Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

168 peter waldron

members of the governing elite and in gaining support among working people.

Radical parties found their support growing as disillusionment grew with the Duma.

This was intensiﬁed by widespread labor unrest; in April 1912 a demonstration by

workers in the Lena goldﬁelds was ﬁred upon by government troops, resulting in

several hundred deaths. Strikes broke out in many Russian cities after 1912, as

working people protested about their working conditions and, increasingly, about

political issues. In St Petersburg alone, more than 300,000 workers came out on

strike in 1912 for political reasons, and this number grew to half a million in the

following year, and to more than 650,000 in the ﬁrst six months of 1914.

Political

opposition became more vocal and angry in other parts of the political spectrum,

too. Liberal political parties became further alienated from the regime: the Kadet

(Constitutional Democratic) Party had protested against the government’s rapid dis-

solution of the First Duma in 1906 and, as a result, had been largely excluded from

formal political life. They argued that the post-1905 constitutional structures had

failed and that Russia needed further fundamental constitutional reform if it was to

make progress. Even the most loyal supporters of the new system, the Octobrist Party

(named after the October 1905 manifesto that had brought the Duma into being),

were disillusioned. Guchkov, one of the most prominent Octobrists, spoke in 1913

of the “inevitable and grave catastrophe” that was facing Russia. His presentiment

of disaster was stark: “Never were the Russian public and the Russian people so pro-

foundly revolutionized by the actions of the government, for day by day faith in

the government is steadily waning, and with it is waning faith in the possibility of

a peaceful issue from the crisis.”

Russia’s history of revolutionary terrorism gave it

a particular sense of instability, and a series of government ofﬁcials had been assassi-

nated after 1900, including Pleve, the minister of internal affairs, in 1904 and prime

minister Stolypin in 1911. The threat of violent revolution was never far away and

this made the intensiﬁcation of popular unrest after 1900 especially dangerous for

the tsarist government.

Britain: Liberalism and Discontent

Russia’s prewar crisis was mirrored elsewhere in Europe. At the western edge of the

continent, British politics experienced great turbulence after 1900. As the greatest

industrial power in the world, Britain had a large working class and a well-developed

tradition of dissent. In contrast to Russia, however, Britain had no real history of

terrorism directed at the overthrow of the state. However, Britain had not been

immune from political discontent and the seventeenth century had seen a civil war

that culminated in the execution of the king and the temporary abolition of the

monarchy. By 1900 the British monarchy was a very different creature from the

Russian autocracy. In the 1860s the constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot had com-

mented that the rights of the British monarch were reduced to “the right to be con-

sulted, the right to encourage [and] the right to warn.”

It was the British parliament,

and its governing party, that held sway in the political arena. A landslide general

election victory brought a Liberal government into power in 1906 with more than

400 MPs, after more than a decade of Conservative rule. The extent of the country’s

rejection of the Conservatives was hammered home by the election of 29 Labour

members of the House of Commons. These results were all the more emphatic since

politics: the past and the future 169

Britain still did not have universal male suffrage. More than 40 percent of adult men

in towns and cities and more than 30 percent of men in the countryside were still

deprived of the vote.

The new Liberal government was initially cautious, but after

the replacement of Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister by Asquith in 1908, and

the appointment of Lloyd George as chancellor of the exchequer, the mood changed.

Lloyd George set out to make his ﬁrst budget controversial in an attempt to revitalize

the Liberal Party’s supporters. The government proposed to introduce an almost

universal system of old-age pensions, and it needed to ﬁnd long-term sources of

revenue that would support this major social reform. At the same time, Britain was

engaged in building up its naval strength. Germany had begun to expand its navy in

the late 1890s, and Britain felt compelled to respond, even though it was clearly

impracticable to retain the “two-power standard” by which the British navy was to

be greater in size than the next two navies combined. In 1906, HMS Dreadnought

was launched, the ﬁrst in a line of new heavy battleships. This program of naval

expansion was very costly, and Britain’s naval expenditure rose by almost 40 percent

between 1900 and 1910. Lloyd George therefore needed to raise signiﬁcant addi-

tional revenue to ﬁnance the government’s plans and his 1909 budget contained

plans to increase income taxes and to impose new taxation on land. These taxation

measures were aimed especially at the more prosperous and provoked huge opposi-

tion from the Conservatives, who denounced Lloyd George’s budget as “socialism.”

