Barricades is a collaborative research project on contesting power across Europe 1815-1850.

The core of the project is a website featuring objects and short accounts of their significance, in relation to the development of forms of protest and contention in Europe in the wake of the Congress of Vienna to the aftermath of the year of revolutions, 1848.

See the Barricades project website

The project has also been accompanied by various workshops and activities.

Workshop on November 23rd 2019 in the Quaker Meeting House, Warwick City on emerging women's organisations and political activity in the period. See Before Suffrage.

This project examines emerging and re-emerging strategies of organization, contestation and resistance, and associated political thinking, from revolutionaries to reactionaries, across Europe in the wake of the restoration of European monarchies following the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna.

The project is engaged in constructing a web-site using a network of contributors (like our previous 100 days project <100days.org.uk>) exploring restoration, resistance and rebellion in Europe between 1815 and c.1850. Contributors identify events and associated objects and write short entries – potentially on particular days, or events, or incidents – and others might contribute background pieces and pieces reflecting on changing terms, practices, aspirations etc.

The website has national timelines and key events and occasions, worked up with objects, pictures, manuscripts etc., to present the (re-)emergence of protest and contestation in the UK and the restored states of Europe. The majority of entries are short (200-250 words) pieces on an object/image explaining its significance and identifying particular incidents. There are additional over-view entries that will be twice that length. The website went live in the Summer of 2019: https://agmed.lnx.warwick.ac.uk/about.

Entries also explore instances of their inter-action and cross-fertilization for ideas and strategies.
We have also been holding a workshop and set of papers about strategies and languages of contestation in the period. These might be forms of resistance learnt and developed under Napoleonic occupation, repurposed against the old order that they were often originally aimed at restoring – conspiracies, insurrections, moral economy riots, boycotting, satire, strikes, assassinations or the emergence of new forms - demonstrations, mass petitions, pronunciamentos, monster meetings, press campaigns. In part in commentary on the idea that it is in this period that we see the fuller development of a popular politics we are interested in how far we can identify developments and shift in strategies of legitimation and integration in relation to the public. We are also interested in contributions that explore the historiography of these events.

We would greatly value your involvement in the project whether in the form of entries or papers or suggestions about whom we might approach to make contributions.

Finally, we aim to collect, amongst other things, songs and music that sought to engage popular audiences in the cause of contestation throughout Europe.

The project held a workshop (programme) on songs of protest and contention in Europe (1815-1850), coupled with a public performance in Warwick City, on November 24th 2018 as part of the Warwick Words Programme. See the Concert Programme here

We also held a workshop on May 17 2019 examining changing styles and methods of protest across Europe in the Period.(programmeLink opens in a new window)