One of the best-known news photographs of early twentieth-century Britain is a picture of a small, elegantly dressed woman, her feet well off the ground, being carried upright away from the gates of Buckingham Palace on 21 May 1914 by a large, burly policeman in a cap, her mouth open perhaps in protest, perhaps in pain. The woman was Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), and she had been attempting to present to King George V a petition in favour of women’s right to vote. Always respectable in appearance – ‘beauty and appropriateness in her dress and household appointments,’ one of her daughters commented, ‘seemed to her at all times an indispensable setting to public work’ – she had already had many brushes with the police as a result of the vigorous and often illegal campaign she had been waging for female suffrage. On this occasion she was hauled off – and not for the first time – to the women’s jail at Holloway. Pankhurst always claimed that she was predestined to be a revolutionary because she had been born on Bastille Day, although her birthday was actually a day later, on 15 July 1858; she counted Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution among her favourite books (it ‘remained all my life a source of inspiration’, she once said). There was certainly a political tradition running in her family; her grandfather had been present at the Peterloo massacre in 1819, and her grandmother had been active in the Anti-Corn Law League (1838–46). Emmeline’s father, a comfortably off Manchester merchant, had been involved in the campaign to end slavery in the United States and had read his daughter the anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) when she was a child. As in so many fields of nineteenth-century politics, the language of emancipation from slavery played a part in the campaign for the emancipation of other groups in society, in this instance women.
Both of Emmeline’s parents supported women’s suffrage. Her mother subscribed to the Women’s Suffrage Journal, edited by Lydia Becker (1827–90), another Manchester woman, who in 1867 founded the National Society for Women’s Suffrage; Becker also campaigned for the inclusion of women on school boards, and in 1870 stood successfully for election to the Manchester School Board. In 1874, Emmeline attended a meeting organized by Becker, and later wrote: ‘I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist.’ In 1878 she met a barrister known for his support for female suffrage, Richard Pankhurst (1834–98), twenty-four years her senior. Emmeline suggested they live together in a free union, but he objected that this would lead to social ostracism, at least for her, so they married in 1879, moving to London in 1886; she had five children with him over the course of their marriage. In 1889 the couple moved house to Russell Square, in Bloomsbury, which became a centre for suffrage campaigners, including a leading American, Harriet Stanton Blatch (1856–1940). Emmeline and Richard founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889 to work for women’s right to vote in local elections. Before long, however, it fell apart, largely over the issues of trade unionism and Irish Home Rule. In 1903, frustrated by the lack of progress in the campaign for women’s suffrage, Emmeline, her daughter Christabel (1880–1958) and four others founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. It began recruiting supporters, particularly in Lancashire, it published a newsletter, it organized petitions and it held rallies. In May 1905, after a Bill for women’s suffrage had been filibustered within the House of Commons, Emmeline and her supporters staged a noisy protest outside.
The publicity that the demonstration won them seemed to her to mark the arrival as a political force of the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members were dubbed ‘suffragettes’ by the Daily Mail. Their tactics grew bolder. In February 1908, Emmeline was arrested while trying to enter the Houses of Parliament to deliver a protest to Prime Minister Asquith. Charged with obstruction, she was sentenced to six weeks in prison. So welcome was the publicity this generated that in June 1909 she struck a police officer twice in the face to make sure she was arrested again. Her campaigns won massive public attention, with between a quarter and half a million people attending an open-air meeting organized in London’s Hyde Park by the Women’s Social and Political Union on 21 June 1908. The lack of reaction to the meeting shown by Asquith’s government prompted the suffragettes to raise the level of radical action. Two of them threw stones at the windows of the Prime Minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street (there were no security barriers to prevent access). At the same time others smashed shop windows in the West End. When they were arrested and imprisoned in the women’s jail at Holloway, fourteen women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, went on hunger strike in protest against the conditions under which they were held. The prison authorities responded by force-feeding suffragette prisoners through a painful procedure in which steel clamps were held in their mouths to keep them open, and tubes were inserted down their throat. Emmeline successfully resisted by threatening the officers with a heavy earthenware jug. ‘Holloway,’ she wrote, ‘became a place of horror and torment. Sickening scenes of violence took place almost every hour of the day, as the doctors went from cell to cell performing their hideous office.’
In 1913 the government enacted the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, dubbed by the suffragettes the Cat and Mouse Act. Under this statute prisoners, including Pankhurst, would be released from prison if they were suffering from ill health because they had gone on hunger strike, only to be re-arrested when they got better in order to serve the rest of their sentence. Meanwhile the police had become extremely rough in dealing with suffragette demonstrations, and Emmeline recruited a squad of female bodyguards trained in ju-jitsu and armed with clubs. Her supporters radicalized their attacks on property, unsuccessfully attempting to set fire to the Theatre Royal in Dublin, where the Prime Minister was due to speak. They threw an axe at Asquith’s carriage and set fire to postboxes. They burned down a pavilion in Regent’s Park, an orchid house at Kew Gardens, and some empty railway carriages at King’s Norton station. The Canadian suffragette Mary Richardson (1882/3–1961), who had also blown up a railway station and broken in windows at the Home Office, slashed the Rokeby Venus, a painting by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) in the National Gallery in March 1914, declaring: ‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.’ Other suffragettes used acid to burn the slogan ‘Votes for Women’ on golf courses used by MPs, and assaulted individual politicians. Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913), who had previously committed acts of arson and attacked a man in the mistaken belief that he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, stepped out in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, probably with the intention of attaching a slogan to it, and was run down. She died of her injuries a few days later, the first suffragette martyr.
This campaign of ‘outrages’ created severe strains within the suffragette movement. Emmeline Pankhurst tried to quell them by cancelling the annual meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union, denying members the right to object, and concentrating all decision-making processes in a small coterie she gathered round her, which included her daughter Christabel. Democracy was beside the point, she said: the suffragettes were ‘an army in the field’. Several prominent members had already left in 1907 to form the Women’s Freedom League, whose supporters soon outnumbered Pankhurst’s: it confined itself to passive civil disobedience. Others were summarily expelled, including Emmeline’s other daughters Sylvia and Adele, who had in her view become too close to the socialist movement. Perhaps, some have claimed, the suffragettes’ willingness to use violence and their contempt for democracy foreshadowed the tactics of fascism, but it has to be remembered that their violence was overwhelmingly directed against physical symbols of male society (such as golf courses); unlike the fascists, they made no serious attempt to kill or maim individual people. They undoubtedly gave the cause of women’s suffrage publicity it would not otherwise have had, but some contemporaries argued that their violence and extremism backed the government into a corner and made it more difficult for it to support votes for women.
Those contemporaries included many moderate supporters of female enfranchisement, a cause that by the late nineteenth century had a long if chequered history. In 1869 one of the most influential of all feminist tracts, The Subjection of Women, was published by the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73). In the early 1830s he had become a close friend of the intellectual Harriet Taylor (1807–58), who was separated from her husband; in 1851, two years after the latter died, the couple married. Her influence was evident in Mill’s tract, which defined female emancipation as ‘the removal of women’s disabilities – their recognition as the equals of men in all that belongs to citizenship, the opening to them of all honourable employments and of the training and education which qualifies for those employments’, together with the ending of ‘the excessive authority which the law gave to husbands over wives’. Mill did not consider that women were necessarily equal to men in every sphere of life, but he thought it wrong that they should be prevented from finding out if they were; if they were inferior in any area, then free competition would prove it and legal barriers were not needed. The legal and social exclusion of women from many areas of public, political, economic and cultural life, he argued, was depriving society of the use of half its members, to its great detriment. Equality was in Mill’s view, however, to be granted only to middle-class women and not the women of the proletariat. ‘Where the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings,’ he wrote, ‘the common arrangement by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two classes.’
Mill’s tract was quickly translated into Danish, French, German and Swedish; by 1870 it was being debated by Russian feminists. In 1866–7, as the Second Reform Bill was being debated, Mill, now an MP, spoke in the House of Commons in favour of the enfranchisement of women, the first time this demand had been raised in Parliament. The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, founded in 1859, supported him, leading in 1867 to Lydia Becker’s formation of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. But this new body won no backing from Gladstone and the leading Liberals, and its fortunes declined. It was not until the 1880s that it began to revive in the wake of Josephine Butler’s campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which, it was thought by many, would have succeeded more swiftly had women been in possession of the vote. In 1897 the disparate factions of the moderate women’s suffrage movement were reunited in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), sister of the campaigner for women’s right to a medical qualification Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The Union campaigned in meetings, pamphlets and magazines for the enfranchisement of women, and in 1907 staged a demonstration march through the centre of London. But whereas the House of Commons was now in favour of votes for women, particularly when legislative proposals were debated in 1886 and 1897, the House of Lords was not. Support for the Union grew with the publicity generated by the suffragettes; its membership far outweighed that of the Women’s Social and Political Union – in 1913 it numbered 50,000 compared to the suffragettes’ 2,000. But, like that of the suffragettes, the Union’s campaign still showed no sign of success at the outbreak of the First World War.
Liberal feminism in France faced problems quite different from those encountered in England. While Republican politicians did a great deal to improve the education of women, believing it would wean them away from the Church, they were consistently opposed to giving women the vote, since they thought this would undermine the Republic by strengthening the forces of monarchism. Clerical conservatives for their part were horrified at the idea of giving women any rights as individuals, though ironically women’s allegiance to the Church was founded not least on the fact that it provided one of the few spaces outside the home and the family where they could be active without having to run the gauntlet of male hostility. Nevertheless, a female suffrage movement emerged in 1876 and by 1883 it boasted a full range of feminist aims, including equality in the law, education, the professions and pay, as well as the vote. Its leading figure, Hubertine Auclert, was organizing street demonstrations for women’s votes as early as 1885, and held a ‘shadow election’ to coincide with the general election of that year: fifteen women stood and gained a great deal of publicity, though they did not gain admission to the legislature.
In 1904, Auclert led feminist demonstrations in Paris on the centenary of the Code Napoléon, publicly tearing up a copy of the famous document. Her associates managed to gain access to a balcony at the official banquet held to celebrate the anniversary and released onto the astonished diners a quantity of huge balloons on which were written the words ‘The Code crushes women: it dishonours the Republic’. In 1907, Auclert led another march through the capital, and the following year she invaded the Chamber of Deputies with twenty followers and threw leaflets at the politicians. Her most famous act of protest occurred the same year when she went with a companion into a polling booth in Paris during municipal elections and overturned the ballot boxes in protest against the disfranchisement of women. This gained her huge publicity but little support. The Female Suffrage Society had 10,000 members in 1913 but most of them were members of affiliated organizations such as temperance societies and women’s trade unions. Even the biggest feminist demonstration, held early in July 1914, only attracted 6,000 people, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands who attended suffragette rallies in London. In the end, the forces ranged against the feminists in France were too great for them to overcome, and they had to wait until the end of the Second World War in Europe before women were granted the vote.
The largest women’s suffrage movement outside Britain was in Germany, where feminists did not have to contend with the hostility of their most obvious political allies as they did in France. However, these allies – the Progressives – were in no way as numerous or as dominant as the Liberals in Britain or the Republicans in France. At an international feminist congress held in Chicago during the World’s Fair in 1893, German feminists agreed to create a new umbrella organization, the Federation of German Women’s Associations; it was established the following year. By 1914 its membership had risen to a quarter of a million. Within this organization and on its fringes a self-proclaimed radical wing emerged, led by the actress Marie Stritt (1855–1928) whose father was a lawyer and Reichstag deputy. The radicals campaigned against the state regulation of prostitution, bringing lawsuits against the police, organizing public meetings, and causing the topic to be debated seriously in the Reichstag for the first time. Police reaction was hostile and the campaign got nowhere. In 1902 the lawyer Anita Augspurg (1857–1943) and her companion Lida Gustava Heymann (1868–1943) founded a German Union for Women’s Suffrage, based in Hamburg, where, exceptionally, it was legal for women to attend political meetings. The feminist Helene Stöcker (1869–1943), an admirer of Nietzsche’s doctrines of personal liberation from the constraints of convention, advocated legal equality for unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, the free distribution of contraceptives, the legalizing of abortion and other measures which shocked bourgeois moral convention. This was too much for the moderate wing of the feminist movement, which took advantage of the legalization of women’s participation in political activities in 1908 to pack the Federation with right-wing Protestant organizations and reject the proposal to legalize abortion. Stritt resigned in protest, to be replaced by a much more conservative figure, the historical novelist and journalist Gertrud Bäumer (1873–1954).
Between 1908 and 1914 the radical wing of the movement fell apart in a welter of mutual recrimination. Stöcker’s ‘New Morality’ movement became caught up in the contradictions of its own ideology, as internal quarrels broke out over whether to focus on welfare measures like women’s clinics or on political campaigning for women’s rights. The leading women in the dispute accused each other of sleeping with various of the men on the executive committee in order to win their votes, leading to no fewer than seven lurid and highly publicized defamation suits, hardly an impressive advertisement for the consistency or durability of the ‘New Morality’. The female suffrage organization split into three rival groups over the issue of whether women should ask for the same electoral rights as men, which would have meant acceptance of the disfranchisement of millions of working-class women through the restrictive property franchise in Prussia, or whether women should demand universal adult suffrage, which would have meant aligning themselves with the socialists in demanding the vote for all adult men as well as women in Prussia. The feminists also attracted growing hostility from radical nationalists on the right, who accused them of undermining the family. In response, they moved away from demanding women’s economic and professional independence to emphasize their domestic roles as well. The growing numbers of female social workers in the movement brought in Social Darwinists who saw women’s primary role as bearing and bringing up healthy children, while the attacks on feminist pacifists like Augspurg, Heymann and Stöcker from nationalists both within the movement and outside it drove them even further to the margins of politics. Thus German feminism, despite its outward appearance of strength, had become ideologically confused, weak and divided by the eve of the First World War.
If women’s political activities in Germany were limited by law until 1908, then in Russia they were almost non-existent. During the 1905 Revolution, Russian feminists, outraged that the October Manifesto, in which Tsar Nicholas II promised wide-ranging reforms, contained no mention of female emancipation, set up the All-Russian Union of Equal Rights for Women. With 12,000 members by 1907, the Union campaigned for female suffrage and legal equality for women. Close to the moderate liberal Cadet (Constitutional Democrat) Party, it also belonged to the Union of Unions, an organization of middle-class professional groups that emerged during the Revolution. ‘The struggle for women’s rights,’ declared the Union, ‘is inseparably connected with the struggle for the political liberation of Russia.’ It drafted appeals to politicians and deputies in the Duma, the Russian Parliament, as well as securing the endorsement of famous literary and cultural figures. The feminists mass-mailed petition forms, printed them in magazines, and passed them out on the street to be signed before being submitted to the Duma. One contained more than 26,000 signatures. The Union sent delegates to the 1906 Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (founded by American and British suffragists in 1902) in Copenhagen. In 1908 it organized an All-Russian Congress of Women, which was attended by over 1,000 delegates and debated a wide range of issues. It was presided over by Anna Pavlovna Filosofova (1837–1912), the grand old lady of Russian social feminism.
But the Congress was repeatedly disrupted by the socialist women who attended. They interrupted the speeches of the ‘bourgeois’ feminists, stamped their feet, and pulled faces. Political rights, they shouted, were irrelevant to working-class women forced to live in grinding poverty. The organizers shouted from the podium ‘we don’t want to listen to you’, and the socialist women staged a walkout. On the right, conservative Duma deputies suggested that the feminists needed a mental examination; one even called them ‘whores’, bringing Filosofova to tears. The Union collapsed in the face of growing police harassment in 1908. Feminists responded by forming a new League for Women’s Equality, which was smaller and better organized than the Union, and focused again on petitioning the Duma for the vote. In 1912 it won the support of forty deputies, and in the following year the leading liberal, Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov (1859–1943), who had taught at a girls’ academy early in his career, brought a universal male and female suffrage proposal forward. However, when he came to the provision enfranchising women, laughter broke out on the right, and the measure was defeated by 206 votes to 106. This marked the end of the campaign for women’s enfranchisement. The feminist movement lost support, declining to a membership of a few thousand, mostly professional women and especially doctors. It had fallen victim to the continual rolling back of democratic and parliamentary institutions and organizations in Russia in the last few years before the outbreak of the First World War.
In most parts of Europe the feminists, bolstered by their creation of global organizations such as the International Council of Women (1888), the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance and many others, had at least succeeded by 1914 in putting votes for women on the agenda. The most important factor in determining the fate of the campaign for votes for women was nationalism. Nationalist associations had gained an authoritarian, masculinist, aggressive, sometimes antisemitic cast in Germany by 1914, and out of their milieu there even emerged the German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation (1912), complete with accusations, entirely erroneous, that the feminist movement in Germany was dominated by Jewish women. In Hungary, however, it was, since the small urban middle class was heavily Jewish in composition; here too nationalism, dominated by the rural gentry, was socially conservative, and most political parties opposed the very vigorous campaign of the Feminists’ Association, founded in 1904 by Vilma Glücklich (1872–1927), the first woman to be admitted to a Hungarian university, and Rosika Schwimmer (1877–1948), a pacifist and close associate of the German radical feminists Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann. In 1913 Glücklich and Schwimmer co-hosted the seventh congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, in Budapest. Their campaign in Hungary included a mass demonstration in 1912 attended by 10,000 people, the distribution of placards and leaflets, the sending of telegrams to deputies, and the raising of questions about female suffrage to candidates at election hustings. It made little progress in winning support from Hungarian nationalists, who were suspicious of its Jewish leadership and opposed to its pacifist orientation in international politics.
Yet nationalism could also work in favour of women’s rights. Feminists focused in many countries on education, arguing that women had to be taught the values and aspirations of the nation in order to transmit them to their children. In Bohemia this argument galvanized the feminist movement, whose petitions for the vote gathered more than four times as many signatures as their counterparts in Austria. Their arguments won the support of the leaders of the Czech nationalist movement, who were convinced of the need for Czech women to teach their children Czech rather than German. The women’s suffrage campaign emerged from a nationalist campaign in 1905–6 for universal male suffrage. The Women’s Suffrage Committee formed during this campaign by Františka Plamínková (1875–1942) argued that the issue of votes for women was above politics; in 1909 it demonstrated its nationalist commitment by demanding (unsuccessfully) that Czech become the fourth official language of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, alongside English, French and German. The women’s cause was strongly supported by the leader of Czech nationalism within the Habsburg Empire, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937). Masaryk had married an American woman, Charlotte Garrigue (1850–1923), whom he had met on a visit to Leipzig: it was not least under her influence that he became a convinced and active supporter of women’s rights. All Czech political parties accepted the principle of female suffrage, and put up women candidates for election to the Bohemian Diet, though with one exception for seats which they had no hope of winning (the one female candidate who was elected was in any case vetoed by the Habsburg-appointed governor).
The most successful examples of a symbiosis between nationalism and feminism occurred in Scandinavia. In Norway, which had been ruled by Sweden since 1814, the advocates of complete separation from Sweden, organized in the Radical Liberal Party, supported votes for women. The party had already secured a majority in the autonomous national legislature, the Storting, by 1893, though not the two-thirds needed for a change in the Constitution. The following year a petition for female enfranchisement garnered 12,000 signatures, and in 1895 a National Women’s Suffrage Association was founded by Gina Krog (1847–1916), a teacher and journalist who had met Millicent Garrett Fawcett in London in 1880. Krog’s association campaigned vigorously for the vote, gaining the municipal suffrage for women in 1901. While the Russian Revolution of 1905 distracted the Great Powers, a quarrel between the Swedish and Norwegian governments over the latter’s right to appoint its own consular service led to negotiations in which Norway secured complete independence. An available Danish prince was found to serve as King Haakon VII (1872–1957). The new Constitution included a limited right to vote for propertied women in 1907, and led to the introduction of full and equal universal suffrage by a government of left-liberals in 1913.
Links between feminism and nationalism such as these had an even more dramatic effect in the case of Finland, which although part of the Russian Empire still possessed its own political institutions, including the traditional representative Estates. As nationalism grew, based on a campaign to secure equality for the Finnish language with the Swedish, a feminist movement emerged, centred on a reading group formed to discuss John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. Linguistic equality was won in 1884, with feminists pointing out the crucial role of women in ‘the education of children in their native tongue’. Women already gained the vote at a municipal level in 1872 and twenty years later Lucina Hagman (1853–1946), a schoolteacher whose pupils included the composer Jean Sibelius, founded a Union of Women’s Societies to campaign for full political equality. Repression and a Russification campaign by the tsarist authorities brought all Finnish nationalists together. In 1905, when the tsar conceded civil liberties across the Russian Empire, a national legislature replaced the Estates; it introduced universal adult suffrage for men and women in 1906. The tsar clawed back his powers of veto after the crisis had passed, and by 1910 the Russian government was firmly in control again. Still, with women now sitting in the Finnish legislature, equal rights provisions were incorporated into the Finnish Constitution in 1909, though it would not be until 1917 that they came fully into effect.
By 1914 feminist movements in Europe had come to focus overwhelmingly on the right to vote in elections. To feminists, their demand seemed part of an unstoppable international tide of opinion that in the end would sweep them to victory. In some cases they pushed society a little way towards establishing equal rights over property and entry to the professions, though the actual numbers of female professionals were still small on the eve of the First World War. The struggle for the vote, often sparked by wider debates about representation, the extension of male voting rights, or national sovereignty, scored some successes at a local or municipal level in many countries, including Denmark, where the women’s suffrage movement numbered more than 23,000 members by 1910. In 1912 a female suffrage Bill passed the Liberal-dominated Lower House of the Danish Parliament by a majority of 100 to 14, though it failed in the Upper House. Swedish suffragists won the right for women to stand in local elections in 1909 and secured a majority in the Lower House of the legislature for full women’s suffrage in 1912, though as in Denmark the measure did not pass in the Upper House. Female suffrage was democracy’s final frontier, but although feminists had made some advances as democracy’s challenge to existing political systems mounted, there still seemed a long way to go by the time war came.
What united all the various national feminist movements, as well as the international associations to which they belonged, was the fact that they were overwhelmingly bourgeois in their composition and liberal in their politics. Even the English suffragettes fought shy of demanding the vote for women of all classes and merely campaigned for equal suffrage. Property laws everywhere still favoured men, so that if middle-class feminists sought equal voting rights for women, they were in effect only seeking them for a very small minority of propertied women. Moreover, the initial demand formulated by John Stuart Mill for equal rights as a recognition of women’s simple equality with men as human beings had increasingly given way to a belief that women should be granted equality because they were different. On the radical left of the movement this meant that women’s suffrage would bring international peace, an end to sexual exploitation, the abolition of regulated and possibly also unregulated prostitution, and other sweeping changes in social morality. Mainstream feminists thought women’s suffrage would strengthen the ties that bound a nation together, as well as allowing female values their full weight in society. These beliefs found their expression in the creation in a number of European countries of the modern welfare state, where the long tradition of female philanthropy, rooted in religious faith, metamorphosed into the rise of modern, female-dominated welfare professions such as social work.
The emergence of women into the public sphere was paralleled by a major reorientation of the state in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. This was above all a response to the increasingly powerful articulation of working-class interests, a fundamental aspect of the challenge of democracy in this period. Labour unrest reached unprecedented heights in the last decade and a half before the outbreak of the First World War, fuelled by a renewal of economic growth that reflected not least the increasing demand from governments for arms and ammunition. Some 400,000 workers downed tools in France in 1906, demanding the introduction of the eight-hour day. There were waves of strikes in the Ruhr in 1905 and 1912 as miners demanded improvements in their conditions of work and pay. The number of workers taking industrial action in Spain leapt from 35,000 in 1910 to more than 84,000 in 1913. The first national railway workers’ stoppage in Britain took place in 1911 and the first national miners’ strike in 1912. Alongside the great collective industrial actions were myriad small-scale, often short-lived strikes in particular factories and mines that addressed perceived injustices of a more localized character. Mounting labour unrest created a growing challenge to the tsarist regime in Russia, culminating in a general strike in St Petersburg in July 1914. Such actions increasingly bore a noticeable political element, as in the general strike and mass demonstration held on ‘Red Thursday’, 10 October 1907, in Budapest to call for universal male suffrage, or on ‘Red Wednesday’ in Hamburg on 17 January 1906, when demonstrators tried unsuccessfully to prevent the curtailment of workers’ voting rights.
