Introduction: oratory and representation in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT

This introduction outlines how the authors of the present special issue share not an eloquence-centred but a more encompassing, interactive, embodied and experience-oriented interpretation of political performance as their heuristic prism. Through this lens, they analyze vocal expectations and deviations in political debates that took place in a few different national and imperial contexts of the long nineteenth century. Their approach reveals what parliamentarians, state-officials and/or journalists perceived as (un)-acceptable speech modes and, more broadly, as ‘proper’ audible and visible political representative practices of the time. Here, we introduce the theoretical and methodological framework employed by the contributors to explore speech as just one but integral part of political performance, and its audience as a multi-layered community, (in)efficiently reimagined, represented and embodied by those in power. Because the timeframes of these analyses mostly predate the focal point that has commonly been central to European histories of political discourse on representation, the authors have challenged themselves to consider important (dis)-continuities and dichotomies in European political culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Political culture
• parliamentary identity
• performance
• nineteenth century
• orators
• representatives

This special issue results from the international Oratory and Representation workshop, organized by CALLIOPE (Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire, ERC StG 2017) at the University of Helsinki in March 2020. The participants addressed the cultural and political importance of various practices of representation in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century legislative assemblies across Europe, with the emphasis on hegemonic perceptions of how political key figures sounded in interaction with one another and with the audience they represented. When brought together in writing, we realized that the common ground of these papers extended beyond an analysis of the speakers’ voices and ventured towards a more encompassing, interactive, embodied and experience-oriented interpretation of political performance. The contributors took up the challenge to build further on the discourse-historical approach to political speech, yet steer away from its focus on language-codes, which has nonetheless proven to be highly valuable to research on twentieth-century parliaments, democracies and national identities.¹ Meanwhile, they also asked themselves what an emphasis on (in)audible, spatial, performative, and thus also non-verbal aspects of political oratory may contribute to our knowledge of especially pre-democratic European political culture.

Although not all presented papers have ended up in this special issue, the articles that make up this volume still pursue the workshop’s initial aim of tracing new research ventures onto the agenda of the aforementioned field.² Mostly being part of still ongoing projects, the papers explore the limits and possibilities of the authors’ approaches to some very concrete, yet until now overlooked case-studies of representative practices in Spain, Russia, and France and the latter’s Algerian colony. As they investigate continuities and dichotomies that have remained underdeveloped in these national and imperial contexts, they help nuance the common periodization of tensions regarding ‘proper’ representation and perceptions of leadership. Furthermore, their research might yield new insights into mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion – beyond its strict interpretation as access to voting rights – and existing notions of what ‘doing politics’ and ‘sounding political’ entailed within these European and imperial regimes.

This is why, in the second section of this introduction, we will shed light on our broad perspective on ‘Political oratory beyond eloquence’. Indeed, the authors employ embodied political performances instead of eloquence as a heuristic lens through which they analyze vocal exploits, expectations, and deviations in parliamentary and extra-parliamentary exchanges. Therefore, in the third section, called ‘Political performance beyond theatricality’, we delve deeper into the concrete implications of this methodological choice. First, however, this issue’s focus on the long nineteenth century requires more specific attention, since we explicitly decided to study political speech before the existence of audio-recordings, and political representation before universal suffrage. Thus, below in section 1, we outline the theoretical framework that underlies the authors’ notions of representation and audience interaction, concepts that may initially seem contradictory to the chosen pre-democratic periodization.

Political representation before democratization

Representatives in parliament (dis)played different roles that intertwined and overlapped, and which they strengthened or muted depending on the intended audience and the physical, acoustic and socio-cultural contexts of the gathering to which they contributed.³ First, they brought their own speaking habits and personality onto the scene, which they adapted to the socio-cultural conventions of this specific assembly. Secondly, they fulfilled an institutional role in the highly ritualized and regulated environment of the sessions, as they spoke both to and for their peers, and as part of the regime that they embodied through their legislative work. Thirdly, their formally expected representation of the nation was in continuous tension with their actual representation of their constituency, which was socially and geographically limited.

