I GOD AND MAMMON: VICTORIAN BRITAIN
The noise of Manchester stirring on Monday mornings reminded Thomas Carlyle of Atlantic breakers and the falls of Niagara. Visitors to Victorian Britain marvelled at the magnificent chaos of industrial society much as they would have reacted, with a mixture of surprise and wonder, to sublime ravines and waterfalls. Surveying London from a Thames steamer, on an English tour to raise much-needed lucre, Richard Wagner said: ‘This is Alberich’s dream come true, Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.’1 The artist Gustave Doré and the writer Blanchard Jerrold captured this extraordinary dynamism of the British capital in their 1872 London: A Pilgrimage:
The view immediately to the west of London Bridge is a many-sided one. The whole round of modern commercial life is massed in the foreground, and the mighty dome which dominates London, swells proudly over the hum, and hiss, and plashing, and whistling, and creaking of the hastening crowds. The bales are swinging in the air; files of dingy people are passing into the steam-boats; the sleepy barges lower masts to pass the bridges; the heavy traffic between the City and the Borough is dragging over Southwark Bridge; trains glide across the railway arches into the prodigious Cannon Street shed. Factories, warehouses, mills, works; barges, wherries, skiffs, tugs, penny-boats; smoke and steam blurring all; and the heaving water churned from its bed and feverish in its ebb and flow, have a grandeur that enlivens the imagination. A little pulse of the mighty organisation is laid bare. It is an eddy in the turbulent stream of London life. It is eminently suggestive of the activity that is behind the wharves, and landing-stages, and mills. The Seine has a holiday look: and the little, fussy steamers that load from London under the walls of the Louvre, seem to be playing at trade. But to the West and East of London Bridge, the surging life and vehement movement are swift and stern. There is no room for a holiday thought. The mills are grinding corn, by steam; the barges are unloading hastily, the passenger boats are bound on pressing errands, the train shoots over the river towards the Continent, and crosses another with the mail from India. The loiterer will inevitably be crushed or drowned. The very urchins knee-deep in mud, upon the banks, are intent on business–mudlarks prospecting for the droppings of the barges!2
Neither Doré nor Jerrold was insensitive to the extreme deprivation that greeted them in their nighttime forays to the East End, to which they came like the first Europeans to set foot in Japan’s Jeddo, although in this case they required the standard Scotland Yard escort to visit these nether regions of the capital. Doré’s engravings are a remarkable record of such sights as a missionary reading the Gospels in a night shelter to the mummified rows of poor. In 1852 the exiled Alexander Herzen ventured into the thick ‘opaline fog’ where ‘every night a hundred thousand men know not where they will lay their heads, and the police often find women and children dead of hunger besides hotels where one cannot dine for less than two pounds’.3 The French conservative historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine visited England for the first time in 1859, although he returned on several further occasions, before committing pen to paper. He visited Manchester, the apogee of the new civilisation and the economic doctrines that informed it:
We were coming to the iron and coal country, with signs of industrial activity everywhere. Slag-heaps like mountains, the earth deformed by excavation, and tall, flaming furnaces. Manchester: a sky turned coppery red by the setting sun; a cloud, strangely shaped resting upon the plain; and under this motionless cover a bristling of chimneys by hundreds, all tall as obelisks. Then a mass, a heap, blackish, enormous, endless rows of buildings; and you are there, at the heart of a Babel built of brick.
A walk in the town: seen close-to it is even more lugubrious. Earth and air seem impregnated with fog and soot. The factories extend their flanks of fouled brick one after another, bare, with shutterless windows, like economical and colossal prisons. The place is a great jerry-built barracks, a ‘work-house’ for four hundred thousand people, a hard-labour penal establishment: such are the ideas it suggests to the mind. One of the factory blocks is a rectangle six storeys high, each storey having forty windows: and inside, lit by gas-jets and deafened by the uproar of their own labour, toil thousands of workmen, penned in, regimented, hands active, feet motionless, all day and every day, mechanically serving their machines. Could there be any kind of life more outraged, more opposed to man’s natural instincts?4
In London Taine sought out such sinks as Shadwell, noting: ‘I have seen the lowest quarters of Marseilles, Antwerp and Paris: they come nowhere near this.’ Shadwell’s inhabitants seem to have been permanently engaged in gin-fuelled brawls, with ‘black eyes, bandaged noses, cut cheeks’, and that was only the female part, whose voices seemed ‘thin, cracked, like that of a sick owl’.
Taine the traveller was less monomaniacal than the earnest young German Friedrich Engels, who had been sent in 1842 by his father to the Manchester branch of Ermen and Engels so as to isolate him from dangerous company. Nothing in provincial Barmen had prepared Engels for London. It reminded him of a gigantic physics experiment: ‘The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate essence, and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.’5
Since Engels was no more a reliable guide to industrial Britain than Lenin was to tsarist Russia we shall not dwell too much on him. In contrast to Engels’s reductively purposive account, Taine’s notes capture the specific rhythms of English civilisation and the importance of religion in its culture. He experienced the limitless tedium of an English Sunday, under the pitiless and interminable drizzle that made even the most monumental classical buildings, darkened with grease and soot, look so drab and dreary. It was like imperial Rome, with the sun eclipsed. Since residual Puritanism ensured there was not much by way of Sunday recreation, Taine visited various Nonconformist chapels and Anglican churches. Unlike his native France, whose churches were filled with ‘congregations of women, aged dyspeptics, servants, [and] working-class people’, Taine was impressed by the ‘respectable middle-class people very correctly dressed, and with serious, sensible faces’ in the chapels, and by the affluent gentlemen and their ladies in the Anglican churches.6 That in essence was their problem, although by the turn of the century even the latter had begun to desert the churches.
The Industrial Revolution transformed the lives of people who for thousands of years had been country folk dependent on the seasons, the soil and the climate. Beginning in Britain, and then varying in impact from country to country, the Industrial Revolution resulted in rapid and unprecedented concentrations of population and large-scale units of production, the mechanisation of time and work, the emergence of new social classes with rival claims to political power, novel forms of wealth and poverty, and liberal political economy which denied the state’s claim to interfere in the autonomous workings of the market, an ideology that did not go unchallenged by conservatives and socialists who subscribed to more nostalgic visions.7
The Industrial Revolution occurred, at a varying pace, in societies that were overwhelmingly Christian in self-understanding, and which, since the Victorians certainly did not invent greed, had views on such vices as the worship of Mammon. Despite its otherworldly focus, Christianity has always been concerned with economic, social and political questions, whether one thinks of the morality of charging interest, the universal obligation of charity, relations between Church and state, or how to remind the rich and powerful of their Christian duty towards their poorer fellows. Its ethical codes were also not designed to cope with anything so abstract as economic laws, or with anything resembling the impersonality of the modern bureaucratic welfare state. Organically linked with traditional rural society, the Churches were confronted by the emergence of new population centres that seemed dedicated to the gods of machine and money, degrading human relations to what Carlyle dubbed the ‘cash-nexus’, while the poor sank into dirt, drink and depravity, forfeiting–in the eyes of some who like Engels did not look very deep–even their humanity.8 The social evils engendered by industrialisation also seemed intimately bound up with disturbing trends in the sociology of religious observance.
The 30 March 1851 religious census shocked many people by revealing that five million people, out of a population of almost eighteen millions, routinely failed to attend Sunday worship. Worse, for the established Church, the percentage of those attending the Church of England was only 51 as against the 44 per cent who worshipped in Nonconformist chapels.9 Shockingly, urban missionaries calculated that church attendance was much higher in Jamaica, Tonga, Habai and Vavau than in the imperial metropolis.10
Yet much had already been done to counteract the trends that the census uncovered, for one should not take Nonconformist or progressive criticism of a complacently inert Anglican establishment at face value. Clerical absenteeism in the Church of England had been almost halved between 1827 and 1848. The Church had also responded to dramatic shifts in population. After 1818 it no longer required a separate act of parliament to create each new parish. An enormous programme of church building was also supported by the legislature and private subscription.
In the previous century, competition between Church and (Huguenot) Dissent had given rise to such English baroque glories as Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church Spitalfields and St Alfege’s in Greenwich. The Victorians intensified the contest. It was so frenzied that it neglected the laws of supply and demand. In the 1840s, the Church of England consecrated eight new or restored churches per month. Nonconformists caught this building mania, in the process downgrading those elements of flexibility and imagination that had once enabled them to appeal to the lower classes through itinerant or open-air preaching: ‘Town Missions etc., are all well in their place; but there wants something in addition, to gather up, consolidate and retain to ourselves, the effects which these means produce; and that something in the erection of places of worship. We must catch the building spirit of the age. We must build, build, build…We cannot multiply our persons, unless we multiply our places.’11 The growth of Nonconformist places of worship was extraordinary. Whereas the Established Church had added over a million new sittings by 1851, the Nonconformists had built 16,689 new places of worship, accommodating a further four million people.12 But even this rate of church and chapel building was inadequate. As the archdeacon of London said in 1899: ‘The fact is that the population is increasing with such enormous rapidity that we are never able to overtake the neglect of 100 years ago.’13
The 1851 census revealed that the urban working class were the most conspicuous absentees. For example, only six thousand of the ninety thousand inhabitants of Bethnal Green attended services, while only six of the thirty-seven towns north of the line Gloucester to Grimsby achieved the 58 per cent national average of church attendance. This absence, which had important local exceptions, was partly because the 1818 Act that built more churches also made them dependent upon pew rents, with only a fifth of seating reserved for the poor, who were otherwise squeezed into the back, sides and galleries of churches, to minimise the risk of poor people’s lice enlivening the well-to-do’s cushions. Of course, pew rents were not entirely the problem, since the equally socially segregated Catholic churches of Ireland were hugely popular. So were the Nonconformist chapels of Welsh Merthyr Tydfil, the town with the second-highest church attendance, partly because the iron-works owners were English and Anglican.14
When the English iron-works owners were replaced by predominantly Welsh coal-mine owners, the chapels began to be segregated between those in the ‘big pew’ and the workers who stood at the rear. Social segregation characterised Nonconformist chapels more generally, with separate services for tradesmen, and the lower classes referred to solely by surname, rather than title, when the roll was called. In England, canting lower-middle-class Nonconformist preachers, often with a Welsh or Scots accent, and hence rendered alien by voice and culture, failed to make a favourable impression, especially when they insisted on temperance among those who liked a drink. By contrast, American Evangelists, who may have sounded brash but, as Anglo-Saxons, raised no ethnic hackles, were extremely popular among the working classes, and inspired such modernising movements as the Salvation Army.15
The Roman Catholic Church was more successful than any Protestant denomination in gaining a sizeable working-class following, chiefly because its priests were much closer by virtue of class, culture and ethnicity to the three-quarters of a million Irish immigrants in London and the northern industrial cities who made up the majority of Catholics in Britain. The ‘foreignness’ that even a prince of the Church like cardinal Manning felt by virtue of his adhesion to Rome may have played to the Catholic clergy’s advantage in forging close links with its ‘foreign’ Irish constituency, but it was Manning’s support for the striking dockworkers in 1889 which, earning him their warm applause, made him feel ‘an Englishman’. The disadvantage was that the Catholic presence increased the sectarian awareness of the Protestant working class in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and Liverpool. In 1848 Protestant mobs in Cardiff, then and now a city synonymous with drunken violence, attacked a Catholic church and the homes of the Irish after a navvy killed a Welshman, while in 1909 Liverpool witnessed attempts by both Catholics and Protestants to cleanse their respective neighbourhoods.16
Beyond these pockets of working-class sectarianism, the content and delivery of all religion was sometimes as inherently limiting as its identification with middle-class respectability. When working-class people attended churches, dull or incomprehensible preaching by middle-class clergy, who routinely read their sermons with minimal gesticulation, invariably bamboozled or bored them. As a woman born in 1895 recollected: ‘the parson, the one we had, he was above our heads you know…You see with all these poor frozen people, and half-starved and half-asleep a lot of them, he would be saying “And of course, as Hegel said, as Kant said, and so and so said,” quoting from the great scholars. What did they know? They couldn’t even read or write, a lot of them.’17
That observation has to be balanced against the enormous popularity of the great dual-purpose battle hymns that steadied the trigger-fingers of riflemen facing Dervishes and Zulus, and of Sunday schools that provided rudimentary moral education, although that did not automatically contribute to adult church attendance. Protestantism did better wherever it pandered to the pugnacity of the population. In Lancashire, Anglican clergymen in clogs and rolled shirt-sleeves appealed to working-class Tories by denouncing Nonconformists as ‘scurrilous, palm-singing, canting hypocrites’ who would deny the worker his pints of ‘British’ beer. Others were equally successful with denunciations of a ‘Babylonian’ papacy, a line restricted nowadays to parts of Ulster.
This is not entirely to argue that where Churches spoke to ‘vulgar’ prejudices they did well, but it is to highlight the fact that the Church of England moved around the twin suns of Oxford and Cambridge, which even today bulk large in its career structures and collective consciousness. As far as the working classes were concerned, the Church spoke the wrong language, in a society where how you spoke, or where you went to school or university, was unmistakable to the many cognoscenti of all social classes. As a resident of Mansfield House, an East End outpost of Oxford’s Congregationalist Mansfield College, had it: ‘It is strange that some Londoners will say i when they mean a.’ This mattered far more than such abstract concerns as the rights and wrongs of establishment.
Few attempts were made to recruit working-class clergy, for the office was regarded as the preserve of gentlemen, the overwhelming majority of whom were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, at a time when the working class had no secondary schooling. When attempts were made to involve working-class people actively, notably through the Church of England Working Men’s Society, this was largely a tool in the High Church ritualists’ battle with Low Church Evangelical Protestants in the rival Church Association. In other words, internal Church faction-fighting took precedence, a pattern that has been endlessly repeated with other ‘issues’, most of monumental irrelevance to all but insistent minorities. There would be further attempts to reach out to the working classes of the cities, but all, as we shall see, were failures.18
There were other ways of approaching the same set of problems. The Christian Churches and Nonconformist chapels had to respond to the multiple social evils that afflicted industrial Britain: disease, drunkenness, homelessness, hunger, insanitary or overcrowded housing, and adult and child prostitution since the age of consent for girls was thirteen for much of this period. These evils in turn raised fundamental questions regarding solutions, notably whether or not the state should be involved. In the earlier part of the century, Anglican clergy differed little from either domestic Dissenters or, as we shall see, continental Social Catholics in denying the state more than an occasional role in alleviating particular social evils, lest the state become an uncontrollable Moloch perpetually interfering where it had no business. Such interference seemed the height of folly to men who had little inkling that in the near future the secular state would all but displace them as the first and last resort of the poor.