The increasing scale and frequency of strikes accompanied the growth across Europe of the trade union movement. In many countries this went back to the post-revolutionary decades in the middle of the century. In 1855 the Scottish miner Alexander Macdonald (1821–81) noted that during a strike in Lanarkshire ‘our divided condition served well the masters, if they were, in any instances, wishing to resist a just demand’. He urged the creation of a union so that ‘our own anarchy should be overthrown’. This led to the formation in 1863 of the Miners’ National Association. A national Trades Union Congress was then created in 1868. Its basis was much more secure than that of previous attempts in the first half of the century, because it was essentially a federation of individual craft unions with a strong local base – so-called ‘new model unions’ like the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, founded in 1860 by Robert Applegarth (1834–1924). The British trade unions became a permanent part of the industrial scene in defiance of all the attempts of employers to stop them. The number of trade union members increased from just over one and a half million in the 1890s to two and a half million in the 1900s and more than four million by 1914.
Unionism in other countries was considerably less successful. In Spain the Socialist Asturian Miners’ Union rose in 1910 from the ashes of smaller local unions that had been destroyed by the employers over the previous few years. It formed part of the socialist trade union federation, the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores), which had grown in membership from 3,355 at its foundation in 1888 to 40,000 in 1910 and nearly 120,000 in 1914 as individual trade unions signed up. It had to contend with a serious rival, the National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo). Founded in 1910 on the principle of anarcho-syndicalism, the doctrine of overthrowing the capitalist state through a universal general strike, this rival organization won support particularly from railway and electrical workers. Membership covered only a small proportion of workers as a whole. The same was true of Germany. Although more than two million German workers belonged to unions by 1914, these unions were still relatively weak, and the number of collectivebargaining agreements in force was minimal – a sharp contrast to the situation in Sweden, where the national organizations of the employers and the unions formally recognized each other in 1906. Most German employers insisted strongly on their right to take decisions about pay and conditions without consulting their employees. Even in 1910 or 1911, when the German mineworkers were at their strongest, only 40 per cent of miners in the Ruhr were members of any trade union. The movement was divided by the formation of Catholic and liberal trade unions to rival the dominant socialist ones, and, as also in France, strike-breakers countered the trade union movement by forming ‘yellow’ unions of their own, paid by the employers.
The weakness and fragmentation of the unions in France, and the repeated failure of strike movements to gain their limited and practical ends, prompted a small revolutionary minority to embrace the radical principle of anarcho-syndicalism. The General Confederation of Labour (Conféderation Générale du Travail), founded in 1895, opposed affiliation with any political party. Its leading figure, the journalist Émile Pouget (1860–1931), advocated sabotage as a means of industrial struggle and saw the general strike as a political weapon with which to bring down the state. But its strikes failed, largely because funds were low. Most of its members were reformists, drawn in particular by one of its constituent organizations, the Bourses du Travail (labour exchanges), which offered practical assistance to workers of all kinds in finding jobs and in so doing helped break down barriers of occupational particularism. There were seventy-four of these in France by 1901, but although their guiding spirit, the radical journalist Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901), thought of them as a revolutionary state within the state, they depended, paradoxically, on government subsidies for their financial viability. Strikes had become legal in 1864 and unions twenty years later, but, as in Britain, the law made unions liable to damages if they prompted workers to break their contract, used threats, or engaged in ‘fraudulent manoeuvres’. French trade unions often dissolved themselves and regrouped under a new name to evade these restrictions, but this imposed tight limits on their freedom of action.
Despite such weaknesses, the rise of the trade unions across Europe, along with the repeated occurrence of strikes, was a major force in driving governments to introduce social legislation to try and reduce worker discontent. Sometimes this had a clear political motive. Conscious of the threat to public safety posed by the long hours worked by railway engine drivers – in the 1860s a driver threatened with dismissal for failing to stop at three stations revealed he had been driving for thirty-eight consecutive hours and had fallen asleep in the cab – French governments repeatedly pressed the railway companies to impose limits, and were finally successful in 1891, when the companies agreed to a twelve-hour maximum working day. Public concern could also inform the introduction of improvements. The British Coal Mines Regulation Acts of 1860 and 1872 introduced numerous safety precautions enforced by an inspectorate. In 1880 legislation was finally passed in the United Kingdom making employers liable for industrial accidents, reflecting the pressure of the new trade unions and the public sympathy that often greeted reports of deaths and injuries. Other laws required proper sanitation in workplaces, and regulated conditions in all kinds of trades. However, a comprehensive programme of social welfare still had to be introduced. Especially if they became too old to work, or fell ill, workers faced an uncertain and often extremely impoverished future.
The major change in this respect was initiated by none other than Bismarck, who introduced a range of state welfare measures in the 1880s. The state, declared the Iron Chancellor, had to ‘meet the justified wishes of the working classes . . . through legislation and administration’. Linked to aristocratic paternalism in Bismarck’s own mind, this ‘state socialism’, as he himself called it, soon outgrew its political roots. In 1883 he introduced health insurance through sickness funds, to which workers themselves had to contribute two-thirds but were rewarded by the right to stand for election to the managing committees, which they came to dominate after the turn of the century. By 1885 sickness insurance schemes in Germany covered 4.3 million workers. An accident insurance scheme followed in 1884 and a pension scheme for the old and infirm in 1889, all of them backed to a considerable extent by the state. The limitations of these schemes were clear. The old-age pension, for example, covered only men over the age of seventy, and even at the end of the century a mere 27 per cent of male workers lived beyond this age. Still, a few months after Bismarck’s departure from office in 1890, the scope of these schemes was extended, night work by women and adolescents was banned, and legislation was passed restricting hours of work. By the eve of the First World War more than 15 million Germans were covered by sickness insurance, 28 million were insured against accidents, and a million were receiving pensions. None of these measures stopped people from voting for the socialists, but they may well have played a part in preventing the working classes from supporting the socialist left wing.
Bismarck’s initiatives in Germany were followed in other European countries. In Hungary a factory inspectorate was established in 1884 and compulsory health insurance, inaugurated in 1900, covered over a million workers by 1911. In 1907 the government introduced compulsory accident insurance, providing free medical care for up to ten weeks and paid sick leave for the victims of industrial accidents. A limited old-age pension fund was set up in Italy in 1898 with state backing, while in Sweden state grants for health insurance were inaugurated in 1891 and a universal public-pensions insurance scheme, the first fully comprehensive system in Europe, was introduced in 1913. In France workers’ pensions were introduced in 1910 (‘the greatest and finest reform of the Third Republic’, as its rapporteur said in the Chamber of Deputies), and although only a third of those eligible actually made a contribution, it was a start. A law of 1905 provided for old-age pensions and sickness benefits, and by 1914 over half a million people were receiving at least some support from the scheme every year, while a law of 1898 established accident compensation supported by the state, removing the previous requirement for the victims to prove negligence on the part of the employer. In Britain the modern welfare state was established by the Liberal governments of the immediate pre-war years, driven partly by a genuine social conscience and partly by a wish, similar to that of Bismarck, to prevent the working classes from drifting away to socialism. These measures included old-age pensions (1908), labour exchanges (1909), the imposition of improved standards for house-building and town planning (1909), and National Insurance to provide for sickness benefits and unemployment pay (1911). All this began to undermine the Poor Law of 1834, although it was not actually repealed until well into the twentieth century.
These measures represented the extension of welfare schemes from the upper reaches of the working class targeted by Bismarck much further down the social scale. Hitherto poverty in its deepest and most radical form had been the object of religious philanthropy, which was gradually being replaced by private and municipal initiative. In Britain it was driven forward in particular by middle-class women such as Octavia Hill (1838–1912), who pioneered the ‘model dwelling’ movement for improved working-class housing, and founded the Charity Organization Society in 1869. This introduced into England the Elberfeld System of poor relief, pioneered in 1852 as a response to the 1848 Revolution in the industrial conurbation where Friedrich Engels grew up. The System established a network of overseers whose task it was to visit the poor, recommend a suitable level of support, check on the probity of their domestic circumstances, and find them a job as soon as possible, which they were obliged to accept on pain of forfeiting their benefits. It took the problem of poverty out of the hands of the Church and turned relief into an instrument of secular social control. The changing roles of secular and ecclesiastical charity over the decades can be observed with particular clarity in the case of the Netherlands, where a new law passed in 1854 made the Churches the primary relief agency; municipalities were only to step in as a last resort. More and more however, the state had to take on the burden of support – covering 40 per cent of the costs of poor relief in 1855, and 57 per cent in 1913. The medical profession increasingly urged a more dynamic approach to health care, because as the Dutch social commentator Jeronimo de Bosch Kemper (1808–76) wrote in 1851: ‘Improve the health of the people and you will have removed a major, a very great cause of poverty.’ The debate continued until in 1901 the Netherlands finally introduced a Public Health Act, a Housing Act and an Industrial Injuries Act, taking away the primary task of combating poverty from the Churches to which it had been entrusted in the previous century. In many respects, however, such secular institutions were not so different from the traditional charitable institutions of the Christian Churches such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul, founded in Paris in 1833, which specialized in home visits to the poor that would not have seemed unfamiliar to the overseers of the Elberfeld System.
The rise of the welfare state was in essence a response to the growing popularity of left-wing politics, especially among the working class. Conservatives and liberals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could see no greater threat to their political position than that posed by socialism, whose central tenets were diametrically opposed to the priority given by mainstream political parties to the idea of the nation. Under the influence of Marx and Engels and their disciples, socialists came to believe that workers in industrialized or industrializing countries were so exploited and oppressed that they owed no allegiance to the capitalists who ruled them nor to the nation state they controlled. Still less did they have an interest in fighting wars, which would only use them as cannon fodder while industrialists grew fat on war profits. The declared aim of the socialist movement was to overthrow the central institutions of ‘bourgeois’ society, including private property, business corporations, the police, the army, the Church, and even the family. They were to be replaced by a state in which property would be owned collectively, children brought up communally, religion abolished, and businesses run by the workers. In practice, however, the politics of socialism turned out to be more complex, and less frightening, than these terrifying visions suggested. The socialists’ bark was often worse than their bite, and the grand intentions stated in party programmes were in many cases belied by the pragmatism of socialist politicians in practice. Part of the reason for these developments was indeed the rise of the welfare state, which gave the workers a growing stake in the society that socialist theory said should be destroyed. To that extent, the political intentions of its architects could be said to have been fulfilled.
The Working Men’s International, founded in 1864, had collapsed at the beginning of the 1870s and was formally dissolved in 1876, destroyed by internal dissension between the followers of Marx and Bakunin, and by the massive police repression that followed the Paris Commune of 1871. By 1889, however, the time was ripe for another attempt at uniting Europe’s workers in a single movement, and a successor organization, generally known as the Second International, was founded in Paris. It stayed in being until 1914, holding regular congresses at which resolutions were taken and policy guidelines formed that were intended to be binding on all the different national sections. The dominant power in the International was the German socialist movement, which dated from the Prussian constitutional struggle of the 1860s, when Ferdinand Lassalle had founded the General German Workers’ Association. Lassalle’s policies and those of his successors included producer co-operatives controlled by the state, parliamentary sovereignty and universal male suffrage. In 1868–9 a second socialist party emerged, the German Social Democratic Party, under the leadership of Wilhelm Liebknecht, a schoolteacher, journalist and veteran of 1848, and the young turner and carpenter August Bebel, son of a Prussian non-commissioned officer. Both were strongly influenced by the ideas of Marx and Engels. In 1875 the two groups united at a conference held in Gotha, forming the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany. But in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx suggested that the ideas of the new party owed more to Lassalle than to himself. It was radical-democratic rather than socialist, and it made no mention of the laws of economic development, the class basis of the state, or the need for revolution. Bebel himself followed the principles of Eugen Dühring (1833–1921), who was not only not a socialist but actually an antisemite. The polemic written by Engels in 1877 in an attempt to counter his influence over the party, the Anti-Dühring (full title: Mr Dühring’s Revolution of Science), was successful in winning Bebel and many others in the movement over to the basic principles of Marxism.
From 1878 to 1890 the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany was illegal. The years underground increased enormously the gulf between German socialists and German liberals and strengthened the party in its hostility to the Bismarckian state. The revolutionary ideology of Marxism and its promise of ultimate victory guaranteed by the laws of history proved irresistibly attractive in these circumstances. In 1887 at a Congress in St Gallen, Switzerland, the last representatives of the Lassalleans were defeated. In 1891, at a conference in Erfurt, the party, now legal again, renamed itself the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) and passed a new programme, strongly Marxist in character. Marx having died in 1883, it was now Engels who dominated the party’s ideology. He implanted in it a belief in economic determinism. Continued industrialization would bring the capitalist system to ruins on its own contradictions, as the working class increased in strength and numbers and experienced ever-increasing levels of exploitation. All the institutions of the capitalist state, from the Church to the army, the schools and the judicial system, were mere tools of indoctrination and would be swept away when the proletarian revolution came, to be replaced by a socialist, egalitarian, classless society.
Engels added to this set of beliefs, derived from Marx, a second element in the SPD’s ideology which subtly altered its significance: Darwinian evolutionism, adopting it instead of the dialectical view of historical development, which was associated with the ‘Prussian philosopher-royal’ Hegel. Well before Engels’s death in 1895, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), a professional journalist, had emerged as the SPD’s chief ideologue. Since it was a scientifically proven fact that the course of social evolution would bring the working class to power, all it had to do in Kautsky’s view was to remain in existence and the revolution would come of its own accord. Thus from 1890 onwards the SPD tried to avoid the danger of being banned again, and laid ever greater stress on its peaceful and law-abiding character. The party focused obsessively on building up its own organization for the revolution. It rejected any co-operation with ‘bourgeois’ parties such as the Liberals, in order to keep itself socially and ideologically pure until the revolution came. The party also claimed that since the bourgeoisie had failed in its historic mission of creating a liberal society in Germany, the mantle of liberal reformism had fallen on the shoulders of the proletariat. This meant not only a commitment to working to mitigate the worst excesses of the system, but also a reliance on the parliamentary road to revolution. It was through gaining a majority in the Reichstag, the party believed, that it would grasp the reins of power. Confirmation of this thesis was seen in the steady increase in the SPD vote and membership from 1890 onwards, until in 1912 it became the largest party in the national legislature, with 110 seats. By the eve of the First World War, the SPD, with over a million members, was the largest political party not only in Germany but in the entire world.
Yet the SPD was increasingly beset by a sense of political paralysis. Attempts were made to find a way forward both on the right and on the left. On the right were the revisionists, led by Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), son of a Jewish train driver in Berlin. Bernstein had been active in the socialist movement since 1872 and was one of the authors of the Erfurt Programme, but he had imbibed the principles of reformism during a period of exile in England. In a series of articles published at the turn of the century, he suggested that Marx’s predictions of the growing immiseration of the proletariat had been falsified by events. The working class was actually becoming more prosperous, revolution was not going to happen, and it was time for the party to convert to liberal reformism. Bernstein’s criticisms unleashed a furious debate within the party. Its rank and file saw these disputes as divisive, and backed the leadership as it silenced the discussion. The revisionists were a small, isolated group of intellectuals with no power base in the party and their ideas made little headway in the end. Much more numerous, and far more influential, were the growing numbers of pragmatists in the party, people to whom ideology, considered so important by Bernstein and his followers, was irrelevant. Men such as Ignaz Auer (1846–1907), a saddler who was the key figure in building up the party machine in the 1890s, believed in simply getting on with the job of recruitment and representing the interests of the working class. The Bavarian socialist leader Georg von Vollmar (1850–1922), a former army officer, was prepared to co-operate with left-liberals or with the state if it would help bring about necessary reforms. Thus in southern Germany the parliamentary representatives of the SPD voted for state budgets and worked closely behind the scenes with the liberals. More generally, members of the party took an active role in the elective parts of community services and health insurance administration. The trade unions focused on immediate, practical benefits for their members, and exerted a growing influence over the party. Its transformation into a mass organization required the appointment of a permanent, paid staff, which increased the number and the influence of the pragmatists by placing in positions of power people whose concern was with the day-to-day running of the party rather than with the wider issues of socialist theory, political principle and long-term strategy.
In Germany the police did not require specific legislation to harass and molest the political activities of a party regarded as hostile to the very existence of the state. The police exploited to the full their right to attend and ‘maintain order’ at public meetings, and used even the most trivial excuse to dissolve Social Democratic assemblies, while extending a wide tolerance to those held by parties of the right. By 1914 the great majority of SPD newspaper and magazine editors had spent months if not years in jail for offences ranging from defaming the police to lèse-majesté. Social Democratic party members or supporters were excluded from all forms of government service. There were no SPD army officers, judges, or civil servants. When the physicist Leo Arons (1860–1919), inventor of the mercury vapour lamp, became an active member of the SPD, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared: ‘I will not tolerate socialists . . . as the teachers of our youth at the Royal universities’. A law was passed in 1898 specifically in order to sack Arons from the University of Berlin, where he taught. More generally, heavy industrialists like Krupp monitored the activities of their workers, employing a private police force to do so, and fired any who were found to be socialists.
Such discrimination aided the emergence of a left wing of the SPD that considered the reformist programme unworkable and urged direct action to bring about a revolution. The leading figure here was the journalist and writer Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), who in 1889 had fled Congress Poland for Switzerland in order to escape arrest by the Russian authorities. She studied at Zurich University, gaining her doctorate in 1897 with a dissertation on the economic history of modern Poland, then moved to Germany, where she married, thereby obtaining German citizenship. (The marriage was purely pragmatic and the couple never lived together, divorcing five years later.) Luxemburg’s closely argued theoretical tracts, culminating in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), sought to identify the economic forces driving imperialism. But it was for her opposition to war that she became best known. Luxemburg argued that war could and should be stopped by a mass strike of proletarians in all potentially participating countries. She successfully introduced a motion into the Second International’s Congress at Stuttgart in 1907 calling for a European general strike if war threatened. ‘Social democracy,’ she said, ‘is simply the embodiment of the modern proletariat’s class struggle, a struggle which is driven by a consciousness of its own historic consequences. The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.’ But while these beliefs made her a more democratic figure than, say, Lenin, her reliance on the masses to produce a revolution without leadership was doomed to failure. Her fellow radical Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), son of the early socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht, a lawyer and Reichstag deputy, put forward similar arguments against the recruitment of workers as cannon-fodder in imperialist wars in his Militarism and Anti-Militarism (1907). But Luxemburg, Liebknecht and their handful of followers remained isolated figures on the fringes of the party until the outbreak of war.
Closely allied to the German Social Democratic Party was its Austrian counterpart, founded early in 1889. The Austrian socialists stood out from the Germans through their greater concern with theory (even the major theorist of the SPD, Kautsky, was an Austrian). Given their situation in the multinational monarchy, they were particularly concerned with nationalism, a subject hitherto rather neglected in the Marxist tradition. In The Nationality Question and Social Democracy (1907), Otto Bauer (1881–1938) conceded that nation states added a great deal to the sum of human culture through their differences, but he still subscribed to the Second International’s policy of preventing war by staging a general European strike. This was ultimately to prove futile. However, there was one successful socialist campaign to prevent war, namely in Sweden, where Hjalmar Branting (1860–1925), an astronomer-turned-journalist and founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1889, led a movement after the turn of the century to stop reservists being called up for a military campaign against the secession of Norway. Branting called a general strike under the slogan ‘Hands off Norway, King!’ Alarmed at the prospect of being unable to recruit an effective military force to mobilize against the Norwegians, the Swedish government caved in, and the two countries divorced peacefully. This was probably the only entirely successful example of a political general strike in Europe before the war.
The socialist movement in Britain was far less ideological than its counterparts on the Continent. The new model trade unions that emerged after the collapse of Chartism were closely linked to the Liberal Party. Only in the 1880s did socialist radicalism re-emerge. The first of the new socialist bodies was the Social Democratic Federation, led by Henry Hyndman (1842–1921), son of a wealthy businessman, graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and among other things a first-class cricketer. Appalled by the bloodshed of the Austro-Italian War of 1866, a sight he witnessed as a journalist, Hyndman was converted to Marxism when he read Das Kapital on an Atlantic crossing in 1880. His associates included William Morris, Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor (1855–98), and two skilled workers, the trade unionists Tom Mann (1856–1941) and John Burns (1858–1943). Once he had read Marx, Hyndman expected capitalist society to collapse of its own accord by the end of the 1880s at the latest. In 1890, undaunted, he revised the date to 1900, also to pass without incident in due course. His programme included the abolition of the monarchy and the army, and, paradoxically, the prevention of women’s emancipation, which he regarded as a deviation from the purposes of socialism. Hyndman’s dictatorial manner alienated all his main associates, and they had resigned by the end of the 1880s, at which time the Social Democratic Federation only had around 3,000 members. It was never more than a sect, but it was the only movement in Britain to keep Marx’s ideas under discussion, even if it did not subscribe to them all. A more intellectual group, the Fabian Society, founded in 1884, named after the Roman general who had defeated Hannibal by delaying tactics rather than open confrontation, had around 2,000 members but made up for its tiny size by producing the influential Fabian Tracts (1884–1901). Their publications included contributions by prominent figures such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw, editor of Fabian Essays (1889), and the social reformers Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) and her husband Sidney Webb (1859–1947).
The major political representative of the working classes in Britain was the Labour Party, whose origins lay in the trade unions. These had acquired some 750,000 members by 1888, mostly organized in the Trades Union Congress. In 1886–7 the Congress set up an electoral committee to press for stronger working-class representation in Parliament. In Scotland and the north of England the trade unions broke with the Liberals and put up independent working-class candidates in elections to Parliament. In 1892 one such candidate, the Scot Keir Hardie (1856–1915), was elected for the impoverished London constituency of West Ham South. Hardie was of illegitimate birth, a former coalminer and miners’ trade union leader. He was not a Marxist. ‘More inspiration for the work,’ he said, ‘has been drawn from the teachings of Jesus than from any other source.’ In 1893, Hardie founded the Independent Labour Party, based in Bradford, with representatives from Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians. It aimed to achieve the ‘collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. Initially dependent on local electoral pacts with the Liberals, the party won twenty-nine seats in the House of Commons in 1906, alongside twenty-six miners’ union representatives elected on the Liberal Party ticket. In 1910 more than forty Labour candidates were successful, though Labour was not to displace the Liberals as the main party of the left until after the war.
French socialism was similarly weak and divided. The most important faction, and the one that bore the closest resemblance to the German model, was led by Jules Guesde (1845–1922), a veteran of the Commune who spent most of the 1870s in exile in Italy and was converted to Marxism in 1876. Guesde, a journalist and former clerk, was a frightening figure for the bourgeoisie: tall and thin, with shoulder-length hair, a large black beard, a pale countenance and metal-framed spectacles, he was ideologically rigid and intransigent. In collaboration with Marx, whose son-in-law Paul Lafargue (1842–1911) was a personal friend, Guesde formed the French Workers’ Party in 1880. Marx, however, wrote to both men in 1883, shortly before his death that year, accusing them of ‘revolutionary phrase-mongering’. When they assured him they were Marxists, he is said to have responded: ‘What’s certain then is that I myself am not a Marxist.’ Guesde had a power base among the textile workers of northern France, where he used local social life to win adherents. In east-central France his party emerged from a secret society popular among the miners, La Marianne, while in the south of France he relied on the radical post-Jacobin lower middle class. With this rather disparate social base, the French Workers’ Party had gained 16,000 members by 1898 and won thirteen seats in the Chamber of Deputies – the largest of the socialist factions in France but tiny by German standards. Unlike the German Social Democrats, the Guesdists never succeeded in winning over the trade unions, a crucial condition for success.
