THE ARTERIAL REVOLUTION
or,
HOW THE SELF WAS REBORN
according to
RICHARD SENNET
A story about the rebirth of the Self or Individual in the Age of Enlightenment, told through the corporal experience of humanity
Western European culture has always had a persistent problem when it comes to honour the dignity of the body and the diversity of human bodies.
This fragment of writing explores what happened when the modern scientific conception of the human body emancipated itself from previous medical knowledge. This revolution began with the release of
De Motu Cordis, by Harvey, in the early seventeenth century; a milestone in scientific literature that altered, in a radical fashion, the conception of the circulation of blood through the system. This new view of the human body, in turn, propelled eighteenth-century attempts in order to make bodies circulate freely. And, during the first French Revolution (another turning-point), this new imagery of corporal freedom led to the first appearance of the modern signals of a passive sensitivity. The nineteenth century saw the triumph of this individualist movement, which led to the present-day dilemma of the individual body moving about freely without any physical conscience of the existence of fellow humanity. The psychological costs of this dilemma were obviously evident in Victorian London, as well as nowadays --with extreme proportions-- even more evident in our days' multiculturality, nowhere as prevalent or more desensitised as in the social media.
In the course of development of Western-European culture, the dominating conceptions of the human body have cracked at the seams and fallen apart during this process. A paradigmatic image of the organic system inherently awakens ambivalence throughout the people it rules over, because every human body is in possession of physical idiosyncrasy, and able to feel contradictory physical desires. These contradictions and ambivalences caused by the prototypical collective image have expressed themselves in alterations and subversive uses of space in Western culture. And it is this necessarily contradictory and fragmented character of the "human body" that has contributed to create the rights of different human bodies and to dignify them.
Long story short, these prototypical images have cracked at the seams and fallen apart. Reuniting different people, presenting all individuals as strangers. These aspects of difference and strangerness allow resistance to domination.
PART THE THIRD:
OF ARTERIES AND VEINS
CHAPTER EIGHT:
BODIES IN MOVEMENT
The Harvey Revolution
1. CIRCULATION AND RESPIRATION
Throughout over two thousand years, medical science accepted the ancient principles of bodily heat. Consecrated by the weight of a vast tradition, it seemed certain that an innate bodily heat explained the differences existing between males and females, and between humans and inferior animals. With the first appearance of
De Motu Cordis, penned by William Harvey in 1628, this certainty began to show cracks at the seams. By virtue of a series of discoveries related to the circulation of the bloodstream, Harvey fired the starting gun for a scientific revolution regarding the conception of living bodies: their structure, their state of health, and their relationship to the soul and/or spirits. Thus, a new prototype of the organic system came into shape.
These new ideas about the human body coincided chronologically with the birth of modern bourgeois capitalism and led to the great social transformation which we now know as individualism. The early modern individual is, above everything else, a moving human being. Adam Smith's
Essay on the Wealth of Nations was the first work ever to capture the direction that would follow in the wake of Harvey's discoveries, since Smith supposed that the free market of goods and services operated in a very similar way to the circulation of the bloodstream, and with very similar revitalizing consequences. Upon surveying the frantic economic behaviour of his contemporaries, he noticed some patterns. The circulation of goods, services, and currencies was more profitable than fixed and stable possession. Property was but the prelude to exchange, at least for those who bettered their own lot in life. However, Smith knew that those who profited from the virtues of a circulating economy felt themselves obliged to break up with their ancient loyalties. These moving economic actors had also to learn specialised and individualised tasks in order to have something specific in particular to offer. The liberated and specialised
Homo economicus had no ties that bound them to society and was able to exploit the possessions and specialisations that the market had to offer, yet everything came at a price.
By changing place freely, the sensory perception and the interest for places and people diminish. Each and every deep visceral connection to the environment threatens to tie down the individual. This was a premonition already foreseen by Shakespeare: in order to move about freely, one cannot allow themself the luxury of having too many feelings. In our days, when the desire for freedom of movements has triumphed over the sensory stimuli of the space through which the body moves, the contemporary moving individual has suffered some kind of tactile crisis: the movement has played its part in depriving the body of sensitivity, in desensitising. This general principle has become reality due to our need for rapid individual movement, neutral spaces, and the dominating value of circulation.