In this context, previous research on the history of democratization has commonly focussed on the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, when many parliamentarians in Western nations were said to have struggled with contrasting expectations surrounding parliamentary representation for the people (in defence of their general interest) and of the people (its subgroups and their specific interests).⁴ Suffrage extensions then increased the importance of working class representation, and although, in many European countries around that time, parliament was still a select and exclusively male gathering, the representatives’ political decisions and the ways in which these were discussed became more ‘democratically’ accessible through the press.⁵ Consequently, the gap between representatives and those whom they represented became smaller around the turn of the century. This challenged them to perform a difficult balancing act between speaking for the general public in rational, dignified discussions with their colleagues on the one hand, and defending regional, local or class interests in more emotional performances on the other.⁶ Although indeed often situated a little before or after 1900, discussions about self(re)presentation and inclusivity were not new. Nonetheless, political experiences connected to parliamentary work in the earlier nineteenth century (and the practices of oratory and speech in particular) have received far less attention. This does not mean, however, that these ‘early’ oratorical practices were homogeneous in nature. As this collection of articles shows, tensions concerning inclusion and exclusion, as well as performativity and delivery can be traced back to the pre-democratic and imperial contexts of earlier nineteenth-century debates.

Whereas Ludovic Marionneau and Tamás Nyirkos’ cases of early-nineteenth-century French parliamentary oratory and its spatial and sonic attributes predate France’s so-called ‘universal suffrage’ of 1848, which was still limited to male citizens only, Karen Lauwers’ French-Algerian case starts a few years before that marker and extends further into the 1860s. In the colony, however, the metropolitan regime change of 1848 did not garner any democratic effects, to say the least, as the violent oppression of the military colonial regime continued. Therefore, she investigates how French colonial officers and officials not only verbally but also in an overall performative way mocked, mimicked, re-contextualized, and consequently misinterpreted power and leadership in Algeria under military rule.

Next, Oriol Luján’s contribution analyzes political representation as an interactive claim-making and claim-receiving process that took place between representatives and those whom they represented. He examines the concepts that elite Spanish deputies and their voting public used to refer to each other in the mid-nineteenth century, a time that, because of its exclusionary character, has not commonly been considered in research on representative politics. Luján explores the success of their interaction outside the vote itself, and notices accountability from the deputies’ side, yet, only when voters, as an active audience, outlined what they expected from their representation. His ongoing research thus sheds light on political negotiations in what can be called a liberal but pre-democratic time in Spanish history.

Investigating similar tensions, although between notions of inclusion and exclusion, and negotiated interpretations of political community, Ivan Sablin’s contribution centres on the debates in the First and Second State Duma of the Russian Empire. His focus lies on the deputies’ experience of the composite imperial space, with its fluid and overlapping social categories. This lens leads him to argue that the imperial parliament was a site for articulating and developing two main approaches to political community, viz. an integrative and a composite one. That development, Sablin discusses, appeared to be part of the global trend of political modernization but often departed from the homogenizing and exclusionary logic of nation-building.

Therefore, the articles here raise questions about the multi-layered community of political speakers as well as audience members and subsequently about the accountability of the first towards the latter. Furthermore, the oratory performances of parliamentary debates were not only defined by the organized communication between actors and audience on a topic or text,⁷ but should also be acknowledged as a process in which explicit and tacit rules, rituals, embodied practices and societal norms were enacted or challenged.⁸ These processes involve expectations about silence as well, which, as Theo Jung suggests, must be seen as an integral part but distinct mode of political communication.⁹

Regarding the gendered nature of such political interactions, the interbellum has become a popular research period,¹⁰ next to which the authors of this special issue aim to offer additional insights into the challenging methods, materials, and research avenues for studying political representation in pre-war times. While these early sources, predating the practice of audio-recording, do not always reveal the ‘ordinary’ voices of the masses, they show a great variety among politically active ‘peers’. Although the audience of peers in national European parliaments, for a long time, shared very similar professional and socio-cultural backgrounds with their colleagues taking the floor, they differed politically, even within the same groups, in the sense that they disagreed, at times, on what their representative duties entailed. As a supposedly impartial arbitrator in these discussions, the Assembly Presidents (or Speakers, in the British context) who embodied the institution and its dignity could not always remain personally indifferent to the political and personal conflicts taking place on the debating floor.¹¹ The public audience, from their side (consisting, for instance, of journalists and ‘ordinary’ people), did not always embody the ideal silent crowd during (and especially after) the sessions either.