From 1881–2 the Guesdists had to face a rival group, the so-called Possibilists, led by Paul Brousse (1844–1912), a medical man. As with so many political parties, the Possibilists were originally given their name by their opponents, in this case Guesde himself, as a term of derision for supposedly selling out to the bourgeoisie. Brousse’s response to this criticism was that he accepted the name and that Guesde was an Impossibilist. Brousse thought socialism would eventually be brought about by economic change; revolution was not necessary. In the meantime he focused on municipal issues and winning power at a local level. In 1889 the Possibilists won nine seats on the municipal council of Paris and two seats in the Chamber of Deputies. As his medical practice became more lucrative, so Brousse became more centrist, arguing that revolution in the end was not going to happen. His pessimism caused the typographer Jean Allemane (1843–1935), a former Communard and exponent of the general strike as a political weapon, to break away in 1890 to form another faction, the Socialist Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Dominated by workers, it won five seats in the Chamber in 1892, but the deputies were so closely tied to the local constituency parties, who treated them as delegates who had to refer back for guidance on every issue, that they found life in the legislature impossible and broke away from the party themselves in 1896.
By this point a new figure was emerging who would unite and eventually dominate French socialism: Jean Jaurès (1859–1914). Jaurès called himself a ‘cultured peasant’. He wore bourgeois clothes including a black frock coat, but dressed so untidily, with his trousers too short, and his pockets stuffed with books and papers, that he did not really seem to belong to any social class. His untidiness betrayed the fact that he was a professor of philosophy by profession. A brilliant speaker with a sixth sense for the mood of a crowd, he left the Radical Party to become an independent socialist when he realized the Radicals were not serious about social reform. He was joined by Alexandre Millerand (1859–1943), a lawyer who had made his name defending strikers in court actions brought against them by the state. Millerand tried to bring together the various socialist deputies including the Guesdists and Possibilists on the basis of a minimum programme that included the nationalization of monopolies, the municipalization of public services and the independence of small proprietors. In 1899, however, he accepted the offer of the post of Minister of Commerce and Industry in a Cabinet led by Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau (1846–1904), which included General Gaston Galliffet (1830–1909), notorious for his part in the repression of the Paris Commune. As a result the socialists disowned Millerand as an opportunist, and indeed he ended up after the First World War as a rather conservative President of the Republic.
Jaurès succeeded where Millerand failed. He benefited from the break-up of the Possibilists and the growth in the number of independent socialist deputies. In 1900 he formed a party of his own, concluding electoral alliances at a local level with the Radicals to boost the numbers of his deputies in the Chamber. He repaid the debt by backing the anticlerical legislation introduced by the Radicals in the early 1900s. Following the German line of non-co-operation with bourgeois parties, Guesde persuaded the 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the Second International to issue a condemnation of Jaurès. Cleverly accepting this, Jaurès ended his co-operation with the Radicals and brought about the unification of all the socialist factions in 1905 as the French Section of the Workers’ International. The 1908 programme of the party, rather like that of the German Social Democrats, offered something to everyone. Drawn up by Jaurès, it offered ultimate revolution to the Guesdists, use of the general strike when opportunity arose to the remaining Allemanists, and immediate electoral campaigning, municipal reform and the support of trade unions to those of a Possibilist cast of mind. On this basis the French Socialists doubled their membership to more than 90,000 by 1914. However, this was still less than one tenth of the membership of the SPD. The French movement remained prone to factionalism, with dissidents led by the fervent anti-militarist Gustave Hervé (1871–1944) on the left and the patriotic Alexandre Varenne (1870–1947) on the right. The party never forged close links with the unions, and despite some electoral successes never really succeeded in mobilizing a significant section of the peasantry. Nevertheless, by 1914 it was a force to be reckoned with, commanding 102 out of 601 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, almost double the number it had won in 1906.
French socialism also had to contend with a powerful rival on the left, namely the anarchists. While both wanted, in theory at least, the destruction of the existing order and the creation of a classless society, the socialists blamed inequality and oppression on the class rule of the bourgeoisie, whereas the anarchists blamed the very existence of the state itself. The socialists were prepared to wait for the revolution, whereas the anarchists wanted it immediately; the socialists were willing to a degree to work through the parliamentary system, whereas the anarchists repudiated parliamentary democracy and wanted direct revolutionary action, or ‘propaganda by the deed’. Following Bakunin’s defeat in the First International by Marx and his followers, the anarchists focused on destabilizing the state through acts of individual violence and terrorism. Their newspapers ran lotteries in which pistols and daggers were offered as prizes. Individual anarchists perpetrated outrages on bourgeois society through robberies, murders and explosions, in a campaign that culminated in 1894 with the assassination of the President of the French Republic, Marie-François Sadi Carnot (1837–94), stabbed to death in Lyon by the young Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio (1873–94) as he left a public banquet in an open carriage. Caserio declared his crime was committed to avenge the execution of another anarchist, Émile Henry (1872–94), who had detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, killing one person and injuring twenty; when reproached with killing innocent victims, Henry had replied: ‘There are no innocents.’
Henry in his turn had let off the bomb as an act of revenge for the execution of Auguste Vaillant (1861–94), who had thrown a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies in 1893 (a home-made device, it was not very effective, and did not kill anyone, though it caused several injuries). Vaillant’s last words before he was guillotined were ‘Death to the bourgeoisie! Long live Anarchy!’ These men entered the long list of anarchist martyrs and heroes, of whom the most famous was probably François Ravachol (1859–92). He tried to blow up apartment blocks where judges lived, and was convicted of murdering an ancient hermit near Saint-Étienne and stealing his savings, as well as killing a rag merchant and two elderly women. As the sentence was read out, he shouted ‘Long live Anarchy!’ The motivation for these seemingly random attacks was lucidly explained by Émile Henry at his trial: ‘I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast it down in mud and blood.’
Such incidents lay behind the popular image of the anarchist, bearded and unkempt, beret on head and bomb in hand. It was also from this period that the most celebrated literary portraits of anarchists emerge – in novels such as Germinal (1885) by Émile Zola, The Princess Casamassima (1886) by Henry James, and The Secret Agent (1907, set in London in 1886) by Joseph Conrad. In fact, there were relatively few of these anarchist terrorists, and their main effect was to terrify bourgeois society and produce drastic police repression, most notably in the so-called lois scélérates (‘villainous laws’) of December 1893 (passed two days after Auguste Vaillant launched his bomb), which allowed the French authorities to close down most of the anarchist press. Anarchism had an even greater impact in Italy and Spain, where the influence of Bakunin proved decisive. During a three-year stay in Italy, from 1864 to 1867, the Russian revolutionary had won the admiration of the younger generation of radicals. ‘The advent of the social revolution,’ Bakunin wrote optimistically, ‘is in no country nearer than in Italy . . . The mass of Italian peasants already constitutes an immense and all-powerful army for the social revolution.’ In 1874 he took part in an anarchist uprising in Bologna that ended even before it had begun, with the betrayal of the revolutionaries’ plans to the police; after considering suicide, Bakunin disguised himself as a priest and escaped to Switzerland. Two years later, his disciple Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) and a Russian revolutionary, Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinsky (1851–95), later known as ‘Stepniak’, went into the Campanian hills near Benevento in 1877, declared the king deposed, and began burning town archives. However, the army arrived and despite the support of the local peasants the anarchists were arrested, though they were acquitted by a sympathetic jury at their trial in 1878.
Malatesta survived into the Fascist era, sometimes in prison, sometimes in exile in London, working as an electrician. In this capacity he helped supply equipment used to rob a jeweller’s premises in Houndsditch. When the police caught the burglars red-handed, there was an exchange of fire in which three policemen were shot. The robbers barricaded themselves in a house on Sidney Street, where a siege, attended by the Home Secretary Winston Churchill (1874–1965), ended in their deaths. Individual Italian anarchists were among the most active proponents of ‘propaganda by the deed’ in the 1890s and 1900s – men such as Gaetano Bresci (1869–1901), who assassinated King Umberto I of Italy, Michele Angiolillo (1871–97), who murdered the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in revenge for the execution of five Spanish anarchists, and Luigi Lucheni (1873–1910), who stabbed the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary to death in 1898 with a four-inch industrial needle. In his diary Lucheni had written before the assassination: ‘How I would like to kill someone; but it must be someone important so it gets in the papers.’
It was in Spain that Bakunin’s influence was greatest. In the 1870s his Italian disciple Giuseppe Fanelli (1827–77) made contact with a small group of followers of Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and succeeded in getting them to form a branch of the International dedicated wholly to Bakunin’s ideas. Fanelli did not know any Spanish and spoke in French, but one of his listeners recalled how his voice ‘could take on all the inflections suitable to what he was expressing, passing rapidly from accents of rage and threats against exploiters and tyrants to those of suffering, pity and consolation’. They managed to find a following among workers by encouraging political strikes in Barcelona, and their ideas had a huge influence on the dispossessed rural labourers and small peasants of the south. By the 1890s the anarchists were organizing mass demonstrations in many parts of Spain, leading to the ‘tragic week’ in Barcelona, from 25 July to 2 August 1909, in which thousands demonstrated against a call-up of troops for service in Africa. Over a hundred were killed by troops brought in by the government, and 1,700 people were indicted for armed rebellion, of whom five were sentenced to death and fifty-nine to life imprisonment. These events resulted in the creation of the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, in 1910.
By contrast, anarchism was unable to take root in Germany, largely thanks to the strength of the organized industrial working class. Its most notable moment was in September 1883, when a small band of anarchists put a huge bomb in a drain underneath the path along which Kaiser Wilhelm I, Bismarck and the German princes were due to pass to the unveiling of the statue of ‘Germania’ on a hill overlooking the Rhine above Rüdesheim. The carnage would have been considerable had they succeeded, but being short of money they could not afford to buy waterproof fuses. It rained the night before the event, so the bomb did not go off. A few weeks later they blew up the main police station in Frankfurt, and when they were arrested they confessed to the earlier attempt at the monument. Three were beheaded, two imprisoned and two acquitted. In the dock one of them shouted as he was sentenced: ‘If I had ten heads left, I would gladly lay them on the block for the same cause!’ German anarchism’s most lasting influence in fact was not in its home country but in the United States. The bookbinder Johann Most (1846–1906), expelled from the SPD in 1880, emigrated to America in 1882, changing his first name to John. He played an active role in the emerging anarchist movement there, in which Italian emigrants were particularly prominent. In 1885, Most published his Science of Revolutionary Warfare (subtitled A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc., etc.). For the rest of his life he was in and out of prison, on one occasion condemned for supposedly having inspired the assassination of President William McKinley (1843–1901).
One of the most celebrated of Most’s followers in America was the Russian émigrée Emma Goldman, ‘Red Emma’ (1869–1940). In theory at least, the anarchist and socialist leaders were supporters of female equality, inspired by classics such as Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). The most widely read of such texts was Woman and Socialism (1879) by the German socialist leader August Bebel. It painted a drastic portrait of the social and economic exploitation of working-class women, especially those who were forced into prostitution, and held out the utopian promise of complete female equality in a post-revolutionary world in which the conventional restrictions of marriage and family life would no longer exist. Partly due to its influence, the most important socialist women’s organization in Europe was the German one. The movement was brought together in 1896 from a number of small and disparate local groups into a functioning unit by Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), who was the dominant figure until the First World War. Born Clara Eissner in a small peasant village in Saxony, the daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife, she became active in the socialist movement in the late 1870s and met the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin (1848–89), who became her mentor and partner. The couple did not marry, but she followed him into exile, first in Zurich then in Paris, and bore him two sons. Living in considerable poverty, they both contracted tuberculosis, from which Ossip died in 1889. Clara recovered and later married an artist, Georg Zundel (1875–1948), eighteen years her junior: she was no respecter of bourgeois convention in either of her two relationships.
It was in Paris that Clara Zetkin became passionately committed to a socialist conception of feminism after reading Bebel’s tract and making the acquaintance of Engels. On returning to Germany after Ossip’s death, she took over an ailing socialist feminist magazine and renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality). The magazine, which had achieved a circulation of 125,000 by 1914, argued consistently that the proletarian women’s struggle was an essential part of the general working-class struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society. Zetkin condemned the idea of a separate feminist movement as ‘bourgeois’ and polemicized ceaselessly against its leaders. Aided by Luise Zietz (1865–1922), a tobacco worker married to a Hamburg docker, Zetkin built up a team of ‘agitators’ who devoted themselves to the systematic recruitment of working-class women. At first, hampered by the legal ban on women’s participation in politics in most parts of Germany, they met with little success. But after 1905, as these laws relaxed, and especially from 1908, when they were repealed, the movement grew rapidly, reaching 175,000 members by 1914. The members were overwhelmingly the wives of active male Social Democrats and trade unionists who had come to realize that womenfolk hostile or indifferent to their politics would hamper their commitment, especially in time of strikes or lockouts, and would endanger the socialist future by not bringing up their children to support the cause. The principle of women’s emancipation, including full enfranchisement, was therefore written into the SPD’s party programme.
However, the women in the movement were not expected to show any independent initiative. The biennial women’s conferences held from 1900 to 1908 aroused particular hostility from the men of the SPD, who ensured that only one further conference was held before the war, in 1911. Still more controversial within the movement was the International Women’s Day, founded on Zetkin’s initiative by a resolution of the Women’s Socialist International Congress in Copenhagen in 1910, following the lead of the American socialist women. On 19 March 1911 women in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and the United States demonstrated for votes for women. The demonstrations, with processions of respectably clad socialist women silently snaking through the streets holding aloft banners demanding the vote, were held again in 1912, 1913 and 1914. Repeated attempts by the male leadership of the SPD to prevent them came to nothing, though the party did wind up its Women’s Bureau in 1912. By this time Zetkin had long since gravitated to the extreme left along with Rosa Luxemburg (who kept determinedly clear of women’s issues, regarding them as a distraction from her revolutionary activities), and she was replaced as head of the women’s movement in 1908. The SPD leadership’s commitment to enfranchising women was never more than token, as became clear in 1910, when the prospect of extending the vote to all adult males in Prussia became a possibility and was embraced by the party without any reference to votes for women.
Impressive in its size and its discipline, the German socialist women’s movement had no rival anywhere else in Europe. In France a number of radical feminists, the most important of whom was Louise Saumoneau (1875–1950), a seamstress from a working-class family of cabinet-makers, founded a ‘Feminist Socialist Group’. Saumoneau took Zetkin’s line that a focus on women’s issues was irrelevant to the overriding cause of revolution, and ran into open hostility from the mainstream socialists; in 1914 the combined socialists, with 90,000 members, numbered fewer than 1,000 women among them. The influence of the misogynist writings of Proudhon and the family-based economy of the artisan household was still strong in France. And the trade unions never approved of women’s work, which they saw as undermining men’s wages. There were small but significant women’s socialist movements in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands, and a number of women active in the Labour Party in Britain, but in the area of women’s rights the Germans were even more absolutely dominant in the international movement than they were in the Second International as a whole.
Despite their disunity, organized socialist movements were perhaps the most powerful of all the pressures for the democratization of European politics in the quarter-century leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. With millions of followers, overwhelmingly from the industrial working class, the great socialist organizations of the day were publicly committed to achieving full equality for the masses in politics, ministerial responsibility, the abolition of monarchies and titled aristocracies, the overthrow of state religion, the breaking-up of the great landed estates, and the ending of exploitation through the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of public ownership in all areas of the economy. These beliefs were inculcated, especially in Germany and Austria, through a vast and elaborate network of exclusively socialist institutions, newspapers, magazines, clubs and associations, trade unions, educational societies and much more, so that members could live their entire lives in a world informed by socialist values. Socialism transformed the lives of millions of ordinary workers in this way, but it also constituted a growing threat to social stability and order in the minds of the elites who dominated the political establishment of the day. Repeatedly, conservative and, in the end too, liberal governments tried to defuse working-class discontent by passing welfare reforms that gave the working class a stake in society and removed from its life the insecurity and poverty that generated resentment and disillusion with the dominant institutions of the state. By 1900 in almost every European country the age of the masses had begun, as political parties and groupings of every hue vied for their allegiance and competed for their support.
If democracy in its modern form is based above all on universal adult suffrage and the responsibility of government to parliament and the electorate, then the tide of history in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century seemed to be flowing inexorably towards it. The roll-back of revolution in 1848 did not mean the defeat of liberalism; on the contrary, alongside liberal reforms such as freedom of the press, equality before the law, public trial by jury, and so on, a number of countries saw the triumph of constitutionalism and the establishment of parliamentary supremacy. Legislative assemblies emerged at mid-century either as a result of the revolution or as part of an attempt to ward it off, replacing traditional Estates in almost all countries. Sweden was late in replacing Estates with an elected Parliament, in 1865, but more typical was Prussia, where a Parliament was instituted in the course of the 1848 Revolution. In one country after another the right to vote was extended to new classes of the population.
A number of countries already had universal male suffrage well before the end of the century. Greece was founded on the principle of votes for all adult men from its beginnings in 1829 (though it excluded the unemployed until 1877). In France universal male suffrage was introduced in 1848 and remained in place thereafter, while the German Empire brought it in for national elections on its foundation in 1871. Austria enfranchised all adult males in 1907 and Italy in 1912 following earlier, more limited extensions in 1882 and 1887. In Spain the Constitution of 1869 accorded voting rights to all adult men. In some countries the extension of the franchise was clearly under way but incomplete by 1914: Sweden, where the electorate had already been modestly increased in the 1840s, enfranchised around 20 per cent of adult males in elections for the Upper House of Parliament in 1865, and 40 per cent for the Lower House, with a major though not quite total extension in 1909. In Norway universal adult male suffrage was introduced in 1898 in the course of a sharp rise in nationalist sentiment, as liberal politicians strove to gain the maximum legitimacy for their policy of freeing the country from Swedish rule. In Denmark only one in seven adult males could vote for the Lower House when it was established in 1849, a late fruit of the mid-century revolutions, but voting rights were extended in stages until complete adult male suffrage was achieved in 1915.
In some countries the extension of the franchise to the whole of the adult male population went at a slower pace. In Britain the 1867 Reform Act had already increased the electorate from 1,365,000 to 2,446,000, or about a third of all adult males. The right to vote was still based on a property qualification but on a much lower one than in 1832, so that the urban middle classes but also a limited number of skilled working men now had the vote. Fifty-two small boroughs were disfranchised and the seats redistributed. This was followed by the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872, which reduced the power of the landlords and brought bribery and intimidation of the electorate to an end. In 1884 the provisions of the 1867 Act were extended to the countryside, in a measure followed a year later by a redistribution of 142 constituencies, thirty-nine of them added to London, and others to industrial cities in the north. Nearly two out of every three adult males now had the vote. In Romania the franchise of 1866 was extended in 1884 to most elements of the middle class but left the mass of the peasantry unrepresented, a factor in provoking the violent peasant uprising that swept the country in 1907.
The most influential of all European constitutions in the nineteenth century, the Belgian Constitution of 1831, gained its fame through the incorporation of basic liberal principles such as freedom of religion, the right to education and so on. However, to begin with, it imposed high property qualifications. The number of men who possessed the right to vote, only about 45,000, was doubled to 90,000 in the course of the 1848 Revolution. Only 4.4 per cent of the male population (of all ages) had the vote in 1892; a new constitution, voted through in 1893 amid widespread strikes and noisy street demonstrations in favour of universal male suffrage, gave every man over twenty-four one vote, those over thirty-four with a family and a rateable home two votes, and those with professional qualifications or property three votes. This increased the number of electors tenfold, though most of the votes were cast by the plural electors. In the Netherlands the States General were swept away and indirect elections were replaced by direct ones. The roll-back of Revolution led in 1850 to an actual reduction in the size of the electorate, which numbered around 80,000 out of a population of three million, while in Belgium an electorate of the same size represented a population of four and a third million. By the end of the century, the pressure for democratization from the increasingly powerful socialist movement in the Netherlands, with a growing number of strikes fuelled by the economic downturn of the previous years, had forced the extension of the franchise in 1887 to all men over the age of twenty-three who fulfilled relatively modest tax and residence requirements. The measure meant that the number of voters increased from 14 per cent of the total adult population in 1890 to 31 per cent in 1910.
In some parts of Europe the forces of democratization were obstructed by monarchical or military authoritarianism, but political instability could also benefit the democratic principle. A military coup in Serbia in 1903 actually reduced the power of the monarch and increased the influence of the electorate. On 4 October 1910 in Portugal a group of junior army officers calling themselves the carbonari arrested their superiors, armed the people of Lisbon, and declared a republic. The king was forced to abandon a game of bridge in mid-play and make his way to a lonely beach from where he embarked for England and exile. Repeated political upheavals in Spain were succeeded during the last half-century before 1914 by a relatively stable constitutional monarchy in which the alternation of conservative and liberal governments acquired the name turnismo. Everywhere the balance between state authority and legislative assemblies depended not least on the character of the individual monarch and the strengths and weaknesses of the political class and the nation’s political culture. The principle of ministerial and government responsibility to the elected legislature was established in Norway in 1884, in Denmark in 1901 and in Sweden in 1917. There were many different reasons for these domestic reforms, but it was significant that the introduction of legislative assemblies and the extension of the right to vote owed a great deal to fear of revolution at different points and in different countries, from Britain in 1832 to Austria in 1907. In France and Germany, as well as in Britain in 1867, voting rights were extended by conservative politicians to groups of the population they wrongly thought would outflank the liberals by voting to preserve the existing order. At other times, as in many countries in 1848, Denmark in 1865 or Russia in 1905, these reforms were brought about by a defeat of the ruling system in revolution or war. Moderate liberals believed that only those who had a stake in the country, whether through owning property and paying taxes, or those who were able to contribute to its political culture, for example by being able to read and write, should have the right to vote. But gradually they were forced to extend this right through the pressure for change exerted by the growing power of socialist and democratic movements.
By the turn of the century modern politics were beginning to reach the rural masses. Certainly, traditional riots and uprisings continued, above all where the peasants were denied the right to participate in the national political culture, as in Russia in 1905 and Romania two years later. Yet the peasantry in many parts of Europe was beginning to mobilize politically. In southern Italy and Sicily old-fashioned peasant revolts were now intermingled with adherence to the modern politics of the socialists or the revolutionary ideology of anarchism. In Germany peasants began to organize in the 1890s by setting up farming co-operatives, a thousand of which were newly established every year up to 1914. In Bavaria the Peasant Leagues mobilized a rural population dissatisfied with its neglect by local notables and the middle class, under the slogan ‘no aristocrats, no priests, no doctors and no professors, only peasants for the representation of the peasants’. In central Germany the antisemitic parties of Otto Böckel (1859–1923) and Hermann Ahlwardt (1846–1914) exploited peasant discontent for their own purposes, adopting the black, red and gold colours of the 1848 Revolution and declaring themselves ‘against Junkers and Jews’. In France middle-class observers began to report that peasants were becoming ‘less obliging than they used to be’. Improved communications made it easier for them to get to the polls, which were always held in towns. In 1907, as the ravages of phylloxera were still causing widespread economic hardship, the winegrower and café owner Marcelin Albert (1851–1921) began holding public meetings that attracted hundreds of thousands of people, or so it was said: as a result, peasants stopped paying taxes, local officials resigned, and crowds besieged departmental prefectures in the south. The troops sent to restore order mutinied (and were subsequently sent to man a remote fort in Tunisia). The Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, eventually summoned Albert, found that he was frightened by having created a movement that was now out of control, and persuaded him to abandon the campaign. What survived was the Radical Party, buoyed up by the voting power of the peasantry, who obtained significant tax concessions through its agency.
