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EVERYDAY POLITICAL OBJECTS
Everyday Political Objects examines a series of historical case studies across a very
broad timescale, using objects as a means to develop diffe ent approaches to
understanding politics where both internal and external definitions of the political
prove inadequate.
Materiality and objects have gradually made their way into the historian’s toolbox
in recent years, but the distinctive contribution that a set of methods developed
for the study of objects can make to our understanding of politics has yet to be
explored. This book shows how everyday objects play a certain role in politics,
which is specific to material things. It provides case studies which re-orientate the
view of the political in a way that is distinct from, but complementary to, the study
of political institutions, the social history of politics and the analysis of discourse.
Each chapter shows, in a distinctive and innovative way, how historians might
change their approach to politics by incorporating objects into their methodology.
Analysing case studies from France, the Congo, Burkina Faso, Romania and
Britain between the early Middle Ages and the present day makes this study the
perfect tool for students and scholars in the disciplines of history, art history,
political science, anthropology and archaeology.
Christopher Fletcher is a Chargé de recherche (Associate Research Professor)
with the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) affiliate to the
University of Lille. He specializes in late medieval political culture and the history
of masculinity. His books include Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99
(2008) and The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe (2018).EVERYDAY POLITICAL OBJECTS From the Middle Ages to the Contemporary World Edited by Christopher Fletcher
First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Christopher Fletcher; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Christopher Fletcher to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 7, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 7 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fletcher, Christopher David, editor. Title: Everyday political objects : from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world / edited by Christopher Fletcher. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: LCSH: Political customs and rites—Case studies. | Political culture—Case studies. | Object (Philosophy)—Case studies. Classification: LCC GN492.3 .E84 2021 | DDC 306.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056153 ISBN: 978-0-367-70661-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-70660-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14742-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003147428 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS List of figure vii List of contributors xi Acknowledgements xiv 1 Introduction: useful things 1 Christopher Fletcher 2 Rings of power: the interpretation of early medieval objects of adornment 13 Julie Renou 3 The practical and symbolic uses of the medieval horn: from power object to common instrument 30 Luc Bourgeois 4 A history of domestic disorder: the French royal household in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 48 Gil Bartholeyns 5 The prince and his coffe : the material functions and symbolic power of an everyday political object at the end of the Middle Ages 62 Jean-Baptiste Santamaria
vi Contents 6 Teapots, fans and snuffb xes: the portable politics of gender and empire in eighteenth-century Britain 81 Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding 7 Wooden shoes and wellington boots: the politics of footwear in Georgian Britain 104 Matthew McCormack 8 The fan during the French Revolution: from the elite to the people 120 Mathilde Semal 9 Resisting with objects? Seditious political objects and their ‘Agency’ in restoration France (1814–1830) 135 Emmanuel Fureix 10 A sonorous politics of everyday objects: coal workers’ charivaris during the Anzin strike of 1884 151 Adrien Quièvre 11 Political fashion: elegance as subversion in the Congos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 170 Manuel Charpy 12 ‘Citizen Browning’: the banality of a revolutionary object, c.1905–c.1912 209 Éric Fournier 13 Bringing audible propaganda into the everyday: the politicization of the phonograph record from its origins to the SERP, 1888–2000 219 Jonathan Thomas 14 Image, voice and voivodes: communist diafil in Romania (1950–1989) 237 Alexandra Ilina 15 The trajectory of a spear: the materiality of an everyday political object 256 Laurence Douny Bibliography of secondary material 274 Index 292
FIGURES
2.1 Ring with woven shank in copper alloy, white metal alloy and
glass paste. Unearthed in sepulchre 31 during excavations at
Saint-Martin Priory, Niort (Deux-Sèvres). 16
2.2 Gold ring dating from the fourth century. 19
2.3 Proportion of women and men buried with rings during the
early Middle Ages in southwest Gaul. 21
2.4 Ring in white metal alloy with a missing head. Discovered in
sepulchre 84 during excavations at the Priory of Saint-Martin,
Niort (Deux-Sèvres). 24
3.1 Earthenware horn, eleventh century. Pineuilh (Gironde),
La Mothe. 31
3.2 The Moot Horn of Winchester (Hampshire). Copper alloy,
between 1187 and the beginning of the thirteenth century. 32
3.3 Horn from the treasure of the cathedral of Saint-Maurice,
Angers. Byzantine workshop, twelfth century. Probably brought
back from the Near East by Bishop Guillaume de Beaumont
(1202–1240). Elephant ivory. 32
3.4 Konrad, Ruolandes liet, Allemagne, c. 1180–1190: the pagans
sound the horn. 33
3.5 Horn blower in a tower. Graffiti in the clock wer of
Saint-Martin de Moings (Réaux-sur-Trèfl , Charente-
Maritime), twelfth century. 34
3.6 Deer hunt, detail. Angoulême (Charente), cathedral of
Saint-Pierre, portail, c. 1118–1119. 35
3.7 The banquet at Hastings. Bayeux Tapestry. Probably
Canterbury, c. 1080. 37viii Figures
3.8 Gregory the Great, Liber pastoralis, Saint-Amant, third quarter
of the twelfth century. 43
4.1 This is the ordinance of the household of King Saint Louis made in
the month of August in the year of Our Lord one thousand CC LXI,
manuscript of the Chamber accounts, 1316. 50
5.1 The payment of taxes to the lord. Valerius Maximus, Faits et
dits. France, fifteenth centu y. 63
5.2 A striking illustration of the complementarity of writing and
money. While his servants handle treasure, the king takes note
and records. Psalterium romanum, Mantova, c. 1430. 64
5.3 Alexander distributes the treasure of Philip of Macedon.
Johannes de Columna, Mare historiarum, Anjou, 1447–1450.
Maître de Jouvenel and his assistants. 70
5.4 King Arthur sleeping under his tent with his coffe s. Songe
d’Arthur. Mort le roi Artu. Poitiers, around 1480. 71
5.5 The beheading of Thedebert II in the treasure room on
the orders of Thierry II in 613. Grandes chroniques de France.
