Mass as a Political Entity? The Emergence of ‘the Masses’ as a Political Actor in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands

By the end of the nineteenth century, ordinary people had become an essential feature of a new legitimizing strategy: instead of the quality of political representatives, it was the quantity of the represented that legitimized power. This contribution takes a conceptual history approach to analyse the slowly changing perception of political participation in the period before elections became the dominant instrument of democratic representation. It studies the changing meaning of the term ‘the masses’ in the nineteenth-century Netherlands. The first part of the article explains the transformation of the way ordinary people and their practices of participation were represented in political discourses in Dutch newspapers. Particular attention will be given to the difference between the domestic and foreign context. The Dutch often discussed the manifestation of protest in foreign politics as a negative development. When occurring in the Netherlands, crowds were treated with more tolerance and were used to demonstrating the legitimacy of the existing political order. The second part focuses on uses of the term ‘mass’ in the non-human world. ‘Mass’ described quantity for neutral objects, but also appeared in the context of movement, unpredictability and harm in the natural world. Thirdly, the paper closely analyses ‘the masses’ in reference to human crowds, which were often depicted as unreliable and violent. The fourth part moves to analysing a so far understudied aspect of ‘the masses’ as an orderly and disciplined entity in the reporting about the Franco-Prussian War. Finally, I focus on ‘the masses’ as a reliable political actor in the Netherlands. The conclusion shows that the image of ‘the masses’ was not only negative, but also contained a positive dimension.