Much more difficult to control was the peasant movement in Ireland. After the potato famine of the late 1840s and the ensuing mass emigration, social antagonisms between a mainly Protestant, Anglo-Irish class of landowners and the mass of the cottagers and landless labourers deepened dramatically; this was in the light of an increase in the number of larger estates (more than 20 per cent in the case of all estates over 15 acres) and a decline in the number of smallholdings (38 per cent of those between 5 and 15 acres, and 52 per cent of those between 1 and 5 acres). As literacy rates grew (rising from 33 per cent in 1850 to 84 per cent in 1900) and a Catholic middle class emerged, a mass movement known as the Land War broke out at the end of the 1870s, convulsing rural society with more than 11,000 ‘outrages’, mostly threatening letters, between 1879 and 1882, and the same number of families evicted from their tenancies. Landlords were attacked, and a few were shot (one commentator claimed that ‘the English shot pheasants and poachers, and the Irish shot landlords and agents’). In the 1880s ‘agrarian crimes’ were running at twenty-five times the level of 1878, including shootings, beatings, the maiming of animals, the disruption of fox hunting and the dispatching of threatening letters. The discontent of the small farmers in Ireland was fuelled by resentment at their deprivation of legal rights, hostility to the dominance of the ‘Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy’, and an emerging, largely middle-class nationalism.
The increase in literacy, the spread of education, the standardization of national languages, the extension of communications through railways, newspapers, magazines, mass-produced pamphlets and flysheets – all this drew the urban and rural masses into the wider political discourse and intensified a national sense of identity. In countries where universal adult suffrage obtained or significant elements of the masses were enfranchised, men increasingly began to exercise their right to vote. Percentage polls at elections grew steadily until in a country like Germany they reached over 85 per cent by the early 1900s. With more and more citizens participating in political life, modern political parties began to form, organizing themselves to take part in elections and win representation in national legislatures. Increasingly, however, these parties included the representation of national minorities, which soon began to challenge the political systems of Europe’s multinational states.
In most European states national minorities were either marginal or more or less quiescent from the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century. Polish nationalism, the cause of major upheavals throughout the century, had finally been curbed by the brutal suppression of the 1863 uprising. Nationalist political parties began to form, but tsarist autocracy and the repression exercised in their respective parts of the former Polish state by Austria and Prussia ensured their activities were kept within strict limits. In France, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands and Scandinavia national minorities were marginal to the political process. Catalan nationalism in Spain was only just beginning to stir. However, there were two states in particular where the extension of the franchise and the ‘nationalization of the masses’ gave rise to serious political conflicts. These were the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. In both countries the intransigence of significant national minorities battened onto the decay of liberal hegemony that was the most obvious consequence of the extension of the franchise and began to threaten the very existence of the state by the outbreak of the First World War.
The extension of the right to vote in Britain in 1867 and 1884 spelled the end for the Whigs, the aristocratic liberals who had dominated the British political scene from the beginning of the 1830s to the middle of the 1860s. In 1883 the leading Whig in the House of Commons, Lord Hartington (1833–1908), son of the Duke of Devonshire, said that the purpose of the Whigs was to ‘direct and guide, and moderate’ the popular will, and to form ‘a connecting link between the advanced party and those classes which, possessing property, power and influence, are naturally averse to change’. What he called the ‘advanced party’, or Radicals, numbered around eighty in the Commons and wanted further democratic and social reforms. The old Whig Party metamorphosed in the decades after mid-century into the Liberal Party, increasingly dominated by the middle classes. The party as a whole was held together by Gladstone, who delayed the advent of mass politics until the 1880s, after which he played a major role in bringing it about.
The pre-eminent practitioner of fiscal conservatism, working for the restriction of government spending, Gladstone regarded all his policies as designed to preserve social and political order. He believed strongly in rule by the elite, packed his Ministries with Whig peers, and deeply disapproved of the Radicals. Yet on the other hand he believed that it was better to move with the masses than against them. He saw his role as bridging the gap between the landed interest and the broader political elite on the one hand, and the new industrial middle and working classes on the other. With his passionate commitment to every cause he embraced, Gladstone dominated the House of Commons. He had competition only from his great rival Disraeli, who employed humour and sarcasm in an attempt to deflate ‘that unprincipled maniac Gladstone’ as he called him in private, a man who in his view possessed an ‘extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition’. Gladstone for his part regarded Disraeli as an unprincipled opportunist: ‘The Tory party,’ he remarked, ‘had principles by which it would and did stand for bad and for good. All this Dizzy destroyed.’ The oratorical duels between the two men were printed in the newspapers and transformed their rivalry in the Commons into a national spectator sport. This was politics as performance, cementing a sense of the House of Commons as the great forum for national political debate.
Yet Gladstone was more important in his ability to rouse crowds outside Parliament. His deep, resonant and penetrating voice enabled him to address an audience of ten or twelve thousand in the open air, assisted by ‘relayers’, men with acute hearing and booming voices, who repeated his words to the outer fringes of the crowd. His great series of outdoor speeches in 1879–80, known as the ‘Midlothian campaign’, in which he brought many thousands to a state of frenzy with his rhetorical attacks on Disraeli’s government, marked the creation of the modern electoral campaign, in which he addressed his programme not to his constituency but to the country. The speeches, lasting up to five hours each, were often likened to sermons. Even in a pious age, Gladstone’s religiosity stood out. His High Anglicanism infused all his political statements with a moral conviction that made him the national hero of Calvinists, Methodists and other religious nonconformists. In 1868 he declared: ‘The Almighty seems to sustain me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself to be. Glory be to his name.’ It was bad enough, Disraeli complained, that Gladstone often had a political trump card up his sleeve: what was completely unbearable was the fact that he always claimed God had put it there. Gladstone’s reputation for taking a long time to make up his mind on important issues – the origin of the legend that he chewed each piece of food thirty-two times before swallowing it – was belied by his impulsiveness on many occasions.
Gladstone presided over the creation of the Liberal Party as a modern political movement with a coherent programme and a permanent organization. The National Liberal Federation was founded in 1877 by the leading Birmingham Liberal, Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914), an industrialist who began as a manufacturer of screws and later became mayor of his home city. The Federation was organized in constituency branches, it had a registered membership, it engaged in fund-raising activities, it founded local social clubs, and it ran co-ordinated campaigns at election time. Its Conservative counterpart, the National Union of Conservative Associations, was set up in 1867 and run from a Conservative Central Office from 1870, though it had decayed by 1880 and had to be subsequently revived. These changes, and the extension of the electorate, increased the number of contested constituency elections, so that whereas 194 constituencies returned an MP unopposed in 1865, only thirty-nine did so twenty years later. Contrary to Disraeli’s expectation, it was Gladstone who rallied the new electorate in 1868 to form his first Ministry, which lasted until 1874 and was the first great reforming government since the Whig administrations of the 1830s. Its aim was to introduce liberal principles of free competition into every area of politics and society, and the list and scope of its reforms were breathtaking.
From 1870 all candidates for the Civil Service, except the Diplomatic Corps, were required to take an open competitive examination; nomination and patronage were no more. This opened up the Civil Service to the middle classes. The War Minister Lord Cardwell (1813–86) reorganized the army in response to the Prussian victories of 1864–71, bringing back many troop units from India and creating a home-based expeditionary force. The purchase of commissions was abolished; henceforth appointment as an officer was on merit. Flogging as a disciplinary measure was also outlawed. The Education Act of 1870 created ‘Board Schools’ funded by local government, effectively rivalling the Church-run voluntary schools and making elementary education universal. A Public Health Act (1872) set up local Health Boards and medical officers of health; a Local Government Board Act (1871) centralized government agencies dealing with local authorities; another measure the same year removed religious tests for holders of teaching posts in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; a Trade Union (Protection of Funds) Act was passed in 1869; and in 1870 the Married Women’s Property Act (strengthened in 1882) gave wives legal power over the property they brought into a marriage. After this outburst of legislative energy it was hardly surprising that in 1873 Disraeli compared the government ministers on the front bench of the House of Commons to ‘a range of exhausted volcanoes’; for by this time a number of other measures were running into difficulties. Gladstone called a general election in 1874 but his only clear policy was the abolition of income tax, and he was heavily defeated.
The winner of the election was Disraeli, who served as Prime Minister until 1880. ‘I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,’ he boasted. Born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family, Disraeli had been baptized a Christian, and with his goatee beard, his dandified clothing, his profession as a writer of novels (which he continued to publish during his tenure of office), and his often frivolous wit, he hardly seemed cut out to lead a party of stolid gentry and landowners. Part of his secret was that he had a firm belief in the virtues of the aristocracy, strong-minded, independent, and not to be overawed by the mob; indeed, he believed that Jews themselves were natural aristocrats. The architect of the 1867 extension of the franchise, he was the founder of ‘Tory Democracy’, turning the Conservatives into a modern political party in terms not only of organization but also of ideology. On the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865, Disraeli was quick to appropriate his mantle of patriotism for the Conservatives. His party’s fortunes were buoyed up by the growth of the London suburbs, which voted solidly Tory in the elections of 1874. Seventy years of age when he came to office, Disraeli passed a new Public Health Act (1875), the Artisans’ Dwelling Act (1875), an Act requiring ships to mark on their sides the minimum freeboard level known as the Plimsoll Line (1876), and other measures. But his domestic record did not compare with that of his predecessor. Overwhelmingly concerned with foreign and imperial policy, Disraeli saw his mission as engineering social calm through a ‘return to normality’, bringing about minor reforms but not attempting anything major. In 1876 he moved to the House of Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield. His great debating duels with Gladstone had already come to an end. The former Liberal Prime Minister had retired after his defeat in 1874, but, spurred by personal outrage at Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria, Gladstone returned to politics with his Midlothian campaign. Its momentum swept Gladstone back into the leadership of the Liberals and into power in the general election of 1880.
The Midlothian campaign had unleashed forces of popular politics that Gladstone found difficult to control. He was now widely known as the G. O. M. or ‘Grand Old Man’ – his enemies called him ‘God’s One Mistake’ – or ‘The People’s William’. With popular support outside Parliament for major reforms, he put through the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883, which limited the amount of money that could be spent on election campaigns by candidates and cracked down on corruption during election time. The 1884 Reform Act brought about a significant extension of the franchise to precisely those parts of society that had lent Gladstone’s campaign their support. But, declaring that the Liberals were ‘ripe for a new departure in constructive Radicalism’, Chamberlain also pressed for improvements in housing, inheritance tax on landed estates (eventually introduced in 1894), free elementary education, a progressive income tax and other measures bound to annoy the Whigs. With his elegant dress, orchid buttonhole and monocle, Chamberlain was hardly the image of a wild radical. But as President of the Board of Trade, his rhetoric began to drive offended Whig aristocrats into the Conservative Party.
Chamberlain’s radicalism was combined with a strong belief in Empire and in the United Kingdom, and it was this that brought him into conflict with Gladstone, above all over the Irish Question. This was the crucial point at which democracy came into conflict with liberalism. Resentment at English rule and the ascendancy of Protestant landowners, many of them absentees living in England, was rife among the Catholic Irish peasantry. Gladstone had attempted to deal with religious issues in 1869 by disestablishing and disendowing the Anglican Church in Ireland. In 1870 his Irish Land Act had granted more security to tenants, but proved difficult to enforce. The introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 freed Irish electors from the pressure previously put on them by Anglo-Irish landlords and brought fifty-nine Irish MPs to the Westminster Parliament, all of them committed to Home Rule for Ireland. Disraeli neglected the Irish Question except for a Coercion Act (1875), which gave the government powers to stamp out unrest. The Act was a failure, and by 1880 anti-landlord and anti-English violence was spreading across the countryside. Gladstone became obsessed with the Irish problem. ‘My mission,’ he said in 1880, ‘is to pacify Ireland.’
Gladstone passed a second Land Act in 1881, giving tenants more rights, but this was opposed as inadequate by Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91), a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord who had entered Parliament in 1875 and became leader of the Irish Home Rule League in 1880. Founded in 1873, the League was renamed the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1882 and gave Parnell a platform from which to exercise his remarkable oratorical talents. Half-American himself, Parnell toured the United States in the winter of 1879–80 drumming up funds and support from the Irish diaspora. He told his American listeners:
When we have undermined English misgovernment we have paved the way for Ireland to take her place amongst the nations of the earth. And let us not forget that that is the ultimate goal at which all we Irishmen aim. None of us whether we be in America or in Ireland . . . will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England.
Parnell cultivated the radical nationalist Fenian movement, and was imprisoned under the Coercion Act. In 1882 he was released after agreeing to the Land Act if rent arrears were written off, in the so-called Kilmainham Treaty. The negotiations were conducted by Captain William O’Shea (1840–1905), whose wife Kitty O’Shea (1846–1921) was Parnell’s long-term mistress and about to bear his child. For the moment the liaison remained secret, though the captain did try to fight a duel with Parnell in 1881. More immediately, however, the Kilmainham Treaty was undermined by the murder on 6 May 1882 of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish (1836–82), and his top civil servant, Thomas Henry Burke (1829–82), in Dublin’s Phoenix Park by members of an Irish nationalist secret society, the Irish National Invincibles. Parnell was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Jail in 1882 for having allegedly supported the murders; he publicly condemned them and was released. Although an inquiry reported that the incriminating documents were forgeries, further progress had become impossible for the time being.
The 1884 Reform Act increased the number of Irish Home Rulers in Parliament to eighty-six in the election of the following year. They were led by Parnell, who had allied with the Conservatives to bring down the Gladstone government. In the new House of Commons the Irish MPs held the balance of power. Gladstone was by this point converted to the idea of Home Rule as the only way out, but the Protestant Whig magnates, appalled by the idea of Anglo-Irish landowners being expropriated by a prospective Irish Parliament dominated by Catholic peasant farmers, refused to join the Cabinet. They were supported by the Radicals, led by Chamberlain, who regarded Home Rule as a blow to Britain’s imperial mission. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill was defeated in 1886, and in the ensuing general election his Liberal supporters lost heavily. A coalition of seventy-nine Liberal Unionists led by Chamberlain and 316 Conservatives now led from the House of Lords by Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, came into office. With three brief intervals – Gladstone’s Third Ministry, in 1886, and Fourth Ministry, from 1892–4, which again foundered on the issue of Home Rule, and another short-lived Liberal government in 1894–5 under the brilliant but indolent Lord Rosebery (1847–1929) – the Conservatives under Salisbury were continuously in power for some two decades, from 1885 to 1905. The Irish question had brought Liberal hegemony to an end.
Gladstone supported Home Rule partly because he realized that Parnell would settle for nothing else. He was not prepared to let the Liberal leadership pass to Chamberlain, whom he saw as a dangerous opportunist in the Disraelian mould, and he feared that the Irish Question would dominate British politics until it was solved. But Home Rule also became a moral crusade, giving Gladstone the will to carry on in politics well into his eighties. He did not succeed. The wreck of the Home Rule cause was completed by the downfall of Parnell, ruined by the public scandal occasioned by Captain O’Shea, who finally sued his wife Kitty for divorce in 1889, naming Parnell as co-respondent. Nonconformist Protestants among the Liberals were outraged by the details revealed at the trial in 1890, Gladstone warned that they would lose the next election if Parnell stayed on, and the Irish leader’s followers split over the issue. Fighting for his political life, Parnell fell ill and died in October 1891 of pneumonia in the arms of Kitty, whom he had married just over three months before.
Salisbury became the dominant figure in British politics for the last fifteen years or so of the nineteenth century. An aristocratic landowner and active journalist, he concealed a neurotic, pessimistic character behind an effective mask as a calm and imperious statesman. He served as Prime Minister in 1885–6, 1886–92 and 1895–1902, sustained in the House of Commons by the solid phalanx of Liberal Unionists led by Chamberlain and in the House of Lords by the Whig peers, who by now had mostly defected to the Conservatives. During his first two Ministries, Salisbury was also Foreign Secretary, and this, and the fact that he was in the House of Lords, allowed individual ministers a great deal of initiative in domestic policy. Overall, however, despite a reorganization of local government and some improvements in conditions of work, Salisbury’s years in office were quiet ones, reflecting his deeply conservative belief that ‘whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible’. In this sense, perhaps, he held back the rising tide of democracy in Britain. Yet despite these beliefs, Salisbury, an effective public speaker, accepted the new popular politics introduced by Gladstone. In the meantime the gradual departure of Gladstone from the scene allowed the Liberals to reorient their politics with the Newcastle Programme of 1891, which accepted state intervention to bring about social reform and alleviate working-class poverty. This was a new kind of liberalism, one that was abandoning the Gladstonian belief in the minimal state and moving towards a compromise with the ideology of state-sponsored social welfare instead. Not coincidentally, it had the added benefit of bringing the trade unions round behind the Liberals, and a series of electoral pacts at a local level ensured that growing numbers of Unionists and Conservatives met with defeat at the polls.
Salisbury’s final years in office were dominated by the imperial issue of the Second Boer War (1899–1902), which provoked an orgy of patriotic enthusiasm in the populace, including many people in the working class, while the Liberals were deeply divided over the issue. When Salisbury, his health failing, resigned office in July 1902, he was succeeded as Prime Minster by Arthur Balfour, who was his nephew (the succession reputedly gave rise to the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ for a done deal). Although he had run the government’s business in the House of Commons under Salisbury, Balfour was wholly unable to cope with a new crisis sparked by Chamberlain. Seriously alarmed by the rise of German economic power, the former Mayor of Birmingham launched an energetic campaign for the introduction of import tariffs to reduce the effects of goods ‘made in Germany’ on the British economy. This breached the principle of free trade that had been held sacrosanct since the abolition of the Corn Laws more than half a century before. The introduction of import duties was to be linked with ‘Imperial Preference’, which would keep food prices low with minimal duties on imports from the empire. The campaign alienated the Whig aristocrats among the Conservatives, and they broke away from the government in 1903 to form the Unionist Free Fooders. It also aroused the united opposition of the Liberals and the trade unions, who thought that even low import tariffs on foodstuffs from the empire would raise the cost of living for the working classes.
The split in the Conservative Party forced Balfour’s resignation in December 1905 and the appointment of a Liberal government under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, which won the general election of 1906 on the issue of free trade. Balfour himself lost his parliamentary seat – to a young war correspondent, Winston Churchill. However, Campbell-Bannerman suffered a series of heart attacks in November 1907 and shortly before his death in April 1908 was replaced by his Chancellor, Herbert Henry Asquith. Asquith was to remain in power for a further eight years. With 377 Liberals, fifty-three representatives of the newly founded Labour Party and eighty-three Irish Nationalists, Asquith had a strong majority over the Conservatives, who were divided between seventy-nine Tariff Reform ‘Whole Hoggers’, forty-nine Balfourites and thirty-one ‘Free Fooders’. A brilliant lawyer and effective debater, the new Prime Minister managed his Cabinet rather than ruling it, and took a relaxed attitude both to political life and to his personal affairs. Married to the socialite Margot Tennant (1864–1945), Asquith carried on a lengthy affair between 1910 and 1915 with a young aristocratic woman, Venetia Stanley (1887–1948), to whom he was soon writing up to three letters a day, some of them penned during Cabinet meetings. He was also notoriously fond of the bottle.
The advent to power of the Liberals was one of a number of events that symbolized the coming of a new era, beginning with the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901. Her successor, Edward VII, was fifty-nine when he came to the throne. He had spent most of his life drinking, gambling – the source of a number of scandals that scarred his public reputation – hunting, and pursuing affairs with a wide variety of women, from Russian princesses to Parisian prostitutes. (He earned a wholly undeserved reputation as a major international diplomat largely because of his frequent visits to Paris, which were very far from being political in nature.) When he died in 1910 he was succeeded by his son George V, who had become heir to the throne on the death of his elder brother in 1892. George had spent most of his life in the Royal Navy (acquiring a tattoo on his arm in the process), and divided his time on dry land between stamp-collecting and hunting. Unlike Queen Victoria, neither Edward VII nor George V played any notable part in politics, which, together with the decline of the Conservatives, allowed the democratizing tendencies of the Liberal Party full rein – or almost, since the Conservatives still possessed a crushing majority among the hereditary peers of the House of Lords.
Asquith’s light touch on government allowed two major Liberal politicians to make their mark in the Cabinet. The first was Sir Edward Grey (1862–1933), Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916. A stolid figure who had graduated from Oxford with third class honours and had been university champion in ‘real tennis’, Grey was connected to one of the great Whig landowning families and possessed enough confidence to make foreign policy on his own. By contrast, the other leading figure in Asquith’s Cabinet, David Lloyd George, had made his way as a lawyer and then a politician through his charismatic abilities as a public speaker. Radical in temperament, and even more so in his rhetoric, he was committed to using the resources of the state to improve the lot of the poor. Under his influence the Liberals moved quickly to fulfil the promises of the Newcastle Programme and satisfy their trade union supporters. In 1909, Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced what he called the ‘People’s Budget’, which included a progressive income tax to hit the rich, and a tax on land. In an unprecedented move the Conservative majority in the House of Lords rejected the Budget as an attack on property. The government declared a general election, which it won in January 1910 with Liberals and Labour combined beating the Conservatives in the highest ever poll (87 per cent of the electorate). This was a mandate not only for the People’s Budget but also for the removal of the Lords’ power of veto over legislation. Asquith introduced a Parliament Bill to achieve this aim. By threatening immediate resignation, the Prime Minister forced the new king, George V, to agree to create 500 Liberal peers should the Lords reject the Bill, which they did. Asquith called a second general election, which took place in December 1910 with the same result as before. Under the threat of the 500 new peers, and against the resistance of almost a hundred ‘last ditchers’ among the hereditary peers, the Bill passed the House of Lords by seventeen votes and received the royal assent. From now on the Upper Chamber only had delaying powers over legislation approved by the House of Commons, and was no longer able to block it. This was a major step forward for democracy.
From 1910 onwards, in the midst of this constitutional crisis, Asquith’s government depended for its majority on the support of the eighty-three MPs of the Irish Party, which demanded Home Rule as a reward once the Lords’ powers had been curbed. This moved the Irish Question back to the centre of politics once more, and soon it was threatening to derail the entire political process. In 1912 the government put forward a Bill to give Ireland its own Parliament with powers over everything except foreign policy, defence and some financial and police matters. But it now faced the determined opposition of the Unionists, who had gained control over the Conservative Party after Balfour had been removed as leader in 1911 because he had backed the reform of the Lords. His successor, the Canadian-born businessman and tariff reformer Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923), was a strong opponent of Home Rule and supporter of the Ulster Protestants, who objected vehemently to being ruled by the Catholic majority in the rest of Ireland. As the Irish Party insisted on Home Rule including the whole of Ireland, the Protestants raised an armed force of 160,000 Ulster Volunteers commanded by a retired British general. British army officers, sympathetic to Unionism, refused to act, and the Unionists, led by the barrister Sir Edward Carson (1854–1935), who had made his name as the counsel for the prosecution in the trial of Oscar Wilde, prepared for civil war.
