1Tuesday morning, 25 January, time itself is in suspense. Significant – though not excessive – demonstrations have taken shape in several of Egypt’s big cities, most notably in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. This day is the first of eighteen days of “political crisis” [2] that, on 11 February, will result in the departure of Hosni Moubarak, Head of State since 1981. Observers are left perplexed by the speed and magnitude of the movement. The “revolution” has just begun.

2The event’s chronological and emotional proximity make it difficult to grasp, and the problem of comprehension is only worsened by a lack of reliable information on the many actors caught within this “broadened tactical interdependence”. [3] For the time being it thus seems impossible to provide some sort of reading that would convey the “truth” behind the events of January-February 2011, which were unprecedented to say the least. By considering the situation from several angles and vantage points, it does however seem possible to explore a few hypotheses pertaining to the way in which these events played out on the ground.

3The angle adopted in this article engages key issues fundamental to the study of major political crises, especially in the context of authoritarian regimes. [4] Indeed, one might even claim with a certain degree of confidence that there is nothing particularly surprising – nothing particularly revolutionary – to be observed in battle-hardened activists who have lived through their fair share of protests taking part in yet another protest action they themselves had called for. To be sure, the manner in which they participated, the estimates and the expectations that they formulated concerning their participation, the justifications or framing of the situation that they produced, might all have varied considerably. Nevertheless, the elucidation of their shift into concrete action is not such a difficult task. The “surprise” engendered by these events had little to do with the participation of the Youth of the 6th of April [5] (Y6A) or of the Revolutionary Socialists [6] (RS). In other words, the unprecedented nature of these events lay not so much in the fact that collective protest action took place, but rather that this action went well beyond the usual activist circles. Arithmetically, the fact that tens of thousands of people took to the Egyptian streets must lead us to believe that the revolutionary masses were in fact largely made up of “lay” people.

4Howthen are we to understand the Egyptians’ move to action during the eighteen days between 25 January and 11 February, especially by those who had never been active in this way before?

5By studying the specific ways in which the Egyptian youth mobilised, despite their lack of prior political experience, I attempt to identify those mechanisms that lead “depoliticised” individuals to become “revolutionaries”. This mobilisation becomes a privileged vantage point for observing several dynamics: firstly, it enables us to grasp the impact of the tactical choices made by mobilisation entrepreneurs on the subsequent trajectory of the mobilisation. Secondly, this approach allows us to observe how the sequential chains of “ordinary” events leads individuals to become involved in an extraordinary event (and thus, to its redefinition). Finally, it provides insight into the role played by “daily life” in Tahrir Square, and of how this space was constructed – through practices and discourses – as the physical and symbolic epicentre of the revolution.

6I begin with a description of what the activists did, in order to make clear two important aspects. On the one hand, I look at the importance of the logic of the activist field and of activist “dispositions” in defining the issues of the moment and the route to be followed (i.e. what is to be done, concretely?). [7] In contrast, it might be said that the logic of the activist field and of activist dispositions played a lesser role in determining the move to mobilisation of “lay people”, for whom dynamics of “emergence” [8] linked to the fluidity of circumstance played a more pivotal role. Moreover, a brief description of these interactions will shed light on the very concrete effects of the activists’ efforts to mobilise lay people. The activists’ tactical choices bore direct consequences for the manner in which certain protests took shape, even if these same activists suddenly found themselves unable to properly control how the protest developed and the meanings which were ascribed to it. In the second part of this article, I will show how these “lay people” were persuaded to mobilise (sometimes for the first time) and how they gradually became “revolutionaries” [9] in their own right. I focus on two elements in order to properly illustrate this process: on the one hand, the chain of micro-events that drew these youths into the mobilisation; and on the other hand, the shifting perceptual environment in which they were immersed, and which helped to reinforce within their imaginary the idea that we’re in a revolution.

