The Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe 1917-1920

Challenges of Labour

Challenges of Labour Central and western Europe 1917–1920

Edited by

Chris Wrigley

London and New York

First published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Editorial contribution, Introduction and Conclusion © 1993 C.J. Wrigley; individual chapters © 1993 individual contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Challenges of Labour: central and western Europe, 1917–1920 I. Wrigley, Chris 940–5 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Challenges of labour: central and western Europe, 1917–1920/edited by Chris Wrigley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Protest movements—Europe—History—20th century. 2. Europe—Politics and government—20th century. 3. Working class— Europe—Political activity. 4. Europe—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Europe—Economic conditions—1918–1945. I. Wrigley, Chris. D445.C4 1993 940.5’1–dc20 92–9966 ISBN 0-415-07686-2 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-20208-2 Master e-Book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20211-2 (Glassbook ISBN)

Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction Chris Wrigley 2 Revolutionary Berlin 1917–20 Dick Geary 3 Munich in turmoil: social protest and the revolutionary movement 1918–19 Martin H.Geyer

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4 Budapest and the revolutions of 1918 and 1919 Zsuzsa L.Nagy

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5 Vienna: a city in the years of radical change 1917–20 Hans Hautmann

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6 The interregnum: Turin, Fiat and industrial conflict between war and Fascism Giuseppe Berta

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7 Paris 1917–20: labour protest and popular politics Roger Magraw

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8 Working-class mobilisation on the Clyde 1917–20 John Foster

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9 Demobilisation in Germany 1918–19: the gradual erosion of the powers of the soldiers’ councils Wolfram Wette

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10 The Hungarian peasantry and the revolutions of 1918–19 Ignác Romsics

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11 The fear of revolution in rural Austria: the case of Tyrol Elisabeth Dietrich

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12 Lenin, Italy and fairy-tales 1919–20 Piero Melograni

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13 The state and the challenge of labour in France 1917–20 John Horne

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14 The state and the challenge of labour in Britain 1917–20 Chris Wrigley

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15 Conclusion Chris Wrigley

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Index

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Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Berta is Reader in Economic History at the Libero Istituto Universitario C.Cattaneo of Castellanza (Varese). He is scientific consultant of the Fondazione L.Einaudi of Turin, Italy. His publications include: Le idee al potere. A.Olivetti tra la fabbrica e la Comunità (1980); Lavoro, solidarietà, conflitti (1983); and Capitali in gioco (1990) Elisabeth Dietrich is a lecturer at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She has published work stemming from her research into the modern history of the province of Tyrol. John Foster is Professor of Applied Social Studies at Paisley University, Scotland. He was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge between 1965 and 1968 and lectured in Politics at Strathclyde University between 1968 and 1981. His publications include: Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974); Scottish Capitalism (joint author, 1981); Politics of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work-in: Class Alliances and the Right to Work (co-author with Charles Woolfson, 1986); and Track Record: The Caterpillar Occupation (co-author with Charles Woolfson, 1989). Dick Geary is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham, England, Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Research Associate of the Institute for Research into European Labour Movements at the Ruhr University (Bochum), Germany. He was previously head of the German Department of Lancaster University, England. His publications include: European Labour Protest (1981); Karl Kautsky (1987); and European Labour Politics from 1900 to the Depression (1991). He has also edited Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914 (1989) and (with Richard J.Evans) The German Unemployed (1987).

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Martin H.Geyer is Hochschulassistent in the Department of History at the University of Cologne, Germany. Previously he taught at the University of Trier. In addition to numerous essays he is the author of Die Reichsknappschaft. Versicherungsreformen und Sozialpolitik im deutschen Bergbau 1900–1947 (Munich, 1987). He recently published a book entitled Verkehrte Welt [The World Upside Down] dealing with the impact of war, revolution and inflation on German society. Hans Hautmann is Assistant Professor and University Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. He is author of the following books: Die Anfänge der Linksradikalen Bewegung und der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschösterreichs 1916–1919 (1970); Die verlorene Räterepublik, Am Beispiel der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschösterreichs (1971); Die österreichische Arbeiterbewegung vom Vormärz bis 1945 (with Rudolf Kropf, 1974; 3rd edn, 1978); Die Gemeindebauten des Roten Wien 1919–1934 (with Winfried R.Garscha, 1980); Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Österreich 1918–1924 (1987). He was also editor of the volumes Bewegung und Klasse, Studien zur österreichischen Arbeitergeschichte (with Gerhard Botz, Helmut Konrad and Josef Weidenholzer, 1978) and of Arbeiterschaft und Nationalsozialismus in Österreich. In memoriam Karl R.Stadler (with Rudolf G. Ardelt, 1990). John Horne is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. His publications include Labour at War. France and Britain 1914–1918 (1991) as well as various articles on French and comparative labour history and on the history of the Great War. He is currently writing a social history of twentieth-century France. Roger Magraw is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Warwick, England. Previously he taught at Leeds University. His publications include: France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (1983 and 1987); and A History of the French Working Class 1830–1939 (2 vols, 1992). He has also written articles on various aspects of French social history, including anti-clericalism and peasant radicalism. Piero Melograni is Professor of Contemporary History at Perugia University, Italy. His publications include: Storia politica della Grande Guerra 1915–1918 (1969); Gli industriali e Mussolini, rapporti tra confidustria e fascismo dal 1919 al 1929 (1972); Saggio sui potenti (1977); and Lenin e il mito della rivoluzione mondiale. Lenin tra ideologia e ragion di stato, 1917–1920 (1985). He has also edited Corriere della Sera 1919–1943 (1965), and La famiglia Italiana dall’ ottocento a oggi (1988).

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Zsuzsa L.Nagy is Scientific Adviser of the Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and Professor of Modern Hungarian History at Lajos Kossuth University, Debrecen, Hungary. Her publications include: The Paris Peace Conference and Hungary, 1918– 1919 (1965); The Budapest Liberal Opposition, 1919–1944 (1972); Freemasonry in the 20th Century (1972); Prime Minister Bethlen’s Liberal Opposition 1919–1931 (1980); The Liberal Opposition in Hungary, 1919–1945 (1983); The Activities of the Liberal Parties in Hungary 1931–1945 (1986); and Freemasons (1988). She is co-author of books on Hungarian history: One Thousand Years. A Concise History of Hungary, ed. Peter Hanák (1988); The Hungarians. A Divided Nation, ed. Stephen Borsody (1988); and A History of Hungary, gen. ed. Peter F.Sugar (1990). Ignác Romsics is Professor of Modern Hungarian History at Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Previously he worked as Deputy Director of the Institute of Hungarian Studies, Budapest (1986– 91) and as Research Fellow in the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1977–85). His publications include: The PowerPolitics of the Danube and Tisza Region in 1918–19 (1982); Counterrevolution and Consolidation. The first decade of the Horthy Regime, 1919–1929 (1982); and Stephen Bethlen. A political biography 1874–1946 (1991). Wolfram Wette is Historian at the Research Institute for Military History in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, Lecturer at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Basle, Switzerland. In 1987–8 he was Speaker of the Working Party on Historical Peace Research. His publications include: Kriegstheorien deutscher Sozialisten (1971); and Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 1, Ursachen und Voraussetzungen der deutschen Kriegspolitik (1979; paperback edn, 1989; English translation, Oxford, 1990). He is co-author of ‘Operation Barbarossa’. Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941 (1981); Geschichte und Frieden. Aufgaben historischer Friedensforschung (1987); Gustav Noske. Eine politische Biographie (2nd edn, 1988); Militarismus und Pazifismus. Auseinandersetzung mit den deutschen Kriegen (1991); and editor of Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes. Eine Militärgeschichte von unten (1992). Chris Wrigley is Professor of Modern British History at Nottingham University, England. Previously he taught at Loughborough University and Queen’s University, Belfast. His publications include David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (1976); A.J.P. Taylor: A Bibliography

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(1980); Arthur Henderson (1990); Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour (1990); and Lloyd George (1992). He has also edited two volumes of A History of British Industrial Relations, those for 1875–1914 (1982) and 1914–39 (1986), as well as Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics (1986) and On the Move (with John Shepherd, 1991).

Acknowledgements

Several of the essays were commissioned specifically for this volume. Others were adapted from papers given at an international conference held at Graz between 5 and 8 June 1989; the versions here often being substantially altered for this volume. All who participated in that international colloquium on ‘Labour Movements and Revolutionary Potential in Europe at the end of World War I’ are grateful to the institutions which organised it—Columbia University, New York; Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn; Karl-FranzensUniversität, Graz; and the Graz Chamber of Labour—and to Professors Leopold Haimson and Helmut Konrad in particular. The editor is grateful to John Lynch of Bardon Mill, Hexham for quickly and capably translating the essays on Munich and Vienna; and similarly to Dona Geyer for her work on the essay on South Tyrol. He is also grateful for Professor Dick Geary’s generous help with some of the German language essays when he was revising all the translations. Furthermore he is grateful to Su Spencer for her work in preparing the final copy in typescript of some of the essays and to Louise Snell and Claire L’Enfant of Routledge for their encouragement and help.

1 Introduction Chris Wrigley

The years 1917–20 can be seen as ‘red years’ —a high-water mark in European labour and socialist achievement. They can also be seen as a period in which the propertied classes demonstrated their strength and the range of their resources, years which laid the foundations for a move to the Right across much of Europe. This book provides a collection of essays which examine aspects of the impact of the First World War and the Russian revolutions of 1917 on central and western Europe. The first part offers a series of essays on the principal cities associated with revolution or major social unrest in these years. Perhaps in this there is an echo of earlier critical periods in European history, such as 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871. A.J.P.Taylor long ago observed, ‘What happened in Russia in 1917 was an epilogue to the turmoils of the nineteenth century, not the beginning of a new age.’1 The second part is made up of essays on major aspects of the resurgence of the old order and the undermining of revolutionary and radical forces in Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, France and Britain. In restabilising their societies, Charles Maier has argued that the propertied classes did not stop at a ‘simple restoration’ of earlier society but set about ‘creating new institutional arrangements and distributions of power’.2 Among other things, these essays suggest that while new arrangements were set up by the forces of conservatism as the challenge of labour was repelled, nevertheless 1919–20 was also marked by a ‘simple restoration’ of the old order and of old policies (see, for example, chapters 10, 11 and 14 on Hungary, Austria and Britain). The First World War was a war which stretched the major European powers’ industrial, financial and agrarian resources, reaching breaking-point (or coming close to it) in several countries in 1917–18. Huge armies which suffered massive losses required constant replenishments of manpower and munitions. In several

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continental countries the passage of armies and the fighting of repeated battles devastated towns and the countryside. For the central powers the Allied blockade caused major hardship. In facing modern economic as well as military warfare, the political systems of the central powers eventually broke. Jay Winter has argued that the success of the British and French states in largely maintaining —or even improving—the welfare of their populations, was ‘one of the prerequisites of military victory’.3 By 1917 two years of war and the severe winter of 1916–17 had put a massive strain on the belligerents. At the end of 1916 some 14.6 million men had been called up in Russia with the figure reaching 15.3 million by the time of the October 1917 revolution. By the end of the war Germany had enlisted some 11.1 million, Austria-Hungary 7.8 million, France 8.3 million, Britain 5.7 million and Italy 5 million men. This was from total populations before the war of 139.3 million, 64.9 million, 50.8 million, 39.1 million, 45.2 million and 34.7 million respectively.4 Withdrawal of such large numbers of adult males from the labour force had a considerable impact on each economy. In the case of Britain, in 1918 the armed forces accounted for 20.7 per cent of the total potential labour force of the British Isles, or roughly 39 per cent of the male labour force. Voluntary recruiting raised huge numbers of men in the early period of the war—478,893 enlisting between 4 August and 12 September 1914, and 2 million by July 1915. As a result there were dramatic drops in the total number of males working in industries of particular importance in wartime; thus, by July 1915, the totals had fallen in coal and other mining by 21.8, iron and steel 18.8, engineering 19.5, electrical engineering 23.7, chemicals and explosives 23.8 and shipbuilding 16.5 per cent.5 Across much of Europe millions of men, who had previously never travelled more than a few miles from their home village or small town, went to distant combat zones. After perhaps initial enthusiasm at the outbreak of war, many peasant soldiers relapsed into a morose resentment at fighting for aims which bore little relationship to their village concerns. Among Russian peasant soldiers their disdain for the war was reflected in such views as ‘The war will do nothing for us and the Germans will lick us good… it doesn’t make sense for the soldiermuzhik to fight on account of the Serbs’ and ‘We’re from Tambov. The Germans won’t get that far!’6 Similar views were held in the AustroHungarian army. In the fictional Good Soldier Švejk, a soldier says, ‘I wish it was all over and they knocked us out, so that Austria at last had peace’ and the Czech Švejk responds with ‘A monarchy as idiotic as

Introduction 3

this ought not to exist at all.’7 Moreover, the uprooted peasant soldiers mixed with former urban workers, many of whom were radical. For many soldiers, from urban as well as rural backgrounds, the horrific slaughter on both the Western Front and the Eastern Front brought into question the war aims of their country and often, also, the inequalities of their society. One young English front-line officer commented in his diary in September 1918: We can never again go forward with the same fiery ardour and implicit faith in the Justice of Our Cause, which drove us onwards in the early days. We have seen brave Germans die with faith as great as ours. He also remarked on the loosening of class divisions among those suffering together at the front: And now Hardy’s sister is selling matches in Ancoats, and my sister would refer to her as ‘that woman’ —yet Hardy and I have saved each other’s lives. On another occasion he observed of them sheltering in a captured German dug-out: ‘There was no room for officer and servant there — just two very weary men, we sat either side of the fire drying clothes.’8 Such camaraderie across ranks, however, could be a strength in maintaining a dogged willingness to fight on at the front. In the case of the British army, by 1916 most of those joining the army were no longer volunteers. Siegfried Sassoon in his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) perceptively commented of late 1916: Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable. The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman. What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.9 Yet for all the appalling conditions, there was a lack of mutinies in the British army on the Western Front.10 In contrast there were serious problems in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies before 1917. In the former most of the 28th Prague Infantry Battalion deserted to the Russian army during a battle at Stebnicka Huta on 3 April 1915. There were less spectacular desertions by Czech and Ruthenian troops on the Eastern Front in 1916.

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Nevertheless, in spite of repeated defeats the Habsburg monarchy’s armies stayed in the field until the end of the war, perhaps buoyed up by the hope of a central powers victory—at least until the failure of Ludendorff’s spring offensive in 1918.11 In the Russian army there were eight or more mutinies during the last three months of 1916, apparently sparked off by horror at the continuing high level of casualties, general battle fatigue and anxiety about conditions back home for their families. Allan K.Wildman has argued that these mutinies of 1916 were akin to those in the French army of 1917 in their cause and did ‘not in themselves reflect an incipient politicisation of the army’. This, he has suggested, changed in the following year: ‘Politicisation, when it did come about on a massive scale in 1917, emanated from the rear and was most pronounced in the garrisons and transfer points, from whence it found its way to the front.’12 As well as the mass mobilisations into the armed forces, there was also a major movement of people on the ‘home fronts’, with rural workers entering the cities as well as urban workers transferring to higher priority work. Given the massive withdrawal of males to the armed forces, the overall size of the industrial labour forces did not change that dramatically, even if their composition did (with more elderly males, more under-age males and more females). In Russia the estimated total industrial workforce rose from 3,114,945 in 1913 to 3,338,580 at the start of 1917. Within this there was a considerable swing to war work. Thus the number of workers in metallurgical enterprises increased by 93 per cent from 150,9442 in 1913 to 291,356. Petrograd was the centre for such work, with the metal workforce growing in that period by 135 per cent and constituting 60.4 (instead of 41.5) per cent of the city’s workforce.13 In Germany the number of workers in industrial enterprises with ten or more employees fell from 7,387,000 in 1913 to 6,787,000 in 1918 (with the latter figure including a 46 per cent increase in female workers), while those employed in war industries meeting military needs (metal industries, chemicals, petroleum and the electrical industry) rose by 44 per cent from 2,116,000 to 3,050,000. There was an accompanying increase in the numbers of workers crowding into Berlin and the Ruhr.14 In the United Kingdom the numbers in civil employment fell from 19,440,000 in 1914 to 17,060,000 in 1918, while the numbers employed in the metal trades rose by 34 per cent, from 1,804,000 (9.4 per cent of whom were female) in July 1914 to 2,418,000 (24.6 per cent female) in July 1918.15 Inadequate housing stocks were put under further pressure in munitions centres such as Glasgow, Barrow, Sheffield, the Tyne and the Woolwich Arsenal area of London. In the

Introduction 5

case of Woolwich Arsenal the workforce expanded from 10,868 at the outbreak of the war to a peak of 74,467 in May 1917.16 In Italy industrial expansion was concentrated heavily in Piedmont, Liguria and Lombardy in the north-west. Several large firms such as Fiat, Breda and Pirelli grew dramatically; Fiat’s workforce expanded twelvefold, from 3,500 to 40,000, and its capital fivefold, from 25 to 125 million lire. People crowded into the northern cities and towns, with Milan expanding from some 600,000 to 718,000 and Turin from 427,000 to 518,000 between 1911 and 1921.17 European centres of urban unrest in the war and post-war years were usually marked by active workers’ councils and by the presence of large metal trades. The almost unlimited demand for war material and the shortages of labour, especially skilled labour, gave engineering workers much potential bargaining power. However, the exigencies of war constrained them in the use of their negotiating strength. The war accelerated major changes in the metal industries, changes that were already under way before. In Britain, Italy and elsewhere, employers pushed ahead with rationalisation while vastly expanding output. So skilled workers struggled to try to defend the work patterns to which they were accustomed and such workplace autonomy as they had. In opposing the dilution of skilled labour with semi-skilled and unskilled labour, socialist shop stewards found a common cause with the more conservative of their workmates.18 Yet the needs of the state ensured that pressure was put on the employers as well. Employers’ reluctance to recognise trade unions or to make other concessions was frequently swept aside by the need for uninterrupted production. Thus, for example, in Germany on 10 February 1916 the government informed the employers in the metal industries: The War Ministry regards it as desirable to satisfy in some way the wishes of the worker and create war boards for the settlement of differences arising from the changing of places of employment for the duration of the war…. In view of the decreased worker supply resulting from callups the military authorities must place more value than before upon the workers staying on their jobs and the utilisation of all available manpower. But if the worker is to be kept on his job, then his right to move freely is restricted, and he must be given the possibility of turning to a non-partisan agency in disputes concerning wages, etc.19

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Similarly in Britain the government, as the largest purchaser of goods and services, often paid little respect to the views of the business community. One Huddersfield engineering employer complained in early 1918: Employers have had imposed upon them conditions and restrictions which in normal times would be unthinkable. They have been deprived of almost all freedom of action…. Their men have to a large extent been spoiled not only by wages awards which have been expedient rather than just, but also by marked weakness on the part of the government. In many other ways the just rights of the employers have been ruthlessly put aside for the purpose of maintaining industrial peace.20 Nevertheless many working people felt that the legislation impinged much harder on them. In the summer of 1917, the West Midland special commissioners of the eight area commissions appointed by Lloyd George to inquire into industrial unrest after the major engineering strikes of that May reported: These changes are strongly resented as infringements on personal liberty, to which men are deeply attached. But beyond this they affect profoundly everyday industrial life. In many cases they are the renunciation of the gains of years, and what renders the renunciation more bitter is the feeling that all changes bear more hardly on the men than on the employers…. From this feeling…it is an easy step to the feeling that the restrictions have been definitely imposed in the employers’ interest.21 While industrial conditions were preferable to the soldiers’ lot on the Western or Eastern Fronts, many industrial workers across Europe were aggrieved at wartime conditions both in their workplaces and outside. Though they took more money home, they worked longer hours and experienced a greater intensity of work for it. Then they and their families were faced with soaring prices and shortages of goods. At work they were also subjected to greater discipline. In Britain the Munitions of War Act not only banned strikes and lock-outs and suspended trade unions’ working practices (‘restrictive practices’) but also set up special industrial courts— munitions tribunals—which enforced the rules of controlled establishments. These rules were either those set by the employer and approved by the Ministry of Munitions or model ones which the ministry had supplied. They dealt with such

