Strasse und Brot: Sozialer Protest in den deutschen Staaten unter besonderer Beruecksichtigung Preussens, 1847-1849.

The book under review deals with the rebellious years 1847-1849 in Germany from the perspective of "street politics." The first part of the book is based on about 1,500 cases of social protest, condensed out of five contemporary newspapers. "Protest" is defined by four elements: collectivity, incidentalness, protest intention, and physical and/or symbolic form of argumentation. The data are classified according to temporal, spatial and typological components. In connection with this, the author provides a wealth of details about specific examples. The constant reflection of the abstract and the concrete makes it easy for the reader to understand the author's typology. In analyzing the assembled data, however, a minor methodological error is apparent. The author should be expected to draw conclusions from a systematical sample of an unknown totality (parent population) of protests. But the methods of analytical statistics are not used, nor is there any passage which indicates that the author is aware of the difference between sample and total. Not one word, for example, is said about the confidence intervals for the estimates made. Instead, the reader is presented with a description with the sample itself as the totality. Nearly all the statements sound plausible, but they have no systematic roots in the figures.

At various points the author inveighs against previous works, which, in his opinion, used too costly analyses of correlation in order to isolate causal variables of protest. But here the question has to be raised, whether it was not too costly, and, strictly speaking, unreasonable in terms of research strategy, to choose too large a sample. To judge by the refinement of the results, a sample size of 50-80 percent of the total is certainly excessive.

Furthermore, it seems to be a retrograde step compared to previous works, not to weight the duration of a protest and the number of participants in order to distinguish between intensive and empty periods and areas of protest. Thus, the sample seems to be somewhat biased.

Finally, the failure to consider the Prussian province of Posen gives cause for thought. The "permanent ethnic conflicts" which occurred there are, according to the author, "fundamentally non-quantifiable." But in 1847, only in one single case did ethnic differences exist between the conflicting parties in this subregion's food riots. And Posen was, after all, Prussia's most protest-intensive province, accounting for roughly one-third of the 130 food riots.

The result of the sample descriptions basically confirm previous research. For example, it is restated that urban riots were significantly more frequent, or at least better documented, than rural unrest, but that the inclination to protest was greater in small and medium-sized towns than in non-integrated rapidly growing industrial centers.

The quantitative analysis documented so far, serves as the background to the book's second part, which is dedicated to the narration of single cases of protest (exclusively in Prussia), for the most part on the basis of court records. The sources are handled skilfully, sometimes with a knowing wink. The author concentrates with good reason on three (out of 16) types of protest. The food riots of spring 1847, aspects of the Revolution of March 1848, and the plebeian elements of the counterrevolution are dealt with as distinct spheres in terms of both time and content. According to Gailus, "street politics" in all three subgroups is determined by the collective occupation of the public sphere as an aim and simultaneously as a means, particularly in order to collectively realize demands for food. Therefore it is justified to put the book under the generic heading of "street and bread," even if at first glance the food riots as such are only one of three central areas of conflict. Gailus successfully incorporates general structural information into his narration. This skill in integrating insights from different approaches is a particular strength of Gailus's contribution on this subject.

Gailus's arguments are based on a tripolar model of society. It distinguishes between an "Old Elite," a "New Elite," and the masses - social configurations whose identity is established by interests and mentalities. Tribute must be paid to the author's avoidance of simply assigning social and political actions mechanistically and unrefracted to social interests. Of course, the model could have been more finely differentiated, for example, if one thinks about the discussion on the agro-capitalist character of East- Elbian manorhouse economy (which no longer generated only "old elite" at this time). But, undoubtedly, the epistemological uncertainty principle as between a model's capacity to differentiate and its manageability applies here, too. In any event, Gailus uses the model productively by elaborating three conflict levels and three possible alliances: 1. conflicts between the allied elites and the masses (e.g. food riots): the primary level of conflict; 2. conflicts between the old elite, on the one hand, and the new elite allied with the masses, on the other hand (the street politics of the revolution proper), and conflicts between the new elite, on the one hand, and the old elite allied with the masses, on the other hand (the plebeian counterrevolution): the secondary level of conflict; 3. finally, a third level of conflict existed, where differences within a particular social configuration are treated, for example, between different groups of workers.