While the Conservatives were hopelessly outnumbered in the Commons, they held

an impregnable majority in the House of Lords and the Lords duly rejected Lloyd

George’s budget in November 1909.

This caused a constitutional crisis and forced a general election early in 1910. The

Liberals lost their overall majority in the Commons, but were able to remain in power

with support from the Labour Party and from Irish Nationalists. The political crisis

was not resolved when the Lords agreed to pass the budget, since the Liberal gov-

ernment was now determined to curb the powers of the Lords once and for all, by

legislating to ensure the supremacy of the Commons. This process provoked a second

general election during 1910, since the Conservative-dominated Lords vigorously

resisted Liberal attempts to subordinate them to the Commons. It was not until

August 1911 that the Parliament Act was passed, preventing the Lords from ﬂouting

the will of the elected Commons and instead giving them the power to delay legisla-

tion for a period of no more than two years.

Political tensions between Liberals and Conservatives were exacerbated by the

situation in Ireland. The Irish Question had caused severe problems for successive

British governments, as Irish nationalists – both within and outside parliament –

pressed for autonomy from the London government. Irish nationalism had provoked

great passions and Gladstone, the great Liberal prime minister, had unsuccessfully

tried to implement Home Rule for Ireland in the 1880s. The Conservative Lords

had proved to be the chief stumbling block to Home Rule, and they had argued that

it would lead to the destruction of the united British state. The passage of the

Parliament Act meant that the Lords could no longer deal a fatal blow to Irish Home

Rule legislation and in 1912 Asquith introduced the measure. The Lords, as was now

their constitutional right, delayed the bill for two years and it was in the process of

becoming law in 1914. But opposition to Irish Home Rule among Conservatives

spread outside the parliamentary arena. The northeastern corner of Ireland was

170 peter waldron

dominated by a Protestant population that did not wish to be ruled by the Catholic

majority of the Irish population and was prepared to take extreme measures to resist.

Conservative Ulster Protestants wanted to remain an integral part of Britain and,

under the leadership of Edward Carson, a former Conservative government minister,

they prepared for direct action. “Ulster will ﬁght, and Ulster will be right” was their

rallying call and Ulster Protestants began to prepare for armed resistance to Home

Rule. Some 250,000 men signed the Covenant, promising to use whatever means

they could to defeat the government’s proposals, and a private army, the Ulster

Volunteers, was formed to show that this was no mere paper threat.

There were

doubts over the loyalty of British military units stationed in Ireland in the event of

them being ordered to put down rebellion in Ulster,

and the cause of the Ulster

Protestants was taken up by the Conservative Party in parliament. The crisis over

Ireland that gripped the British political establishment between 1912 and 1914

showed the deep ﬁssures inside the British state and its society. It brought together

the potent forces of nationalism and religion, and these were intermixed with the

existing bitter political struggle between Liberals and Conservatives.

British politics and society were also divided over the issue of votes for women.

The movement for women’s suffrage had developed during the Victorian era, but it

gained much greater prominence after 1900 and the emergence of the Women’s

Social and Political Union.

Led by the Pankhursts, the suffragette movement turned

to direct action to make its case. Political meetings were disrupted, public buildings

were attacked, and government ministers assaulted. Suffragette activists were arrested

and imprisoned, responding by going on hunger strike. The government at ﬁrst

attempted to force-feed hunger strikers, but public opinion was shocked by the bru-

tality of the process and the government was forced to release hunger-striking suf-

fragettes, only to rearrest them when they had recovered from their ordeal. In 1913

the suffragette Emily Davison was killed as a result of injuries she received when she

threw herself under the king’s horse during the running of the Derby. The majority

of the suffragette activists were middle-class women and their actions caused signiﬁ-

cant disquiet among their peers – both male and female. Images of respectable

women being dragged out of meetings by policemen, and of women chaining them-

selves to railings in the centers of large cities, sat awkwardly with the predominant

view of women as subordinate to men. The Liberal government attempted to offer

concessions in 1912, but was frustrated by parliamentary procedure. The govern-

ment’s failure to address the issue directly and to make female suffrage a signiﬁcant

element of its legislative program provoked the suspicion that leading members of

the government were, at best, lukewarm about the idea and, at worst, bitterly

opposed to the concept.

