Learning from the outside: parliament's response to public meetings in Germany and the Netherlands, 1870–1914

ABSTRACT

In this article, we study the changing position of parliament regarding public meetings in Germany and the Netherlands between 1870 and 1914. In the second half of the nineteenth century, parliaments in both countries were confronted with the challenge of how to justify their position, and whether and how to integrate the claims and longings of new groups into political decision-making. Public meetings offered a unique place to get in touch with voters and get direct knowledge of the constituents' needs and wishes. Based on the minutes of the Reichstag and Tweede Kamer, we argue that public meetings were increasingly conceived as a legitimate source of public opinion. Although parliamentary traditions and legal frameworks were different in Germany and the Netherlands, we demonstrate that there are interesting parallels in argumentation. In both countries, the question of freedom of expression, access to the meeting hall and an orderly style of debate were central. Public opinion was no longer considered the intellectual affair of an elite and taking ‘the voice of the people’ seriously could now also provide legitimacy to parliamentary politics.

The second half of the nineteenth century constituted an important phase of transition in the way parliaments in Western Europe engaged with the voice of the people. From a parliamentary viewpoint, a rational and orderly debate was an important condition to ensure the best outcome for the nation. Parliamentarians believed that politics outside of parliament was not only unconstitutional, but it was also perceived as emotional, volatile and unreliable. This perception of parliament as the centre of politics was challenged by the fact that citizens took part in political processes in various and increasingly institutionalized ways. Hence, parliaments had to reconcile their orderly culture with demands to sufficiently integrate ordinary citizens' interests and longings into decisions. Parliamentarians had to show that their claim to representation was legitimate in the coming democratic age.

Nineteenth-century citizens made use of at least four types of institutionalized political participation: elections, parties, petitions and public meetings. In this article, we focus on the parliamentary perspective on public meetings – a type that was formative in the historical perception of representation. In contrast to other types of political participation, public meetings are often overlooked in the history of democracy. We know that in the second half of the nineteenth century, voting became increasingly important as a democratic practice.¹ Although not necessarily inspired by democratic norms, suffrage extension substantially changed political culture.² The new mass parties connected parliamentarians more closely to voters.³ Recently, petitions as a previously understudied form of political participation have gained renewed attention in historiography. Petitioners established quantity as a new form of legitimacy. Uniting large numbers of signatories, they appealed to monarchs and confidently addressed parliament.⁴

The high profile of elections, parties and petitions has placed public meetings at the lower end of historians' research agenda.⁵ This is unfortunate because political meetings formed an essential component of political participation throughout the nineteenth century. Studying political meetings also offers an important addition to the diverse institutional landscape of the history of democracy. Elections, petitions and even parties were closely integrated into parliamentary procedures. Public meetings in contrast could address political demands without parliament. In addition, they allowed for a comprehensive process for the formation and expression of political opinion. As Cossart demonstrated for the French Third Republic, meetings represented an opportunity for deliberation, to arrive at a measured consensus through disagreement.⁶ Not unlike in parliament, rules of debate were extensive and detailed. In this way, political meetings offered a forum where citizens could participate in political debates more directly than they did in elections, parties or petitions.

For parliamentarians, the existence of political meetings was both a great opportunity and a difficult challenge. Positioned at the centre of political decision-making, parliament was the place where ‘the people’ were represented and the general interest defined and secured. Parliamentarians argued that their assembly was the only legitimate form of speaking for the nation. When public meetings called themselves Volksversammlung in German or volksvergadering in Dutch, they to some extent presented themselves as alternative people's assemblies. In the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain, there was even a tradition of public meetings that directly posed as anti-parliaments.⁷ No wonder therefore that public meetings were met with suspicion in parliament. Yet, there was another interpretation possible. For many politicians, public meetings offered a place to get in touch with voters. Especially for new parliamentarians who did not belong to the traditional elite, this was an important opportunity. Those parliamentarians who attended public meetings argued that they had an authentic understanding of the people. After all, they had direct knowledge of their constituents' needs and wishes.

In this article we argue that parliamentary debates about public meetings help us solve the puzzle why parliament became the most important institution in the history of democracy. As others have wisely noted: parliamentarization did not necessarily mean democratization.⁸ But there is no denying that at the beginning of the twentieth century, parliamentary assemblies had become the beating heart of democratic representation. The question of representativity, however, was no longer considered the intellectual responsibility of an elite. The integration of citizens' interests and longings into parliamentary decisions was not only through formal institutional channels such as suffrage and party organization but also through the increasing interest of parliamentarians in public discussions that took place outside of the parliamentary arena. As public meetings were independent of and procedurally similar to parliament, they forced parliamentarians to reflect on and justify their position in the changing political landscape of the nineteenth century. In other words, we show that taking seriously the voices of the meeting hall could also provide legitimacy to parliamentary politics.

The parliamentary perspective on public meetings: Germany and the Netherlands

In this article, we study the changing position of parliament regarding public meetings. For this purpose, we focus on the parliamentary debates in Germany and the Netherlands between 1870 and 1914. We chose these two cases because the two neighbouring countries experienced substantially different roads to democracy on an institutional level. However, in both Germany and the Netherlands, parliamentarians struggled with determining the role of parliament as representative political institution in the coming democratic age.