This animadversion towards the state reflected the Anglican hierarchy’s well-founded reluctance to engage in temporal ‘politics’ and their subscription to contemporary views on political economy: ‘Society will work out its own good of a temporal nature, through the medium of private interest, much better than Government can do it for us, while the general error into which all plans of centralization naturally fall–that of treating in the same manner districts wholly different in circumstances and habits–is thus avoided’ being the representative laissez-faire creed of many bishops in early Victorian Britain.19 The major dissidents from this universal creed were old-fashioned Tory paternalists who regarded the factory-owning classes with snobbish disdain, and who feared that gross exploitation would lead to class warfare and a revolution that would spell the end of religion. To bishop Wilberforce, who described himself as a moderate Tory, liberalism was:
the Devil’s creed: a heartless steam-engine, un-Christian, low…utilitarian creed which would put down all that is really great and high and noble: all old remembrances and customs: merely to let up what is low and multiply such miserable comforts as going very fast through the air on a railroad–and for this purpose it would overturn the Church; that is Christianity; and worship the very devil if his horns were gold and his tail was a steam-engine.20
The obvious compromise between widespread subscription to laissez-faire and recognition of social evils was to advocate judicious, piecemeal legislation that tackled individual abuses while restraining the potential for promiscuous state interference, the thin end of the wedge for bureau-cratised and secular state welfare. During the Victorian era religious people tried to maintain their own distinctive approach to social evils, based on a combination of evangelism and social work, tempering laissez-faire liberalism with humanitarian interventions. The Church of England gradually came round to the sort of evangelisation that was more typical of Nonconformity. One of the most remarkable developments involved Evangelical Protestants of all denominational persuasions, although it has received far less attention than the later Salvation Army.21 Although celibate High Church and Roman Catholic clergy distinguished themselves as ‘slum priests’, in areas where it was unwise to relocate a genteel family, it has been estimated that Evangelical Protestants were responsible for three-quarters of the religious social work in nineteenth-century London.22
David Nasmith, a Glaswegian Nonconformist, founded the London City Mission (LCM) in 1835. Nasmith was inspired by the earlier example of Thomas Chalmers, who between 1815 and 1820 had used volunteers to visit small subdivisions of his large and overcrowded Glasgow parish. Nasmith took this system abroad, notably by founding the New York City Mission in April 1830, before he returned to establish the LCM in the British capital. He decided to use salaried missionaries rather than volunteers, being helped in that endeavour by the wealthy brewer and member of parliament Thomas Buxton. Following difficulties with the Anglican bishop of London, Nasmith resigned from his own creation after twenty-one months, unwilling to cede Anglicans formal parity on the LCM’s governing committee.23
The Mission allocated hundreds of domiciliary missionaries, each responsible for a very compact area, who were monitored in turn by district superintendents. For example, what became ‘Mission District 13 Lewisham Road and (Gravel) Pits’, was the domain of a Mr Horobin under the superintendence of a W. Shrimpton Esq., its boundaries marked by Blackheath Hill and Orchard Road, Dartmouth Row, Morden Road and the elusive Ravensbourne branch of the Thames.24
The four hundred or so missionaries of the 1870s were financially supported by an impressive number of donors and subscribers, not only in London but throughout the counties. For example, the burgers of sedate Cheltenham gave £130 per annum to support a missionary in Jacob’s Island in London’s Bermondsey, the setting for much of Dickens’s Oliver Twist.25 Most of the missionaries were Nonconformists; most of their backers and sponsors were members of the Church of England. After an initial period of scepticism, the Anglican bishops supported the LCM, chiefly because of its role in what the bishop of Norwich called ‘macadamizing the road to the Church’.26 According to the LCM’s published accounts, receipts rose from about £2,700 in 1835 to £45,450 in 1876–7. The Committee was adorned with such names as Gurney Barclay, J. H. Buxton and Joseph Hoare, who brought their banking, business and brewing acumen to the LCM’s affairs. Perhaps they thought up the idea of including a template bequest form in the LCM’s literature?
The missionaries, most of whom were themselves working class, called on people at home or in their workplace, listening to and advising people on their problems, while trying to persuade them to read the Bible, to send their children to Sunday school and to attend church themselves. They could not dispense money, but they could solicit money from wealthy Christian sympathisers, or intercede, perhaps by writing a letter, with the authorities, private charities or, for this was the Victorian era, a person’s relatives. They did much good work reclaiming the former barmaids, needlewomen and servants who had ended up in prostitution as an alternative to abuse and low wages. For example, in 1855 a missionary in London’s Kentish Town reclaimed a twenty-one-year-old woman ‘who had fallen into sin’. He found her a refuge in the Temporary House in Mornington Crescent, and then communicated with her elder married sister who lived near New York. Funds were raised to pay for the younger sister’s new life with her sibling in the USA.27
Virtually all of the Ragged Schools established in London owed their inception to the efforts of LCM missionaries. They found suitable premises, and then formed committees of philanthropists to finance and administer them. At the end of each day, the missionary was obliged to write up his journal, some of which were then developed during retirement into fascinating autobiographical accounts, like that of Thomas Galt, a sales assistant in a London store, who resigned because he would not deceive customers with the ‘bargains’ offered in the annual sales, before joining the LCM. The LCM’s magazine and reports also provided an important basis for statistical information on deprived areas. Long before Charles Booth surveyed the London poor, the LCM’s John Garwood had published The Million-Peopled City; or One-half of the people of London made known to the other half (1853). The more astute social reformers did not need police escorts into the courts of the East End; instead they simply contacted the missionaries of the LCM. The great Evangelical social reformer Shaftesbury frequently recognised the help he had been given by the Mission in his inquiries into poverty in the capital, it being the LCM missionary Thomas Lupton Jackson who at their request arranged Shaftesbury’s famous meeting with about four hundred thieves, one of whom, rising to speak, tellingly began his disquisition with ‘My lord and gentlemen of the jury–not jury–I mean Mr Jackson’.28
The LCM catered to the fluctuating diversity of the capital’s population. There were specialist missions to cabmen, dockworkers, firemen, policemen and sailors. They provided the cabmen with shelters where they could rest and enjoy refreshments, while enjoining them not to abuse or swear at their customers. Firemen, who lived with their families in eighteen local fire stations, were given such apposite tracts as Remarkable Escapes from Peril. The Tavern missionaries used pub signs as their opening gambit to publicans, sensing more hope in ‘The Good Samaritan’ than in ‘The Man Loaded with Mischief’. There were also missions to the large floating population of foreign sailors, many of whom were Spanish-speaking, to whom George Gillman (who worked with sailors for fifty years) preached in their native tongue, after risking life and limb clambering over the gangways and planks heaving with burly stevedores that linked ships and quays in harbour. Sometimes Gillman was rebuffed from the lower decks ‘with oaths peculiar to the language of the sea’. Occasionally the officers welcomed him aboard: ‘Mira hombres, venga va a niendo a este culto, porque los Protestantes tienen una religion mayor que tenemos nostros en Espana,’ although this kindly captain soon perished when his ship the Daoiz was accidently sunk by the English Busy Bee in Hamburg harbour. There were also (converted Jewish) missionaries to the Jews, and resident foreigners, who were often suspected of political subversion.29 Special campaigns were aimed at ‘the system of social disturbance and moral pollution’ known as socialism through a lecture series at the Birkbeck Institution, and others were launched to abolish such ancient dissipations as Bartholomew Fair.30
A famous illustration shows a missionary being hounded out of a London rookery by a mob of menacing men and women. It was dirty and dangerous work requiring a very special sort of person for whom bug and flea bites, or buildings that occasionally fell down, were the lesser deterrents. A missionary to Pestilentia, as Jacob’s Island was known when it was an open sewer, recalled in 1871: ‘Once I was laid up for seven weeks from fever [which killed his eldest child], twice I was stricken down with cholera, and once I was disabled from work by nervous disability.’ Then there were the inhabitants:
I had not been many hours at work when the report spread that I was a policeman in disguise, and I was hounded out of the place by a desperate, howling mob of thieves and outcasts. Upon my return home I was so cast down as only to be able to gain relief in tears and prayer. Next day I went very cautiously to work; but upon ascending a very steep, rickety staircase, a woman with hobnail boots came onto the landing, and with bitter oaths declared ‘if I came a step higher she would kick my eyes out’; so I had to beat a retreat.
He persevered through months of abuse and violence until his ministrations to the sick and the dying won people over.
Others tried a different tack, assimilating the Churches to whatever afforded the working class excitement and leisure, regardless of the risk of vulgarising religion. Following the example of the Baptist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a United Committee for Special Services used seven popular theatres for Sunday-evening services, drawing over twenty thousand worshippers, although most of them were clerks and shop assistants rather than the most impoverished. It is not clear whether the audiences cum congregations were attracted by curiosity and spectacle rather than a loftier search for meaning.
These encroachments into working-class areas were accompanied by more concerted campaigns, in which Christians played a prominent role, against animal cruelty, drunkenness and to enforce the sabbath. The effects were ambiguous. For every worker who took the pledge or refrained from kicking carthorses, many more objected to attempts to stop cock-or dog-fights, as well as the closure not just of drinking dens, but of shops and public museums, from which working-class people drew material and intellectual sustenance.31 Sport provided another opportunity for Churches in working-class areas, with muscular Anglicans heavily involved (as were Jews) in East End boxing, and many football clubs having sectarian origins. These sports gradually detached themselves from the Churches, which baulked at the gambling that went with them. The religious origins of football teams have merely left a faintly unpleasant sectarian residue whenever supporters of Glasgow Rangers chant ‘Get ye to hell, ye Fenian scum’ when they play ‘Catholic’ Celtic.32 Sport, like social work, gradually wriggled out of the clerical embrace, becoming a wholly secular activity, albeit one through which quasi-religious passions were rerouted. Although the Churches generated sporting heroes, such as the Anglican cricketer–missionary C. T. Studd, sport gradually displaced religion as the principal focus of primal emotions, a trend reflected in the bowler Harold Larwood’s ‘Cricket was my reason for living’ or P. G. Wodehouse’s rejoinder that ‘Golf is only a game.’33
One spectacular inroad into working-class indifference was made by the Salvation Army, founded by William and Catherine Booth, which inherited and militarised the Primitive Methodist tradition of plebeian evangelicalism, their ‘corybantic’ trumpet blasts, tambourine rattles and cymbal tinkles disconcerting staid Anglican and Dissenting establishments alike until they came to their respective accommodations with this raucous phenomenon. The Booths, for Catherine was a talented preacher in her own right, began as itinerant revivalists in the north of England, a role that the Methodist New Connexion found difficult to accommodate. That inflexibility, and the Methodists’ identification with the respectable classes, propelled the Booths into open-air preaching to rougher audiences, beginning with those attracted to a tent in a former Quaker burial ground in East London. The notion of a Salvation Army was slow to evolve among the hardcore, which consisted of the Booths’ large family and their immediate acolytes, many of whom looked like bearded Conradian sea-captains.
Military metaphors were not unique to Christians in the 1860s, but it was from that decade that many of the great battle hymns stemmed, including ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.34 From the start the Booths welcomed, in a passive–aggressive sort of way, fracas with brewers’ hired roughs, the so-called ‘Skeleton Army’, that resulted from efforts to evangelise the denizens of gin-palaces and pubs along the Mile End or Whitechapel Roads.
Open-air preaching on waste ground gave way to the search for permanent sites. In 1868 wealthy benefactors enabled the Booths to open the East London Christian Mission in a former meat market. This consisted of a meeting hall, tearoom and soup kitchen for the poor. The Booths then expanded their operations to such venues as the Eastern Alhambra theatre in Limehouse or the Oriental Theatre in Poplar. Since battles were part and parcel of the Booths’ activities from the beginning, it is not surprising that in the late 1870s their mission was explicitly militarised, a development partly inspired by the Christian Soldiers who regularly expired on the Empire’s wilder frontiers. William Booth became better known as ‘General’, rather than ‘General Superintendent’, of the Hallelujah Army, the missions became ‘barracks’, and its local branches ‘corps’ with colonels, majors and captains. A campaign to evangelise Whitby in 1877 saw the use of posters that announced: ‘War! War! 200 Men and Women wanted at once to join the Hallelujah Army.’ Other ‘bulletins’ put up during the six-month ‘campaign’ read: ‘WE ARE RUSHING INTO WAR. The battle has begun: thousands killed and wounded, a few have been saved from death. It is a field of blood already, but what will it be?’ In 1879 the rather staid-sounding Christian Mission Magazine became the War Cry. The final step was to abandon civilian clothes for a standardised plain uniform, the dark serge tunics, caps and bonnets that the Army wears today.35 Battles there were aplenty. In 1882 Captain Tom Bull reported from Liverpool: ‘The storm raged, the wind blew, rain and snow came down. Stones were thrown, a brickbat striking the head of Sergeant Fellowes, breaking his head, and causing the loss of a pint of blood. He was taken to the hospital, had his head bandaged, and came back leaping and praising God.’36
In keeping with a trend in the Churches in general, social work became more and more salient, for the hypocrisy of propagating the faith overseas when there was much residual darkness at home was not a point lost on many Victorians, whose capacity for rigorous self-scrutiny was extraordinary. Appalling living conditions were seen as obstacles to salvation. Drunks and rough sleepers were inveigled into night shelters, and prostitutes were offered honest employment by an organisation that was progressive in seeing sexually importunate men as part of the problem. Following the death of his wife, William Booth supervised the ghost-writing of In Darkest England and the Way Out, his prescriptions for the Empire’s very own ‘heart of darkness’, with publicans standing in for ivory-traders and dockside helots for cannibalistic pygmies. Its object were the submerged tenth of unemployed who were not already catered for by asylums, the poor-house and prison. Blithely adapting virtually every nineteenth-century utopian solution to society’s problems, Booth advocated City Colonies which would provide food and shelter to the very poor; Farm Colonies, consisting of smallholdings, which would turn ‘the scum of Cockneydom’ into worthy kibbutzim; and, last but not least, Overseas Colonies, to which the hardier poor could be transplanted. The interstices of this bold scheme were filled with subordinate schemes for citizens’ advice bureaux, co-operative banks, créches and halfway houses for discharged prisoners. Some of these minor schemes stuck, but the whole design never took off, while there were murmurings in and out of the press about how the funds donated were being administered by the autocratic and secretive general, until he was effortlessly absorbed into the British Establishment with the freedom of the City of London and an honorary doctorate from Oxford.
Nothing can be further from the truth that the Church of England somehow eschewed such social responsibilities, although Nonconformists liked to depict it as being socially negligent and solely concerned with preservation of the constitutional establishment that they wished to unravel. Paradoxically, although the Church of England was involved in ever ramifying social projects, its collective mind chose to act as if each venture into the slums was akin to a voyage of discovery.