Britain was also gripped by labor militancy in the years after 1900. The number

of days of work lost because of strikes more than doubled between 1902 and 1910,

and trade union membership also showed signiﬁcant increases. The ﬁrst-ever national

railway strike took place in 1911, and there were also strikes that year by merchant

seamen and dockers. The year 1912 was the most signiﬁcant year for industrial unrest,

however, when more than 40 million days were lost due to strikes, especially in the

coalmining industry. Dockers in London also struck that year and it appeared at times

as if Britain was close to anarchy. The apparent tranquility of British politics and

society in the last period of Victoria’s reign had been superﬁcial. The persistence of

politics: the past and the future 171

the old order was profound and it required little for the conservative forces in British

political life to ﬂex their muscles. Even though the monarch had lost all his formal

power, the traditional elites in British society that were represented by the Conservative

Party could still wield huge inﬂuence. The 1906 Liberal government was successful

in reducing the formal power of the House of Lords, but still faced the entrenched

inﬂuence of its sympathizers in other areas. Coupled with labor unrest and with the

militant suffragette movement, Britain was far from political stability in the years

before 1914, but the prospect of actual violent revolution seemed remote. The long-

established British state appeared able to weather the storms of discontent that were

assailing it, even though the cost to its social fabric was severe.

Germany: Kaiser and People

The united German Empire that had been created in 1871 had immediately become

one of the great powers of Europe. Bismarck’s ideas and personality had formed the

political landscape of the new Reich and had ensured signiﬁcant stability for almost

twenty years, until his dismissal in 1890. But this had been achieved largely through

the efforts of Bismarck alone, and the new German Empire was still far from being

a cohesive social entity. While Germany was expanding industrially at great speed, it

did not have the long-established political coherence of Britain, but on the other

hand, neither did it have a tradition of revolutionary activity. The accession of

Wilhelm II to the throne in 1888 marked the beginning of signiﬁcant turbulence

in German politics, as the Kaiser’s impulsive temperament coincided with growing

importance for the imperial parliament, the Reichstag, and with increasing social

pressures. Wilhelm was not prepared to allow his chancellors the same degree of

authority and latitude that Bismarck had enjoyed, instead wanting to establish a

“personal regime” in which the Kaiser himself would wield great authority. The ulti-

mate sanction that the Kaiser possessed was to dismiss his chancellor and, since he

had been prepared to dispense with the services of Bismarck, the architect of the new

empire, it was clear that he would not hesitate to use this power. Wilhelm did not,

however, possess the degree of application necessary to establish personal rule, and

his impact on the German political process was haphazard and unpredictable.

was able to exert particular inﬂuence over military and naval policy, and was enthu-

siastic about the plans being laid by the navy minister, Tirpitz, to strengthen the

German navy to a point where it could challenge British dominance of the seas. The

Kaiser was in full agreement with Max Weber who, in his inaugural lecture at Freiburg

University in 1895, had argued that “the uniﬁcation of Germany . . . should

be . . . the starting point for a German Weltmachtpolitik”

and in 1901 the Kaiser

himself declared “we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun. It will now

be my task to see to it that this place in the sun shall remain our undisputed

possession.”

Germany’s Weltpolitik – its policy designed to place the new empire ﬁrmly at the

center of world politics – was controversial in both the international and domestic

political arenas. Bismarck’s German Reich had come into being with universal

manhood suffrage for the imperial Reichstag. The wily Bismarck had sought to neu-

tralize parliament and to ensure that all signiﬁcant decisions were removed from the

parliamentary arena, but his successors were less skilled and also faced a resurgent

172 peter waldron

Reichstag. German men voted in large numbers at elections, with turnout in both

1907 and 1912 reaching more than 84 percent, so that parliament could fairly claim

to represent the views of the people. The main beneﬁciary of elections was the Social

Democratic Party, the SPD, which saw its share of the vote rise from 20 percent in