Brittany, end of the fifteenth centu y. 76
6.1 Trade card of Esther Burney, fan-maker, 1749–1751
Anonymous, British, late eighteenth–early nineteenth century. 82
6.2 Fan, painted vellum with pierced ivory sticks and guards,
mid-eighteenth century; pastoral scene. 84
6.3 William Hogarth, Royalty Episcopacy Law. 88
6.4 A rectangular, jewelled gold-mounted mother-of-pearl
snuffb x, the cover chased with Mars, Venus and Cupid at
the Temple of Love. 91
6.5 The Excise Fan. 97
6.6 Jacobite fan. 98
6.7 Tortoiseshell box and cover with inset miniature of Prince
Charles Edward Stuart (1720–1788) late eighteenth century. 99
6.8 Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, Abolition Teapot, c. 1760. 100
7.1 Men’s silk brocade shoes (1730). 106
7.2 ‘Welladay! is this my son Tom’ (1774). 110
7.3 James Gillray, ‘Un petit soupèr a la Parisiènne, or
A Family of Sans-Culotts refreshing after the fatigues
of the day’ (1793). 112
7.4 Clogs, early nineteenth century. 113
7.5 Wellington boots, 1800–1825. 116
8.1 Folding fan, 1781. Gouached silk on ivory frame. 123
8.2 Folding fan, 1788. Gouached paper on wooden frame. 125
8.3 Brisé fan ‘Le retour de Necker,’ 1788. Gouached and
varnished wood. 126
8.4 Folding fan, 1790. Printed paper on rosewood frame. 127
8.5 Folding fan, 1792. Printed paper on wooden frame. 128Figures ix
8.6 Folding fan, 1790. Printed paper on ivory frame. 130
8.7 Folding fan, 1787. Printed paper on rosewood frame. 130
9.1 ‘Elixir de Sainte-Hélène.’ Seditious liqueur label. 138
9.2 Traces left by a seditious gingerbread showing the
effigy of the esuit-King, seized in Metz in 1827. 140
9.3 Indian ink and paper copy of a coin debasing the effig
of Charles X, found in Loudun (Vienne) in 1827. 141
9.4 Piece of seditious fabric seized by the police in
Bas-Rhin in 1824. 141
9.5 Seditious statuette with a dual effigy of Louis XVIII
and Napoléon. 143
9.6 Seditious fleur-de-lys dr wn on folded paper and seized in
Toulouse, 1819. 144
10.1 Le mineur à table (around 1900). The postcard shows a family
of miners inside their home. 156
10.2 Le mineur à table (detail). Various kitchen utensils, including
pans and tong. 157
10.3 La toilette du mineur (around 1900). 158
10.4 Abscon. La fosse ‘La pensée’ (around 1900). Children posing
with their hoops. 159
10.5 Denain. Un groupe de cafus (around 1900). Women wearing
their work clothes and clogs. 160
11.1 ‘Jean Roy de Congo, à la tête de ses armées et le premier
fait Chrétien. Taken from l’Histoire des Voyages’ in Recueil
d’estampes, représentant les grades, les rangs & les dignités, suivant
le costume de toutes les nations. 171
11.2 ‘Une curieuse tombe moderne . . . d’un “civilisé”’
[A curious modern grave . . . of a ‘Civilized’ person],
Katanga, Belgian Congo, November 1933. 174
11.3 ‘Un roitelet africain’ [An African petty king], from
Henri-Nicolas Frey and Pierre-Georges Jeanniot (illus.),
Illustrations de Côte occidentale d’Afrique: vues, scènes, croquis
(Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1890). 178
11.4 Chief with a medal: ‘Grand Chef des Bekalelwe.’
Yakaumbu, Kabinda (Belgian Congo), Postcard, 1910s. 180
11.5 Couple converted to Christianity. ‘Un jeune ménage à
Brazzaville, Congo français’ [A young married couple
in Brazzaville, French Congo], 1890s. 181
11.6 Monseigneur Augouard in full regalia in Brazzaville,
c. 1900. Fonds Augouard, Congo. 183
11.7 Catalogue of La Belle Jardinière, Paris for French
and foreign colonies, 1921. 184
11.8 Club of ‘evolved people,’ amateur photograph,
c. 1930, Boma (?), Belgian Congo. 185x Figures
11.9 ‘Congo Brazzaville. Boys Loango habillés à l’Européenne’
[Loango ‘Boys’ dressed in European style], postcard, Vialle
photographer, Brazzaville, printed in France by Meyrignac et
Puydebois, c. 1905. 187
11.10 Congo français. Le contre-maître Casinga à Tuba (Rivière
Kouilou), [French Congo. The foreman Casinga in Tuba
(Kouilou river)], postcard, printed by Albert Bergeret et Cie, in
Nancy, France, 1907. 189
11.11 Party in the ‘native village’ (village indigène) in Brazzaville,
amateur photograph, 1920s. 191
11.12 Loanda. Carnival of Cabindas, Angola, 1910s. 195
11.13 The Sapeur Bachelor on the Boulevards of Paris, end
of the 1970s. 199
14.1 Dănilă Prepeleac. Adaptation of the story written by Ion
Creanga (1955). 244
14.2 Censored sequences in the script of the diafil ‘Feudal castles
in our homeland’ (1958). 245
14.3 Mihai Voievod Viteazul (1975). 249
14.4 Frame from ‘The peasant revolt of 1907.’ 252
15.1 The copy of the original spear is made of a double head: a flat
pointed head fashioned in an unidentified metal and a long and
flat metal head used as a hoe to hunt animals in their urrows. 259CONTRIBUTORS Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding is Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) of Eight- eenth-Century British Studies and a member of the Centre d’Études en Civilisations Langues et Littératures Étrangères (CECILLE: EA 4074) at the U niversity of Lille. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British art and cultural history, visual and material culture, the fashion for chinoiserie and the representation of the Ori- ent in British art. She is the author of Les voyages du capitaine James Cook, 1768–1779 (2020) and La Chine dans l’imaginaire anglais des Lumières, 1685–1798 (2016). Gil Bartholeyns is Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) at the University of Lille and a member of Institut de Recherche Historique du Septentrion (IRHiS: UMR 8529) specialized in medieval visual culture and in the material culture of pre-industrial Europe. He is joint editor-in-chief of Techniques and Cultures and an active member of several editorial boards, including Entre temps (Collège de France), Modes pratiques and Terrain. His publications include Image et transgression au Moyen Âge, with Pierre-Olivier Dittmar and Vincent Jolivet (2008), Politiques visuelles (2016) and, recently, a novel, Deux kilos deux (2019). Luc Bourgeois is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Caen- Normandy (Centre Michel de Boüard-CRAHAM). He is editor of the journal Archéologie médiévale and of the collection Publications du CRAHAM (Presses uni- versitaires de Caen). His research is primarily focused on the habitat and symbolic objects associated with medieval elites. Manuel Charpy is a Chargé de recherche (Associate Research Professor) with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Director of the research institute InVisu (USR 3103). His research concerns the links between