Initially, advanced grouplets within the Church of England advocated various forms of collectivism; by the last decades of the century, such views had become general among Anglican bishops, many of whom were representative of broader fashions in intellectual opinion.
It may be that the security of tenure enjoyed by Anglican clerics gave them a lead in terms of social activism over Nonconformist ministers, who were more dependent upon the favour of classes unlikely to welcome anything that raided their wallets and who routinely equated poverty with sin. As the rhyme went: ‘The pulpit’s laws, the pulpit’s patron give, And men who live to preach must preach to live’. Not only could influential laymen remove a preacher given to political harangues, since preachers itinerated they could blot his copybook with a future congregation.37
The Chartist crisis contributed to the formation of an Anglican grouplet, eventually known as Christian Socialism, and associated with the academic theologian Frederick Maurice, the barrister John Ludlow and the preacher and writer Charles Kingsley. Ludlow, who had discovered Christian Socialism in Paris, turned to Maurice in order to educate and evangelise the poor in the environs of the courts around Lincoln’s Inn. This came to nothing, but in the wake of the Chartist fiasco, when Maurice had volunteered as a special constable, he put Ludlow in touch with Charles Kingsley, and the group was born. They founded a penny paper called Politics for the People, which first appeared in May 1848. A year later they began to hold meetings with London’s artisans, which in turn led to the establishment of a number of associational workshops for bakers, builders, shoemakers and tailors that received capital investment and orders from well-to-do patrons and philanthropists. In 1850 they founded another paper called Christian Socialist from which the group took its name.38 Maurice regarded the Evangelical concern with individual salvation as the religious analogue to the evils of capitalist competition. He was more impressed by the Tractarian emphasis upon communion, which in contrast to the egalitarian brotherhood of the socialists needed only to be rediscovered rather than imposed.39 This also meant that he was cool towards interference by the state:
Christian Socialism is to my mind, the assertion of God’s order. Every attempt to hide it under a great machinery, call it Organization of Labour, Central Board, or what you like, I must protest against as hindering the gradual development of what I regard as a divine purpose, as an attempt to create a new constitution of society, when what we want is that the old constitution should exhibit its true functions and energies.40
He and his friends argued that the Church had to go about in the world, extending the notion of Christian charity to cover a range of disabling social and economic evils. If one will, it was Christianity by the deed. Like continental Social Catholics and Christian Socials, they were nostalgic for the lost ‘brotherhood’ of medieval guilds. They wished to create co-operatives which would span the nation and set both prices and wages. Judging from later Christian accommodations with such doctrines as revolutionary Marxism, the group’s connections with ‘socialism’ seem nominal. They were sympathetic to working men rather than to Chartism, rejecting the calls for universal suffrage that were at the heart of the movement. Maurice opposed the Reform Bill, trades unions and indeed any state social reforms, including those in such fields as public health. He admired Bismarck, that great persecutor of German socialists, and thought that war was the best way of shaping national consciousness.41 Their attempts to forge a new Christian form of political economy were correspondingly confused. They combined a detestation of laissez-faire and industrial England worthy of any aristocratic paternalist Tory, with a liberal emphasis upon popular education as the sine qua non for enfranchisement. Maybe that explains how their ideas became so pervasive within the Church later in the century, for the only immediate product of Christian Socialism was the Working Men’s College that Maurice founded in 1854 in London’s Red Lion Square.
Such groups seem eccentric when set beside the great Evangelical philanthropists of the Victorian era, or the gradual recognition by the highest Anglican authorities that something had to be done on the ‘social question’, the prelude to their eventual subscription to collectivism. As late as 1830 the Anglican bishops had regarded a public inquiry into the social evils of industrialisation as superfluous. This indifference was short-lived. Evangelical Protestants within the Church of England were as prominent in campaigns to improve conditions in British factories as they had been central to the campaign against overseas slavery. Memory of the latter was important, since, as Richard Oastler argued under the slogan ‘Yorkshire Slavery’, West Indian plantation-owners came off better in many comparisons with English mill-owners at least in terms of the hours they inflicted on minors.
The leading figure in promoting factory legislation was the Evangelical Tory lord Ashley, who after he succeeded his father in 1851 became earl of Shaftesbury. An Old Harrovian and graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, Ashley believed that parliament should use the power of the state to educate the poor and to improve their general circumstances. Private philanthropy should operate where intervention by the state was inappropriate. Ashley was one of those extraordinarily good men who are far harder to make flesh and blood than history’s villains. The source of his remarkable reformist energy was the belief that degrading living conditions were preventing the poor from seeing the Evangelical light at a time when the Protestant basis of British society was being menaced by the fashionable creeds of ‘infidels’ and the sacerdotal mummery of the High Church Tractarians.42 There was also his more visceral response to the sights, sounds and smells of Victorian poverty and to the ‘Jacobins of commerce’ whom he blamed for deranging the traditional mores and stability of British society. Having distinguished himself as a public Lunacy Commissioner, Ashley was ‘astonished and disgusted’ by reports he read in newspapers of conditions in Britain’s factories and hastened to learn more. He was a tireless promoter of ameliorative legislation, and patron saint of countless charities, judging by the two hundred societies that were represented at his funeral, ranging from the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund to the Watercress and Flower Girls and Railway Missions.
Ashley first concentrated upon a local problem: that of the bad employers and worse conditions in British textile factories. The 1833 Factory Act, which he boosted, banned work by children under nine and established an eight-hour day for those under thirteen. Employees aged between thirteen and eighteen were to work no more than twelve hours a day. Employers were obliged to ascertain the ages of their employees; those who claimed ‘I thought he was eighteen’ found themselves named and shamed in public. The introduction of a factory inspectorate provided the information indispensable to the further legislation closing loopholes in the 1833 law. Ashley was the driving force behind the Royal Commission into Children’s Employment of 1840, which two years later led to the banning of all women and boys under ten below ground in the mines. Ashley explained: ‘I have been bold enough to undertake this task, because I must regard the objects of it as being created, as ourselves, by the same Maker, redeemed by the same Saviour, and destined to the same immortality.’ Thirteen bishops supported this measure, with the bishop of London dismissing the specious defences of the colliery-owning peers in the House of Lords.43 The Ten-Hours’ Act of 1847, which by curtailing the working day for women and children also shortened it for men, was all but Ashley’s too in name, and it again enjoyed the support of the bishops. The latter sometimes regarded factory legislation as a form of ‘pay-back’ against the Dissenting manufacturers who financed the Nonconformist attacks on the Anglican establishment, that war of attrition that dominated the politics of the century.
Conditions in northern factories were but one of the areas to receive legislative attention in Victorian Britain, although it is worth bearing in mind that local initiatives often inspired national measures. Deleterious environmental conditions in both the provincial cities and the capital were exposed by Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population, as well as in the extraordinarily vivid journalism of Henry Mayhew, without whose writings we would not know much about costermongers, dustmen and mud-larks sifting scrap and old rope from the grey-brown mud of the unembanked river Thames. Time and again, Victorian social reformers ventured through the invisible wall that separated the London that produced marmalade from those that spread it, probing into the slums that were proliferating around the vast docks cut into the marshes of the East End. A journalist reported on life above the open sewer that was Jacob’s Island. Any drinking or washing water was brought up in buckets and cans from where he described:
It is not only the nose, but the stomach, that tells how heavily the air is loaded with sulphurretted hydrogen…The water is covered with a scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green, rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction. Along its shores are heaps of indescribable filth, the phosphorretted smell from which tells you of the rotting fish there, while the oyster shells are like pieces of slate, from their coating of mud and filth. In some parts the fluid is almost red as blood, from the colouring matter that pours into it from reeking leather-dressers close by.
The striking peculiarity of Jacob’s island consists in the wooden galleries and sleeping rooms at the back of the houses, which overhang the dark flood, and are built upon piles, so that the place has positively the air of a Flemish street, flanking a sewer instead of a canal; while the rackety bridges that span the ditches, and connect court with court, give it the appearance of the Venice drains, where channels before and behind the houses do duty for the ocean. Across some parts of the stream whole rooms have been built, so that house adjoins house; and here, with the very stench of death arising through the boards, human beings sleep night after night, until the last sleep of all comes upon them, years before its time.44
Chadwick’s report prompted the establishment of a number of associations, including the Health of Towns Associations, the Association for Promoting Cleanliness among the Poor, and the Society for the Improvement of the Conditions of the Labouring Classes. The Health of Towns Association, established in 1844, was dominated by Evangelical aristocrats, whose concerns were primarily religious: ‘The health, the tranquillity, the morality, nay, the Christianity of the people of this country are nearly concerned in the sanitary condition of these towns,’ as viscount Ebrington put it.45 Among the most active reformers were lord Ashley and bishop Blomfield of London, in whose diocese fourteen thousand people had perished in a major cholera epidemic. Blomfield was a leading proponent of the 1846 Bath and Wash Houses Act, which enabled local authorities to establish public baths supported from the local rates. Public sewers were a much larger proposition, not least because in London alone there were some three hundred local vested interests, ranging from lowly shopkeepers on a parish council to the patricians of the City of London, whose subscription to ‘Saxon’ micro-democracy felicitously coincided with their reluctance to levy and spend huge amounts of money. In 1848 Ashley became ex-officio president of the new General Board of Health, which during its six years’ existence tried to improve local sanitary authorities, until Chadwick’s autocratic manner grated on too many nerves. The 1858 ‘Great Stink’ that had MPs retching into their handkerchiefs as they caught the fetid odours of the Thames spurred more effective legislative measures that resulted in the great arterial and branch sewers of Bazalgette which still flow beneath the capital.
Although bath-houses and sewers were partly due to the connection that religious people were increasingly prepared to make between dirt and sin, enhanced sanitation gradually displaced the power of public prayer. In 1831–2 a cholera epidemic prompted parliament to declare an official Day of Fasting and Humiliation. In 1848–9 a second epidemic led to a brief religious revival, but even the bishop of London spoke primarily in terms of improved sanitation being the path to salvation. In 1854, when a further epidemic occurred, the idea of a national day of prayer was rejected. These were signs of the changing times.46
The capital, like other towns, was constantly both expanding and metamorphosing, so that the conditions Dickens described in his novels sometimes did not exist by the time they were published. Jacob’s Island, for example, was considerably improved after Peek, Frean & Co. opened in its midst a large biscuit factory that required fresh water. However, an improving infrastructure often served to condense the very poorest parts of the population, who needed to remain in the centre to have access to casual labour in the docks and meat, fish, fruit and vegetable markets. Construction of such prestige thoroughfares as New Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Victoria Street also slashed through the habitual haunts of the very poor, worsening conditions in Devil’s Acre, Little Hell, Jack Ketch’s Warren and Rat Castle, nicknames which all too vividly reflected conditions for those who lived there.47 Similar problems occurred when Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester were given improved municipal identities, although Improvement Bills did impose an obligation upon developers to report on displacements of population and the remedies they proposed.48
One of the causes of urban dilapidation was that no one seemed to own many of the worst tenements, although that did not stop the charging of extortionate rents for places that were tumbling down. Blomfield was a critic of excessive rents and overcrowding in city ‘lodging houses’ where unfortunates coughed, scratched, spat and turned as they lay head to toe in rooms that lacked ventilation.49 In 1851 Shaftesbury promoted legislation that required such lodging houses to be licensed and inspected by the local police authorities, and enabled local government to build ‘model lodging houses’ on the rates, although very few authorities took up the opportunity.50 He was a leading supporter of the Ragged Schools Union, founded in 1844, to solicit help for the ad-hoc schools that had sprung up in the previous decade to provide rudimentary education for the thirty thousand or so Artful Dodgers who combined casual work with theft and then crept into brick-kilns or building sites or under bridges and railway arches for a night’s shelter. Having identified this constituency, further exploration of its problems led to the provision of dormitories, which in turn spurred the creation of reformatories for juvenile delinquents. A further outgrowth of the Ragged School movement was the promotion of emigration as a means of disposal and redemption for the children who had been educated in these schools.51
In 1888 the Anglican Lambeth conference discussed ‘socialism’, arriving at a definition so latitudinarian–‘every wise endeavour which has for its object the material and moral welfare of the poor’–that most clergy could eagerly subscribe. For some, this definition was so vague as to be useless, and not serviceable in their quest to identify moral postures partially derived from Christianity with a single political ideology.
The 1870s and 1880s saw a re-emergence of Christian Socialism, in the shape of the Guild of St Matthew based from 1877 in London’s Bethnal Green, and the Christian Social Union formed at Oxford in 1889. The former grouping were inspired by the Etonian aesthete ritualist Stewart Headlam, a Fabian balletomane who favoured the radical Liberals and the man who put up bail for Oscar Wilde. He believed that ‘If you want to be a good Christian, you must be something very much like a good Socialist’ and regarded the state as a ‘sacred organisation’ along with the Church. He also advocated nationalisation of the land, progressive income tax, universal suffrage and the abolition of hereditary peers. That was very much a minority view, and the Guild of St Matthew never attracted many followers, and conspicuously failed to attract the working classes.
By contrast, the CSU exerted a considerable influence upon the higher reaches of the Church. Its leading lights were Charles Gore, a Harrovian descendant of an Irish peer, and Brooke Foss Westcott, the former headmaster of Harrow, canon of Westminster and from 1890 bishop of Durham, who until 1900 was its president. Between 1889 and 1913, sixteen of fifty-three appointees to bishoprics were members of the CSU. The CSU opposed the ‘warring atoms’ world of economic liberalism with its flighty vision of brotherhood and co-operation. Rather oddly it deliberately avoided having any concrete policy, although individual groups favoured what we nowadays call ‘ethical investment’ or white lists of employers who treated their workers well. The Oxford branch published a quarterly journal, the Economic Review, whose object was to introduce ethics to the dismal science. Members of the CSU sought to influence existing political parties in a Christian direction, and hence many of them saw no need for a separate Independent Labour Party.
Oxford also provided the impulse for the university settlement movement, although there had been earlier attempts to build bridges between the jeunesse dorée and the London poor in the form of visits to the slums organised by major public schools. University settlements differed from missions in that the residents lived collectively in what amounted to transposed colleges, rather than isolated amid the working class. The first, Toynbee Hall, involved graduates and undergraduates living permanently, or while on vacation, in Whitechapel. Using this as a base they involved themselves in matters affecting ordinary people by mounting campaigns or serving on local bodies. Toynbee Hall was also prominent in adult education, the aim being a University of East London. Other settlements, such as Oxford House, established boys’ and men’s clubs where there was no beer or betting. While attempts to foster social intercourse between the classes through tea parties tended to be strained affairs, the settlements did contribute to the creation of an informed body of knowledge regarding the poor, although, in purely spiritual terms, they probably did more for the souls (and careers) of Balliol or Keble men than they did for those in whose midst they settled.52 What they manifestly did not do, for conditions in the East End apparently shocked each successive group of university men, was bridge the inter-generational replication of mutual incomprehension between the classes.
