ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 considers efforts by the organizers of the LCS and SCI to manage meeting spaces and create sites for well-ordered behavior – demarcated from the more raucous, everyday urban world, and resistant to seditious language and emotions. The goal was to establish self-regulated spaces for rational deliberation. For artisans turned reformers, men like Francis Place and the shoemaker Thomas Hardy, each of whom collected materials for a history of the LCS, their movement was characterized by the desire to form an enlightened public organized for the pursuit of political reform, a transformation that required some distancing from the vulgar habits pervading everyday life. The archives assembled by Place and Hardy reflect these commitments, although they leave traces of the overheated emotions and seditious politics which they sought to contain. Other sources perhaps more closely reveal the lived experience of metropolitan Jacobinism, as something more playfully subversive. In considering the relationship between ordinary life and radical organization, the chapter employs the theoretical concept of everyday life pioneered by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau in its analysis of the non-formalized “tactics” of daily life, and for mapping the transgressive behavior that cropped up at popular meetings for political reform.
