Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

138 gary p. steenson

come early in Anderson’s book, and many passages that come later seem to downplay

the impact of the organized workers’ movement.

Similarly, Robert Gildea argues somewhat ambiguously that one of the four

“crucial” factors in the run-up to the war was “the pressure of both nationalist and

socialist anti-militarist opinion.”

However, he then concludes that by virtue of the

German Burgfrieden, the French Union sacrée, and British party unity in August

1914, “the spectre of socialism had been exorcized . . . The moment to begin a

revolution, it turned out, was not at the beginning of a war.”

Because Gildea’s

account ends at this point, this still leaves open the possibility that the moment for

revolution might well be in the midst of a war, as it was for Russia, or at the end of

same, as for Germany. Finally, Ken Post, a self-professed unrepentant Marxist, has

recently offered an explanation for why Marx and most of his late nineteenth-century

followers were wrong in their prediction of an imminent revolution that would bring

an end to capitalism. Post argues that development of European capitalism in the

nineteenth century on a national, rather than an international, basis “broke up any

broad potential social revolutionary movement,” and when this was coupled with the

globalization of capitalism in the form of imperialism, domestic resources in Europe

could be devoted “to socializing workers in [capitalism’s] own values and encapsulat-

ing [workers’] movements.” He calls this process “the emergence of ‘social capital.’”

Perhaps more plainly than with any of the other authors cited here, Post’s argument

at least suggests a high degree of continuity between pre- and postwar Europe.

This approach is given further validity when attention is focused on developments

in Europe after World War II. The societies that have emerged almost everywhere in

western Europe seem now to be much more the products of trends which developed

in the 25 years before 1914 than the results of the war and its aftermath. The com-

munism and fascism that arose in the interwar years now seem anomalies of the time,

short-lived products of World War I even. Contemporary European society, with its

commitment to universal healthcare and retirement programs, decent housing for all,

universal education, care for the disadvantaged and elderly, and all the other aspects

of regard for human welfare, seems much more clearly to reﬂect the growing trends

of the earlier period than it does the aggressive, hostile, confrontational qualities of

the interwar years. Above all, these later developments clearly give the lie to the smug

conﬁdence of the rapidly disappearing classical European liberals that theirs was the

best of all possible worlds. Perhaps then we are justiﬁed in looking back on the years

before the Great War to ﬁnd whence the Europe of today came. If historians are to

fulﬁll their task of understanding the present by explaining the past, then the appar-

ent paradox of the pre-1914 years, an age of promise, leading to the disaster of

communism and fascism, only to yield, eventually, the united, prosperous, and gener-

ally contented Europe of the twenty-ﬁrst century, must be dealt with directly.

Marxism and the Workers’ Movements

Somewhat paradoxically, at least one obstacle to ﬁnding a smoother transition from

pre-1914 Europe to what followed has been the prevalence of Marxist interpretations

of history, or more particularly, Marxist understanding of the classes of modern

industrial societies – their deﬁnitions, their relationships, and their role in politics.

social reform or social revolution? 139

The paradox is that while Marxism may well have brought many scholars to focus

on the industrial working class as a major force in modern society, the weaknesses of

the Marxist view of class tended to direct their attention away from fruitful lines of

investigation that might have made it easier to ﬁnd the continuity that seems to be

missing. Certainly, this tendency was greatly strengthened by the claim to Marxian

orthodoxy made by the victorious Bolsheviks in Russia and their European defenders

and the eventual expansion of communism to much of the rest of the world. The

ability of communism to outlast fascism – and spread far and wide – reinforced

Leninist claims to orthodoxy and accuracy, which, in turn, perpetuated the notion

that Marxist lines of analysis, if not Marxism itself, could yield useful insights into

the nature of modern society.