Methodological precautions

7There are numerous ways in which a revolutionary situation can be understood. The term “Revolution” is in itself problematic, inviting the scepticism of many a political scientist. I will make reference to the “Egyptian Revolution” or of the “Revolution of 25 January” for two main reasons. On the one hand, the eighteen-day period from 25 January until 11 February in 2011 corresponds more or less to the definition given by Charles Tilly of “revolutionary situations”. [10] On the other hand, and perhaps somewhat more simply, this description of the events of January and February is one that is currently used today in Egypt, at least in the media and in official discourse.

8The object can be analysed from its causes, by tracing its aetiology, or by analysing its results or consequences. I nevertheless prefer to approach the event solely through a description of some of its episodes, and mainly through analysis of individual trajectories. This reading can only ever be partial and fragmented, but it enables us to understand concretely how individuals were persuaded to mobilise (or were mobilised) by a wider movement; how the everyday aspects of the action playing out on the ground influenced the direction that this action took; and how enduring dispositions or prior experiences were reactivated by the immediacy of the event, or came into conflict with it. In this respect, this contribution does not pretend to proffer a “holistic” illumination nor a “general” explanation of “the Revolution”; it attempts instead to shed light on certain observable phenomena that, when aggregated with others, constitute something that can be referred to as a revolutionary situation.

9The final methodological point that is somewhat problematic concerns the terms employed to categorise the interviewees’ relationship to politics. I do not wish here to reopen the tricky debate surrounding the politicisation/depoliticisation binary. [11] I use the terms lay/depoliticised/everyday protestor as equivalent in this article, contrasting these categories of actor with professional/politicised/battle-hardened protestors (otherwise encompassed by the label “activist”). The activists are individuals with long-term involvement in forms of collective protest action (in the context of movements, groups or campaigns that were structured to at least some extent) in the period prior to January 2011. Depoliticisation is thus meant here in the restrictive sense of non-participation in any kind of politics (conventional or non-conventional).

10The contingency of the event, most notably on 30 January, led me to follow a group of young people whom I did not previously know. [12] The core of the group comprised four young men and two young women, all of them aged between 23 and 32 years old. They had all completed graduate studies (to a bachelors or masters level). The four young men (Mohsen, Salah, Mahmoud and Haridi) [13] grew up in the same neighbourhood, el-Haram, [14] the first three studied together (architecture) and the fourth was a sound engineer (radio). The two young women (Heba and Siham) were Alexandrian. [15] They both worked in the cultural sector (in a cultural centre and an independent cinema, respectively). The members of the group knew one another through a third person who was absent during the mobilisation, a mutual friend known to one of the young men and the young women. Though she did not herself belong to a political movement, Heba (and to a lesser extent, Siham) was relatively politicised and often participated in protests. [16] At the time, the most recent protest in which she had participated was one in solidarity with the victims of the attack on the Church of Two Saints in Alexandria, on 1 January. [17] At the opposite end of the spectrum, the young men all declared – almost proudly so – that they had never participated in protests, and illustrated a pronounced lack of knowledge of and disinterest in Egyptian political life. Their disapproval of the regime [18] expressed itself principally in the form of a marked apprehensiveness towards the police, due to various “bad memories” [19] of their dealings with officers. Finally, if we accept the somewhat schematic use of the term, they can be considered as “social dropouts” [déclassés sociaux], in the sense that they saw their own objective position within the social strata as completely out of phase with that to which they aspired. [20]

Activists confronted by the revolutionary moment

Dispositions, situational constraints and self-limitation by activists

18Two episodes shed light on the dynamics that determined the tactical choices made by the activists and further serve to illustrate one of the central differences distinguishing them from the “lay” actors. The hypothesis underlying these episodes is that the activists’ choices between different positions and modes of action were strongly conditioned by two elements: their prior activist careers (dispositions) and the logics of the Egyptian political field in which they evolved (field logics). If one is to follow Olivier Fillieule’s hypothesis, in which the activist career “allows for an understanding of how, in each step of the biography, attitudes and behaviours are determined by past attitudes and in turn condition what is possible, thus situating periods of engagement within the individual’s entire lifecycle”, [31] then we should pay close attention to the manner in which the activists’ past experiences condition what is thinkable and what is doable, and thus direct choices towards one mode of action at the expense of another. Moreover, the activists’ parallel involvement with both the political field and the protest field mean that they are obliged to abide by the logics governing these two fields. [32]