Together, the contributors to this special issue discuss how the audiences in their case-studies interpreted what it meant to sound, look, dress and act politically and thus to embody representative power beyond eloquent speech. Indeed, the persuasive power of the speakers was not limited to their verbal eloquence, but extended to the overall performance of their interaction with a multi-layered audience, supported by their bodily expression and by the debating space’s material and acoustic qualities.

Political oratory beyond eloquence

Although indebted to the cultural and linguistic turns which, with their deconstruction of national and gender identities provided the necessary nuance to political historiography, this collection of articles does not primarily dissect the semiotics of representative politics. While we treat parliaments as flexible cultures rather than as fixed institutions,¹² we aim to investigate ‘culture as practice and performance’ instead of focussing on ‘culture as discourse’. This tendency, as discussed by Gabrielle Spiegel in the context of Practicing History after the linguistic turn, moves the attention towards individual agency of historical actors, and away from linguistic determinism.¹³ For the present collection of articles, this means that we prioritize these individuals’ speech over code, instead of adopting the Saussurean langue over parole hierarchy, in our analysis of political oratory.¹⁴ Indeed, apart from providing insights into different argumentation strategies, the contributions to this special issue highlight the various ways in which political speech was performed and perceived, within parliament itself or outside such national assemblies in the broader context of politicized socio-cultural gatherings. Having their own set of norms and rituals, parliaments can be considered microcosms, but by no means were they severed from the outside world. Individual members and groups mobilized alternative oratorical choices and skills, going against the hegemonic parliamentary rituals or regulations. Deviations from the expectations and norms were criticized, yet tolerated at times, and eventually became woven into the assembly’s daily routine.

By exploring the differences between enacted or challenged norms, and accepted or rejected practices in the interactive social and political spaces of parliaments against the light of extra-parliamentary gatherings, this special issue interrogates nineteenth-century political oratory as situated, multi-dimensional speech acts. Doing so, the authors lean on the growing scholarship on Western European parliamentary culture(s) and its attention to the orators’ eloquence within their broader rhetorical culture.¹⁵ More prominently, perceptions of political orators’ vocal and physical delivery, and especially their engagement with(in) the public space form important categories of analysis in the articles that make up this issue.

The oratorical expectations and norms of the time influenced the design and (re)-construction processes of the debating rooms. These spaces’ physical shapes, organization, and dimensions, in their turn, actively modified the audibility, and consequently the reception of the speeches taking place there. Thus, without hereby replacing the criticized linguistic determinism with spatial determinism, the articles in this volume examine political speech acts within the social and acoustic space of their respective assemblies, and projected by the actual bodies of the speakers. In other words, we follow Joan Scott’s interpretation of political experiences as discursive events, but are also interested in the physical contexts in which these experiences resonated, were transferred, and potentially altered.¹⁶

For example, in the first contribution, Ludovic Marionneau examines a specific debate and its interaction with the institutional fabric of the assembly of Restoration France. The deputies’ material practices and embodied (inter)actions during these early-nineteenth-century parliamentary speeches heavily shaped the cultural code of the assembly, which, when expanded towards newer research, might reveal different continuities and changes that superpose the existing periodization of French political history by regimes. Therefore, Marionneau suggests introducing such a performative lens into French parliamentary historiography of the longue durée, spanning from the Revolution until now, to discover continuities and change in the cultural traditions of the parliamentary craft and shed light on the embodied memory of its actors.

Secondly, Tamás Nyirkos focuses on two leading French conservatives of the same Restoration era, in the French Lower and Upper House respectively: Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald and François-René de Chateaubriand. Although their personal background and their original political aspirations were similar, their performance as members of their respective Chamber seemed to be remarkably different. By exploring and comparing their performative framework, situated each in the different debating rooms of their legislative body, Nyirkos analyzes how both politicians interacted with the official roles bestowed upon them. He explores how they understood oratory and representation within this complex new political environment of 1815–16 and its conception of parliamentarism.

Whereas these early nineteenth-century French cases shed light on certain orators’ failure or refusal to play by the rules, which affected perceptions of their efficiency and mastery, the mid-nineteenth-century French-Algerian and Spanish cases (by Karen Lauwers and Oriol Luján respectively) explore the versatility of political communication and representative claims beyond the legislative assemblies. At the same time, all contributions highlight the challenges and possibilities of using written source material commonly used in parliamentary history, to analyze perceptions of acceptability and efficiency of political speech, and the impact of audible and visible aspects of political performances. These sources include transcriptions of the spoken word, its emphases, accents and tone, and/or the use of multiple languages, in addition to more broadly underlying cultural and at times non-verbal practices and expectations, such as theatre- and music experiences. Such a scope allows for attention to the embodied political entanglements that characterized the dynamics of imperial contexts as well.

