ABSTRACT
With the growing nationalization of political power, ordinary people fashioned new means of acting together on their interests. They created a new repertoire of collective action. The nineteenth-century repertoire rests on the premises of possessive individualism, of capitalism, of a strong, centralized state, of electoral politics. Perhaps the main change in the repertoire from the 1780s to the 1820s was a general increase in the directness and explicitness of the connection between national politics and previously local forms of action such as the food riot and the charivari. In the case of the charivari, Eugen Weber has found traces of the old form in remote rural areas well into the twentieth century. Those charivaris, furthermore, concern local moral matters, not national politics. 'Noticeably', reports Weber, 'the political charivaris were largely restricted to towns with a political public.' By and large, rural areas retained the eighteenth-century forms of collective action much longer than did urban centres.