xii Contributors material cultures and social identities during the industrial age, in France, the UK, the USA and western and central Africa. Laurence Douny is an anthropologist and research associate at the Humboldt Uni- versity, Berlin. Her work lies at the intersection of the history and anthropology of techniques, the indigenous science of materials, and design. She is the author of Living in a Landscape of Scarcity: Materiality and cosmology in West Africa (2014) and co-authored with Urmila Mohan The Material Subject. Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion (2021). Christopher Fletcher is a Chargé de recherche (Associate Research Professor) with the CNRS, affiliate to the research centre IRHiS (UMR 8529), University of Lille. He specializes in late medieval political culture and the history of masculinity. He has so far published Richard II: Manhood, youth and politics, 1377–99 (2008), Government and Political Life in England and France, c. 1300–c. 1500 with Jean-Philippe Genet and John Watts (2015) and The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe with Sean Brady, Rachel E. Moss and Lucy Riall (2018). Éric Fournier is a Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) in the social and cultural history of nineteenth-century France at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He is the author of Paris en ruines. Du Paris haussmannien au Paris communard (2007), Cité du sang (2008), La belle juive: D’Ivanhoé à la Shoah (2011), La commune n’est pas morte: Les usages politiques du passé de 1871 à nos jours (2013) and most recently La critique des armes: une histoire d’objets révolutionnaires (2019). Emmanuel Fureix is Professor of Contemporary History at the Université de Paris-Est, Créteil. He works on the political and cultural history of the nineteenth century, with a particular interest in images, emotions and gestures. He has pub- lished La France des larmes. Deuils politiques à l’âge romantique (2009), which won the Prix Chateaubriand, La modernité désenchantée. Relire l’histoire du XIXe siècle français, with François Jarrige (2015), and more recently L’oeil blessé. Politiques d’iconoclasme après la Révolution française (2019). Alexandra Ilina is Lecturer in the French department, University of Bucharest, Romania. Her main research focus is on medieval literature, with a penchant for French Arthurian texts and their visual dimension, heraldry and medievalism. Her PhD thesis was recently published by Classiques Garnier: La hiérarchie: entre texte et image dans le Tristan en Prose (2020). Matthew McCormack is Professor of History and Head of the Graduate School at the University of Northampton. His books include The Independent Man: Citizen- ship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (2005), Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (2015) and Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688–1928 (2019).
Contributors xiii Adrien Quièvre is a PhD candidate in history and musicology at the research centre IRHiS, University of Lille. His research focuses on the uses of sound and music during strikes and workers revolts in nineteenth-century France. He recently published an article on the political spaces of the soundscape in the collection Paysages sensoriels: approche pluridisciplinaires, edited by Véronique Mehla and Laura Péaud (2019). Julie Renou recently completed her PhD in archaeological sciences at the Univer- sity of Bordeaux Montaigne, specialized in the analysis of material cultures of the early Middle Ages through the observation of metallic artefacts, specifically orna- mental objects. Through the study of jewellery she investigates power and gender relations, the question of representations and the circulation of so-called ‘precious’ goods during this period. Jean-Baptiste Santamaria is Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) in Medi- eval History at the University of Lille, affiliate to the IRHiS research centre. On the basis of sources from Artois and the lands of the late medieval dukes of Bur- gundy, he explores the diffe ent ramifications of princely government, from the mastery of technical knowledge to the daily life of the court. He recently published Le secret du prince. Gouverner par le secret (2019), which won the Prix de la Dame à la Licorne and the Prix du Livre d’histoire du Sénat. Mathilde Semal is a PhD candidate in the history of art at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. She dedicated her master’s thesis to the cultural and social history of eighteenth-century fans. Her PhD thesis now plans to study the issues and representations of exoticism in the visual arts of the southern Neth- erlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is interested in particular in the decorative arts and is concerned with combining stylistic, iconological and sociological, and anthropological approaches. Jonathan Thomas is a PhD candidate at the Centre de Recherche sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. He works on the political uses of phonograph records and, more generally, the audible dimension of political practices, in an approach which combines his- tory, anthropology and musicology. He has published his work on the political uses of music, song and records in the journals Volume!, Analitica and Transposition, and has recently published his fi st book La propagande par le disque. Jean-Marie Le Pen, éditeur phonographique (2020).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Objects, things or materiality is now such a well-established theme in the social
sciences that when I suggested to one of the contributors to this volume that a
footnote introducing Actor-Network Theory might be helpful for the uniniti-
ated, his fi st reaction was that this risked seeming ridiculous: ‘As if to say, “Heh,
you know, it’s Latour, John Law, Bloor.” There has been absolutely no sociological
theory better known in the last thirty years.’ Yet although the material turn now
seems to bestride the world, or at least the social sciences, triumphant, its influence
on political or social history, as opposed to cultural history, is perhaps not as clear as
this might imply. This is partly a result of the incomplete or at least relatively recent
victory in these sub-disciplines of the assumed pre-existing hermeneutic: that of
semiotics and language-as-a-system. As a political historian, interested in both the
effects of language on action and on the social history of politics, it seemed to me,
at least, that historians had only recently started to integrate discourse, ideas and
culture into their account of past societies, and that the material turn was even less
advanced in its influenc . After a little friendly discussion, we put in an explanatory
footnote.