Attempts to assimilate Church or Chapel to the developing Labour movement were no more successful. In 1893 a former Unitarian minister called John Trevor presented a set of principles for a Labour Church to delegates from sixteen Churches who met in Manchester prior to breaking away from their respective institutional moorings:
The Labour Churches were products of disillusionment with the social exclusivity of mainly Nonconformist places of worship, and of popular belief that a genuinely egalitarian religion could be separated from the involutions of theology. Largely restricted to Lancashire and Yorkshire, and making no impression in London, they rejected the formality and hierarchy of other Churches, while trying to accentuate such notions as brotherhood and fellowship. Their difficulty, especially after they became platforms for socialist political figures, lay in distinguishing their own pitch from secular economic or ethical doctrines set forth by the speakers who pulled in large audiences.
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Church of England was no longer viewed as a monolithic obstruction to social reform, which was how it had routinely been regarded earlier in the century. The highest echelons of the Church had been converted to the anti-competitive nostrums that were fashionable among the progressive intelligentsia, and which were residual among a certain kind of Tory, albeit a conversion that was expressed in their customarily limp and qualified manner. An influential minority of activist clergymen went a great deal further, without much reflection on their privileged personal station, or their collective ignorance of the worlds of business, commerce and industry, generic incapacities that were more than camouflaged by their emphatic social moralism. The more they talked about industrial and urban society the less they seemed a part of it. They were emissaries from another world, although not the one that many working-class people still believed awaited them in the heaven.54
II ’SOCIAL CATHOLICISM’
British liberalism and socialism were inextricably bound up with religious Dissent, in marked contrast to continental Europe where these political forces were more nominally secular, and Catholicism, if not always Protestantism, tended to be identified with political conservatism. Nonetheless, the Catholic Church developed an explicit social philosophy, partly in response to the excesses of liberalism and the threat of socialism, both of which it routinely identified with freemasonry, Protestantism and the Jews, but also in recognition of radically altered social circumstances.
The first manifestations of what would be known as ‘Social Catholicism’ are difficult to disentangle from the age-old tradition of Christian charity. Social Catholicism reflected the view that the scale of the ‘social question’, which effectively meant morally degrading pauperism, was so great that it could not be remedied by traditional charity, although the Church was keen to preserve the generous individual impulses that inspired it, and was therefore wary of bureaucratising social policy. The sources of Social Catholicism were many and stemmed from across Europe, which partly accounts for the range of views that were represented within it.
The effects of industrialisation in France began to be apparent during the Restoration and the July Monarchy, although it lacked the frenetic ‘take-offs’ that occurred earlier in Britain and later in Germany, bringing much human desolation in their wake. Small-scale workshops under a single patron were more typical than factories, which in France often blurred into a strong rural economy that in turn has survived unrationalised (and heavily subsidised) into the twenty-first century. In 1890, around 64 per cent of the population lived in the countryside, a percentage that only declined to 56 per cent by 1911; in Britain, by contrast, in 1900 three-quarters of the population lived in towns, the balance between town and country having already tilted in favour of the former fifty years earlier. In 1896, a good 83 percent of French businesses employed fewer than five people, with only 4 per cent employing more than fifty workers.55 Moreover, apart from migrants to the working-class districts of Paris, or the eastern textile centre of Mulhouse, in 1881 only 15 per cent of French people lived outside the department in which they were born, so that France lacked the large industrial conurbations that typified the Industrial Revolution elsewhere. The French language may have given us the word ‘deracination’, to convey anomic urban dislocation, but the French themselves were still bien enraciné.56
Some French ultramontane Catholics, notably the polemicist Louis Veuillot, deplored any form of technological innovation, as well as what little he cared to know of industrial civilisation in general. Veuillot hated railways and steamboats for turning life’s hitherto commodious pace into a blur of smoke and sparks, thereby diminishing man’s space for contemplation and reflection. This was an eccentric, minority view, since Catholic bishops often blessed the new locomotives and steamships, both of which enabled senior ecclesiastics to deliberate regularly together, with Americans attending councils and conclaves; and, though the railways may have meant that pilgrims no longer felt the road under their feet or stopped to pray in different places, they transformed pilgrimages into vast occasions.57
While Catholics in authority often identified structural reform with revolution, individual Catholics were also prominent in attempting to mitigate the dislocation and misery that often went with the transition to industrial society. This was important since the French state was notoriously laggard in legislating against social evils. The first industrial legislation, prohibiting children under eight from working in factories, was passed in 1841, with a ten-and-a-half-hour day for women and children over eight being introduced only in 1900.
In some senses, Social Catholicism was simply a continuation and amplification of domestic missionary activity that stretched back to the seventeenth century. A Society of St Joseph was founded in Paris in 1822, with the aim of keeping young migrant workers on the straight and narrow, by providing them with decent lodgings, harmless recreation, employment and opportunities for worship. Its membership numbered a thousand employers and seven thousand workers. The listless deracination that the Society was designed to prevent was described by Lamennais, one of its earliest promoters, in a passage that has some contemporary resonance with the moral disorientation of contemporary migrants from traditional religious societies:
It is dreadful to contemplate the condition of so many decent young people who are drawn to Paris each year…and who find themselves witnesses of a licentiousness which unhappily is only too contagious. Without any bearings, without supervision or advice; surrounded by seductions; lost, so to speak, in this crowd of vices which press upon them and solicit them from every side; how can they fail to succumb? How can they preserve the religious sentiments, the sound morals, and the simple and regular habits, which most of them bring with them from the provinces? It is practically impossible: experience proves that only too well.58
Conservative exponents of Social Catholicism, who tended to romanticise the Middle Ages, usually wished to re-establish a corporate society, including guilds which had once provided artisans with dignity, status, training and rudimentary welfare. According to Civiltà Cattolica, the influential journal of Jesuit opinion, the guilds suppressed by the 1791 Chapelier Law during the French Revolution belonged to the natural law.59 Conservative Social Catholics were also concerned to preserve the familial character of the artisanal workplace, their ideal being something along the lines of the draper’s shop described by Balzac in his 1830 novella At the Sign of the Cat and Racket:
These old houses were a school of honesty and sound morals. The masters adopted their apprentices. The young man’s linen was cared for, mended, and often replaced by the mistress of the house. If an apprentice fell ill, he was the object of truly maternal attention. In a case of danger the master lavished his money in calling in the most celebrated physicians, for he was not answerable to their parents merely for the good conduct and training of the lads. If one of them, whose character was unimpeachable, suffered misfortune, these old tradesmen knew how to value the intelligence he had displayed, and they did not hesitate to entrust the happiness of their daughters to men whom they had long trusted with their fortunes.60
The motives which inspired the conservative strain of Social Catholicism were as mixed as those that drive most idealisms, an observation only shocking to moral purists. Apart from nostalgia for societies that had not undergone the dissolvent experiences of either the French or British political or industrial revolutions, these Bourbon legitimists sought to use sporadic evidence of worker unrest to discredit the July Monarchy, while claiming that ‘the men of the right are the real protectors of the poor’. They had a visceral dislike of liberalism. It was usually anticlerical. It reduced everything to money. It had an atomising impact on social solidarities and established hierarchies. It had no social conscience.
Some of these conservative social reformers were talented administrators whose legitimist sympathies disbarred them from public administration, leading them to find other channels through which to express their caste ethos of public service. The vicomte Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont was a career prefect whose experience had included a two-year stint in the industrialising department du Nord before he was dismissed in 1830. He detested the sort of society he saw emerging in Britain, with what he called its ‘pauperisme anglais’, and had a physiocrat’s concern with a thriving rural sector. In various works, produced in his enforced retirement after the July Revolution, Villeneuve-Bargemont argued that the state had a duty to create agricultural colonies, as well as to provide decent housing, education and rudimentary welfare, although he recognised the need too for worker self-organisation. His speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 22 December 1840 was the first in which a politician argued that social reform was a responsibility of government. He did not simply denounce such specific abuses as child labour, but condemned the wider impact of British-style industrial capitalism, responsible as it was for ‘a portion of the population dependent on certain branches of industry [becoming] a caste by itself, condemned to unhappiness, as in England; their way of life, health and very existence are a matter of blind chance. This is a situation which no society that calls itself civilized and Christian can tolerate.’61
The realisation that new forms of deprivation were cyclical or systemic led socially minded conservative Catholics to think beyond traditional alms-giving whose impact would inevitably be merely palliative. Comte Armand de Melun was an aristocratic lawyer who was fortuitously introduced to a member of the Daughters of Charity religious order. Up to that point, he recalled, ‘I had never visited anyone who was poor, I knew only those who had held out their hands to me in the streets…I had hitherto regarded it as the job of public assistance and welfare offices to get to know them and to provide relief for them.’ Careful study of the problem led Melun to the conclusion that ‘today we must broaden the horizon. It is not just a matter of filling some gaps, of rendering aid where the dole and the social interest have overlooked someone. One must address the task of making available to everybody the assistance that society is capable of rendering to each.’ Melun established a series of ‘patronages’ to deal with the problems of such specific groups as apprentices, orphans and serving girls. He founded a journal which sought to study the problems of the poor in a systematic fashion, as well as a Society for Charitable Economy that endeavoured to co-ordinate disparate charitable initiatives. The object of the Society was to find a third way between cut-throat liberalism and ‘scientific’ socialism, and to express this in the form of legislation to be put before parliament. The French equivalent of Shaftesbury, Melun sought action on abandoned infants, begging, pawnbrokers and child labour. He was also involved in holding regular meetings for workers in churches, which combined religious and moral instruction from both priests and laymen with the provision of medical and funeral benefits based on a modest subscription. Known from 1840 onwards as the Society of St Francis Xavier, these meetings enjoyed the support and protection of archbishop Affre of Paris, who ordained one of the few priests, Auguste Ledreuille, actually of working-class origin. By 1845 some fifteen thousand Parisian workers were involved with the Society of St Francis Xavier, which opened a ‘Workers House’ that functioned as a labour exchange to help its clientele at times of cyclical downturn. These initiatives explain why the 1848 Revolution lacked the anticlerical outbursts that conventionally accompanied past upheavals, and why the conservative bishops initially welcomed the new Republic.
Conservatives nostalgic for a vanishing social order were not the only socially engaged Catholics. Liberal Catholics, of whom the most notable was Frédéric Ozanam, organised a network of conferences, which assumed the name Society of St Vincent de Paul, whose ends included visiting and befriending poor people in their own homes. By 1848 some eight to ten thousand people were active in 388 of these conferences.62 Ozanam was also the prime mover behind a new daily paper called Ere Nouvelle which in its brief existence advocated reductions in working hours, graduated income taxes and the application of a scientifically considered charity to the plight of the disadvantaged.
The 1848 Revolution saw the emergence of a handful of socialist priests, thirty-three of whom attended a huge banquet for workers in April 1848. Emboldened with toasts to ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the father of socialism’, the priests announced, ‘We want your emancipation, we will no longer allow the exploitation of man by man. It is time that the worker enjoyed all the fruit of his labour, and that an industrialist, only because he is a capitalist, should not fatten himself on your toil.’63 Their disapproving ecclesiastical superiors quickly silenced such socialist priests.
The most prominent exponent of a left-wing form of Social Catholicism was the doctor Philippe Buchez, who had transferred his sympathies from Saint-Simonian socialism to Roman Catholicism after the former had degenerated into a species of pseudo-religious cult. Later he recalled that ‘I was convinced that I should find in Christianity all that I had long desired, and I regretted that those who had taught me in my youth and the philosophes had sent me so far off the track in search of the truth when I had it so close to me.’64 In the summer of 1848 he briefly became president of the Constituent Assembly, but his influence was mainly as a propagandist rather than as a politician. Buchez advocated worker co-operatives whose profit-sharing arrangements would enable them to acquire the capital necessary for them to become employers. He believed that ‘this great social crisis cannot be solved till the day when the revolutionaries are Catholics and the Catholics are revolutionaries’. Buchez’s influence was evident among the working men who founded a journal called Atelier in 1840. They implicitly rejected the idea that people had to belong to the Church to be good Christians. They also put much emphasis upon fraternity and deprecated both charity and paternalism, regarding the attainment of justice for the workers as the essential precondition for a more just, and hence more Christian, society.
During the brief existence of the Second Republic, it was the conservative strand of Social Catholicism, represented by Melun, that most influenced policy once more heady schemes for extensive nationalisation and the right to work had come to nothing. There was a profound scepticism about utopian ‘solutions’ to poverty; as a group of Catholic employers had it: ‘Teach the masses morality and you will do more against need and pauperism than all the innovators and theoreticians with their systems and utopias…Hunger, sickness, poverty, these are evils which are intrinsic to our nature; dreaming of their total eradication means surrendering oneself to a hopeful illusion.’ In this unpropitious climate Melun sought to introduce a welter of reforms, including maternity hospitals, nurseries, orphan asylums, improved housing, mass education, vocational training, shorter working hours, savings schemes, and welfare associations for young workers. Elected to the National Assembly in May 1849, he secured the appointment of a committee to review the entire question of public provision for the poor. On the basis of its reports, the Assembly introduced a corpus of social legislation that dealt with insalubrious housing, pensions, hospitals, medical care and the provision of public baths. Much of this legislation survived the transition to the presidential regime, the conservatism of its main sponsor making it acceptable to the otherwise rabidly anti-socialist Party of Order which had been terrified by the disturbances of the June Days that followed the dissolution of the government’s ‘national workshops’. Almost immediately Church leaders abandoned their earlier enthusiasm for the Revolution, pronouncing that ‘Democracy is the heresy of our age’ and banning Catholics from subscribing to, or reading, Ere Nouvelle.65
The ecclesiastical authorities, whose influence upon the education system had been reasserted by the 1850 Falloux Law, fulsomely supported Bonaparte’s December 1851 coup d’état. This alliance of mutual convenience meant the death knell for the left-leaning forms of Social Catholicism, although Napoleon’s long-standing interest in pauperism, about which he published a book, meant limited opportunities for socially conscious conservative Catholics to influence his government’s policy. Although Melun was personally a Bourbon legitimist, in early 1852 he was invited to dine with Napoleon, who proceeded to extol the virtues of a nationwide system of friendly societies to dispense sickness, accident and funeral insurance payments, membership of which would be compulsory for proprietors and employees alike. The unemployed were excluded since payments to them would only encourage their alleged idleness. Once Melun had successfully argued that these arrangements should be voluntary, he agreed to participate in their ramification. By 1869 nearly a million people, many of them artisans and professionals rather than workers, belonged to either approved or authorised friendly societies which were also closely connected to their local communes and church.
