4 - Crowds, Criminals and Charlatans

Summary

‘Wherever those experiments have been made, persons of every rank have gazed with the greatest anxiety, and have shewn unequivocal marks of astonishment and satisfaction’

Tiberius Cavallo, A History of Aerostation, 1785

CROWDS HAVE ATTRACTED the interest of historians, sociologists, philosophers and psychoanalysts. British crowds in the second half of the eighteenth century get special attention from historians in relation to political unrest, and whether riots were a form of popular revolt against forms of power. What can this illuminate about crowds at balloon ascents? How did the massing of people into crowds help to shape and spread balloon madness?

Elias Canetti's landmark book Crowds and Power begins by cataloguing crowds: ‘we discover that there are: baiting crowds, flight crowds, prohibition crowds, reversal crowds, feast crowds, panic crowds, double crowds, invisible crowds, etc. (No lonely crowds!)’ Charles Tilly analyses what he calls Contentious Gatherings from 1758 to 1834 and also finds a rich vocabulary: they involve 2,500 distinct verbs, he says. ‘The category of verbs whose share increased by at least a third 1758–1820 were cheer, disperse, meet, petition and support’. Just for that movement of gathering which creates a crowd, Tilly supplies a long index of terms: abandon, abate, accompany, accost, advance, appear, approach, arrive, ascend … and that's just the As. The lexicon of crowds is complex.

The grammar of crowds is also complex, but it has a tendency to turn singular. Mark Harrison suggests that crowds fascinate us because many individuals seem to become one: ‘the sea of faces becomes, paradoxically, a single-headed entity. … reduced to a single, coherent, entity, they are presented, either by their spokespeople or outside commentators, as representatives of a single, coherent, belief.’ This unifying language can change fast: a crowd becomes a mob when it acts to offend. Some activities described as riots in this period were not necessarily violent; Tilly shows that food riots, for instance, were protests where fighting was uncommon. There were many shades of riotous behaviour in everyday life, and especially at elections; lobbing a brick or a stone was a common art. Violence at balloon launches usually had a trigger point, when an erstwhile peaceable and patient crowd grew restive, boiled over and attacked balloon, aeronaut and authorities – and each other.