Protest, Popular Culture and Tradition in Modern and Contemporary Western Europe

Mock funerals, effigy parading, smearing with eggs and tomatoes, pot-banging and Carnival street theatre, arson and ransacking: all these seemingly archaic forms of action have been regular features of modern European protest, from the 19th to the 21st century. In a wide chronological and geographical framework, this book analyses the uses, meanings, functions and reactivations of folk imagery, behaviour and language in modern collective action. The authors examine the role of protest actors as diverse as peasants, liberal movements, nationalist and separatist parties, anarchists, workers, students, right-wing activists and the global justice movement. So-called traditional repertoires have long been described as residual and obsolete. This book challenges the conventional distinction between pre-industrial and post-1789 forms of collective action, which continues to operate as a powerful dichotomy in the understanding of protest, and casts new light on rituals and symbolic performances that, albeit poorly understood and deciphered, are integral to our protest repertoire.

Ilaria Favretto is Professor of Contemporary European History at Kingston University, UK. She has published on the British and the Italian Left after 1945; on memory and identity in post-war Italy; and most recently, on Italian factory protest in the period after 1945.

Xabier Itçaina is CNRS Research fellow-HDR in Political Sociology at the Centre Emile Durkheim, France, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France, and a former Marie Curie Fellow (2012-2013) at the European University Institute, Italy. His research focuses on the politics of Catholicism, social economy and local development, political anthropology and identity politics.