The Second Empire also witnessed attempts by many thinkers to study human society in an inductive scientific fashion, an approach that was partly inspired by their scepticism about general principles, theoretical models and Rousseauist utopianism. The most distinguished exponent of this social ‘science’ was Frédéric Le Play, for the first half of his life a professor of metallurgy at the Ecole des Mines. There he combined lecturing with officially sponsored study visits to the industrialising regions of a wide range of countries which resulted in a number of books on, for example, the South Wales copper industry or cutlery manufacture in South Yorkshire. As an entrepreneur–academic he surveyed the mineral resources of the Donets basin, and reorganised industry in the Urals mountains on behalf of the Russian tycoon Danilov, with whom he went into partnership. Le Play also took on an enormous range of public functions. Initially sympathetic to socialism, in 1848 he joined the Luxembourg Commission for the Workers, one of the earliest examples of industrial conciliation involving employers, workers and independent experts. Disillusioned with the Republic, Le Play moved to the right and became a supporter of Louis Napoleon, becoming a member of the Council of State in 1855. A year later he became one of the founders of the International Society for the Applied Study of Social Economy. During the 1850s he belonged to an impressive range of official inquiries, including into the coal industry, housing conditions, the public lottery, Sunday leisure, absentee landlordism, the Parisian baking trade, local government devolution, proof of paternity, and, last but not least, for it was a personal obsession, an investigation into the ill-effects upon the family and national economy of laws limiting a father’s testamentary freedom. Partible inheritance both diminished the moral authority of family patriarchs, allowing younger sons to inherit as a matter of right, and led to a proliferation of dwarf agricultural units. He was an admirer of eighteenth-century English and Russian aristocratic primogeniture.
In the 1860s Le Play was appointed commissioner-general for public international exhibitions, at the time one of the major indices of national prestige. He ensured that awards for industrial relations, with international trades unionists encouraged to comment on the choice of winners, were introduced for the first time at these well-publicised orgies of competitive national display. In 1867 the first prize for excellence in industrial relations went to a Prussian silk and velvet mill that retained workers during slumps, provided free schooling for children, permitted married women to work from home, and provided workers with loans to enable them to purchase smallholdings which would reduce their dependence upon the factory itself. Le Play’s own publishers won a prize for having a sick club and pension scheme, and for selling property to avoid having to make injurious layoffs.66
Le Play believed that moral considerations should always have priority over the merely economic or technical. His annual lecture courses on metallurgy were based on the view that the promoters of technological progress should be constantly aware of its widest human and social consequences, since new technologies were constantly undermining delicate inherited social customs. In the mid-1850s Le Play published a series of monographs on individual working-class families in various European countries that included details of their income and expenditure. He used this information (whose deficient methods are as obvious as the detailed results were impressive) to argue that a more flexible version of the traditional, religious, patriarchal family, where the father had the right to disinherit undeserving children, would best guarantee both order and innovation, security and freedom. He called this the ‘stem’ family, where, after all had competed for paternal approval, one son would inherit and remain the head of a ramified family whose breakaway members would still retain links with the new patriarch. The model of the family was to dominate industry too. Businesses and factories were to be run as extended families in which the employer assumed the role of father and the workforce that of children, Le Play’s answer to the anonymity of modern industrial society.
Of course, Le Play’s campaign against partible inheritance was primarily designed to shore up traditional French rural society, rather than to transpose its structures on to urban conditions. Partible inheritance was leading to de-facto birth control to limit the number of children seeking a slice of the family pie, as well as to the migration to towns and cities of younger sons from economically unviable dwarf-holdings, where they inevitably formed atomised and unstable nuclear families. Catholic ‘familism’ resulted in a number of legislative attempts throughout the Third Republic to penalise celibacy and childlessness, and to encourage ‘familles nombreuses’ with tax breaks.67
The shock of France’s defeat by Prussia and the bloodshed of the Paris Commune gave a fillip to conservative forms of Social Catholicism. The former experience engendered a mood of national soul-searching, while the latter was like a dark red stain that required expiation. Two Catholic aristocrats, comtes Albert de Mun and René de la Tour du Pin, first met in a German internment camp at Aix-la-Chapelle in November 1870, where they read and discussed Emile Keller’s The Church, the State and Liberty. Published in 1865, Keller’s book was an ultra-orthodox defence of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, which was written to confound those (few) French clergy who had been taken aback by the violence of the domestic opposition to the pope’s pronouncements. Keller inveighed against everything represented by the date 1789, and all that stemmed from it, including big government, high finance and industrial concentration. Here he echoed Marx’s notion of progressive immiseration. The much vaunted value of freedom was nothing more than the ‘freedom’ of a rich minority to prosper at the expense of the burgeoning ranks of proletarians who were replacing independent peasants, artisans and shopkeepers. He condemned the money-crazed nineteenth-century bourgeoisie: ‘They have betrayed and sold everything, starting with their own souls, in order to be allowed to continue consuming gold and dividends.’ Only the Church, restored to its freedom, would give the workers real liberty. Keller called for men to come forward who would help re-Christianise society. These ideas became compelling once Mun and La Tour du Pin returned to Paris, where Mun witnessed the bloodshed of the Commune as a military press officer. Seeing a wounded Communard insurgent passing on a stretcher, he felt that ‘Between these rebels and the legal society of which we were the defenders, it seemed that there was a chasm.’ That autumn the two men sought out Maurice Maignen, a lay brother of St Vincent de Paul who ran a club in Montparnasse for young workers. They had been sent there by the military government of Paris that was investigating the causes of the recent explosion of class warfare. Gesturing towards the burned-out Tuileries, Maignen said:
The criminals who burned Paris were not those people…No: the guilty men, the really guilty men, are you…I mean the rich, the great, the fortunate who amused themselves within those ruined walls, who pass by the people, without knowing them, without seeing them, with no feeling for their souls, their needs, or their sufferings…I live with them, and I can tell you on their behalf, they do not hate you, they are as ignorant of you as you of them. Go to them with an open heart and an outstretched hand, and you will find that they understand you.
The two aristocrats and their friends formed an Association of Workingmen’s Clubs to establish them in Paris, Lyons and other cities. By 1878 there were 375 such ‘circles’, with thirty-eight thousand worker members and eight thousand members of the upper-class committees that were an adjunct of them. There was even a branch in Belleville, the epicentre of working-class discontentment, for the clubs were a conservative Catholic response to the republican and socialist clubs that were attracting many workers. Workers administered these clubs, which in addition to common rooms had a chapel and chaplain so as to emphasise their Catholic character. Each club was also to have a committee representing the employers and upper classes, the aim being to encourage the two to bridge the chasm whose existence had inspired the whole enterprise. After the Commune, many in the Catholic upper class had a keen interest in ending such estrangement. Although the clubs were run by an upper-class oligarchy that included aristocrats, army officers and titled ladies, with the workers very much in statu pupillari, it is worth noting their role in alleviating minor iniquities, whether persuading the rich to pay their seamstresses and tailors on time, or encouraging store-owners to provide seats for shop assistants weary of standing.68
These workers’ clubs were very much targeted at bachelor itinerant journeymen. Religion was to insulate them from metropolitan vice until such time as their savings enabled them to achieve economic independence and start a family. As army officers Mun and La Tour du Pin were not especially conversant with the lives of factory workers, who in any event were suspicious of their counter-revolutionary politics and of the paternalism that their schemes represented. The clergy were inherently sceptical about associations of laymen that seemed to bypass parochial and diocesan control.69
This emphasis upon keeping wayward journeymen on the straight and narrow changed when in 1873 Léon Harmel encountered the aristocratic leaders of Social Catholicism while on a pilgrimage to Notre Dame de Liesse. Photographs of Harmel show a straight-backed, carefully barbered member of the French bourgeoisie, with a great domed forehead and sensitive but penetrating dark eyes. Born in 1829, Harmel inherited his father’s concern for the spiritual and material well-being of his workforce in the family woollen thread-spinning enterprise at Val des Bois in the Suippe Valley which the son took over in his mid-twenties. Harmel senior had already created a savings bank for the workers, and a relief fund guaranteeing a sick worker half of his or her salary, free medical care and, when the worst came to the worst, funeral expenses.70 The younger Harmel shared his father’s paternal regard for their workforce, while practising his own austere form of Catholicism, which led him to become celibate following the death of his wife (after she had borne him nine children) and to live in an unostentatious manner, that included giving up smoking. In 1860 he joined the Third Order of St Francis, subsequently supporting its campaigns against freemasons and Jews, whom he–and others–egregiously identified as being responsible for ‘usurious’ capitalism and the rampant anti-Catholicism of the Third Republic.
The Val des Bois factory employed between 375 and 678 people, which meant that it was a relatively large undertaking since in 1906 only 10 per cent of French factories employed more than five hundred workers. Harmel imported families from the devout Belgian Ardennes to act as exemplars for the de-Christianised workers of rural Champagne where his factory stood. Up to forty of his own family were involved in running the factory, being encouraged to participate in the factory council and in an extensive nexus of religious associations that spanned life in the Wooded Valley. In 1862 he built an imposing factory chapel, attendance at which was voluntary. Self-governing religious associations brought adult men, as well as women and minors, back into the Christian fold, and provided an extended network of support at such crucial junctures in family life as births, marriages and funerals. Although Harmel paid below the going rates in the industrial Nord, his workers benefited from his adherence to the letter and the spirit of industrial legislation, at a time when factory inspectors were often retired factory owners, and hence inclined to turn a blind eye to abuses.
Within the notoriously hot and dusty atmosphere of textile factories, Harmel provided washing facilities and a mandatory working temperature of 24 degrees Celsius, in contrast to competitors who were happy to have their workers sweltering in temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius. Men were deployed in tasks that were conventionally given to women, such as washing and dyeing, despite their strength being taxed by the heaviness of wet textiles. Children of both sexes were afforded a decent education and apprenticeships, while all workers benefited from co-operative and savings schemes, company housing, medical care and pension plans. Older workers were kept busy as gardeners and grounds-men into their seventies, at a time when most industrial workers were consigned to the scrap heap at forty-five or fifty when their physical strength was expended. Although none of these things were dependent upon the religious orthodoxy of the beneficiaries, Harmel did try to structure life in a Christian fashion. Families received a supplementary wage according to the number of children, which took away the need to practise crude contraception or abortion. All wages were paid to the designated family head, and moreover were dispensed bimonthly on Mondays, which encouraged employees to spend the money on food, rather than to binge-drink their pay, which had been depressingly frequent when monthly pay was doled out on Saturday evenings, with the ensuing weekend hangovers cancelling out work until Tuesdays. Although the anticlerical government had restored Sunday as a working day in 1880, Harmel forbade it in his factory, and proceeded to abandon work on Saturdays as well, without any appreciable dent in his firm’s profitability during an era when French trade and industry were buffeted by a few decades of liberalisation.71
Harmel was a model Catholic patriarchal employer whose workforce was constantly reminded of Christian values, whether in the form of feasts and festivals, or a disciplinary system that was to be informed by the Christian spirit. Like a Catholic Robert Owen, Harmel had global ambitions for his model factory, hoping that it would become the norm not just in the industrial Nord, but in the industrialising world as a whole. He was an active member of the L’Oeuvre des Cercles Catholiques d’Ouvriers, and of its educational wing the Conseil des Etudes where he argued for his corporatist model against those of La Tour du Pin and Mun. Harmel was also instrumental in the formation of L’Association Catholique des Patrons du Nord, which brought together Catholic employers and which by 1895 had thirty thousand members in 177 enterprises. While some of these employers emulated individual features of Harmel’s model factory, few of them were prepared to adopt such innovations as factory councils, while the majority introduced religion into an industrial context chiefly in order to reinforce their authoritarian grip on the workforce. Harmel was also the originator of a series of worker pilgrimages to Rome that had an important effect on Leo XIII’s pronouncements on social policy, even as they enabled the pope to extend a diplomatic hand to republican France at a time of tensions with Italy. The pilgrimages began in 1885 when a hundred employers claiming to represent workers in every part of France travelled to Rome where they were granted three audiences with the pope. At the last audience he suggested they return with some workers. Two years later the same number of industrialists arrived in Rome, but with fourteen hundred workers and a large contingent of French clergy. Lottery tickets costing a franc a time were used to reduce the vast number of applicants, who benefited from discounted third-class railway fares. The resources of the Vatican were deployed to make the workers’ week in Rome affordable and enjoyable, while rules were relaxed to enable men to meet the Holy Father in overalls, although black silk or wool dresses and a veil were stipulated for working women. So successful was this event that Leo XIII instructed Harmel to return in two years’ time with ten thousand worker pilgrims. Seventeen trains shuttled back and forth between France and Rome for a month to make this huge descent upon the Vatican possible. At the formal audiences with the French workers, Leo XIII emphasised the dignity of labour, recognising the need for state intervention on the workers’ behalf, while strongly condemning any form of class warfare.72
Harmel was one important influence on Leo XIII’s historic pronouncement on the ‘social question’, but he was not alone. Albert de Mun was tireless in his capacity, from 1887 onwards, as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, in advocating industrial and social reform from within the political system. He campaigned for the legalisation of trades unions, conceded in 1884, and for laws restricting female and child labour. He was responsible for the 1898 law on compensation for industrial accidents, the 1905 law which gave assistance to the elderly, the 1906 law that restored the status of Sundays, and the 1910 law on old-age pensions. Sitting with the extreme right in parliament, he rejected both liberalism and socialism as the malign inheritance of the French Revolution. After the Socialist leader Jean Jaurés the second greatest orator in the Chamber, in 1878 Mun castigated the first principles of the Revolution:
Freedom, gentlemen? Where is it then? I hear it spoken of everywhere, but I only see people who confiscate it for their own profit!…Absolute freedom of labour is the formula of the Revolution, the implementation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the economic order…It posits one’s personal interest as motivation for one’s efforts. By depriving the sovereign power of the duty of protection that is the foundation of its right, by suppressing in one fell swoop every tutelary intervention, it has delivered the weak without defence to the mercy of the strong. By creating the individualism that makes the weak and the strong face each other in isolation, and by opening the door to free competition, that is to implacable war, the Revolution is like those gargantuan riverboat duels they have in America: each goes at the top speed that its engines will attain, until they explode and dump crew and passengers. You are the crew! The passengers are France!
As an alternative Mun proposed ‘professional associations’ that were in effect a corporate Catholic alternative to trade unions and employers’ associations. In this he was influenced by his more theoretically inclined friend La Tour du Pin, who had spent time in Austria as a military attaché.