Introduction 7

matters as regular and punctual attendance, diligent work, sobriety and the enforcement of changed workplace practices. By December 1915 more than a million working people in Britain were covered by the regulations and in the last five months of that year 2,771 people had been convicted of offences (61 of them employers). Some of the offences were likely to arouse resentment against the state as well as the employer; notably the requirement (designed to restrict the mobility of skilled labour) that workmen must obtain a leaving certificate which indicated the consent of their employer when going to other work. This measure, which some employers misused as a means of disciplining their employees, caused great offence. Trade union activists in some areas dubbed the whole statute ‘the Slavery Act’ and the government felt obliged first to amend the leaving certificate regulations in January 1916 and then abandon them altogether in September 1917 after the May engineering strikes.22 Falls in real wages quickened across continental Europe as the war went on. By the time of the February 1917 revolution, in Petrograd real wages had declined by some 25 per cent from their 1913 level, with more than half the fall occurring in the winter of 1916–17. In France real wages had dropped by some 10.5 per cent between the outbreak of war and late 1916. There, as in Russia, there was a remarkable acceleration of inflation during the early months of 1917. During 1918 wage increases closed much of the gap with prices, but even so by the end of the war real wages in France had fallen by some 20 per cent below their pre-war level. In Germany by 1918 real wages had fallen by 25 per cent since the outbreak of war.23 However, for Russia and the central powers the problem was as much, or more, to do with the availability of many basic goods. In Russia and central Europe many commodities became very scarce, often only regularly obtainable on the black market. Shortages of domestic coal, for instance, caused acute suffering during the later winters of the war. Even in Britain it was felt necessary to introduce coal-rationing for domestic consumers in London from October 1917 following the exhaustion of supplies early in the previous April. In Russia general coal shortages were serious and caused factory closures. Supplies from Britain were stopped and those from the Donbass mines (much affected by a loss of manpower) dwindled as a result of the war, while coal reserves piled up in the Donets Basin as Russia’s railways failed to move them.24 In Britain the spark that ignited several cities in continental Europe was missing: that is, drastic food shortages. Even so in Britain, France and Italy food scarcities did much to radicalise urban workers. By early

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1918 there were serious shortages of meat, bacon, butter, margarine and tea in London. J.R.Clynes, a leading figure of the Parliamentary Labour Party and then parliamentary secretary to Lord Rhondda, the Minister of Food Control, later recalled: Smithfield Market, in coping with the Christmas rush, sold out its entire supplies; and for a week or more it was perfectly bare of meat. The knowledge of this fact was suppressed, since, had it spread, something like a national panic might have resulted…. During the trouble at Smithfield some of the biggest queues formed that were ever seen in Britain. I well remember receiving news at the Food Ministry one day that a queue of over 4,000 people was formed up outside the market, awaiting admission. The queue had begun to form at 2am on a January morning, with snow falling and the temperature many degrees below freezingpoint…. All over London that day women in queues outside butchers’ shops had to wait six and eight hours…and seldom obtained anything but horseflesh even after all that time. He also recorded Rhondda’s response to his question whether Britain would put up with food-rationing: ‘Without rationing, we’re done. It might well be, Clynes, that you and I, at this moment, are all that stand between this country and revolution!’25 This remark, however, owes more to an awareness of Russia’s conditions the previous year than a realistic assessment of Britain’s proximity to revolution at that time. In Britain, France and Italy food prices were seen as the single most important cause of industrial discontent. These were the major cause of the widespread, spontaneous strikes in Paris and other parts of France in the spring and early summer of 1917 and also of the engineering strikes of that May in Britain. High prices were linked in the popular mind with profiteering. In Scotland the commissioners looking into the causes of industrial unrest in mid-1917 reported: ‘The actual increase in the cost of living does not appear to be so important a factor in the workers’ mind as the belief that profiteering exists.’ They added: The publication in the Press of the balance sheets of trading and shipping companies showing large dividends, and hearing reports of the increase of the price of commodities having been caused by intermediate agency, commissions etc., tend to create in the workers’

Introduction 9

mind the belief that the few are making fortunes at the expense of the many.26 Such beliefs were not without foundation. Clynes, for example, later gave the example of the soaring price of beans (which were being used to dilute wheat in bread): ‘One consignment of beans shipped at £36 a ton changed hands “on paper” three times during the voyage to England, and was priced at £93 a ton when it reached these shores.’27 But in Britain and elsewhere people did not need to read a newspaper to be aware of the good food readily available in expensive restaurants. Food shortages and soaring prices often threatened to lead to serious social urban disorder in Britain, France and Italy. In Paris and other French urban areas there were widespread protests in 1915 and 1916. There is much evidence that landlords and shopkeepers made the most of the high wartime demand in France’s large munitions centres. There were sporadic outbreaks of unrest in the earlier part of the war, before the 1917 strikes. Thus, for example, at Le Creusot in June 1915 women ransacked bakers’ premises when there was a shortage of flour. In Italy such unrest became particularly serious in the summer of 1917. That August some fifty people died in Turin in serious rioting which accompanied bread shortages.28 In Britain such incidents were less severe, but nevertheless gave the authorities cause for concern. Across all three countries there was an upsurge of popular feeling against hoarders and profiteers and for ‘fair shares’ and equality of treatment. Popular sentiment declared in favour of a ‘moral economy’ rather than for one led by market forces; and in places this took the age-old form of crowds rioting and forcing down prices deemed to be extortionate. The feelings of injustice engendered by the soaring food prices and the queues contributed to the growing strength of Labour. In Britain in many cities and towns food vigilance committees were formed, which drew much of their membership from the co-operatives, trades councils and local branches of the Labour Party. In France cooperatives flourished. Although through the German invasion they had lost 40 per cent of their resources, they recovered and expanded—with their turnover rising from 9 to 42 million francs in the course of the war. Through the policies of Albert Thomas and Clemenceau they came to play a significant role in the state’s distribution system. Similarly the war gave the British co-operative movement a sizeable boost in membership while also accelerating its swing away from Lib-Lab political sympathies to Labour. Indeed the

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experience of the government’s blatant favouritism towards private retailers and its persistent disregard of the co-operative movement was a major cause of the co-operators’ decision in 1917 to set up the Co-operative Party. 29 More generally, the soaring cost of living, combined with the full labour market and the increased pressures at work, made a most important contribution to the growth of trade unionism—both in terms of numbers and of new groups of workers unionised. However, in Britain, France and Italy the authorities were able to respond positively to the issue of food shortages. In all three countries rationing was brought in, thereby ending most of the queues and providing a fairer method of distribution. Above all British naval supremacy enabled overseas supplies to be brought to the three countries, thereby avoiding severe shortages. Lloyd George later recalled, ‘Food cargoes which we urgently needed for our own population we had from time to time to divert to meet the needs of France and Italy, and to save their governments from serious discontent.’ He might have added that US credit also played a crucial part in the inter-Allied shipping and import policies. Overall, Lloyd George delivered the verdict: The food question ultimately decided the issue of this war. It was directly responsible for the downfall of Russia, finally it was the element that led to the collapse of Austria and Germany. Indirectly it was responsible for bringing America into the war, since Germany’s indiscriminate submarine warfare was her answer to our blockade.30 In the case of Russia and the central powers, the governments proved unable to respond adequately to the problem of deteriorating food supplies. In Russia the food problem was an aspect of the larger economic crisis caused by the pressures of rapid economic growth on a system which was unable to make an adequate response. There were dislocations of agricultural output due to the removal of fit males, 36 per cent of all able-bodied men being enlisted in the army by 1916, and to the sheer damage of warfare in some regions. But the major reasons why sufficient food supplies did not reach the towns were the inadequacies of the transport network to meet both civilian and military needs and peasant unwillingness, in the face of shortages of industrial goods, to put produce on the market. The situation regarding such food as did go on the open market was made much worse by the very large purchases made by the Ministry of War, very

Introduction

11

often at prices above those fixed by the government. The army bought half of its grain needs this way (the other half directly from producers); its total demand in 1915–16 being some 8,058,000 tons and in 1916–17 some 11,281,000 tons.31 In Germany and Austria-Hungary there were also serious problems of agricultural output arising from the loss of manpower and horsepower; but there was in addition a reduction in imported food as a result of the Allied blockade. German harvests of grain fell substantially, with 1917 outputs of wheat, barley, oats and rye being respectively 43, 41, 59 and 33 per cent lower than those of 1914. As in Russia, the fixing of maximum prices had the effect of driving food off the open market. According to one estimate, by 1918 ‘about oneeighth to one-seventh of grain, flour and potato output, one-quarter to one-third of milk, butter and cheese production, and one-third to onehalf of egg, meat and fruit production passed through the hands of black marketeers…sometimes as much as ten times the peacetime price’. 32 The Allied blockade hurt, especially from 1916; though Germany and Austria-Hungary benefited from Romanian grain and from meat, fish and dairy product imports from neighbouring neutral states. Transport dislocation also caused serious urban supply problems in Austria-Hungary and to a lesser extent in Germany during the latter part of the war. Austria suffered more acutely than the more rural Hungary, a matter illustrated by its severer level of rationing.33 The food shortages radicalised large portions of the urban populations in central and eastern Europe. One German officer observed in mid-1917: It is almost always women, whether from the lower or better classes, who express their dissatisfaction in bitter scolding. The men are quieter and more restrained. The women’s behaviour is understandable. They are supposed to cook and cater for their hungry families and see that they are powerless to do so.34 Before the February revolution, the Petrograd secret police ‘observed that on days of severe crisis the queues had the same force as revolutionary meetings and tens of thousands of revolutionary leaflets. The street had become a political club.’35 Food shortages were a crucial element in moving much of a diverse Russian working class towards revolution in February 1917. The lead was taken by enraged female workers taking to the streets shouting, ‘Bread!’ Four days later, on 27 February 1917, some 80 per cent of Petrograd workers were on strike—

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Chris Wrigley

with white-collar workers and even domestic servants marching in the street demonstrations.36 Experiences of food shortages, profiteering and wide-ranging collectivist state policies made many people across Europe see something real and not simply utopian in socialist arguments. Diane Koenker, while emphasising the complexity and diversity of workingclass attitudes in Moscow, has analysed the growing class antagonism in the city during 1917. She has commented: Capitalists began to behave as Marx said they would: no concessions to the workers, no compromise on the rights of factory owners…. The Bolsheviks…had offered the most consistent class interpretation of the revolution, and by the late summer their interpretation appeared more and more to correspond to reality.37 In Britain, to take the case of one of the least revolutionary belligerent countries, there was also a radicalisation of many working people in the later stages of the war. State controls of industry and of food distribution, whatever their limitations, provided a different experience to pre-war Liberal policies. The February 1917 revolution in Russia showed the power of working-class discontent and the October revolution put socialists unequivocally in power. Amidst the universal talk of reconstruction and of ‘a fit land for heroes to live in’ there was a swing of opinion towards a really independent Labour Party which advocated some measure of socialism. While this should not be exaggerated before 1919, it was marked among trade unionists, cooperators and some of the wider working class.38 The war itself transmuted economic issues into political ones. If the war was the root cause of inflation, food shortages, deteriorating working and living conditions and other hardships, then the war should be ended. Discontent became aimed at governments which failed to ensure the necessities of life and which prolonged the war. As Dick Geary has observed: A government’s refusal to end the war could lead to its overthrow: this is essentially what happened in Russia in both February and again in October 1917. Similarly the fact that President Wilson and his allies refused to conclude peace with the Kaiser gave a powerful impetus to the movement for democratic reform in Germany in November 1918.39

Introduction

13

Governments across Europe became alarmed as strikers widened their demands beyond wages and conditions of work to wider political matters. Thus in Britain from 1916 the government was anxious lest the major unions were converted by food shortages and pacifist speakers into demanding an early negotiated peace. In Germany, by early 1918, strikers were pressing for an early peace settlement without annexations or reparations as well as for the democratisation of the state.40 While the war drew more distinctive class lines across Europe, it also depicted sharp divisions within labour and socialist movements. Ideological divisions had always been a feature of European socialism, indeed part of its very nature. The 1880s and 1890s had been marked by demarcation lines being drawn between democratic socialist groups and anarchists and syndicalists. The latter groups had been put beyond the pale by the Second International at its Zurich congress in 1893. The war exacerbated many of the divisions within European labour and socialist movements, not least between advocates of various democratic routes to socialism and those revolutionary socialists who saw the war as being an inevitable outcome of capitalism and providing the opportunity to end, not mend, the capitalist system. The establishment of the Third International, based at Moscow, in March 1919 drew a further clear line between, on the one hand, revolutionary socialists and, on the other hand, the remaining supporters of the old Second International as well as the more radical grouping known as the Vienna Union. As well as differences over whether it provided the occasion for the overthrow of capitalism, the First World War accentuated divisions among socialists in several ways. First entry into the war and the matter of whether or not to vote for the finance required to wage it confronted them with difficult decisions. In Germany nearly all the Social Democratic Party (SPD) representatives in the Reichstag were willing to vote credits to protect Germany in a defensive war against invasion by tsarist Russia; but the numbers opposing the war grew as the far from defensive nature of the German campaign in Belgium and France became apparent. While Britain was not in imminent danger of invasion, the violation of Belgian neutrality provided an emotional justification for supporting war. The majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party supported the Liberal government’s request for war credits, rejecting the minority view of Ramsay MacDonald and a few other Independent Labour Party (ILP) intellectuals that they should abstain. The majority view was bluntly put by John Hodge who responded to MacDonald’s views by observing that he ‘was no believer

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Chris Wrigley

in a policy of sitting on the fence—either we were for our country or we were against it’.41 Henderson and the majority made clear, though, that their support was not unqualified, joining with the minority in condemning secret diplomacy and the reliance on balance of power international politics for producing the war (thereby being at least partly in line with Second International policy agreed at its Copenhagen congress in 1910). Second, where ministerial posts were on offer, socialists divided over the issue of whether or not to enter a coalition government and thereby accept some responsibility for the conduct of the war. At its congress in Paris in 1900 the Second International had condemned socialists joining with bourgeois politicians in coalitions except as temporary measures in an emergency and then only with the approval of their party. Belgian and French socialists in favour of fully supporting the war could point to the German occupation of territory, and could link national self-preservation of their nations with the defence of their democracies against the kaiser’s regime. Hence socialists joined the governments early on (in Belgium immediately, in France on 26 August 1914). In Britain Henderson, with the approval of Labour’s national executive committee, joined the first wartime coalition government when it was formed on 25 May 1915; but before then he had been deeply involved in helping the government with recruiting and munitions production. In contrast, like the Bolsheviks in Russia, the majority of the Italian socialists opposed the war, taking a line of ‘neither adherence nor sabotage’. A minority of socialist deputies broke away to support the war effort and joined the government in June 1916. However, it proved difficult for socialists of any belligerent nation to stay aloof in such a war. At the local level many Italian socialists helped oil the war machine, just as Henderson had done in Britain before entering office. As in Germany, France and Belgium, the issue of national defence made a clear-cut ideological stance difficult; a point recognised by the moderate socialist Claudio Treves in the Chamber in December 1914, even before Italy entered the war.42 Third, there were widely differing views on the Left as to how the war should end. The British Labour Party issued a circular on 7 August 1914 which stated that ‘the Labour movement reiterates the fact that it has opposed the policy which has produced the war, and that its duty is now to secure peace at the earliest possible moment on such conditions as will provide the best opportunities for the re-establishment of amicable feelings between the workers of Europe’. This policy avoided specifying how peace should be secured—through negotiations or an Allied military

Introduction

15

victory? But, as war weariness developed and disillusionment with government policies was dramatically reinforced by the Bolsheviks publishing the Allies’ secret territorial agreements, it did provide the area of ‘a democratic peace’ around which nearly all could regroup. Much the same happened in France. As John Horne had commented, the French pro-war socialists (like the British) showed ‘the compatability of a sustained socialist political mobilisation behind the national military effort with growing criticism of government organisation of that effort, and of the war aims to which it was directed’.43 In Germany and Austria also, there were divisions between prowar majority and critical minority socialist parliamentarians. These led to a formal split in the SPD, involving the membership at all levels; with the creation on 6 April 1917 of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) out of those who had been expelled for opposing cooperation with the government and for demanding peace without annexations, including the far Left group known from January 1916 as the Spartacists. In Austria the Sozialdemokratischen Partei Österreichs (SPO) did not split; but the majority’s support of the war led to very substantial membership losses and as the war went on there was growing support for the minority position that the country was involved in an aggressive imperialist war not a defensive one.44 Furthermore the changes in working practices and the dislocation of supplies of food and other necessities to urban areas often led to growing anger directed at moderate trade union and socialist parliamentarians who were working with the government. This was particularly marked among those in large war production workplaces and among young workers in particular. Moreover, more conservative craft workers in war work were often radicalised by the sweeping aside of their old conditions of employment and the accompanying influx of semi-skilled and unskilled labour (including women workers). Such dissent accompanied often serious industrial unrest. In Italy, for example, factory workers in Milan, Turin and other northern industrial cities took a leading role in the revolt away from moderate socialism, a revolt widened among the urban populations by the shortages of food and other necessities. Similarly in Britain many of the leading figures in the militant engineering shop stewards’ movement went on to be leading figures of the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was formed in 1920. The role of young workers in revolutionary politics received widespread comment. For example, the governor of Graz was informed that during the January 1918 strike in Vienna ‘agitators, mainly of youthful age’ had been spreading revolutionary propaganda; and in October 1918 Gustav

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Noske complained that ‘the most turbulent and disobedient element in Kiel were the very young’.45 While the war had a massive impact on European labour and socialist movements, especially in areas of war work, it should be emphasised that often it was reinforcing existing trends. In the case of German metalworkers, there had been a notable swing to the Left by many branches in the period since 1905, accompanied by much friction with the trade union leadership. Areas which became notable for advanced socialist or communist politics after 1914 were often places which had a marked radical past. The German Communist Party, founded in December 1918, drew strength from pre-war centres of radical SPD politics such as Bremen, Brunswick, Remscheid and Solingen. In France the Left in 1917–20 often drew on earlier anarcho-syndicalist traditions. The weak Communist Party of Great Britain had notable support from such areas as the South Wales coalfield and London as well as what had been the wartime munitions centres.46 For a period in 1917–19 European labour and socialist movements rode on a wave of unrest which extended well beyond their normal constituencies. The sheer scale of dissatisfaction was exhibited in the range of social groups who displayed their hostility to the crumbling imperial regimes in Russia in February 1917 and Germany and AustriaHungary in 1918. In Petrograd in February 1917 those demonstrating in the streets included white-collar workers, domestic servants and artisans as well as factory workers. In the Russian countryside peasants took advantage of the much-weakened authority of the state to carry out their own agrarian revolution. As Orlando Figes has observed, their local actions were the rural equivalents of those of the factory workers who operated under the slogan ‘All power to the soviets!’ In Hungary and Bavaria the peasants could also work with socialists for a while, at least while the urban socialists supported land redistribution. The war also loosened many bands of social control, thereby adding to the general turmoil of these years. In Germany, for example, many commented that youths during the war were becoming more and more immune to discipline.47 With the ending of hostilities on 11 November 1918 when the Armistice came into effect, the leaders of the victor nations gained temporary kudos. But even in those countries there were serious tensions which still caused the propertied classes major concern. In Britain politicians looked back with apprehension to 1815–20, the era of social unrest which had followed the Napoleonic Wars. Moreover, there was an acute awareness of the serious problems that would arise