The crisis imperilled the entire stability of the British state. It was only postponed by the advent of hostilities against Germany in August 1914. The war came on the heels of massive labour unrest, including the first national railwaymen’s strike in 1911, a dock strike in the same year, and a miners’ strike in south Wales in which troops opened fire on strikers at Tonypandy. The government seemed unable to control events. Suffragette outrages increased the general sense of chaos. The Liberals responded with a minimum wage for coalminers and a system of sickness and unemployment benefits in 1912, but these measures did not satisfy most workers. Trade union membership grew by 60 per cent between 1910 and 1914, and with it the influence of the Labour Party. Asquith’s attempt to pacify the forces of democracy with an extension of the franchise in 1912 foundered on the issue of women’s suffrage. The Gladstonian alliance of the middle and working classes was coming to an end as the suburban bourgeoisie began drifting away to the Conservatives in step with the decline of the landed interest’s domination of the party. Democracy in Britain had made significant advances, but the onward march of political progress was clearly running into difficulties by 1914. What a later historian described as ‘the strange death of liberal England’ had already begun. By far the most serious threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom was the Irish imbroglio. It was eventually to end in an armed uprising, followed by civil war and the creation of an independent Irish state in the 1920s, with only the six counties of Ulster left within the United Kingdom.
The second major power to witness the subversive effects of the extension of voting rights on liberal parliamentarism through its empowerment of national minorities was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, created through the Compromise of 1867. The enfranchisement of the masses in response to pressure from the socialists, accomplished in 1907 in one half of the monarchy but not in the other, exacerbated nationalist passions, and ended by reducing the influence of elected legislatures rather than increasing them. Throughout the period, the politics of the Dual Monarchy were dominated by the long-lived Emperor Franz Joseph, who had been put on the throne in 1848 and remained on it for nearly seventy years, until his death in 1916. Simply by staying in office for so long, he provided an element of stability and continuity to the empire. Brought up under the guidance of Prince Metternich, who in turn had been a leading figure in the struggle against the French during the Napoleonic Wars, Franz Joseph increasingly seemed like a survival from another era. He believed in the Divine Right of Kingship, interpreting this to imply a punctilious observation of his duties and a strict observance of ceremonial and tradition. Dull, pedestrian and unimaginative, he was nevertheless not without intelligence. He spoke English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish, with some knowledge of Czech and Serbo-Croat. Age and experience made him cautious about change, but where it was unavoidable he was flexible enough to concede it. His private life was marred by a series of tragedies, including the execution in Mexico of his brother Maximilian (1832–67), the suicide of his son and heir Crown Prince Rudolf (1858–89), the assassination of his beautiful and headstrong wife the Empress Elisabeth in 1898 by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, and finally the murder of his nephew the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.
The leading and most powerful state in Europe up to the mid-1850s, Austria began a long and uneven process of decline after its defeat by Italy and France in the War of Italian Unification in 1859. Geopolitical logic dictated that rather than seeking revenge like the French, the Dual Monarchy had to ally itself, however reluctantly, with the new German Empire from 1871 onwards. It had to face rising nationalism on its border in the Balkans, backed by an expansionist Russia seeking to profit from the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Over time the balance of power between the Dual Monarchy and the German Empire shifted in favour of the latter, especially as German investments in east-central and south-eastern Europe increased. The Dualist system of government meant that there were two separate states, Austria and Hungary, divided roughly along the line of the river Leithe, and known therefore as Cisleithania and Transleithania. Each contained substantial national minorities – in particular, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Slovenes, Italians and Ukrainians in the Austrian half of the empire, and Romanians, Serbs and Croats in the Hungarian half. The story of Austro-Hungarian politics up to 1914 is in many ways the story of a rearguard action of the multinational empire against the rising forces of linguistic and ethnic nationalism, intertwined with growing demands for democratic participation from the emerging working classes.
As in Britain, parliamentary institutions underwent a gradual process of modernization. The Reichsrat, or imperial legislature, established in 1861 and confined to the Austrian half of the empire from 1867 onwards, was an antiquated institution clearly in need of reform. It was elected indirectly, by the Diets of the Crown lands, and the Diets in turn were elected by four curiae representing respectively landowners, towns, chambers of commerce and rural communities. In 1873 the number of deputies was increased from 203 to 353, elected directly by the curiae. The change, rather like the 1832 Reform Act in Britain, gave stronger representation to the towns. The landowners elected 85 deputies, the towns 118, the chambers of commerce 21, and the rural communities 128. Only 6 per cent of the population of the empire could vote in these elections. In 1883, as the Reichsrat moved into its grand new building on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, the tax qualification for entry into the curiae was lowered, and in 1896 a fifth curia was added, with universal suffrage for all men over the age of twenty-four. It elected seventy-two deputies, shifting the balance of power away from the nobility.
In essence, these changes did not alter the fact that the emperor retained the right to appoint and dismiss ministers, nor did they affect the powers of the hereditary Upper Chamber of the legislature, but they did mark a gradual extension of the franchise in the spirit of cautious liberalism. Here the dominant figure was Prince Adolf von Auersperg (1821–85), whose Ministry was in power for most of the 1870s, despite Franz Joseph’s dislike of his liberal outlook, expressed above all in the prince’s fiercely anticlerical policies. Auersperg not only broadened the franchise in 1873 but also conceded a greater measure of self-government to the Poles in Galicia, extended trial by jury to cover most serious offences, and passed a number of other liberal reforms. But in 1873 the financial crash of ‘Black Friday’, in which 700 million gulden were wiped off the Vienna stock market and thousands of firms and individuals were bankrupted, including forty-eight banks and two railway companies, undermined public confidence in the liberals, especially since a number of them had been heavily involved in the dubious financial speculations that had led to the crash. In 1879, Auersperg’s failure to take advantage of a major international crisis between Russia and the Ottoman Empire led to his downfall, as both Franz Joseph on the one hand and many liberal deputies on the other finally deserted him.
The ensuing elections gave a narrow victory to the Right, ushering into office Count Eduard Taaffe (1833–95), descendant of an Irish peer who had entered the service of the Habsburgs in the seventeenth century (this also made him an Irish peer, though Irish peers did not sit in the British House of Lords). A childhood companion of Franz Joseph, Taaffe had begun as a moderate liberal and had served as Prime Minister in the late 1860s. By the time he came to office again he had become more conservative. His great achievement was to persuade the Czech deputies, who had been boycotting the Reichsrat, to come back, in return for a series of significant concessions on the use of the Czech language in Bohemia and on the representation of Czechs in the Bohemian Diet. Taaffe’s reaction to the rising tide of nationalism was expressed in his famous statement that his aim was ‘to keep all the nationalities of the Monarchy in a condition of even and well-modulated discontent’. Rather than signifying a deliberate policy of ‘divide and rule’, this embodied a recognition that discontent was inevitable; all Taaffe could do was to try and keep it under control. It was Taaffe who pushed through the extension of the franchise in 1883, a measure that further undermined the liberals and opened the door for new political parties, including not only the Socialists but also the Christian Social Party, which acquired a popular and energetic leader in the shape of Karl Lueger. A lawyer from a humble background, Lueger had made a reputation for himself by representing the ‘little people’ in court cases in Vienna. His combination of social reform, antisemitic rhetoric and defence of Catholic interests gained him huge popularity, and in 1890 his party won fourteen seats, including seven in Vienna, at the same time as the liberals lost a quarter of theirs. In 1895 the Christian Social Party won a majority on the Vienna Town Council, but Franz Joseph, who disliked the party’s radicalism, refused to accept the appointments; two years later, however, he relented when Lueger won twenty-seven seats in the Reichsrat. Before long, Lueger won further support through his implementation of urban improvement, using his position as Mayor of Vienna to give the city modern health, water and transport services, parks, hospitals and schools, and going some way to fulfilling his ambition of turning it into a ‘beautiful garden city’.
By the time of Lueger’s death from diabetes in 1910, a further, decisive extension of the Austrian franchise had taken place, in 1907, steered through against fierce opposition from the Upper Chamber. The curiae were finally abolished, and universal male suffrage was introduced in all the Crown lands, in response to massive and repeated demonstrations by the socialists, which made Franz Joseph fear that the revolution that had so shaken the position of Nicholas II in Russia would be repeated in Austria-Hungary. This reform brought new nationalist splinter groups into the Reichsrat, such as Tomáš Masaryk’s Czech Realists, founded in 1900 and opposed to the liberal Young Czechs, the conservative Old Czechs, and the Czech Social Democrats (founded in 1878) – a pattern of ideological fragmentation repeated in other national minorities as well. In 1907 the 516 deputies in the Reichsrat were divided into some thirty political parties, ranging from eighty-seven Social Democrats and ninety-seven Christian Socials to eighteen Slovene Clericals, seventeen Polish Populists, three Old Ruthenes and two Czech Realists. The debating chamber became an arena where rival national groups did little more than shout each other down in their different languages. The Czech deputies filibustered and disrupted proceedings because they were held in German, so the German deputies in the Bohemian Diet did the same in return. On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Franz Joseph’s accession, in 1908, Czech nationalists even signalled their frustration by tearing down Habsburg flags across Bohemia. The chaos and impotence of the Reichsrat moved political power upwards into the court and the ministerial clique around Franz Joseph. The emperor’s relations with his designated successor, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, were not good, not least because Franz Joseph had forced his nephew to make his marriage with Sophie Chotek (1868–1914) a morganatic one, barring their children from succeeding to the throne: she was after all a mere countess, and so of a rank insufficient to become a Habsburg empress. The archduke’s ability to bring about a reform of the Dual Monarchy that might mollify the Czechs was therefore limited. More important still was the fact that the concentration of power around the emperor gave the military far greater influence than before.
While military and foreign policy remained the prerogative of the monarch, the political system of the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy possessed enough autonomy to oblige Franz Joseph to consult the government when major steps in these areas were taken. Hungary had been extensively reconstructed with the fall of the centralizing absolutist system in Vienna after the 1867 Compromise. It modernized its Constitution, granted civil and legal equality to the Jews (1868), introduced universal elementary education (1868) and separated justice from administration (1869). Hungary settled down in 1875 to a lengthy period of rule by the Liberal Party, formed by the fusion of the two leading nationalist organizations of the 1860s. The Liberals, representing the moderate wing of Hungarian nationalism, were kept in power, as in many other parts of Europe, by a restricted franchise that limited voting rights to about 10 per cent of the population, mainly landowners and professionals but not the poorer classes. Hungarian Liberals stubbornly resisted all attempts to extend the right to vote because they feared this would give more opportunities to Romanians, Croats and others to voice their grievances. The Prime Minister from 1875 to 1890, the landowner Kálmán Tisza (1830–1902), reformed the taxation system, making the state solvent but winning few friends in the process. He found it increasingly difficult to hold the ring between the radical nationalists on the left, who wanted more autonomy for Hungary than the Compromise allowed, and the army and bureaucracy in Vienna, who thought the Compromise had gone too far and wanted to claw back some powers for themselves. The nationalists’ allergic reaction to a ceremony in Budapest in 1886 when the Austrian army commander in the Hungarian capital laid a wreath on the tomb of an Austrian general who had fought against the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1848 was only one of many clashes. Tisza eventually tired of trying to deal with such ostensibly rather trivial controversies, and resigned in 1890, though his party continued in office.
Hungarian liberalism was sustained mainly by the Magyar nationalist landowning gentry, who resisted calls for social reform from representatives of the peasantry. The relative backwardness of industry retarded the growth of a large-scale socialist movement, and labour unions were outlawed after a wave of strikes in the 1890s. Railway workers who went on strike in 1904 were drafted into the army, and demonstrations were commonly put down with violence by the police (thirty-three demonstrators were killed at one such event in Bihar). Magyar was made the official language for all levels of the judicial and administrative systems, and for all public announcements, even in areas where it was not spoken at all. Place names were all Magyarized and the language was mandated as the medium of instruction in virtually all secondary schools. Thus governmental, educational, administrative, judicial and professional systems were all confined to those who could speak, read and write Magyar. The 1910 census recorded a population consisting of 54 per cent Magyars, 16 per cent Romanians, 11 per cent Slovaks, 10 per cent Germans, and smaller proportions of other national groups such as Serbs and Croats, but the figures were manipulated to show a majority of Magyar speakers, and the real figure was probably below 50 per cent. Magyarization aroused growing protests from Serb, Croat, Slovak and Romanian nationalists from the middle of the 1890s onwards, spelling the end of the era of Liberal domination. Deputies began to defect from the Liberal Party, which was led by Tisza’s son István (1861–1918), and many of them joined nationalist groups. In 1905 Tisza attempted to revise the rules of the Lower House to get round the obstructive tactics of the opposition, but when the Speaker was seen waving a handkerchief to signal that the government deputies should vote in favour, this ‘election by handkerchief’ outraged those who thought he should be neutral. Many more Liberals subsequently left to join the Independence Party, led by Ferenc Kossuth (1841–1914), son of the nationalist leader of 1848 and part of a new ‘Nationalist Coalition’.
Alarmed by the breakdown of parliamentary order, Franz Joseph appointed Géza Fejérváry (1833–1914), captain of the Hungarian Life-Guards and a career soldier, as Prime Minister and threatened to double the number of voters in Hungary by decree. In a gesture of compromise he offered the government to the Nationalist Coalition, which won a substantial victory at the ensuing elections. A new Prime Minister, the lawyer Sándor Wekerle (1848–1921), was appointed, but the Coalition fell apart in 1909, and the Liberals returned to government the following year. By this time the political climate had deteriorated sharply. The rival nationalist parties cancelled each other out with their opposing demands for linguistic recognition, defeating measures of educational reform in the process. Opposition deputies filibustered and made proceedings impossible. When the Magyar Speaker of the Parliament pushed through a reform of the standing orders that actually made proceedings workable, an enraged opposition deputy fired three revolver shots at him before turning the gun on himself (all four shots missed their target). The government countered by prosecuting nationalist leaders, but here too, as in Vienna, it now effectively ruled by decree. This meant that the decision-making process in government, though it had to be tempered in military and foreign policy by the need to consult with Vienna, became increasingly removed from popular and democratic influences. Far more than in the British troubles with Ireland, therefore, the nationalization of the masses in Austria-Hungary was deeply damaging to parliamentarism and the integrity of the state.
Two European political systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were characterized by the appearance of chronic instability, with weak political parties and coalition governments rising and falling in quick succession: these were the Italian and the French. In both cases governments succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity. In both cases, too, the political system underwent a period of crisis towards the end of the century, when for a while popular dissatisfaction with the apparent ineffectiveness of government threatened to bring a dictator into power. In France shifting political alliances and alignments produced forty-nine successive governments from February 1871 to the beginning of September 1914, with an average duration of under a year each. In Italy a similar system produced thirty-two different governments from 1861 to 1914, with an average duration each that was slightly longer but not significantly so. By contrast, Great Britain experienced only fourteen governments between the 1867 Reform Act and the outbreak of World War I. Austria, with twenty-four governments from 1867 to 1914, and Hungary, with seventeen over the same period, were somewhere in between these two extremes, but still markedly more stable than either Italy or France.
What were the reasons for the chronic political instability of the two Latin nations? To begin with Italy, it was clear that governments suffered from an extreme lack of cohesion. There was no doctrine of collective responsibility and individual ministers felt no qualms about resigning over policies they disagreed with, often bringing down the entire government with them. Disagreements within governments were far more important in bringing about a change of leadership than elections were. This was because, for most of the period, governments always won elections. The Italian legislature was based on a very narrow franchise deriving from the Piedmontese Constitution of 1848. Only half a million people out of a total Italian population of 22 million possessed the vote, and in the early years of the new state only around 300,000 of these actually bothered to turn up at the polls. Electoral corruption was rife. Banknotes were torn in two at election time and given to electors half before and half after voting; electoral lists contained fictitious names, sometimes gathered from tombstones in the local cemetery; and it was reported on one occasion that forty cows were registered for an election in Predappio. Intimidation was as common as bribery, exercised in Sicily through the Mafia.
The political system was initially run by men from the north, who generally used the south as a source of political patronage and power, working through the great landowners who also dominated the administration and provided numerous delegates for the legislature. From Cavour’s premature death in 1861 up to 1876 the coalition of moderate liberals and conservatives he had assembled dominated the political scene. There was a succession of short-lived Ministries. Cavour’s successor, the Tuscan Baron Bettino Ricasoli (1809–80), a man of unusual probity known as the ‘Iron Baron’, offended the king by boasting that his ancestry was longer than that of the House of Savoy, and was dismissed in 1862. His efforts to reconcile the Italian Kingdom with the Vatican were sincere, but they foundered on the rocks of obduracy on both sides; Ricasoli is mainly remembered today not for his political role but for having created the modern recipe for Chianti wine. The next Prime Minister, Urbano Rattazzi (1808–73), who served in 1862, was followed by Luigi Farini (1812–66), who was forced to resign in 1863 after he had threatened the king with a knife in order to get him to declare war on Russia. Marco Minghetti (1818–86), who served over the next two years, was known for his quick temper; he actually fought a duel with Rattazzi in 1863 after they had exchanged intemperate words in Parliament. Ricasoli, Rattazzi and Minghetti all returned to office later on, as the succession of short-lived governments continued. The time and energy of successive governments in the 1860s were largely taken up first by the question of Rome, finally resolved by the conquest of the city and its declaration as the capital of Italy in 1870, and then by a series of battles with the Church. By 1876 the absence of social reforms had become obvious, and the liberal Left, led by the journalist Agostino Depretis (1813–87), came to power.
Prime Minister almost continuously from 1876 until his death in 1887, Depretis was the first really able politician to emerge in Italy since Cavour. His policy, he declared, was ‘more democracy’. But his methods were often dubious. He persuaded the Italian legislature to vote funds to build 1,250 miles of roads, and then distributed them to localities in return for the votes of the deputies who represented them. He used the royal influence to pack the Senate. Nevertheless Depretis did achieve some major reforms, including a large-scale programme of railway-building and the establishment of universal, free and compulsory elementary education – important in a society where more than three-quarters of the population were unable to read or write. And most important of all, in 1882 he finally enacted his promise of ‘more democracy’, steering through an extension of the franchise to increase the electorate from half a million to two million by lowering the property qualification for voting and the age limit for voters from twenty-five to twenty-one. The requirement that voters had to be literate, however, disfranchised almost everyone in the Italian south while at the same time bringing literate artisans in the north and other members of the lower middle class into the electorate.
The newly enfranchised sections of the population formed a significant part of the power base of the Sicilian Francesco Crispi, a former associate of Depretis. Crispi took over as Prime Minister on the latter’s death and served from 1887 to 1891 and again from 1893 to 1896. He was descended from an Albanian family, which some thought explained his volatile character. His nationalist credentials were impeccable. A fervent Mazzinian nationalist forced into exile in early adulthood, he had sailed with Garibaldi’s Thousand during the Risorgimento. Crispi was endowed with so much energy that although he was sixty-eight when he came to office in 1887, he still ran three major departmental Ministries as well as being Prime Minister. As a man of the liberal Left, he reformed the prisons, legalized the right to strike, introduced a modern code of civil law, and pushed through many other policies, almost all of them using the royal power of decree. His critics began to call him a dictator, and certainly his actions set a precedent for Mussolini in the twentieth century. One thing Crispi did not do was to curb the corruption so rife in the Italian political system. A report in 1891 on banking scandals – Crispi tried to suppress it but it was leaked to the press – revealed that the banks had been printing money in excess of the legal limit (the Banco Romana secretly used a printing press in England for the purpose). The notes were used in order to bribe politicians and officials. The banks also allowed politicians to run up huge debts in return for favours, especially the award to bankers of titles of nobility. The report named names and spared none of the details. One deputy who owed the Credito Mobiliare half a million lire died of a heart attack; a former bank director was murdered on a train; another bank director disappeared and was arrested attempting to take poison when he was discovered disguised as a priest. The scandal caused the fall of Crispi’s first government in 1891, but he was recalled in 1893 as the man to deal with a peasant uprising in Sicily, which he did in a predictably ruthless and uncompromising fashion. At this point Crispi pushed through a series of strict legal controls on the banks, which among other things enabled them to play a greater role in financing industry, helping to boost the economy in the years running up to the outbreak of the First World War.
In 1896, Crispi was forced to resign in the wake of the catastrophic defeat of an Italian army in Ethiopia that did much to discredit Italian liberalism. Two years later a major economic crisis, caused not least by a rise in the price of bread during the Spanish-American War, led to riots in cities across Italy. General Luigi Pelloux (1839–1934), a veteran of the Battle of Custoza, had resigned office as Minister of War in order to tackle the riots, after achieving a major reform of the army, and was now appointed Prime Minister as well as Minister of the Interior by the king. Four other government Ministries were placed under active soldiers. Using the royal power of decree, Pelloux banned political meetings, outlawed strikes by state employees, imposed the penalties of banishment and preventive arrest for political offences, and introduced strict press censorship. He announced he would rule by decree alone and brought a Bill before the parliament, giving his decrees the force of law without having to confirm them by a parliamentary vote. When the liberal Left tried to ‘talk out’ the Bill with an interminable filibuster, there were violent altercations on the floor. Pelloux dissolved the parliament and arrested a number of the deputies. The Court of Appeal ruled his actions unconstitutional, and when he tried to cut short a debate on the issue before a reconvened parliament, the deputies of the Left withdrew from the Chamber in protest. Pelloux called elections in 1900 on a law-and-order platform coupled with a promise to acquire a colony in China as compensation for Italy’s failure in Africa. He lost and was forced to retire. The political system was saved. But the episode showed how vulnerable parliamentarism was to authoritarian intervention at a time of national crisis; in the 1920s it fell victim to the far more ruthless Fascist leader Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), who simply ignored the liberal deputies when they withdrew from the Chamber in protest at his role in the murder of one of their number.
The years leading up to the First World War were dominated politically by Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928), another left-liberal but one without the experience of participation in the Risorgimento. A career civil servant, Giolitti saw that the rapid growth of industrial society in northern Italy made further social reforms necessary to ameliorate the conditions of the working classes. Giolitti never interfered in strikes, and tried not to alienate the Socialists or do anything to prompt social unrest of the sort that had led to the ascendancy of General Pelloux. Following an election victory in 1906, he proposed to increase death duties as well as raise income tax, but was defeated: the issue aroused such passions that one conservative opposition member threw an inkpot at him in the middle of the debate. Normally, however, Giolitti was a past master at putting together coalitions from disparate groups of ministers and deputies, switching the composition of his majority just at the moment when it looked like falling apart. This tactic quickly became known as trasformismo, the art of converting a failing coalition into a winning one, and it kept him in power for most of the period from the turn of the century to the outbreak of the war. It was backed up by a systematic collection of files on every deputy, listing personal weaknesses and points of pressure. However, Giolitti’s careful appeasement of the Socialists did not prevent them from gaining more support – in 1909 the far Left won more than 100 seats, half of them going to the Socialists – nor did it stop them following the line of the Second International in 1913 as they withdrew from collaboration with ‘bourgeois’ parties.
Giolitti’s most important reform was a major extension of the franchise, undertaken to mollify the demands of the Socialists. In 1912 this led to an increase in the electorate from 3 million to 8.5 million voters, the overwhelming majority of the adult male population. The Socialists predictably won seventy-eight seats in the elections of the following year, when fifty-two of their most radical deputies were pledged to the subversion of Parliament as a bourgeois institution. Only half the expanded electorate cast their votes, but clearly, as in other parts of Europe, the more the percentage poll increased, the more the liberals lost seats to the extremes. The Vatican’s rescinding of its ban on Catholics participating in politics in 1913 also led to the rapid emergence of conservative Catholic political organizations, which began to assail the liberals from the Right. The political system was clearly becoming progressively less manageable. Giolitti tried to rally popular opinion by engaging in foreign and colonial conquests from 1911 onwards, ultimately with disastrous consequences, and not merely for Italy. There was no doubt that with the progressive extension of the franchise, the country was becoming more democratic, and the dominance of Parliament had survived the Pelloux episode. However, the headlong rush towards an industrial society in the north of the country was creating social tensions that a political system designed for a small elite of middle-class liberals was poorly designed to master.