This book is the result of a project involving primarily historians but also
archaeologists, anthropologists and politologues, to investigate what focusing on
everyday objects can contribute to an historical understanding of politics. It pro-
vides a series of case studies which re-orientate our view of the political in a way
distinct from, but complementary to, the study of political institutions, the social
history of politics and the analysis of discourse. It was made possible by generous
support from the University of Lille and from the Institut de Recherche Histo-
rique du Septentrion (IRHiS), a mixed CNRS-University of Lille research unit
(UMR 8589). The majority of the cases studied are drawn from France, between
the early Middle Ages and the twentieth century, although individual chapters
also consider the Congo, Burkina Faso, Romania and Britain. The University ofAcknowledgements xv
Lille funded the initial three-year project ‘Everyday Political Cultures’ (2017–19) of
which ‘Everyday Political Objects’ was one thematic strand. Together with IRHiS
and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, the university also provided generous
support towards translating the 8 out of 16 chapters which were originally written
in French. This translation was undertaken by Adrian Morfee and Anita Conrade.
Most importantly of all, however, IRHiS provided the opportunity to develop
this project in an intellectually stimulating environment, which is, moreover, far
from being an ivory tower, tightly entangled as it is with a hard-working, public
university. This book could not have existed without the scientific input of Gil
Bartholeyns, Laurent Brassart, Manuel Charpy, Esther Dehoux, Elodie Lecuppre-
Desjardin, Matthieu de Oliveira, Thomas Golsenne, Sylvain Lesage and Mathieu
Vivas, nor without the benevolent oversight of Stéphane Michonneau and Charles
Mériaux, and the technical support of Christine Aubry, Martine Duhamel and
Julie Lemoine. Thanks are also due to Karen Harvey, and to the four readers for
Routledge (including Rebecca Spang and Jonathan Spangler) for their incisive
comments at crucial moments.
Christopher Fletcher
Lille, November 20201
INTRODUCTION
Useful things
Christopher Fletcher
This book aims to show how everyday objects play a certain kind of role in politics,
which is specific to material things. It hopes, in the process, to show how this helps
us to understand what politics is. Materiality in general and objects in particular
have gradually made their way into the historian’s toolbox since the 1990s. So
far, however, the distinctive contribution that methods developed for the study of
objects can make to our understanding of politics has yet to be fully realized. Much
stimulating work, for example, has been devoted to the way that everyday objects
and forms of dress become symbols of the bearer’s or the wearer’s political beliefs;
how they can display demands for change, or opposition to change, in forms of
government and social organisation.1 Research on the cusp of cultural, economic
and political history has examined how changing political regimes inflected the
relationship between political power and furniture design, for example, or the ten-
sion between perceptions of the value of money and the material forms it takes.2
Following the lead of economists and anthropologists, historians have tracked the
flow of commodities for interactions, which since they concern power relations,
sometimes on a global scale, might be thought of as political.3 In all this work, how-
ever, the meaning of the political has been taken for granted in a way which limits
its usefulness for more distant periods and beyond Western Europe. It also risks
introducing an element of teleology even when dealing with the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century West. This is a pity, since historians of politics have much to
learn from the study of objects, and even more from the study of everyday objects.
If we talk about politics in terms of our common-sense understanding of it,
we tend to focus on phenomena which seem to us self-evidently political in a
way which risks anachronism.4 In the present day, politics is usually understood
either in a ‘narrow sense’ as denoting the world of politicians, public policy and the
state, or else in a ‘broad sense’ denoting competition for control over any human
grouping. Both have their advantages and their limitations as tools for studying past
DOI: 10.4324/9781003147428-12 Christopher Fletcher
societies. Focusing on the nearest equivalents to the former in past societies carries
the clearest risk of anachronism. The search for the origins of the ‘modern state,’
useful as it has been for comparative purposes, risks privileging certain institutions
over other social phenomena which were at least as important at the time.5 The
solution frequently offe ed is to take up contemporary terminology: what actors in
past societies called politics. One problem with this move, however, is that today
and in the past, much which might be identified as politics has not been described
by participants or contemporary observers as such. In the modern West, political
scientists note the phenomenon of ‘avoiding politics’ in which agents actively avoid
using language or raising issues considered to be ‘political,’ even when they deal
with matters which raise questions of general import and even when they seek to
influence government policy.6 In late medieval Western Europe, by comparison,
the division between ethics, economics and politics was a commonplace of Latinate
expert discourse after the twelfth century re-discovery of Aristotle, but it did not
become at all common in the vernacular until the fifteenth century. ‘Politics’ was
discussed in terms of negotiating common or mutual interest in a way which did
not involve a specifi , specialized, ‘political’ vocabulary.7 As this and other historical
examples demonstrate, it would be wrong to limit our inquiry by only consider-
ing phenomena to be political if participants or contemporary observers describe
them as such, especially as one common political tactic is to deny that one is acting
politically.