While the German Parliament Reichstag was a newly created institution, the Tweede Kamer in the Netherlands was rooted in early modern predecessors. In Germany, parliamentary influence was limited and grew in the decades after the constitution was adopted in 1867.⁹ Universal male suffrage was abruptly implemented at an early stage in the North German Confederation (1867) and Imperial Germany (1871). After France (1848), Switzerland (1848) and Denmark (1849), this made Germany the fourth European nation to have taken this step towards a more democratic political system. In the confederal state of Germany, national parliament was sometimes seen as a correcting force to the Junker-dominated government and the limited suffrage in the Länder.¹⁰ In the Netherlands, the 1848 constitutional reform gave parliament a powerful position between the monarch and the nation.¹¹ At the same time, limited direct suffrage was introduced. Suffrage rights were based on income and tax payments: around 1850, 10.8 per cent of the adult male population was allowed to vote (=just over 82,000 men), by 1880 that number had barely risen to 12.3 per cent.¹² It took several suffrage reforms before universal male suffrage was finally introduced in 1917. Female suffrage followed in both Germany and the Netherlands in 1919.

The different institutional arrangements in the two countries shaped the relationship between parliament and the people in ways less different than one might expect. In the Netherlands, parliamentary attention to the interests and longings of ordinary citizens was limited, although the emergence of the first formal political parties towards the end of the century slowly started to change this.¹³ Parliamentary politics, however, remained an elitist world and parliamentarians kept their distance from society well into the nineteenth century. German parliament was more socially heterogeneous. German citizens took their suffrage seriously as a political right.¹⁴ Yet parliament likewise did not derive legitimacy from electors, but through its members’ elevated social status based on education, political understanding and economic independence.¹⁵

This view of parliament as a distinctive political and social arena also influenced the way parliamentarians designed the legal framework for public meetings in both countries. In Germany, public meetings had become an essential part of political culture in the early nineteenth century with celebrative public mass meetings such as Wartburgfest and Hambacherfest as well as the many meetings of the 1848 revolution. German authorities responded with persecution: the repressive Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 were followed by a renewed ban on political associations in the early 1830s. Political speeches were generally prohibited, while Volksfeste (celebratory gatherings) and people's assemblies needed to be approved by the authorities.¹⁶ The 1867 Reichstag was more generous in its relationship to public meetings. Even with rigid associational laws like the Socialist laws (1878) in place, delegates were willing to protect people's assemblies to some extent.

While in 1848 revolutions unravelled in several European countries, the Netherlands chose constitutional reforms to protect public order. The Dutch 1855 law on associations and assemblies (Wet tot regeling en beperking der uitoefening van het regt van vereeniging en vergadering) emphasized the balance between freedom of assembly and public order and authority. For this reason, the law made a distinction between public meetings in buildings (free, but police have access), in the open air without debate (idem), and in the open air with debate (permission from the authorities required in advance).¹⁷ From the 1850s onwards larger meetings were organized by specific religious groups or single-issue organizations.¹⁸ It was not until the 1870s that large-scale political gatherings, organized by political parties, associations or in response to topical social debates, became more common.

To examine the parliamentary debate on public meetings in the two countries we use the minutes of parliamentary assemblies as our main source. For the Netherlands and Germany, the minutes have been digitized and are searchable at word level via an online database.¹⁹ We looked for similar terms in both languages but also exercised flexibility to adjust our search to the specific historical context of the two countries. Volksversammlung in German was often associated with Socialist meeting culture. In order to broaden the analysis to groups with a less contentious agenda, we also considered Wahlversammlung (electoral assemblies). In the Netherlands, volksvergadering was the most common description of public meetings. In contrast to its German counterpart, this term did not have strong Socialist connotations and was sometimes even used to describe the parliamentary assembly itself. The English word ‘meeting’ was used for the first time in the Dutch Parliament in 1848, in reference to the revolutionary upheaval in France.²⁰ However, the term soon became part of Dutch political vocabulary, both inside and outside parliament, to describe a variety of public assemblies.

We do not pursue a classic comparative study, but instead focus on detecting broader trends in the two parliamentary arenas. Although the parliamentary traditions and legal frameworks regarding public meetings were different in the two countries, there are interesting parallels in the argumentation. For example, the rise of new political groups, such as Socialists and Progressive Liberals, was perceived as a threat.²¹ The examples that we present have been selected to illustrate the discussions about public meetings among parliamentarians. In the first part, we show the consequences of a repressive legal framework in both Reich and Länder for the German meeting culture and that parliamentary immunity protected freedom of expression in the assembly. In the Netherlands, the political climate was less polarized. The second part focuses on how the newly developing phenomenon of a ‘meeting tone’ worried Dutch parliamentarians, while others saw it as an opportunity to reach a wider audience. In conclusion, we demonstrate that these parliamentary discussions shaped the integration of public opinion into the parliamentary debate in the democratization of politics around 1900.

Threat or opportunity? Volksversammlungen in Germany

In Germany, the parliamentary discussion about public meetings was polarized and focused on legal questions. Universal male suffrage had made parliament a remarkably heterogeneous assembly. It had also brought a small but confident number of Social Democrats into the Reichstag.²² Their presence forced parliament to directly respond to the oppositional forces that wanted to overthrow the existing order. The new parliament transferred the contention from the streets directly onto the parliamentary stage. Public meetings became a topic by which the legislative power, and with it the legitimacy of the entire political system, could be gauged, criticized, defended and negotiated.