Figure 1

Map and diagram of Tahrir Square

Map and diagram of Tahrir Square

Episode 1: 20 January 2011. Cairo

19In the modest premises of the Centre for Socialist Renewal several groups of young activists held a meeting (another would be held on the 24 January). [33] These young adults were by no means meeting for the very first time (see below). The principal actors of the young Egyptian activist generation were all present: Islamist, left-wing, nationalist and liberal. [34] They came together to organise a protest for 25 January, national Police Day. [35] Nevertheless, this year, the meeting was markedly different. The political “context” had changed. On 14 January, Ben Ali, the unshakeable president of Tunisia, had fled to Saudi Arabia, chased out by a “Revolution”. For the young activists, it was important to capitalise on the event and to dare to hope for a little more than usual. [36] The practical details of the protest were discussed during these two meetings, not without provoking tensions between those present. [37] How could a blow really be struck? How could they organise a protest that wouldn’t go unnoticed?

20The discussion was tense. It centred on three main points: 1) Which would be the main places for assembly? 2) What were to be the terms of the logistical coordination with the administrators of the We are all Khaled Saïd (WKS) Facebook page, who were still at that point strangers to the political groups? 3) How should they (re)present themselves during the protest? These three points constituted major divisions. [38] Concerning the first point, the discord resulted from two opposing visions: on one side, those who wanted to assemble in a working-class neighbourhood and then march to the chosen destination; on the other side, those who wanted to call for people to assemble directly in front of the Interior Ministry, on the edges of Tahrir Square. The second point concerned opposition from the most radical minority of activists, who refused to coordinate [39] such a sensitive political act with strangers, even if, since June 2010, the Facebook page in question had played an undeniable role in bringing about a recent mobilisation cycle. Finally, the third point discussed concerned the manner in which political forces were supposed to (re)present themselves during the protests. Should there be flags, distinctive signs for each movement present? Or should all of the groups seek to meld together into one big movement by homogenising their demands, their slogans, and their forms of identification? [40]

21Such disagreements were in part founded on these activists’ prior experiences. A considerable proportion of those present had undergone their political socialisation during the mass gatherings of the “Kifaya” cycle between 2004 and 2006. They had been through several political movements, had experimented with micro-mobilisations that had left some personally disappointed, [41] or they had experienced failure with calls sent out on the internet, not to mention all of the agonies of political repression. They were familiar with the “street” and never missed a demonstration. Yet, with this experience behind them, they were conscious of several problems, which influenced their attitudes and preferences. First of all, they were conscious of the limits of street-based protest action, notably those of the stand-in, [42] whose routinisation over the preceding years had by and large neutralised its supposed destabilising effects. [43] These activists knew all too well that a fixed protest could take place without any major problems. It is for this reason that many proposed masira (marches), instead of a stand-in in front of the Interior Ministry. [44]

22

“Personally I was amongst the group that saw this day as important […] and that’s why I helped to push for changing the location of the demonstration instead of being in front of the Interior Ministry, so that it wouldn’t simply become a protest that is repressed and then that’s all… we had to start using new spaces…” [45]

23It is interesting to note that the same people who had participated only a few weeks earlier in the marches for solidarity with the victims of the Alexandria attack had opted for a static assembly. [46] This slight (yet decisive) transformation in the mode of action came after the Tunisian “event”, [47] but it was also related to the particular nature of certain “spontaneous” demonstrations in reaction to the Alexandria attacks.