Falling back on the second, ‘broad sense’ definition, however, risks losing ‘poli-
tics’ some of its descriptive usefulness, for one of two very diffe ent reasons. On the
one hand, a ‘broad sense’ conception of politics might be used to justify external
intervention in areas which had been kept aside from politics in a certain society
at a certain moment. One example of this is the feminist dictum ‘the personal is
political,’ another the environmentalist claim to intervene in decisions which had
been treated as solely scientific or technical.8 Indeed, in the sophisticated devel-
opment of such a view of politics fitted for the present-day West, some politi-
cal theorists have taken the identification of common interests and the raising of
these interests to a general level as the marker of true politics.9 Politics, or rather
politicization, is the act of introducing new areas of contention into a political
sphere with a definite institutional existence in the modern West. In fact, such
definitions are somewhere in between a ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ sense, since they are
themselves intended as political moves which seek to mark certain areas of human
life as explicitly conflictual and hence legitimate areas for intervention. As such,
they are not easy to adapt as a way of providing a means of discussing politics in
past societies, although they do have the merit of underlining the permeability of
this sphere. A more general, vernacular broad definition of ‘politics’ as competition
for influence in any human grouping is certainly more adaptable, and hence less
distorting of past realities, but it risks becoming so general as to lose the specifics of
the political. In expressions such as ‘offic politics,’ or in moves by social historians
to broaden the use of this term to include all kinds of manifestations of ‘the social
distribution and use of power,’ what seemed to be specific about politics in ourIntroduction 3
usage is largely lost.10 If all human conflict and competition is politics, then politics
loses a large part of the usefulness it possessed when used more narrowly, becoming
an adaptable but consequently rather loose label for conflictualit , competition and
strategic behaviour in any human grouping.
Yet if politics should not be described in our own terms, and cannot be identi-
fied in all cases by the terms participants used, it is difficul to see how else it can
be defined. Despite repeated effo ts by political philosophers over the past two
centuries to provide a broader definition of politics which is not centred on the
state; it has proved difficul to provide one which commands general acceptance.
The liberal or ‘Weberian’ conception of politics as competition to secure control
of the state, and especially its monopoly of legitimate violence, has often been put
into question, but each new approach to politics then proposed tends to retain the
mark of the particular historical circumstances for which it was developed.11 Poli-
tics among those, like most historians, who are not political philosophers, is still
most often conceived either in a ‘narrow sense’ with reference to the state, or in
historical societies those institutions which seem to resemble it, or else in a ‘broad
sense’ as the enterprise of securing influence within a y human grouping.
It is here that everyday political objects come in. Everyday political objects help
to reveal the articulations between the ‘narrow sense’ and ‘broad sense’ politics, in
part because they frequently migrate between state politics, the specialized political
sphere or what most closely resembles it in a given society, and other arenas which
can be taken to be political latu sensu – labour relations; the family; religion; and
various kinds of face-to-face communities – or which simply do not appear to be
political at all.
A case drawn from recent history, which emerged whilst this project was in
progress, gives a fi st idea of how these propositions might be put into practice. On
30 July 2008, the French government issued a decree modifying the Code de la route
to specify, among other things, that drivers must equip themselves with a reflect ve
triangle and a hi-visibility jacket for use in the case of a breakdown or emergency
stop.12 In practice, this meant that all drivers were supposed to buy these items
and to place the jacket, in particular, somewhere convenient within their vehicle:
the article specified that it should be ‘to hand’ (à portée de main). From then on, it
was not unusual to see this item displayed prominently in more modest or utility
vehicles, often over the passenger seat, in a way which quickly incurred conde-
scension on internet forums and beyond.13 Ten years later, however, this everyday
object suddenly acquired an enormous political charge. Between October 2017
and October 2018, the price of petrol increased by 15% and that of diesel, which
had previously been much cheaper as a result of a preferential tax rate, by 23%.14
Between May and November 2018 an online petition launched against the rise in
fuel prices received over a million signatures.15 Far from giving ground in the face
of this protest, in September 2018 the French government announced its intention
to increase energy taxes by 11.5% from 1 January 2019.16 As a result, the movement
hardened, and in the course of October calls for a national blockade beginning
on 17 November spread quickly through the internet and increasingly through4 Christopher Fletcher
conventional media. It was during the build-up to this movement that the gilet
jaune or high-vis jacket made its fi st political appearance. On 24 October, Ghislain
Coutard, a 36-year-old maintenance technician, posted a video in which he took
his hi-vis jacket from the seat next to him, apparently at random, and suggested
using it as a sign for the movement: ‘That will motivate [people] and say: “Putain,
we’re going to see ‘gilets jaunes’ everywhere on the dashboards, it’s a sign, it will
maybe really move. It’s not just words in the air.”’17 In the months that followed, the
gilet jaune became the uniform of those participating in regular Saturday blockades
at roundabouts across the country, and in the unlicensed demonstrations in major
cities which accompanied them. It would also become the name of the participants
themselves: they were the gilets jaunes.
For the early twenty-fi st century historian or cultural critic, it might seem that
what we have here is a semiotic intervention, an attempt to do politics by manipu-
lating the system of signs (‘it’s a sign’), comparable to the role of discourse and
language in many political contexts.18 Yet, quite apart from the reaction we might
imagine this provoking from the gilets jaunes themselves, with their contempt for
‘words in the air,’ closer analysis reveals that this is not the whole story. The gilets
jaunes show instead how a familiar object, primarily characterized by its use value,
might acquire a new meaning and a distinctively political use. Hi-vis jackets did
have symbolic connotations before the autumn of 2018, and these definitely con-
tributed to their usefulness as a new political symbol. But it was ultimately the fact
that such jackets were technically conceived to be seen from a distance, and that all
drivers were legally obliged to own one, which suggested its new use and hence its
new symbolic value.
