciation of the benefits of a plural, open society. Before WW2, democratic trends were tolerated rather than warmly endorsed. Even in the 1790s, few saw democracy as something positive; in the Batavian Republic, established in the aftermath of the Terror, a democratic identity might have seemed dangerously Jacobin. In terms of what we might now take to be democracy, there were certainly early elements in the Netherlands, in the form of political sociability, participation etc, but he didn’t think anyone identified as a democrat. During the Dutch Revolution of 1780s there were forms of behaviour such as group singing and dancing, perhaps around liberty trees, and other kinds of identification with party symbols, but his sense was that this kind of stuff was top down. His impression is that democratic identities were less often embodied than in France – don’t find people choosing to dress in ways or name their children in ways that would announce such an identity. During the 1790s radical societies thrived, but only for a very short period (1795-8): they didn’t last until the nineteenth century.
Anne said that she thought a democratic identity did emerge in Norway in the 1850s, but she wasn’t yet in a position to say much about that. She would mainly talk about Denmark. She’d been inspired by the paper’s suggestion that one might dress as a democrat. She thought that in 1848, when the identity emerged in Denmark, there was talk of the other side dressing in ‘white ties’. But also there were negative images of how democrats dressed, in the dress of peasants: they were said to wear peasant coats and boots, and homespun clothes. She thought that these sorts of representations continued through the 1850s and 60s. In that context it’s interesting that Orla Lehmann Orla Lehmann – Wikipedia — who became a government minister in 1848, and was one of two key people involved in drafting the new constitution – later in his career talked about ‘democracy in peasant’s clothes’ as the kind of thing one wouldn’t want. She also showed a cartoon representation of a finely dressed ‘democrat’ looking at the paper associated with the workers’ movement which she interpreted as a critique of the self-declared “democrats” among the centrum liberals who called themselves democrats (briefly in 1848 before they abandoned the term) but were very hostile towards the early workers’ movement that emerged in 1848.
Claire also said that in Austria the term took off in 1848, when there was talk about democratic identity, though its negative associations remained predominant. It was said to entail the terrorisation of the majority in the name of a few. In satire it was associated with stealing. It was a contemporary joke that the Czech word for ‘democrat’ was ‘kde moh’ kradl’ which roughly translates as ‘wherever he could, he stole’. The joke also alludes to the fashion to create Czech versions of international words with Slavic roots in that time period. It also reveals how the word was still considered relatively foreign at the time and up until 1848 was more used for foreign contexts. She had also found “demokratie” and “demokrat” in a Czech dictionary of words of foreign origin from 1849.
The word’s negative association are well illustrated by the fact that in a local assembly in Moravia, in which the consensus broadly favoured democracy as then understood, nonetheless the word was used to connote something seen as problematic – giving broader powers to the towns. When it was embraced, it was often understood in ways that overlapped with national identity: there was an idea that Slavs were inherently democrats. It seems there was a relative ‘anti-democratic’ consensus among local assemblies up to early 1848 with nobody claiming the word for themselves. One example is of the local provincial diet in Moravia in 1848 in which the term democracy was suddenly used by the big landowners to counter the influence of the towns. They claimed to be more ‘democratic’ because they ‘represented’ more people (their peasants). This small example shows how the term could gain positive connotation in 1848 and even be used strategically by conservative elites to oppose growing influence from the Bürger. Volksfreund can be used as a synonym to democrat to describe middle-class men who display their sympathies for the common people (also in satire).
Iain said that he had struggled to get away from thinking about how people used the term. But he had four points to make.
- He didn’t think there was much positive identification with being a democrat, as opposed to wanting a more democratic system, in Germany until 1848. Though there might be other terms worth examining, such as Volksfreund, which seems to be mentioned more often in journals.
- Re beards, there was such a thing as a Hambacher beard: the Hambacher Fest (1832) was associated with beard-wearers.
- He didn’t think that gymnastics were necessarily democratic. They could be conservative or liberal. He noted in Chris Clark’s book that Karl Grun [this man? Karl Theodor Ferdinand Grün – Wikipedia] called himself a democrat and raised money for Silesian weavers – but their cause was similarly not specifically a democratic cause.