There he was impressed by an influential group of aristocratic Christian Social conservatives around baron Karl von Vogelsang, who from 1879 onwards produced the Austrian Monthly Review for Christian Social Science. Many of these men, like Vogelsang himself, who had emigrated to Austria from Mecklenburg after his business had failed, were converts to Catholicism. They were aided by younger clergy, one of whom became a hand on a barge on the Danube so as to study the lives of stevedores.
These Christian Socials were implacably opposed to the anomic and unjust conditions that modern liberalism was visiting upon such people as Vienna’s trolley drivers, blaming their long hours, it has to be said, on Vienna’s recently emancipated Jewish population, whom they eagerly identified with economic liberalism. Be that as it may, this group were partly responsible for the socially reforming legislation that conservative governments introduced between 1883 and 1888, including restrictions on working hours, industrial safety and the employment of child labour. Returned to France, La Tour du Pin elaborated a corporatist philosophy based on the belief that ‘abuses of power in this world do not get corrected by freedom, but by constraint, when persuasion fails’. The political system was to be refashioned on vocational lines. The base unit would be something resembling Harmel’s factory corporations, which were to be joined by similar bodies for those working in the arts and education, in the public service and in agriculture. The next rung in the hierarchy would consist of regional commissions in which employers and employees were represented, who would elect delegates to a national corporate senate. These delegates were duty bound to consult their corporate constituents constantly, one of the many points at which corporatism differed from representative parliamentary democracy.
In the twentieth century corporatism would act as a bridge between Catholic authoritarians and the Fascist extreme right, which shared their nostalgia for rural social harmony as well as amplifying their antisemitism to include Jews who were not liberal capitalists. But in the France of the 1880s the wider implications of conservative Social Catholicism were more ambiguous. Certainly, corporatism was profoundly anti-democratic, an attempt both to restore the traditional pre-1789 society based on functional orders and to dispense with the bouleversements of the emergent democratic process in favour of consensus and stasis. However, Mun’s contemptuous dismissal of charity–he likened it to ambulances arriving after an accident–signified Catholic recognition that the industrial age required something more than piecemeal benevolence, while the attempt to combine the liberty represented by decentralised bodies with a limited measure of state intervention (regardless of whether that government was dominated by liberal anticlericals) also represented a subtle shift towards irreversible realities.
Industrialisation came significantly later to Germany than to Britain, Belgium or France. The first stretch of railway, from Nuremberg to Fürth, did not open until 1835, and even by the mid-nineteenth century there were only about six thousand kilometres of track. The Ruhr was still predominantly agricultural; in 1846 Krupps of Essen, which would later be synonymous with industrial gigantism, employed a rather modest 142 people.73 This is not to say that there was widespread social distress. British competition wiped out the domestic textiles production that compensated for paltry and poor peasant holdings, while increasing numbers of journeymen found that the trades they had trained in were superfluous. Both groups flooded into cities and towns, which had neither the factory-based industries nor the welfare resources to employ or otherwise support them.
The responses of both Churches in Germany to mass distress were hesitant. Catholics were preoccupied with the political battles they were waging in many states, while Protestants tended to equate poverty with sin. The 1848 Revolution gave both a sharp jolt in the sense that the spectre of ‘Communism’–a term covering many views on the left –induced a limited awareness of what came to be called the ‘social question’.
Protestant charitable associations and institutions existed in considerable profusion before the Revolution–there were 1,680 in Prussia alone in 1847–and many of them included civil servants on their governing boards so as to keep them indirectly under state control. However, the idea of centrally co-ordinating Protestant activity in this field was first broached by Johann Heinrich Wichern, who since 1833 had run a home for delinquent juveniles in Hamburg. At the September 1848 Wittenberg assembly of Protestant churchmen, Wichern spoke of the need for a Home Mission (‘Innere Mission’) whose Central Committee would co-ordinate a broad effort to re-evangelise society–this would include detoxifying it of ‘Communist’ influences–through preaching, urban missions, tracts, domestic visits, as well as the many charitable institutions and organisations already active in Germany.74
Catholic social activity was much more focused on the problems of journeymen at a time of transition between the old economy and the new. Adolf Kolping, a former shoemaker who had been helped to study both classical languages and then theology, established a club for journeymen in Elberfeld in 1846. By 1855, Kolping, who was clearly a remarkable priest, had created 104 such clubs with twelve thousand members in most of Germany’s towns and cities. By 1879 the clubs had nearly eighty thousand members. The clubs were partly boarding houses and partly labour exchanges, but also places where journeymen could learn to read and write, or take further education classes in civics, religion and business. They were initially funded by private donations (and later by small subscriptions) and kept costs low by having the diocesan clergy deal with administration. One of Kolping’s fellow students in Munich had been a Westfalian aristocrat, Wilhelm Emmanuel freiherr von Ketteler, who abandoned a career in the civil service (over the arrest of archbishop Droste-Vischering of Cologne) to become a priest. He served as a delegate to the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848, and became bishop of Mainz in 1850.75
Ketteler’s interest in the ‘social question’ was initially secondary to his concern with the freedom of the Church vis-à-vis the state, and couched in conventional charitable and paternalistic terms. Catholic polemicists, from whom he drew his own ammunition, had little to say about the ‘social question’, concentrating their fire upon the pernicious effects of economic liberalism to which their only known antidote was a revival of the medieval guild system. While this may have had some relevance to the problems of artisans, it had little or nothing to offer industrial workers.76
This emphasis changed when the Catholic Church discovered the maxim ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Hitherto, most German workers had been content with the political tutelage that middle-class liberals exercised on their behalf. While the progressive liberal Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch had helped form four hundred or so workers’ co-operatives, he was also of the view that workers were not ready to participate directly in the political process.77 This view was shared by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, but not by the radical firebrand Ferdinand Lassalle, who in 1863 formed the Allgemeiner Arbeiterverein, the first independent German workers’ party. Lassalle was strongly opposed to the liberals, and rejected Schulze’s schemes for autonomous workers’ co-operatives in favour of the idea that these should be funded by the state. In January 1864 bishop Ketteler wrote anonymously to Lassalle, asking for his help in establishing five productive associations, for which he was prepared to put up fifty thousand florins as capital. Lassalle declined to take the anonymous benefactor up on his offer.
That April Ketteler published a book entitled The Labour Problem and Christianity. This argued that Christianity afforded the only true solution to the ‘social question’, whereby he offered an olive branch to social reformers among conservative Protestants. The bishop used Lassalle’s concept of the ‘iron law of wages’, whereby wages tended to hover on or below the minimum necessary for subsistence, to assail the ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘neo-pagan’ liberalism which was responsible for the imposition of an industrialised form of slavery, from which in antiquity Christianity had once delivered humanity. The attacks on modern liberalism were more substantial than the bishop’s positive proposals, which largely consisted of moralising generalities about the family, the importance of Christian charity and the role of education in Christian values. Only Christianity, he wrote, held the means to improve the condition of the working classes, although his proposals for doing so were on the thin side. Having devoted so much time to assailing liberalism, Ketteler appropriated the idea of producer associations, which he thought could be funded by voluntary contributions along the lines of the Peter’s Pence being collected to support the beleaguered pope. This was as unrealistic as Ketteler’s idea that Christian employers should join with the bishop in establishing artisanal workshops, half of whose profits should be distributed to the workforce.78
Ketteler’s heavily qualified enthusiasm for Lassalle also led to complications. Workers in the Lower Rhineland who attempted to combine Catholicism with membership of Lassalle’s socialist party found themselves refused absolution by local priests. Unsurprisingly, the workers went over the priests’ heads to Ketteler, who after all had championed Lassalle against the Progressive Schulze-Delitzsch. The bishop extracted himself from this delicate position (which might have seen many Catholic workers joining a labour party on the ground that it must have embodied Catholic teaching since its founder had been cited so approvingly by a bishop) by praising the dead Lassalle at the expense of a Party whose ‘evolution’ he condemned. The Party was both anticlerical, to a degree that resembled religious fanaticism, and sympathetic to a Bismarckian ‘Kleindeutsch’ solution to the German Question that would extrude Catholic Austria and reduce German Catholics to a large minority.
Ketteler’s views on the ‘social question’ reflected these political considerations. In November 1865 he addressed the Mainz branch of the Kolping Association, arguing that, as the absolutist Prussian state had often supported key industries, so it should support workers’ associations. In December 1867 he demanded state intervention to limit hours of work and to preserve the special character of Sundays. This did not mean that he had come round to those ‘statist’ parts of Lassalle’s programme that he had earlier rejected. On the contrary, in the last years of the 1860s a new ‘Christian socialism’ began to gain ground among clerics in Aachen and Essen in the Cologne diocese that was explicitly hostile not just towards liberalism but also to the increasing influence of Marx upon socialism in Germany. Marx was sufficiently troubled by this to mention it in a letter to Engels: ‘I convinced myself that energetic action must be taken against the clerics, particularly in the Catholic areas. I shall work in this vein in the International. Where it appears viable, the rogues are flirting with workers’ problems (e.g. Ketteler in Mainz, the clerics at the Düsseldorf Congress etc.).’
Ketteler took up the problems of industrial society in an address in the summer of 1869 to a gathering, which included many cigar workers, to celebrate the opening of a shrine church near Offenbach. In this address, Ketteler condemned the concentration of money-power and the corresponding weakening of an atomised workforce. He commended English-style trade unions and justified the right to strike for higher wages, with the caveat that without the adoption of moderation and thrift ever higher wages would simply be an excuse to indulge in more drink. The state would do little to stop this process because it derived tax revenues from the proliferation of pubs. Ketteler also denounced Sunday working and the employment of women and children which was undermining the family. He warned the workers against the fantastic schemes of the socialists, recommending that they pay heed to the respect shown to religion by their British counterparts:
Even though the English working class was in worse shape than the German, so far as the dire consequences of modern economic philosophy are concerned, the efforts to organise the working class in England are vastly superior to our own. That is due first and foremost to the great respect shown in England toward the significance of religion in solving social problems. In Germany, on the other hand, the spokesmen of labour make a public display of their hatred for religion.79
In the summer of 1869 Ketteler visited various parishes in the vicinity of Frankfurt so as to report on the ‘worker question’ to the Fulda bishops’ conference that September. At the conference he acknowledged that there was no going back from industrial society, which brought such ‘blessings’ as increased production. However, the problem was how to soften the impact of these changes upon the workers. There was a certain self-interest here, for in a remarkable acknowledgement of realities Ketteler claimed that it would soon be necessary to send missionaries to people who had reverted to being heathens. Partly informed by factory legislation in England, he called for laws to deal with several abuses. There should be statutory minimum ages for child workers in various sectors, together with adequate provision for their education. Young girls were not to be employed in factories at all. Laws should limit hours of work, and ensure observance of the sabbath. A factory inspectorate would improve health and safety, while workers were to be entitled to accident insurance. Workers’ associations were to be legally recognised. Turning to his clerical auditors he suggested that in future some priests should be trained in political economy, and that those posted to industrial areas should be competent to act as apostles of peace between employers and workers. Ketteler’s colleagues listened with polite interest, and then did nothing, although his nephew, count Ferdinand von Galen (the father of the famous bishop who opposed the Nazis), tried to introduce Germany’s first social policy legislation in 1877. By contrast, enormous energy went into the simultaneous defence of the papacy, as when Pius IX was presented with a congratulatory address from Catholic Germany signed by a quarter of a million people and bound in twenty-three leather volumes, together with a gift of a million francs.
III RERUM NOVARUM AND AFTER
Social Catholicism was one of the influences upon both the Ralliement, discussed in Chapter 7 above, and Leo XIII’s 15 March 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum. Both effectively recognised that the Church could not pursue its overall goal of re-Christianising society if politically it was exclusively identified with the intransigent right, and with social and economic privilege. The encyclical managed the considerable feat of condemning the more vicious characteristics of contemporary capitalism, while repeatedly excoriating the utopian ‘solutions’ of the socialists. It also had important things to say on the role of the state as well as private associations of citizens in achieving a more just society.
Subtitled ‘rights and duties of capital and labour’, Rerum novarum began by emphasising the importance of the ‘social question’: ‘The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and rulers of nations are all busied with it–actually there is no question which has taken deeper hold on the public mind.’ Much of this discussion filtered into the encyclical, whose detailed proposals consisted of more than nostalgic pious generalities, and reflected the fact that the pope had previously indicated his concern with economic and social questions on several occasions.80
The pope was keenly aware of the topicality of industrial conflict, which in 1886 led to strikes and bloodshed in the industrial regions of Belgium, a country he had known as a nuncio. He may have mentioned medieval guilds and fraternities, but the encyclical was informed by industrial society in the late nineteenth century. He was cognisant of the discussions at the Catholic Congresses of Liége which were held in the wake of the Belgian disturbances from 1886 onwards, and of the private discussions of the Fribourg Union, a group of corporatist opponents of modern liberalism from Austria, Belgium, France, Italy and Switzerland who met for a week each year to discuss Catholic solutions to social questions.81 Leo XIII had an audience with nine of its members in 1888 and two years later made its convener a cardinal. Further afield, Leo refrained from joining the Canadian bishops in condemning the American Knights of Labour, a large union whose membership and president were Catholics, not only because the union enjoyed the support of the US hierarchy, but because they indicated how Catholicism might flourish in a modern democracy. He also did nothing to impede Britain’s cardinal Manning when he successfully and very visibly mediated in the 1889 London dock strike.
The encyclical steered a careful but steady course despite the passions of the day. While the pope condemned ‘crafty agitators’ who sought to exploit ‘the poor man’s envy of the rich’, and dismissed socialism for its ‘pleasant dreams’ of an ideal equality which would in reality mean ‘the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation’, he also inveighed against ‘the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition’ which had enabled ‘a small number of very rich men…to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery’. The modern rich were not especially happy; rather, through greed and the quest for sensation, they risked becoming ‘a void of self-restraint miserable in the midst of abundance’.
The pope constantly reiterated the importance of private property and of the family, while he categorically rejected the claim that class conflict was either endemic or inevitable. In reality the various classes were inter-dependent: ‘capital cannot do without labour, nor labour without capital’.
The twentieth clause dealt with the mutual obligations of employers and employees. It is noteworthy that the former received far greater attention. Employers were to respect the dignity of labour, never forgetting that men are not machines whose powers were to be exhausted ad infinitum. To treat men in such a fashion would be ‘truly shameful and inhuman’, as would the exploitation of children or women in tasks for which they were unsuited and which would prejudice both their development and the well-being of the family. Employers were duty bound to ensure that workers had time for both their religious observances and a fulfilling home and family life. Wages were to be fair rather than reflections of the iron laws of free-market economics; to defraud people of wages (a not uncommon occurrence) was ‘a great crime which cries out to the avenging anger of heaven’. In keeping with the encyclical’s capacity to see things in a long continuum, Leo argued that wages were to be sufficiently generous as to facilitate modest saving, which would conduce to a more equitable and widespread distribution of property that would in turn benefit society. More general ownership of property would bridge the gap between rich and poor, enhance productivity and stem the tides of desperate migrants. However, these benefits of wider property ownership would be vitiated by ‘excessive taxation’.