In terms of cognitive psychology, it was the ‘perceived affo dances’ of this object,
the things that it could apparently be used for, which suggested its new, politi-
cal use and hence its new, political meaning.19 We can further assert, using terms
which have become widespread amongst anthropologists, archaeologists and more
recently historians, that with its political appropriation the ‘biography’ or ‘cultural
biography’ of this particular object entered a new phase.20 This phase was distinc-
tively ‘political’ in our terms, in that it involved intervention in what is assumed in
modern Western societies to be ‘politics’ in the narrow or strict sense: the world of
public policy and the action of the state. The gilets jaunes made this intervention,
paradoxically, by insisting that they were exterior to the institutionalized political
sphere, a characteristic which aligned them with the contemporary category of
‘populism.’ Indeed one of the characteristics of the movement of the gilets jaunes
was how the leaders which emerged were violently rejected the moment they
sought institutional legitimacy or agreed to attend negotiations with the govern-
ment, even though many of them subsequently remained public figu es.21
The case of the gilets jaunes is a useful starting point for considering a num-
ber of questions which have come to concern the historical profession in recent
years as well as the contribution these might make to historical understandings of
politics. In some circles, the steadily increasing interest in materiality, the study of
objects and material culture in recent decades has been seen as a means of puttingIntroduction 5
into question the ‘linguistic turn’ conventionally dated between the 1980s and
1990s.22 A ‘material turn’ has been proposed as one of the means to move beyond
an alleged academic orthodoxy in which language is supposedly conceived of as
both an all-encompassing and, rather contradictorily, infinitely flexi le structure
which must be negotiated prior to understanding any past society.23 In fact, the
‘material turn’ and the interest in objects is better considered as complementary to
the ‘linguistic turn’ rather than superseding it or cancelling it out.24 Nonetheless,
it does have to be recognized that focusing on the perceived affo dances and biog-
raphy of objects, for example, and, more radically, on their ‘agency’ does involve a
more fundamental revision of our models for conceiving historical processes than
is sometimes allowed.25 Objects and materiality cannot simply be incorporated
into existing models of interpretation developed for the analysis of language and
discourse. Objects, like images, are something diffe ent, and we need a diffe ent
set of methods to understand them. This, too, has an important contribution to
make to how we historicize past phenomena, including politics, in a fundamentally
diffe ent fashion from discursive approaches, in a way that contributes in a modest
way to understanding comparable phenomena today.
The contributions to this volume examine a series of historical case studies,
using objects as a means to develop new approaches to understanding politics.
A number of themes emerged organically in the course of the presentation, discus-
sion, translation and revision of these chapters. These themes are independent of
any pre-existing theoretical schema, even if they draw on and adapt a number of
existing theoretical currents. One of these, close to the notion of the ‘biography’
of objects, is the social mobility of everyday objects. Another, recalling ‘perceived
affo dances,’ is the primacy of use, and the diffe ent way an everyday, functional
object might be political than a more exclusively symbolic one. Many of the objects
discussed here were familiar both in elite and in ‘popular’ contexts, either simulta-
neously, since the objects were useful for a number of diffe ent social groups at the
same time, or at diffe ent periods, as objects which were once associated with par-
ticular social groups were taken up and re-used by others. A number of the authors
also draw on Alfred Gell’s theorisation of ‘agency’ as the capacity for social action
ascribed to an object, even of the extent to which some objects may be considered
to be veritable ‘persons,’26 but what is perhaps more marked across the volume is
the affiliatio of almost all the contributors with Gell’s project of demonstrating
the limits of semiotics as a way of understanding the social efficac of objects.
Although some objects, especially art objects, might be conceived of by both artists
and recipients as a means of transmitting messages through the mastery of a com-
mon system of interpretation, Gell insists that the symbolic value of an object is
rarely if ever determined solely by its position in a system of signs.27 Similarly, in
the chapters which follow, use is something independent of meaning, a product of
particular techniques, social practices and specific historical circumstances, which
can, however, influence and provide new meaning. In the process, useful objects
provide both specific means of overtly exercising political power and also ways of
exerting political influence while obscu ing or denying the desire to do so.6 Christopher Fletcher
The political consequences of the social mobility of everyday objects can be
considered from the point of view of the biography of a single object, or of the
typical trajectory of a particular kind of object, or else as the biography of a type of
object over the long term. Considering a broad category of objects over the long
term in the longest chapter in this volume, Manuel Charpy begins by examining
how the practice of reselling second-hand European clothes in the colonial Congo
initially made their recipients seem absurd and inferior in Western eyes, as clothes
were, from a colonial point of view, used in a way which seemed to misunderstand
their symbolic value. How the political significance of Western clothing changed
emerges as Charpy expands his perspective to the biography of this category of
objects between the nineteenth century and the present day. From a marker of
submission to colonial norms, high levels of expenditure on imported European
clothing became a means to wrong-foot and undermine those who positioned
themselves as their superiors. Applying comparable methods to the coloniser,
Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding offe s an explicitly political reading of the fl w of com-
modities in the context of eighteenth-century British colonialism. She consid-
ers how objects such as porcelain tea things included teapots, tea tables and also
fans with oriental themes were appropriated in eighteenth-century Britain, often
by women, in a way which inscribed colonial politics in the everyday. Alayrac-
Fielding, in considering a broad category of objects, considers themes which run
through these chapters, including the agency which could be ascribed to objects,
such as fans and snuff boxes, perceived not merely as a tools but as an extension of
the person who used them, conditioning in turn what they could do. In a theme
which recurs throughout this volume, she notes the way that portable objects com-
bined intimacy and familiarity with a potential for concealment and revelation,
which made them particularly effect ve as a means of mobilizing political senti-
ments that found themselves marginalized.
Moving the focus to a more restricted category of objects yields revealing com-
parisons about how the use value of an object inflects its political meaning in dif-
ferent ways as it is used by diffe ent social groups. Luc Bourgeois considers horns
used as musical instruments, which also migrated between social groups in the
course of the Middle Ages. At fi st associated with the aristocratic pursuits of war
and hunting, and with the sounding of the alert on the walls of fortifications or on
ships, horns were an important symbol of noble power in the central Middle Ages.