24

“There was a rift over the point of departure for the demonstration. There were two main schools of thought: either, across from the Interior Ministry, or from a working-class neighbourhood. We were considering Shubra in particular, undoubtedly because the January 1 protests hadn’t long taken place […] when the Muslims and the Christians had been protesting together against the police and were accusing the state of negligence.” [48]

Episode 2. 25 January 2011. Cairo, 7pm – Midnight

25Tahrir Square was swarming like an anthill. Small groups (made up of ten to over fifty people sometimes) circulated around the square intoning different chants and slogans, in particular those which had been decided upon by the leaders of the young activists. [49] Nevertheless, other slogans also appeared. Young people who had never in their lives chanted a single slogan outside of a football stadium thundered “The people want the downfall of the regime!”. An absolute euphoria took hold of the crowd. They experienced a “moment of madness”. [50] The activists shared in this euphoria, though they did not quite know what to make of these few extraordinary moments… but, most of all, they didn’t know what to do. [51] As Chaymaa Hassabo has suggested “the situation went beyond […] the logic, aspirations and expectations of its own instigators and organisers”. [52] The account of another activist is illuminating on this subject:

26

“The 25th of January, when we arrived in Tahrir Square […], we were joined by the representatives of the different political forces; Îbrâhîm ‘Issâ and Kamâl Abû ‘Ayta were there and we didn’t know what to do. We had talked about the option of i’tissâm [occupation] of the premises; and even if we were prepared to go down that road, in any case, we wouldn’t have known what to do with the people or how to ask them to leave, or what would make them go home… Every two hours, we [53] got together to figure out what to do… […] the discussions: we evacuate everyone, we suspend the demonstration and the sit-in, and we demand the dismissal of Al-’Adlî [the Interior Minister], as well as the overthrow of a number of corrupt ministers [sic].” [54]

27The completely unexpected outcome of this protest episode overturned the actors’ strategies. Worse still, these actors gradually became conscious of the fact that they had lost any real control over what was happening. While certain youths – undoubtedly emulating the Tunisian images relayed by Al Jazeera – were already calling for an end to the regime, the activists were caught up in debates which seemed to have little to do with the situation. In their perpetual anxiety and fear of things getting out of control, certain activists already thought that they had gone too far. [55] Others drafted a declaration that they circulated amongst those present in the square, calling for “the seizure of the Parliament”. [56] Finally, the dynamics of competition within the protest space were keenly felt, and certain activists were marginalised for fear that they were “too radical” in their demands. [57]

28Quite quickly however, the activists’ political calculations (al-hisabat as-siyasiyya), which were the result of the strategies and issues of the protest space, appeared out of synch with the parameters of the situation. The activists soon became aware that they had considerable trouble coordinating the protestors, controlling them and imposing good sense onto what was happening. The capital these activists possessed, which had a certain value in the political field (past experiences, repression or time spent in prison, connections to an activist family) could not be leveraged in Tahrir Square. While they might occupy a privileged position within the political field at a microcosmic scale, they were unable to transfer such capital – which was above all symbolic – in such a way as to influence the protestors, who had in general never even heard of them. Faced with this new situation – especially the following morning when news came in of numerous protests across the country which were independent of their efforts – the activists decided on a “strategic retreat” in order to let the “People’ act.” [58]

29These two episodes illustrate the difficulty which the activists experienced in situations when social space was conjuncturally fluid. For the most part, they remained prisoners of their dispositions and of the competing logics of the protest space; they struggled to evaluate, anticipate, calculate and adapt to their shifting environment. In contrast, as we shall see, the tactical choices they made in a very specific context (at the intersection of dispositions and field logics) would go on to have a considerable impact on other individuals who were outside this field. Finally, we can see the extent to which the mobilisation of “lay people” differs in its logic from activist mobilisations; doubtless one of the blindspots in the understanding of revolutionary phenomena.

