James M. Brophy . Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800–1850.(New Studies in European History.)New York : Cambridge University Press . 2007 . Pp. xvi, 365. $99.00.

Abstract

The Rhineland holds a special place in German history as the region in which its national political culture received early liberal and democratic impulses. From the influence of the French Revolution in the 1790s through the democratic tumult of the Hambach Festival of 1832, the Rhineland and the neighboring Palatinate evidenced a degree of politicization and radicalism in stark contrast to the Prussian east and the Bavarian south. The forms of political organization that took shape in Rhenish cities and villages throughout the 1840s were a harbinger of both the 1848 Revolution and the further development of Germany's national party-political landscape. James M. Brophy's new book explores what he calls the “prehistory” of the 1840s by analyzing the role played by non-bourgeois and non-elite actors in the formation of political communities and politicized subjectivities during the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. When looking at the making of the public sphere, he asks, how did “peasant proprietors, tenant farmers, day laborers, artisans or the urban underclasses participate in this transformative process” (p. 19)?