Because the assembly of the Reichstag was a new institution, the legitimacy of its representative function was an important theme in the 1870s and 1880s. In nineteenth-century political discourse, representativity did not require universal suffrage for all citizens – a view that was shared by the vast majority of parliament. For instance, Catholic parliamentarian Ludwig Windhorst was neither a Social Democrat, nor member of the old aristocratic elite. Comparing parliament to public meetings, he explained that the representative role of parliament was related to legislative power. Even though neither women, the ‘more beautiful half of humankind’, nor soldiers had the right to vote in parliamentary elections, the Reichstag's claim to legitimacy was beyond doubt: ‘no one would doubt that the representation with legal capacity is also the legitimate one’.²³ Consequently, Windhorst argued, groups without voting rights should stop considering petitions or speaking ‘in people's assemblies or whatever’ as an alternative form of representation.²⁴ When such groups told parliament ‘we don't care about the things you decide’, they were arrogant and wrong.²⁵ According to Windhorst, the Reichstag constituted the single most relevant representative body: it ‘binds the entire population, including those who do not vote, with their decisions’.²⁶

In support of these claims for the unique position of the Reichstag, public meetings were criticized for their emotional, manipulative and sometimes aggressive atmosphere. Edward Banks, Liberal of the Progress Party, characterized the ‘sense of what constitutes a right’ among the population as ‘nothing but a surge of feeling’.²⁷ If one would be so naïve as to trust these sentiments, the informed debates of parliament would become obsolete: ‘then we do not need a Reichstag at all’.²⁸ If one would follow this line of reasoning, Banks ironically concluded, this would result in the need for a ‘people's assembly’ to ‘vote on criminal laws’.²⁹ This conclusion met loud resistance in parliament. Whether the objections were triggered by Bank's provocative statement or by the proposal itself is difficult to establish. In his response, Banks pretended that the scenario of legislative power for a people's assembly was the core issue: ‘this is the one reason, which aggravates the negotiations’.³⁰

This distrust of people's assemblies was strengthened by debates about whether the police should be allowed to actively intervene in public meetings. When the Democrat Johann Jacoby was arrested for openly supporting France during the Prussian-Franco War in 1870, his case led to a discussion about the relationship between parliament and government in the Reichstag. As the interpellation of Liberal Franz Gustav Duncker in defence of Jacoby stated, it was not only parliament's duty to establish legal norms, but also to defend ‘established legal norms against any intervention, whether it comes from outside or from a force within our own state’.³¹ Against this position, Conservative Ludwig von Wedemeyer argued that Social Democrats would have organized meetings ‘in all places where they have even a very small number of party comrades’.³² In particular, Wedemeyer warned that Social Democratic agitation might have stirred French resistance during the Franco-Prussian War.

The question of parliament's position in regard to public meetings gained new relevance with the suppressive Sozialistengesetze (Socialist laws) in October 1878. After an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Emperor William I, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck claimed that it was a Social Democrat who had committed the attack and he demanded stricter regulation. Initially, parliament had refused to implement the Socialist laws. It seemed unethical to target a single political movement. The strategy of the government was to directly connect anti-monarchical violence with Social Democratic political activism.³³ After a second assassination attempt, parliament was dissolved and many parliamentarians feared appearing complicit in the attack by their inactivity and followed Bismarck's suggestion to crush almost any form of Social Democratic politics.

There was, however, also the question whether government had the right to intervene in such extreme ways in political life. After all, the Reichstag claimed legislative power – a claim that also concerned the regulation of political life outside of parliament. Public meetings became a key battleground for the implementation of the Socialist laws. The Socialist laws prohibited Social Democracy as a political movement, party organization and meetings. Until the ban was lifted in 1890, the party organization went into exile or underground.³⁴ The only exception was parliament. Parliamentary immunity protected Social Democratic parliamentarians and ironically made the Reichstag the last bastion of free speech.

At the beginning, Social Democrats tried to circumvent the ban with creative methods for public meetings. For instance, the police did not permit a Social Democratic gathering in Bavaria in 1880. The People's Party (Volkspartei) of Leopold Sonnenmann volunteered and registered a new meeting under its (non-Socialist) name. Sonnemann belonged to the Democratic wing of German Liberalism, and his party was one of the closest allies of Social Democracy. Yet, the police took a strict anti-Socialist position and dissolved the meeting of 2000 participants. The meeting was ‘subjectively and objectively identical’ with the previously prohibited Social Democratic meeting.³⁵

The subsequent parliamentary discussion reveals the great impact of the Socialist laws on the lives of some parliamentarians and on the enforcement of the legislative power of the Reichstag in the German states. Conservatives supported the decision of the police in parliament. They ridiculed the opposition's description of the police prevention of a non-Socialist meeting. The ban on the meeting was only ‘allegedly’ illegal.³⁶ The final decision about the intervention of the police lay with the Oberste Beschwerdebehörde (Supreme Complaints Authority).³⁷ Also, National Liberals left the final decision with the government. As Marquardsen argued, ‘we are unable to make a decision at this moment’.³⁸ The discussion was so heated that his fellow party member Heyl had to thank the chairman for protecting parliamentarians against the ‘personal attacks, which the representative Liebknecht for the reason of untrue (…) announcements considered necessary’.³⁹

Another example that was mentioned was a public meeting in Leipzig that was again organized by Sonnemann. The police had approved this meeting with the requirement that no debate would be held. The reason for such an unusual regulating of a meeting was the possibility that a Social Democrat might speak in the debate. Social Democratic parliamentarian August Bebel found the pre-emptive nature of such a decree worrying. In his interpretation, the local authorities used the Socialist laws to ban political debates, regardless whether they had a forbidden Social Democratic nature or not.⁴⁰ The parliamentary debate became so emotional because it pointed at the parliamentary approval of the Socialist laws. If the Socialist laws were used to restrict political bystanders, parliament had lost control over the political process in Germany – a concern that Social Democratic and their allies had raised from the beginning.