For example, Lauwers’ article explores new ways to fruitfully investigate French colonial expedition diaries and memoirs of the mid-nineteenth century and deconstruct what their authors framed as ‘historically accurate’ accounts of ‘pacification’ during the violent French military colonization of Algeria. Her paper shifts the focus from French colonial writers’ discursive representations of the colonized Other to their situated re-presentations of native Algerian chiefs and the embodied performance of their leadership. This performative approach helps differentiate between the authors’ socio-cultural habitus and their political strategy when it comes to their misinterpretations of native Algerian expressions of loyalty and resistance. By analyzing their representations of speech, silence, and performance during their encounters with Algerian leaders, she aims to trace the mechanisms by which the French colonial authorities artificially separated spirituality from politics, and ultimately failed to grasp how power worked in the colony.

Ivan Sablin, in his imperial case too, examines the correlation between religion and politics, while going beyond an analysis of discourse and interpretations of eloquence. His case-study allows him to approach language-use in parliament quite literally, as he explores perspectives on the use of native languages in the multi-ethnic early Russian State Dumas. Aside from ethnicity and language, class and religion were other lines along which the deputies in the Duma organized themselves in factions but also imagined the nation which they represented as internally diverse and composite, so Sablin discusses in his article.

Political performance beyond theatricality

Both Marionneau and Lauwers, moreover, address the use of theatrical and poetic devices and genres on nineteenth-century French parliamentary or imperial debating scenes. Although they hereby connect the political and theatrical spheres, they do not focus on the debates’ dramatic connotation. Instead, their starting point constitutes of these performances’ shared reflexivity, following Shirin Rai and Janelle Reinelt’s interpretation of political performance, implying that the actor was aware ‘of the act of doing something’ and had ‘to show doing it’.¹⁷ The speaker’s awareness is further extended to include his knowledge of and engagement with the audience perceiving and evaluating his act. In the context of parliamentary reflexivity, moreover, the political speaker aimed to persuade his audience of the legitimacy of his representative claims. Because this exchange required a higher degree of interaction between speaker and listener, parliamentary reflexivity differed from its theatrical counterpart, which nonetheless influenced political rhetoric.¹⁸ When extrapolated to their respective cases, both authors thus highlight the political implications of theatrical metaphors in an aim to shed clearer light on what political actors considered to be (in)efficient, (in)competent, (in)audible, (un)-acceptable and overall (a)political modes of public speaking.

Indeed, although nineteenth-century European parliaments have commonly been accused of drama and their debates have consequently been compared to spectacles, the collection of papers presented here does not reduce political performance to the strictest theatrical sense of the word. Such accusations seem to be as old as the institution itself, and have even been uttered by those taking part in it.¹⁹ As Timon (Viscount de Cormenin, French député between 1830 and 1849) wrote in 1842: ‘The tribune is a theatre, eloquence is a spectacle, and the orator a comedian’.²⁰ From the late eighteenth century onwards, British and French contemporary commentators mobilized such associations between spectacle and debate, between theatricality and representation, to criticize parliamentary politics.²¹ In its theatrical connotation, political performance has received increased scholarly attention, especially concerning the British and French parliamentary frameworks. This could be explained, first, by the field’s interest in the ‘golden ages’ of eloquence. Although this focus might pose the risk of perpetuating the treatment of past rhetorical practices as objects of nostalgia, it has offered a useful entry-point into the early history of parliamentary representation as a craft or métier.²² Secondly, European political historiography’s growing attention for theatricality and, more broadly, performance displays the field’s material and cultural turns in its study of parliamentary debate.²³ As part of this ongoing tendency, relations between efficient decision-making and persuasive speaking, as well as tensions between dignity and theatricality have moved to the centre in historiography and theory of the ritualized procedural context of nineteenth-century parliamentary debates.²⁴