The missing link between the activist and the “lay” person: on the (physical and symbolic) paths that lead to Tahrir

30For many years, Cairo’s city-centre (West el-Balad or Downtown) was the habitual space for collective protest actions with political demands. Tahrir Square, more specifically, represents an important symbolic space for Egyptian activism. It functioned as such for the “70s generation”, [59] because it was one of the locations in which the “bread intifada” mobilised on the 18 and 19 January 1977. [60] But it also played this role for the young activists socialised at the beginning of the 2000s. In March of 2003, the protests opposing American intervention in Iraq, which marked a shift in collective street protest, elevated the square – which was occupied for two days by some 50,000 people – into a symbolic site for this embryonic activist generation. Finally, in the second half of the 2000s, the area around the square (especially the building housing the Council of Ministers) became a public stage from which to make social demands. [61] It was for this reason that the activists’ “desired” objective – their vain aspiration – was to march on Tahrir. [62]

31This point is crucial to understanding the events of the eighteen days, for two main reasons. On the one hand, retrospectively, the significant media coverage given to Tahrir, which became the symbolic and physical epicentre of the Egyptian revolution, obscured the different paths that led all of these protestors to the square. Hasty analyses of these paths make them seem linear and teleological. They give the impression that, on the morning of 25 January, having read the calls to protest published online, the protestors had made a quick calculation and subsequently decided to go and “have a Revolution” on Tahrir Square. In this manner, the (reasons underlying the) protests were smoothed out so that to a certain extent they resembled one another. The protests thus became an arithmetical accumulation of individuals. All the different individual paths, as well as the different small groups that took shape on every street corner during the course of the action itself, were erased in favor of a national rhetorical mold of the “Egyptian Revolution”. The image of an harmonious union of Egyptians which was conveyed (and felt) during these eighteen days would go on to reinforce this particular reading. It is important here to recognise that the political discourse of unity (“the People are United in Revolution”) should not be confused with the scholarly attempt to understand precisely such processes underlying the unity and “disunity” of the mobilised masses. [63] For we must not forget that that while the different routes to mobilisation might seem comparable, they are in no way identical. [64]

32On the other hand, this theoretical problem concerning how mobilisations are understood goes hand-in-hand with a practical problem of which the activists (especially those of the younger generations) were, as it turned out, only too aware. Many studies have illustrated that political opposition members active under authoritarian regimes tend to self-impose limits, be it with regard to the demands that they prioritise or in the modes of action they employ. [65] This tendency was reinforced amongst the older generation of elite opposition members, who were rarely in favour of any action outside of the limits drawn up with the authorities. [66] Over the years, the young activists had come to realise that the stand-in had become a relatively innocuous form of action. The protestors were subject to a dual form of containment: they found themselves isolated in media terms (via disinformation campaigns) and in terms of physical space (by a police cordon that blocked anyone from stopping to observe). The idea of the march (masira) thus brought with it two major innovations: on the one hand, a march made it possible to make the event public, expanding its reach beyond the city-centre, and, on the other hand, by organising several simultaneous marches, it made the security forces’ task more arduous. It is important to note that the choice of this mode of action for the 25 January was in no way neutral or random. [67]

33This “localisation” of the protest action – here, in the sense of a physical embedding of protest action into new geographical spaces – certainly played an important role in getting people who were not previously in the habit of protesting to participate. The marches thus became grassroots demonstrations, more visible, more accessible, playing out in the places that were more familiar to individuals. Moreover, the activists had developed different “sensitising devices” [68] that served to incite the emotions of spectators instead of simply hiding behind an abstract political discourse, distant from the present audience. This took the form, for example, of shouting the now classic marching chants, such as “Come out! Come out!” to the curious faces looking on from the balconies and windows, or “Our dear families, come and join us!” (ya ahalina, dummu ‘alena).

34On 25 January, the activists and those who had responded to the first call sent out via the internet assembled in five different areas in Cairo. A significant contingent of the Trotskyist activists (revolutionary socialists), for example, gathered in the Shubra neighbourhood and, by using the back alleys, attempted to avoid the security forces and to involve the passers-by by chanting essentially “social” slogans, focusing on high living costs or on unemployment, to appeal to the residents of this working-class neighbourhood. The beginnings of a protest are not always simple. At one point, the activists were chased about by the central security forces (CSF), and at another, dirty water and insults rained down on them from the overhanging balconies. [69] Before the day was over, around forty were arrested, among them a veteran protestor and a few battle-hardened activists, people protesting for the first time and a few passers-by snapped up erroneously. The night spent in detention (hagz) turned out to be an excellent opportunity for the activists to convince a significant number of the detainees to join the cause. The activists who set out from the residential neighbourhood of Mohandesin, on the other hand, targeted young people from middle-class and petit-bourgeois backgrounds.