This problem has many facets, not the least important of which is an understand-

ing of the nature of the relationship between political consciousness and the

experiences of humans in the day-to-day world. If being determines consciousness,

as most Marxists argue, and the most important element of being is one’s place in

the process of production, again something most Marxists hold, then it follows, for

Marxists, that the overthrow of an economic and political system which exploits

industrial workers and the rise of those same workers to power is an inevitable result

of the further growth of capitalism. Acceptance of this general view, even by those

who cannot properly be deemed Marxists, has led to much confusion and

misunderstanding, especially about the nature of the working-class movement in

pre-1914 Europe. It has, for example, brought a great many people (who should

have known better) to accept the notion that the theoreticians of socialism accurately

reﬂected the consciousness of the workers. This was an especially egregious problem

with the left-wing faction of the world socialist movement in the prewar years.

This self-delusional position strongly suggests that such people believed their own

propaganda and never seriously looked into the matter for themselves. Barrington

Moore’s caution many years ago to “remember that the history of the Social

Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) is not the history of the German industrial

workers” has increasingly been heeded by some scholars at least.

But the

myopia suggested by Moore led too many observers to be surprised that while the

pre-1914 socialist parties ofﬁcially called for peace, their followers in a great many

cases greeted the war with enthusiasm. For far too long, the facile acceptance of the

idea that the consciousness of the working classes corresponds to the claims of the

socialist leadership, especially the theorists within it, has resulted in confusion and

misunderstanding.

One possible reason for the persistence of this problem was the persistence of the

Soviet Union. As long as it survived, the Marxist position, however misunderstood

or misinterpreted by the communists, carried considerable weight. Thus, the fall of

the Soviet Union in 1991 had a potential liberating inﬂuence on scholarship con-

cerned with the working classes in Europe prior to 1914. In fact, the end of the

Soviet Union seems to have brought a virtual end to serious study of Marx’s inﬂu-

ence on the workers’ movement of western Europe. Moreover, in the new millen-

nium, there has been a severe drop in the number of studies of any aspect of Marx,

his life, and his inﬂuence. Works about Marx and his inﬂuence used to be published

by the hundreds every year; now they appear much less frequently. While this

140 gary p. steenson

precipitous decline in Marx scholarship does not necessarily signal an end to interest

in radical social and political developments in the west during the years Marxism was

such an important force, it certainly does suggest that one of the former central

concerns of scholars working in this ﬁeld, namely the role of Marxists and their ideol-

ogy, no longer attracts much attention.

Sources of Worker Consciousness

Of course, not everyone accepted the Marxian view that the workers would be social-

ists as a result of their place in the dominant economic system. In sharp contrast to

the apparent decline of interest in Marx and his inﬂuence on radical social-political

movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars and activists

have recently devoted considerably more time and attention to several major rivals

to Marxism as the ideology of worker radicalism. Both anarchism and its variant form,

anarcho-syndicalism, have been the subjects of several recent works. Much of the

work in this area has been produced by those more or less committed to the ideol-

ogy, and a great many of the studies concentrate on contemporary political move-

ments, especially those opposing so-called globalization. An excellent example of the

ﬁrst sort is Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism.

Marshall’s survey is quite comprehensive and accurate, which makes it a useful and

handy study. But it is also clearly marked by the author’s own ideological inclination,

which at times leads him to be overly generous and forgiving with regard to anarchists

and less than generous with regard to their opponents. Curiously enough, given the

traditional hostility of anarchists to the theories of Marx, they share with Marxists a

predilection to explain workers’ political consciousness in ideological terms rather

than as a product of self-interest.

Furthermore, not everyone outside anarchist circles waited for the fall of the Soviet

Union to begin a reevaluation of the working class in pre-1914 Europe. Contrasting

markedly with the decline of interest in Marx and his impact on the working classes

of Europe is the vast expansion in the past thirty years of studies that have focused

more directly on the experiences, consciousness, politics, and daily lives of workers

themselves. In fact, such studies have almost certainly contributed to the decline of

interest in Marx as the philosopher of the working class by explicitly challenging

several fundamental Marxian concepts, including, especially, the notion that con-

sciousness, and therefore political behavior, is primarily determined by the position

occupied by groups in the process of production. By the 1980s, more and more

scholars were arguing that factors like language, ethnicity, religion, gender, and race

were fundamentally important to shaping consciousness among workers. Among the

most inﬂuential works in laying the basis for this new view are those by William H.