Introduction

17

as the existing economic order readjusted from production which aimed at meeting the demands of war to production which would respond to peacetime market forces. One of Lloyd George’s cabinet colleagues, Arthur Balfour, observed in March 1920: Before the war there was a natural adjustment between the supply of raw materials and the demand…. This adjustment has been destroyed; and as an inevitable result great natural monopolies have grown up which cannot be left wholly to themselves. It is impossible that in such circumstances there should not be industrial unrest; it is impossible that this should not be aggravated by the rise of prices, as it may be some day by their fall; it is impossible that our task should not be complicated by the political revolutions which have changed the face of Germany, of Russia and of all that once was Austria. We cannot feel surprised that, in such circumstances, there should be strikes and lock-outs, or that subversive elements to be found in all countries should not be eagerly on the look-out for some opportunity of furthering their disastrous projects.48 These tensions and the fear of revolution spreading from the lands of the defeated encouraged social concessions for some months at the end of the war. In Britain not only were there moves towards building ‘a fit land for heroes to live in’ but the government also responded to the popular demand to set up inquiries into profiteering. Also, for a period, there were fears of the attitudes of the returning soldiers, heightened when many returned to large cities and displayed left-wing tendencies. Eventually in both the victorious and defeated nations the propertied classes came to feel that too much was being given away; that their taxes paid for what they deemed to be unduly lavish social programmes. In time inflation became a greater worry than workingclass unrest and businessmen returned to their age-old concern of keeping wage costs low to help their chances in the worrying trading conditions of the disrupted international economy. Moreover, the former acceptance of state involvement in economies marked by scarcities of resources gave way to the desire for its removal as an impediment in markets returning to normal and even to fears that its presence in ordinary industrial clashes could lead to all economic disputes becoming politicised. In central Europe suffering continued until the signing of peace in mid-1919 as a consequence of the continuation of the Allied blockade. The blockade was seen not simply as an instrument which could be

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used to force the defeated to agree to peace terms but also as a means of removing leftist governments. Hence the blockade section of the Supreme Economic Council was unambiguous that even after Germany had made peace the blockade would be maintained against Bolshevik Russia and Hungary until ‘steady’ governments were in power which offered ‘satisfactory guarantees of liberty and stability’.49 Thus the blockade was both a cause of continuing social tension (see chapters 2 and 4) and seen by those operating it as a means of eradicating leftist regimes. Radical urban workers soon found that such allies as peasants and soldiers, where they had ever been allies at all, rapidly fell away. In the case of peasants, outside of Russia, Hungary and Bavaria, most remained anti-socialist and often conservative (see, for example, chapter 11 on Austria). Moreover, even in these areas peasants soon became disenchanted with socialist actions or intentions; a failure to deliver sufficient land in reforms soon leading to apathy or hostility (see chapter 10 on Hungary). Similarly soldiers and sailors were a diminishing asset for the Left in a period of mass demobilisation and often proved very disappointing in their loyalties. The massive discharge of men from the services undercut the soldiers’ council movement in Germany and helped facilitate the officers’ efforts to return the army to its old discipline and to being a conservative force (see chapter 9). Yet at the end of the war the returning soldier from the front line had been a figure of fear for many central European conservatives (see chapter 11). In fact many of the most notable revolutionary soldiers and sailors had been at garrisons at the rear (Petrograd, Kronstadt and Kiel) and in time it became clear that a sizeable number of them were willing to join illiberal bodies such as the Freikorps in Germany or the Black and Tans and ‘the Auxies’ in Ireland (400,000 in the case of the first; some 7,000 in the second; and 1,418 in the latter 50). Stephen Ward and his associates have demonstrated the extent to which ex-servicemen of all countries became factionalised; indeed that they could draw very diverse lessons from their wartime experiences: rightist veterans used both the concepts of the ‘military way’ and the ‘unity of the trenches’ to solidify support, while those of the Left spoke of unity and comradeship but used it in the broader idealistic context and as an example of the spirit which could produce a more perfect society in peacetime.51

Introduction

19

In 1919 and 1920 the propertied classes were not alone in wanting a return to order. Many were weary of war, strikes and other social convulsions. Lloyd George was not unique among heads of government in playing consumers off against producers, unorganised labour against ‘greedy unions’, unskilled unions against skilled and rural workers against urban. Where the middle classes were strong, revolutions failed. Across Europe there were powerful forces which could unite disparate groups to restabilise society against ‘reds’ or even relatively mild social reform. The later chapters in this volume examine some of these forces, which often prove to be old conservative forces as well as newer ones. Yet if the more utopian or more revolutionary hopes of the Left were not achieved by 1920, in many countries much was achieved. It is easy to point to the failures, a host of lost opportunities which often include an apparent inability to widen support among the workforce, including female, white-collar and rural workers (or at least to maintain their commitment). But one can also point in central Europe to socialists entering office and to the democratisation of politics, the enhanced social welfare provision, better housing and improved workplace regulations. In Britain Labour replaced the Liberals as the more radical of the country’s two main political parties and went on to take minority office in 1924, something which few, if any, would have predicted occurring within a decade in the summer of 1914. Such achievements, however, were to be overshadowed both by the ideological divisions within European socialism which aided the rise of Fascism and Nazism and the collapse of earlier socialist idealism in the practicalities of minority office in times of severe economic recession. NOTES 1 2 3 4

When reviewing E.H.Carr’s 1917: Before and After in the Observer, 26 January 1969. C.S.Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, NJ, 1975), p. 9. J.Winter, ‘Some paradoxes of the First World War’, in R.Wall and J.Winter (eds), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 10–12 and 40–1. A.K.Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ, 1980), p. 95. R.A.Clarke, Soviet Economic Facts 1917–70 (London, 1972), p. 3. A.Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy (London, 1989), pp. 261 and 278. M.Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1982 (London, 1982), p. 186. P.E Dewey,

20

5

6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18

Chris Wrigley ‘Military recruiting and the British labour force during the First World War’, Historical Journal 27 (1984), pp. 199–223. B.R.Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 9– 10. On the British figures Ireland (4.4 million) is included in the total population figure, but conscription was not applied there. B.R.Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (2nd edn, London, 1981), pp. 30–1. Dewey, op. cit., pp. 200–5. C.J.Wrigley, ‘The First World War and state intervention in industrial relations 1914–18’, in C.J.Wrigley (ed.), A History of British Industrial Relations, vol. 2, 1914–39 (Brighton, E. Sx , 1986), pp. 23–5. P.Simkins, Kitchener’s Army (Manchester, 1988), p. 75. C.H.Feinstein, National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom 1855–1965 (Cambridge, 1972), T126. Wildman, op. cit., pp. 77 and 93. Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War, tr. Cecil Parrott (London, 1973), p. 208. Ralph Scott, A Soldier’s Diary (London, 1923), pp. 108, 98 and 139 respectively. For a comment on similar responses among German soldiers, see V.R.Berghahn, Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1982), p. 45. Quoted in P.Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), p. 98. For collective unrest at a base camp see D.Gill and G.Dallas, ‘Mutiny at Etaples base in 1917’, Past and Present 66 (1975), pp. 88–112 and G.Dallas and D.Gill, The Unknown Army (London, 1985). For the response to individual dissent, see A.Babington, For the Sake of Example (London, 1983). Z.A.B.Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1961), pp. 54–7. Sked, op. cit., pp. 261–4. Wildman, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 115–20. D.P.Koenker and W.G.Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1989), p. 30. S.Smith, Red Petrograd (Cambridge, 1983), p. 10. R.B.McKean, St Petersburg between the Revolutions (New Haven, Conn., 1990), p. 328. J.Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1984), pp. 18–19. Feinstein, op. cit., T.126. N.K.Buxton and D.I.MacKay, British Employment Statistics (Oxford, 1977), pp 78–80. A.W.Kirkaldy, British Labour: Replacement and Conciliation 1914–21 (London, 1921), pp. 1–3. J.Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1973), p. 179. Clark, op. cit., pp. 191–2. See also this volume, p. 107. As well as Hinton, see the essays by M.Perrot, K.Burgess, E. Domansky, L.H.Haimson and B.Bezza in part 3, ‘Workers in metalprocessing enterprises in comparative perspective’, in L.H.Haimson and C.Tilly (eds), Strikes, Wars and Revolutions in an International Perspective (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 261–401; and D.Geary,

Introduction

19 20 21 22

23

24

25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35

21

‘Radicalism and the German worker’, in R.J.Evans (ed.), Politics and Society in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), pp. 267–86. G.D.Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), p. 88. Wrigley in Wrigley (ed.), op. cit., p. 52. Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest (1917): West Midlands Area, Cd 8665, p. 5. Wrigley in Wrigley (ed.), op. cit., pp. 30–4. His Majesty’s Government, History of the Ministry of Munitions (printed but not published, 1922), vol. 4, part 2, pp. 31–2. The fullest analysis of the work of the tribunals is in G.R.Rubin, War, Law and Labour (Oxford, 1987). T.Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle, Wash., 1981), p. 84. J-J.Becker, The Great War and the French People (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1985), pp. 206–7. P.Fridenson, ‘The impact of the First World War on French workers’, in Wall a n d Wi n t e r, ( e d s ) , o p . c i t . , p . 2 3 9 . A . R y d e r, T h e G e r m a n Revolution of 1918 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 216. For graphic contemporary accounts of the London shortages see T. Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge, 1986), p. 512. E.N. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution, tr. D.J.Raleigh (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), p. 21. McKean, op. cit., pp. 323–4. J.R.Clynes, Memoirs, vol. 1 (London, 1937), pp. 234–5. Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest (1917): Scotland, Cd 8669, p. 3. Clynes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 218. Becker, op. cit., pp. 133–4, 145–6 and 206–16. J.N.Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 91 and 178. Wilson, op. cit., pp. 513–16. Clark, op. cit., pp. 192–3. S. Pollard, ‘The foundation of the Co-operative Party’, in A.Briggs and J.Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History 1886–1923 (London, 1971), pp. 185–210. A.J.Adams, ‘The formation of the Co-operative Party reconsidered’, International Review of Social History 32 (1987), pp. 48–68. B.Waites, A Class Society at War: England 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1987), pp. 225–31. Horne, op. cit., pp. 95–6. G.Hardach, The First World War 1914–1918 (London, 1977), pp. 130–3. D.Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. 3 (London, 1934), pp. 1269 and 1341. More recently the importance of food has been stressed by Avner Offer in his The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989). Hardach, op. cit., pp. 133–5. N.Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914– 1917 (London, 1975), pp. 208–9 and 284–6. K.Leites, Recent Economic Developments in Russia (Oxford, 1922), pp. 48–9. W.Zimmerman, quoted in Hardach, op. cit., p. 120. Mitchell, European Statistics, p. 269. Feldman, op. cit., p. 283–91. Hardach, op. cit., pp. 112–23. Sked, op. cit., p. 263. The commander of the Mainz fortress, quoted in Kocka, p. 49. E.N.Burdzhalov’s summary of the Petrograd Okhranka’s view; Burdzhalov, op. cit., p. 103.

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36 ibid, pp. 106–10. Hasegawa, op. cit., pp. 215–20. McKean, op. cit., pp. 461–4. 37 D.Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1981), p. 364. 38 On the changing trade union opinion, see D.Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 392–404. On the co-operators, see Adams, op. cit., pp. 52–63. 39 D.Geary, European Labour Protest 1848–1939 (London, 1981), p. 138. 40 C.J.Wrigley, David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (Hassocks, E. Sx, 1976), pp. 180–3. Kocka, op. cit., pp. 57–8. 41 Ryder, op. cit., pp. 40–4. J.Hodge, Workman’s Cottage to Windsor Castle (London, 1931), pp. 166–7. 42 Horne, op. cit., pp. 43–7. C.J.Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (Cardiff, 1990), pp. 85–9. C.Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism 1870–1925 (London, 1967), pp. 469–71. Clark, op. cit., pp. 195–9. J.A.Thayer, Italy and the Great War: Politics and Culture 1870– 1915 (Madison, Wis., and Milwaukee, Wis., 1964), pp. 321–2. 43 G.D.H.Cole, A History of the Labour Party from 1914 (London, 1948), p. 18. Horne, op. cit., p. 63. 44 Ryder, op. cit., pp. 76–96. F.L.Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (London, 1972), pp. 14–16. M.Kitchen, The Coming of Austrian Fascism (London, 1980) pp. 10–12. 45 Hinton, op. cit. Geary, ‘Radicalism and the worker’, pp. 277–83. K.E.Amdur, Syndicalist Legacy: Trade Unions and Politics in Two French Cities in the Era of World War I ( U r b a n a , I l l . , a n d Chicago, 1986), pp. 62–107. 46 Geary, ‘Radicalism and the worker’, pp. 267–86 and Geary, European Labour Protest, pp. 149 and 163. Amdur, op. cit., pp. 81 and 102. For the case that the British Communist Party itself represented a break with earlier revolutionary developments rather than their culmination, see W.Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–21 (London, 1969). For the contrary view see Hinton, op. cit., pp. 298–329. 47 Hasegawa, op. cit., p. 247. McKean, op. cit., pp. 464 and 468. O.Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–21 (Oxford, 1989), p. 31. T.Hajdu, ‘Socialist revolution in Central Europe, 1917–21’, in R.Porter and M.Teich (eds), Revolutions in History (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 101–20. On complaints about the decline of discipline among German young people in the war, see, for example, Feldman, op. cit., p. 456, and R.D.Stachura, The Weimar Republic and the Younger Proletariat (London, 1989), pp. 32–3. 48 Quoted in C.J.Wrigley, Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour (Hemel Hempstead, Herts, 1990), p. 293. 49 S.L.Bane and R.H.Lutz, The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice 1918–1919 (Stanford, Calif., 1942), pp. 473, 489 and 500–4. For an analysis of the levels of deprivation experienced by most Germans by 1918, see A.Triebel, ‘Variations in patterns of

Introduction

23

consumption in Germany in the period of the First World War’ , in Wall and Winter (eds), op. cit., pp. 159–95. 50 F.S.Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London, 1971), pp. 414–15. 51 S.R.Ward (ed.), The War Generation: Veterans of the First World War (Port Washington, NY, 1975), p. 6.

2

Revolutionary Berlin 1917–20 Dick Geary

The decision to locate the capit al of the newly united Germany in Berlin in 1991 was surrounded by a great deal of controversy, not least because of the historical symbolism of that city. For many Berlin typified all that was wrong with the German past. Together with the nearby garrison town of Potsdam it represented the autocratic and militaristic traditions of the Prussian state. It was the city from which two world wars were unleashed and the seat of a Nazi government which embarked upon the despicable politics of racial genocide. Yet this powerful symbolism hid a different face of the city and scarcely does justice to the political positions of those who resided there. For Berliners, more than the citizens of almost any other German city, gave their support to the Left. In the scarcely free elections of March 1933, when Hitler was already Chancellor, the Nazis gained roughly 44 per cent of all votes cast in the Reich, yet just over 31 per cent of those cast in its capital city. There the Social Democrats secured the support of 22.5 per cent of voters and the Communists over 30 per cent. Berlin was then and had for some time been a ‘red city’. I

THE BACKGROUND: ‘RED BERLIN’

Germany before the First World War saw the growth of the largest socialist movement in the world. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) won over a third of the popular vote in the Reichstag elections of 1912, making it easily the largest party in the country in terms of electoral support, and by 1914 had recruited over a million individual fee-paying members, who were further mobilised in a host of ancillary educational and leisure organisations: choral and dramatic societies, cycling, rambling, sport, chess and smoking clubs. Nowhere was this mobilisation of labour more marked than in Berlin itself. As early as 1907, 66.5 per cent of the capital’s voters gave their

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support to the SPD, while the party’s membership in Greater Berlin had reached no fewer than 121,689 persons five years later. Three of the local party branches in and around Berlin (two in the city and that of Teltow-Beeskow) were listed as third, fourth and fifth in size of all SPD locals.1 The reasons for the scale of Social Democratic support in imperial Germany’s capital are not difficult to find. Not only as a centre of government but also and much more as an industrial metropolis Berlin grew hugely and rapidly before the First World War. From a city of under 1 million inhabitants in 1875, it housed over 2 million in 1910. This process of urban growth was obviously associated with the development of industrial manufacture. Berlin was one of the centres of engineering and electro-technology (Borsig, AEG, Siemens, Schwarzkopff), which also expanded further during the First World War as armaments producers, of the textile industry, of the fashion and garments trade, and of finance and commerce. Of these Berliners in 1907, 53 per cent were employed in industry and manufacture, compared to a Reich average of under 43 per cent, and 61 per cent of the labour force were categorised as manual workers, compared to an average of 59.4 per cent in cities of over 100,000 inhabitants and a national average of 49.4 per cent.2 As a rule the organised labour movement of imperial Germany was strongest in the largest cities, not only absolutely but proportionally; and this was especially true in Protestant areas such as Berlin, Hamburg and the large Saxon towns.3 The political mobilisation of the Berlin working class was further facilitated by appallingly overcrowded housing conditions, which left little space for private or family-orientated leisure and encouraged the occupation of public spaces, such as the public houses in which Social Democrats organised their meetings. 4 The working-class districts of pre-war Berlin surrounded the administrative, commercial and cultural centre of middle-class Berlin. On days of Social Democratic demonstrations the bourgeois public felt itself invaded by a red menace. The existence of an independent and radical working-class culture in parts of imperial Germany, in particular in Berlin, before 1914 is crucial to an understanding of the social upheavals that characterised the country during and at the end of the First World War. Working-class radicalism was a product not just of the deprivations and hardships of war (which were certainly important and will be discussed below) but of precisely the traditional hostility to the semi-autocratic Wilhelmine state on the part of at least some sections of organised labour and of their desire, inculcated by pre-war Social Democracy, for some form of

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qualitative social change. It was no accident that opposition to the war and support for the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which broke away from the SPD in 1917, were strongest in those places where SPD branches had adopted radical positions and rejected reformism before 1914. Such was the case in Remscheid, Solingen, Düsseldorf, Brunswick, Göppingen, Stuttgart, Leipzig and parts of Berlin. In fact in Berlin the whole party organisation had swung to the opposition (against the SPD leadership and its support for the war effort) as early as 1916 and subsequently became one of the bastions of the Independents.5 A radical continuity of a different kind, one which concerns the SPD-orientated ‘Free Trade Unions’, can also be traced back to pre-war days in Berlin. Before the First World War the increasingly bureaucratised trade union leadership exhibited a growing unwillingness to unleash industrial conflict in the face of the fact that the success rate of strikes was declining whilst lock-outs, initiated by highly organised and powerful employers, proved more successful. This caution was not necessarily appreciated by a restive rank and file experiencing price inflation, an intensification of labour sometimes, but not always, associated with technological modernisation, and more ‘scientific’ techniques of management involving greater supervision of the labour force and an increased division of labour. As a result there emerged in certain places, as in the coal-mines of the Ruhr and the Hamburg docks, especially but by no means exclusively among younger workers, what the leading Social Democratic theoretician Karl Kautsky described as a ‘syndicalist under-current’. Not dissimilar developments could be identified in imperial Germany’s engineering industries, undergoing rapid expansion in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War. In several places a series of conflicts developed between the national leadership of the German Metalworkers Union (DMV), the largest trade union in the world, and its rank and file. In Mannheim union officialdom’s attempt to prevent strike action in 1908 led to unofficial strikes and a marked hostility to the central leadership on the part of the local shop stewards. Further struggles occurred in 1910 and came to a head in 1913. In some places there were demands for more power to be given to the local union branches. In others a reluctant union leadership was forced to give its support to industrial action as a result of pressure from the membership. Berlin was not immune from these developments, not least because of the traditions of shop-floor assembly and decision-making which had characterised the localist nature of DMV branches in the city. In many ways the emergence of the radical organisation of the socalled