Recalling that ‘civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions’, Leo argued that the future lay in a ‘return to Christian life and Christian institutions’. For over a thousand years the Church had practised charity, as even its bitterest critics grudgingly acknowledged. However, the time had come for the state to lend a helping hand with ‘general laws’, but without undue interference in spheres, notably the family, where it had no business. One of the functions of the state was to ensure that the workers, who made the greatest contribution to any nation’s wealth, should share in the benefits, and receive decent clothing, housing and health care. However, the pope was careful to retain and encourage spaces for initiatives from individuals and associations, whether charitable, co-operative or, and here was the biggest departure, in the form of both mixed employer and employee and exclusively working-class associations and trade unions. Since some unions were working to covert political agendas, Catholics were urged to form their own unions in which the rights of religion would be respected. The state had no business in prohibiting man’s natural right to private association. Leo took the opportunity to condemn those contemporary governments, notably that of France, which permitted trade unions while simultaneously prohibiting religious confraternities, societies and orders.
Although much of this seems uncontroversial nowadays, except to the most dogmatic socialist or free-marketeer, at the time it was considered highly radical. Speaking a year later, Albert de Mun recalled:
Do you remember the tremendous surprise the encyclical caused to all who like to look on the Church as only a sort of gendarme in the service of bourgeois society, and to all the comfortably off who were scandalized when they heard the highest authority in the world sanction ideas and doctrines which hitherto they had regarded as fatally subversive?82
The first episcopal response to the encyclical came from Victor Doutreloux, archbishop of Liége in Belgium. This was partly because the encyclical had caused divisions between the ruling conservative Catholic Party (which dominated Belgian politics from 1880 to 1919) and the Democratic Belgium League (with a separate organisation in Flanders), both of which sought to give the workers a voice by infiltrating their views into the Catholic Party. While in some areas these conservative and democratic Catholics co-operated against the liberals and socialists, elsewhere their bitter rivalry gave their opponents victory. The conservative Catholics turned to archbishop Doutreloux for support against their democratic Catholic opponents. Both the archbishop and cardinal Goosens rejected their implorations, telling Catholic industrialists to fall in with the spirit of Rerum novarum. Thanks to the rearguard action fought by Catholic Party leader Charles Woeste, it was not until 1907 that the ideas of the democratic ‘Young Right’ made an impact on the Party. Depressed by these delays, the priest who led the Flemish branch of the Young Right formed his own Christian People’s Party that succeeded in leaching votes away from the socialists. Both the Church and the Catholic Party crushed this development, with the result that the Flemish workers were lost to the socialists.83
The encyclical encouraged Catholics to concern themselves with social questions, while the Ralliement raised the question of how they were to engage with the political system. What is often called the ‘second’ Christian Democracy (to distinguish it from the ‘first’ of 1848) was influenced by the conservative criticisms of liberalism and socialism associated with the names Albert de Mun and Le Play, but at the same time rejected their hierarchical and paternalist view of society. They accorded the state a certain right to intervene in industrial affairs, and supported the creation of exclusively working-class unions and participation in factory decision-making. They also accepted the Republic and sometimes participated in its political life. For example, the abbés Gayraud and Lamire were elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the 1890s.84 Other initiatives in the late 1890s included mixed unions consisting of employers and workers, and a group of Catholic industrialists who sought to moralise commerce, by restricting purchases of goods to firms which won approval in the group’s annual report, incidentally and indirectly resulting in the first antisemitic boycott in modern European history. The Association of French Catholic Youth, which had been founded in 1886, decided to open its ranks to young peasants and workers in 1896, becoming the first national socially mixed Catholic organisation in French history.
Léon Harmel organised worker study groups in the Rheims area, followed by the first national Christian worker congresses, which were held in Rheims and Lyons between 1893 and 1900. These congresses insisted upon the sanctity of religion, the family, and private property, while arguing that laws should conform to the Ten Commandments and the Gospels. They also lobbied for the protection of Sundays, a ten-hour working day, the protection of small enterprises and the abolition of night work. In 1896 the congresses were renamed Congress of Christian Democracy. It was also decided to establish a political party whose allegiance would be republican and popular in orientation. While the former signified a break with legitimism, the latter did not signify an exclusive subscription to democracy. Only by isolating a single strand within this movement can it be regarded as the ancestor of post-Second World War ‘Christian Democracy’.85
Localised and subject to the influence of myriad minor newspapers, Christian Democracy was regarded with suspicion in various quarters, sometimes for entirely justifiable reasons. Albert de Mun thought it was detaching the workers from the guiding reins of the socially conscious upper classes. Industrialists disliked its sponsorship of exclusively working-class trades unions, of which the first, formed in 1899, soon grew to over six hundred thousand members. The French hierarchy also disapproved of the anti-masonic, anti-Protestant and antisemitic enthusiasms of many Christian Democrats, as manifested in the ‘France for the French’ slogans that graced many of their newspapers, notably La France Libre. Christian Democracy was also supported by the Assumptionist organ La Croix, one of France’s largest daily newspapers, and one of the worst exponents of the conspiracy explanation of the Third Republic. Cardinal Couillé was among those to prohibit his priests from joining Christian Democracy because of its antisemitism. The Dreyfus Affair led to the outflow of many Christian Democrats to the nationalist extreme right, while the aged pope’s 1901 encyclical Graves de communire set limits to the flirtation of Christian Democrats not only with the left but with any one political system. Leo implicitly and obliquely endorsed the suspicions of ‘many excellent men’ regarding Christian Democracy:
It seems by implication covertly to favour popular government and to disparage other methods of political administration. Secondly, it appears to belittle religion by restricting its scope to care of the poor, as if the other sections of society were not of its concern. More than that, under the shadow of its name there might easily lurk a design to attack all legitimate power, either civil or sacred.
Leo reasserted the Church’s traditional agnosticism towards political forms so long as they were in harmony with morality and justice. It condemned class warfare and fraternisation with socialists, and warned against an over-emphasis upon social justice at the expense of traditional Christian charity. Only initiatives that were firmly embedded in the Church’s own hierarchy would henceforth receive his favour.86
Even as the hierarchy sought to rein in the trade unionist and party political elements in Christian Democracy, so its banner passed to the Catholic youth movement. A charismatic young Catholic former army officer called Marc Sangnier founded a spiritual study group which took its name from a journal called Le Sillon (The Furrow). An admirer described Sangnier’s ability to attract people ‘as the fingers of the bird-charmer attract the sparrows’; a rather disillusioned François Mauriac wrote of ‘the disarranged necktie, the untidy hair, the rather coarse mouth set in a heavy face, the enormous neck, and the flabby cheeks, always badly shaven’. From 1899 onwards the Sillon brought together artisans, clerks, middle-class students and workers, as friends rather than as patrons and clients, the idea being that class differences would dissolve in Christian fellowship. Its ends were rather vague, largely consisting of an unending spiritual journey. As an ‘immaterial link between souls’ the Sillon had no membership dues or lists of who belonged, no formalities and no rules, so people seem to have come and gone as they chose.
It attracted wider notice when the group began to hold mass meetings, which were attended by hecklers and toughs from the markets at Les Halles, drawn to such confrontational theatrics as having Sangnier debate with an apostate priest. In 1901 the Sillon acquired a Young Guard, with boxing skills, black berets, white shirts and black ties, which only confirms that Christian fellowship was in short supply in France at the turn of the century.87 It must be the only paramilitary outfit in modern history whose remit was ‘to enforce respect for freedom of speech and debate’. To add to its confusion, the Young Guard’s rituals were based on those of medieval military religious orders, whose spirit was certainly not characterised by either of the foregoing values. About ten thousand young people probably joined the various regional groups, whose aim was to produce a socially conscious Catholic elite, derived from all classes, who would go out to serve the entire unredeemed community. This elite would be selected rather than elected, for Sangnier’s vision of the political future was of a meritocratic worker elite presiding over a society consisting of voluntary associations like trades unions. In the early 1900s the Sillon attempted to develop from being a Christian ginger group into a new, mould-breaking political party that would break through the anticlerical republican bloc and the bloc of Catholic anti-republicans. Its ideology seems rather confused: a self-professed elite that condemned capitalism and regarded democracy as ‘the social organisation which tends to maximise the conscience and civic responsibility of each individual’, and a Catholic organisation that extended the hand of friendship to freethinkers and Protestants.
The increasing politicisation of the Sillon led a growing number of French bishops to forbid their priests to join it. On 25 August 1910 pope Pius X wrote to the French hierarchy condemning Sangnier’s claim that Catholics only owed obedience in matters of faith and the Sillon’s pretensions to exemption from ecclesiastical hierarchies. Lest anyone mistake his views, Pius added:
This limpid and rushing stream has been captured in the course of its forward flow by the modern enemies of the Church, to form henceforth nothing more than a miserable tributary to the great modern movement of apostasy organised in all countries with the aim of establishing a universal Church that will have neither dogma, hierarchy, nor rules for spiritual life, that will put no check on man’s passions, and that, under the pretext of liberty and human dignity, would bring about in the world, did it but triumph, the legal rule of trickery and force, and the oppression of the weak and of those who toil and suffer.
After a brief period of submission, Sangnier devoted himself to purely political activities, becoming a deputy immediately after the First World War.
IV ’COURT PREACHER TO ALL GERMANS’
As in the 1813–15 wars of liberation against Napoleon, so in 1870–1 the god of war had turned the tide of battle in favour of Germans of a Protestant persuasion. Bismarck’s victories over Austria and France were widely regarded as triumphs for Protestantism, rather than superior generalship and weaponry. As the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung crowed, the war was ‘a victory of the loyal subject over Revolution, of heavenly order against anarchy, of the virtuous powers over the immorality of the flesh, of hierarchical rule over popular sovereignty’. In such circles it followed that the newly founded German Reich would be based on a clear self-understanding as an emphatically Christian, Protestant German state. This was hyperbolic since the new Reich consisted of twenty-five federal states (some of which were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic in composition), while there were twenty-eight autonomous Protestant Churches, some of them very reluctant to be absorbed by Prussia’s Old Union.
An attempt to achieve the ecclesiastical equivalent of national unification in October 1871 by uniting the autonomous Protestant Churches ended in disarray and disunion. Nor did the undoubted upsurge of militant patriotism translate into an equivalent upsurge in religious enthusiasm, partly, it should be said, because the Protestant triumphalism was tempered by calls for atonement and warnings that national arrogance had brought down Napoleon III.88 Not only did Bismarck and the ascendant National Liberals refuse to accord the Protestant Churches the central position some of the pastors craved. Worse, during the Kulturkampf, the liberals’ anticlerical animus seeped from the Roman Catholics to the Prussian–conservative–Protestant establishment, whose traditional values they wished their own individualistic creed would displace. The major flashpoints between liberals and Protestants were over the introduction of civil marriage, and attempts to prise the pastors’ grip from teachers in elementary and secondary schools. There were also worrying signs of defection from the Protestant Churches which contributed to their mood of epochal decline. In the new capital, Germany’s largest industrial city, only two-thirds of children born to Protestant parents were being baptised, while only a quarter of Protestant couples eligible to marry in church did so, after the introduction of civil marriage in October 1874. The Protestant Churches seemed mired in the agrarian past, at a time when they needed to win over the urban bourgeoisie and the toiling masses, a chronic failing of German conservatism in general.
One of those to be appalled by these signs of religious indifference was the Court preacher Adolf Stoecker, who had risen from a humble rural smithy to become a military chaplain during the Franco-Prussian War. His solid face, immaculately groomed whiskers and piggy eyes suggest a certain Teutonic determination. Rather coarsely, Bismarck observed that ‘his gob is like a sword’. Stoecker was vehemently opposed to the Social Democrats, continuing to regard them as an unpatriotic, revolutionary Party long after such a description disregarded the reformist facts. However, his main animus was directed at ‘Manchester liberalism’, and the Jews he held responsible for it, a claim that was untroubled by the likes of Adam Smith. Liberal individualism was undermining a God-given ethical and political order; while the rapacious capitalism that accompanied it was responsible for the advent of revolutionary socialism. Jews, he claimed, were over-represented among prominent liberals and socialists.
Stoecker was not, however, simply an antisemitic cum anti-socialist agitator. He was convinced that ‘Germany’s misfortune is the impotence of the Evangelical spirit’. Rather than shoring up the decrepit alliance of throne and altar, he wanted to make the ‘people’s Church’ truly independent of the state, so that it could then exercise powerful moral leadership over both state and nation. The Church, in turn, should concentrate on consolidating its activist core, largely through charitable work for the Inner Mission network, whose example would then draw in the far larger number of nominal Protestants in the population. This was ambitious, given the rather paltry results Stoecker achieved when he turned from running Berlin’s City Mission and his duties at Court to active politics.
On 3 January 1878 Stoecker held a meeting in a pub called the Eiskeller to recruit working-class socialist Berliners to a new Christian Social Workers’ Party.89 After a stuttering performance by a renegade socialist, Stoecker gave an impassioned speech in which he attacked liberalism and socialism, while calling for comprehensive social reform and enjoining the workers to turn to Christianity. Johannes Most, a fiery Social Democrat orator, immediately retorted: ‘The days of Christianity are numbered and one can only respond to the priests with the cry: make your peace with heaven, your hour has run its course.’90 Stoecker essayed a few further meetings, which invariably concluded with rival renditions of the Internationale and the Lutheran hymn ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott’.
Stoecker drew up the programme of the Christian Social Workers’ Party with the aid of professor Adolph Wagner. Article 1 declared that the Party ‘is founded on the Christian faith and upon love of King and Country’. It advocated national workers’ co-operatives, compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes, comprehensive and compulsory welfare arrangements, the reintroduction of laws against usury, and progressive income and inheritance taxes, as well as the eradication of all ‘coarseness’ from entertainment and the cultivation of family life in the Christian spirit.91
When Stoecker’s Party did conspicuously badly in the July 1878 Reichstag elections, winning a mere 1,422 votes, or less than the sum total of the Party’s membership, he shifted his attentions from workers to artisans, shopkeepers and small farmers outside the ambit of the traditional conservatives. In September 1879 he was elected to the Prussian House of Deputies, and two years later to the Reichstag, while his Christian Socials (the word Workers was quietly dropped) became a populist adjunct to the Conservative Party.