Harvey's revolution played its part in changing the expectations and plans of people regarding their surroundings. The discoveries made by Harvey and related to the circulation of the bloodstream and the respiration led to brand new ideas concerning public health, ideas that were applied by Enlightened planners during the eighteenth century. These planners tried to create a place through which people could displace themselves and breathe freely, endowed with fluid arteries and veins in which people could circulate just like healthy blood cells. The medical revolution seemed to have replaced morality with health as a model for human happiness in the view of these social engineers, and this health was defined by movement and circulation.
The discoveries made by Harvey related to the healthy circulation within living bodies, together with the new capitalist convictions about individual movement within society, did nothing more than to reiterate an issue that is permanent throughout Western European culture: how to find the right place for sensitive bodies within society, for bodies that were restless and solitary. Circulation regarded as a value in both medicine and economy has created an ethic of indifference. At least the LORD promised the wayward Abrahamic bodies, exiled from Eden, that they would be more conscious of their surroundings and their fellow displaced humans. John Milton, a contemporary of Harvey's, related the history of the Fall from Grace in this fashion in his
Paradise Lost. Contrariwise, the secular body in incessant movement is risking to lose its connections to other people and to the places through which it displaces itself.
This chapter describes the way that goes all the way from Harvey's discoveries about the circulation of the bloodstream to the eighteenth century, and what "circulation" meant, individually and collectively, during the Enlightenment. There was a challenge which circulation proposed to the feeling of place during the French Revolution; out of this conflict arose, in the nineteenth century, public spaces meant for moving individuals (as opposed to moving crowds/masses). This evolution in turn had psychological consequences, nowhere expressed as clearly as in Victorian-Edwardian London when it was the capital of an empire where the sun never set. In our days, especially the social platforms have become multicultural, full of uprooted people hailing from all over the globe. The term "uprooted" itself suggests unhappiness, but this story will not end with a tinge of negativity; instead, we ask ourselves the question that, even against everything that history has proclaimed, in multiculturality the racial, ethnic, and sexual differences can become points of connection instead of points of rejection. Can diversity on the Net vanquish the forces of individualism? (
Look no further than Facebook, where HBTQA+ people, cosplayers, cat owners, dollmakers, Thronies, Mizzies, Potterheads... have bonded across the vagaries, in communities connected by commonalities!)
All of these questions begin in the flesh.
Of Sanguine Pulses
Harvey made what in retrospect seems to be a quite simple discovery: that the heart pumps blood through the arteries and receives the same blood through the veins. This discovery questioned the ancient idea that blood flowed through bodies as a consequence of its inherent heat and that different bodies contained different degrees of
calor innatus --male bodies, for instance, being warmer than those of females. Harvey believed that circulation warmed the blood, while, according to the ancient theory, it was the warmth in the blood that made it circulate. Harvey discovered that circulation took place by mechanical means: "The vigourous beat of the heart moves, purifies, activates, and protects the blood from injury and decay." He described the living body as a great machine that pumped life.
First, Harvey studied in 1614 and 1615 the valves within the heart itself, and then, the differences between the functioning of arteries and veins. In the third decade of the century (those revolutionary 1630s), his disciples extraced hearts from corpses of the newly-deceased, in order to observe how the heart muscle kept on expanding and contracting, even without having any blood to pump. One of his students discovered that avian blood is warmer than human blood because the hearts of especially songbirds, being smaller in size, pumped blood at a far faster pace. By observation of the machinery of circulation, these scholars gradually convinced themselves that, throughout the entire animal kingdom, the same mechanism operated.
Until the eighteenth century, Judaeo-Christian physicians debated hotly amongst themselves about where exactly the soul was located within the human body, if the soul or spirit communicated with the body through the brain or the heart, or if these were "double organs." Though in his writings Harvey maintains the medieval Abrahamic notion that the heart is the seat of affection and compassion, in the epoch when he published his discoveries he knew that it was a machine as well. He insisted on empiricism, ie that scientific knowledge is acquired rather through personal observation and experiments than through theory and reasonings based on abstract principles. Some of Harvey's adversaries, like René Descartes, were ready to believe that living bodies were machines, just like Divinity itself can act in virtue of some sort of heavenly mechanics. Heaven as the principle for operating the machine. To the question of whether the soul, which is rational (immaterial), has physiological functions, Descartes' reply was a oui. Harvey's science led to replying that it had none. According to Harvey, even though the human animal has an immaterial soul, the presence of Divinity in the universe does not explain how the heart makes the blood move.