Moreover, research centring on the performative aspects of politics have also illuminated the gendered nature of those practices and, therefore, the role of embodied modes of performativity in addition to practices of theatrical display in parliament. For the period under scrutiny in this volume, parliamentary representation was an all-male and, by extension, explicitly ‘masculine’ affair. Performances of masculinity have been shown to be intrinsically interwoven with performances of parliamentary dignity and growing demands of political professionalism in the course of the nineteenth century.²⁵ Oratorical skill and public speech, along with performances of self-control and autonomy, constituted one facet of such practices that were coded masculine in that period, serving as a means of both parliamentary democratization (opening up spaces for previously excluded members provided they could ‘speak well’²⁶) and continued gatekeeping (excluding those who were heard to lack proper oratorical skill).²⁷ Thus, this volume’s focus on ‘sounding’ political (beyond being considered eloquent) and ‘acting’ politically (beyond the theatrical interpretation of ‘acting’) opens up discussions about the era’s intersectional interpretations of ‘the political’ along racial, ethnic, gendered, religious and classist lines.

Conclusion

In sum, as the authors of the following contributions continue to build on the trend that compares parliamentary procedure with political practice, they verify the efficiency of the rules and expectations regarding the craft of the studied orators and the organization of their debating space. As a result, this collection of articles brings successful and failed, hegemonic and deviant speech modes to the fore, and places them in their architectural and larger cultural contexts. Consequently, they hope to contribute to a better understanding of what ‘proper’ political representative practices were supposed to be in the historiographically underexposed pre-democratic contexts of Spain, the Russian Empire, and France during the Restoration and in its later colonial empire. All contributors take political performance seriously by interpreting it in the sense of embodied articulations of power and powerlessness, in and beyond speech acts, e.g. in silence, assumed names, objects, attire, movement, and assembly.²⁸ Together, they explore what it meant to have a powerful voice and, by extension, a powerful presence in all its connotations. To put it differently, this special issue interrogates when a voice or political performance was considered powerful in that it asserted authority, was perceived as loud and clear, or conveyed strong emotions. What, in contrast, defined a boring or annoying public speech? And how did the sense of what an efficient speech act was change over time? Did an ‘impactful’ political performance equate a ‘representative’ one? Is there a clear shift to be noted, and if so, did this shift coincide with the democratization of representative practices; a process that has been discussed in recent and ongoing research, e.g. in Henk te Velde and Anne Petterson’s Forum for the Journal of Modern European History on what it means to be a politician?²⁹

How, then, does the present special issue aim to answer such questions, which are particularly challenging for the period under scrutiny, given its lack of ‘adequate’ representation in the absence of democracy and given its subjective written records in the absence of audio recordings of the debates? All cases, indeed, address highly exclusionary frameworks in terms of electoral and/or imperial politics. Meanwhile, this volume discusses sources and research strategies that have been popular within the fields of parliamentary history, history of nationality, democracy and representation, and imperial histories, but it aims to offer additional, alternative vantage points. By shifting the focus away from eloquence in parliament to such a more situated experience-, sensory-, and/or interaction-oriented approach to (extra)parliamentary political gatherings, the different papers explore continuities and dichotomies that have remained underdeveloped in the studied national and imperial contexts. They shed light on the diverse aims of these oratory combats in contexts that have commonly been underexposed by histories of representation, precisely because the context in which they played out was still pre-democratic.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank everyone who participated in the CALLIOPE-workshop on Oratory and Representation on 6 March 2020 in Helsinki (https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/news/language-culture/oratory-and-representation-parliamentary-discourses-and-practices-in-the-19th-century). Our greatest deal of gratitude goes out to the speakers who have contributed, with their papers, to this special issue. We also thank the journal’s anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The workshop on which this special issue is based was sponsored by the ERC-funded CALLIOPE project (‘Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire’, no. 757291), which employed the three authors of this introduction during the time of collecting their material and completing their contributions.