In the following decades, the question of legitimacy of the political order remained open. The Socialist laws had to be regularly re-approved by the vigilant Reichstag. This brought again to the surface the question of legitimacy of the political order but also the implementation of the law in local circumstances. In defence of the harsh policing of public meetings, National Liberals emphasized the subversive nature of public meetings, too. Their allegations were directly related to the emotional debating culture at public meetings. Critical statements could be made in the safe environment of a courtroom where they were ‘harmless’, but ‘the same utterance, made in an agitated people's assembly, may be highly dangerous’.⁴¹

It was Social Democrats who defended public meetings against the allegation of unruliness. Bebel had already told parliament in 1880 that even when Social Democratic meetings were dissolved under the Socialist laws, the participants behaved exemplarily: ‘to this day there has been no dissolution of a Social-Democratic assembly in Germany with the result that it has led to tumultuous performances’.⁴² In 1890 parliamentarian Johann Dietz praised a working-class meeting held by August Bebel. Not only were there no unruly events, everything happened in ‘the greatest calm’, the calm nature of the meeting was also typical for Social Democratic assemblies: ‘as we are used to with Hamburg workers’.⁴³ Part of this strategy was to point out unrespectable behaviour on the other side of the political spectrum. Social Democrat Karl Frohme argued that should Conservative Kleist-Retzow hold the same speeches in a public meeting as he did in parliament, the police would dissolve the assembly. Kleist-Retzow's support for a legislative proposal was ‘aimed at destroying the foundations of the existing state and social order’.⁴⁴ The difference with the Social Democratic experience was clear, as Frohme explained, Social Democrats were ‘persecuted in the most unreasonable and ruthless manner’ while the opposite was the case with the Conservatives.⁴⁵

This sort of statement also helps us understand why public meetings were not discussed as a general representative organ in direct competition with the Reichstag, but rather seen as an expression of partisan interests. In particular, people's assemblies were increasingly (but not exclusively) related to Social Democratic activism. Parliamentarians almost exclusively used the term people's assembly for Social Democrats. Conservatives' meetings often were tied to elections and hence often described as Wahlversammlung (electoral assembly); they were seen as another type of meeting.⁴⁶ If we believe Minister Puttkamer, Social Democrats talked about ‘our people's assembly’.⁴⁷ The opinion of partisan people's assemblies was also directly mentioned in the Reichstag. As Catholic von Schorlemer-Alst explained, Chancellor Bismarck's speech had revealed his true intentions – an outcome ‘favourable for our party’.⁴⁸ If the speech would be read in a public meeting, it ‘would make the best effect in our sense’.⁴⁹ Parliament might have had the legitimacy to determine the future of the nation, but it was in public meetings where the voice of the people could be heard.

The potential of the ‘meeting tone’

In the Netherlands, the formal regulation of meetings by parliament was limited. Unlike the repressive regulations in Germany, the 1855 law on associations and assemblies continued to set the juridical framework. Instead of repression, discussions focused on the style of political debate. The use and potential of the ‘meeting tone’ triggered concerns about the legitimacy of debate at popular assemblies. While an evocative style could inspire and move a full meeting hall, big words also carried the risk of turning into populism.

In Dutch parliamentary debate, pathos played a limited role during the nineteenth century. The Tweede Kamer was a continuation of the closed sessions of the eighteenth-century States General. Discussions often took on a constitutional character: parliamentary debate was about making and discussing laws; parliamentarians did not aim to mobilize their audience. Consequently, eloquence and rhetorical strategies were regarded with suspicion.⁵⁰ Parliamentarians who used a meeting tone were often therefore accused of manipulating their audiences and deliberately generating expressions of approval. This included various rhetorical strategies to attack opponents, such as exaggeration or personal insults. At best contemporaries characterized the meeting tone as ‘titillating’, but most mentions were accompanied by more negative adjectives such as ‘garish’, ‘shouty’, ‘uncivilized’ or downright ‘cheap’.⁵¹

In his study on the rhetorical culture of the British House of Commons, Richard Toye has demonstrated how after 1918 and the introduction of universal male suffrage norms and expectations around parliamentary speech changed.⁵² Newcomers in the British parliament, especially from a Labour background, were keen to adopt existing rules, but at the same time also adapted parliamentary practices. While others have emphasized how politicians at the turn of the nineteenth century tried to distance themselves from a more ‘rowdy’ political expressions, Toye showed how discussions on which debating style was considered appropriate (and which not) were at the core of parliamentary politics.⁵³

While the public meeting was all about stirring up emotions, parliament was to function as the place for calm and orderly exchange of arguments. The consensus in the nineteenth-century Tweede Kamer seemed to be that the use of a meeting tone was an inferior style of debate and a mode of speech to be avoided as much as possible. During parliamentary debates the distinction between the two political arenas was therefore constantly emphasized and maintained.⁵⁴ In a crowded and somewhat noisy meeting hall the strategic distortion of facts or personal attacks could fulfil certain emotional needs and expectations, but it was clear these strategies did not belong in parliament. ‘Here, of course, among sensible and calm people, one does not come up with such arguments’, the Progressive Liberal Hendrik Drucker concluded with relief, contrasting the discussion in parliament with the provocative tactics he encountered in the responses of working-class delegates at a public meeting.⁵⁵

The demarcation between parliament and meeting hall was accentuated by the deliberate protection of parliamentary standards in two ways. First of all, parliamentarians repeatedly corrected each other on the use of a meeting tone during debates in the Tweede Kamer. In 1905, for example, the Orthodox Protestant Syb Talma explicitly apologized to his colleagues for not adapting his style to the right environment after comments from a fellow parliamentarian:

Someone for whom I have a great deal of respect said that from time to time I spoke as if I were at a meeting. Now, I have been to many meetings these days, and it is possible that you have heard a tone in my speech that is more at home there than in this Chamber. I apologize if I have caused this.⁵⁶

Talma was known as a soft and well-mannered speaker, which might have made the use of the meeting style in parliament more striking – and more alarming. From the 1870s onwards, parliamentarians increasingly spoke at public meetings and consequently the meeting tone became a regular part of their oratorical repertoire. For some parliamentarians, like Talma, the need to switch between various debating styles was clearly a challenge. While one would expect this might result in a more relaxed approach to this new style of debate, this was not reflected by the number of comments on the use of a meeting tone in parliament.

