ABSTRACT:Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.

This article demonstrates how and when the nation—whether in the shape of concrete national symbols or as an abstract frame of reference—became relevant to ordinary people. It focuses on the experiences and activities of Amsterdam citizens in the second half of the 19th century. Central to the analysis is the apparent contradiction between ‘banal’ or ‘everyday nationalism’, in which nationalist symbols and rhetoric appeared to successfully reach their audience because of their omnipresence in daily life, and ‘national indifference’, as referring to the absence of national identification among the masses. It argues that in order to overcome the dichotomies between elites and masses and national and non‐national performances, we should focus on the popular incentives for national identification, rather than on the ideological content and the (physical or symbolic) borders of the national community.

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In this Forum, we use the history of 'the politician' from the eighteenth century until the present to start a discussion about what it means to be a politician. According to the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte, a new understanding of 'politics' manifested itself around 1800. The politician, as a consequence, turned into a professional who operated within the context of a 'modern' administration. The history of what is considered 'political' and who is considered to be a 'politician' thus became a history of modernization (see, for example, Weber's famous Politics as a Vocation). Recently, this narrative of modernization has been challenged. This raises the question of the extent to which the nature of 'the politician' has developed over time. Surprisingly, there have been few studies on this topic. This Forum aims to put the subject on the historian's agenda and offer an incentive for future research. The contributions discuss different historical forms of professionalization, public perceptions of professional politicians, the interaction with common citizens, and the question of when it was profitable not to be, or to pose as, a professional politician. They demonstrate how there might be continuities in the way that political professionals operate and the qualities that they need, but it also becomes clear that each time, the profession has had to adapt to the demands of society.

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