- He thought democracy was often understood as having something to do with moral character, bad or good: one might be a demagogue, a fantasist, brave or warm-hearted. More was at issue than just a form of government. In 1851, an article in a conservative journal asked the question What is a democrat 12 times and gave 13 answers, including a person who can’t get a job in the civil service and someone who needed a revolution to free them from debt. He noted that around 1848 there were lots of novels published called Der Demokrat or with Demokrat in their titles.
Piotr said that the term emerged in a Polish context around 1800, but was initially mainly negative. Democrats were Jacobins, sympathisers with the bloody revolution in France. He thought that really changed only in 1832, with the foundation of the Polish Democratic Society in Paris. The image of a democrat around that time was of an emaciated bearded man drinking vodka and taking opium, and being keen on peasants; he wore a peasant coat, and sang songs to educate the peasants. He mindlessly absorbed and repeated foreign political ideas. He might be involved with freemasonry. 1848 marked a fundamental defeat for Polish democrats, a point at which they lost political influence, and their ability to publish journals. Thenceforth there was discontinuity: democratic identities weren’t endorsed again until the interwar period, when there were some attempts to gesture towards an older democratic tradition. One could also look at democrats in Poland through Russian eyes. In 1848, Paskevich Ivan Paskevich – Wikipedia wrote to Nicholas I about democratic activity in Poland. He said that there was nothing to worry about; they had little influence over the people, and represented the interests of the middle classes.
Cody said that he was going to focus on the 1790s, and on Hungarians and South Slavs. There was a supposedly Jacobin conspiracy in which Ignac Martinovics Ignác Martinovics – Wikipedia played a complicated role. He was an agent of the secret police, who used the term ‘democrat’ a lot in his reports on the secret societies, which in fact contained a huge variety of people. But he was also himself sympathetic to the French Revolution and his established two societies of his own whose activities he didn’t report on, and in that context the term was used more positively.
In the main city of Carniola, Ljubljana, the enlightenment took a more moderate form. Typical enlightened texts focussed on agriculture and commerce; there was little political pamphleteering. But in 1791, when Leopold toured the region, he was approached by a lawyer with a petition, seeking the representation of peasants in the provincial diet (from 153 villages). The key concept in this context, though, was ‘representation’, not ‘democracy’.
In terms of practices, a local intellectual, Anton Tomaz Linhart Anton Tomaž Linhart – Wikipedia, translated Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro in 1790s. Its theme of equality made it provocative, and the translation was not performed until the 1840s, but the ms survived in a private library – providing a thread of continuity between the two periods.
In general, he thought that at this time the word had largely negative connotations except in small radical circles.
Jana also thought that the term was largely used negatively. It connoted an ugly egotist, or someone who was really an aristocrat trying to advantage a few. But we do find it employed in more diverse ways in literature and poetry. Thus in poems by Božena Němcová Božena Němcová – Wikipedia. She talked about the Slavs as being innately democratic – although never defining what ‘democratic’ meant. She was renowned as a writer, especially for her book Granny. She might be a candidate for a case study. She also identified as a socialist and a feminist. George Sand was also a heroine for Němcová in 1848. In Bohemia the term came to be attached retrospectively to people in the national pantheon.
Jussi said he would talk about Sweden and more briefly about Finland. He has previously been interested in the construction of a democratic tradition, but found it more challenging to find people who identified as democrats. In one instance, the Swedish monarch was said to be the first democrat (because of his responsibilities for the people). It is important to note that the idea of a monarch as a democrat could be employed to serve critical purposes. For instance, the radical paper Argus in 1830 wrote that Gustav III had after his coup in 1772 first acted as a democrat but soon lost it. The basic antithesis was democrat/aristocrat. It seems that, at least before the 1840s, the division between a democrat and an aristocrat was less about a person’s class position than about how that person behaved and thought. Sometimes the same people were described both as democrats and as aristocrats. For instance, the nobleman C. H. Anckarswärd, who in 1830 was one of the authors of a reform proposal concerning political representation, was described both as a “democrat” and “a janus-faced aristocrat” (Fädernesland, 29 December 1832), as well as an aristocrat advocating “democratism” (Göteborgs Dagblad 3 May 1837). The term was more used of people from elsewhere: the US, France or England. From the 1830s there was quite a strong liberal tradition in Sweden and the political lexicon widened to express liberal ideas. Norway was often seen as a democracy because of its constitution and strong peasant representation in the Stortinget. In 1850 there was a newspaper called Demokraten (The Democrat). In Finland, he hasn’t found the word used with reference to Finland itself until 1859 and it did not really take off until the 1860s.
