After 1870, political structures in
Europe increasingly converged on a single model: the national state with a written constitution
(except in Great Britain), an elected parliament, and two or more
major political parties competing with each other for power. These liberal states had capitalist
economies; their laws protected private property. These political systems—which were found in Britain, France,
Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and most of the smaller countries of western
and central Europe—reflected the liberal ideas first put forward in the French
Revolution of 1789.
Not everyone in Europe accepted the
new liberal order, however. Some
critics of liberalism argued that it did not in fact fulfill the promise of the
French Revolution to make all men free and equal. These critics demanded more rights for workers and the poor, and
were said to be on the left side of the political spectrum. They argued that it was impossible to
fulfill the promise of the French Revolution without overthrowing the
capitalist economic system and replacing it with a system in which property
would be owned collectively and used for the benefit of the entire
population. Movements that argued
against private property most often called themselves socialists,
although some used other terms, such as anarchist and syndicalist. The most influential socialist thinker of
the nineteenth century was Karl Marx, who argued that the spread of
capitalism would inevitably create the conditions for a proletarian
revolution that would create a workers’ state and usher in a
communist society. Reformist or revisionist
socialists hoped that socialist ideas could be implemented through democratic
political processes, without a violent revolution.
Socialists usually (but not always)
also supported more rights for women.
Women still did not have the right to vote in any of the major European
countries. Feminist movements,
which developed throughout Europe in this period, challenged liberal
politicians to explain why women should not have the same rights as men. They also agitated for women to have access
to higher education and professional careers, to have the right to control
their own property, and for greater equality in marriage arrangements and
greater sexual freedom for women. Most
feminist leaders came from the middle classes. They did not always show much sympathy for working-class
women.
Movements on the right or conservative
side of the political spectrum also attacked the liberal order. These movements denounced the principles of
the French Revolution. The most
important conservative force in the late nineteenth century was the Catholic
Church. Pius IX (Pope, 1846-1878)
denounced liberalism, democracy, and socialism and the granting of rights to
other religions as contrary to Catholic teachings. His successor, Leo XIII, was more open to the possibility of
compromise with liberal regimes; he also insisted that the Church had a duty to
side with workers who were exploited in the capitalist system.
More extreme right-wing movements developed after
1890. They claimed that men were not
inherently equal, and that democracy amounted to the rule of the most numerous
and least intelligent members of the population. These movements often adopted racist and anti-semitic
(anti-Jewish) ideas, and extreme nationalist positions. Knowing that they could not hope to win many
votes, these groups tended to argue in favor of violence, which was one
way in which a determined minority could seize control from an apathetic
majority. They were usually also
strongly misogynist (hostile to women), seeing them as weak creatures
whose attractions led men astray. Among
those attracted to extreme right-wing ideas in the years before 1914 was a
young Austrian named Adolf Hitler.
I.
The
Rise of Socialism after 1848
A.
Marx’s
theories
1.
a
scientific explanation of capitalism
2.
the
inevitable proletarian revolution
3.
Marx’s
theory of politics
B.
The
development of socialist political parties
1.
Social
Democracy in Germany
2.
Eduard
Bernstein and the ‘revisionist’ crisis
3.
socialism
in Russia
II.
The
Anti-Democratic Right
A.
Catholic
opposition to modernity
1.
Pius
IX and the ‘Syllabus of Errors’
2.
the
Catholic critique of capitalism
B.
Nietzsche
and the attractions of anti-democratic thought
C.
The
politics of the extreme right: Charles
Maurras and the Action française
1.
extreme
nationalism
2.
anti-semitism
3.
authoritarianism
4.
violence
Karl
Marx, Das Kapital v. 1 (1867):
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital,
who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation,
grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but
with this grows, too, the revolt of the working class, a class always
increasing in numbers, and discipline, united, organized by the very mechanism
of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of
production which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it… The knell of capitalist private property
sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated.”
Jean
Jaurès, French reformist socialist (1910):
“When socialists speak of the bourgeois state as if the working class
had no part in it, their thinking is much too rigid. There never has been a pure and simple class state, a perfcet
instrument for every caprice and desire of the dominant class. The contemporary democratic state is not a
homogeneous block forged of only one metal.
It represents less a single class than the actual relationship of
classes.”
Georges
Sorel, On Violence (1910): “The
Syndicalists do not propose to reform the State… They would like to destory it
because they want to bring about his idea of Marx: that the Socialist revolution should not lead to the replacement
of one governing minority by another minority… It is impossible for there to be
the slightest agreement between the Syndicalists and the official socialists on
this subject. The latter do talk about
breaking everything up, but they attack the men in power rather than the power
itself.”
Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors (1864): Pope Pius IX specifically condemned a long list of “errors of our time” as contrary to Catholic teaching, including the ideas that “every man is free to embrace and profess the religion he shall believe true, guided by the light of reason,” and that “the Roman Pontiff [Pope] can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and civilization as lately introduced.”