A horn might be used, for example, to symbolize the gift of privileges of liberties
from a lord to a town, with the original object or a copy of it being preserved and
regularly sounded in certain towns into the modern era. Yet this symbolism marked
a fossilization of past use, since with the return of metal trumpets and other more
sophisticated instruments in the later Middle Ages, the horn no longer served to
symbolize aristocratic power, becoming instead the instrument of pilgrims, shep-
herds and tradesmen. Julie Renou, meanwhile, considers a class of objects, rings,
whose use and meaning could change over a human being’s lifespan, or over several
lifetimes, as they were passed from one owner to another, accruing meaning with
each step. Rings have tended to be classed in terms of the expense of the materialsIntroduction 7
they were made from, ascribing high status materials to high status individuals,
and cheaper stones and metals to lesser folk. Yet Renou demonstrates the social
mobility of these objects. Rings made with copper alloy or with a blue-tinted
glass paste ‘jewel’ could serve comparable functions of creating or strengthening
social ties and power relationships for the noble women who feature in Gregory of
Tours, or for the lesser individuals who were interred with comparable objects. In
a study of the social mobility and political resonance of a particularly revealing type
of object, Mathilde Semal examines the case of women’s fans in eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century France. An object with a simple use value as a means of
cooling down its owner, fans had also long served functions as a tool of seduction
and self-presentation strongly associated with the aristocracy, while also providing
a decorative ground which could relay news and political messages. With the sim-
plification of methods of production at the time of the Revolution, the fan, after
a brief eclipse, returned as a means of transmitting a far broader range of messages,
fi st pro-Revolutionary, and then counter-Revolutionary. In this case, use in itself
did not dictate the message, but the fan evolved with the aims and tastes of its
diffe ent owners. Even here, the fan’s technical composition as something which
could be opened or closed, wholly or in part, which could be seen close to or from
a distance, meant that its materiality inflected how it could be used, and what mes-
sages could be delivered, to whom and with what effect
Alongside the biography of an object, a recurring theme in this volume is the
way an object’s use value and ‘perceived affo dances’ suggest possibilities for the
exercise of power and dominance, which in turn inflect its meaning, in a way
which is not fully understandable from a purely semiotic perspective. Jean-Baptiste
Santamaria, for example, considers how the political resonance of the coffer or
chest as a symbol of princely or noble power in the later Middle Ages was inflected
by its everyday use. Coffe s served to stock money, which primarily meant silver or
gold coin, or objects made of these metals, in a way which evaded paper account-
ing. Coffe s thus served the prince as a reserve of power which no underling could
regulate, and it was for this reason that the image of the prince dipping into his
coffer to reward his followers was so powerful. Yet at the same time, this object’s use
made it ambiguous and a source of tension, standing both for good management
and the prince’s miserliness. Laurence Douny examines another charged political
object, chosen for its ‘perceived affo dances,’ which although it was initially mobi-
lized to reinforce the dominance of the powerful, nevertheless invoked and con-
tinues to invoke the compromises and controversies which underlie their power.
Drawing on interviews in the field, she analyzes the political resonances of a Fulbe
spear in the village of Douroula in western Burkina Faso from the seventeenth cen-
tury to the present day. Initially taken as a trophy by a Marka archer from a Fulbe
horseman he had killed with a poisoned arrow, the spear was of a type adapted for
the slave hunting that they practised, designed to intimidate or immobilize their
prey. This particular spear, adopted as part of the symbolic property of Douroula
at its founding, regularly used in collective rituals, became an ambiguous symbol
after the Marka founder of the village was killed by his own brother, who seized8 Christopher Fletcher
power in alliance with the Fulbe. Even after its replacement by a copy at an undated
but acknowledged moment in the past, the spear has been used in regular sacrifi-
cial ceremonies which enact the political tensions and the political constitution of
Douroula, in a manner which is inseparable from the spear’s original use.
More simply, focusing on the everyday use of objects which acquire political
meaning assists historians in their most fundamental task: understanding what was
going on. Éric Fournier examines the seemingly arbitrary use of the Browning
gun in the socialist newspaper La Guerre Sociale in the early 1910s to characterize
‘Citizen Browning,’ an initially mysterious socialist figu e, perhaps a man or perhaps
the weapon itself, who provides cool-headed resistance to the violence of police
or strike-breakers. Fournier shows how after the generalization of the right to bear
arms after 1885, coupled with the development of mass industrial production in
France and Belgium, fi earms became a mundane object for the last time in French
civilian life. The Browning gun was both readily available, was advertised to have
a fi epower which surpassed that of the police, and could be easily smuggled in
from Belgium if the import of guns was banned at some future point. It was this
mundane context which made the figu e of ‘Citizen Browning’ effect ve. Also
with the aim of understanding what was ‘at stake’ in a particular conflict, Adrien
Quièvre analyzes the use of mundane and familiar objects in mine workers’ chari-
vari on the margins of a major strike in the Anzin coalfields, near Valenciennes, in
1884. Although this strike was marked by a degree of union organization which
minimized the more spontaneous outbreaks of contestation or violence which had
marked earlier movements, on a number of occasions miners who returned to
work were targeted by charivari or ‘rough music.’ Drawing on the emerging field of
sound studies, Quièvre analyzes the objects used to make the noise which accom-
panied these events. He demonstrates how, although their affo dances as means of
creating noise were important, the everyday uses of the objects chosen carried their
own messages. In particular, they used objects associated with the domestic life of
miners and their families in a way which reintroduced miners’ wives, sidelined by
the new, exclusively masculine organization of the labour movement. Cauldrons,
pans and clogs served to make noise whilst reintroducing women, challenging the
division between paid work and the unpaid labour, which enabled it, and which
was closely regulated by the mine company in its role as landlord.