Secondly, parliamentarians emphasized a continuity in style both inside and outside parliament to show they were trustworthy and sincere.⁵⁷ Accusations of opportunistic behaviour did not seem to be limited to specific political groups, although newcomers in parliament (and the political arena in general) such as Socialists were subject to additional scrutiny here. The emphasis on the parliamentary ideal of an orderly and gentlemanly debate helped to avoid the suspicion of populism. Thus, Antoine van Wijnbergen, who had taken his seat in 1904 for the Roman Catholic side, defended his debating style in response to a remark by the Social Democrat Pieter Jelles Troelstra:

Mr Troelstra even feels the need to mention, what the meeting report does not say, that I spoke calmly in Enschede [at a meeting of Roman Catholic labour organizations]; I readily admit that I did so because it seems to me that one should discuss matters calmly and objectively in public assemblies. If, however, Mr Troelstra disapproves of all this and cannot agree that I have only discussed objections that really exist and have tried to find ways of meeting them, I will not argue with him. It only shows that he and I have a difference of opinion about what to do and what not to do when it comes to informing the people, and I will gladly accept that.⁵⁸

A style of debate that focused on true and objective arguments (‘that really exist’) should be the aim both inside and outside parliament and offered an antidote to populism, according to Van Wijnbergen. He incidentally characterized the meeting not as a place of debate but as a place to inform the citizen, accentuating the passive role of the audience.

Although keeping up parliamentary standards had long been a deliberate strategy to safeguard the demarcation between parliament and meeting hall, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century boundaries began to shift. Discussions about the extension of universal suffrage and increasing attention to the voice of the people went hand in hand with the call for a more accessible style of debate. From the 1870s onwards, newcomers to parliament deliberately broke with the traditional judicial style. In doing so, they mainly aimed at voters outside parliament rather than their fellow parliamentarians.⁵⁹ Not surprisingly, it was the representatives of the working classes who first pointed out the weaknesses of the parliamentary ideal. ‘Our speeches are usually so compact that it is not surprising if the audience sometimes falls asleep during them’, the Social Liberal Bernard Heldt stated during a debate about the extension of the right to vote in 1887.⁶⁰ It should not be taken as an expression of popular disinterest that the public galleries remained empty, he argued, instead parliamentary language and argumentation itself had to become more accessible.

The distinction between the political arenas remained, but some parliamentarians started to recognize the use of a meeting tone as an opportunity to connect with their constituents and the public as a whole. This can partly be explained by new topics on the parliamentary agenda. During the 1860s and 1870s, it was still possible to claim that citizens had little understanding of the state affairs that were being discussed, but this was not the case for issues such as suffrage, education, housing or pension provision that became dominant in the final quarter of the century. This shift in topics called for a different type of political exchange. When in 1904 Social Democrat representative Troelstra complained about the ‘academic’ and completely inaccessible tone of the parliamentary debates, he cited how the Minister of the Interior once came up with ‘about 20 explanations of the word “reason” from a lexicon’, which led to discussions ‘where heads might get hot, hearts cold, but the stomachs of the people remain empty’.⁶¹

The discussion on the legitimacy of public meetings shows that around the turn of the century, a new appreciation of the meeting tone emerged within parliament as well. The phenomenon of the public meeting had become so commonplace after the turn of the century that Social Democrat Jan Schaper pointed out to his colleagues in parliament that perhaps it had become time to abandon mutual accusations of a meeting tone as well. ‘Let us not be ashamed of our origins. We all come from the meeting’, he declared in 1911, referring to the importance of popular assemblies at election time. Most parliamentarians had performed at political meetings across the country to get themselves or their party elected:

So, there is no need to feel sorry for using that tone, even when it is used by a man like this Minister [of Agriculture, Industry and Trade], who has also had his share of meetings. We cannot be blamed for ‘lapsing’ into that tone of voice; it is not a trap that we should be ashamed of.⁶²

The changing political landscape and the increasing importance of voters for political parties made this more open attitude towards the debating style at meetings seem inevitable.

From the 1890s onwards, various parliamentarians even started to use anecdotes from meetings as compelling evidence in the Tweede Kamer. By doing so, they not only showed that they took the stories of ordinary people seriously, but also confirmed the legitimacy of public opinion expressed during these assemblies. Most examples referred to the conditions of the poor and working classes. Speakers cited the sad stories of workmen showing their exhausted children at a meeting to demonstrate the consequences of child labour or referred to the broad range of financial problems they had heard about at people's assemblies.⁶³ This was done not only by parliamentarians with a progressive or working-class background, but also by conservative or confessional representatives. Although such references were partly deployed rhetorically to play on the feelings of fellow parliamentarians, surprisingly they evoked few accusations of populism.