1897 to 32 percent in 1903 and 35 percent in 1912, making it the largest single

party in parliament after 1912. German socialism contained two central strands: it

continued to espouse the cause of revolution that Marx had propounded, but the

party’s Erfurt program of 1891 showed the inﬂuence of revisionism, as Eduard

Bernstein advocated the path of reformism. Bernstein stressed that the SPD could

achieve its ends by engaging in the parliamentary process and by promoting radical

social reform, rather than waiting for revolution to come and for the barricades to

be built in German cities, and his message was important in winning voters over to

the SPD’s side. By 1914 the party had more than a million members and was the

focus for a huge variety of cultural and sporting organizations, originally established

in response to the left’s exclusion from German social life, but which were instru-

mental in the creation of a “socialist subculture” that could challenge traditional

politics. German socialism continued to contain a powerful revolutionary element,

however, and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg advocated direct action, such as

mass strikes, to press home the socialist case.

The SPD consistently voted against naval expansion when it was debated in the

Reichstag, but the government was able to count on support from the conservative

and center majority. German foreign policy after 1900 was designed as much for

domestic consumption as for the international stage. Tirpitz’s huge naval expansion

program was intended to mobilize political support for the Wilhelmine regime, both

inside the Reichstag and in the country as a whole, by stimulating German national

sentiment. The aggressive foreign policy that Germany pursued in the years after

1900 was conducted with at least half an eye on domestic political opinion, with

chancellor Bülow calculating that the threat of impending war would serve to unite

opinion behind the government. He argued that “a courageous and generous policy

which succeeds in maintaining a positive attitude towards our national life in its

present shape and form would offer the best medicine against the Social Democrats.”

This policy did succeed in denying the SPD a majority in the Reichstag, since the

socialists could be outvoted by a combination of right and center parties, but it did

not bring about national political consensus. Germany experienced very substantial

labor unrest as its economy strengthened after the short recession of 1907 and 1908.

Huge strikes broke out across a wide range of industries in 1909 and 1910. Coalminers,

building workers, and shipbuilders all came out on strike and parts of Berlin saw

violent clashes between strikers and the police. This served to isolate the German left

from broader political opinion and made it even less likely that an alliance could be

formed between the SPD and center parties to oppose government policy. German

politics were in a state of impasse by 1914: the socialists had insufﬁcient power on

their own to challenge the government, while the right had proved unable to develop

policies that would siphon off socialist support. In the 1880s, Bismarck had tried to

win over working people to the regime by instituting schemes of social insurance,

but this process did not advance much further after 1900, as his successors did not

want to alienate conservative parties by appearing to make concessions to the left.

The SPD condemned any move to support the imperial government and withdrew

politics: the past and the future 173

its support from the Baden regional party when it voted in favor of the annual budget

in 1910, even though it included a range of welfare provisions.

It was difﬁcult to see how German politics could develop. The Kaiser and his

ministers were isolated from public opinion and took no account of the huge popular

support enjoyed by the socialists. The imperial regime appeared dislocated from its

people, pursuing a policy of imperial and military expansion that ran wholly counter

to the internationalist aspirations and rhetoric of the SPD. To the left, the imperial

state had no legitimacy and was out of touch with the modern society and economy

that Germany possessed after 1900. But the left was condemned to perpetual opposi-

tion since it refused to compromise with the regime and could not hope to achieve

an absolute majority in the Reichstag. In these circumstances it was unsurprising that

the revolutionary element of the SPD retained its strength. Ordinary working people

felt themselves alienated from the state and Bernstein’s reformism did not appear to

have delivered its promised beneﬁts. War in 1914 offered Wilhelm II’s government

the prospect that it could unite a deeply fractured Germany.

Austria-Hungary: Dualism and the Nationalities

The third great conservative monarchy of Europe – Austria-Hungary – was in scarcely

better shape. However, its political problems stemmed from very different pressures

from the other European great powers. The Habsburg Empire was comprised of

more than a dozen separate national groups and, while the German population was

the largest single group, they formed only a quarter of the empire’s people. Slav

peoples made up almost half of the empire, while the Magyars came close to match-

ing the German population.