Stoecker sought to appeal to this social constituency by attacking the Jews as, to adapt the leading Borussian historian Treitschke’s contemporary aspersion, the architects of their misfortune.92 But the message also appealed to other constituencies. Like Treitschke, Stoecker did much to make antisemitism respectable, especially since the students whose minds he poisoned would go on to become civil servants, doctors, lawyers, judges, professors and so forth. Antisemitism became institutionally embedded in such lobby groups as the Agrarian League or the DHV which represented commercial employees. With malicious subtlety Stoecker spoke on the theme of ‘Our demands on modern Judaism’, parodying the Jews’ own emancipatory demands, while enjoining the Jews to exercise more equality, modesty and tolerance towards a Christian society which, having lost their own faith, they allegedly wished to subvert. His attacks on the wealthiest and most influential Jews, notably Bismarck’s banker Gerson Bleichröder, irritated the ruling elites.93 Bismarck regarded Stoecker as a nuisance whose politics were driven by obscure ecclesio-political urges. ‘I have nothing against Stoecker,’ he wrote to crown prince Wilhelm; ‘in my eyes he has only one failing as a politician, that he is a priest, and as a priest, that he pursues politics.’ That did not inhibit the chancellor from offering Stoecker tacit support in the 1881 Berlin elections since the Christian Socials and their antisemitic allies promised to weaken support in the capital for the Progressive liberals. Stoecker was closely connected to such notorious racial antisemites as Wilhelm Marr (an atheist), Bernhard Förster (mobilising signatories for Marr’s 1880 antisemitic petition), Otto Glagau, Ernst Henrici and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg. The concerns of these racial antisemites began to figure amid Stoecker’s cultural, economic and political reasons for opposing the emancipation of the Jews, up to and including talk of ‘parasites’ contaminating German blood or a sinister credulity towards tales of blood libel. Leading Protestants, as well as the Catholic leader Windthorst, denounced Stoecker’s antisemitic demagoguery, which in some places resulted in anti-Jewish riots.
Stoecker’s oft-rehearsed role in the dismal history of modern German Protestant antisemitism (which was far more consequential to the electoral basis of Nazism than the better publicised failings of the Roman Catholic Church) has largely occluded his indirect contribution to the expectation that, for reasons of Christian humanity as well as to emasculate the socialists, the state should guarantee certain minimal rights to the most distressed sectors of society. An extraordinarily advanced welfare policy, whatever its many limitations, was the sugared analogue of the stick represented by the 1878–90 Anti-Socialist Laws. An Evangelical Christian from Stoecker’s milieu was one of the most important advisers to Bismarck when he introduced the social insurance legislation of the 1880s, including the Sickness Insurance Law of 1883, the Accident Insurance Law of 1884, and the Old Age and Disability Insurance Law of 1889. Bismarck himself referred to this legislation as ‘practical Christianity’ and Stoecker regarded it as the implementation of Christian Social policy.
Relations between Stoecker and traditional conservatives cooled once the latter realised that the passions he was arousing were inherently unstable. In 1890 the Higher Consistory of the Grand Duchy of Hessen had to admonish young clergy to refrain from aiding and abetting antisemitic candidates in elections. Stoecker was stirring up expectations that no government could satisfy, something that applied to many of the other noisy nationalist pressure groups that proliferated in that era. His supporters were also destabilising the traditional elite domination of conservative party politics. His Christian Social organisation, which had become indispensable to the mobilisation of electoral support for the conservatives, began to dominate conservative party congresses, successfully inserting an explicitly antisemitic statement into the 1892 Tivoli conservative programme, against the wishes of the notable elites who had hitherto controlled party affairs.94
The accession of kaiser Wilhelm II in February 1890 seemed to Stoecker an opportune moment to revive his reforming social agenda. This had become urgent since in that year Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation was due to expire, while the Ruhr coalfields witnessed a viciously fought miners’ strike.
In May 1890 Stoecker summoned eight hundred Protestant pastors to an Evangelical–Social Congress. The Congress discussed virtually every aspect of the social question in debates that were impressively informed but which appalled traditional conservatives who wanted no reform at all. Three major groupings evolved in the wider context of ‘Pastors’ Socialism’. First, there were older Christian Socials, including Stoecker, who wanted a populist conservative, but non-governmental, movement of social reform based on virulent anti-socialism. Secondly, there were Social Liberals, like the historian Adolf von Harnack, who desired a sober discussion of social realities and of how the Christian ethic might humanise modern industrial society. Finally, there was a group of Young Christian Socials, exemplified by the pastors Paul Göhre, author of a bestseller about his three months as a factory hand, and Friedrich Naumann, who sought an accommodation with the revisionist wing of the Social Democrats. The latter were in the process of abandoning the Party’s infantile Marxist revolutionism in order to come to terms with the economic realities of the 1890s while seeking to widen the Party’s base beyond working-class ghettos.
In 1894, following a survey of a thousand rural pastors, the Young Christian Social Paul Göhre and Max Weber sharply criticised conditions in the agrarian east of Germany, thereby endangering the old operational alliance of landowner and pastor. The emperor, whose views on industrial relations were increasingly being shaped by Karl Freiherr von Stumm-Halberg and the higher consistory of the Protestant Church in Berlin, banned clergy and theologians from any further interventions in the field of social policy. They had a point since the Young Christian Socials were compromising the political neutrality of the Churches through their amateurish and biased interventions in politics and attempted arrogation of the role of umpire in social conflicts, although one should equally acknowledge that the Church authorities themselves were as correspondingly political in the sense of being vehemently anti-socialist defenders of the status quo.
Having already been dismissed from his Court position, Stoecker was expelled from the conservative party in February 1896 over the so-called Scheiterhaufenbrief or ‘funeral pyre letter’. A year before, the Social Democrats had made public a highly embarrassing letter that Stoecker had written to the editor of the conservative Kreuzzeitung in 1888, whose gist was the need to sow the fires of discord between Bismarck and Wilhelm so that the latter would blow up like a bonfire and dismiss the chancellor, as indeed occurred when the German pilot was unceremoniously dropped two years later. But by 1895, when the letter was published, the cult of the former chancellor was in full swing, and Stoecker’s stock was low. Having decided to abandon his initial flirtation with reform, Wilhelm leaked a letter that announced: ‘Christian Socialism is nonsense and leads to presumptuousness and impatience. The clerical gentlemen should concern themselves with the souls of their parishioners, and leave politics alone, since it doesn’t concern them.’ Stoecker attempted to form an independent Christian Social Party in Frankfurt, but it was not a success. Naumann and forty-four of his clerical associates left the Church to form a separate National Social Association, and to engage fully in politics, which although a pastor himself he thought no longer had nothing to do with religion.95
Outsiders, who are routinely deaf to the nuances of religion in Germany, are often perplexed as to how Nazism could have taken root in a Christian nation, without over-troubling themselves with the question whether one part of that proposition is true. The story of Stoecker shows the extent to which Protestantism had become polluted with antisemitism and chauvinism, at the expense of traditional Christian values. But that is only half of the story, for nominal Protestants were hardly impressed by Adolf Stoecker. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Protestant middle classes in Germany had largely distanced themselves from the Churches, viewing them coolly as survivals from a world that had passed. They were no longer even necessary to the maintenance of external social respectability, which could just as easily be accrued from attendance at a classical concert or public lecture. Enormous credulity was shown towards a vulgar scientism; theology, once among the most topical of subjects, only sparked any interest when it touched on history or philosophy. Of course, that does not mean that their very being was not deeply influenced by residual Christian values. They believed, passionately, in the absolute value of the individual, in the vital role of individual conscience, in moral responsibility and in a sense of duty, whether to family, society or their country. The inner space they cultivated so assiduously and earnestly may have been increasingly informed by art or science, but an inner space it remained, a notion meaningless to outright materialists. Their sense of patriotic duty was also shaped by a religious exaltation of the German nation, into which fed the influences of the ‘national’ reformer Luther, an idealist Prussian–Protestant veneration of the state, vulgar anti-Catholicism and a militarism as informed by Christianity as that of late-Victorian England: for after 1914 ‘Gott mit uns’ proved as much a rallying cry as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.
A militant materialism may have characterised the leading lights of the Social Democratic Party, but attempts to induce the rank and file actively to renounce the Churches were spectacularly unsuccessful, partly because this would result in domestic trouble with wives who were often conventionally religious. Again, the world of socialism was not so free of the grasp of the Churches as it pretended. The guiding vision of the collapse of capitalism and the advent of a classless, ideal society owed a great deal to Christian eschatology. As Friedrich Naumann recognised, the power of socialism was in no small measure due to the fact that ‘this doctrine is in a position to create a mood, which is similar to the mood in many religious sects, which put all their hopes in a great day of wrath and joy, and which bravely winds its way through daily life, because the morning star of the thousand year Reich is already in the heavens’. Aside from the ultimate vision, the comrades’ world was informed by a high sense of moral purpose and self-sacrifice, by absolute adhesion to a set of incontrovertible dogmas, as relayed by the Party prophets with the aid of sacred screeds, and by a radical intolerance of any heretical, let alone opposed, point of view. Miners’ choirs and the like were secular surrogates; the Internationale was sung to the tune of a well-known Christmas hymn. The Party did especially well in overwhelmingly Protestant regions, achieving 55 per cent of the 1912 poll in Saxony, 40.4 per cent in Schleswig-Holstein, and almost 50 per cent in Brandenburg. Whatever the Protestant Churches were failing to supply to the workers by way of community, meaning and ultimate purpose was being provided by the living witness of an avowedly atheist political party. How much more susceptible might they, and their fellow countrymen, be if that party was truly indistinguishable from a religion?
If the record of nineteenth-century German Protestantism in the field of social policy is unimpressive, as it was almost bound to be given Protestantism’s involvements with the conservative political Establishment, what of the Roman Catholics? Industrialisation and urbanisation threatened the homogeneity of Catholic Germany by fostering solidarities between workers, whatever their confessional or political backgrounds. Moreover, the desire of Catholics for equality and parity of esteem in a society dominated by Protestants, could also lead to working-class Catholics demanding the same from the wealthier and more powerful members of their own community. On a theoretical level, there were two kinds of Catholic response to the social evils attendant upon industrialisation. One was to hark back to the supposed harmonies of medieval society through an updated form of corporatism, which would steer a middle course between liberal individualism and socialist collectivism, or between the ‘power of money without religion’ and ‘power of workers without religion’ as Catholic contemporaries put it. The other approach was to accept current realities, smoothing their harder edges through a combination of state intervention and the legalisation of workers’ associations and the right to strike. Although the former tendency remained a powerful undercurrent in some quarters, in practice the latter, with its implicit acceptance of the market (albeit with its inevitable excesses curbed by Catholic moral philosophy, the state and powerful subsidiary associations), eventually set the pace.96
In 1877 a nephew of bishop Ketteler, count Maximilian Gereon Galen, introduced in the Reichstag a petition that combined such detailed measures as protection of the right to work and Sundays as a time of rest, with neo-medieval corporatist solutions to the atomistic individualism of modern industrial society. More significantly, the Catholics rose to the challenge that Social Democracy represented to their urban working-class constituency. In 1879 Franz Brandts, a reform-minded textile manufacturer in Mönchengladbach, and the priest Franz Hitze formed Worker Welfare, an attempt to copy Léon Harmel’s French fusion of paternalism and piety. This was explicitly designed to combat the influence of the Social Democrats upon Catholic workers. So too were the associations of Catholic workers that proliferated during the 1880s in the industrial regions of the Prussian Rhineland provinces and Silesia. In 1889 there were 168 of these associations, by 1906 some 656 with 114,613 members. Each association was led by a priest, an arrangement that ensured they were closely tied to the interests and outlook of the Church. Their goal was to neutralise ‘class’ consciousness by emphasising the ethical–professional aspects of each craft. In the 1890s the local branches came together in larger regional associations for each point of the compass. These regional groupings developed their own workers’ press, the Westdeutsche Arbeiterzeitung achieveing a circulation of two hundred thousand.
Parallel with these workers’ associations, the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland was designed to promote parity of representation for Catholics in both state and society in the wake of the Kulturkampf. It was open to Catholics of all social classes, with the membership set at a token one mark so as to encourage the poorest. Membership grew from an initial one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand by the eve of the First World War. It published a newspaper and pamphlets that discussed current issues from a Catholic perspective, while its seminars and meetings helped train future generations of Catholic leaders. Its importance lay in democratising the political culture of German Catholicism as well as expanding its horizons beyond the Church–state conflicts of the Kulturkampf era.97
The nationwide miners’ strike in 1889 saw the formation of trade unions, whose wider orientation both socialists and non-socialist workers sought to dominate. When the Catholic miners effectively lost this battle, they established their own confessional union. Since Catholic workers were too weak to combat socialist influence, in 1894 they joined with Protestant workers to form the first inter-confessional trade union founded by August Brust in Essen. These unions were anti-socialist, nationalist, monarchist and conservative, and both pastors and priests gave them their support. The fact that they could and did resort to strikes and were increasingly led by laymen appalled those of a more traditional cast of mind. Integral Catholics based in Berlin and Trier spent the next decade opposing inter-confessional unions and any workers’ representation that transcended branches for each specific craft. Their vision was of workers loyal to their employers and obedient to their priests. The fact that the Christian trade unions were under lay, working-class, rather than clerical, control, and that they could and did resort to strikes, bulked as large in integralist criticisms as the unions’ retreat from the Church’s insistence upon an essentially moral message. To that end, integralists supported the creation of Craft Associations within the existing Catholic Workers’ Associations, thereby attempting to ensure the continued influence of clergy and employers. A bitter ‘trade union dispute’ broke out between the two types of worker representation, with the Catholic hierarchy largely ranged on the side of the Craft Associations.98 Almost despite itself, the Catholic Church clung on to a significant working-class membership, with about 350,000 workers belonging to the Christian trade unions. The numbers involved in exclusively Protestant trade unions were about fifty thousand. That the Catholic trade unions constituted a mere 14 per cent of the total membership of socialist unions, who also included eight hundred thousand Catholics in their ranks, suggests the scale of the problem they faced. Nonetheless, despite the continued adhesion of the Catholic community to its Church and the practice of a rather kitschy form of religiosity, it is striking that in many respects German Catholics had negotiated the journey to a modern, pluralistic world rather better than their Protestant neighbours, whose failure to adapt was symbolised by the career of Adolf Stoecker. His rabble-rousing fusion of Christianity and antisemitism was one harbinger of what was to come, though there were worshippers of strange gods whose tidings would win followings in the aftermath of the Great War, the source of the Durkheimian ‘effervescence’ out of which Fascism and Nazism would flow.