A more extensive debate on the value of ‘government by public meeting’ (Bagehot) was not on the agenda of Dutch parliamentary politics.⁶⁴ As in Germany, some parliamentarians, to further enhance the legitimacy of meetings, stressed how political debate at meetings took place in an orderly fashion. They advocated taking the opinions of ‘ordinary’ citizens seriously, by proving that they too could conform to parliamentary debate ideals. The Social Liberal Hendrik Pyttersen, for example, made a case for more confidence in what he – following Gambetta – called the ‘nouvelles couches sociales’. He referred to his colleagues' fear of a large-scale meeting in the Dutch town of Leeuwarden in 1891:

Those who attended the large public assembly in Leeuwarden this summer and observed it with an open mind will think with reverence of the thousands of men and women who, with a self-restraint not found in many assemblies, avoided and prevented anything that might lead to a breakdown of order or to unruliness.⁶⁵

According to Pyttersen and some of his progressive colleagues, these concerns were not justified. Rather such examples showed that not only politicians, but also ordinary men and women had the right and capacities ‘to judge for themselves measures of legislation in which their interests, the interests of labour, are so closely involved’.⁶⁶

Conclusion: the question of legitimacy

In the second half of the nineteenth century, European parliaments had to come to terms with the questions of how and why the voice of the people should be involved in politics. In contrast to the traditional approach of deferential politics, the pressure grew to demonstrate that political elites were making decisions in the interest of individual citizens and the nation as a whole. In other words, this was a period in which contemporaries not only tried to determine the degree of but also searched for the best mode to implement democratization. This process was not unique to a specific national context but rather shaped politics in many European states and beyond.

At the heart of this development was parliament as the central institution in this new political order. Parliamentarians claimed to represent the general will, which made them important political players in the emerging democratic age. Yet, parliament's role as the key institution of representation did not emerge without difficulties. While around 1848 it seemed that parliament was to become the main forum in which national interests were expressed, negotiated and settled, in the following decades alternative arenas of debates remained and became important in Germany and the Netherlands. In the parliamentary responses to the challenge of democratic legitimacy, we identified important commonalities in argumentation of parliamentarians. While national differences were to be expected in two different political and legal systems, it is the parallels that tell a remarkable story: German and Dutch parliamentarians used public meetings to assert the unique position of parliament in the political landscape of the two nations.

In Germany, the parliamentary discussions were shaped by the legal question of whether the political discussions at public meetings were admissible under the laws of the newly created nation state. Universal male suffrage had brought both proponents and opponents of public meetings into the Reichstag. In the parliamentary assembly, the different opinions directly confronted each other, creating a more polarized debate than in the Netherlands. Contentious political forces like Social Democrats defended public meetings as the purest form of expression of the popular will. Their opponents used the intervention of the police to problematize public meetings as a manifestation of the unreliable political actions of the people and a reason to ban Social Democratic activism. The introduction of the Socialist laws intensified parliamentary discussions, but it also demonstrated to parliament how closely related parliamentary routine was to what was happening at public meetings. Left-wing parliamentarians reported in the Reichstag on their experiences at public meetings. They reminded their colleagues that police suppression not only targeted the extra-parliamentary world but also concerned parliamentarians' personal freedom of expression. Although these ideas were initially dismissed as the argument of the opposition, many parliamentarians remained committed to protecting their legislative power against the government.

These legal questions were largely absent in the Netherlands. Dutch parliamentarians who doubted the legitimacy of the voice of the people found another way to criticize public meetings. Discussions at public meetings were not really free and fair, parliamentarians argued: the popular assemblies were set up based on certain party-political preferences or societal agendas. The unstructured nature and tone of the debate were problematized: the discussion style at public meetings did not meet the rules of deliberative democracy. Recurrent concerns about the debating style at public meetings had a disciplining effect. Above all, the demarcation between parliament and meeting hall was constantly emphasized and maintained by actively safeguarding parliamentary standards of orderly and gentlemanly debate, both inside and outside parliament. New topics on the political agenda, however, called for a more accessible style. Some even argued that the phenomenon of the meeting tone had become so commonplace that perhaps accusations of using it should stop as well.

Were popular assemblies a legitimate source of public opinion? When parliament and public meetings became increasingly intertwined, this question gained relevance. Not only did parliamentarians participate in growing numbers in public meetings, but the experiences in the meeting hall also shaped the debating style within parliament. In response to the growing connection between the two political arenas, the differentiation between parliament and public meetings in parliamentary debates did not disappear but became stronger. Using the issue of public meetings as an ideal occasion to define the unique position of parliament, parliamentarians instinctively attempted to reinforce the status of parliament as the only representative assembly of the nation.

Part of this legitimizing strategy of parliamentarians was to criticize the political culture at public meetings – a commonly expressed concern that connected the Netherlands with Germany. When new politicians as representatives of previously excluded social groups entered parliament, they maintained their relationship with the meeting culture outside of parliament. The idea that meetings were unsettled and disorderly could not be dismissed out of hand – in part because popular assemblies often displayed rowdy behaviour by both speakers and audience. Hence, parliamentarians who advocated taking public meetings seriously presented public meetings as organized and orderly assemblies. This disciplined debating style had to convince fellow parliamentarians of the value and legitimacy of public debate. Proponents considered the organization of and participation in a meeting to be an expression of good citizenship: being present at a meeting was not to be perceived as a sign of distrust of the government but as a demonstration of political commitment.

At the same time, the criticism of popular assemblies did not disappear after the turn of the century: parliament and the meeting hall remained two different political arenas. After the First World War and the introduction of universal suffrage, the antagonism only increased as parliament acquired a central position in representative democracy and mass politics became more institutionalized. However, this post-war balancing act was not a historical anomaly, but rather formed an integral part in the history of parliamentary democracy. As we have demonstrated in this article, the contested debate about the position of parliament between politics and society had its roots in nineteenth-century political discussions. Parliamentarians in both Germany and the Netherlands became more sensitive to the complementary role of the public meeting. Parliament could no longer ignore the voice of the people, as expressed in political meetings; parliamentarians needed to better align their tone with the public debate. Taking public opinion seriously increasingly also provided legitimacy to parliamentary politics. Although ultimately, from the perspective of the parliamentarians themselves, parliament had the last word.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Staatsman Thorbecke).

