The Hurricane of Passion : Popular Politics and Emotion in Late Georgian England 1792-1812

Sammanfattning: This book casts new light on the struggle over reform in Britain following the French Revolution by studying how Georgians from across the social spectrum sought to enlist popular passions, either in defence of the established order – or in order to subvert and challenge it. Inspired by the history of emotions, practice theory, and social movements theory it introduces the concept of ‘emotional tactics’, defined as the language, material objects, and practices used to encourage emotions for political purposes. Using a wide range of source material including controverted election cases, campaign material, newspapers, letters, ballads and prints, this book analyses events of political mobilisation in three English cities: the rapidly industrialising textile town of Nottingham, the imperial capital of London, and Liverpool, Europe’s largest slave trading port. It asks what emotional tactics were used to encourage or discourage political mobilisation, and how they were adapted and deployed depending on local context. The results of this analysis are organised into four ideal types of emotional tactics that were crucial to late Georgian popular politics: 1) Tactics fostering anger; 2) terror tactics; 3) shaming tactics; and 4) tactics fostering loyalty, love and community. This book shows that people in Georgian England were aware that emotions could be manipulated for political gain. It was an established part of the political game. For those who engaged in politics, knowledge about how to influence feelings and passions was a crucial skill, as was the ability to adapt their emotional tactics to the demands of the local community. To the persons studied in this book, contemporary understandings of emotionality were the go-to frame of reference to make sense of the political convulsions of their time. Radicals and government loyalists alike viewed the struggle over reform as a fight to control the hurricane of passions unleashed by the French Revolution. While emotional tactics could achieve powerful results, the persons studied in this book also grappled with the challenge of sustaining emotions over time as a mobilising force. This study finds two ways that Georgians sought to overcome this difficulty: 1) The creation of memory cultures in which the re-telling of stories of past abuses was used to evoke their emotional charge; and 2) the use of re-occurring events of mobilisation to sustain the emotional energy of the participants of a movement. Rather than a history of top-down repression or bottom up protest, this book maps the emotional interaction that linked the national and regional levels of politics, that united and divided socially and ideologically diverse groups of people, and upon which all political mobilisation depended. By bringing passion back into politics in a more balanced and nuanced way, it changes the narrative of popular mobilisation in the Age of Revolutions. It shows both elite and plebeian actors as rational actors who consciously and calculatingly appealed to emotion. Yet it also casts them as driven by emotion and shows examples where people from both spheres were caught up in escalating spirals of radicalisation with unintended consequences.