Harvey's research on the bloodstream impulsed other researchers to examine other organic systems in a similar fashion. Fellow Englishman and physician Thomas Willis, 1621-1675, tried to comprehend how the nervous system operates through mechanical circulation. Even though he could not see the visible movement of "nervous energies" along the nervous fibres just like Harvey had been able to observe the circulation of the bloodstream, Willis was at least able to study cerebral tissues. Just like Harvey's disciples, he discovered, upon comparing human and various animal brains, that there was "little difference or none at all in what pertains to shape and outward configuration of each and every part, with the exception of mass (ie size); hence we conclude that the common soul of men and beasts is only bodily, and that humans use immediately these organs." The successors of Willis in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century neurology discovered, through experiments with live frogs, that in a living body the clusters of nervous fibres responded in the same manner to sensory stimulation (think Luigi Galvani and his famous frog experiments). By experimenting with cadavers of the freshly-deceased, they discovered that human nervous clusters kept on responding, just like those in frogs, even after the soul had presumably left the body to meet its Maker and join the Choir Invisible. Regarding the nervous system, the body needed no spirit in order to feel. Since all the nervous clusters seemed to operate in the same manner, the soul could be anywhere, but it did not exist in any place in particular. Empirical observation, long story short, could not locate the seat of the soul within the living body.
In this manner, the mechanical movements of the organic system, both nervous and those of the bloodstream, led to a more secular conception of bodies, upon questioning the ancient idea of a soul or spirit (anima, qi, prana) as the source of vital energy.
This transformation led researchers to question the hierarchical image of bodies that was the groundwork of medieval thinkers like John of Salisbury. Long before the discovery of the electric nature of nervous impulses, for instance, it was already evident to eighteenth-century physicians that the nervous system was more than a simple extension of the cerebrum. Physiologist Albrecht von Haller proclaimed in his 1757
Demonstration of Physiology that the nervous system functioned by means of involuntary sensations that partly eluded the cerebrum and, of course, partly eluded conscious control. In some way or another, the nerves transmitted feelings of pain from the affected foot to the wrists when a person stubbed a toe, in such a manner that the upper and lower extremities contracted simultaneously. Just like blood, pain seemed to circulate throughout the system. Enlightened physicians and physiologists surrendered to a real orgy of cruel animal experiments, in order to show that nervous tissue had a life independent of consciousness or of the superior soul: hearts that still throbbed were ripped out of chests, viscera were taken out, tracheae were pierced in order to stifle the howling of frightened animals that shuddered and writhed in suffering.
Likewise, the heart was dethroned from the place it had been assigned by Henri de Mondeville. Even though Harvey affirmed that the heart was the "beginning of life," he felt that "blood is life itself;" and the heart, nothing but a mechanical pump for the circulation. The science of circulation, thus, underlined the individual independence of each and every body part.
Claudius Galen had defined health as "balance in between the bodily warmth and fluids." The new medicine defined health as the free flux and movement of the energies of the bloodstream and of nervous impulse. The free flux of blood seemed to favour the healthy growth of individual tissues. In a similar fashion, experimenting neurologists believed that the nervous energy that flowed freely favoured the growth of individual tissues. It was this paradigm of flux, health, and individuality within the living body that finally transformed the relationship between it and society. As regarded by one medical historian: "in a society that was gradually becoming more and more secular... health began to be regarded as one of the responsibilities of the individual, more than as a gift from Heaven." This internal paradigm, as the eighteenth century unfurled, was translated into an image of a healthy body in a healthy society.
These connections between society and this new science of the body began to establish themselves when the heirs of Harvey and Willis applied their discoveries to the skin. We owe eighteenth-century physician Ernst Platner the first clear analogy of circulation within the body and the environmental experience of the same. The air, according to Platner, is just like blood: it must circulate throughout the system, and the skin is what allows it to respire the air (more so than the lung tissue). According to Platner, filth was the greatest enemy of the functioning of the skin. And according to historian Alain Corbin, Platner sustained that the dirt that blocked the pores "retained excretory fluids, favoured fermentation, and worse, it hindered the expulsion of noxious substances through the skin." The movement of air through the human skin gave a new, secular meaning to the word "impure." Impurity now meant filthy skin, rather than a blot on the soul. The skin became impure more due to social experience than to the consequence of moral failure.