Notes on contributors

Anne Heyer

Anne Heyer is Assistant Professor in Political History at the History Institute at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her work focuses on the ideas and practices of political participation from 1800 to the present day. She has mainly published on the history of political parties from an interdisciplinary perspective, including her monograph The Making of the Democratic Party (Cham, 2022). Her research interests also include digital history, populism, social movements and democracy in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Britain and Spain).

Anne Petterson

Anne Petterson is Assistant Professor in Political History at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History (RICH) of Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research interests involve local, national and political identity formation in the daily lives of citizens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent publications include ‘Performing National Identities in Everyday Life. Popular Motivations and National Indifference in 19th-century Amsterdam’ in Nations and Nationalism 29, (2023); the forum ‘What Does it Mean to be a Politician?’ in Journal of Modern European History 18, (2020), (with Henk te Velde). Her PhD thesis (Leiden University, 2017), ‘Eigenwijs vaderland. Populair nationalisme in negentiende-eeuws Amsterdam’ (2017) was awarded the prestigious Dirk Jacob Veegens Prijs of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in 2018.

Notes

1 H. Richter, Moderne Wahlen: Eine Geschichte der Demokratie in Preußen und den USA im 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2017).

2 R. Saunders, ‘The Politics of Reform and the Making of the Second Reform Act, 1848–1867’, The Historical Journal 50, (2007), pp. 571–91; M.L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000).

3 G. Capoccia and D. Ziblatt, ‘The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond’, Comparative Political Studies 43, (2010), pp. 931–68; A. Heyer, The Making of the Democratic Party in Europe, 1860–1890 (Cham, 2022).

4 R. Huzzey and H. Miller, ‘Petitions, Parliament and Political Culture: Petitioning the House of Commons, 1780–1918’, Past & Present 248, (2020), pp. 123–64. M. Janse, ‘“What Value Can We Attach to These Petitions?” Petition Campaigns and the Problem of Legitimacy in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands’, Social Science History 43, (2019), pp. 1–22.

5 An important exception is the work of Paula Cossart on meetings in the French Third Republic, P. Cossart, From Deliberation to Demonstration. Political Rallies in France, 1868–1939 (Colchester, 2013). See also J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People. Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 178–93; J. Lawrence, Electing our Masters. The Husting in British politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), ch. 1 and 2; A. Faure, ‘The Public Meeting Movement in Paris from 1866 to 1870’, in A. Rifkin and R. Thomas (eds), Voices of the People. The Social Life of ‘La Sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire (London, 1988), pp. 181–234; J. Vernon, Politics and the People. A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), 208–30; T. Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn, 2000), part II, ch. 3; T. Jung, ‘Streitkultur im Kaiserreich. Politische Versammlungen zwischen Deliberation und Demonstration‘, in A. Braune, M. Dreyer, M. Lang and U. Lappenküper (eds), Einigkeit und Recht, doch Freiheit? Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Demokratiegeschichte und Erinnerungskultur (Stuttgart, 2021), pp. 101–20; M. Schoups, Meester van de straat. Collectieve actie en de strijd om de publieke ruimte: Antwerpen (1884–1936) (Ghent, 2022), ch. 1.

6 Cossart, From Deliberation to Demonstration, p. 2.

7 T.M. Parssinen, ‘Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848’, The English Historical Review 88, (1973), pp. 504–33.

8 C. Schönberger, ‘Die überholte Parlamentarisierung: Einflußgewinn und fehlende Herrschaftsfähigkeit des Reichstags im sich demokratisierenden Kaiserreich’, Historische Zeitschrift 272, (2001), pp. 623–66; T. Kühne, ‘Demokratisierung und Parlamentarisierung: Neue Forschungen zur politischen Entwicklungsfähigkeit Deutschlands vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31, (2005), pp. 293–316.

9 Kühne, ‘Demokratisierung und Parlamentarisierung’.

10 M. Hewitson, ‘The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany before the First World War’, Journal of Modern History 73, 4 (2001), pp. 725–80.

11 R. Aerts, ‘Iemand moet het doen. Twee eeuwen beeld en zelfbeeld van de Tweede Kamer‘, in: idem, Denkend aan Nederland. Over geschiedenis, nationaliteit en politiek (Amsterdam, 2022), p. 297.

12 R. de Jong et al., Verkiezingen op de kaart, 1848–2010. Tweede Kamerverkiezingen in geografisch perspectief (Utrecht, 2011), p. 12. R. Andeweg and M. Leyenaar (eds), Alle stemmen tellen! Een eeuw algemeen kiesrecht (Amsterdam, 2017).

13 J. Loots, Voor het volk, van het volk. Van districtenstelsel naar evenredige vertegenwoordiging (Amsterdam, 2004).

14 Anderson, Practicing Democracy.

15 K.E. Pollmann, Parlamentarismus im Norddeutschen Bund, 1867–1870 (Düsseldorf, 1985), p. 222.

16 H.W. Hahn and H. Berding, Reformen, Restauration und Revolution, 1806–1848/49, (Stuttgart, 2010), p. 451; Reichstag 12 April 1869, p. 327.

17 H.IJ. IJnzonides, Het recht van vergadering (Zwolle, 1938), p. 32.

18 A. Houkes, Christelijke vaderlanders. Godsdienst, burgerschap en de Nederlandse natie, 1850–1900 (Amsterdam, 2009) pp. 58, 117–19, 134–39; M. Janse, De afschaffers. Publieke opinie, organisatie en politiek in Nederland, 1840–1880 (Amsterdam, 2007) pp. 149–52.