Notes on contributors

Karen Lauwers

Karen Lauwers is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Department of Cultures, where she has been working on the French-Algerian axis of the CALLIOPE project. Trained as a historian of Political Culture & National Identities in the Low Countries (MA, Leiden University) and French political history (PhD, University of Antwerp), her earlier publications focus on interactions between people and parliament. ([email protected])

Ludovic Marionneau

Ludovic Marionneau is a doctoral student in Cultural History at the University of Helsinki, where he is writing his dissertation on ‘Pratique du métier parlementaire: Performances in the French Lower Chamber in the Long Nineteenth Century’. Supported by the CALLIOPE project, his research examines parliamentary representatives’ performances in the French Chambers, with an emphasis on sounds and objects in the political, cultural and physical space of the assemblies. ([email protected])

Josephine Hoegaerts

Josephine Hoegaerts is associate professor of European Studies at the University of Helsinki, and PI of the CALLIOPE project. Her current research centres on the political, social and scientific histories of the voice in the nineteenth century, with recent publications in Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, Women’s History Review and Radical History Review. ([email protected])

Notes

1. See Ruth Wodak’s work in particular, e.g. Wodak, “Discourse­analytic and Socio­Linguistic Approaches,” 104–117; and “The Discourse-Historical Approach,” 63–94.

2. Apart from this special issue’s contributors, we would also like to thank Theo Jung, Clarice Bland, Daniel Morat, Anna Rajavuori and Henk te Velde for their insightful presentations at the CALLIOPE workshop.

3. On the diversity of these roles in French history, cf. Joana, Pratiques politiques; and El Gammal, Être parlementaire.

4. For the Netherlands: Loots, Voor het volk; for Prussia and the U.S.; and Richter, Moderne Wahlen.

5. For France, cf. Gauchet, “La droite et la gauche,” 2533–2602; and Garrigues, Histoire du Parlement, 289–314.

6. On dignity in the Belgian Lower House, cf. Beyen and Röttger, “Het streven naar waardigheid,” 337–83.

7. For example: Finlayson, “Becoming a Democratic Audience,” 93–105.

8. Rai, “Political Performance,” 1179–97.

9. As discussed by Theo Jung during his talk at the CALLIOPE workshop and in Jung, “Mind the gaps,” 296–315.

10. E.g. Lawrence, “The Transformation,” 185–216.

11. On the Assembly Presidents of France, cf. Garrigues. ed., Les Présidents de l’Assemblée.

12. As was a focal point of Henk te Velde’s keynote speech (on expectations of rationality and emotional authenticity in the British and French parliamentary contexts) during the aforementioned CALLIOPE workshop.

13. Spiegel, “Introduction,” 3.

14. Spiegel, 5.

15. Roussellier, Le Parlement de l’éloquence and “La diffusion de l’éloquence,” 41–46; Fumaroli, Histoire de la rhétorique; D’Almeida, L’Éloquence politique; Meisel, Public Speech; and Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers..

16. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 793, as referred to by: Spiegel, 28.

17. Rai and Reinelt, The Grammar, 4.

18. Rai, “Political Performance,” 1194.

19. See Edmund Burke as discussed by Te Velde, “Parliamentary ‘Theatre’,” 38–9.

20. Timon, Le Livre des Orateurs, 75–76.

21. Te Velde, “Parliamentary ‘Theatre’,” 39.

22. See endnote 15, and Billard Le métier de la politique; Fayat, “Le métier parlementaire,” 29–48; Garrigues “Les Débuts de La Troisième République,” 165–79; and El Gammal, Être parlementaire.

23. E.g. Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers; Rai, “Political Performance,” 1179–97; Gardey, Le linge du Palais-Bourbon; Hoegaerts, “Speaking Like Intelligent Men,” 123–44; and Yeandle, Newey, and Richards, Politics, Performance and Popular Culture.

24. In the House of Commons in particular, cf. Finlayson, “What is the Point of Parliamentary Debate,” 11–31; Te Velde, “Parliamentary ‘Theatre’,” 35–50; and Palonen, Parliamentary Thinking.

25. Griffin, “Masculinities and parliamentary culture in modern Britain,” 403–433; and Hoegaerts, “Historicizing Political Masculinities and Careers,” 241–60.

26. See e.g. Hélène Quanquin on the career of Frederic Douglass and the role of oratory in his career as a political activist, in: Men in the American Women’s Rights Movement, and Madeleine Hurd on the performative work of working class men towards inclusion in political speech, in: “Class, Masculinity, Manners, and Mores,” 75–110.

27. Hoegaerts, “Speaking Like Intelligent Men,” 123–144.

28. On the embodied dimension of assembling, cf. Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly.

29. Te Velde and Petterson, “What does it mean to be a politician?” 231; and Van Middelaar, “Right from the Heart,” 269–74.