The 50 million people who populated the Austro-

Hungarian empire made it the most nationally incoherent state in Europe. It was a

matter of surprise to contemporaries that the empire had actually survived for so long

and that it had not been destroyed by national tensions. The continued existence of

Austria-Hungary was due in large part to the Ausgleich – the Compromise of 1867

between the emperor and the leaders of the Hungarian peoples of the empire. In

the wake of Austria’s crushing military defeat by Bismarck’s Prussia in 1866, the

Hungarians saw an opportunity to press their case for greater autonomy from a seri-

ously weakened Vienna. The 1867 Compromise effectively gave the Hungarian part

of the empire autonomy in most areas of domestic policy. The imperial government

retained control of foreign affairs, war, and ﬁnance, but the Hungarians saw them-

selves as having achieved independence from the empire, with the only real link

between Hungary and Austria being provided in the person of the monarch, who

was both emperor of Austria and king of Hungary.

Franz Joseph, who ruled from

1848 until his death in 1916, was a keystone in ensuring the survival of the imperial

state. He recognized that his powers were limited by constitutions in both the

Austrian and Hungarian parts of the empire, although he did not relish the restric-

tions that this posed on his authority. His power had, however, only been limited by

constitutional change, not destroyed, so that Franz Joseph enjoyed signiﬁcantly

greater authority than the British monarch. In 1905 and 1906 he played a signiﬁcant

role in discussions to make electoral reform in both parts of the empire, making it

plain that his position was to extend the franchise, especially in Hungary. Only 7

percent of the Hungarian people had the right to vote and this ensured that power

174 peter waldron

was retained in the hands of a deeply nationalist Magyar elite, who sought to extend

Hungarian inﬂuence over the largely Slav peoples of their part of the empire. Franchise

reform would have given the vote not just to people from the lower classes but

also – much more alarming to the Magyar elite – to people who were from Slav

races. While Franz Joseph did not press his support for electoral reform to the limit,

his preferences were well known and played a part in the calculations made by

politicians.

The system of dualism that developed in the last part of the nineteenth century

proved to be successful in conciliating the Hungarians, but it did little for the Slav

peoples of the empire. The crisis that erupted over Bosnia in 1908 gives a very clear

example of the issues that the substantial Slav population of the empire posed.

Austria-Hungary was intimately involved in the Balkans, numbering more than 6

million South Slavs – Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes – among its population. But while

the empire included more than 2 million Serbs, the independent Serbian state also

claimed their loyalty. National tensions in the Balkans had been accentuated by the

way in which the Hungarians had treated the Slav peoples. Both Croats and Serbs

were indignant at the way in which the Hungarian language was imposed on them,

and the attempts of the Hungarian elite to dominate them both politically and cul-

turally. The Serbs were able to look to independent Serbia in the hope that they

could become part of a single Serb state, and Austria always feared that Serbia, with

the backing of Slav Russia, might offer support to the empire’s Serb people against

rule from Budapest and Vienna. With the disintegration of the Turkish empire, the

Austrian regime was fearful that a single large Slav state might come into being in

the Balkans, thus triggering instability among the South Slav peoples of the empire.

The domestic concerns of the Austro-Hungarian regime were thus reﬂected in its

foreign policy and, in 1908, it made the decision to annex the provinces of Bosnia

and Herzegovina, in an attempt to prevent them falling under the inﬂuence of any

other power. A British observer of the scene, Horace Rumbold, commented on what

he referred to as the “more decided policy” of the empire in the Balkans, suggesting

that it was motivated by a hope to “awaken in both halves of the Monarchy a common

sense of solidarity and a feeling of devotion to Imperial interests, irrespective of

nationality, which have too long remained dormant in the polyglot empire.”

Elsewhere in the empire, national tensions were also becoming more pronounced.

The most prosperous parts of the empire were in the Czech lands of Bohemia and

Moravia. The Czechs had developed both heavy industrial and consumer goods

sectors, and increasingly they were making inroads into the business and professional

classes that had been the preserve of the German population. The great controversy

that brought national discontent to boiling point was over the use of the German

and Czech languages. The German populations of Bohemia and Moravia resented

the use of the Czech language in administration and education, while the Czechs

believed that, since they were the majority in these areas, it was unreasonable to

expect them to learn German. Language disputes raged furiously, bringing both

national groups out onto the streets to demonstrate and riot against apparent slights

to their own language and, by extension, to their nationality. Segregation became

the order of the day, at least in education. Most Czech schools taught no German,

and German schools in the Czech lands carried out their education exclusively in

German. By 1910, German schools in Moravia were open to legal action if they

politics: the past and the future 175

allowed Czech children to study in them.