Stephen said since he was just entering the group to represent Russia, he would give some background. During this period, the empire was expanding rapidly and a key political challenge was to find a means of ruling such diverse and dispersed peoples. There was and was seen to be a huge gap between the educated and the people, which by the 1860s gave rise to a peculiarly Russian version of socialism, named populism (narodnichestvo). There were some references to democracy in the eighteenth century, largely in typologies of government. Following the French revolution, these references mainly involved warning of its dangers, thus eg Karamzin Nikolay Karamzin – Wikipedia. On the radical republican wing of the Decembrist movement, as represented for example by Pavel Pestel Pavel Pestel – Wikipedia, the term democracy receives passing mention (as characteristic of small states that is degraded and gives way to forms of representation as size of political units grows). Emphasis was on state unity and inclusion, e.g. via system of indirect elections to national assembly. In the 1840s, developments in western Europe were attentively followed, and there were some transnational actors, such as Bakunin, who wrote an appeal to the Slavs Appeal to the Slavs | The Anarchist Library that denounced the betrayal of Slavic popular interests by German liberals (as well as by the Prussian, Austrian and Russian states). Bakunin predicted that a truly ‘democratic’ (and violent) revolution would come via the Russian peasantry. 1848 had little impact in Russia itself, though some Russian emigres and tourists did experience some of the events, and various Russian intellectuals pondered their implications. Alexander Herzen experienced disillusionment in Paris, but continued to reflect on Western European experience as he worked out his own form of socialism in the 1850s-60s. Chernyshevsky Nikolay Chernyshevsky – Wikipedia in the late 1850s/early 1860s wrote extensively about representation and democracy in various European contexts. Members of the 1860s radical movement (‘nihilists’) employed many marks of ‘democratic’ identity such as short hair for women and dishevelled clothing.
DISCUSSION
Mark invited Joanna and Peter to comment.
Joanna said that when Mark had set about researching his chapter on the 1790s in Britain, in their first book, he had initially told her that no one identified as a democrat, It was just a negative word. But she said she didn’t believe this, and he looked harder and found that, though it was an identity it was hard for people to own publicly, there were some who owned the term in private correspondence. She thought that there would similarly still be democrats to be found – not huge numbers of democrats, but some self-avowed democrats – in the places now surveyed.
She said that she had a hypothesis that there might be a difference overall, not necessarily in every case, between democrats in the 1790s and 1840s. She thought that in the 1790s it might be more an ethical choice; in the 1840s, more a kind of social or class affiliation. But that remained to be tested.
On two points of detail: on clothing, English historians had suggested that in the 1840s it was very common to evoke someone’s social position by commenting on their clothing: so Chartist speakers might refer to working men as those who wore ‘fustian jackets’. Also on the word friend (as in Iain’s Volksfreund) this seemed to her to be a word that occurred across Europe in the early nineteenth century in eg magazine titles to suggest bridging class differences: The Labourer’s Friend; the People’s Friend, that kind of thing.
Mark said he thought people sometimes developed identities in response to having them thrust upon them, with negative intent. They were prompted to ask, well, suppose I were a democrat, what would that entail?
Responding to Iain on gymnastic societies, about which he had become (slightly) obsessed, he said that in the early nineteenth century they were nationalist and elitist, but by the 1830s and 40s their membership was diversifying, to include eg women. Also they were developing more complex forms of self-management. Iain asked if they weren’t often linked to military service. Mark said that they kicked off after Waterloo as a response to fitness concerns – but then developed an independent life. Joanna said that supposedly Napoleon kept his army waiting to invade England in trim by having them do gymnastics. She wasn’t aware of it in England at so early a date, but drilling as a form of exercise certainly caught on. Owen had children drilling in his schools, which made some fear he was training revolutionaries.
