The 1851 exhibition taught mass politics to be passive rather than dangerous.

Evidence

Despite their apprehension about allowing enormous numbers of the lower classes to congregate in European capitals so soon after the events of 1848, the authorities encouraged them to visit exhibitions. Workers were given permission to leave their shops and factories to attend, and manufacturers and benevolent societies subsidised the cost of their travel and accommodation. The result was an example of mass behaviour without precedent. ‘Popular movements that only a few years ago would have been pronounced dangerous to the safety of the State’, it was reported after the 1851 exhibition, ’… have taken place not only without disorder, but also almost without crime.’ The article on ‘objective people’ in The Times was commenting on the reassuring absence of ‘political passions’ in the country during the exhibition. The objective attitude of the exhibition visitor, in other words, seemed to suggest not only the true nature of the modern individual, but the model of behaviour for the modern political subject. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 100

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to theories of spectacle and social control — channels the reader’s interest in how institutions shape attention and docility.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a passive, detached curiosity became the model for the modern political subject — that political quietude was engineered through pleasure-spectacle — is dense and paradigm-shifting.