This segregation was reﬂected more

broadly in social life. Czechs had their own sporting and social clubs and organiza-

tions, helping to reinforce their national identity and to demonstrate their separate-

ness from the Germans who ruled from Vienna.

The Austro-Hungarian empire had proved exceptionally adept at coping with its

national differences over a long period. But the international tensions that sharpened

after 1900 made the empire’s domestic situation much more difﬁcult. The strains in

the Balkans intensiﬁed, while Germany’s growing assertiveness had an impact on the

German population of the Austrian state. The ageing Franz Joseph was no longer

able to govern with the forcefulness of his youth, and he was especially affected by

the assassination of his wife, the Empress Elisabeth, in 1898 by an Italian anarchist.

The national stresses that Britain was experiencing in Ireland were multiplied many

times over in Austria-Hungary. World War I accelerated their development to a stage

where the imperial state could no longer cope. Many people had predicted the demise

of Austria-Hungary and much of Europe was surprised that it had succeeded in

surviving into the twentieth century.

France: Republicanism and Socialism

France, the remaining European great power, was very different from each of the

other four in 1900. France was the only republic among the ﬁve and its revolutionary

heritage was a central part of French political culture. This did not mean that mon-

archism had been expunged from French political consciousness: republicanism had

proved to be a ﬂower that could easily be crushed under the boot of royalist revival.

Napoleon Bonaparte had transformed himself from revolutionary general to imperial

ruler, subsequently both Bourbon and Orleanist dynasties had worn the restored

French crown and, ﬁnally, Napoleon III had established the Second Empire in 1851.

It was only in 1870, with the trauma of defeat by Bismarck’s Prussia, that monarchist

rule disappeared once and for all from France. The Third Republic that came into

existence in the turmoil of the national humiliation of defeat and the German seizure

of Alsace-Lorraine was a political system that, while it had deep intellectual roots in

the French revolutionary tradition, proved to be unstable. French governments

changed frequently: between 1870 and 1914, France experienced 108 separate

administrations, lasting for an average of eight months each.

This was symptomatic

of structural problems in the French political system: the French lower house of

parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, lacked any proper party system until 1910 and

it was really only the French Socialist Party that had any real coherence.

There were signiﬁcant ﬁssures in French society that were reﬂected in its political

life. The Dreyfus affairs still reverberated through the country.

There was growing

labor militancy after 1900. The number of strikes in the decade after 1900 was more

than ten times the quantity of strikes in the 1880s and, by 1901, the average strike

lasted for three weeks. Strikes took place in all sorts of industries, including the rail-

ways, silk manufacture, and winegrowing, and there was an unsuccessful attempt at

organizing a general strike in 1909. The radical prime minister, Clemenceau, formed

a new government in 1906 and attempted to drive through a wide-ranging program

of social reform that included a statutory eight-hour working day, the introduction

of retirement pensions, government control of labor contracts, provisions for workers

176 peter waldron

to receive compensation in the event of industrial accidents, and proper regulation

of trade unions. These reform proposals bore signiﬁcant similarities to the program

of the 1906 British Liberal government, but while the British government was

able to push through its program – albeit in the face of ﬁerce resistance from the

Conservative-dominated Lords – Clemenceau’s government had no success in imple-

menting its reforms. While French industry had developed signiﬁcantly and great

urban centers were coming into existence, France remained overwhelmingly a peasant

country, where small farmers dominated the rural economy. The divisions between

town and country had been very obvious throughout the nineteenth century, and

Paris in particular had shown itself to be a center for revolutionary and radical

opinion. French socialism was espoused by many of the urban population and, while

most of the countryside remained resolutely conservative, socialism did make some

inroads in rural France.

Divisions between left and right in politics do not, however, fully explain the

contentious nature of French politics. At least as signiﬁcant were arguments over the

place of religion.

In rural France, priest and teacher clashed furiously as the teachers

sought to inculcate republican values in their charges, while the Catholic clergy con-

tinued to assert conservative values and respect for authority. By 1814 there were

120,000 lay teachers spread across France and many of them took on additional roles,

such as town clerk or even mayor, in their communities. Social life in many French

villages was divided into Catholic groups and republican groups, and these divisions

were being formalized at a national level. In 1905, legislation was passed to formalize

the division of church and state. The state would no longer be responsible for paying

priests’ salaries or for maintaining religious buildings and the church no longer

needed state approval for its appointments. This process caused riots in some areas

as Catholics protested against what they perceived as an attack on the church. But,

overall, it was the secular state that emerged victorious, pushing traditional religion

into the background.