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‘Revolutionary Shop Stewards’ (Revolutionäre Obleute) in the course of the First World War was a culmination of Berlin’s localist tradition and earlier conflicts with the leadership of the DMV. Significantly the emergence of a radical opposition between 1914 and 1918 was as much related to disputes within the Metalworkers Union as to political factionalism within the SPD; for the areas of greatest USPD strength were precisely those in which there had been strong rank-and-file opposition to the leadership of the DMV both before and during the war.6 On the eve of that war, therefore, the German labour movement was neither so quiescent nor as integrated into the German body politic as has often been imagined. II

THE WAR

At first sight the above statement might seem to be contradicted by developments in the first week of August 1914, when the Free Trade Unions abandoned industrial action for the duration of the war and the SPD agreed to vote for the government war credits in the Reichstag. Such actions have been deemed to represent the final abandonment of Social Democracy’s commitment to class-based politics, to betoken the abandonment of proletarian internationalism for nationalist class collaboration. This picture has been seriously called into question by much research. It appears that only a small group on the right of the SPD were both prepared for the war and wished to use the opportunity to change the party’s nature for good by participating in the national effort. Even they, however, expected such collaboration with the ruling authorities to bring about political change, namely the democratisation of the Reich, in return. For some of the party leaders such as Friedrich Ebert the prime aim was to preserve the party organisation above all else, not a principled commitment to a reformist course. Many parliamentary deputies and party officials were simply confused by the onset of hostilities and initially did not know how to react. The decision to support the war effort on the part of the SPD, which had organised massively supported anti-war demonstrations in the last week of July 1914, was really guaranteed only by the imperial Chancellor’s (Bethmann Hollweg’s) success in convincing most Social Democrats in circumstances of strict censorship that the Reich was about to be invaded by tsarist Russia. Under such circumstances support for a war of defence against autocratic despotism was guaranteed; but such support, as the Reichstag declaration of the party on 4 August made clear, was conditional. When it became clear to some party members that Germany’s war aims were not simply defensive, then their support

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for the government could no longer be vouched safe. Even the idea that the German working class became carried away by the nationalist frenzy on the outbreak of war has been called into question by detailed local studies.7 In any case, labour’s commitment to the war effort was to prove short-lived. It has to be admitted that explicit opposition to the SPD’s support for the war effort among party members was, at least initially, muted and numerically limited. It involved some party branches, such as that in Stuttgart, the party’s youth and women’s organisations and specific groupings of small numbers of radicals. The most famous of these was what subsequently developed into the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), whose members such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring met regularly in Berlin to discuss developments. They opposed the war from the start as an imperialist venture in which all capitalist states were equally culpable. Under such circumstances any concept of a ‘defensive’ war made little sense. The enemy was to be found not abroad but at home in the shape of the capitalist class. Despite opposition to the war, the Spartacists did not break away from the Social Democratic Party until it split more widely in 1917, when they joined the Independents. It was then not until late December 1918 that they left this organisation to participate in the foundation of the German Communist Party (KPD). Such a position was miles removed from Leninist insistence on the necessity of revolutionary purity, the creation of a vanguard party and the tactics of ‘revolutionary defeatism’. Closer to the Bolsheviks both in terms of personal contacts and political position were other radical groups which broke from the mother party early in the war: the Hamburg Left, the Bremen Left, which included Anton Pannekoek, and the so-called German International Socialists led by Julius Borchardt, based around the journal Die Lichstrahlen and with some not insubstantial support in the Berlin districts of Teltow and Charlottenburg. In the main, support for such groups was numerically tiny compared to that of the SPD.8 More significant was the emergence of a growing mainstream opposition within Social Democracy based not on the call for revolution but for ‘peace without annexations’, a return to the status quo ante bellum. This movement was fuelled by an increasing awareness that Germany’s war aims were far from defensive and it found expression in an important pamphlet written by the leading party figures Hugo Haase, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein in 1915 and entitled Das Gebot der Stunde (The Demand of the Hour). As time passed and the domestic situation continued to deteriorate,

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so support for this position grew and was institutionalised in a grouping of deputies and officials calling themselves the ‘Socialist Working Group’ (Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, or SAG) in 1916. Still within the SPD’s party organisation, members of this group engaged in a series of struggles with the official leadership for control of party institutions, in particular the press. In 1917 the opposition was effectively forced out of the party and reconstituted itself as the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) at a conference in the Saxon town of Gotha. Initially the new party could count upon the support of about a third of the previously united SPD’s membership.9 Significantly and as one might expect from the previous strength of radicals in the Berlin party organisation, the imperial capital developed into a centre of Independent strength. In March 1916 a general meeting of the SPD Berlin organisations adopted a resolution in support of the position of the SAG and subsequently their executive revealed sympathy for an anti-war resolution formulated by Rosa Luxemburg. By the summer of the same year supporters of the war effort had effectively been ousted from all positions of any importance in the Berlin party branches; and upon the foundation of the USPD in the spring of 1917 the whole Berlin organisation deserted to the Independents.10 At the same time oppositional elements became increasingly strong in the Berlin branches of several trade unions, not least that of the metalworkers. This opposition, close to the USPD, was in the majority in the DMV and in the Berlin printers’ and woodworkers’ organisations.11 This trade union opposition and the emergence of independent groups such as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, centred on the turners’ branch of the Berlin Metalworkers Union, was a consequence on the one hand of the increasing rapprochement between government and the official leaderships of the Free Trade Unions and SPD, and on the other of the increasing radicalisation of the German labour force in the face of material hardship. A significant group of Germany’s wartime leaders, in particular General Wilhelm Groener, recognised that a modern war necessitated uninterrupted arms production, which in turn required some help from the representatives of organised labour. As a result and in stark contrast to the situation in pre-war Germany, concessions were made to trade union leaders and their organisations. Outstanding legal actions against trade unionists were dropped, the unions were now allowed to recruit among groups whose mobilisation was previously illegal (state employees and rural labourers) and trade union leaders were exempted from conscription. They were also taken into the activities of the War

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Food Office, as was the Social Democrat August Müller, and into various other wartime committees, such as that of the Greater Berlin Metal Industry. During the hostilities trade unions participated in relief work for the dependents of soldiers and formed an important adjunct to the state authorities in the distribution of food. Most important of all were the provisions of the so-called Auxiliary Service Law, which came into force in late 1916. The law established committees in larger firms on which elected workers’ representatives sat. Much against the wishes of industrialists, the introduction of these committees gave the unions their first foothold in many large firms; and the massive growth in trade union membership from 1917 onwards was not least a consequence of this event.12 The rapprochement between the imperial government and the trade union movement was further facilitated by a significant increase in welfare provision during the war. In recognition of a debt to the victims of the conflict, invalids, war-widows and orphans received various kinds of support. Local and national efforts were made to control rents or provide rent subsidies and help with medical bills, while the massive unemployment in the consumer goods industries in the early part of the war led to the development of unemployment benefits and a system of labour exchanges. 13 Under these circumstances the attempt of trade union leaders to prevent or at least control industrial conflict for the duration of the war can be understood, much as it led to widespread discontent among the rank and file to be described below. Many union officials reconsidered their position and adopted one of positive support for the German war effort. One such official (Adolf Cohen, chairman of the DMV on the outbreak of war) was even prepared to state that the commencement of hostilities had been a godsend to his membership, as otherwise there would have been large-scale unemployment in the following winter.14 To some extent the leadership of German Social Democracy experienced the same changes between 1914 and 1918. Although not taken into government (unlike labour leaders in Britain and France), leading party figures were now consulted by various official governmental agencies, such as the War Food Office, and were no longer the pariahs they had been before the war. Like the unions, the SPD was also allowed to recruit from previously forbidden sections of the labour force and its publications were no longer prevented from reaching the troops. In consequence some on the right of the SPD were prepared to argue the German government’s case to neutrals and drew a blind eye to military atrocities involving Belgian prisoners of war.15

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At the same time that the trade unions and some Social Democratic leaders were beginning to look more favourably upon the imperial state, nothing could be further from the case as far as their supposed followers were concerned; for as the war dragged on, and even in fact in its first twelve months, clear signs of discontent began to emerge fuelled by a marked deterioration in living conditions. In the first place a combination of conscription of rural labourers into the army and the entente’s naval blockade of German ports led to a kind of food shortage almost unknown in an advanced industrial state. As the situation continued to get worse, especially in the ‘turnip winter’ of 1917–18, so decent food became hard to get and was earmarked for the black market, itself a cause of grievance and increasing class awareness. Germans had to be satisfied by progressive reductions in the bread ration and a variety of ‘ersatz’ food products. The resultant decline in calorific and protein intake provided little resistance to disease, in particular the influenza epidemic that hit Europe towards the end of the war, and produced a marked deterioration in the nation’s health. Food shortage was also, of course, one of the major factors in generating price inflation between 1914 and 1918. In Berlin a kilogram of beef, which had cost 176 paper marks in 1914, was to cost 469 in 1916 and 433 in 1918. One kilogram of rye-bread (29 paper marks in 1914) was to cost 49 paper marks in the latter year. The inevitable consequence was a marked reduction in the real value of wages. According to Gerhard Bry, German real wages in September 1918 were only 65.7 per cent of 1914 values. For those employed in the munitions industries the situation was slightly better, the real wage level in September 1918 being 76 per cent of that in March 1914. 16 Declining real wages were accompanied by an infuriating rise in the profits of big business during the war, a longer working day for the employee and a marked increase in the number of industrial accidents, itself a consequence of accelerated processes of production and the increased employment of newcomers to industry, especially in the shape of women and youths. In the large centres of war manufacture an influx of population exacerbated an already disastrous situation and led to spiralling rents before government intervention.17 As a result of increasing material hardship Germany’s home front could not be expected to remain quiescent; and indeed it did not. The first and most elemental form of protest was the demonstration or riot outside food shops. In February 1916 there were various incidents in Berlin in which women and the young participated in food riots; the summer of 1916 saw such disturbances in most of the Reich’s major

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cities; and by the following year they had spread to neighbouring but smaller towns, again with a prominent participation of females and the young. The idea that such forms of protest preceded and were distinct from subsequent strike action has been demonstrated to be untenable; for as early as 1916 food riots could turn into strikes and vice versa. Nor were food riots totally devoid of ‘political’ content. Local studies have shown that the state’s inability to organise a decent supply of food and its difficulties in controlling the black market, to which only the wealthy had access, led many to question the legitimacy of the regime: women standing in bread queues asked ‘Why are we fighting?’ and in some cases in and after 1917 mentioned the revolutionary upheavals in Russia with favour.18 Far more serious from the regime’s point of view was the onset of industrial conflict which threatened the war effort. In spite of the commitment of the official trade union leadership to industrial peace for the duration of the war, German workers were not prepared to remain inactive in the face of food shortage, rising prices and other forms of material hardship. Whereas the number of strikers plummeted to a mere 14,000 in 1915 (compared to 266,000 two years previously), official figures registered 240 strikes and 129,000 strikers in 1916, 561 strikes involving 667,000 in 1917, and 531 strikes of 391,000 participants in the following year. It is the case, however, that many strikes in 1918 went unrecorded. The strikes were especially common in the large armaments factories which employed the newest techniques of production and had a disproportionately large number of young and female workers in the labour force. Many were primarily concerned with economistic issues: with opposing cuts in the bread ration, with wage levels and working conditions. However, from 1916 onwards many industrial actions also possessed a political dimension, were accompanied by other forms of dissent (go-slows, absenteeism, theft), and could lead to violent clashes with the authorities, as in January 1918 in the Berlin districts of Wedding, Charlottenburg, Spandau and Moabit.19 There had been protest strikes in several Berlin factories in 1916 (AEG, Borsig, Ludwig Löwe). In April 1917 independent shop stewards organised co-ordinated action in many German cities against a cut in the bread ration; and in Leipzig at least, the strikes aimed at far more than an improvement in material conditions. There they also made the following demands: peace without annexations, the ending of censorship and the state of siege (i.e. martial law), the abrogation of the Auxiliary Service Law, disliked because it placed restrictions on labour mobility, the release of political prisoners and equal and direct suffrage throughout the

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Reich (a plea to end the discriminatory electoral systems that characterised most of the individual German states). Similar demands appeared during the great strike which commenced in Berlin on 28 January 1918, involved something in the order of 300,000 workers primarily from the large arms factories and was organised by the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, with significant USPD participation. However, the workers’ council elected by the striking metalworkers importantly included representatives of the SPD as well as the Independents, testifying to the widespread desire amongst the grassroots for the rediscovery of socialist unity. The first strike demand was for the rapid conclusion of peace, followed by increases in food rations, the restoration of civil liberties and protective labour legislation, the release of political prisoners, universal, equal and direct suffrage in Prussia, and a general democratisation of German political life. The strike was met with the systematic conscription of its leaders and military presence in the factories.20 It was more or less inevitable that wartime discontent could not be restricted to economistic issues. Forced to make sacrifices for a state which effectively excluded them from political decision-making and treated them at best as second-class citizens, German working men and women were bound to ask themselves why they had to carry the burden when war-profiteers amassed fortunes, big business increased its dividends and only the rich had access to the black market. It has been widely remarked that the democratic states were much more successful in mobilising labour during the conflict than the autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes of central and eastern Europe (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia), where mass discontent ultimately led to revolution in 1917 and 1918. The revolutionary upheavals at the end of the war testify to another intrinsic connection between economic deprivation and political change in wartime: to remove material deprivation one had to remove its cause. Between 1914 and 1918 the cause of such deprivation was manifestly the war itself. So the solution to economic hardship was to put an end to the conflict. But it is governments that wage and end wars. The failure of governments to put an end to the suffering both on the military front and at home thus led of necessity to demands for their removal; and this was precisely what happened twice in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in the following year. A final point needs to be made about the increase in manifestations of discontent through food riots, demonstrations and strikes, namely the prominent role of women and youths in protest. Their participation in food disturbances is scarcely surprising: women had often been in

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the forefront of consumer protests. Their involvement and that of younger workers in strike action, however, was at least in part a consequence of important changes in the structure of the labour force which affected Germany no less than other belligerent countries. The number of male employees under 16 years of age increased by 10 per cent during the war (from 384,000 to 421,000), whilst that of young females rose by no less than 52 per cent. This employment was made necessary by the call-up of adult males into the army and facilitated by technological modernisation, which in some cases enabled less skilled employees to perform tasks that had previously been the preserve of skilled males who had served apprenticeships. The widely perceived increase in the alienation of youth during the war can also be attributed to other factors.21 Even before the outbreak of war in 1914 contemporaries had identified a growing ‘youth problem’, reflected, they believed, in criminal statistics. During the war the problem became a good deal worse as various traditional forces of authority and social control lost their efficacy. Sons and daughters were brought up in fatherless homes, either because the father had been called up to the front or because he had been killed there. Parental presence was further removed as many working-class women went out to work in the munitions factories and as youngsters left the parental home and were attracted to places where the necessity of war production guaranteed them immediate and unprecedentedly high levels of remuneration. The ability to find work with such ease also led to a flight from apprenticeship, which had previously constrained independent youth activity. The control of the classroom disappeared in many places as schools were used as military hospitals or headquarters in some areas and as more generally conscription reduced the number of teachers. According to the authorities the result was a decline in morality and an increase in youth criminality. To prevent youngsters idling their time in gangs on street corners curfews were introduced and certain kinds of establishments (e.g. dance-halls) forbidden to the young, who also had a levy deducted from their wages. Not surprisingly such government interventions had precisely the opposite effects to those intended and further alienated workingclass youth. 22 As the war dragged on, as food became scarcer and more expensive, as martial law and autocratic government remained, so the discontent of the working masses grew. In Germany in 1918 it culminated in revolution.

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REVOLUTION

The first stage of the undermining of the old order in Germany began with what has been described as the ‘revolution from above’ and was not a direct consequence of lower-class insurrection. The German High Command, and in particular Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had effectively taken over the governance of the country and direction of the war effort from 1916 in place of an increasingly ineffectual kaiser, realised in late September 1918 that they had to all intents and purposes lost the war. They therefore embarked upon the adventurous step of handing over power to a civilian government led by Prince Max of Baden. His new coalition government even included members of the Social Democratic Party. The German military had taken this step not because of any commitment to democratic government but for two quite different reasons. First they wished to escape responsibility for defeat and transfer that responsibility on to the shoulders of civilian politicians in order to preserve the reputation of the German officer corps. (In this they were remarkably successful, as the subsequent growth of the ‘stab-in-the-back myth’ —the idea that Germany had not been defeated by external enemies but betrayed by domestic foes—shows.) Second, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, worried by increasing discontent at home and deteriorating morale within the ranks of the army, believed that if the entente powers refused to negotiate, then a subsequent remobilisation of the German people could only take place under a more popular regime. Whatever the reasons for its creation, however, the government of Prince Max was to prove short-lived. It failed to bring about an immediate ceasefire and left martial law, censorship and discriminatory fran-chises in place. The coalition itself was not representative of the balance of forces with the Reichstag; it was far from clear that it really could dictate to the military; and in the meantime food shortage, disease and price inflation continued to haunt the daily lives of millions of Germans. Early November 1918 thus was to see a much more profound upheaval, in which the government of Max of Baden was swept away. The ‘November Revolution’ began in the last days of October 1918 as a naval mutiny, when sailors in the High Seas Fleet in Kiel refused to obey admiralty orders to embark on a last-ditch confrontation with the British navy. The event in itself revealed just how fragile was the government’s authority, for the instruction to set sail clearly contradicted the wishes of that government, committed as it was to peace. This the sailors knew; and after years cooped up in port with lousy rations and no sympathy from their officers they mutinied.