Sewell, Jr, Gareth Steadman-Jones, William Reddy, and Patrick Joyce.

Interestingly,

many of these writers have been motivated, at least in part, by a desire not only to

understand history, but to change the course of society as well. Steadman-Jones

concluded his study cited above with a chapter on the failings of the contemporary

British Labour Party. In this, scholars bent on rejecting Marx’s interpretation of class

are also echoing one of his most poignant remarks about the purpose of philosophy,

the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world,

in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

social reform or social revolution? 141

Perhaps the most fruitful line of investigation in this apparent turn away from

understanding class exclusively in terms of socioeconomic causality is the work being

done by feminist and gender scholars. Although the implications of such work are

much broader than just labor and working-class history, much recent work has

focused especially on the narrower realm. Above all, the work of Joan Scott deserves

special recognition. In works like “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”

and “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,”

Scott has presented

persuasive evidence and arguments that gender history is a potentially rich source

(and in her hands the potential is realized) for better understanding labor and

working-class history in the years before 1914. Anyone who has so fundamentally

assaulted Marx’s positivistic view of the nature of class and can also observe that by

following this new approach “the historian can interpret the world while trying to

change it,” deserves not only our attention, but also our admiration.

Following the lead of Scott and others, several scholars, including Kathleen

Canning, have expanded the groundbreaking work into new areas.

German histo-

rians have been less eager to incorporate the gender-based approach into their work

than have American, British, and French researchers, but given the importance of

Germany as the birthplace of the ﬁrst mass workers’ party and, even more impor-

tantly, as the home of Nazism, a great deal more work needs to be done along these

lines in order better to understand this crucial factor in the development of working-

class consciousness.

In fact, what is needed now is not only studies of the impact of gender on the formal

institutions of workers (Canning, for example, focuses her attention on the Deutscher

Textilarbeiterverband and its female members), but also much broader efforts to

understand the importance of gender issues within the family, neighborhoods, and

social-political activities of worker populations. A great many important questions

might usefully be rethought from a gender point of view, including why it was that

the SPD was the only major group in pre-1914 Germany to espouse the female fran-

chise. It is easy enough to answer this question in terms of the party’s putative ideol-

ogy, socialism, since socialists throughout Europe held similar positions, but if we want

to understand the extent to which worker consciousness derived from worker experi-

ences beyond and outside of the work place, the commitment of individual workers

to this political position must be investigated in terms of their home and neighbor-

hood situations. Similarly, if, as Canning points out, the male-dominated trade unions

in Germany often tended to see female workers as displacing male workers for lower

wages, while at the same time, as Canning also contends, females more often than not

entered the workforce out of necessity (a fact their husbands, brothers, and fathers

were surely aware of), what role did gender issues have in the creation and perpetua-

tion of these apparently contradictory positions? Furthermore, did the majority of

individual workers, as opposed to their institutional representatives, hold these con-

tradictory positions or even consider them contradictory?

Moving even further away from the earlier focus on the institutions of the working

classes and delving into the collective consciousness of the individuals that comprise

this group will require imaginative use of available sources. The fact is that workers

were often not literate, and even more often simply did not have the time and leisure

to devote to the writing of letters, journals, diaries, or even ﬁction – sources that

might provide valuable insights into what workers themselves were thinking. This

142 gary p. steenson

may well be one of the most important reasons why researchers in this ﬁeld have so

often turned to the intellectuals of the movements when seeking to understand their

character – at least the intellectuals expressed themselves in writing. Some sources

that derive from actual workers’ experiences do exist, but they are often colored by

the fact that their authors had already committed to socialist activities before they

launched into an explanation and description of their early lives. Works that draw

from the workers’ own writings about their lives can provide valuable insights into

certain aspects of the development of worker consciousness, but the inherent limita-

tions of autobiographical sources (especially the fact that they constitute a very small,

statistically insigniﬁcant sample of all workers, and the imbalance in numbers between

those written by males and those written by females) limit their value in the search

for the origins of worker consciousness.

Autobiographies and memoirs can be combined with other sources to expand our

reach a bit. Nicola Verdon added detailed archival research in public and estate

records to her reading of autobiographical accounts to give a fuller picture of an

admittedly limited but still important element of the working class.