Among the peasantry and sans-culotterie, dirt caked on the skin seemed natural and even healthy. Urine and feces played their part in feeding the soil as manure (even humanure), and over the bodies they seemed to form a nutritious layer, especially on young children. Thus, the common people believed that they did not have to wash often, because the crust of feces and dry urine, dust and perspiration, formed part of the body and played a protective part, especially in newborn infants.
The habit of scrupulously cleansing one's own bodily wastes became a specifically bourgeois, middle-class practice. In the mid-eighteenth century, upper- and middle-class townsfolk began to use expendable paper to cleanse the anus and urethra after relieving themselves. Around those days, urinals or chamber-pots began to be emptied on a day-to-day basis. The loathing towards excrements itself was a bourgeois phenomenon, whose origin was in the new medical ideas about impurities that blocked the skin (
according to Sennet: compare new British studies of the last decade --2000s-- on disgust being rooted in nature rather than nurture, as an ingrained defence against poisoning!). Besides, those who transmitted this medical knowledge, or any scientific knowledge in general, lived in the capitals and seats of learning. Peasants and provincials were literally incapable of communicating with physicians in a common world of representations of the body and its peripeties, according to historian Dorinda Outram. The commoners knew men and women of science only in the figures of wise women, midwives, and/or itinerant surgeons, generally retired military surgeons that gave rural and provincial healthcare during peacetime, and these people were only one person out of one thousand in 1789 France, when the Bastille fell; university-graduated physicians (as well as lawyers, schoolteachers, university lecturers, and other such professionals) were one out of ten thousand - the ancien régime intelligentsia was a minority.
In spite of this, such beliefs about the importance of letting the skin "breathe" contributed to change the way people dressed; a change that became evident as early as the fourth decade of the eighteenth century (1740s). Females reduced the weight of their attire by wearing light fabric, such as gauze, muslin, or cotton. Male suits were also cut in order to cover the figure of the wearer more loosely. Even though the artifice of wigs, that in fact gradually became more complicated as the century unfurled, did not cease to exist, both males and females tried to lighten and loosen their attire. A body that was free to breathe was healthier because its noxious vapours were expelled with more ease.
Moreover, to let the skin breathe, people had to wash themselves more frequently than before. The daily bathing custom of the Romans had disappeared during the Dark Ages. In fact, some medieval physicians regarded this practise as dangerous because it radically unbalanced bodily temperature. Now people that dressed in light fabrics and cleansed themselves frequently did no longer need to mask the odour of perspiration. Perfumes had been distilled throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with essential oils that frequently caused cutaneous eruptions, so that a good scent was often paid for in pustules.
The desire to put into practise the healthy virtues of respiration and circulation transformed corporal practices.
Enlightened planners desired a healthy system to function flowing freely and enjoying a clean skin. The medical image of the vital circulation gave a new significance to the baroque premise of people being able to efficiently circulate through public space; where the Counter-Reformation planned with the outlook of celebrating ceremonies of movement towards an objective, the Enlightenment turned the movement into an end in itself. The former highlighted the advance towards a monumental destination; the latter highlighted the journey itself.
Even though it was a lousy anatomy, they were guided by the sanguine mechanics: they thought that if movement was blocked anywhere, the collective body would suffer a circulatory crisis just like the one the individual body suffers during a stroke in which an artery is caulked. As highlighted by a historian, "the discovery of Harvey and his model of the circulation of the bloodstream created the condition that air, water, and waste products would also have to maintain themselves in motion", in a state of motion in a human, social environment, which required meticulous planning. A disordered growth (chaotic, cancerous) would only worsen the structures and tissues of the past; obstructed, closed, and unhealthy.
The lung was a reference as important as the heart for the Enlightenment. The contemporaries of that era knew little about photosynthesis, but they could feel its consequences as they breathed.
The open space that appeared in the influential Romantic landscaping of the eighteenth century was the limitless English garden, a cultivated woodland that lacked a clear beginning and a clear ending, its limits being blurry, confused, everywhere. English gardens overwhelmed imagination in an irregular space full of surprises as the eyesight displaced itself or the body moved (and they still give the same effect!). It was a place of exuberant, free vegetation. Some kind of jungle, if not forested area, where people went (and still go!) for a stroll whenever they wanted to cleanse their lungs.
Besides, that countervened the power relations that configurated open space in royal gardens, such as was the case of Versailles or Sans-Souci, the latter in Prussia. In these Versaillesque French gardens, regular lines of treelines, paths, and geometrical ponds were arranged in endless perspectives that gradually retreated until disappearing into the horizon: the Crown commanded Nature itself.
