Abstract
Lord Byron’s question from Ravenna appeared in a letter, which was intended for publication, to John Murray in February 1821. It might have been asked by any number of Britons, who had been afforded manifold opportunities over the preceding years both to see and to be a part of regiments and ‘mobs’ in action and, frequently, in confrontation. Had he been in Britain more regularly between 1815 and 1820, however, Byron might well have witnessed the narrowing of this perceived gap between the spectacles of military and civil collective action. The ‘mass platform’ agitation for parliamentary reform, which had characterized post-war popular politics, demanded of its participants scrupulous attention to matters of dress, movement and ritual display. The argument of this essay is that this can in part be understood as a militarization of collective action, which occurred both as a legacy of Britain’s long war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793–1815) and as a strategic response to the particular political situation in which radicals found themselves after 1815.
What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view — than the same mass of Mob? — Their arms — their dresses — their banners — and the art-and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.1
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Notes
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Pentland, G. (2015). Militarization and Collective Action in Great Britain, 1815–20. In: Davis, M.T. (eds) Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_11
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