19 Historische parlementaire documenten (1814–1995), https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/uitgebreidzoeken/historisch; Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, https://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/.

20 Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (Minutes of the House of Representatives; hereafter: HTK), 17 August 1848, p. 667.

21 With Progressive Liberals we mainly refer to the political situation in the Netherlands. In Germany the Progressive Party took a more ambiguous stance that could also mean both criticism of and cooperation with the Bismarck government.

22 T. Jung, ‘Der Feind im eigenen Hause: Antiparlamentarismus im Reichstag 1867–1918’, in M.-L. Recker and A. Schulz (eds), Parlamentarismuskritik und Antiparlamentarismus in Europa (Düsseldorf, 2018), pp. 129–49.

23 Reichstag, 12 May 1869, p. 948.

24 Reichstag, 12 May 1869, p. 948.

25 Reichstag, 12 May 1869, p. 948.

26 Reichstag, 12 May 1869, p. 948.

27 Reichstag, 24 January 1876, p. 854.

28 Reichstag, 24 January 1876, p. 854.

29 Reichstag, 24 January 1876, p. 854.

30 Reichstag, 24 January 1876, p. 854.

31 Reichstag, 3 December 1870, p. 47.

32 Reichstag, 3 December 1870, p. 62.

33 W. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen um das Sozialistengesetz Bismarcks, 1878–1890 (Düsseldorf, 1961).

34 Even in the nineteenth century, observers recognized that the Socialist laws would not be able to stop German Social Democracy, see W. Kulemann, Die Sozialdemokratie und deren Bekämpfung. Eine Studie zur Reform des Sozialistengesetzes (Berlin, 1890). For a detailed study on party organization, membership and electoral performance, see G. Ritter, Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialdemokratie und freie Gewerkschaften im Parteiensystem und Sozialmilieu des Kaiserreiches (München, 1990); T. Kupfer, ‘Die organisatorische Entwicklung der Sozialdemokratie in Preußen nach dem Sozialistengesetz 1889–1898’, Moving the Social 18, (1997), pp. 61–82.

35 Reichstag, 17 April 1880, p. 786.

36 Reichstag, 19 April 1880, p. 803.

37 Reichstag, 19 April 1880, p. 803.

38 Reichstag, 19 April 1880, p. 804.

39 Reichstag, 4 May 1880, p. 1164.

40 Reichstag, 17 April 1880, p. 789.

41 Reichstag, 23 January 1890, p. 1178.

42 Reichstag, 17 April 1880, p. 789.

43 Reichstag, 22 January 1890, p. 1162.

44 Reichstag, 31 January 1883, p. 1213.

45 Reichstag, 31 January 1883, p. 1213.

46 Reichstag Anlagen, 1879, Aktenstück 325, p. 1788. The term ‘electoral assembly’ often referred to the moment when votes were counted after an election.

47 Reichstag, 30 March 1881, p. 630.

48 Reichstag, 10 May 1880, p. 1301.

49 Reichstag, 10 May 1880, p. 1301.

50 H. te Velde, ‘Staten-Generaal en parlement. De welsprekendheid van de Tweede Kamer’, in R. Aerts, C. Baalen, J. Oddens, H. Te Velde and D. Smit (eds), In dit huis. Twee eeuwen Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam, 2015).

51 Some examples from Dutch newspapers: Het Nieuws van den Dag, 26 June 1911 (‘zelfs de heer Troelstra vervalt somwijlen al te zeer in den goedkoopen meeting-toon’); De Nederlander, 28 November 1911 (‘zóó mal-schreeuwerig, zóó beneden den meeting-toon zelfs’); De Nederlander, 16 October 1912 (‘het was ontzaglijk pedant en aanstellerig, en zoo héélemaal meetingtoon’); Nieuwe Tilburgsche Courant, 22 November 1913 (‘de kunst van prikkelen’).

52 Richard Toye, ‘The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons after 1918’, History 99, no.2 (2014), pp. 270–98.

53 Here Toye points out the work of Jon Lawrence: Toye, ‘The Rhetorical Culture’, 274–75.

54 In 1869, the minutes of the Tweede Kamer note for the first time that a certain speech may belong at a meeting rather than in parliament: HTK, 15 December 1869, pp. 663–4.

55 HTK, 8 March 1906, p. 1260.

56 HTK, 11 April 1905, p. 1685.

57 See, for example, the aristocratic parliamentarian Alexander de Savornin Lohman – a member of parliament since 1879 – who stated in 1910 how ‘as long as I have been in politics and have appeared in this Chamber or in public assemblies’ he had taken the same position on certain issues in order to increase his credibility: HTK, 25 November 1910, p. 550.

58 HTK, 1 June 1906, p. 1940.

59 H. te Velde, ‘Een aparte techniek. Nederlandse politieke acteurs en de massa na 1870’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 110, (1997), pp. 198–212.

60 HTK, 16 February 1887, p. 837.

61 HTK, 13 December 1904, p. 597.

62 HTK, 17 March 1911, p. 1804. Of course, Schaper did not refer to the use of an improper meeting tone: ‘A bad tone is also bad at a meeting.’

63 See, for example, HTK, 20 March 1889, p. 864 (Conservative Liberal Adriaan Gildemeester on child labour); HTK, 25 July 1893, p. 1600 (Progressive Liberal Harm Smeenge on the problem of money savings for members of the working class).

64 W. Bagehot, The English Constitution (London, 1872), pp. 161–62.

65 HTK, 25 November 1891, p. 196.

66 HTK, 25 November 1891, p. 196.