In Enlightened green zones,
ut supra, there was no commerce at all; they were rather reserved for contact with nature and with others. Movement through these social lungs had to be, still, a sociable experience.
In the open air, quoth Thomas Jefferson, one breathes freely. The medical origins of the metaphor suggest that, thanks to the circulation of the bloodstream, the parts of the body were alive and that blood as as important for the vitality of the most inferior tissues as it was for that of the heart and the nervous system.
2. THE MOVEABLE INDIVIDUAL
In reality, eighteenth-century authors that preached the virtues of the free market were extremely susceptible about the question of human greed. One of the arguments with which they tried to defend themselves from this accusation (of capitalism being ruthless) was supported by the new science of the body and on its surroundings. Defenders of the free market in the eighteenth century directly correlated the flux of labour and currencies throughout society with the flux of blood and nervous energy throughout bodies. Adam Smith and his colleagues spoke of economic health in the same terms used by physicians to refer to bodily health, taking to metaphors like "respiration of goods," "exercise of capitalism," and "stimulation of labour energy" through the market economy. They thought that, just like the flux of blood nurtured all the tissues in the system, economic circulation nurtured all the members of society.
Of course part of all this was interested balderdash. No buyer who was suddenly confronted with the perspective of paying twice as much for bread or kindling would have been ready to accept the price as "stimulating." However, Smith himself added to these theories of the day about the free market an idea that his contemporaries had not grasped with the same clarity, one that hindered that this bio-economic language would become a concealing front for covetousness. Smith tried to explain how people related to the movements of the market economy become actors, each time clearer, in the economy. This occurs, according to Smith, because of the division of labour inspired by the free market.
"When the market is too small, no one has enough stimulation to devote themselves entirely to a trade, facing the impossibility of exchanging all the surplus of the fruit of their labour." When the market is vast and active, workers find themselves stimulated to produce a surplus. Thus, the division of labour rises from the propension to barter, permutate, or exchange one thing for another. The greater the circulation, the more specialised the labour, and the more workers are turned into individual actors.
Smith extended the dignity of labour to all workers who could freely exchange the fruit of their labours and thus be able to acquire a narrower specialisation into a specific task niche. This specialisation dignified labour and free market encouraged the development of such specialisations. Thus, Smith's market economy echoes Diderot's great mid-eighteenth-century Encyclopédie. In this compendium, beautiful etchings and exact descriptions showcased the skills needed in order to put a wicker seat on a wooden chair, or to roast a duck on a spit. The artisan, peasant, or servant in possession of these skillsets appeared in Diderot's pages as a worthy member of society, one far worthier than the masters who knew nothing but to use and consume.
An unlikely aspect of his work for the era was that Adam Smith argumented that industrial development stimulated the rural economy, by means of creating a demand for farmed goods (to feed the proletariat). He believed that farmers had to do the same as factory workers, ie specialise in crops destined for the market, instead of being self-sufficient with each household doing everything by and for themselves (a result of self-sufficiency being a very small surplus to sell at provincial marketplaces). That is, the advantages of circulation linked industrial and rural proletariat to one another through the process of creating specialised labour for both of them.
This view spotlights what is most enlightened and hopeful about Smith's thinking: his conception of the economic individual as a social being, rather than a solitary or covetous one. In the division of labour, as Smith conceived it, each and every individual needed the others to perform their duty. To his contemporaries, he appeared as both scientific and humane. In the circulation of capitalism, of labour and currencies, he discovered a force that dignified labour, even the most humble one, and that reconciled independence and interdependence.
This was a contemporary response... When the eighteenth century had to operate on circulatory principles, Smith made the adequate economic activities legible and believable. At the same time, he promised a more emotional possibility for emotional freedom and liberty.
Goethe Goes South
The liberty, the freedom promised to an individual in motion appears for the first time in one of the most noteworthy documents of the eighteenth century, one published immediately after the outburst of the French Revolution. We are speaking about Goethe's Italian Travels, in which he narrates his 1784 flight from an idyllic, small German royal court to sultry, decadent Italy; a flight that, in his own humble opinion, restored life to his body.
Throughout over a decade, Goethe had been accountant, superintendent, and financial advisor to Karl August (Charles Augustus), a lesser duke of a ruler; the monotony of controlling the finances of the little realm and the supervision of the draining of its marshlands had, year after year, detached Goethe gradually more and more from literature. The extraordinary attainments of his youth --his poetry, the novel
Young Werther, the drama
Götz von Berlichingen-- threatened to turn to simple memories. His star was fading fast. In the end, he fled south.