Politics in the years before 1914 was dominated by three national issues. The

process of rearmament that was gripping Europe did not leave France unscathed. To

keep pace with the increase in the size of the German army, France had to move

from two to three years of military service. This was controversial in itself, but it also

had important ﬁnancial implications. The French taxation system was complex and

rested on revenue from land and from tariffs. Successive governments tried to intro-

duce an income tax, but the upper house of the French parliament, the Senate,

rejected the measure in both 1907 and 1910. This experience was reminiscent of the

passage of Lloyd George’s 1909 budget in Britain, and in France too the government

was eventually successful in getting its ﬁnancial legislation through. In 1913 the

French parliament ﬁnally approved the introduction of an income tax. The third issue

that exercised French politicians was electoral reform. The introduction of propor-

tional representation was also mooted by the government, but it proved to be too

complex a matter for easy resolution. Like each of the other European great powers,

France faced signiﬁcant political divisions. The French revolutionary tradition made

France’s position more dangerous. The great revolution of 1789 had been followed

by revolution in 1848 and by the Paris Commune in 1871, and each of these events

had demonstrated the volatility of French society. But, as in each of the other great

powers, the outbreak of war in 1914 was greeted with widespread displays of popular

politics: the past and the future 177

unity. National parliaments right across Europe forgot their party differences and

voted in favor of the ﬁnancial measures needed to wage war.

Conclusion

The success of European governments in rallying their people to the cause of war

was surprising, given the apparent strength of European socialism. In 1889 socialist

parties across Europe had banded together in the Second International, intending to

bring together the working peoples of the great powers and, by emphasizing the

common interests that held them together, to prevent war breaking out in Europe.

The International was designed to unite the working class and to lead it in a struggle

against bourgeois society across the continent, but the very different political situa-

tions in each of the great powers made such unity almost impossible. In 1904 the

International met in Amsterdam to discuss the issue of the participation of socialist

parties in governments led by bourgeois parties.

This question of “ministerialism”

divided the European left. The German SPD was staunch in its refusal to contemplate

such a course of action, and was instrumental in defeating the French socialist Jean

Jaurès, who had agreed to the participation of his colleague Millerand in a coalition

government in France at the height of the Dreyfus affair. Although the French

retorted that the Germans were only able to take such a principled stand because

they would never be invited to participate in a government and were thus never going

to be faced with this issue, it demonstrated that European socialism was far from

united. The Russian socialist movement was even more extreme in its views, arguing

that the left should offer no support even to programs of social reform, which Lenin

and his Bolshevik Party believed were implemented by conservative governments to

dupe working people into abandoning their class interests. This was not entirely

far-fetched: the British Conservative prime minister between 1902 and 1905, Arthur

Balfour, declared that “social legislation is not merely to be distinguished from social-

ist legislation, but is its most direct opposite and its most effective antidote.”

The

European left was deeply divided about the tactics that it should utilize in order to

win power. The British Labour Party that was founded in 1906 espoused the reform-

ist cause, believing that it could bring about change by winning seats in parliament

and promoting socialism by peaceful means. This was anathema to the Russian Social

Democrats, who had no prospect of gaining any inﬂuence in Russia through the

ballot box, even after the introduction of the Duma in 1905. As war was breaking

out in the summer of 1914, the leaders of European socialism gathered in Brussels

to discuss what action they could take to mobilize opinion against the war. Even

though “they spoke for millions, they had little conﬁdence in their ability to prevent

the threatened war by direct mass action.”

The politics of Europe in the years that led up to 1914 were a microcosm of con-

ﬂicts that had developed since 1789. Monarchs and traditional landed elites clung

tenaciously to their remaining power as they came under severe attack from elected

parliaments and from groups who had no representation in elected assemblies,

whether they were industrial workers or disenfranchised women. National minorities

in multinational states pressed for greater autonomy or for outright independence.

Governments across Europe recognized that they were presiding over fractured soci-

eties and looked for ways in which they could restore social stability. For the Russian