Up to this point, despite the rapid succession of governments throughout its history, the Italian political system had preserved an underlying stability due to the presence of individual ministers in successive administrations. It had managed to develop effective policies above all when one minister rose above the herd to exercise a dominant influence for a number of years, as with Depretis, Crispi, and finally Giolitti. A similar contrast characterized the Third French Republic, established on the ruins of the Second Empire in 1871, although unlike Italy, it was based on universal male suffrage, introduced by Napoleon III. Republican politicians had removed the authoritarian centralism of the Second Empire and instead given political power to the Chamber of Deputies, whose dominance thus matched that of its counterpart in Italy. Unusually among European states at this time, France possessed both a democratic franchise (for men, at least) and a government responsible to the legislature and thus, ultimately, to the electorate. Yet these achievements repeatedly came under threat. Ironically, it was the Legitimists, the party of France’s traditional monarchy, ousted in the Revolution of 1830, who won the first national elections under the Republic on 8 February 1871, taking 400 seats out of 645. The monarchist majority in the new Chamber elected Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, a well-known Legitimist, as President of the Republic in 1873. Such was his reputation as a hero of the Franco-Prussian War that only one vote was cast against him. Initially MacMahon stuck scrupulously to the neutrality of his office, overseeing the promulgation of a new Constitution in 1875. However, two years later, he dismissed a Republican government, leading to accusations that he was preparing a coup d’état; the ensuing elections returned the Left with a majority of 120, upon which he resigned. The Legitimist majority had proved short-lived; many voters had opposed the Republicans in the 1871 elections since their platform included the continuation of the war against Germany; six years later this issue had vanished from the political scene.
Quite apart from the fragility of the Legitimists’ support, the official claimant to the throne, Henri, Comte de Chambord (1820–83), was entirely lacking in political skills. He was very lazy (he never learned to tie his shoelaces). He was as obese as his predecessor Louis XVIII and extraordinarily hairy (as one of his courtiers put it, ‘his pilose system was very developed’). Worst of all as far as the Legitimist cause was concerned, he was childless. Chambord belonged to the most extreme faction among the Legitimists, who wanted to turn the clock back to pre-revolutionary times. As a child in Austria, he had been taught no history after 1788. He rejected the tricolor as the French flag and insisted on flying the old white lilies instead. The mainstream Legitimists, local notables and aristocrats, wanted power for the localities rather than power wielded by the centralizing absolutism that Chambord desired. He undermined his cause by banning any of his followers from taking office at local or national level under the Republic, since this would imply they recognized it. At one point in the 1870s, Chambord had done a deal with the Orléanists, supporters of the July Monarchy and its heirs, but when he died in 1883 his diehard followers refused to respect the central provision in the agreement and recognize Philippe of Orléans, Count of Paris (1838–94), as the legitimate heir to the throne. In any case, Philippe was hardly a promising candidate. Grandson of King Louis-Philippe, the count lived in Surrey and had few supporters, since most had long since become either Republicans or Bonapartists. The latter gained seventy-five seats in the elections of 1876 and were a political force to be reckoned with. However, Napoleon the Prince Imperial (1856–79), son and heir of Napoleon III, who also lived in Britain, was killed in his twenties by Zulus while fighting in the British Army, leaving no effective claimant to the legacy of Bonapartism either. Philippe of Orléans did at least have a son and successor, also called Philippe (1869–1926), who became a well-known explorer, but that was the end of the Orléanist line too. A law of 1886 banned royal claimants from entering France, to complete the rout.
The leading personalities in French politics during the 1870s were therefore moderate Republicans. Following the death in 1877 of Adolphe Thiers, founder and first President of the Third Republic, the leadership of the Republicans was taken up by Léon Gambetta (1838–82). Gambetta, who had lost his right eye in an accident and always insisted on being painted or photographed from the left, was a charismatic speaker who championed the cause of what he called the nouvelles couches sociales, civil servants, artisans, shopkeepers, in general the lower middle class, which he brought into alliance with the professionals, businessmen, middling landowners and others who provided the backbone of Republicanism. It was this social compact that formed the basis for the Republic’s longevity and stability. The dominant politician of the late 1870s and early 1880s, Jules Ferry, a lawyer and journalist, built on Gambetta’s achievements. A clever and talented manipulator, Ferry deployed anticlerical and nationalist policies that won him a great deal of support, but also aroused considerable opposition. Cold and aloof, he survived two assassination attempts – one critic remarked that this was not surprising, since he had no heart that an assassin could fire at. In 1885 his government fell after military reverses in Indochina, triggering a serious crisis in the Republic’s affairs. An economic downturn plunged swathes of the peasantry into debt; import duties were raised in 1887 so urban workers, 250,000 of whom were out of work, suffered; and the President’s son-in-law was discovered to have been selling the Légion d’honneur and other decorations. Ferry’s focus on colonial and anticlerical policies had meant that his ministries passed few social reforms, and in the 1885 elections new groups of disgruntled petty bourgeois were mobilized against the Republic. The Conservative Union, led by the Count of Paris, won 177 seats against the Republicans’ 129 in the first round, though the Republicans buried their differences in the second and won 383 seats to the Conservatives’ 200. However, the Republicans were split between so-called Opportunists, followers of Gambetta and his political heirs, and Radicals.
A revision of the Constitution seemed necessary, and the Chamber of Deputies turned to the Minister of War, General Georges Boulanger (1837–91), ‘General Revanche’ as he was known, the French counterpart to the Italian would-be dictator General Pelloux. Boulanger quickly became a symbol of national unity in the midst of the squabbling parliamentarians. When Jules Grévy (1807–91) was forced to resign as President in 1887 over the honours scandal, many thought Boulanger should have taken over, though in the event the post was taken by Sadi Carnot, known for his integrity as Finance Minister, later to be assassinated by an anarchist, in 1894. Boulanger now mounted a vigorous campaign, funded by many who thought he could rescue France’s honour and become the new Napoleon. He was elected deputy for Paris in January 1889, heavily defeating the Republican candidate. He urged the dissolution of the Chamber and the election of a Constituent Assembly. But his bluff was called by the Minister of the Interior Jean Constans (1833–1913). A bankrupt manufacturer of lavatory cisterns who became Governor-General of Indochina and then a skilled if corrupt electoral manager, Constans was in many ways typical of the politicians of the Third Republic. He threatened Boulanger with arrest but allowed him time to escape; Boulanger lost his nerve and fled to Belgium, where he eventually committed suicide on the grave of his mistress. Constans was rewarded by being appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Boulangism continued as a minor political force, but the Republic was saved.
With the collapse of Boulangism, the Radicals rejoined the Republican mainstream, forging an alliance with the Opportunists in a new centrist movement that went by the name of Solidarism, leaving the Socialists behind to form the core of the Left. Since Boulangism had emerged not least because of frustration at the lack of social reform in the first two decades of the Third Republic, the Republican majority elected in 1889 passed laws improving the status of friendly societies and abolishing the livret, the workbook employees had up to then been required to carry with them. In 1893 the poor were given access to free medical care ‘in the name of the great principle of solidarity’, and in 1905 public assistance was extended to the old, infirm and incurable. An arbitration service for labour disputes was inaugurated in 1892, and in the same year limits were set on working hours for women and children. Laws compensating victims of workplace injuries were introduced between 1898 and 1903 and a pension scheme for workers came into being in 1910. The eight-hour day for miners and a ten-hour maximum for many other workers were introduced after the turn of the century. The welfare state finally seemed to have arrived in France. However, the effects of these laws were limited: in 1914 there were still nearly nine million people living in communes without the institutions (the bureaux d’assistance) needed to administer the state pension, insurance and medical-care programmes, and local authorities starved them of cash where they did exist (five-sixths of the sum the Chamber of Deputies voted in 1897 for medical care was never spent). The laws on hours of work were full of loopholes and hard to enforce. And towards the end of the 1890s the Republic was plunged into a fresh political crisis even more serious than that caused by General Boulanger.
At the end of 1894 the French Secret Service (officially entitled the ‘Statistical Section’) obtained a letter in which a French officer informed the German military attaché in Paris that he was sending him some secret military documents. The writer implied that this was not the first time he had passed military secrets to the Germans. The finger of suspicion pointed immediately to a captain of artillery attached to the General Staff, Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), whose writing was thought to resemble that of the letter’s author. His reply to the accusation that he was the author was an immediate and unequivocal denial. Dreyfus was an Alsatian whose family had chosen French nationality in 1872 rather than take German citizenship. He was well off and had no financial motive for committing treason. But he was also, unusually for a staff officer, Jewish. To prove its efficiency, the Secret Service needed a quick solution to the crime. A secret dossier was compiled, which neither Dreyfus nor his lawyer was allowed to see. On this basis the captain was stripped of his rank on 5 January 1895 in a public ceremony of degradation and shipped off to life imprisonment on the penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana.
His family refused to accept his guilt and continued to lobby the press, who the following year discovered that some of the documents in the dossier had been forged by the Secret Service. In 1897 it emerged that the original letter had in fact been written by Ferdinand Esterhazy (1847–1923), a dissolute and deeply indebted officer who had every reason to sell secrets to the Germans. However, Esterhazy had friends in high places. He was portrayed by the right-wing press as the victim of a Jewish plot, and was acquitted by a military tribunal which reaffirmed Dreyfus’s guilt. Outraged by this outcome, the novelist Émile Zola published a lengthy open letter to the President, arguing Dreyfus had been framed. Entitled J’accuse, it became an instant best-seller, with 300,000 copies bought within a few weeks. Zola was successfully sued for libel, but the Ministry of War was forced to admit there were forgeries in the dossier, and that the man responsible was Hubert-Joseph Henry (1846–98), a colonel in the Secret Service. Arrested and imprisoned, Henry committed suicide in despair. In 1899, Dreyfus was finally granted an appeal. Brought back from Devil’s Island, he was found guilty by a military court once more. However, he was granted a presidential pardon in September 1899, confirmed by the Senate the following year, and in 1906 a civilian court of appeal reversed the verdict of 1895 and declared him innocent.
Throughout the Dreyfus Affair a literary war was waged in the press, in magazines, pamphlets and posters, between Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards; huge public meetings were held all over France on both sides, revealing deep and irreconcilable passions. Mass anti-Dreyfusard demonstrations in Marseille were followed by violent attacks on Jewish shops. Republicans were shocked to discover that the French Army was still deeply monarchist and remained a law unto itself. As a symbol of French nationalism and the will for revanche against the Germans, however, the army was vehemently defended by politicians and writers on the Right. The clergy saw in the Dreyfusards a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons, showing that the ralliement had paid no more than lip service to the Republic. Thus the Dreyfusard campaign became yet another anticlerical cause, leading to the government’s dissolution of more than two hundred congregations of religious orders and to the further secularization of education. The Radicals split once more from the moderate Republicans, and with the Socialists gained increased representation in the Assembly in 1902, leading to the appointment of Émile Combes (1835–1921) as Prime Minister. The son of a peasant who engaged in tailoring and ran a wine shop, Combes represented the new social classes identified by Gambetta. Frugal to the point of austerity, he economized on paper by writing 3,600 words to the page, and as a teetotaler, drank reddened water at public banquets instead of wine to avoid attracting unfavourable attention to himself. His Ministry quickened the pace of social reform begun under his predecessors. The Dreyfus Affair removed any last remnants of antisemitism from the socialist movement, while it anchored antisemitism firmly in the politicians and journalists of the Right. Hatred of the Jews was pumped out regularly in the daily paper La Libre Parole, edited by Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), which sold 100,000 copies a day and combined religious and racial antisemitism with conspiracy theories of various kinds. Meanwhile the Combes Ministry lasted until 1905, when it was brought down by the withdrawal of support from the Socialists under pressure from the Second International.
In 1906, in the midst of a series of measures of anticlerical and social reform, elections brought a striking victory to the Radicals, who won 42 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. They were now led by Georges Clemenceau (‘The Tiger’), a combative and aggressive politician who made many enemies. He fought numerous duels, he divorced his wife and had her imprisoned for adultery, and as a newspaper editor he had been the first to publish J’accuse. He was a celebrated orator, but instead of delivering the reforms he had promised, Clemenceau spent much of his time trying to suppress labour unrest, using troops to break strikes and alienating the Socialists in the process. His fall in 1909 left the Radicals divided, resulting in a series of short-lived governments. Indeed, the chronic instability of French governments under the Third Republic as a whole was striking. There were many reasons for this. The Chamber of Deputies was divided into numerous small factions rather than mass political parties, and was dominated by local politicians whose main concern was to win advantages for the constituencies they represented. There was little effective co-ordination of government policy since the office of Prime Minister did not formally exist, so the leader of a government had to occupy a Ministry such as Foreign Affairs, leaving little time for implementing a coherent overall line for the government as a whole. The imperfections of the democratic system were obvious, with no secret ballot, no limits on electoral spending, free wine for voters, bribery and corruption. Alliances and alignments among the locally driven deputies shifted with bewildering rapidity. At least to the uninformed, democracy in France did not seem to work very well.
Nevertheless, there was a high degree of continuity behind the appearance of chronic instability. It was striking, indeed, that for all its divisions and fissures, French democracy under the Third Republic weathered the storms of monarchism in the 1870s, Boulangism in the 1880s and the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, to achieve a remarkable degree of stability by the eve of the First World War. Among the many reasons for this was the power of the bureaucracy, especially the prefects in the provinces, and the large cohort of civil servants in the Ministries in Paris. Often legislation was couched only in general terms, leaving the bureaucrats to work out the details. The electorate was also remarkably unchanging in its political allegiances, with some regions in the west voting for conservative candidates ever since the Revolution, others, in the south and centre, supporting the Jacobins in the early 1790s and the Socialists a century later. The slow pace of economic growth and the persistence of a large mass of independent peasants meant that rapid and violent social change did not disrupt the political system as it did in other states. More than half the French in 1914 lived in towns with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. There was not enough large-scale industry to sustain a mass Socialist Party. And following the defeat of the Commune in 1871, Paris and its inhabitants no longer posed the revolutionary threat they had done ever since 1789: the Third Republic, unlike the Second or the First, was a Republic of provincials. The Chamber of Deputies changed very little over time: at any one moment between 1870 and 1940, a quarter of the members had served for twenty years and 3 per cent for a remarkable thirty-three years. Given its massive political power, it is not surprising that the Chamber met in almost permanent session; and the composition of its influential commissions changed only infrequently. The Chamber could not be dissolved, and so was able to assert its power during the five-year periods between elections without fear of the government. The Third Republic, in other words, was ruled by an oligarchy of professional politicians, most with strong roots in their constituencies.
Although Ministries changed every few months, the same ministers very often stayed on from one to the next. During the whole period of the Third Republic up to the Second World War, 217 out of a total of 561 ministers served once, 103 twice, 71 three times, 48 four times, and 122 more than four times; thus anyone not wholly incompetent in government could expect to serve in office repeatedly. Leading figures did emerge to dominate French politics for several years at a time. The anticlerical Aristide Briand (1862–1932) served three times as Prime Minister from 1909 to 1913, while Charles de Freycinet (1828–1923), an engineer who had become organizational chief of the railway system and was head of the mobilization service in 1870–1, served as War Minister seven times and Prime Minister four times. This long service enabled Freycinet to push through a series of major reforms of the army that were only possible because he occupied the War Ministry repeatedly. Jules Ferry was Minister of Education in five out of eight governments between 1879 and 1885 and Prime Minister twice, which helped him implement major reforms to the French school system. Reforms were therefore frequently achievable, from the anticlerical legislation of Ferry and then Combes, to the social welfare measures of the 1890s and 1900s. Lasting some seventy years in the end, the Third Republic was to prove the longest lived of all French political systems since the Revolution. Like Italy, it only seemed to be chronically unstable.
While France’s combination of parliamentary rule and universal male suffrage marked it out from other political systems until the extension of the franchise in Italy, Austria and other countries shortly before the First World War, the Italian polity displayed significant similarities with that of Imperial Germany. Like Germany, Italy had been created largely by one dominant member state, in this case Piedmont, Italy’s Prussia. The institutions of Piedmont were extended to the whole of Italy, however, while Germany retained its federal system of governance and administration. Parliament was far more influential in Italy. The monarch’s position in both cases was strong, including as it did the power to nominate and dismiss ministers and to reject their advice, the right to dissolve the national legislature, control over foreign policy and the army, and the independent issuing of decrees. But there were also important differences. It was generally accepted that an Italian government had to possess a majority in the legislature, and a vote of no confidence usually led to the government’s resignation or the calling of fresh elections, as it did not in Germany. Unlike in Great Britain or Prussia, the Upper Chamber of the legislature possessed only limited powers. The constitutional rights of the monarch were to prove fatal for democracy in Italy after the First World War, as in Germany, where they were largely transferred to the President after the fall of Wilhelm II. But for the moment, in Italy, they were seldom exercised.
This was not least because the Italian monarchs themselves were less than ambitious or dynamic personalities. Vittorio Emanuele II was a simple military man whose main pursuits, like those of so many European princes in this period, were women and hunting. He publicly maintained at least one mistress, and had numerous illegitimate children (it was observed that the common phrase used for a king, ‘the father of his people’, was in his case only too true). His successor Umberto I, the fourth Piedmontese monarch of that name, nevertheless took the number ‘I’ to denote his loyalty to the whole Kingdom of Italy; a passionate fox hunter, he had a military background and was known for his conservative political opinions, which on occasion, though not very often, he expressed publicly and through his choice of ministers. After Umberto’s assassination in 1900, his successor Vittorio Emanuele III (1869–1947), a private and withdrawn man who disliked politics, devoted himself mainly to amassing a collection of over 100,000 coins, which he painstakingly catalogued in his Corpus Nummorum Italicorum, begun in 1910 and eventually stretching to twenty volumes, the last of which was published in 1943. The only piece of advice his father gave him was: ‘Remember: to be a king, all you need to know is how to sign your name, read a newspaper, and mount a horse.’ Only five feet tall, Vittorio Emanuele III was mortally offended when on a state visit to Italy, Kaiser Wilhelm II, in one of his numerous ill-conceived practical jokes, brought with him a squad of giant Prussian grenadiers for him to inspect.
The episode was characteristic of the ineptitude of German foreign policy from the 1890s onwards. Yet for its first twenty years, the newly minted German Empire had been cautiously and successfully steered by the architect of German unity, Otto von Bismarck. Here was another political system, like that of France, where the national legislature was elected by universal male suffrage. Following the example of Napoleon III, Bismarck had gambled on the loyalty of the masses. ‘In a country with monarchical traditions and loyal sentiments,’ he declared with his usual candour, as he defended the introduction of universal male suffrage for the German national legislature in 1871, ‘the general suffrage, by eliminating the influences of the liberal bourgeois classes, will also lead to monarchical elections.’ But they did not. Throughout the 1870s the Reichstag was dominated by the National Liberals, conditional supporters of the Bismarckian Empire but also convinced proponents of liberal reforms. This was mainly because the great mass of the peasantry did not bother to vote. In the mid-1870s the National Liberals commanded an absolute majority in the legislature, with 204 out of 397 seats. The result was a stream of liberal legislation, ranging from the Reich Criminal Code to the standardization of weights and measures, the creation of a national currency and a national bank. In conformity with the National Liberals’ commitment to free enterprise, the remaining restrictions on freedom of trade were swept away.
In Imperial Germany there was no ministerial responsibility or party rule, indeed in a formal sense no national government, merely civil servants heading up a range of Reich institutions as State Secretaries. In practice, however, the Kaiser, the Reich Chancellor and the State Secretaries depended to a considerable extent on the national legislature to be effective. Elections were therefore increasingly fought along party-political lines, and as time went on, organized campaigning became more important. Political parties were quickly formed, ranging from the pro-Bismarck National Liberals and anti-Bismarck Progressives, founded in 1866, to the parties representing national minorities such as Poles and Danes in 1870–1. The SPD was established in 1875, the German Conservative Party in 1876. In the short term, the main beneficiary of universal male suffrage was the Catholic Centre Party, founded at the beginning of the 1870s, and imitated successfully in Italy only after the introduction of universal male suffrage there in 1912. Uniting all social classes of the urban and rural south and west, the party soon established itself as a major force, its popularity boosted by resentment against Bismarck’s assault on the Church in the Kulturkampf.
The Catholic Centre Party was led by the Hanoverian lawyer Ludwig Windthorst (1812–91), whose background made him an Anglophile (indeed, he had made his reputation by disputing Prussia’s right to annex the Kingdom of Hanover in 1866). Windthorst’s appetite for work, along with his rhetorical skills, made him indispensable in the debating chamber. With an undersized body and an oversized head, and with such poor eyesight that he had to have the newspapers read to him, he was a gift to caricaturists. Yet he was, noted one of his contemporaries, ‘a parliamentary miracle. He alone was equal to Bismarck.’ He was particularly adept at the witty put-down. During one debate, Bismarck, who loathed Windthorst, accused him of using the Catholic issue to try and detach Hanover from the Reich, an act of treason. Windthorst responded by remarking that in the past two days ‘such an excess of personal attacks has been directed against me, and indeed with such violence, that I am in fact beginning to believe that I possess a significance of which, until now, I had never dreamed [Laughter]’. His letters were steamed open by the Prussian police, but he did not give up (he started using ciphers), and in due course he steered the Centre Party out of the Bismarckian storm and into calmer political waters.
The Centre Party was hampered by the fact that in the early years of the new state, voting, restricted to men over twenty-five, was often neither fair nor secret. Voters had to bring their own ballot papers to the polls, and increasingly these were supplied by the parties that claimed their allegiance, including of course the Conservatives, dominated by landowning interests in rural areas. The ballot papers could be inspected and sanctions imposed by landlords and factory owners on employees who voted the wrong way. In industrial areas magnates or their agents often led the workers to the polls in a procession. It was only in 1903, after a long campaign, that the state was converted to the idea of supplying opaque envelopes for voters to put their ballot papers into, and only in 1913 that standardized ballot boxes were introduced (before, it was reported, they variously included cigar boxes, drawers, suitcases, hatboxes, cooking pots, earthenware bowls, beer mugs, plates and washbasins). Yet if intimidation was widespread, bribery and corruption were not, and the legalistic political culture of Germany ensured that Reichstag elections were on the whole fairer than their counterparts in many other areas of Europe even before the reform of 1903.
This was important not least because the powers of the Reichstag gradually increased over time, due in part to the creation of a growing number of central institutions over which it could claim oversight: these included the Reich Audit Office (1871), the Reich Statistical Office (1872), the Reich Railway Office (1873), the National Debt Administration (1874), the Reich Health Office (1876), the Reich Post Office (1876), the Reich Patent Office (1877), the Reich Justice Office (1877), the Reich Supreme Court (1877), and the Reich Colonial Office (1884). All of these sucked power away from the federated states and directed it towards Berlin. The increasing flow of national legislation through the Reichstag also tilted the balance of power in the Constitution away from the Federal Council, which represented the twenty-five states that made up the empire, and towards the elected legislature. Correspondingly the State Secretaries who headed the various central institutions of the Reich, including the Foreign Office, the most important of them, gradually evolved into the equivalent of ministers in a national government. As in France, therefore, a strong bureaucracy underpinned what all too often looked like a weak and fractious legislative system.
By the late 1870s, Bismarck’s ability to manage the Reichstag successfully enough to get legislation through it was running into trouble. The Kulturkampf was not working, the economy was going through a lengthy crisis after the crash of 1873, and revenues from customs duties and indirect taxation were unable to pay for the mushrooming administration of the Reich. Germany was becoming dependent on foreign grain imports as the industrial population grew. Landowners and industrialists were clamouring for the introduction of protective import tariffs, anathema to the free-trade National Liberals. Half of Germany’s blast furnaces were lying idle in the mid-1870s, and yet the liberals in the Reichstag still defeated a motion to levy duties on imported pig iron. Bismarck tried to square the circle by inviting the National Liberal leader, Rudolf von Bennigsen (1824–1902), to join the government, but the plan failed because Bennigsen wanted a guarantee that his party would occupy other Reich posts and introduce in effect ministerial responsibility and party government to the Constitution. Neither Bismarck nor Kaiser Wilhelm I was willing to take this step.