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Subsequently armed sailors rescued their imprisoned colleagues from gaols. Thus began the revolution. Not much of a revolution, many have commented: the sailors had immediate grievances but little desire to change the political world. They were concerned with rations, the release of their friends and above all not to have to fight. Such a view contains a great deal of truth; but it is also far too simple. In themselves demands for peace and the freeing of political prisoners were not devoid of political consequences in the autumn of 1918. Some of the sailors in Kiel had established contacts with members of the USPD since troubles in the fleet in the previous year, though it would be utterly misleading to ascribe to the Independent Socialists any role in the actual organisation of the mutiny. Subsequently sailors rapidly established contacts with working-class organisations, first on the northern seaboard and then elsewhere. Through mobile flying squads they spread revolutionary initiatives throughout the Reich, appearing in Essen, Brunswick, Frankfurt am Main and even Munich. In Berlin the People’s Naval Division (Volksmarine), led by Heinrich Dorrenbach, had contacts with both the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and some of the Spartacists. Certainly the role of sailors in the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the war was more radical than that of the soldiery.23 In the first ten days of November 1918 the revolution spread the length and breadth of Germany. In Munich, for example, the Wittelsbach monarchy was replaced by armed groups of workers and soldiers under the leadership of the Independent Social Democrat intellectual Kurt Eisner, ironically one of the leading advocates of the revisionist cause before 1914. There and elsewhere the old order bowed before the demands of armed workers’ and soldiers’ councils with little or no resistance. In a sense the German bourgeoisie had been momentarily stupefied by the sudden announcement of defeat after years of government propaganda had promised a great and glorious victory. The legitimacy of the ruling authorities was further called into question by certain developments during the war which undermined the support that might have traditionally been expected from certain social groups, in particular the peasantry and white-collar workers. Peasants increasingly came to mistrust a regime which attempted to control their behaviour through various restrictions (the Zwangswirtschaft) such as the pegging of prices and control of the food supply. This explains how the revolution could take place in a state like Bavaria: for, although the Bavarian peasantry had little time for urban socialists, it was not prepared, at least in the November of 1918, to rally behind the old order. Similarly white-collar workers, who had either remained aloof

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from political and trade union organisation before 1914 or had joined an explicitly anti-socialist union (the German National Union of Commercial Employees), became increasingly disgruntled during the war, as a process of proletarianisation accelerated and their relative position in society deteriorated. From 1917 onwards white-collar workers joined the trade union movement in increasing numbers; and this time a majority of these new unionists were to be found in the Free Trade Unions, i.e. those close to the Social Democratic Party. In the elections of January 1919 it is clear that many of them gave their support to the SPD for the first time.24 There were few places where the revolution had been systematically prepared; and the organs of revolution were less the individual parties of the Left than the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. It is tempting to see in these institutions an imitation of the Russian soviets, for German workers were certainly aware of what had happened in the East. But like the soviets, these more or less spontaneously created bodies were expressions of self-determination on the part of workers and soldiers whose formal organisations were either inactive or placed under wartime restrictions. In some places workers’ councils were led by the USPD; more generally they were composed of representatives of both socialist parties; and from the start the councils of soldiers were more likely to come under the influence of the moderate SPD than more radical groups. Almost everywhere the old order was either removed without the necessity of violence or even—in the shape of mayors and bureaucrats—allowed to continue in office, albeit under the supervision of the local workers’ and soldiers’ councils. The failure to remove such figures was denounced by the revolutionary Left and was to prove a major problem for democratic politics during the Weimar Republic.25 Ironically Berlin was one of the few places where left-wing groups were attempting to organise the destruction of the old regime. On 4 November 1918, for example, members of the Spartacus group and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards determined upon action for 11 November. Their plans were obviously overtaken by the upheavals in northern Germany and in Bavaria; and by the decision of both the SPD and USPD leaderships to call a general strike in the capital on 9 November. On the morning of that day hundreds of thousands of workers, especially from the great arms factories in the north of the capital, marched into the city centre demanding both the ending of the war and the abdication of the kaiser, whose dismissal had been declared a prerequisite for the ending of hostilities by US President Wilson. In all, something like three-quarters of a million workers

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participated in this most important of acts in the collapse of the ancien régime. From the balcony of the royal palace the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht, who had earned enormous personal popularity by his opposition to the war and by his imprisonment, proclaimed the creation of a socialist republic. In front of other demonstrators and much to the disgust of his party leader Friedrich Ebert, one of the SPD’s most prominent politicians, Philipp Scheidemann, also proclaimed the coming of the republic from a balcony of the Reichstag building. In the wake of these developments the emperor was forced to abdicate at the military headquarters in Spa, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of Berlin elected a Central Council (Zentralrat) to represent their interests, and on 10 November a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Rat der Volksbeauftragten) was created. This new democratic and socialist body was composed of three SPD and three USPD representatives, once again reflecting the widespread demand among the ordinary workers of Berlin for socialist unity.26 On 10 November the new German Republic seemed to stand on the threshold of genuine revolutionary possibilities. First of all there was no army to repress the revolution. In most cases the garrisons based in the large towns fraternised with the workers, demanded peace and democratic reform and often attacked their officers, destroying insignia of rank and calling for a more democratic army. The combatants at the front returned formally in mid-December 1918 (though many soldiers had returned home without permission before then); but when the army crossed the Rhine, many soldiers simply went home to spend Christmas with their loved ones, thus frustrating the aims of some army commanders to deal with the councils once and for all. At a local level power was in the hands of armed workers’ and soldiers’ councils; while at the political centre of government socialists held the reins of power. Why, therefore, in the absence of strong opposition in the second half of November 1918 did the ostensible representatives of the German working class not follow the example of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in rooting out all the left-overs of the ancien régime and create a new socialist order? In truth it is not difficult to discover a multitude of reasons. Those who have believed that such an opportunity really did exist are given little credence by most serious historians. Germany was not Russia but a much more advanced and complicated industrial society. The peasantry, who still constituted a sizeable proportion of the population of the Reich, had been given the land in the nineteenth century and had already been mobilised in various anti-socialist organisations in the

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imperial period and thus did not resemble their Russian counterparts. A large and politically vociferous Mittelstand of small shopkeepers, small businessmen and independent craftsmen existed who might well dislike German big business but who equally resisted trade union organisation, felt aggrieved by competition from socialist co-operatives and as independent property owners shunned socialism and feared proletarianisation. Nor did Russia possess a real counterpart of Germany’s large and powerful industrial bourgeoisie, which could be guaranteed to fund anti-socialist activities, as it did in the case of the Freikorps in early 1919. Under such circumstances any attempt to push through revolutionary socialist initiatives was bound to encounter serious and potentially bloody resistance in a country far less polarised than revolutionary Russia. In fact what is really remarkable is the speed with which the counter-revolution constituted itself in Germany after the initial stupefacation of November 1918. In the first two weeks of January 1919 the Freikorps, called into existence by the Social Democratic Defence Minister Gustav Noske to put down left-wing insurrections, managed to mobilise no fewer than 400,000 men from former soldiers, students, the peasantry and other sections of nonworking-class Germany. These then repressed the Spartacist rising in Berlin in January 1919, subsequent upheavals there and various revolutionary initiatives in Munich.27 The problems of the Left in Germany at the end of the First World War, however, were not simply a consequence of the strength of its enemies but also of its own internal weaknesses and divisions. On top of the divisions that had characterised the German labour movement before 1914 (separate organisations of socialist, Catholic and Polish workers), the socialist movement itself, at least at the level of leadership and formal organisation, had been split asunder. As we have already seen, the USPD split off from the more moderate SPD in 1917. In 1918, whereas the leaders of the Majority Socialists wanted to consolidate parliamentary democracy, get the economy moving again and avoid risky political adventures, some within the USPD wanted more radical action, in particular the socialisation of the means of production and the retention of power in the hands of the workers’ councils. Such was the position of the Spartacists and some of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards. However, this position was not characteristic of all the Independents: for the glue that held the party together had been opposition to the war. Thus the USPD also included in its ranks the arch-priest of revisionism Eduard Bernstein and a large number of former ‘centrists’ such as Karl Kautsky, who were more cautious than Rosa Luxemburg and her fellow Spartacists. Of

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course these latter people left the USPD in late December 1918 and together with the Bremen and Hamburg Left and Borchardt’s International Communists formed the German Communist Party (KPD). But even this organisation bore little resemblance to the Leninist model of a vanguard party, was at this stage far from tightly organised and included in its ranks a significant number of syndicalists. There also existed other anarcho-syndicalist and leftcommunist groups in some parts of Germany. Finally the group which seemed to have the most influence in getting workers on to the streets of Berlin, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, refused to identify with any individual faction, fearing that this might jeopardise its authority, despite the fact that most of the stewards were close to the left wing of the USPD.28 Obviously such fragmentation of the Left scarcely helped the cause of socialist revolution, though it is more than a little doubtful that a united labour movement could have succeeded against its powerful enemies, a lesson taught with great brutality to the Austrian working class in the civil war of 1934. The problems of the Left were further compounded, however, by an almost total absence of what might be described as ‘revolutionary realism’. Not only was there no German Lenin or Trotsky but scarcely anyone with an idea about how a revolutionary seizure of power could be organised. The syndicalists and for that matter most of the Spartacists, in particular Rosa Luxemburg, had developed a distrust of almost all organisational forms as a result of Social Democracy’s ossified bureaucracy and its ‘organisational fetishism’. On the other hand many in the USPD subscribed to an extremely fatalistic view of history, which in the words of its leader Hugo Haase meant that ‘revolutions are not made, they simply happen’! Above all and perhaps most fatefully the Majority Socialists under their leader Friedrich Ebert adopted policies which from the point of view of the radicals could only be described as counter-revolutionary. Ebert himself is on record as declaring that he hated revolution ‘like sin’. On 10 November 1918, far from seeking to destroy the power of the old German officer corps, he came to an agreement with General Wilhelm Groener (the so-called ‘Ebert-Groener Pact), in which the SPD and the army leadership agreed to co-operate in the repression of Bolshevism in Germany. On the same day the official organ of the Social Democratic Party, Vorwärts, declared that the revolution was already completed, thus excluding the possibility of an immediate socialist agenda. Subsequently the SPD participated in governments which sent troops and Freikorps not only against

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communist insurrections but also against striking metalworkers and miners. 29 To describe such actions as a simple ‘betrayal’ of the German working class, as many historians of the former German Democratic Republic were wont to do, is, however, more than a little misleading. The fact that the SPD continued to enjoy the support of a sizeable proportion of the German working class alone is sufficient to indicate the problematical nature of any such claim. Furthermore the leadership of Social Democracy had good grounds for their caution. At the end of the war they saw their first task as the achievement of peace and the demobilisation of an army of approximately 7 million men with as little upheaval as feasible. They were concerned to restore food and fuel supplies to a hapless people as quickly as possible. Thus the time was not ‘ripe’ for socialist interference with the economic order. That would have to wait. There was also the possibility that the entente powers might simply step in and expropriate a socialised economy. Above all, attempts to push the revolution beyond its democratic phase in the near future would run the risk of a bloody and potentially disastrous civil war. Far better, thought the SPD leadership, to wait for a democratically elected parliament with broad popular support to bring about change. I have no doubt that the set of reasons outlined above has considerable validity and played a role in determining the SPD’s position during the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the First World War. However, the fact that Ebert and his colleagues acquiesced in the destruction of the German Left with apparently no bad conscience and did so moreover in collusion with right-wing bodies such as the army High Command and the Freikorps makes one think that the above does not constitute the whole story. In a sense the leadership of the SPD and for that matter of the Free Trade Unions was concerned with precisely the same issue as the officer corps, namely survival. It wanted to protect its interests and organisational empire against threats from workers’ councils and competing socialist organisations. In this it could rely upon the support of significant sections of the German working class. The extent to which the moderation of the SPD between 1918 and 1920 genuinely expressed the moderate nature of the German working class is a matter of some controversy. It has been argued that Germany escaped Bolshevik revolution because more affluent German workers lacked the revolutionary sentiment and drive of their Russian counterparts. There is considerable evidence to support this view. Many of the soldiers’ councils which came into existence in the course of the revolution renounced radical socialist aims quite explicitly; and where

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soldiers had to choose between the SPD and the USPD they preferred the first, more moderate organisation. Indeed it was through the soldiers rather than the workers that the SPD was able to establish some kind of hold on the revolution in Berlin on the night of 9–10 November 1918 when it appeared for a time that it had been sidelined.30 Among the workers’ councils themselves, however, it was the case that many saw their role as no more than the maintenance of law and order and the guarantee of food supplies. As already noted, it was not that common for councils to remove the old local authorities root and branch.31 The essential moderation of the German worker, so it is claimed, was demonstrated even more decisively at the National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils which met at the Busch Circus in Berlin in mid-December 1918. Here the attacks upon the Majority Socialists by Luxemburg and Liebknecht were met with disapproval. The slogan ‘All power to the councils’ and calls for a dictatorship of the proletariat were rejected in favour of elections for a national assembly, i.e. what the revolutionary Left denounced as ‘bourgeois democracy’. This was scarcely surprising given the composition of the congress: 288 of the delegates were Majority Socialists, of whom no fewer than 164 were salaried party functionaries, with only 80 Independent Socialists and 10 Spartacists in attendance.32 Yet more conclusive of the stance of German workers appeared to be the result of the national elections in January 1919: the SPD gained almost 40 per cent of the votes cast, while the USPD polled only 7.6 per cent. (The newly formed Communist Party decided to boycott the elections, testifying to the strength of syndicalist feelings among its relatively few supporters.) It is not the contention here to deny the strength of the moderate desires of significant numbers of German workers but rather to demonstrate that this is only one side of the coin and that other sections of the German working class had more extensive ambitions than merely peace and democratic reform. In fact the situation varied from town to town and from worker to worker. From the very outset of the revolution workers’ councils in certain places were dominated by the radicals and hailed the advent of the ‘socialist republic’. This was the case in Brunswick, Remscheid, Leipzig and Chemnitz and was also true of the provisional workers’ and soldiers’ council of Berlin. Demands for the socialisation of the means of production could also be detected among the labour force of several Berlin factories, such as Deutsche Motorwerke, Fritz Werner, von Flohr and Siemens-Schukert. The Central Council in Berlin equally claimed parity with elected representatives of government and saw itself as a watch-dog of revolutionary achievements.33

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The decisions of the National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils in Berlin also need to be subjected to greater scrutiny. The congress may have voted for parliamentary democracy rather than proletarian dictatorship; but it also made demands which went much further than the immediate policies of the SPD leadership, namely the quick socialisation of major branches of the German economy, the democratisation of the army and the establishment of an executive committee of councils to oversee governmental actions. And all of this despite the large presence of soldiers’ representatives, who were in the main not recruited from urban working-class backgrounds, and the overwhelming preponderance of SPD representatives at the conference.34 This last point suggests something of great significance. The precise relationship between the positions of party leaders and the attitude of their supposed followers is by no means easy to judge in times of rapid social upheaval, let alone at any other point in time. For it was difficult to recognise the exact differences between the various political factions in the early days of the revolution. In some places, as in July 1919, the SPD and USPD joined forces in calling for strike action, as in Bautzen, Kiel and Nuremberg, but were far less prepared to contemplate joint action in Berlin, Dresden and Wilhelmshaven. In Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Brunswick and Hanover the USPD and KPD co-operated with one another, whereas there was hostility between the two organisations in Dresden, Hamburg and Stuttgart. In the Ruhr some miners belonged to both the Communist Party and to anarcho-syndicalist organisations; while Rosa Luxemburg complained in December 1918 that the SPD and USPD had reunited in some localities. Such confusion is scarcely surprising given the absence of unity and the lack of clarity which characterised virtually all the radical groups. The fact that USPD representatives served in a coalition government with Majority Socialists until late December 1918 scarcely helped to clarify matters; whilst the USPD had a decentralised party structure which allowed considerable autonomy to local branches. The KPD was no more monolithic in its structure and ideology at its inception.35 As a result it is scarcely surprising that party labels gave little guide to the precise aspirations of the rank and file of the various organisations of the labour movement. Some members of Berlin’s executive council (Vollzugsrat) who were members of the SPD voted for the Independent Ernst Däumig’s proposal for rule by workers’ councils and against the immediate calling of a National Assembly. In the Ruhr many Majority Socialists joined the campaign for the socialisation of the mines, supported in

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that area even by Catholic miners’ organisations. Other SPD members resisted the decision by their leadership in the Council of People’s Commissars to dismiss the radical Berlin chief of police, Emil Eichhorn, in the first days of January 1919.36 What is quite clear is that many workers resented the split in the socialist camp. The Revolutionary Shop Stewards, who, as already stated, did not wish to be identified with any particular party, insisted on parity representation of the SPD and USPD in the strike committee of January 1918. After the events of 6 December 1918 in Berlin, when troops had fired on leftist demonstrators and some suspected Ebert’s complicity in a counter-revolutionary coup, workers of the AEG factory in the capital’s Hennigsdorf district downed tools in protest, yet at the same time refused to allow their protest to be understood as support for any one group. Even during the Spartacist Rising in Berlin in January 1919, in the midst of fratricide the workers of the AEG and Schwarzkopff concerns called for socialist unity, if necessary ‘without the leaders’.37 Such confusion means that it is not possible to view the election results of January 1919 as simple confirmation of the ‘moderation’ of German workers or an indication that they were in complete agreement with the marked caution of the national SPD leadership. Not only did that election take place at the beginning of a process of radicalisation which will be described below and in the circumstances of confusion outlined above, but also a disaggregated analysis of voting reveals a far more complicated pattern of working-class political choice. In Berlin as a whole the SPD gained 36.4 per cent of the vote, the USPD 27.6 per cent (much higher than its national 7 per cent), arguably demonstrating that the proximity to the SPD’s national leadership enabled Berlin workers to distance themselves from it earlier than elsewhere in the Reich. In the working-class districts of Friedrichshain and Wedding, in fact, the two parties were already more or less equal. There were even places (Leipzig and Halle-Merseburg) where the USPD outstripped its parent party in terms of support.38 What is certainly true is that a marked radicalisation of the German working class set in after the elections to the National Assembly in 1919. In the Reichstag elections of the following year the USPD increased its share of the vote to 18.8 per cent (less than three points behind the SPD) and had overtaken the Majority Socialists in many industrial centres. In Berlin itself the Independents clearly spoke for a majority of working-class voters: their share of votes cast now stood at 42.7 per cent compared with the SPD’s 17.5 per cent. What is more, as

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the USPD threatened to become Germany’s largest working-class party, it was itself moving to the left, reflected in its momentous decision in 1920 to join with the Communists and affiliate to Lenin’s Third International. 39 Within the trade union movement the giant Metalworkers Union fell clearly under the control of members of the Independent Social Democratic Party.40 The bloodiest testimony to increasing working-class discontent was a series of armed insurrections and general strikes: in Berlin in January and March 1919, in Bremen, Brunswick and Cuxhaven in the same January, in Mannheim in February and in Munich in April. The following year, 1920, saw a civil war in the Ruhr and a general strike in Berlin in response to the Kapp putsch, an attempt to seize power by counter-revolutionary Freikorps units. In the wake of the defeat of the coup even the cautious leader of the Free Trade Unions, Carl Legien, called for the formation of an allsocialist government with trade union representation, the punishment of the putschists, the dismissal of the SPD Minister of Defence and ‘bloodhound of the revolution’ Gustav Noske, the purging of reactionary elements from the German civil service, the immediate socialisation of the mining, power and potash industries, as well as the expropriation of non-productive landlords, the destruction of counterrevolutionary military formations and the appropriation of the duties of the security forces by labour. Even this stance, however, was not sufficient to guarantee the union leadership control of the strike movement in Berlin, where workers accepted the authority of a joint USPD-KPD strike committee.41 The radicalisation of significant numbers of German workers in 1919 and 1920 is not difficult to understand. The continuance of the entente naval blockade of Germany until the signing of the peace treaty prolonged serious food shortages at a time of widespread disease and high infant mortality. Inflation continued to erode any nominal wage increases; while the winter of 1918–19 was also to witness an increase in levels of unemployment, as a result of the demobilisation of the army and transition to a peace economy. From 300,000 out of work on 1 December 1918, the figure rose to 1.1 million by the end of the following February. Although not a massive figure in comparison with the later experience of the Weimar economy, it is significant that this unemployment was concentrated in places that were already politically volatile: in the Reich’s capital over 250,000 were without jobs and there is some evidence to suggest that the Spartacists and other left-wing organisations gained some support from such people in the north-east of the city.42 Material hardship alone, however, need not necessarily lead to radical working-class politics, as British and American experience

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testifies. In Germany the pre-existence of a radical culture, discussed at the start of this chapter, was equally relevant, as was the fact that it was an SPD government which sent Freikorps and later troops against striking workers. The failure of that party to bring about real economic and social change led rapidly to disillusionment, as in the case of the passage through the Reichstag in 1920 of the ‘Factory Council’ Bill. This set up in large plants workers’ organisations which had to be consulted by management about some aspects of working conditions; but for those who wanted the expropriation of the capitalists and some real form of workers’ control it was but a pale and inadequate substitute. As a result there were massive demonstrations outside the Reichstag building, leading to clashes with police and to fatalities. IV

