On 23 March 2006, crowds of people took to the streets in France to demand the withdrawal of the Villepin government's proposed ‘First Job Contract’ (Contrat Première Embauche [CPE]). Passers-by saw long processions of demonstrators brandishing placards and yelling slogans, while sound systems mounted on the backs of trucks provided a constant musical accompaniment. Groups sang ‘Motivated, Motivated! Must get motivated!’, a line that the band Zebda had recently added to the ‘Chant des partisans’, the famous anthem of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Further on, younger demonstrated made a show of anger by raising their clenched fists whilst the Diam's rap song ‘La Boulette’ echoed in the background: ‘so yeah, we f*ck around / yeah yeah, we shock you / nah nah it ain't the school that dictates our rules / nah nah, generation nah nah’.

This musical accompaniment to a protest march is nothing new. No revolt, no significant social mobilisation, seems to have been able to do without musical and choral practices. The nationalist movements and revolutions of the 19th century, for example, the result of the entry of the masses into politics, cannot be dissociated from the large repertoire of romantic anthems and other operatic songs. As for the ideologies that clashed in the first half of the 20th century, such as fascism, Nazism and communism, they were all just as hungry for fanfares and drum rolls. They were often staged with pomp and grandiloquence, involving forceful and virile choirs.

In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century was marked by the resurgence of gospel music, the emergence of soul, and the support of white American protest singers. During the boycott of the segregationist busses in Montgomery in 1955 (one of the high points of the movement), the long, exhausting marches took on an even more political dimension because they were accompanied by the spiritual song ‘Walk Together Children’: ‘Walk together children / Don't get weary / […] There's a great camp meeting in the promised Land’.

This book seeks to explore the complexity of the relations between protest and the musical forms that accompany its different situations.