In 1878 two attempts to assassinate the Kaiser played into Bismarck’s hands. On 11 May a young plumber, Max Hödel (1857–78), fired two shots with a revolver at Wilhelm I as he was driving in his carriage along Berlin’s main thoroughfare, Unter den Linden. They missed, and Hödel was apprehended by an angry crowd. On 2 June, however, a disgruntled economist, Karl Nobiling (1848–78), using a double-barrelled shotgun, fired at the elderly monarch from an upstairs window overlooking the same street. Wilhelm I’s life was only saved by the fact that he was in military uniform and wearing a spiked iron helmet. Nevertheless, he sustained serious injuries and had to retire from public life for a while in order to recuperate. Nobiling shot himself in the head with a revolver as a crowd tried to arrest him, but Hödel was tried and beheaded amid a massive propaganda barrage organized by Bismarck, who blamed the Social Democrats for the assassination attempt (they had in fact expelled Hödel when he had turned to anarchism). Bismarck used these events as a pretext for banning the SPD, whose members he portrayed, in succession to the Catholics, as ‘enemies of the Reich’. As Bismarck intended, this presented the National Liberals with a dilemma: should they uphold civil liberties at the risk of being labelled sympathizers of an assassin, or should they agree to the ban at the risk of sacrificing their liberal principles? A similar dilemma faced them when Bismarck now introduced a range of protective tariffs, which were passed by the Reichstag the following year. Both measures, civil liberty and free trade, split the Liberals apart.
This was a major turn to the right in the governance of the empire. Liberally inclined senior administrators were dismissed and replaced by conservatives. At the same time more of the electorate were now exercising their right to vote, so that the percentage poll in Reichstag elections rose from 50 per cent in 1871 to over 80 per cent in 1912. As more peasants and more workers voted, there was a sharp rise in the Social Democratic and Catholic Centre Party votes, while the National Liberals, who depended on the crumbling hegemony of local notables in urban constituencies, underwent a steady decline. In 1871 they won 125 seats as opposed to seventy-six for the anti-Bismarck liberals, the Progressives, ninety-four for the Conservatives and two for the Social Democrats. By 1912 the National Liberals had fallen back to forty-five seats, with the Progressives gaining forty-two, the Conservatives fifty-seven, the Catholic Centre ninety-one and the Social Democrats 110. Here was evidence of a long and steady decline of liberalism of all varieties, balanced by a comparable rise in the forces of socialism on the left and Catholic politics on the right.
Despite its criticisms of German colonial policy, the Catholic Centre, anxious to demonstrate its loyalty to the empire after having suffered during the Kulturkampf, had in effect become the major prop of the government in the Reichstag. Yet Bismarck’s gamble on universal male suffrage had failed spectacularly, in consequence of his failure to grasp the scale or importance of the industrialization process at work in Germany. As Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner (1845–1932), State Secretary in the Reich Treasury, complained in 1896:
Germany is becoming more and more an industrial state. Thereby that part of the population is strengthened upon which the crown cannot depend – the population of the great towns and industrial districts – whereas the agricultural population provided the real support of the monarchy. If things go on as at present, then the monarchy will either pass over to a republican system or, as in England, become a sort of sham monarchy.
That this prediction did not come true was partly a result of the continued ostracism of the Social Democrats by the political elite, partly a consequence of the limited competence that continued to restrict the effect of the legislature all the way up to 1914. In addition, wide-ranging powers remained with the twenty-five federated states, which included tiny and insignificant ones like Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, small but important ones like the city-state of Hamburg, and large and influential ones such as Baden, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg.
All these German states were dwarfed by the Kingdom of Prussia, which contained the majority of the empire’s population and occupied the bulk of its territory. It was even more dominant in Germany than Piedmont was in Italy, offering a strong contrast to France, where the Third Republic was built on the rejection of Parisian hegemony and reflected the power of the provinces. Crucially, the King of Prussia was always German Emperor. Prussia held seventeen out of the fifty-eight seats on the Federal Council and could always pressure enough of the other states into voting with it to obtain an outright majority. The Prussian Prime Minister was almost always Reich Chancellor (Bismarck held both posts and that of Foreign Secretary as well). Each federated state had its own sovereign, legislature and administration, and each controlled education, health, police, and the levying of most taxes, though the growth of central government slowly reduced their autonomy. Few of these states were democratic, and in many of them the right to vote was linked to property ownership. In Prussia the electorate was divided into three equal classes reflecting the top, middle and bottom third of taxpayers: thus the two richest classes could always outvote the third, poorest class even though the latter heavily outnumbered them in terms of voters. More crucially still, the Prussian Army, which controlled the armies of the other states, above all in time of war, was to a large extent independent of the legislature. In a faint echo of their more radical position in the 1860s, the National Liberals in the Reichstag had attempted in the 1870s to force an annual budget on the army, while the latter did not want any budgetary controls at all. Bismarck managed to patch up a compromise whereby the army estimates were voted through every seven years. This minimized the degree of parliamentary control, though it still led in 1887 to a major clash as the Liberals tried to vote through a three-year period for the army budget. ‘The German army,’ declared Bismarck, ‘is an institution that cannot be dependent on transient Reichstag majorities . . . This attempt to turn the imperial army into a parliamentary army . . . will not succeed.’
Angered by the National Liberals’ assault on the independence of the Army, Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag in 1887 and fought an election campaign on the basis of a cynical and alarmist vision of a France that was so hell-bent on revanche that he could see ‘war in sight’. Bismarck won, and was able to rely for the first time on a Reichstag majority, consisting of the Conservatives and the National Liberals. The Kartell, as the new majority was called, did not last long. Despite the introduction of his pioneering social welfare policies in the 1880s, Bismarck realized by 1890 that he had failed to destroy the SPD just as he had failed to curb the Catholic Centre Party. As the twelve-year sunset clause of the Anti-Socialist Law threatened to come into operation, therefore, Bismarck began to prepare for the Law’s renewal. But his dominant position had depended not just on his mastery of the Reichstag but also on the trust of the Kaiser (‘It’s hard being Kaiser under Bismarck,’ Wilhelm I had once remarked). In 1888, the old Kaiser died at the age of ninety, and was succeeded by his son, who took the throne using the Prussian royal number of Friedrich III (1831–88). Married to Queen Victoria’s daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal (1840–1901), and enjoying the reputation of being a liberal, the new Kaiser did not get on with Bismarck. But he was weak and indecisive. The ‘Iron Chancellor’ had no problem in browbeating Friedrich III when he wanted to. Although he was a convinced opponent of the death penalty, Friedrich signed Hödel’s death warrant as acting monarch in 1878 when Bismarck told him he would be betraying the Reich and the monarchy if he let the would-be assassin live. In any case, however, Friedrich’s reign only lasted ninety-nine days before he died of throat cancer, despite the attentions of the best English surgeons.
He was succeeded by his son Wilhelm II, a very different character: restless, bombastic and unstable. The new Kaiser had been born with a withered left arm, which his parents tried to stimulate into growing by plunging it into the warm entrails of newly slaughtered animals, a therapy that can hardly have helped him gain the psychological balance he so obviously needed. Incapable of systematic work, Wilhelm travelled so much that he was popularly known as the Reisekaiser, the ‘travelling emperor’. In August 1894 one newspaper calculated that he had spent 199 out of the previous 365 days on the move. There was, contemporaries observed, something about him that was ‘not quite normal’. On cruises he made elderly generals perform gymnastics and on one occasion ran around them as they did so, cutting through their braces so their trousers fell down. On another occasion he got one rather fat courtier to make howling noises dressed up as a poodle; on a third occasion he forced the head of the Military Cabinet, Count Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler (1853–1908), to dress up as a ballerina and perform before the court; the unfortunate general had a heart attack in the middle of a pirouette and died on the spot. Wilhelm II was equally tactless with foreign potentates; when King Ferdinand of Bulgaria (1861–1948) was on a state visit to Berlin, Wilhelm slapped him vigorously on the bottom, in public, then pretended nothing had happened; while at a dinner in 1904, he told King Leopold II of the Belgians (1835–1909) that he should help him invade France. Leopold was said to have been so upset by this bizarre request that when he got up to leave he put his helmet on back to front.
Wilhelm II surrounded himself with a court ‘camarilla’ that was credited by critics with more power than it probably possessed. But its fawning sycophancy certainly encouraged him in the illusion that he ruled alone, and by Divine Right. ‘I am the sole master of German policy,’ he declared once, ‘and my country must follow wherever I go!’ In 1908, Colonel Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley (1857–1934) leaked a private conversation he had had with the Kaiser, during the latter’s state visit to England, to the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. The report offended almost everyone, from the Japanese, who the Kaiser said were intended as the target of Germany’s construction of a high-seas battle fleet, to the French and the Russians, who he claimed had tried to persuade Germany to intervene against the British in the Boer War. ‘You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares,’ he told his interlocutor at one point. His dilettantism was illustrated by the fact that the most influential figure in the Foreign Ministry, Friedrich von Holstein (1837–1909), spent much of his time trying to neutralize the Kaiser’s interventions, but met him only once during his sixteen-year tenure of office; according to legend, the subject of their conversation on this occasion was Pomeranian duck-shooting.
A man of Wilhelm II’s qualities was not going to let Bismarck run things, and a series of minor squabbles between the two, augmented by the new Kaiser’s reluctance to renew the Anti-Socialist Law, ended in Bismarck’s employment of his customary tactic of threatening to resign. To everyone’s surprise Wilhelm II accepted. Bismarck left office in 1890 to the accompaniment of a celebrated cartoon by Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914), illustrator of Alice in Wonderland, called ‘Dropping the Pilot’, which has Bismarck disembarking from the German ship of state as the Kaiser looks down insouciantly from the deck. Wilhelm’s response was to announce that his policy was ‘Full steam ahead!’ But in his place Wilhelm appointed a general, Leo von Caprivi (1831–99), a well-meaning man with no experience of politics. To everyone’s surprise, Caprivi began to pursue liberal policies, lowering tariffs and making conciliatory gestures to the opposition parties. However, Caprivi proved unable to manage the Reichstag, and the military Bill he got through was not to the Kaiser’s satisfaction. By allowing too much freedom to his ministers, the general opened himself up to intrigues and plots, aided and abetted by the ‘camarilla’. He resigned, tired of office, in 1894. His successor, the Bavarian Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1819–1901), was older than Bismarck had been at the time of his resignation. He stood by as one by one the independent ministers resigned and were replaced by the Kaiser’s cronies. The Chancellor did not care. ‘I may be weak,’ he said, ‘but at least I am not a scoundrel.’ In 1900 he resigned at the age of eighty.
Hohenlohe’s replacement was Bernhard von Bülow (1849–1929), an intimate of the Kaiser and State Secretary in the Foreign Office since 1897. ‘Bernhard – superb fellow!’ wrote the Kaiser: ‘What a joy to deal with someone who is devoted to one body and soul!’ This was another of his illusions. Bülow flattered and cajoled the Kaiser, and tried to gather a workable coalition together in the Reichstag, which passed laws providing for the construction of a High Seas fleet in 1898 and 1900, strongly advocated by the Kaiser, and a tariff reform in 1902, bitterly opposed by the agrarian interest, who did not think it went far enough. But convinced that his job was being made impossible by the Kaiser’s tactless interventions, Bülow embarked on a covert campaign to limit his influence. Bülow engineered an election in 1907 over the Catholic Centre Party’s criticism of German colonial policy. This resulted in a Reichstag majority, the so-called Bülow Bloc, which included the left-liberals, thanks to concessions to their policies, and pushed the Centre Party into opposition. By leaking a series of homosexual scandals at Court to the press, Bülow brought about the disgrace of the ‘camarilla’. He made no attempt to stop the embarrassing Daily Telegraph interview from being published in full, though the newspaper had submitted it to him for approval in advance, and used the furore caused by its publication to get the Kaiser to promise not to interfere in government any more.
It was, however, not the Kaiser, but splits within the Bloc over the reform of the financial system of the empire that brought down Bülow. Before resigning in 1909 the Chancellor still managed to force Wilhelm to appoint not one of the discredited ‘camarilla’ but his own nominee as his successor. This was Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1921), a career bureaucrat who had been Prussian Minister of the Interior then State Secretary for the same department in the Reich administration. Inexperienced in politics, Bethmann found it difficult to manage the Reichstag. At the same time, the collapse of the Bülow Bloc opened the way to the emergence of new radical pressure groups on the right, as the Navy League, originally founded to support government policy, broke free from government control and began to criticize the Reich leadership for its supposed lack of enthusiasm for a big battle fleet. Other organizations such as the Colonial Union, the Society for the Eastern Marches and the Pan-German League formed a ‘nationalist opposition’ to demand imperial expansion and tough, even military action against the Social Democrats. Especially following the SPD’s victory in the 1912 Reichstag election, all the signs were that a polarization of politics was in progress. It would culminate in a descent into political violence at the end of the war.
Despite Kaiser Wilhelm II’s repeated insistence that he alone was in charge of the destinies of Imperial Germany, it was clear there was a vibrant political culture in Germany, with lively debates in the political press, mass membership of the parties, and a high turnout at election time. The authoritarian instincts of the state increasingly ran counter to the forces of democratic political participation. Universal male suffrage had given rise to a system of party politics that was forcing the central government to rely on parliamentary majorities to get many of its policies through. However, like the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, where the paralysis of the legislative system caused by the intransigence of national minorities was putting more and more power into the hands of the monarch and his chief advisers, the German Empire possessed a legislative and political system that had only a limited effect on decision-making at the top. In 1913 the Reichstag actually passed a motion of no confidence in Bethmann Hollweg’s administration over the Zabern Affair, where military units occupying the town of Zabern (Saverne) in Alsace had been arresting, imprisoning and maltreating local people without intervention from the Reich government, which ruled the province directly and refused to condemn the soldiers’ behaviour. Bethmann’s administration continued as if nothing had happened. Parliamentary responsibility clearly still had some way to go before it finally took root in Germany. The crisis of August 1914 was to demonstrate that Germany’s civil and military leadership made policy largely without reference to the legislature and the political parties.
The authoritarianism of the central European empires paled into insignificance in comparison to that of Tsarist Russia. The reforms undertaken by Tsar Alexander II following defeat in the Crimean War in 1856 had not altered the basic fact that the country was ruled by an autocracy unaccountable to no one but itself. There was no national legislature before the turn of the century and there were no political parties. The possibilities of public political discussion were limited. Correspondingly, the tactics used by oppositional groups in Russia were far more extreme than elsewhere in Europe. In the absence of a large middle class and lacking any tradition of liberal politics, the challenge of democracy was mounted by a new and in many ways unique social group that emerged in the 1870s in the wake of Tsar Alexander’s relaxation of censorship and reform of education. This was the intelligentsia, a term originally coined by the Polish philosopher and nationalist activist Karol Libelt (1807–75) to denote the men and women who actively campaigned for Polish national identity on the basis of language, culture and education. The term meant both more and less than its equivalent in the world of the Baltic Germans, the literati: it did not include the whole of the educated middle class (the German Bildungsbürgertum), but on the other hand it did have a specific connotation of civic activism, particularly – in the light of official restrictions on freedom of speech – in literature, which thus took on a highly political character. Initially drawn from the nobility, the members of the Russian intelligentsia were gradually joined by people of less well-defined social origins, the raznochintsy (people of miscellaneous social rank), largely because of the expansion of the professional classes, the universities and the secondary-school system. In 1833, 79 per cent of secondary school pupils were sons of nobles and bureaucrats, but by 1885 this proportion had fallen to 49 per cent. The proportion of commoners among these pupils had risen over the same period from 19 per cent to 44 per cent. By 1894, too, there were 25,000 students at Russian universities. Long before this students began to organize themselves and produce newsletters with titles such as The Living Voice and The Unmasker. The students formed the audience for the new intelligentsia and eventually supplied it with new recruits: they were, as one commentator remarked, ‘the barometer of public opinion’.
As the students began to demand the dismissal of ineffectual professors, forcing two in Moscow to resign in 1858, a reaction set in. One group of professors complained that ‘the student is no longer a pupil but is becoming a master’. Admissions were curtailed and the police came back into the universities to supervise conduct. Exemptions from tax were removed, drastically reducing the numbers of the poor ‘academic proletariat’. Meetings could only be held with permission from the university authorities. This clampdown radicalized many students. A number were arrested and expelled. Similar events occurred in the provinces. More generally, as news-sheets and magazines began to appear in greater numbers, the failure of Alexander II to push forward with more reforms, above all his refusal to introduce an elected national legislature, propelled students and members of the intelligentsia sharply to the left. In the ferment of political discussion that broke out, the criticism of revolutionary ideology as ‘nihilism’ in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862) called forth a response by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828–89), editor of a radical periodical, The Contemporary, in the form of another novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863), which advocated a society based on producer co-operatives along the lines sketched out by the Utopian socialists. His book became a seminal text for the Russian radicals. The idea of using the peasant commune as a basis for a new society, bypassing the evils of capitalism and industrialism, was based on the writings of a radical of the older generation, Alexander Herzen, whose periodical The Bell was smuggled into Russia from his exile in London. But Herzen was too moderate for many of the younger intelligentsia, such as Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823–1900), who believed that peasant society could become the vehicle of a violent revolution once the peasants had imbibed the principles of socialism. Lavrov too had been arrested for anti-government writings and was in exile, in Switzerland, where he quarrelled with conspiratorial revolutionaries such as Mikhail Bakunin.
The situation became worse in 1866, when a young nobleman, Dmitry Vladimirovich Karakozov (1840–66), who had been expelled from university in both Kazan and Moscow, made an attempt on the tsar’s life. Karakozov had been chosen by lot from ‘Hell’, the inner circle of a small conspiratorial society of Utopian socialists at Moscow University. Racked by remorse for his family’s exploitation of the peasantry, he was personally enthusiastic about his mission. ‘I have decided to destroy the evil Tsar,’ he wrote in a proclamation that was never published because it was lost in the post, ‘and to die for my beloved people.’ On 4 April 1866, the date predicted for the revolution in What Is to Be Done?, he rushed towards the tsar as he was leaving the Summer Garden in St Petersburg, but as he took aim with his pistol his arm was jostled and he missed; the guards arrested him as he tried to take a second shot, and found a phial of strychnine in his jacket. ‘What do you want?’ the tsar asked him. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ he replied. Despite begging forgiveness and converting to Orthodoxy, Karakozov was executed by hanging on 3 September 1866; ten of his accomplices were sentenced to hard labour. A further clampdown at St Petersburg University followed, and all societies of any kind were banned (a consequence of the fact that many revolutionary cells were disguised with harmless names: the one to which Karakozov belonged was registered as a society aiming to establish sewing co-operatives). From now on, the radicals organized themselves in secret.
Inspired by these events, the student Sergei Gennadiyevich Nechayev (1847–82) began to plot the tsar’s death. An admirer of Chernyshevsky, he was said to sleep on a wooden board and live on black bread in imitation of the ascetic hero of What Is to Be Done? Fleeing the police, he went into exile in Zurich, where he met Bakunin, gaining his confidence by pretending to be part of a revolutionary committee whose members had escaped the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, though in fact this was not true. The two men then sat down to compose the celebrated Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869). According to this document, the revolutionary had to devote himself full-time to the violent overthrow of the social order:
The revolutionary is a lost man; he has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings, he does not even have a name. Every thing in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive intent, a single thought, a single passion – the revolution. In the very depths of his being, not just in words but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, conventions and generally accepted conditions, and with the ethics of this world. He will be an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that will only be so as to destroy it the more effectively.
Nechayev returned secretly to Russia a few months later, disillusioned with Bakunin (who, he said, was always ‘idly running off at the mouth and on paper’), and organized another secret society, the ‘People’s Reprisal’. When one of its members disagreed with his views and left the society, Nechayev and several of his comrades strangled and shot him and put his body through a hole in the ice covering a lake. But the body was discovered and the details of the incident came to light after the arrest of some of the perpetrators, prompting Dostoyevsky to pen a scathing portrait of the revolutionaries in his novel The Devils (1872). Fleeing once more to Swizterland, Nechayev took up again with Bakunin, and began publishing a small magazine, but his behaviour, which included stealing letters from Bakunin and others with a view to using them for blackmail, and threatening to murder a publisher if he did not release Bakunin from a contract, horrified his acquaintances. He was arrested and extradited to Russia, where he died in prison in 1882. This vision of the dedicated revolutionary was to exert a powerful fascination on later generations.
But this cult of violence at first had only limited influence. More important was the discussion and reading circle led by the student Nikolai Vasilyevich Tchaikovsky (1851–1926) that produced pamphlets advocating the creation of a peasant-based socialist society. Their ideas led to a movement ‘to go to the people’, in which students, who quickly became known as Narodniki, or Populists, donned peasant costumes, learned trades, and went to live with the peasants with the aim of converting them to the need for revolution. The movement spread, and soon young revolutionaries were holding meetings in the countryside, working alongside peasants and gaining their trust. They soon discovered that the peasants could not be weaned away from their veneration for the tsar. The Populists distributed revolutionary pamphlets and books but discovered the peasants were unable to read them. Many Populists were denounced by local priests or village elders. By the end of 1874 the movement was over. The Minister of Justice reported that 770 people had been arrested, including 158 women. Fifty-three Narodniki had escaped but 265 were imprisoned on remand.
The sheer extent of the movement was deeply worrying to the tsarist authorities, who ordered a mass trial of 193 individuals in 1877. Lasting for several months, the trial was conducted in public, and the defendants, who also included participants in student demonstrations, heckled the judges, delivered lengthy political speeches, and impressed the jury to the extent that 153 of them were acquitted. Forty of them were sentenced all the same, and the rest had been in prison for many months awaiting trial. This trial further radicalized the remaining revolutionaries, who formed a new organization, ‘Land and Liberty’, the first proper political movement with a title and a programme, rather than a loose network grouped around a single individual. It sent out its members to the provinces in the spirit of the movement ‘to go to the people’, and had considerable influence among students. It advocated the ‘disorganization of the state’ by selective assassinations. In the middle of the trial of the 193, the Governor of St Petersburg, Fyodor Fyodorovich Trepov (1809–89), was shot by the young secretary Vera Zasulich (1849–1919), a close associate of Nechayev. Zasulich belonged to a small Bakuninist group in Kiev and, like many others, was outraged by Trepov’s flogging of a political prisoner who had refused to doff his cap in his presence. Her shot only wounded Trepov, and in her subsequent trial so much evidence emerged of his brutality that the jury acquitted her of all charges. Fearing re-arrest, she fled to Swizterland. The government responded by transferring political trials to military courts.
The revolutionary movement was now pulled in different directions by the followers of Bakunin and Lavrov. One wing, styling itself ‘Black Partition’, and led by Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918) and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod (1850–1928), eschewed violence; the leaders left for Switzerland in 1880 and continued their political activities in exile, joining Zasulich in the formation of a new Marxist movement. The other wing, ‘The People’s Will’, focused on realizing the anarchist vision of the collapse of the state by killing the tsar. They got one of their members into Alexander II’s palace and supplied him with dynamite, which he used to set an explosive device timed to go off under the dining room of the Winter Palace when the tsar was present. Eleven people were killed but the tsar’s arrival had been delayed and so he escaped. A second attempt was made, involving digging a tunnel under a railway line and planting a bomb which the People’s Will would detonate when the tsar’s train passed over it. Through a double agent in the Third Section, they had obtained detailed plans of the tsar’s movements, and knew he would be in the first of the two trains, but the order of the trains was changed at the last moment, and the bomb only destroyed the wagons carrying the tsar’s baggage. To try and defuse the movement, Alexander II ordered a degree of liberalization to include the first steps towards a system of representative institutions, but on 13 March 1881, as he was riding in a closed carriage to a regular military engagement, two members of the People’s Will threw bombs at him in quick succession. The first missed but the second found its target. ‘I was deafened by the new explosion,’ the police chief, who was accompanying him, later reported:
burned, wounded and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty’s weak voice cry, ‘Help!’ Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and rushed to the emperor. His Majesty was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking he was merely wounded heavily, I tried to lift him but the tsar’s legs were shattered, and the blood poured out of them. Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay on the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others to crawl, still others tried to get out from beneath bodies that had fallen on them.