THE FAILURE OF THE LEFT

The radicalisation of German labour in the wake of the November revolution was not accompanied by successful socialist revolution. We have already seen the reasons for this: the strength of the Right, the divisions of the Left leadership, the regionally circumscribed nature of many of the uprisings, which took place at different moments in time and were easily repressed by military force. It is also true that the process of radicalisation did not apply to all sections of the labour force. The SPD continued to win the support of many workers in areas of older industry, among older workers and workers with craft skills, such as printers. Younger workers in large and more modern plants, on the other hand, were conspicuous among more radical organisations, especially in the mining and metalworking industries. Yet the very confusion of party labels described above, the fact that some groups of skilled workers— engineering craftsmen, pipe-fitters in Berlin, cutlers in Remscheid and Solingen—were prominent in revolutionary ranks, while the SPD did reasonably well among less skilled textile workers in Saxony, should warn against any simplistic structural model of radicalism.43 However radical some sections of the German working class became, the prospects of socialist revolution were always remote and became ever more so as time progressed. But the ‘German revolution’ should not be dismissed as a non-event. It brought about peace and the democratisation of the Reich. For the first time labour organisations could participate in national, regional and local government. A consequence of this was advanced welfare reform and a transformation of labour legislation, in which previously

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recalcitrant employers were forced to recognise and deal with trade unions. These reforms, however, and even more having to pay for them, were precisely what set non-proletarian Germany against the Weimar Republic.44 NOTES 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

W.Guttsman, The German Social Democratic Party (London, 1981), p. 93; David W.Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1975), p. 69. Guttsman, op. cit., p. 91. ibid., pp. 91–3. In industrial but Catholic cities such as Cologne and Aachen German Social Democracy remained weak. On housing conditions in Berlin see Dietrich Mühlberg et al., Arbeiterleben um 1900 (2nd edn, Berlin, 1985), pp. 68 and 83 f. For the social consequences of dense housing see Dick Geary, ‘Workingclass culture in imperial Germany’, in Roger Fletcher (ed.), From Bernstein to Brandt (London, 1987), pp. 11–15. The argument for continuity is stated at greater length in Dick Geary, ‘Radicalism and the German worker’, in Richard J.Evans (ed.), Politics and Society in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), pp. 267–86. On Brunswick, see Friedhelm Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachsen (Bonn, 1981); on Düsseldorf, Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and German Society (Cambridge, 1981). For Berlin, see Morgan, op. cit., p. 69. Geary, ‘Radicalism’, p. 279 f.; Klaus Schönhoven, ‘Localism-craft union-industrial union’, in Wolfgang J.Mommsen and Hans-Gerhard Husung (eds), The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany (London, 1986), pp. 219–38; and Dirk H.Müller, ‘Syndicalism and localism in the German trade union movement’, in ibid., pp. 239–49. The best description of discussions within the SPD leadership is to be found in the opening chapters of Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf (Düsseldorf, 1974). The idea that SPD support for the war credits vote marked a major turning-point is demolished by Detlef Lehnert, ‘Zwischen Arbeiterinteressen und Staatsraison’, in F.-G.Dreyfus (ed.), Réformisme et révisionisme dans les socialismes allemand, autrichien et français (Paris, 1984), pp. 4–13; and by Dieter Groh, ‘Einige Überlegungen zur Herausbildung des Reformismus in Deutschland vor 1914’, in ibid., pp. 64–6. Evidence that workers were not caught up in the general enthusiasm for war can be found in Boll, op. cit., pp. 151–3; Volker Ullrich, ‘Everyday life and the German working class, 1914–18’, in Fletcher (ed.), op. cit., p. 56; and Geoff Eley, ‘The SPD in war and revolution’, in ibid., p. 66. For general developments on the left during the war see Miller, Burgfrieden; A.J.Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918 (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 33–139; J.P.Nettl, Rosa Luxenburg (Oxford, 1966); Helmut Trotnow, Karl Liebknecht (New York, 1984); Gilbert Badia,

48

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

Dick Geary Le Spartakisme (Paris, 1966); G.Mergner, Arbeiter und Intelligenz (Starnberg, 1973); Manfred Bock, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus in Deutschland (Meisenheim, 1969); Warren Lerner, Karl Radek (Stanford, Calif., 1980), pp. 76–90. Das Gebot der Stunde is reprinted in Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD (Berlin, 1921), pp. 72–4. By far the best account of the development of the USPD is Morgan, op. cit. Nettl, op. cit., p. 647; Morgan, op. cit., p. 69; Miller, Burgfrieden, p. 148; Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution (Hamburg, 1981), p. 270 f. Heinrich Potthoff, Gewerkschaften und Politik zwischen Revolution und Inflation (Düsseldorf, 1979), p. 85 f. The best description of the development of the trade unions during the war is to be found in Bieber, op. cit. On the development of co-operation see Gerald D.Feldman, Army, Industry and Labour (Princeton, NJ, 1966). For welfare developments during the war see Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1978). Emil Barth, Aus der Werkstatt der Revolution (Berlin, 1919), p. 11. The best description of SPD positions is to be found in Miller, Burgfrieden. G.Hohorst et al., Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, vol. II (Munich, 1978), p. 83; Ullrich, op. cit., pp. 55 ff.; Ryder, op. cit., pp. 67 ff.; Gerhard Bry, Wages in Germany (Princeton, NJ, 1966), p. 211; Bieber, op. cit., pp. 200 ff. and 416–25. ibid., pp. 203–10; Mergner, op. cit., p. 88 f. Ute Daniel, ‘The politics of rationing versus the politics of subsistence’, in Fletcher (ed.), op. cit., p. 89 f.; Ullrich, op. cit., pp. 61 ff.; Boll, op. cit., pp. 200–7. Hohorst et al., op. cit., p. 114; J.S.Drabkin, Die Novemberrevolution in Deutschland (Berlin, 1968), p. 57. Fritz Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiterverband (Hanover, 1957), p. 55 and p. 72; Drabkin, op. cit., p. 151; Morgan, op. cit., p. 83 and pp. 89 ff. Sylvia Kontos, Die Partei kämpft wie ein Mann (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 28; Bieber, op. cit., pp. 203–10; Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1984), p. 17. Bieber, op. cit., pp. 210–13; Klaus Tenfelde, ‘Grossstadtjugend in Deutschland vor 1918’, Vierteljahresheft für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 69 (1962), pp. 64–6; Dick Geary, ‘Jugend, Arbeitslosigkeit und politischer Radikalismus am Ende der Weimarer Republik’, Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte 34 (1983), pp. 304–9. By far the most sensitive treatment of youth is to be found in Detlev Peukert, Jugend zwischen den Kriegen (Cologne, 1987). A standard account of the events of the revolution is to be found in Ryder, op. cit. On the naval mutiny see D.Woodward, Mutiny in the High Seas Fleet (London, 1973) and D.Horn, The German Naval Mutinies of World War I (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969). For t h e l a t e r a c t iv i t i e s o f s a i l o r s s e e E b e r h a r d B ü c h n e r, Revolutionsdokumente, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1921), pp. 119 and 124;

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24 25

26

27 28

29

30 31 32 33

34

35

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Karl Anlauf, Die Revolution in Niedersachsen (Hanover, 1919), p. 97; Heinrich Ströbel, The German Revolution and After (London, 1940), passim. Michael Prinz, ‘Das Ende der Standespolitik’, in Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Angestellte im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen, 1981), pp. 334–8. On the councils see Peter von Oertzen, Betriebsräte in der November-revolution (Düsseldorf, 1963); F.L.Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe 1918–1919 (London, 1972); Ulrich Kluge, Soldatenräte und Revolution (Göttingen, 1975); Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik (Düsseldorf, 1962). A narrative account both of developments in Berlin and of the various institutions of the revolution can be found in Charles B.Burdick and Ralph H.Lutz, The Institutions of the German Revolution (London, 1966). On revolutionary prospects see Reinhard Rürup, Probleme der Revolution in Deutschland (Wiesbaden, 1968). On the Freikorps see Richard L.Waite, Vanguard of Nazism (New York, 1969). On the USPD see Morgan, op. cit; for the Spartacists, Nettl, op. cit., and Trotnow, op. cit. Also Eric Waldman, The Spartacist Uprising (Milwaukee, Wis., 1955). On the KPD see H.Weber, Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1969) and H.Weber, Die Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). On left-communist and syndicalist groups see Bock, op. cit. On the Revolutionary Shop Stewards see Richard Müller, Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik (Berlin, 1924), pp. 66 and 103. On the role of the SPD in the revolution see Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf, 1978) and H.A.Winkler, Die Sozialdemokratie in der Revolution 1918/19 (Berlin, 1979). Kluge, op. cit. The essential moderation of the councils is stressed in Ryder, op. cit., and Carsten, op. cit., and in G.A.Ritter and S.Miller, Die deutsche Revolution (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). Waldman, op. cit., p. 129 n. Ritter and Miller, op. cit., p. 76; W.Sollman, Die Revolution in Köln (Cologne, 1918), p. 11; Büchner, op. cit., p. 75 f.; Anlauf, op. cit., p. 99; Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Berlin, 1968), p. 195; Eduard Bernstein, Die deutsche Revolution (Berlin, 1921), p. 59; Drabkin, op. cit., p. 120. Jürgen Reulecke, Arbeitebewegung an Rhein und Ruhr (Wuppertal, 1974), p, 245; Pierre Broué, Révolution en Allemagne (Paris, 1971), p. 349; R.Müller, Der Bürgerkrieg in Deutschland (Berlin, 1925), p. 130; R.F.Wheeler, USPD und Internationale (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), pp. 95–8; Morgan, op. cit., passim; Illustrierte Geschichte, pp. 313–16; Badia, op. cit., p. 183; Bock, op. cit., pp. 154 ff. ibid., p. 117; Morgan, op. cit., passim; H.Weber (ed.), Die Gründungsparteitag der KPD (Frankfurt am Main, 1969) gives an account of the confusion in the KPD’s ranks at its founding congress.

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36 Bock, op. cit., p. 120; Reulecke, op. cit., p. 245; Broué, op. cit., p. 349; Kolb, op. cit., p. 131; Drabkin, op. cit., p. 240; Carsten, op. cit., p. 67; Gerhard Schmolze, Räterepublik in München (Düsseldorf, 1969), p. 24; Rosa-Meyer Leviné, Leviné (Munich, 1972), p. 109. 37 Müller, Vom Kaiserreich, pp. 66 and 103; Badia, op. cit., p. 66n.; Bernstein, op. cit., pp. 46 ff., p. 96 and p. 154; Drabkin, op. cit., p. 498. 38 ibid., pp. 538–50; Broué, op. cit., pp. 290 ff. 39 This is the major theme of Wheeler, op. cit. 40 See Opel, op. cit. Also Potthoff, op. cit., p. 85 f. 41 On the uprisings and their repression see Werner T.Angress, Stillborn Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1963). On reactions to the Kapp putsch see Richard N.Hunt, German Social Democracy 1918–1933 (Chicago, 1970), p. 182 f . 42 Badia, op. cit., pp. 214, 277; Bernstein, op. cit., p. 71; Kolb, op. cit., pp. 319 ff. 43 Geary, ‘Radicalism’, pp. 281 ff. 44 Preller, op. cit.

3

Munich in turmoil: social protest and the revolutionary movement 1918–19 Martin H.Geyer

I

After the Communist council republic in Munich had been suppressed in the early days of May 1919, contemporaries were confronted with the challenge of explaining the causes and the peculiar development of this local revolution, one that at first glance seemed to share so many similarities with its ominous predecessor, the Russian revolution. Why, of all places in Germany, was the republic first proclaimed in November 1918 in a city which so cherished its own image of liberality, social peace and easy living and which appeared to be dominated by the petty bourgeoisie instead of the working class? Why Munich instead of Berlin? How does one explain the dynamics of the radical movement leading to the Communist council republic in April of the following year? These questions were just as confusing at the time as they are today. However, there were also some ready answers. The revolution was supposedly caused by a group of ‘uprooted’, primarily alien, socialists and Jews who were able in a moment of war weariness to capture the political initiative, grab the reins of power over the multitudes and keep that power in the hands of a few for a while. Medical experts diagnosed the revolutionary leaders as ‘psychopaths’. According to a modern author who argues in a similar fashion, the revolution’s origins lay in a ‘broad demoralised mass—not Volk but uprooted mob’ and this mass was led by a handful of ‘doctrinaires and writers’, who confused Schwabing, the Latin quarter of the city, with Munich itself and with Bavaria.1 In the mid-1920s the sociologist Theodor Geiger wrote astutely that it was necessary for the leaders of the revolution to be depicted as ‘seducers’ in order to make them responsible for what happened and to enable their repentant, ‘seduced’ followers to return to the forgiving

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arms of the old order.2 But who were the politically ‘seduced’? How were the masses mobilised and what kind of relationship existed between them and their leaders? While conservatives criticised the ‘heads’ of the revolution, the extreme Left had little good to say about the Munich proletariat, which lacked both ‘discipline’ and ‘revolutionary tradition’, as Hans Kain, one of the founders of the local organisation of the Spartakusbund complained bitterly later in the summer of 1919: its only tradition was ‘gluttony and drinking’, and even within the party itself there was constant fighting over a good place at the trough. His complaint that the ‘immature masses’ became more and more ‘undisciplined’ during the spring of 1919, was shared by many.3 Similar complaints were voiced by the unions as well as the parties which had tried to integrate the radical mass movement into their ranks and to exert a ‘taming’ influence on it; the revolution had developed a dynamic of its own that was almost impossible to control. The young expressionist writer and leader of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) Ernst Toller, reflecting on his own role in the revolution, came to the disillusioned conclusion that the law and the consequences of an individual’s struggle were determined by factors other than personal good intentions.4 The causes, conditions and forms of political mobilisation and radicalisation following the First World War will be examined in this chapter. In particular, attention will be paid to the emergence of an unusual social protest movement, the origins of which lay in fundamental social changes resulting from the mass mobilisation of society during the war, the depreciation of the currency and the failure of the regulated economy. The impact and potential of this social protest movement, which was in no way limited to the period during the war and immediately after it, could be felt everywhere in Germany. 5 It was the particular economic, social and political conjunctions that were to lead to an outburst of radicalism such as that which occurred in Munich and other parts of Germany starting in the winter of 1918–19. II

Although the protracted duration of the war created wide-ranging dissatisfaction, new conflicts and disillusionments, these factors alone were not necessarily predestined to lead to a situation that inevitably culminated in the destruction of the old political order in 1918. The Russian revolution might have appeared to many as a premonition of Germany’s fate should the war be lost; but at the time it was also

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welcomed. In fact, the idea of revolution, which had greatly plagued the pre-war German elite, suddenly seemed full of opportunities for the nation’s future. The October revolution of the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin, who in early April 1917 had been allowed to travel through Germany in a special train taking him from his Swiss exile back to Russia, appeared to the German High Command to be an apt instrument of waging war by other means.6 The turmoil in Russia seemed to bring the war on the Eastern Front to a quick end, thus permitting the military to seize the initiative again on the Western Front to abandon the demoralising trench war, and finally to wage successfully the ‘decisive battle’ that the military leadership had been promising since 1914. It is not astonishing that the war’s duration caused turmoil and dissatisfaction. Very few apsects of life went untouched by the military and economic mobilisation during the war. Usually changes were most obvious in the economy, and Munich proved to be no exception. As the fourth largest city in the Reich, Munich had a strong industrial base but it was certainly not what one would consider to be an industrial city. Prevalent were small-scale industries both in consumer and capital goods employing fewer than a thousand persons. Private and public services, namely the railway and postal services, employed a far greater number of workers than did the rapidly expanding sector of the metal industries. Considering the large number of employees in the public sector, contemporaries stressed time and again the fundamentally petty-bourgeois character of the city. Last but not least, the relatively large number of persons living on incomes which were not marketrelated—such as rentiers, pensioners and students—played a large part in shaping the image of Munich as the city of easy, although not necessarily luxurious, living. Despite the continuities of some of the basic social structures, the war economy and the drafting of a large number of men into the army both caused a major reshuffling of the labour force. Although there were voices complaining continuously that Bavaria was not receiving enough war contracts, Friedrich Zahn, the director of the Bavarian Office of Statistics, praised the war as the ‘creator of new values’.7 The metal industries in particular were booming, and new plants were being built. Altogether about 20,000 new jobs were created, thus balancing out the loss of jobs in the consumer industries and among artisan crafts. The labour force decreased only by about 4 per cent between 1913 and 1918 in Munich as opposed to 8 per cent nationwide. In the same period, the number of male workers in industries with more than nine employees was reduced by a third (nation-wide

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by a fourth), whereas the number of employed women increased by 87 per cent (while only by 50 per cent in the national average) and that of male and female youth by 33 and 80 per cent, respectively. Although the overall increase of female labour was smaller due to the closing of other industries, a 1917 survey shows that most of the female workers in the munition industries of Munich were relatively young. Only a fifth of them had any previous experience in industrial work, whereas a large number had never worked or had been employed as domestic servants.8 However, for many the war economy meant more than just new types of employment. Hunger and what was at times an extremely poor supply of goods essential to daily life became experiences common to almost everybody, even though hardship was not as extreme in Munich as in other German industrial cities. Many resentments were caused by the fact that the ‘war profiteers’ did not suffer equally, but instead led a life of supposed luxury. Successive efforts to extend state regulation by way of rationing, the fixing of ceiling prices, and prosecuting evaders failed; starting in 1916–17, practically every man and woman who wanted to feed themselves and their family decently had to buy on the black market or to scour the countryside for food. It was a peculiar twist of Bavarian regionalism that the regulated economy was resented as yet another form of Prussian ‘conspiracy’. According to mouth-to-mouth propaganda and rumours, it was Prussia that was getting ‘fat’ on the food that the south produced. This fed the fires of widespread anti-Borussianism which traditionally featured a strong anti-state quality.9 The initially infrequent public protests against hunger, supply bottlenecks and soaring inflation and the growing disillusionment with the course of the war—summarised under the catchword ‘war weariness’ even in reports of the time—were, to a certain extent, not class-specific phenomena. These discontents soon led to a coming together of disparate groups of the urban population. The politicisation of this vague protest phenomenon would significantly contribute to the peculiar dynamics of the revolutionary movement of 1919. Yet this protest coalition, which Jürgen Kocka has aptly termed an ‘antiVerwaltungs-Koalition’ (anti-Administration coalition),10 was never formally structured. To some degree the regulated economy concealed the fact that blue-collar and white-collar workers, government officials and artisans, country people and city dwellers experienced the economic situation quite differently. Were not the workers, namely those employed in the armament industries, profiting from high wages and food supplies with which the companies bribed them into tolerating

