Bodies and Urban Space: Parades, Marches and Demonstrations 1890s–1920s

Abstract

Parades, marches and demonstrations belong to the best-known and most public representative forms. They show strength, voice protest and gather support for a particular claim or cause. In so doing, parades provide visual images, acoustical impressions as well as physical movements through public spaces. This chapter concentrates on changes and developments in parades and demonstrations from the 1890s to the mid-1920s with a focus on the moderate left. Parades, marches and demonstrations always used the notion of occupying public space. Organisations claimed space and, with this, attention for their particular cause. At the same time, individual bodies within parades became collective carriers of this cause. Consequently, they imprinted their political conviction(s) upon the environment they were marching through. Sometimes urban space was included in a political narrative to offer a politically charged framework for a particular event. Parades of the moderate left, especially of the Social Democrats and affiliated organisations, reveal a continuous increase in emphasising order and discipline. Organisers and planners of working-class demonstrations had always stressed the importance of discipline to publicly illustrate that workers behaved well. This increased in the 1920s when the appeal of paramilitary groups and veteran societies had to be matched.