Footwear, indeed, has often provided powerful political objects in diffe ent con-
texts, again with clearly gendered connotations, notably by the way that the material
existence shaped the body of the wearer, the way they moved and held them-
selves. Matthew McCormack examines the complex structure of political mean-
ings attached to diffe ent kinds of shoes in Georgian England. Fashionable French
footwear for men, which often had wooden soles, shaped how the wearer walked,
or rather did not walk very much. Like female footwear for the well-to-do, which
in this period consisted of delicate pumps with a limited lifespan, these wooden
or part-wooden shoes were impractical for walking over anything but a short dis-
tance. Leather boots, on the other hand, were adapted primarily for riding, making
the wearer mobile over the countryside or on the road but to a limited extent onIntroduction 9
foot. They were thus excellently adapted markers of rough, independent ‘country’
masculinity. As male leather footwear for the better-off developed, it became
more practical for walking in town. McCormack suggests that this produced a
more gendered form of footwear, which marked the moral and even physical
superiority of Englishmen of the propertied or professional classes, over the
French-influenced court, women and the bulk of the population who largely wore
ill-fitting ooden footwear, or footwear with wooden soles, regardless of sex.
In mine workers’ homes, in a protester’s pocket, on a man’s feet or in a woman’s
tea set, political objects drew their power from the way they mixed with the eve-
ryday, the way they were familiar, ordinary, even anodyne. This characteristic of
political objects extends to everyday things which might at fi st seem to be sim-
ple devices for the transmission of political messages which could be reduced to
language or discourse but which turn out to have a particular material and even
bodily aspect. Alexandra Ilina analyzes how the use of still film strips or ‘diafilm
in communist Romania served to transmit messages which the historian can ana-
lyze as translating the changing nature of state ideology in the 1970s and 1980s, as
Ceausescu’s regime gradually adopted a nationalist ideology tinged with medieval-
ism in place of earlier more orthodox Soviet propaganda. Yet to focus on the mes-
sage without taking into account the everyday medium loses much of their power,
since these film strips had no associated audio: the script was read aloud, usually in
a family environment, often by an adult to children, in a way which made them
less aggressive and more immersive than a newsreel would have been. Jonathan
Thomas likewise describes how the changing uses of recorded audio, notably in the
form of vinyl records, inflected the way it was used by groups and parties seeking
political influence in the ‘narrow’ sense, fi st on the left, and subsequently on the
far right. While records were initially used to deliver political speeches, requiring
conscious listening and engagement by the audience, politicized record companies
increasingly made use of music as a means of transmitting messages to a less atten-
tive audience. Initially used by groups close to the Socialist and Communist Parties,
after the Second World War similar methods were adopted by the Société d’Etudes
et de Relations Publiques (SERP), a record company directed by the far-right
politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. Musical recordings associated with the Third Reich
or colonial Algeria were published as historical documents, themselves submerged
in a catalogue of political recordings more acceptable in mainstream politics. The
aim was to make extreme right messages seem anodyne or at least commonplace in
a period in which they were politically marginalized.
The biography and social mobility of objects, their use value and perceived
affo dances, the way that they mix with the everyday and familiar, shaping bod-
ies as well as minds: all these factors give them a political power which is stronger
for not being uniquely political. Indeed, the way in which everyday objects seem
self-evidently apolitical or even anti-political makes them particularly effect ve as
a means to intervene in the specialized political sphere or politics in the ‘narrow
sense.’ As we saw in the case of coffe s or a captured spear, everyday objects mediate
agency in a way which obscures its originator. Faced with the same objects, multiple10 Christopher Fletcher
possibilities present themselves for the interpretation of where the demands they
make might come from. As Gil Bartholeyns discusses in the case of the household
regulations of the king of France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, human
beings could easily be placed at the service of objects: drinking vessels, tableware,
bedding and hunting boots. In a way comparable to but not identical with written
regulations, the objects of the royal household carried an agency which might be
perceived to originate with the king, since it was in his service that they were sup-
posed to act. Yet as often in royal or princely rule, the king’s agency was consider-
ably less immediate and even real than that of the offic s, laws or objects which
were held to made it manifest. Even in the case of the ‘seditious objects’ from the
Restoration (1814–1830) analyzed by Emmanuel Fureix, there is nothing self-
evident about ascribing the agency behind them to the human being who made
them, the ‘artist’ in Gell’s terms. These objects, according to the police at least,
had the power to provoke political movements and riots at the mere sight of a coin
defaced to portray Charles X in Jesuit robes or a liqueur bottle decorated with the
image of Napoleon. Here the ascription or ‘abduction of agency’ is very much the
work of the police, even when the objects in question were clearly constructed
with political intent: a statuette of a portly Louis XVIII, for example, where the top
could be removed to reveal the bust of Napoleon.28 Such objects were deliberately
mixed by the shopkeepers with royalist objects, or were kept to the back of the
shop, so that they could argue that the agency was somebody else’s. Indeed, they
were clearly sometimes in good faith, as is demonstrated by the sometimes highly
imaginative misinterpretations of objects which fell into police hands, giving them
a seditious agency which was neither the doing of the maker nor of the vender.
This book thus examines a series of historical case studies across a very long time
scale, using objects as a means to develop diffe ent approaches to understanding
politics where existing definitions of the political prove inadequate. A number of
themes emerge clearly. The fi st is the way that the biography of an everyday object
or category of objects, and especially the way they can migrate from one social,
geographical or political context to another, can make them important recipients
of political meaning. Many of the objects discussed here were familiar both in elite
and in ‘popular’ contexts, either simultaneously, since the objects were useful for
a number of diffe ent social groups at the same time, or at diffe ent periods, as
objects which were once associated with particular social groups were taken up
and re-used by others. A second is the way that the use value of objects confers
on them political significance and political meanings which are not just a function
of discourse. Each chapter in this book demonstrates in a variety of ways that an
object’s use is distinct from its meaning: use is a product of particular techniques,
social practices and specific historical circumstances which are not reducible to
language or discourse. But they also each show how use can influence or create
new meaning, new symbols and new discourses. In the process, useful objects
provide both specific means of overtly exercising political power and also ways of
exerting political influenc , while obscuring or denying the desire to do so. The
everyday objects studied here acquired part of their political power precisely fromYou can also read