However, no

matter how sophisticated such work is, the problem of inferring consciousness from

impersonal or otherwise suspect sources remains. Oral histories based on personal

interviews might at one time have offered real promise, but the people who

went through the experience of being workers in the latter half of the nineteenth

century and early years of the twentieth are no longer available to scholars, so this

source is probably not going to yield much more of interest. The potential was tan-

talizingly revealed in studies like that of J. Robert Wegs; however, now we must look

elsewhere.

Many recent scholars have approached European working-class history with greater

sophistication than did older studies.

Nonetheless, considerable work remains to be

done. New studies that are informed by a greater sensitivity to gender, religious,

ethnicity, and racial issues will deepen our understanding of the origins of conscious-

ness. Such undertakings in German working-class history will almost certainly provide

very useful insights into another issue – namely, to what extent was the German

movement characterized by a collective commitment to Marxism, in however a dis-

torted form, something obvious on the highest levels, and to what extent was the

movement cemented together by concerns of workers and voters with the daily,

grassroots issues of home, work place, and neighborhood? Anyone familiar with the

scorn for theory expressed frequently and loudly by the leaders of the German so-

called “free trade unions” will agree that this question is one well worth pursuing.

The history of the Austrian workers’ movement also provides rich possibilities for

similar study, especially with regard to its concern with housing issues, something

that was not nearly so prominent in other European workers’ movements. Potentially

interesting and fruitful studies also might be done concerning the role of women –

not just prominent female leaders in the party and trade unions, but also mothers,

wives, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, etc. – in shaping the positions of Austrian social-

ists on the matter of housing. Those more familiar with the other national movements

surely can cite similarly promising lines of investigation in France, Italy, Spain,

Scandinavia, and other areas.

Besides questions of gender, at least three other areas demand more detailed study

to give us a fuller understanding of the nature of the worker-socialist movements in

social reform or social revolution? 143

Europe prior to 1914. One is the relationship between the development of worker

consciousness and religion. This is a particularly important question in Germany,

where the SPD was far more successful in winning followers among the largely

Protestant workers of Prussia’s large cities than it was among the predominantly

Catholic populations of the south. Furthermore, a Catholic confessional party, the

Center Party, frequently challenged the SPD in predominantly Catholic worker dis-

tricts right up to 1914 and beyond, although the socialists won Reichstag seats in

Catholic Alsace-Lorraine as early as 1893 and held a seat in an overwhelmingly

Catholic district (2 Oberbayern – Munich II – which was almost 90 percent Catholic)

from 1890 on.

The question which naturally arises then is what exactly was going on in workers’

minds when they chose to back the Center rather than the SPD or vice versa. Wilfred

Spohn discusses the secular tradition in the German movement, confessional dualism,

and the ambiguous results of Catholic consciousness versus socialist consciousness.

He does not, however, draw from personal sources or memoirs in this brief study.

Even if letters, memoirs, and autobiographies are not readily available, it should be

possible to look at parish records for some place like 2 Oberbayern to see what bap-

tismal and conﬁrmation entries reveal about the religious consciousness of the worker

population. Perhaps such investigations – which can just as well be conducted in the

Catholic countries of Austria, Italy, France, and Spain – will disclose a gap between

the experiences of the workers and the ofﬁcial atheism and anti-religion stances of

the party hierarchy. It might even be possible to use studies of this sort to get at

gender issues as well. One widely held assumption is that if worker children were

baptized and conﬁrmed, wives and mothers probably pushed for this more than did

industrial-worker husbands and fathers. Maybe listening to the intellectuals and

leaders has caused us to get this wrong also.

A second area that seems to require further study is the matter of the non-industrial

worker following of the various European socialist parties in the years before 1914.

Southern French farmers (at least at times of economic crisis), landless Italian agrarian

ﬁeld workers (the braccianti), the emerging white collar and lower professional classes

(including various kinds of state employees, but especially school teachers), shop

owners and workers in working-class districts, and other groups often formed a strong

pool of socialist voters and even party activists at various times. None of these was

considered prime socialist material by the theoreticians inﬂuenced by Marx and his

analysis of modern industrial society. What does this say about the relationship

between a group’s role in the process of production and its political consciousness?