In his Italian travelogue, Goethe describes streets paved with crushed cobblestones, cracked and ransacked townscapes littered with excrements, yet the poet wandered admiring and happy among these ruins. Written on the 10th of November 1786: "Never have I felt myself so sensitive to things of this world than here." Six weeks earlier, he had addressed a friend of his: "I lead a frugal life, tranquil and in such a way that objects do not find an uplifted mind, but rather uplift it." Goethe discovered that moving among masses of foreigners and strangers excited him sensually as an individual. Amidst the crowd on the Piazza San Marco: "At last I can really enjoy the loneliness I longed for, since nowhere can one be more lonely than in the middle of a great crowd, through which one makes way." One of the most beautiful passages of the Italian Travels, penned on the 17th of March in 1787, expresses the inner peace that Goethe felt among the madding crowd:
"Making way through an immense crowd in constant motion is a peculiar and healthy experience. All the people fuse into a great current, but each and every one contrives to find their own way towards their own goals. Amidst so many people and all of their hustle and bustle, I feel at ease and alone at last. The more the clamour, the more tranquil I feel myself."
Why did he have to feel more stimulated as an individual in the middle of the crowd? On the 10th of November, Goethe writes: "Everyone who looks around seriously here and has eyes to see must become solid. One must perceive the solidity more vividly than ever." How strange that the ostensibly gauche expression "to become solid," in German "solid werden", hails from Goethe's reaction to the clamour of the madding crowd. Circulating in the middle of a multitude (moreover, as a stranger in strange lands) made Goethe particularise his impressions. He would even advise himself to "take up things one by one as they appear; let them arrange themselves later on."
It might seem strange, furthermore, to compare Smith's
Wealth of Nations, first released in 1776, with Goethe's Italian travelogue, from one decade later, yet both of these works share a common resonance. In both of them, motion articulates, specifies, and individualises experience. The results of this process began to come to fruition in both Goethe's poetry and his Italian Travels. At thirty-eight, the author began a relationship with a younger, Mediterranean female, and love for concrete things fused with this erotic passion. The last of his Elegies is a paean of love to his dark lady, in which he describes the metamorphosis of plant life and the progress of love in such a specific manner as one would describe the growth of a plant itself. Goethe was conscious that, during his travels, he was, time after time, growing more interested in specific aesthetic experience.
Goethe's southward quest was unique, and, in spite of this, the idea that motion, voyage in itself, exploration would stimulate the sensitive life of a person was what originated the desire to travel in the eighteenth century. Of course, some forms of travel kept on awakening within Europeans a possessive stimulus to know strange regions and lands. Goethe's travels were not of this kind. He did not leave for Italy to search for the unknown or the primitive, but rather felt the burning desire to displace himself, to detach himself from his comfort zone. His case was more similar to the Wanderjahre or Grand Tours that crystallised in the same epoch: a whole sabbatical year during which both young men and maidens travelled extensively, supported by parents or guardians, before they settled down. In Enlightenment culture, individuals wanted to travel because of the physical stimulation and mental clarification. These expectations, born out of science, expanded into the planning of surroundings, the reformation of economy, and even the formation of artistic and literary sensitivity.
But Goethe's Italian Travels also show the limits of this Enlightened mentality. Rarely does he describe the southern crowds amongst which he moves with the same meticulous detail in which he describes himself. Likewise, Adam Smith tends to describe the madding crowd as if it were divided into different stock characters or categories, instead of as a single human ensemble. In the Enlightened discourse on public health, the masses appeared as a dark pit of disease that had to be purified by means of scattering their people individually.
This inability to foresee the movements of the crowd and to accept it as one item is doubtless related to the people who formed the crowds in question: mainly the populace. However, the sans-culotterie experimented this movement culture in forms that transcended these prejudices. This experience was crystallised in the meaning that, to the commoners, had the movements of the market economy: the difference between survival and starvation was measured in the fluctuation in coppers (pence, sous, kreutzers...) when it came to the price of bread. The masses wanted less motion of the market and more governmental regulation, stability, and security. The physical motion only sharpened the pain in the empty gut. And nowhere and in no time was the insecurity inspired by motion surely more evident than in the eve of the first French Revolution.