Alexander II was taken back to the palace and died shortly afterwards from his injuries.
The new tsar, Alexander III, a burly man over six feet tall, was a gruff and uncompromising conservative who had already made clear his disapproval of many of his father’s reforms. Deeply religious, he was under the influence of his former tutor Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church, on whose advice he cancelled the decree authorizing the creation of representative assemblies, appointed ‘land captains’ to oversee local administration, and drastically increased political repression. The police now had the power, without consulting anyone, to search, arrest, interrogate, imprison and exile people who were found guilty of any kind of political activity or even just suspected of engaging in it; to prevent ‘untrustworthy’ citizens from gaining employment; and to supervise all cultural activities. They had the right to declare martial law or a state of emergency. Secret agents were despatched to Switzerland to begin surveillance of political refugees and infiltrate revolutionary organizations. Under Sergei Vasilyevich Zubatov (1864–1917) a new anti-terrorist police department in the Interior Ministry, the Okhrana, founded in 1881, even created trade unions to try and divert revolutionary impulses into peaceful channels, and secretly sponsored student societies. The assassination of Alexander II also prompted an outburst of antisemitism in Russia, since the regime imagined a Jewish conspiracy behind the deed (in fact, the People’s Will included very few Jews among its members, and none who adhered to the Jewish religion). Jews were confined to the towns, while quotas were introduced in the universities and professions. In 1891 the Jews were expelled from Moscow into the former Pale of Settlement, whose rules had been relaxed by Alexander II. Russian was enforced as the official language of the courts, the university and the schools in Poland, though the Finns continued to enjoy a substantial degree of autonomy. The result was a nascent revival of Polish nationalism, though it remained subdued by the extremely repressive conditions under which it had to exist.
Alexander III’s repression lasted for the rest of his reign. The intensity of police activity ensured that further assassination plots came to nothing, and the People’s Will fell apart. However, the tsar died unexpectedly in 1894 at the age of forty-nine, of kidney failure, probably as a result of the physical trauma he suffered when the imperial train derailed in 1888 (he was with his family in the dining car, and reportedly held up the collapsing roof with his bare hands as his children escaped from the wreckage). His eldest son and successor, Nicholas II, was at first an unknown quantity. ‘What is going to happen to me and all of Russia?’ he asked his brother-in-law on hearing of his father’s death: ‘I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one.’ Conscientious but unimaginative, he was a man of limited abilities who was too shy and polite to deal effectively with his subordinates. However, his support for the principle of autocracy was unwavering: ‘I want everyone to know,’ he declared, ‘that I will devote all my strength to maintain, for the good of the whole nation, the principle of absolute autocracy as firmly and as strongly as did my late lamented father.’ Yet Nicholas II interpreted this to mean he had to micromanage everything, from petitions from peasants for a change of name to summoning an official for interview. Nothing was too trivial for his attention. He resented his ministers because their functions derogated from his own, and he even refused to appoint a private secretary, preferring to deal with his own correspondence. He was unable to tell the difference between the important and the trivial, and so he was incapable of delegating the latter in order to concentrate on the former. ‘He sticks to his insignificant, petty point of view,’ Pobedonostsev complained. The tsar increasingly bypassed his ministers and surrounded himself with aristocratic sycophants, but he also spent months away on tours or on hunting expeditions, yachting trips and family holidays, during which time the business of government ground to a halt. It was widely regarded as a bad omen when on the day following his formal coronation, a crowd of up to half a million people attending celebrations on a large military training ground outside Moscow, where free food and beer were supplied, stampeded as the rumour spread that there would not be enough for everyone: people were pushed into military ditches and suffocated or were trampled to death; altogether some 1,400 were killed and 600 injured. Blithely ignoring this unfortunate event, Nicholas continued the celebrations, attending balls, concerts and other festivities as if nothing had happened. Even in the carefully controlled media of Russia at the time, there was widespread criticism of his indifference.
The revolutionary movement soon revived, especially when former members of ‘Land and Liberty’ returned from exile in Siberia. In 1894 they formed a new organization, ‘The People’s Right’, which joined another, the ‘Union of Socialist Revolutionaries’, founded in 1896, to create the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1902. Influenced by the ideas of Herzen and Lavrov, this new party campaigned on the Populist platform of peasant rights as the basis for the creation of a new society, and Russian peasants began to undergo the same process of politicization that was taking place in other parts of the European countryside at the same time. In contrast to peasant political organizations in France or Italy, Germany or Spain, however, the Socialist Revolutionaries also continued the Russian terrorist tradition. They established a secret Combat Organization, which over the next two years assassinated two Ministers of the Interior, a Grand Duke, and many other government officials. The revelation that its deputy head was a police agent persuaded the party that agents provocateurs might be at work, and it abandoned the tactic of ‘individual terror’ in 1909. By the turn of the century the challenge of democracy was being articulated by more moderate political movements as well. In the 1860s Alexander II had introduced a new network of local government institutions, the zemstva, which included district assemblies elected by nobility, townsmen and peasant communes, and these district assemblies in turn elected provincial assemblies, of which there were thirty-four by 1870. Their powers were extremely limited. However, the zemstva employed growing numbers of administrators, doctors, teachers, agronomists, engineers, statisticians and experts of various kinds, who provided a basis of support for liberal political ideas. There were an estimated 47,000 professionals working in them by 1900. By the 1890s the zemstva were also holding a growing number of conferences that raised the demand for the liberalization of the political system. Here was a grass-roots movement of moderate democratic reform that was potentially a far more serious challenge to the autocracy than the small, if dangerous, terrorist milieu.
On the fringes of politics, Plekhanov and other exiled Marxists rejected the idea of the peasant commune as an agent of revolution, and began to argue instead that revolution would be brought about by the industrial working class, which was growing apace as a result of Witte’s economic reforms in the 1890s and 1900s. The year 1898 saw the creation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to pursue this aim, but amid incessant quarrels about tactics it split in 1903 into two bitterly opposed factions, the Bolsheviks (majority) and the Mensheviks (minority), over Lenin’s book What Is to Be Done? A tract, not a novel, it was influenced not so much by Chernyshevsky, who originated the title in his own much earlier work (1863), as by Nechayev. Adapting the central principle of the Revolutionary Catechism to Marxist ideology, Lenin argued that a revolution could only be brought about by a dedicated core of professional revolutionaries under a strong leader (himself). Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, in contrast, argued for a flexible approach focusing on a legal political and economic struggle, roughly approximating to the model of the German Social Democrats. The Bolsheviks in turn rejected the idea of policy formation by votes, pitting against it the doctrine of ‘democratic centralism’ as a way of legitimizing their autocratic system of administration. Doctrinaire and inflexible, Lenin would brook no opposition. He insisted that the industrial workers should accept the leadership of the party, which would mobilize them to extract concessions from the middle classes when they eventually came to power and established a parliamentary government. The Bolsheviks remained for the moment on the fringes even of revolutionary politics. They were more than willing to use illegal and violent tactics, as in the 1907 Tbilisi bank robbery, when the young Georgian Josef Djugashvili (1878–1953), later known as Stalin, organized the hijacking of a coachload of cash on the main square of the Georgian city. There were many police spies in their midst, including Roman Vatslavovich Malinovsky (1876–1918), who rose to become a member of the party’s Central Committee and the Okhrana’s highest-paid agent. By 1914 Malinovsky was the only leading member of the party not in prison or in exile, a fact that in itself aroused suspicions which proved to be entirely justified.
After mid-century, the tsarist regime always failed the test of a major war, whether in the Crimea in 1854–6 or, terminally, in the First World War in 1917. A major war arrived shortly after the turn of the century, as Russia, expanding eastwards, clashed with the growing Asian power of Japan in Korea and Manchuria, which a Russian army 177,000 strong had occupied in 1900. Foreshadowing the bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, the only ice-free Russian port in the Pacific, in February 1904. After a lengthy siege, Russia surrendered Port Arthur in January 1905. In February, the Russians lost a major battle at Mukden, where their losses totalled 90,000. In May the Russian Baltic fleet reached the scene of the conflict after many months, having been denied use of the Suez Canal by the British, who were allied to the Japanese and had been annoyed by Russian ships firing on their fishing vessels in the North Sea in the mistaken belief that they were Japanese gunboats. The Japanese annihilated the Russian fleet, sinking eight battleships with no major losses of their own, and their ground forces occupied Sakhalin Island. Strikingly, an Asian state with a constitutional political system had defeated a European state without one.
The war was extremely unpopular at home, and the legitimacy of the tsar’s rule was badly damaged by the defeat. While a peace settlement was arranged, brokered in London by the United States, the zemstva, taking advantage of the army’s absence in the Far East, met to demand a constitution. Nicholas II agreed, his hand forced by a massive peasant uprising that now spread to the army, where mutinies broke out as it returned defeated from the front. A deputation of workers on their way to present a petition to Nicholas at the Winter Palace early in 1905 was fired on by troops, even though it was led by an Orthodox priest, Father Georgy Apollonovich Gapon, and carried religious banners and portraits of the tsar, in a massacre that became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Gapon escaped but when it was revealed that he had been in contact with the Okhrana and received financial support from the Japanese military, he was kidnapped and hanged by members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Unit. Workers had already downed tools in the capital and now there was a general strike. It was followed in May 1905 by the formation of a general Union of Unions, and in June by a mutiny in the harbour at Odessa by the crew of the battleship Potemkin. A strike by railway workers stopped any further troop movements. In St Petersburg a council, or Soviet, of workers’ deputies was set up, led by Leon Trotsky, who had developed the theory of ‘permanent revolution’, meaning that a bourgeois revolution could be pushed straight on into a proletarian or socialist revolution under the right circumstances. Proclaiming that the tsar was ‘at war with the entire people’, the Soviet declared a general strike and began demanding full democratization.
Under these various pressures, Nicholas II granted the so-called ‘October Manifesto’, conceding the election of a Parliament, or Duma, and establishing a Council of Ministers on western European lines. The government tried to pacify the peasants by cancelling the last redemption payments, allowing them to consolidate their holdings and reducing the powers of the commune. The architect of these reforms, Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin, Prime Minister and Minister of Internal Affairs from 1906 to 1911, believed he could create a class of small landowners who would be loyal to the state. Although he had been dismissed earlier in the year Stolypin was still thought of as a danger by the Socialist Revolutionaries. One of them, Dmitry Grigoriyevich Bogrov (1887–1911), shot him during the interval at a performance of an opera by Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) in Kiev in September 1911, in front of Tsar Nicholas and two of his daughters. Stolypin died a few days later. Bogrov was arrested on the spot, condemned by a military court and hanged ten days later. As so often in these cases in late Imperial Russia, the background was murky in the extreme: Bogrov was unmasked as a police informer and there were accusations that extreme right-wing elements in the police had commissioned the assassination in order to provoke greater repression. An investigation was launched but it was halted on the personal orders of the tsar. The truth was never properly established.
Meanwhile the First Duma had been elected on 27 April 1906, though it did not have the power to appoint or dismiss ministers, which was retained by the tsar. Political parties emerged, however, with the Constitutional Democrats or Cadets, mostly zemstvo liberals, winning 179 seats, the Socialist Revolutionaries ninety-four, reflecting their growing popularity among the peasantry, the Social Democrats eighteen, the Right thirty-two, and nationalists of various hues the rest. When the Cadets demanded the right to appoint ministers, the tsar dissolved the Duma, declaring most of the deputies ineligible for re-election. The Second Duma, which convened on 27 February 1907, contained more conservatives and fewer Cadets, and was dissolved when the Social Democrats dared to criticize the army. A Third Duma was elected on a restrictive and indirect franchise, in which one elector was chosen by every 230 landowners, while it took 60,000 peasants to choose an elector, and 125,000 workers. Meeting on 14 November 1907, it contained 154 Octobrists, or supporters of the October Manifesto, 127 conservatives, fifty-four Cadets and thirty-three left-wingers; the Fourth Duma, which met on 15 November 1912 and was elected on the same basis as the Third Duma, was more conservative still (though five years later, its deputies were to play a key part in the February Revolution). Not one of Nicholas II’s concessions was made sincerely, and on the urging of his reactionary entourage he sanctioned the dismissal of more than 7,000 government employees, mostly in the zemstva, and the creation of armed militias known as Black Hundreds, who attacked and sometimes killed liberal deputies, broke up oppositional meetings, and instigated antisemitic pogroms. The tsar himself pointed the accusing finger: ‘Nine-tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews,’ he said: ‘The people’s whole anger has turned against them.’
Despite the roll-back of the democratic movement and representative institutions, the arrests, and the suppression of the Soviet, full autocracy was not restored after 1905. The remaining censorship system was shattered, political parties had emerged and continued to function, and universities expanded and became more autonomous, though restrictions on radical students were reimposed in 1910. The system of local assemblies was extended, a limited measure of health insurance was introduced for workers, local justices of the peace were restored, and the corporal punishment of peasants was curtailed though not abolished entirely. Elementary education and literacy spread fast, though in 1913 the peasants were still spending less on printed matter than on oil for icons. Nevertheless the country was still ruled by a small and increasingly irresponsible clique around the tsar. From November 1905, Nicholas and his entourage fell progressively under the influence of the illiterate peasant faith healer Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869–1916), who was said to have healing powers over the tsar’s sickly haemophiliac son and heir. Rasputin used his influence in favour of the antisemitic Black Hundreds, and was instrumental in the dismissal of Stolypin as Prime Minister. Scandals and rumours surrounded the monk, including tales of sexual orgies and a liaison with the Empress Alexandra (1872–1918). These had already begun to undermine the tsar’s reputation by 1912.
As the court freewheeled into irrationality, the galloping pace of industrialization and the lack of legitimate outlets for union protests and representation led to a growing number of illegal strikes. Between January and July 1912 some 1,450,000 industrial workers went on strike, with 1,030,000 of them putting political items on their lists of demands. The rickety and unstable nature of Nicholas II’s rule was becoming steadily more apparent. Politics were polarized: the tsar’s repression of the legitimate opposition in the Dumas had hollowed out the moderate centre. The creation of democracy seemed increasingly unlikely, its potential squeezed between a violent right and a terrorist left. As in other European states, some in the government saw in the fostering of nationalist enthusiasms a possible way out of the situation. Shortly before the outbreak of the war with Japan, and only a few months before his own assassination, Vyecheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve (1846–1904), Minister of the Interior, remarked: ‘In order to hold back the revolution, we need a small, victorious war.’ The war with Japan that broke out a few weeks after he uttered these words was neither small nor victorious. The war that was to come in 1914 was, however, different in scale altogether; it was to sweep away the tsarist regime altogether and usher in nearly three-quarters of a century of brutal Communist dictatorship.
Halted, or at least temporarily stemmed, in Russia, the tide of democracy still seemed unstoppable in most of the rest of Europe. Yet it was carrying along with it the seeds of its own destruction. The extension of the franchise brought the increasingly literate and educated masses into politics. While the working classes gave their support to socialist movements that at least outwardly seemed to aim at the destruction of capitalism and the overthrow of established institutions, the peasantry were beginning to move away from traditional forms of protest and gravitate towards populist Catholic parties or rural pressure groups of various kinds. Outflanked by these mass movements, middle-class liberalism was in decline by 1914 in many European polities. Above all, perhaps, the nationalization of the masses introduced a new vehemence into political discourse, expressed in episodes such as the rise to power, however temporary, of figures like Pelloux and Boulanger, both of whom built their popular appeal on the promise of national glory. In Germany mass nationalist movements like the Navy League began to push governments towards a more assertive foreign policy. In Belgium the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1893, which enfranchised the monoglot rural masses in Flanders, sparked the emergence of an increasingly vociferous movement for the use of Flemish as well as French in official documents, with demonstrations numbering tens of thousands of shouting protesters. In a similar way, the issue of Irish Home Rule in Britain broke up the existing pattern of politics from the mid-1880s just as the franchise had been extended to new sectors of the population, while in the Habsburg Monarchy it paralyzed the two major legislative assemblies, respectively in Austria and Hungary, altogether. Those who believed in the inevitability of democratic progress had to contend as well with the rise of far-right, ultra-nationalist and anti-democratic movements such as the Pan-Germans or the Black Hundreds – themselves a reaction to the spread of parliamentary and democratic politics. In 1914 these movements were still relatively small, despite being encouraged or at least tolerated by their respective national governments. Nationalism was no longer, as it had been up to 1848, an unambiguously liberal force. In Ukraine the People’s Party, rival of the liberal nationalists, proclaimed: ‘Muscovites, Jews, Poles, Hungarians and Romanians are enemies of our people.’ The Pan-Germans urged the banning of the Social Democrats, the disenfranchisement of Jews, and the establishment of a dictatorship headed by the Kaiser. The influence of such ideas already pointed to the violent roll-back of democracy across Europe after the First World War.
The rival liberal and progressive ideals of the early-to-mid-nineteenth century – the French ideal of a Jacobin-style revolution or the British ideal of a series of gradual reforms – had already began to fade before the turn of the century. The future no longer seemed to hold a universal promise of either kind, particularly as nationalist ideologies began to look inwards to an imagined Volk or race and its historical genealogy rather than to universal principles of justice and popular sovereignty. As the European nations and their political cultures began to seal themselves off from one another in these ways, America started to emerge as the image of the future. The mass emigration of Europeans to the United States forged multiple links between the two continents, blurred the previous image of America as exclusively ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and broadened the conception of America as a land of opportunity for all. Once slavery had been abolished in the Civil War of the 1860s, the major obstacle to a positive image was removed, aided by the rapid rise of American industry and technology, symbolized above all in its massive display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The economic interdependence of America and Europe was becoming obvious to all: ‘The French soldier carries canned meats, prepared in Chicago, in his knapsack,’ wrote the French social scientist Paul de Rousiers (1857–1934) in 1892. American initiative and example was wielding a growing influence over European political culture by the turn of the century, particularly in the issues of female emancipation and women’s suffrage. The historian Gustave Lanson (1857–1934), taking a break from his duties at the Sorbonne to teach as a visiting professor in an American university in 1910, was much taken by ‘the American girl type’ he encountered among his female students – typically ‘a slim, athletic young girl with regular features, a pure profile, blond or brown hair, clear blue eyes, a laughing, frank and firm gaze, free, rich, and joyful expansion of life’. Readers of the novels of Henry James such as The Portrait of a Lady (1881) would have known what he meant.
America could still of course appear as a land of rough-hewn pioneers, as in the touring Wild West Show staged by William Cody (1846–1917, known as ‘Buffalo Bill’), whose European tours, from 1887 onwards, were hugely popular and attended by every class of society from Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm II down through the social scale. By contrast, many conservatives were fearful of the impact of American technology on Europe. The novelist Wilhelm von Polenz (1861–1903), who wrote cosy stories about rural German life, reported after a visit to the United States: ‘The Americanization of culture means trivialization, mechanization, stupification.’ His book, entitled The Land of the Future (1904), was mainly devoted to condemning the influence of Jewish immigrants on America and warning Germans of what he saw as the dangers of the growing influence of ‘international Jews’. The term ‘Americanization’ was invented by the English journalist William Thomas Stead in his book The Americanization of the World (1901), in which his main aim was to advocate a renewal of the British Constitution through some form of union with the United States, to achieve the global dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race. (His quest to fulfill this aim led him to sail to America in April 1912 on the Titanic; he did not survive the journey.) There was growing anxiety about American economic competition, and after the Spanish-American War in 1898 emerging apprehension about America’s imperial ambitions.
American economic methods such as ‘Taylorism’, making the most efficient use of working time, were much admired, and American inventiveness, from the sewing machine to the aeroplane, was quickly applied. Above all, liberals and socialists came to appreciate the virtues of American democracy. In Germany critical attitudes and derogatory references to the ‘abstract freedom’ and ‘rigid’ system of American government common in the Romantic era gave way to admiration towards the end of the century, above all on the part of those who saw Britain as a declining power that had not yet achieved full democratic status. Left-liberals admired the minimal state and widespread freedoms guaranteed Americans by the Constitution, and applauded what they saw as the effectiveness of its federal system, an example for Germany to emulate. Wilhelm Liebknecht rebuked a fellow Social Democrat who had attacked American ‘conservatism’ by reminding him in 1887 that ‘All democratic peoples are conservative. The American constitution has truly earned the right to be “conserved” – in spite of everything. Despotically ruled peoples are never conservative, because they are never content.’ In their continuing, painfully slow struggle for democracy, Many Europeans thought America represented the future for which they were striving: prosperous, peaceful, technologically advanced, the free country of a sovereign people.
Those who opposed democracy and espoused a narrow, militant and aggrandizing nationalism, those who feared and disliked the fast-paced world of urban modernity that cities like Chicago and New York seemed to incorporate, and those who condemned American society as the negation of the ideals of racial purity, took a different, more critical view. Whether liberal or conservative, right or left wing, however, almost everyone assumed that the future belonged to Europeans and their diasporas in America, Australasia and other parts of the world. Whatever the future might hold politically, it was generally believed that it would be imperial, and imperial issues played a role of growing importance in the domestic politics of European states. As politicians such as Crispi, Bülow, Ferry and Disraeli discovered, playing the imperial card was a sure route to domestic popularity. In France the dream of revenge for the defeat of 1871 acquired new power through the expansion of empire. In Germany the political elite increasingly wanted a ‘place in the sun’, an overseas empire fit for a major European state in the twentieth century. In Britain, Joseph Chamberlain and the liberal imperialists put the defence of the empire at the heart of their ambition. Thwarted in East Asia, Russia turned again to its drive towards the Mediterranean. Holding onto the remnants of an overseas empire became a crucial objective in domestic politics in Spain, where, after the First World War, this aim would eventually turn in on democracy and destroy it. Independent nation states, above all in the Balkans, sought to expand their territory, taking advantage of the obvious decay of the Ottoman Empire. In Austria-Hungary the preservation of the empire’s integrity seemed to demand the curbing of Balkan instability. Everywhere, national pride, bolstered by the rise of mass politics, exercised a growing influence over policy.
Among the few who doubted the imperial vision of the future was the English writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), in his poem ‘Recessional’ (1897), written under the overwhelming effect of the review of the Royal Navy, the largest fleet ever assembled, on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The poem ran directly counter to the mood of the time, but acquired a prophetic dimension in retrospect:
Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Kipling reminded his readers of the transience of all empires, including even the British Empire, on which the sun reportedly never set. Yet, overall, people were optimistic about the future, insofar as they thought about it at all. On 1 January 1901, the very first day of the twentieth century, the New York World, guest-edited by Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922), proprietor and editor of the Daily Mail, published a series of people’s responses to the newspaper’s question, sent to them a few weeks before: ‘What, in your opinion, is the chief danger, social or political, that confronts the coming century?’ Correspondents identified a variety of threats, from individualism to alcoholism. Clergymen went for Godlessness and ‘mammon worship’, while Arthur Conan Doyle and other writers somewhat ungratefully pointed to ‘the irresponsible press’. Armaments, imperialism and war featured strongly among the responses. But, ignoring all the pessimism, Harmsworth declared: ‘The World is optimistic enough to believe that the twentieth century . . . will meet and overcome all perils and prove to be the best that this steadily improving planet has ever seen.’