35As we see here then, a significant portion of those who came to the meeting points were thus already interested. They had followed the debates and taken the risk of participation. Such was not however the case of all of those who participated by accident. Other mechanisms must be considered in order to explain their shift towards concrete action. Prior politicisation and the desire for engagement (the “choice” of a shift into action) disappear behind the sequences of micro-events which constituted the event’s contingency. And it is precisely this fabric of interlocking sequences that itself became the driving force of the action. [70] In the case of my interviewees, this was very clear. [71] Unlike the two young women, who had already protested and who had responded to the call by We are all Khaled Saïd (WKS), the three young men were reluctant to participate in the early days. They kept up to date with the events as they played out, but only partially believed in their potential for success. Their perception of the likelihood that the collective action would succeed or fail was conditioned by their negative view of protest acts in general. And yet, they were not hostile to the movement, to its slogans and its demands. Their non-participation was by no means a form of consent to the ruling regime and its practices. On the contrary, they were even quite hostile to the regime, and particularly towards the police. [72] Theoretically, the focus of the demands upon general socio-economic problems and against the impunity of the Interior Ministry should have resonated with these young men. Despite all of this, their judgment of whether the protest action was opportune, useful or effective remained negative. [73]

36

Y: “What was the first day that you began to participate in the protests?”
Mohsen: “Listen man, like I told you, I had really begun to lose all hope in this country, and I had never participated in anything like this sort of thing… And I’m not going to lie to you: we heard about the protests on the 25th and 26th from the television, and I didn’t really believe in it, I said to myself that it was more or less the same thing as the 6th of April [74] or Khaled Saïd, [75] or that sort of thing, which had already happened y’know? Like, a whole bunch of protests and then everyone goes home”.
Y: “So then, when did you go down and join the protests? Had you already protested before?”
Salah: “Oh man, me and politics? No thanks! The slogans and all of that stuff, y’know like, banners and everything; that’s not my thing. It’s completely pointless! No, those first days, I thought that that would be it, just another hundred people with ready-made slogans and banners, y’know? All of the usual stuff, with tons of police everywhere, and then basta. That was not my thing at all.”

37These two accounts help to cast light on how the mechanism of depoliticisation functions. Here it plays the role of conditioning perceptions of the possible. But they also highlight the error of equating depoliticisation with apathy or a lack of interest. Above all else, they demonstrate the error of interpreting (in)action as a symptom of diagnosed depoliticisation: in other words, the tautological belief that individuals are depoliticised because they do not act politically, and that, given that they do not act, they do not become politicised.

38

Mohsen: “I started hearing that the protests were spreading throughout the city, all over the place, and on the 27th, to be quite honest, I live in el-Haram, I heard that the protests had reached my neighbourhood and of course, as always, I acted like nothing was up, and I went out to buy a bit of hashish, and then man, as I was leaving I saw that the protests were actually there, I could actually see them! So I called up my cousin and told him ‘get the hell over here, it’s going off, we’re going to kick their asses this time! for real!’… and that day, that was the first time that I got hit by tear-gas! After that, my cousin – who lives opposite me – and I decided to go and take part in the major demonstration of Friday the 28th, and the big battle had begun and… well you know what happens next!”
Salah: “I didn’t really want to go, in general I didn’t really care much for that sort of thing. But then, on the 26th, that evening, there were guys who I liked, friends from my neighbourhood y’know, they came back from Tahrir with their clothes all ripped, with bruises everywhere, etc., you know what I mean? And then these guys, they’re actually younger than me y’know? They’re kids dammit! They kind of looked up to me in the neighbourhood, and I was really ashamed of myself. And after all, giving one to the cops was definitely my sort of thing, rather than going there just for the slogans. So around Thursday I heard that I wasn’t the only one who was ready to go, there was a bunch of us, so we were just like ‘let’s go!’”.