Anne said that even if the identity of democrat did not catch on in Denmark till the 1840s, yet there were earlier texts that were relevant, eg a 1796 satirical text, The Aristocrat’s Catechism, in which he was shown revelling in persecuting democrats. It was conceived as an identity within this kind of antithesis. A democrat might initially be conceived as someone who read Voltaire and Rousseau, though became more problematic after the Terror. The writer of this satirical tract (Malthe Brun Conrad Malte-Brun – Wikipedia) was banished from the kingdom and lived the rest of his life in Paris.
Jussi said that in 1809 Swedish constitution makers in private letters called themselves liberals [JMI: early for that, in fact; caught on more after used in Spain 1812]. It’s not inconceivable that they might have privately called themselves democrats. Bakunin identified as a democrat on his visit to Sweden in the 1863 and 1864. In the late 1850s and 60s, he thought that the identity became more available, partly as a legacy from the guild radicalism around 1848 but also in connection with Garibaldianism and Scandinavianism. It informed support for the Polish Uprising in 1863. In a Swedish context, though, King as well as people might be described as democrats.
Peter suggested that democracy was often associated with other terms, like liberty, Jacobinism and republicanism. He wondered if being a democrat also represented a way of carrying on those identities, and more specifically if it continued to connote adherence to the ideals of the French revolution.
Joris wanted to know what people had made about his suggestions about Dutch patterns of use, and what the term meant when it did come in – especially the willingness to accept different political opinions and to accept both gaining and subsequently losing power.
Piotr said that while letters and memoirs were potentially useful sources, one shouldn’t forget dictionaries – and translations, not least because emigres were sometimes involved in preparing dictionaries.
Joanna responded to Joris’s point about alternation of power, saying that she did not think that was what democracy connoted at this time. Democrats sought to gain power, and might in practice be prepared to concede it too, but that wasn’t what the word meant.
Cody thought that it would be interesting to look at how the idea circulated across states.
Joanna thought that Peter’s suggestion about continuing to have French revolutionary associations was interesting. [The revolution itself was increasingly positively interpreted from the 1830s, though not of course by everyone]. She also suggested that ‘radical’ was another identity worth keeping an eye on: radicalism tended to receive less attention from historians than words which have a stronger heritage into the present day, but it seems to her to have been an important mid nineteenth-century identity. She had read that it was taken up in France in the 1830s when calling yourself a republican became too dangerous (perhaps was even proscribed).
Jussi thought that to be accepted democracy had to shed its French revolutionary associations, and be equated instead with representative institutions.
Stephen responded to Jana’s point about Slavs being seen as naturally democratic. He thought this was an important theme. And it wasn’t just a matter of myth-making – in Eastern Europe class and nationality often overlapped. Bakunin and Chernyshevsky were well aware of class tensions between Hungarian and Polish gentry and Croats, Slovaks and Ruthenians. [A little later, incidentally, the Ukrainian socialist Drahomanov would criticize the Russian populists themselves for their blindness to the Ukrainian question]
Mark mentioned an 1848 novel by Fanny Lewald, The Lake House, about a young man in Paris during the 1848 revolution, who tries to save the daughter of an aristocratic family from the revolution. It’s written at some distance from the French, and positions men of honour from the middle classes against a corrupt aristocracy. We get something of an attack on aristocracy in Britain in the 1780s and 90s (see A. Goodrich, Debating England’s Aristocracy in the 1790s: Pamphlets, Polemics, and Political Ideas, Boydell Press (Rochester, NY), 2005.– but my sense is that it relates to individuals claiming special privileges or being associated with components of the aristocracy in the political system – and in some cases there is a degree of openness as to whether their conduct is wholly an expression of their social status or whether these are merely individuals whose ‘aristocratic’ behaviour is referencing tropes about Italian and French manners associated with the duelling aristocracy of a society of honour. (I didn’t put that clearly in the session, but that’s what I wanted to say!) Whereas some of the portrayals of aristocracy in German novels like Lewald’s, and Frietag’s Debit and Credit see the individual as very much the direct expression of a fixed class identity.
Anne in Norway you have a lot of talk about democracy vs. Aristocracy even though there is no nobility in Norway, which supports (what I understood as Mark’s point) that it was more a political identity than a social category.