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the overextended working hours and poor living conditions, whereas large numbers of employees and civil servants with fixed wages had to be satisfied with minimal cost-of-living allowances? Did not the urban consumers suffer from the greed of the farmers which it became common to call ‘usury’? ‘Justice’ and ‘equity’ became morally laden codewords with which all social groups tried to rationalise their particular demands. They were a reflection of the crumbling traditional system of deference and social prestige, and an indication that even seemingly well-established legal relations had to be renegotiated due to the inflation concealed under the veil of the regulated economy.11 When the war ended, very few actually recognised the major long-term social transformations that were taking place due to the inflation, yet nearly everyone complained about what were in essence their immediate effects. Dissatisfaction with the war grew as living conditions worsened. The politicisation of this protest potential was significantly to determine the course of the revolution. As has already been mentioned, however, this was not a linear ‘learning process’ which necessarily culiminated in revolution. Women would gather at shops and markets to voice their outrage at the meagre supply of goods or at the high prices being demanded there, but they seldom organised demonstrations in protest against the shortages. Workers would strike spontaneously in demand for higher wages, yet frustrated most attempts to mobilise them politically during the war. Clearly the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917 gave political leaders of the Left more self-confidence. They were proof that even autocratic regimes were bound to fall during the course of the war and that the war could not be fought against the majority of the people. Even though the majority of moderates within the labour movement felt strengthened in their demands for reforms of the political system, the radicals of the various leftist splinter groups ridiculed what they considered to be narrow-minded reformism.12 In contrast with the so-called January strike of 1918, the wave of strikes that shook Germany in the first half of 1917 at the time of the worst war supply crisis left Bavaria largely untouched.13 In the course of these nation-wide strikes, which had actually started in Austria and Hungary, the Independent Socialists, organised since 1917 as the USPD won support. They were led by Kurt Eisner, a writer and journalist for the Socialist party press and an ardent opponent of the strategy of the Majority Social Democratic leadership’s support of the war. The USPD succeeded in mobilising numbers of the Munich metalworkers with demands for peace without annexation, the

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democratisation of the franchise and the lifting of martial law (which at the beginning of the war had put all of Germany’s public life under military supervision). But the strikes were limited to large firms, and Eisner and his people failed to convince other professions to join the effort; still, nearly 8,000 people participated in Munich. With Eisner and other leaders imprisoned during the strike, the local section of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) could assume control of the strike committee. Certainly it was not only out of tactical considerations that the SPD leadership stressed as the cause of the strike economic issues rather than the political one of calling for the end of the war, though that constituted the heart of the USPD campaign. It was also an effort to free the strike movement from its political isolation and, in doing so, to reintegrate it into the broader public’s dissatisfaction with the course of the war. III

Despite the extensive contemporary documentation of the widespread war weariness starting in 1916–17, it should not be forgotten that apparently very few people in Munich or anywhere else in Germany thought that the war could or would be lost. The military offensives in the spring of 1918 initially heartened both the soldiers and the civilian population. At the core of the confrontation between radicals, moderates and conservatives were the issues concerning the terms for ending the war, namely Germany’s war aims. To conservatives the Left’s demand for peace without annexations and indemnities smacked of defeatism. Yet until July 1918, the expectation was widespread even among the opposition that the German military position was fairly good, and that the war could be stopped without disadvantaging Germany. Clearly by the summer of 1918 little was left of the original enthusiasm for what had soon turned out to be an extremely bloody offensive. Troops revolted when they received orders to transfer from Munich to the front lines.14 The collapse of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey in September caused disillusionment, and rumours spread that southern Bavaria might become a battleground. With regard to the general mood of the population, a conservative Munich writer noted in his diary in mid-September that ‘the demobilisation of emotions had already started’.15 It came as a shock both to the government and the public when the news spread in early October that the war could not be won and that an armistice had to be agreed upon as soon as possible. The exchange of

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notes with US President Wilson during October and the revolution that erupted in neighbouring Austria on 21 October dramatised life in the weeks that followed. While nationalists talked about mass mobilisation in order to organise a ‘national defence’, domestic order was crumbling with astounding speed. The old political authorities, namely the monarchical government and the military, lost all credibility; they were considered as major obstacles to peace. Political reforms that had been discussed for years were whipped through the Bavarian Parliament.16 For conservative activists it was a traumatic experience to see large sections of the middle classes, in addition to workers, falling for Allied ‘propaganda’ calling for the quickest possible end to the war, worst of all when it came from England which was usually seen as the ‘archenemy’. Revolution was viewed as betrayal, and those who advocated a political revolution were considered to be aiding and abetting the enemy.17 In fact this outlook was to link the anti-English campaigns of the war period with anti-Bolshevism and the ‘stab in the back’ legend following the Armistice. A peculiar situation was emerging in Munich. The by-election campaign for the seats held in the Reichstag and the Bavarian Diet by the old and ailing Bavarian party leader of the SPD, Georg von Vollmar, was in full swing. The issue of peace stood in the forefront. The USPD and its leader Kurt Eisner, who was released from prison early due to his candidacy, contributed to a political radicalisation by accusing the Majority Socialists of siding with the old elites. In turn the SPD under its new leader Erhard Auer was forced to take a clear and strong stand on the peace issue.18 The conviction was widely held, not only in Munich, that Germany was on the verge of revolution. The USPD campaigns calling for the republic did their part to reinforce such views. During the SPD party congress in October, it was obvious that even among the SPD many had become dissatisfied with their leadership. Auer countered such discontent by arguing that the revolution was indeed long under way even if this was not very conspicuous due to the fundamentally new way in which it was being carried out: ‘By disciplining the workers— and that is a credit to the labour movement—other forms of revolution are at our disposal since it is possible to attain legally that for which we fought for years.’19 This view was quite representative of the majority of the SPD leadership in the Reich who had taken up the ‘burden of power’20 and who in the words of a Bavarian Socialist finally wanted to ‘reap the rewards of the long years of opposition’.21 In their eyes, parliamentary monarchy certainly was the best way to secure this harvest. It fell to the radicals to undertake any major political initiative.

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Just how fragile state authority had become was laid bare by the fact that three participants in the January strike were freed from prison in a manner reminiscent of the French Revolution, following a peace demonstration organised by the Munich section of the USPD on 3 November. News of the sailors’ uprising in Kiel reached Munich the next day, thus helping to reinforce expectations of change. For its part, the government found itself in a strange state of uncertainty, a new Cabinet having been named but not approved. The news from Kiel was registered with concern, but the government lulled itself into the false security of believing that the army was still firmly under its control. Other groups prepared themselves for the critical moment to come: for example, the various organisations representing transportation, post and telegraph workers co-operated in drafting a pamphlet in which they stated in advance their opinion on a possible overthrow while emphasising their own economic interests.22 Yet it still came as a surprise when a small group of hardly more than 1,000 under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, in his words, ‘unhinged the old Bavaria’ with a Husarenstreich (coup)23 following a huge peace demonstration in the afternoon of 7 November which had been staged together with Auer and the Free (Socialist) Trade Unions. Eisner and his men were able to capture the barracks with little resistance due to the enthusiastic support of the soldiers. Only a few hours after the demonstration, soldiers’ councils and a provisional workers’ council had been formed, and by the late evening the ministries, the railroad station, the post and telegraph offices were in the hands of the revolutionaries. At 10.30 p.m., Eisner called together the ‘preliminary constituent assembly of the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ council’ in the halls of the Bavarian Diet, where he proclaimed the founding of the Republic of Bavaria in the early hours of the next day. He called upon council members to assemble in order to govern the new republic until a permanent council had been established and a national assembly could be elected by universal, direct and secret ballot. By the afternoon of the following day, Eisner had assembled a Provincial National Council in which members of the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ council, parliamentarians from the SPD, the Liberals (but not the conservative Catholic Centre Party) and Bavarian Farmers’ League (but not the more influential Christian farmers’ organisations) were represented. Eisner headed the provisional government in which the SPD had four and the USPD three ministers. The fact that Eisner’s coup had been a bloodless one could be interpreted less as a sign of its own strength than as a sign of how weak the monarchy had actually become in its final days: the new

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revolutionary government was able to consolidate its power only because the example of Munich was repeated in other Bavarian cities within a short period of time.24 Even if large numbers of the population originally did not agree with the idea of revolution and approved even less the installation of so bohemian a leader as Kurt Eisner, at least in Munich the new status quo was accepted with amazing speed. In the elections for the Bavarian Diet on 12 January, Eisner received in Munich only a miserable 4.7 per cent of the vote, whereas the SPD received 47.1 per cent and the Liberals, who clearly spoke out in favour of the republic, 18 per cent of the vote. Even among the ranks of the conservative (Catholic) Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), a large number refused, at least at the time, to mourn the bygone days of the monarchy, choosing instead to set their sights on a non-Socialist republic, which was indeed the outcome to be expected, based on the overall election results in Bavaria. The days of the November revolutionary government were indeed numbered. On 21 February, when the Diet first assembled, all signs indicated that Bavaria was on its way towards establishing a parliamentary system of government. The assassination of Eisner on his way to the Diet by Count Anton von Arco Valley, and a few hours later the attempted murder of Erhard Auer, who was accused of being the grey eminence behind Eisner’s murder, by a member of the revolutionary workers’ council, became a decisive turning-point in the history of the political revolution in Bavaria. With Eisner dead, Auer seriously wounded, the Diet disbanded and other ministers of the previous Cabinet hiding out of a cowardly fear of further assassination attempts, Bavaria suddenly was without a legitimate government. A wave of political radicalism swept the city. The initiative fell amost automatically into the hands of the representatives of the councils. ‘Now we have Bolshevism’, noted the novelist Thomas Mann in his diary on 22 February; the day before, his children’s schoolmates had danced and applauded with joy the news of Eisner’s murder.25 IV

The chaos that emerged after the assaults on both Auer and Eisner demonstrates how little political power actually had been consolidated since the dramatic days of the previous November. The deep crisis suffered by state authority at the end of the war had not only been left unresolved, but had worsened. During his short rule, political attacks had been levelled against Eisner both from re-emerging conservative forces and a consolidating radical left.

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One of the fundamental problems was that the political revolution did not alter the basic problems confronting most social groups since the war. As the authority of the state crumbled, so did economic regulation, all the more as rural Bavaria had become very suspicious of the political developments taking place in the city. Although calls to punish the ‘profiteers’ did not subside, and the councils were called upon to make sure that the extensive black market was combated and food delivered, the alternative strategy of increasing wages and salaries became steadily more important. From the beginning, the revolution had essentially been one enormous movement to increase wages in which political demands had been intermingled with economic ones. In Munich as elsewhere, membership of the Free Unions increased rapidly. With the huge influx of new members during the last quarter of 1918, membership doubled within a year, and during the year 1919 it increased almost continuously from 70,522 members to a total of 134,818. White-collar workers, a group that had been hard to organise before the war, flocked in droves to the USPD-orientated National Association of Employees, which soon became the second largest union in Munich. Just as in the workers’ unions, there were complaints that many people who had refused to join the unions previously were now ‘rushing into radicalism’ and demanding improvements without considering what was economically possible.26 With the membership politically split between moderates and radicals, leadership lost much of its former influence. In the first half of 1919, all of Germany was hit by spontaneous strikes. The unions were the organisational models for most other social groups. With traditional protection ‘from above’ disappearing, ‘self-help’ in pursuing one’s own interests became the catchword of the new democratic age. There were also other sources of the prevailing radicalism, with its distinct social and economic connotations. The most important of these were the rapidly increasing unemployment resulting from the demobilisation of the troops—many of whom remained in the overcrowded city—the expiration of war contracts and, last but not least, the extreme fuel shortage caused in part by the breakdown of the transportation system. From a total of 7,342 unemployed in midDecember, the number jumped to 21,450 just a month later and peaked at 40,228 on 8 February.27 The unemployed not only heavily criticised the traditional union leadership, they resorted to their own form of ‘self-help’. On 7 January, they threatened to storm the Ministry of Welfare in order to demand an increase of unemployment compensation, and only a few days later an assembled crowd cornered Eisner and forced him to surrender twelve

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agitators who had been thought to be the chief instigators of such actions. Each time, gunfire was exchanged between the crowds and the security forces, leaving several dead. In the light of such events, Eisner increasingly expressed his concerns about the ‘danger of revolution in Munich’. The bloody riots in early January, especially in Berlin but also in other cities, were a bad omen. As with many revolutionaries before him, he considered ‘demonstrations of revolutionaries against the revolutionary government senseless and nothing but a disguised form of counterrevolution’.28 Since Eisner conceived the revolution primarily in political terms, he was increasingly at a loss to cope with the demands of the radical social protest movement that emerged during the winter. The radicals clearly were profiting from the general dissatisfaction and tried to link political, economic and social grievances. Their rhetoric had the ring the people had been listening for more and more since early 1919; a ‘second’ social revolution was necessary to improve the material situation and to prevent the reactionary encroachments by the bureaucracy and military. On 11 December, the Munich Spartacists formally organised. The Spartacist leader Max Levien had close contacts with the anarchist Erich Mühsam, who had founded the Association of Revolutionary Anarchists—a group which in turn joined the Spartacists. Although the organisational efforts of the Spartacists were all but successful—a working-class critic voiced his irritation that Levien was seeking the support of ‘several hundred, academically trained, intellectual idiots to be found running around by the dozens’, instead of making more of an effort to organise workers and soldiers29 —their slogans of ‘All power to the councils’ and ‘Socialisation’ were popular and visible at every demonstration. Until February, the Munich workers’ councils were controlled, by and large, by the radicals, although they had originally been dominated by moderate members of the unions and the SPD. In a much-noted motion passed on 6 January, the Munich workers’ council made clear that it was not willing to give up its power after the election and the convening of the Diet. 30 The day prior to the election, the nearly one hundred representatives enthusiastically applauded attacks levelled against the introduction of a parliamentary system of government and advocated the strengthening of the power held by the councils. Eisner himself increasingly spoke out in favour of awarding the councils more power, much to the dismay of the SPD Cabinet members, especially Erhard Auer, who as Minister of the Interior had endeavoured to limit the councils’ power to interfere in civil administration. Just how this

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combination of council and parliamentary rule was to be structured into a viable system of government was an issue that remained more or less open, and Eisner remained very ambiguous in his public statements on the matter; so much so, in fact, that his ambiguity provoked the criticism of the extreme Left as well as the SPD and the non-Socialist parties.31 Yet the increasing gravity of the political conflicts in January and February must not be overexaggerated. Not all contemporaries evaluated the situation as being critical and alarming. The Bavarian Hypotheken- und Wechselbank published in its annual report that in the weeks following the November events, and especially in the months of January and February, capital poured into Bavaria from all parts of Germany since investors believed they saw ‘in the primarily agrarian Bavaria a haven safe from storm and strife’. 22 Not until Eisner was assassinated did the storm clouds break over Bavaria, bringing the torrents of unrest that culminated in the dictatorship of the Bavarian Red Army in Munich. V

The weeks between 21 February and the summer of 1919 were marked by a profound vacuum of political power and growing radicalisation.33 With the murder of Eisner, political power fell to the councils: a congress of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils constituted a Provisional National Council of the Free People’s State of Bavaria; this in turn elected an ‘action committee’ of thirty that included representatives from all of the Socialist parties and the executive committees of the congress of the assembled workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils. A political programme was agreed upon: a draft constitution was to be worked out in close co-operation between the councils and the provisional government. The councils’ representatives were to have been granted farreaching constitutional powers that would have indeed introduced a synthesis of parliamentary and council democracy in Bavaria. After long and complicated negotiations between the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD), USPD and the non-Socialist parties, a compromise was reached calling for the convening of the Diet that was to elect a new all-Socialist Bavarian government (as it actually did on 1 March). The Congress of Councils agreed to the compromise solution after having defeated by a large majority a motion put forth by Erich Mühsam demanding the immediate proclamation of a ‘Socialist Council Republic’ and the creation of a Red Army. On 17 March, a new Socialist government under Minister President

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Johannes Hoffman (the Minister of Education and Culture under Eisner) could be formed. As it soon turned out, this government was not to command much authority. One of the most striking developments was the dissatisfaction among the population that manifested itself in a notable shift of political sympathies to the left. Even in Bavarian towns where Majority Socialist forces by and large had been continually losing power since November, the SPD experienced renewed impetus.34 In Munich many members turned away from the SPD, siding instead with the USPD and the KPD. Under the new leadership of the young Ernst Toller, the very heterogeneous USPD became obviously more radical. The party organisation of the KPD was also successfully gaining new members. Headed by Eugen Leviné, who had been sent to Munich by the Berlin KPD office in March, the party went through a complete reorganisation meant to ‘purify’ the leadership and extend the party’s presence into the factories as well as the neighbourhoods. Within just a few weeks, the number of party members rose from only a few hundred to about 2,900. It was clearly Leviné’s aim to reduce the influence of the anarchists and to distance his party from the USPD. The Hoffman government came under especially vehement attack from the radicals, whose battle-cry became their demand for the creation of a Räterepublik. The Räterepublik and socialisation became the panacea for all those disenchanted with economic, social and political developments. All anyone had to do to win the applause of massive crowds, as Eisner’s former secretary Felix Fechenbach noted sarcastically, was to voice in the streets of Munich the most radical demands he could invent.35 Improvements and fundamental changes in both the economic and political spheres were demanded and expected— immediately, not in the future. Complicated theory was rejected and spontaneous action advocated as the solution to the problems facing society. The demands that were circulating were utterly confusing. What was understood by the catchword ‘socialisation’ varied from the direct control of factories by the workers to the bureaucratic administration by the state, the abolition of ‘income without work’ or, as the writer and anarchist Gustav Landauer argued, merely the ‘effort of the working people to create something new out of idealism’.36 At worst, such verbal radicalism sought nothing else but action for action’s sake. Amidst such turmoil and confusion, not only in Munich, the news about the proclamation of the Hungarian Räterepublik on 21 March together with rumours about the possibility of similar developments in Austria and unrest in other parts of Germany ‘hit like a bomb-shell’.37 It appeared as if the revolutionary momentum had accelerated.