39In actual fact we can identify two elements that play a key role in motivating the shift to protest action. First, neighbourhood social connections and dispositions play a central role in the move to action due to the networks of familiarity and solidarity to be found there. Second, the interconnection of entirely contingent micro-events grafted onto this relationship to the neighbourhood made the shift into concrete action possible. Two criteria can thus be used to explain the swing into action (without, however, exhausting the extent of the “causes” behind this swing), while a third explains its radicalisation: physical proximity, the social configurations of the neighbourhood (solidarity, friendship and neighbourhood networks) and the use of violence (police repression). The first two criteria influence to a certain extent the perceived costs of engagement, reducing these as familiarity with the action increases. The protest takes place in the neighbourhood, in familiar streets that are known like the back of their hands; the protestors know one another, and the dynamics of repression mean something different when that repression is taking place “just outside home”. This manipulation of proximity was to be further reinforced after 28 January and the establishment of “popular committees”. [76]

40From the minute they took shape within the different neighbourhoods, the marches were violently repressed by the Central Security Forces (Quwwat al-amn al-markazi) and numerous random arrests took place. The stories told about these hazardous journeys towards Tahrir Square, particularly during the “Friday of Rage”, are often very moving, and it is easy to identify their transformative impact on people’s perception of the situation. Thus, all of the interviewees agreed that the events shifted from the status of demonstrations to that of Revolution on 28 January. This shift in status was consecrated by the flight of the security forces and the arrival of the armed forces – experienced on the ground as a sudden acceleration of history inducing both anxiety and euphoria. [77]

41The “Tahrir” social space [78] was created as several marches across the capital converged upon the geographical space of Tahrir, directly in the centre of the city. [79] The (literal) “obstacle course” leading to the square was an integral part of the way in which it was invested with meaning. In concrete terms, those coordinating the young activists had distributed tasks between the different movements represented. At the assembly points selected and announced on Facebook – which were to welcome the lay protestors who were motivated by the online call to action – were the “heads” of the march, tasked with coordinating the gathered masses, calling out the slogans, and guiding the march. [80]

42One does thus not go to Tahrir, one is brought there. The preceding arguments, which dealt with the shift into mobilisation, and thus with the “upstream” of Tahrir, make the case for taking seriously the banal, contingent, and ordinary building-blocks of the extraordinary. For the extraordinary was indeed constructed on the path toward Tahrir, and then lived by the protestors in Tahrir Square itself.

The ordinary origins of an extraordinary mobilisation

43Let us turn, lastly, to the everyday of the Revolution. We took as our point of departure the idea that there were several “moments” or “episodes” that allow us to understand the engagement of certain young Egyptians. The last of these episodes, and by no means the least important, is the lived experience of the revolutionary moment by these young people. Tahrir was experienced as an extraordinary moment for many Egyptians; this was evident from my periods of observation and during interviews throughout the following year. The emotion with which these eighteen days were often described was born of this collective experience in Tahrir. It is thus necessary, as part of a comprehensive approach, and in order to be able to understand the socialising effects of this event, to imagine the extent to which someone arriving in the square was ambushed from all sides by shouts, images, scenes, smells and chants, embedding the newcomer within a radically new universe.

44Liberation Square (Maydan at-Tahrir) was the object of intense media coverage, but it was also the object of many struggles to define and construct the meaning of the revolution. In all of the stories told by people present on Tahrir Square, there is always a powerful account of how the square represented something new and radically different, and constituted a break with the Egypt that existed before 25 January. Some on the square liked to talk of the “Tahrir Republic”. This imaginary republic was the aggregate outcome of meanings co-produced through interactions between the thousands of individuals present, as well as by the constraints imposed by the situation (political coups, different actors’ tactics), but it was also (and this is key to the present analysis) “framed” by the physical, concrete space of the square. Habits, the symbols displayed, the slogans, the banners and graffiti, how people came about supplies and met their needs: all this constituted the daily life of the square, and played a role in defining the situation, and thus in how individuals came to think and act in such circumstances.