Peter said that now aristocracy was more a social term and democracy more a political one [in British usage, anyway]; he wondered when that pattern had been established.
Iain thought that in novels democracy tends to be associated with youth.
Joanna said in response to Peter that if anything in the late eighteenth-century she thought the opposite was the case: aristocracy meant something more like oligarchy and democracy could mean the common people. Though each could be used in either way. She thought there was anti-aristocratic rhetoric of this kind through much of Europe in the later eighteenth century (which could involve championing king or people or both at once). The social group we now call the aristocracy was then normally called the nobility. She had read that a hinge moment in English usage– whether causal or reflective of change – came with the 1870s ‘new Domesday’ survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_Owners_of_Land,_1873 , which (she thinks) used ‘aristocracy’ to mean great landowners – overlapping but not identical with the nobility. Given that aristocracy was used in many countries at this time to mean something like oligarchy, the ruling elite, she wasn’t surprised that it was used in Norway. It was quite widely used in Mexico (true, there had been a Mexican nobility, but that wasn’t exactly what aristocracy meant).
Joris said there was certainly anti-aristocratic in the sense of oligarchy in the Netherlands in the 1780s, on the part of the Patriots.
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SUGGESTED CASE STUDIES
Jana: Božena Němcová – Wikipedia.
Comments from Franz Fillafer who was unable to attend
Democracy crops up as a buzzword among the so-called “Jacobins” of the 1790s who, however, use it to invoke the august intentions of the house of Habsburg in order to give their projects legitimacy: Andreas Riedel, head of the Viennese Jacobin circle, more of a loose reading circle with a collective subscription of the Moniteur than an actual conspiracy credits Leopold II at whose court he served as mathematics teacher of future emperor Franz with “democratic intentions” (demokratische Denkungsart) to align his own aims with that of the deceased emperor – presumably alluding to Leopold’s constitutional project for Tuscany whose assembly was, however, meant to be purely consultative. Riedel also speaks about the Kantian Johann Benjamin Erhard whom he met at Nuremberg as heftiger Demokrat (sturdy democrat); as for Ignatz Martinovics it would be worthwile to sift and winnow his Mémoires philosophiques ou la nature dévoilée which drew their inspiration from d’Holbach, I sometimes get the impression that postwar Hungarian scholarship over-emphasises the significance of the language of “democracy” among the Hungarian Jacobins for obvious reasons (i.e. ancestor worship under the auspices of “popular democracy”). Ratschky, Viennese sympathiser of the “Jacobins,” a civil servant charged with collecting the meat tax from butcheries in Lower Austria and author of a great Revolution-themed, mock heroic epic entitled Melchior Strigl self-declared as “democrat” which brought him a reprimand from the imperial court; a journal from 1795 reports that newcomers to Vienna’s salons were asked to identify with the shibboleth “democrat” or “aristocrat” before being admitted etc. Regarding the usage in Czech the distinction between “lidový” and “democratic” by Masaryk’s “realists” of the 1890s is relevant, when Havlíček’s “democratic” conception from 1848 was seen as too formalist and depleted of a desire for social transformation!
Histories of sartorial choices and facial hair are certainly revealing! In the 1790s the fashionable wearing of the Phrygian cap by the women of Vienna caused a stir, and poet Joseph Richter hastened to clarify that the Viennese female Jacobins strove for freedom and equality in the realm of love (exclusively?).
In 1848 it was seen as de rigueur for a good Revolutionary to wear a beard, while the “loss of the beards” (Verlust der Bärte) became a quasi-requirement as many chastened 48ers entered the service of the imperial administration in the 1850s; also, political subtexts were given to more longstanding fashions such as the Magyar moustache (ein ries’ger Schnurrbart, steif gewichst, trotzbietend in die Welt hinaus), and a Slovak polemicist wondered in 1850 whether imperial officials slept on matrasses made up of moustaches of executed Hungarian democrats; likewise, Hungarians promised not to shave until Kossuth returned etc. (yet when Carl Giskra, another Viennese 48er became minister of the interior in 1868, his full beard signalled the triumph of liberalism – at the expense of/coinciding with the effacement of democracy, as Giskra himself, son of a tanner, strictly rejected “the rule of the rabble” (Pöbelherrschaft).
Re-imagining Democracy 