Temporary economic crisis was sometimes involved in the turn to socialism of groups

that it might not otherwise have attracted; this seems to be true of southern French

wine growers during the phylloxera disaster of the 1890s. At other times, as in the

case of the growing appeal of socialism to the lower ranks of white collar workers,

longer-term issues, including, above all, the increasing proportion of the workforce

employed by various branches of government, seem to have been more important.

The braccianti of Italy are a particularly important group, especially given the tradi-

tional hostility of Marxism-inﬂuenced socialist parties of Europe to rural populations

and the role of peasants in the later Leninist interpretation of the master’s work.

Often the success of socialism among the agrarian workers of the Po valley has been

explained as a result of the absentee, capitalistic nature of agriculture pursued there.

144 gary p. steenson

But this explanation is ﬂawed in two ways. First, it accepts as a given the now

increasingly doubtful assertion that consciousness is determined primarily by place in

the process of production; and second, it fails to look into the motives of the people

involved. Comparative studies of several of these groups might be another way to

discover the variegated sources of worker consciousness.

Finally, there is the vexing question of nationality. Everybody knows that in 1914

the workers of the world did not unite; rather, a great many of them went to war

against one another with a rather startling enthusiasm, at least in the beginning.

Moreover, anyone familiar with the experiences of the Austrian working-class move-

ment in the years before the Great War knows that transnationalist unity had been

abandoned long before 1914. Similar difﬁculties had also appeared in the German

movement (with regard to the Polish population of the east), in the Italian movement

(with the German-speaking workers of the north), and even in the Belgian movement

(between the Flemish and Walloon populations), to say nothing of the problems

between the English and the Irish. Perhaps no issue in the history of the pre-1914

European working class so clearly reﬂects the conﬂict between the blinkered ideologi-

cal view imposed on the movement by its intellectuals and prominent leaders and the

reality of the working-class consciousness of the period. Only those who in 1914

ignored reality in hopes of avoiding what was to prove such a disastrous war and

those, including later historians and other critics, with much less excuse, who swal-

lowed the myth of the international working class, could so overlook the obvious.

As has happened so often, Hobsbawm came closest to the truth: “The masses fol-

lowed the ﬂags of their respective states, and abandoned the leaders who opposed

the war. There were, indeed, few enough of these, at least in public.”

Determining

whether the workers actually “abandoned” their leaders or were never really with

them on this issue in the ﬁrst place will require that someone undertake a sweeping

and searching new look at European workers and their relationship to nationalism

during these years.

Taken together, studies such as those proposed above should provide a much

clearer and more accurate understanding of the nature of the working classes and

their organized movements in the years before 1914. If further work strengthens the

growing consensus that consciousness is not solely, perhaps not even primarily, deter-

mined by economics, but rather by a subtle and complex interaction of a multitude

of factors, including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, family,

neighborhood, etc., then the tendency to view the world through Marxist spectacles

will be further eroded. This shift will, in turn, allow us to move away from the old

notions that the 1914–18 war marks a failure on the part of the workers’ movements

(which were, on the public level at least, opposed to war) and that somehow

this failure contributed to the horror of the interwar years when fascism and com-

munism ran roughshod over the workers as well as much of the rest of humanity. If

the Marxist view that the position of a group in the process of production largely

determines consciousness is no longer generally accepted, then the notion of the

workers failing to act as they should have (according to the erroneous Marxist view)

no longer holds much water either. In fact, it may well prove that the dichotomy of

social reform versus social revolution is itself mostly a ﬁgment of the Marxist imagi-

nation and that rejecting it will nudge open a bit wider the door to understanding

and enlightenment.

social reform or social revolution? 145

Whence Post-1945 Europe?