The author is not only able to conclusively classify the conflicts which occurred but also presents several historiographic theses in their true light. The food riots of 1847, for example, have indeed a status of their own and cannot be dealt with as an early stage of the revolution. And a new interpretation of the revolution is convincing also from the perspective of street politics. A bourgeois betrayal of the revolution thus is delusive, since the conflict between the new and the old elite was only of a secondary nature. Social protest during this time period, on the other hand, was in fact socially motivated to a greater extent than previously assumed.

In the author's detailed analysis of the food riots, Prussia is presented as the German state with the greatest level of protest. The distribution of protest shows Prussian subregions nearly devoid of protest and others where protest was particularly vehement. Although there are plausible reasons for these distributions, I would point out once again that, to be consistent, the first statement should have been supported by a chi-square-test, while in the second case, comparison with a Poisson distribution would have been necessary to differentiate between random and actual distribution.

The author's hypothesis of diffusion used to explain the occurrence of concentrations of protest seems rather questionable. Although the phenomenon did exist, it is a matter of the initial impetus for protests and not a cause as such. In my opinion, it should first have been examined, whether actual (or feared) food deprivation was greater in such high-protest areas than elsewhere. This is thus Geary's simple, but nevertheless necessary question: were hunger rioters really hungry? (NB, vital statistics promise to be better indicators than prices, which do not reflect the regional and social distribution of purchasing power!)

In the end the food riots will have to be explained by a multidimensional model. At least three elements should be distinguished: firstly, the actual deprivation of food. L. Tilly's version of Sen's "entitlement approach," combined with results from sociophysiological research seems to be most reasonable in this sphere. Gailus, however, disregards this discussion, which is why he is not able to focus his good individual observations. The fact is interesting, e.g., that the sociophysiological conditions for hunger riots did not exist in Upper Silesia because the hunger was too great. At the other end of the scale a relatively strong purchasing power even among the lower classes in the industrializing Rhineland dampened the inclination to protest. Social protest most likely occurred in regions between these two poles.

The second dimension should comprise horizontal possibilities for action and immediate causes. In this field, the "post-Thompsonian" Gailus impresses with many astonishing details. However, he rightly differs from Thompson in also drawing our attention to the fact that symbolic actions could perfectly well be fused with trivial actions for appropriation. Thus, as Gailus mentions, the concept of "moral economy" seems to be a somewhat "too neat" construction. Thirdly, vertical communication between those in authority and their subjects should be considered, as Bohstedt or R. Tilly elaborated. In this area, Gailus offers as a new clue the fact that in 1847, the Prussian authorities tried for the first time to manage without a "moral economy from above" and relied completely on the market economy.

Next, Gailus describes the secondary scenes of the March Revolution, though in his view they are the central scenes: struggles of the Berlin earth laborers, the return of the "bread question." Gailus excels at extracting a meaning from the topography and "choreography" of popular unrest, for example, when portraying the difficult alliance between the popular masses and the friends of the people" by contrasting static, spatially hierarchic public gatherings and dynamic demonstrations which activated all who participated. Also the attempt to understand public gatherings not from a grandstand perspective but focusing on the participants' reactions and interventions is important.

Understandably, this book, too, finds it hard to explain the counterrevolution from below. Gailus does provide some explanations, but none of them is really satisfactory. It even sounds tautological to cite church-and-king-riots as an indicator for a conflict between traditional mentalities and socioeconomic innovations, and then to use this constellation to "explain" the riots (pp. 456, 465). On the other hand, it is reasonable to argue that these counterrevolutionary actions were basically anti-capitalistic and fed by doubts about the legitimacy of the new middle classes.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the author's fluent style and wealth of wordplay and allusions make the book good reading and help the reader through some long-winded, detailed descriptions of disturbances.

Seen as a whole, the work is a valuable contribution to the historiography of the 1848 Revolution and, moreover, to the understanding of social protest in general. With some minor corrections, as proposed above, and some tightening, an English version of the book would greatly benefit international social history research.