45In order to better situate the following description, we should recall that, although the activists were disconcerted by the “all too easy” [81] arrival of the different marches in Tahrir on 25 January, their leaders were resolved to take control of Tahrir during the large demonstration of Friday 28 January, especially given that many notable political actors had made moves perceived of as advantageous to the movement. [82] The heads of the marches were to guide them towards the city-centre. Following the great battles of the Friday of Rage [83] and the taking of Tahrir, the different political movements took the decision to occupy the square until the demands of what was henceforth named “The Revolution” had been met. Once the square had been occupied, routines were gradually established.

46I will thus try to describe the perceptual environment physically embedded within the square, which enveloped each protestor; those routines which, when aggregated, made of this event an extraordinary moment for the individuals present.

By way of conclusion

60As we have seen, any division of protestors into lay protestors and activists is problematic, regardless of the terms employed (politicised vs. depoliticised; lay vs. professional; ordinary vs. battle-hardened protestor, etc.). Such terms are problematic first and foremost due to their inability to translate cleanly into empirically observable realities. Despite the inadequacies of binary reasoning – which obscures the different degrees of acquisition of “political competence” [94] (to employ a narrow definition of politicisation) or the complexity of the “continuous relational processes of interiorising frameworks of perception and action, which relate to the political world or are part of a political relationship to the world” [95] (to employ an extensive and dynamic conception of political socialisation) – I felt the need to differentiate, insofar as it is possible, between these two “categories”.

61A study examining the activists’ reasons for action, or indeed the manner in which they behaved on the square, would have been quite different. The interactions between the small groups were numerous and repeated. The most striking element is that the new arrivals – excepting those who were able to use recently acquired and significant political capital (a wound sustained during the first days, for example) – were to a large extent sidelined by the established political movements. In this sense, the two categories experienced the revolution in parallel. My objective here was thus to attempt to reconstruct how these newcomers arrived.

62Previous work in this area has illustrated that we must observe different moments and scales if we are to understand the dynamics of revolutionary situations.

63Firstly, without embracing a strategic interpretation that claims that the activists opted for one mode of action over another because they anticipated the result that would follow this choice, we must revisit the way in which such choices operated within a given situation, how they were influenced by the actors’ dispositions and by the field logics within which their struggle took place. One can easily observe the extent to which the embeddedness of these actors within a very stabilised and routinised universe of meanings and practices translated into certain choices. But it is also apparent that an “event” was able to trouble this universe of meaning, increasingly becoming as much a constraint as an opportunity for these actors. In this manner, while the choices of such actors directly influenced the engagement of the “lay” protestors (albeit not always deliberately so), the relative autonomisation of the protest sequence in relation to the dynamics of different fields (or sectors, to reprise Michel Dobry’s terminology) meant that the activists lost their effective grasp over the mobilisations.

64Secondly, the dynamic of contingent micro-events encourages us to establish as great a distance as possible from the discourse of actors caught up in the mobilisations, for whom it is clearly advantageous to frame the event in the most generalising and unifying terms possible. In other words, we cannot truly understand the dynamics of a revolutionary situation without tracing the precise paths that lead the protestors to go and protest. In addition to these dynamics, we also need to take into account the effects of reflection and emulation that strongly influence actors’ perceptions, in particular by reducing the perceived costs of engagement. The fact that so many people mobilised between the 25th and the 28th, that the movement took shape, that slogans crystallised, or that public figures adopted positions in favour of the mobilisations, affects individuals’ perceptions.

65Lastly, the concern to take into account the daily life of the square during the revolution is the result of a process-based and gradualist conception of politicisation and engagement. Actors are not lay protestors on Monday night, then revolutionaries on Tuesday morning. The square, as a site of encounters and discussion between individuals with unequal levels of cultural and social capital (particularly a knowledge of politics), but also as a site for experimenting with different and new values, became an important moment in which political opinions and attitudes were forged. It thus came to constitute a sort of political ideal, which would serve as a new ideological and symbolic touchstone for the many young people who engaged in that moment, and who continue their engagement today. [96]