Rejecting the reform vs. revolution dichotomy will help in another way also. How

can it be that the pre-1914 workers’ movement was a failure, while the world that

Europe became after 1945 so clearly reﬂects a great many of the goals and aspirations

of that same movement? How can the supposed failure to achieve a revolution be

reconciled with the power to have so profoundly shaped society? In fact, leaving aside

for the moment the notion of revolution as embodied in the Marxian tradition,

especially in its Leninist incarnation (i.e., a relatively short, violent upheaval that shifts

power from the bourgeoisie and its allies to the working classes), it seems obvious

that the workers’ movement did have a revolutionary impact on Europe.

Several writers have provided hints, and even more, about where this view might

take us. Eric Hobsbawm’s observation cited above about “subjects in the process of

turning into democratic citizens,” a tantalizing suggestion, was left without elabora-

tion. Fortunately, one of the most active participants in the process of rethinking

class, Geoff Eley, in his recent work, has expanded considerably on Hobsbawm’s

suggestion. Although he somewhat cryptically refers to Hobsbawm as “a career-long

mentor, though we’ve only met a handful of times,”

Eley nonetheless admirably

picks up on the theme suggested by the older scholar. The scope of Eley’s work

obviously far outreaches the chronological conﬁnes of the present essay, but those

portions of Forging Democracy that deal with the years before 1914 are based on

many of the same assumptions outlined here. Eley asserts “democracy is not ‘given’

or ‘granted.’ It requires conﬂict . . . It developed because masses of people organized

collectively to demand it.”

Furthermore, he argues that “for most of the period

covered by this book, in fact, the banner of democracy was held up most consistently

by the socialist tradition.”

In this way, not only is the signiﬁcance of the socialist

movements of the pre-1914 years considerably expanded, but Eley also very speciﬁ-

cally ties the democratic success of the leftist movements to both the twentieth

century’s world wars when he writes: “Only the large-scale socioeconomic mobiliza-

tions of world war, it seems, created the societal context for the advancement of

democratic politics.”

With this argument, Eley converts the tragic events of 1914–

18 from a disruption, even a destruction, of the promise of the prewar years into

an essential element of the process of democratizing European society. Thus the

puzzlement raised by Gay’s assertion turns into an explanation of how history

works. Perhaps the Great War may once again be seen as assuming massive, if rather

different, signiﬁcance.

The prevalent notion that the European war of 1914–18 constituted an over-

whelmingly important historical turning point cannot, of course, be overturned by

the arguments presented here. First of all, from the fall of the Paris Commune in

1871 until the outbreak of the Russian revolution in February–March 1917, the only

episode that can be considered a revolution was the rather abortive and remote events

in Russia in 1905. Especially when viewed against the backdrop of the tumultuous

ﬁrst three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the years from 1871 to 1914 constitute

a very long period of relative domestic peace. Similarly, after the end of the wars that

resulted in German uniﬁcation, again in 1871, Europe was not subjected to extensive

ﬁghting on its own territory until 1914. The wars that occurred in the interim,

especially the extraordinarily brutal ﬁghting in the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese

146 gary p. steenson

war of 1904–5, caused hardly a whisper of disruption in most of Europe, which made

for a very long period of relative international tranquility also. Such an extended

period of order and peace seemed anomalous at the time and, given the character of

the 27 years after World War I, would continue to seem abnormal throughout the

remainder of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century.

But this is viewing human events on the overly generalized level. The years

1871–1914 do encompass events that speak to less tranquility and more internal

disruption than the larger view admits. For example, anarchists and other groups and

individuals attempted a great many assassinations during this period, and they were

successful often enough to disturb the police and military forces of many European

nations. The two most important such incidents are the murder of the Russian tsar,

Alexander II, in 1881, and, of course, the event which launched the Great War itself,

the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June of 1914. The

knowledge that this latter event was one of several attacks against the lives of

Habsburg ofﬁceholders in the four years before 1914 brings the archduke’s death

into clearer perspective as less an aberrant occurrence and more typical of the times

than might be argued by those who view the years before the war as a relatively

peaceful time. Furthermore, assassinations of several other prominent ﬁgures during

this period, including the president of the French Republic in 1894, the empress of

Austria in 1898, the king of Italy in 1900, and even an American president in 1901,

makes our own time seem rather less unusual that one might think. That terrorists

in those days did not kill dozens, hundreds, even thousands by driving explosive-laden

cars and trucks, or airplanes, into buildings is almost certainly the result of technical,

rather than moral, restrictions. But, of course, we cannot judge reactions to what

happened then against the more brutal standards of what is happening now. People

in the pre-1914 years did not know that things would get so much worse later.

