Nancy Stieber
Inscriptions
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, three new annual rituals were added to the repertoire of public events in Amsterdam: a Catholic procession, a Socialist march, and a royal drive through the city. This essay explores the way that those annual events used urban nodes and trajectories as stages for performative routines serving political and social aims. It investigates the contemporaneous path-making activity of the Socialists, Catholics, and royal family as each fashioned new signifying spatial practices that crossed each other on the plan of the city, inscribing different meanings on the same map.
Much has already been written about the everyday experience of the city and the ways in which spatial practices invest it with meaning.1 The paths we follow repeatedly in our quotidian rounds structure our knowledge of the city and are shaped by a variety of social and spatial constraints and opportunities. Similarly, the path of the flaneur has become a topos of modernism, emblematic of the freedom of the male bourgeois observing the helter-skelter of contemporary life. These two types of path, the repeated and the serendipitous, reflect individual experience. The extraordinary paths through the city represented by special events such as royal entries, parades, and demonstrations differ from these in that they are experienced collectively both by their participants and their observers. They differ also in that they often have a historical dimension, either repeating patterns of movement established as continuous practice from the past, reenacting discontinued patterns, inventing traditions, or creating patterns that will emerge as new traditions. They are, thus, markers of time as well as of space and their selection of trajectories and nodes is often closely tied to particular historical readings of the city. They can, in that sense, be viewed as representations of the city’s plan and of its history, representations that, in turn, reflect the specific relationship of those involved to shaping their own place in that time-space. Their creation is a dynamic function of collective self- fashioning.
The ritual path through a city makes sense in a way that is not simply spatial; it must be understood synthetically as the product and interpretation of the event that gives rise to it, the places it traverses, and the people involved. As such it is the active result of cultural conditions that give space meaning; changes or stability in the paths over time provide evidence for the way those conditions function. The significance of the particular trajectories and nodes that constitute a path through a city can be easily read by those with an understanding of the specific intersection between social and spatial practices of that city. Knowledge of historic buildings and sites, districts associated with specific socio-economic and/or political groups, and the significance these have for those using the path, make it possible to ‘make sense’ of a path. The ritual paths through a city are thus both the product of, and contributors to, a geography of the imagination that defines a vision of the city.2 By tracing those routes and considering their place in the collective imagining of the city, we can try to interpret the meanings placed by participants and observers on the movements that animated the city during a ritual procession.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam burst the boundaries of its famed seventeenth-century half-moon extension of grand canals as its population grew from 264,000 in 1870 to 404,000 in 1900. New districts arose in a concentric ring around the old city to accommodate the large number of workers migrating to participate in the city’s growing industrial economy. This spatial dimension of Amsterdam’s dramatic transformation was accompanied by upheaval and restructuring of its social composition and political balance. Segments of society that had previously been excluded from participation in the public realm began to organize and find voice. Two of the groups that began to threaten the secure dominance of the bourgeois Liberals were the Catholics and the Socialists. Each of these began a process of emancipation peculiar to its own history, negotiating the creation of institutions, organizations, and a shared identity that would promote its ideological interests. Taking to the streets became part of the emancipatory campaign. At both the national and local level, one of the Liberal responses to the threat perceived in these developments was a concerted effort to use the royal family as a symbolic means of unification, a beacon of shared national identity and culture that would transcend sectarian differences and thus sustain a myth of community in the face of societal fragmentation.3 The aspect of that campaign that concerns us here is the use of the city’s streets and squares to fashion a mode of communication by means of repeated and ritualized movement through the city’s public space.
As in other northern European cities during this period, Amsterdam witnessed an upsurge of public celebrations. Parades, marches, and other forms of collective expression, private, religious, or official, were mounted to commemorate historical anniversaries, births and deaths of heroic figures, significant events in the life of the royal family, and annual holidays.4 While traditional carnivalesque celebrations such as the annual fair in Amsterdam or the raucous summer holiday Hartjesdag were either abolished or suppressed by the Liberal elite in the effort to bring a newly defined civic order to the city, a culture of officially approved celebration carried out under Liberal auspices encouraged the creation of respectable and uplifting public experiences. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, parallel to these approved events, the Catholics and Socialists introduced new annual rituals of passage through the city: the Catholic annual Silent Procession and the Socialist May Day parade. Their oppositional position, subject to controls and constraints, generated spatial practices related to, but different from, that of the annual drive through the city by the royal family. The aims and practices of each of these three annual events will be reviewed and then compared to draw out conclusions about the nature of public ritual in fin-de-siede Amsterdam.
To understand the argument that follows it is necessary to have some rudimentary grasp of Amsterdam’s morphology (Figure 5.1). Amsterdam was built to take advantage of the flow of the River Amstel into the River IJ which gave it access to the North Sea and trade. A dam in the River Amstel, source of the city’s name Amstelodam, became the seed for the growth of a medieval city that expanded concentrically around the dammed banks of that river. By the time Amsterdam joined the United Provinces to fight Spanish rule
in 1578, the city’s merchants were fully exploiting its strategic location.
Success in trade then inspired plans for a four-fold increase in the size of the
city. In the seventeenth century the half-moon formed by the addition of three main canals created boundaries that were to remain essentially in place until the upsurge in the city’s economic fortunes at the end of the nineteenth century. From around 1875 the ring of new housing districts already mentioned was erected. Thus, the plan of the city around 1900 can be understood as consisting of three areas: the historic medieval core established before the Reformation associated with the city’s origins and its Catholic heritage; the half-moon of the seventeenth century associated with the merchant patriciate, the socio-political elite, and the Golden Age following the Reformation; and the nineteenth-century ring of new districts associated with the influx of industrial workers and the challenges of modernity. These associations were far from neutral and, as we shall see, interpretations of their historical and contemporary significance were factors in the spatial readings that resulted from the routes followed by the new urban rituals.