One further assassination is worthy of special note here. Jean Jaurès was, perhaps,

the most able, accomplished, and moderate leader of a factionalized French socialist

movement in the prewar years, but he was unequivocally anti-war, not just as a matter

of ofﬁcial party position, but also out of personal conviction. In August of 1914, a

nationalist extremist assassinated Jaurès, presumably because the assassin thought that

Jaurès’s position against war would weaken French resolve to become involved in

the slaughter that was to come. It must be granted that police and military ofﬁcials

in all the warring states did not respond with particular vehemence to the anti-war

elements of their respective societies at the outset of the war. But the assassination

of Jaurès does reveal that outside of ofﬁcial circles, sentiments ran high on the matter

of socialists’ opposition to war. This, then, is a clue to what was to come later. Perhaps

the fear among those backing the war was not that the workers’ movement could

deliver what the Marxists thought it should, namely, stopping the war, but that the

increasingly powerful working-class socialist movement posed an irresistible challenge

to the old order, an order which did not have to consult with or even consider the

will of the mass of the population before taking action that would have a devastating

impact on the whole of western society. In this sense, Jaurès’s death signaled not the

defeat of socialism, but the fear on the part of many who were beholden or otherwise

committed to the old order that the end was nigh.

Not the extreme, inward-looking nationalism of the right, but the moderate,

though no less deeply held, nationalist and democratic commitment of the left would,

social reform or social revolution? 147

after long and terrible struggle, emerge from the disastrous beginnings of the twen-

tieth century to yield the Europe we know today. We know this for certain now – the

thousand-year Reich of the Nazi madmen lasted only twelve years, and even the much

more enduring regime of Soviet communism is now gone forever. But the society

and values urged by the socialist workers’ movement of the years before World War

I seem set to endure for a long time. Even the incipient internationalism of the pre-

1914 years has now taken the form of the European Union, the euro, and the greatly

expanded and expanding inﬂuence of NATO. The legacy of the socialist workers’

movement of these years was not its failing to stop World War I, but rather its laying

the groundwork for the European society of the future.

NOTES

1 John Keegan,

The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998), p. 3.

2 Frederic Morton, review of Peter Gay’s

Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class

Culture 1815–1914 (New York: Allen Lane, 2001), Los Angeles Times Book Review (August

18, 2002), p. 6.

3 For example, see G. P. Gooch,

History of Modern Europe, 1873–1919 (New York: Holt,

1923).

4 See Carlton J. H. Hayes,

A Generation of Materialism 1871–1900 (New York: Harper,

1941) and Oron J. Hale, The Great Illusion, 1900–1914 (New York: Harper and Row,

1971).

5 Hale,

The Great Illusion, p. 287.

6 Norman Stone,

Europe Transformed, 1878–1919 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University

Press, 1984), p. 335.

7 Ibid,

pp. 330–3.

8 E. J. Hobsbawm,

The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Pantheon, 1987), p. 277.

9 Ibid, pp. 315–16 and ch. 12, passim.

10 Ibid, pp. 322, 325.

11 Malcolm Anderson,

The Ascendancy of Europe, 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1972),

pp. 60, 306.

12 Ibid, p. 59.

13 Ibid, esp. pp. 151–5.

14 Robert Gildea,

Barricades and Borders: Europe, 1800–1914, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003), p. 429.

15 Ibid, p. 435.

16 Ken Post,

Revolution and the European Experience, 1789–1914 (London: Macmillan,

1999), p. 3.

17 Barrington Moore,

Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains NY:

Sharpe, 1978), p. 174.

18 Peter Marshall,

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Harper

Collins, 1992).

19 William H. Sewell, Jr, W

ork and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the

Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Gareth Steadman-

Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1983); William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe:

A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);

and Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class,

1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).