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In early April the state of confusion reached new heights and paved the way for desperate political action.38 In the neighbouring city of Augsburg, activities at a meeting of the Social Democrats were able to push through a resolution demanding that the Hoffmann government proclaim a Räterepublik in Bavaria and enter an alliance with Hungary and the Soviet Union; socialisation was to be introduced immediately. During the meeting of the Central Council the next day, it was decided that the Diet Hoffman (on 3 April) had summoned for five days later should not convene after all. Instead, sentiments ran high in favour of the immediate proclamation of the Räterepublik. The Munich anarchists, whose spokes-man was Gustav Landauer, were pushing especially hard for this and even threatened to proceed alone. The two SPD ministers Johann Segitz and Ernst Schneppenhorst (Minister President Hoffman was not in Munich at the time) paid lip-service to the call for the Räterepublik, but demanded a deferment of two days in order to sound out the reactions in other parts of Bavaria. While some members of the USPD were undecided about what to do, Leviné vehemently spoke out against such an experiment. Although the Communist Party (KPD) had agitated most fiercely for the Räterepublik, according to Leviné neither were the ‘masses’ suddenly sufficiently enlightened nor could Bavaria follow an autonomous path towards revolution. The call for a council republic had developed a dynamic of its own, not only in Munich. As Michael Seligmann has recently shown, not only in large Bavarian cities but also in a number of small ones council republics sprang up, if only for very short periods. This general mood goes a long way to explain why all leftist parties tried to jump on the bandwagon of the council movement. The Social Democrats were afraid of losing even more members to parties further to the left. Within the southern Bavarian party organisation, trouble was brewing. An extraordinary meeting had to be called since a motion to re-elect the party leadership had been introduced. A member of the Free Unions, who was convinced that the political tide was becoming more leftist, argued that the revolution demanded extraordinary measures; warnings that the ‘revolutionising of the mind’ was not proceeding at the same speed in other parts of Bavaria were ignored. With a vote of 240 to 13, the southern Bavarian SPD convention of 5 April proclaimed its support for the Räterepublik, characteristically enough under the condition that the USPD and KPD would join. When the Munich SPD called on its 20,000 members to ratify this proposal on 11 April, little more than half of those who voted (namely a third of the membership) approved the radical solution.39 The position taken by the KPD was not much different and it

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soon realised that its arguments against the Räterepublik were very unpopular. Thus, instead of running the risk of losing popularity, it actually tried to outdo the other parties by making demands that fuelled precisely the type of radicalism it had earlier so denounced. Calling for a Communist Soviet republic instead of what the Central Council soon labelled a sham council republic (Scheinräterepublik), the party leadership found itself taken at its word a few days later when a huge meeting of Communist shop stewards offered Leviné the ‘dictatorship’ in order to create the long-demanded unity of the working class. The KPD leadership was clearly embarrassed that it had to decline with many excuses and much evasion.40 These incidents clearly show how weak the ‘Bairische Räterepublik’ was at its birth on the evening of 6 April. Since the SPD leadership had left Munich—the Hoffman Cabinet established itself in Bamberg—and the Communists denied the legitimacy of the new political order, power fell to the USPD and the anarchists. Colourful individuals such as Ernst Toller, the anarchists Erich Mühsam and Gustav Landauer (the latter an outspoken anti-Marxist), the Socialist Otto Neurath with his comprehensive plans for socialisation, and money-reformer Silvio Gesell41 gave this experiment a Utopian touch which has often been ridiculed since. Considering the comprehensive if illusory plans for the reform of the society, the economy and the state, the results were indeed extremely meagre. Yet the pell-mell of plans and utopias was in the end nothing but a reflection of the general confusion and the state of mind in which this experiment was started.42 Although the attempt to redefine the position of ‘labour’ within society lay at the heart of all these plans, the workers realised that things were only changing for the worse. Munich was soon isolated both politically and economically, the more as similar experiments in other cities failed. On top of this, the Hoffmann government, having transferred its seat to Bamberg, threatened to intervene militarily. Even if the political interests of common workers were not to be overestimated, noted a ministerial official on 23 April, it did appear that a majority of the Munich working class was willing, if not to approve of the council system, then at least to take a wait-and-see attitude. He attributed this primarily to the particular outlook voiced over and over again on the street even from ‘completely reasonable people…that it was Bavaria’s destiny to promote the world revolution, that the whole world was now watching Bavaria…that Bavaria should want nothing to do with the national government’. The Communists used this mood very cleverly ‘in order to suggest to the masses, that a true council republic still did not exist since it had been established from above and

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a real one must come from below’. The belief that a council dictatorship would some day come had become deeply ingrained; at most, many simply thought the time was not yet right for it.43 When troops loyal to the government in Bamberg took up arms against the Munich ‘insurgents’ on 13 April, the whole experiment threatened to come to a rapid end. But workers’ defence units under Communist leadership suppressed the uprising relatively quickly. Eugen Leviné then took over the government in conjuction with two representatives from the USPD and three from the Communists. What actually motivated Leviné to place himself at the head of the by now Communist Räterepublik has remained a controversial issue ever since these events in April. On the one hand, the opportunity to gain political control and to exercise power in alliance with a weakened USPD—Toller was given a military command, the anarchists were not even represented in the action committee —undoubtedly played an important role. Yet on the other hand, one should not underestimate the pressure under which the KPD found itself. In fact, it seems that Leviné himself acted much against his better judgement. In the early 1920s, one of the first to study these events seriously by using interviews and court material came to the conclusion that the Communists had been more or less forced to take this step in light of the emerging mass movement.44 The daily meetings of the shop stewards revealed to the new leaders just how widespread support was for a still vaguely defined Räterepublik. At the heart of the problem of the Communist leadership in Munich (as elsewhere) was its conviction that the support of the social protest movement could be won for establishing a new political order. This turned out to be illusory. The exaggerated demands of certain individuals and groups proved to be extremely divisive.45 In a way, it was symptomatic that the issue of opening bank safes could lead to a major confrontation: a member of the Revolutionary Bank Employees refused to follow such orders because this would discredit the banking business and hence threaten the jobs of bank employees and the reputation of Munich banks. In an ensuing, harsh confrontation, Leviné accused Toller of betraying the revolution. In turn, Toller and other USPD speakers attacked Leviné with accusations that he was pursuing Russian, not Bavarian, politics. In view of the desperate situation, they wanted to negotiate with the government in Bamberg. After being defeated in a vote of the shop stewards, Leviné resigned on 27 April. Having fallen from power, the Communists now relied on the Red Army, which was deemed not to be an ‘instrument of politics,

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but an organ for the defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat’.46 This ‘dictatorship of the Red Army over the shop stewards’ did not last very long. Nevertheless, it created incredible bitterness and deepened what was already a serious split within the ranks of the political Left. In the end, it seemed to many that the revolution in Munich too would devour its children. VI

Toller’s efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement failed. Munich was brutally ‘pacified’ by regular army troops and the Freikorps, blinded by anger at the news of the murder of hostages taken by revolutionaries from the ranks of the völkische Thule-Gesellschaft. In turn, such brutality caused incredible bitterness among the working-class population of Munich. A Reichswehr officer detected in summer ‘a strongly pronounced, one-sided class spirit…big demands and a deepseated dissatisfaction and disappointment with the actual results to date of radical change that do not appear to the workers to have kept up with their hopes and the promises made’.47 In fact, radicalism did not simply cease with the ‘liberation of Munich’. In the local elections on 15 June every third person who went to the ballot box in Munich cast his vote for the USPD; support for the SPD fell to a meagre 20 per cent. This voting trend continued in the elections in the following year when the SPD lost even more votes to the USPD and the KPD, the latter topping the poll. And even the Right was able to log an increase in votes as early as 1919 and especially in 1920. The experience of the revolution had deeply divided the Munich populace. Yet the radicalisation that had commenced with the war did not end abruptly in 1920. Although the food supply improved once the Allied blockade was lifted in July of that year, every sector of the population still had to rely on the black market with its high prices in order to supplement the completely inadequate government food rations. Beginning in the summer of 1919, the conflict potential shifted once again, more into the organised domain of trade union wage policy. At the same time, the USPD itself energetically joined the fight against inflation by advocating lower prices and measures to combat usury. It was due in no small part to its agitation that the general political strike (in order to combat inflation) was discussed, beginning in the winter of 1919–20, among the Munich unions.48 The Kapp putsch showed that the political mobilisation of the Munich working class was becoming increasingly difficult; as early as February 1920 it was no longer possible to organise a general work

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stoppage in Munich factories on the occasion of the anniversary of Eisner’s assassination. As the unemployment figures dropped in 1921– 2, the political Left experienced its greatest unpopularity, whereas the Nationalists and the Völkische elements gained more and more support. By the time that the Reichstag elections were held in May 1924, one out of three Munich voters cast their ballot for the ‘Völkischen Block’. These votes did not come solely from the ranks of the bourgeoisie; the party was also able to acquire considerable support in working-class neighbourhoods. The social protest levelled against inflation and the poor economic situation, both factors on which primarily the Left had been able to capitalise politically until 1919, began in 1920 to play an increasingly important role in the campaign of the political Right for the ‘national revolution’ and the struggle against Marxism, capitalism, Berlin, the international status quo and, last but not least, the political revolution of 1918. NOTES 1 Emil Kraepelin, ‘Psychiatrische Randbemerkungen zur Zeitgeschichte’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte 16, 2 (1919). Quote cited in Albert Schwarz , ‘Die Zeit von 1918–1933. Erster Teil: Der Sturz der Monarchie. Revolution und Rätezeit. Die Errichtung des Freistaates (1918–1920)’, in Max Spindler (ed.), Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte, vol. 4, part 1, Das neue Bayern 1800–1970 (Munich, 1978), pp. 387–453 (citing p. 404). 2 Theodor Geiger, Die Masse und ihre Aktion. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der Revolutionen (Stuttgart, 1987; reprint of 1st edn of 1926), p. 151. 3 This is according to a confiscated letter from prison, dated 16 July 1919; Staatsarchiv München (hereafer cited as StAM) Staatsanwaltschaft München no. 2110. 4 Ernst Toller, ‘Eine Jugend in Deutschland’, in Ernst Toller, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1978), p. 138. His play Masse Mensch has to be seen in this context. Ein Stück aus der sozialen Revolution des 20. Jahrhunderts, in ibid., vol. 2. 5 See also Wolfgang J.Mommsen, ‘Die deutsche Revolution 1918– 1920. Politische Revolution and soziale Protestbewegung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (1978), pp. 362–91. 6 Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland 1917. Die deutschen Akten, ed. W. Haiweg (Leiden, 1957); concerning efforts to instrumentalise revolution for the German war aims, see also Egmont Zechlin, ‘Friedensbestrebungen und Revolutionierungsversuche im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 20, 24 and 25 (1961), and 20 and 22 (1963).

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9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

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Friedrich Zahn, ‘Bayern in der deutschen Volkswirtschaft vor, in und nach dem Krieg’, Zeitschrift des bayerischen Statistischen Landesamtes 50 (1918), pp. 175–98 (p. 187). For the figures mentioned, see my forthcoming book on Munich: Martin H.Geyer, Die Frau in der bayrischen Kriegsindustrie nach einer amtlichen Erhebung aus dem Jahr 1917 (Munich, 1920), pp. 11 ff . Karl Ludwig Ay, Die Entstehung einer Revolution. Die Volksstimmung in Bayern Während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin, 1968), pp. 196 ff.; Willy Albrecht, Landtaq und Regierung in Bayern am Vorabend der Revolution von 1918 (Berlin, 1968). Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg (Göttingen, 1978), p. 136. Martin H.Geyer, ‘Teuerungsprotest, Konsumentenpolitik und soziale Gerechtigkeit während der Inflation: München 1920–1923’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 30 (1990), pp. 181–215. For a good survey, see Francis L.Carsten, War against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (London, 1982). For the following, see Franz Schade, Kurt Eisner und die bayerische Sozialdemokratie (Hanover, 1961), pp. 45 ff.; Albrecht, op. cit., pp. 295 ff.; Werner Boldt, ‘Der Januarstreik 1918 in Bayern mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Nürnbergs’, Jahrbuch für Fränkische Landesforschung 25 (1965), pp. 5–42. Albrecht, op. cit., p. 337. Josef Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch 1918/19. Aus den Tagen der Münchener Revolution (Leipzig, 1938), p. 21. Albrecht, op. cit., pp. 377 ff.; Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf, 1978), pp. 23 ff. P.N.Cossmann, ‘Was nun?’, Süddeutsche Monatschefte 16, 1 ( 1918– 19 ), pp. 357–67, 358; P.N.Cossman, ‘Die Lehren der russischen Revolution’, ibid., pp. 63–72 (p. 70). The best English descriptions of the events since November 1918 are to be found in Allan Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria 1918– 1919: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic (Princeton, NJ, 1965): Francis L.Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe 1918–1919 (London, 1972), pp. 178 ff. and passim. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des 14. Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Bayerns am 12. and 13. Oktober 1918 in München (Munich, 1918), p. 165 f. The best description is given by Miller, op. cit. Ernst Niekisch, Gewagtes Leben. Begegnungen und Begebnisse (Cologne and Berlin, 1958), p. 44. G e o rg K a l m e r, ‘Beamtenschaft und R evo l u t i o n . Eine sozialgeschichtliche Studie über Voraussetzungen und Wirklichkeit des Problems’, in Karl Bosl (ed.), Bayern im Umbruch. Die Revolution von 1918, ihre Voraussetzungen, ihr Verlauf und ihre Folgen (Munich and Vienna, 1969), pp. 201–61 (p. 222).

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23 Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen der bayerischen Arbeiterräte am 9. u. 10. Dezember 1918: Beilage 3 zu den Verhandlungen des provisorischen Nationalrates des Volksstaates Bayern im Jahre 1918/ 1919 (Munich, n.d.), p. 129; Verhandlungen des provisorischen Nationalrates, 8 November 1918, p. 1; for a detailed account of the events see Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 75 ff. 24 Martin Müller-Aenis, Sozialdemokratie und Rätebewegung in der Provinz. Schwaben und Mittelfranken in der bayerischen Revolution 1918–1919 (Munich, 1986). 25 Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 155 f. 26 Jahresbericht des Gewerkschaftsvereins 1918–19 (Munich, 1919), p. 11. 27 For the following, see also August Lang, ‘Die Entwicklung der Erwerbslosenfürsorge in München in den ersten zehn Monaten nach E i n t r i t t d e r D e m o b i l m a c h u n g ( N ov. 1 9 1 8 b i s S e p t . 1 9 1 9 ) ’ , Zeitschrift des Bayerischen Statistischen Landesamtes 53 (1921), p p . 4 9 5 – 5 2 4 ; Ku r t K ö n i g s b e rg e r, ‘ D i e w i r t s c h a f t l i c h t e Demobilmachung in Bayern während der Zeit vom November 1918 b i s M a i 1 9 1 9 ’ , Z e i t s ch r i f t d e s B a y e r i s ch e n S t a t i s t i s ch e n Landesamtes 52 (1920), pp. 193–226; Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 230 ff. 28 Die Regierung Eisner 1918/19. Ministeratsprotokolle und Dokumente, ed. and with a foreword by Franz J.Bauer (Düsseldorf, 1987), p. 266 (Cabinet meeting on 9 January 1919). 29 Hans Kain in a letter dated 6 December 1918 (StAm Staatsanwaltschaft München no. 2476). 30 Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 242 ff. 31 ibid., pp. 143 ff. 32 84. Rechenschaftsbericht der Verwaltung der Bayerischen Hypothekenund Wechselbank in München für das Jahr 1919 (Munich, n.d.), p. 12. 33 See Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 273 ff.; Michael Seligmann, Aufstand der Räte. Die erste bayerische Räterepublik vom 7. April 1919, 2 vols (Grafenau, 1989), pp. 80 ff. 34 Also for the following see Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 273 ff.; MüllerAenis, op. cit., pp. 414 ff.; Seligmann, op. cit., pp. 85 ff. 35 Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Kongresses der Arbeiter-, Bauern- und Soldatenräte vom. 25. Februar bis 8. März in München, with a foreword by Gisela Kissel and Wiltrud Witt (Glashütten, 1974; reprint of the Munich edn of 1919), p. 117. 36 Ludwig Reiners, ‘Die wirtschaftlichen Massnahmen der Münchener Räteregierung’, dissertation manuscript, University of Tübingen, 1920, pp. 25, 75; Mommsen, op. cit., pp. 36 ff.; Gustav Landauer, Auch die Vergangenheit ist Zukunft. Essays zum Anarchismus, ed. Siegbert Wolf (Frankfurt am Main, 1989). 37 Erich Mühsam, Von Eisner bis Leviné. Die Entstehung der bayerischen Räterepublik, Persönlicher Rechenschaftsbericht über die Revolutions-ereignisse in München vom 7. November 1918 bis zum 13. April 1919 (Berlin-Britz, 1929), p. 39.

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38 For details of these eventful days, see Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 304 ff.; Carsten, Revolution, pp. 218 ff.; a most detailed account is given by Seligmann, op. cit., pp. 115 ff. 39 ibid., pp. 170 ff.; Georg Kalmer, ‘Die “Massen” in der Revolution 1918/19. Die Unterschichten als Problem der bayerischen Revolutions-forschung’, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 34 (1971), pp. 316–57 (p. 325 ff). 40 Seligmann, op. cit., pp. 182 ff. 41 The English economist John Maynard Keynes was to say later that ‘the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than that of Marx’; see The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Cambridge, 1973), p. 355. 42 The most detailed account is given by Seligmann, op. cit., pp. 337 ff. 43 Zur Lage in München, 23 April 1919, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereafter cited as BayHStA) MA no. 99902; Carsten, Revolution, p. 220 f. 44 Reiners, op. cit., pp. 49, 82; see also Mommsen, op. cit., p. 43. 45 Reiners, op. cit., pp. 75 ff., a good description is given by Toller, op. cit., p. 125 f. 46 Quote as cited by Max Gerstl, ‘Die Münchener Räte-Republik’, Politische Zeitfragen 1 (1919), pp. 311–440 (p. 423). 47 Hauptwerbezentrale des Gruko 4 an Gruko 4, 23 June 1919, BayHStA MA no. 99902. 48 See Geyer, ‘Konsumentenpolitik’.

4

Budapest and the revolutions of 1918 and 1919 Zsuzsa L.Nagy

I

CITY AND SOCIETY

In the half-century which followed the setting-up of the Dual Monarchy in 1867, there was rapid capitalist development in Hungary. This transformed both Hungary’s economy and its society. The most intensive change took place in Budapest, which officially had been declared the capital of the country in 1873. Budapest best represented the modernisation taking place in the country. The city played a key role in the Dual Monarchy. Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary possessed an independent constitutional status and some basic elements of independent policymaking. But the non-official capital of the empire was Vienna, with the imperial residence and three major ministries (Foreign Affairs, War and Finance) located there. In Hungary all political parties wished to develop Budapest into a capital city which would rank equally in status with Vienna. By the turn of the century Budapest was a metropolis of European standing as well as being the hub of Hungarian administrative, political, economic and cultural life.1 The city grew rapidly from the late nineteenth century. Between 1880 and 1910 its population grew by more than 600,000. By 1910, in terms of population, it was the eighth largest city in Europe. It far outstripped all other urban areas in Hungary. One in four Hungarian urban dwellers lived in Budapest— though only 5 per cent of the country’s total population.2 The importance of the capital was emphasised by the fact that the railway lines and the highway system constructed at the turn of the century stretched out radially from it. Even today one can only cross the country diagonally by going through Budapest. The largest port of the Hungarian section of the Danube—the free port of Csepel—was

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built south of the city. Five big Budapest banks controlled nearly 60 per cent of banking capital and thereby a significant part of industrial enterprises. Budapest was also the largest centre of industry, with 36 per cent of the great factories which employed a thousand or more workers established there. Before 1918, 12 per cent of shopkeepers and 19 per cent of craftsmen worked in the capital.3 The capital functioned as a melting pot. Within a few decades capitalist economic development combined with metropolitan living conditions had merged the different ethnic groups into what was virtually a homogeneous Hungarian society. The largest of these groups was of German descent, though proportionately this group’s size fell: in 1880 it constituted 34 per cent of the capital’s population, but by 1910 the figure had fallen to 9 per cent. The capital became more ‘Hungarian’ than the inhabitants of the countryside. Roughly 86 per cent of the capital declared themselves Hungarian by their mother tongue, whereas in the country as a whole they accounted for 54.5 per cent.4 By the beginning of the twentieth century, ethnic differences were losing their significance in the life of the capital and in its municipal politics. However, at the same time social and class conflicts were coming to the fore. Hungary’s economic, social and political relationships were becoming more akin to those of western Europe. Budapest had a very large Jewish community, though it needs to be stressed that the Jews in Hungary were not generally considered by themselves or others to be an ethnic minority group. Vilmos Vázsonyi, one of the prominent representatives of the new Jewish bourgeoisie, declared on many occasions that the Jews were first of all Hungarians and only secondly Jews, having a confessional distinction on a par with those of Catholics or Protestants. 5 In Budapest the Jews represented 23 per cent of the population, in contrast to a mere 5 per cent in the country as a whole.6 As the great majority of Jews declared themselves Hungarian, this raised the ratio of Hungarians in the capital. Budapest was dominated by two social groups before and after the First World War: urban labourers and petty bourgeois. Nowhere in Hungary was the number of urban workers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, office workers and civil servants more highly concentrated than in the capital. The proportion of the working population employed in industry increased from 31 to over 44 per cent between 1880 and 1910.7 By far the largest employers of labour were clothing (55,090), engineering (32,287), food (22,865), building (19,513) and iron and metals (19,212). In 1910 the total industrial workforce numbered

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218,068. Most workers were employed not in the big factories but in smaller plants or in the workshops of small-scale industry. Though the proportion of workers employed in factories with 1,000 or more workers was higher in Budapest than anywhere else in Hungary, it still amounted to only 12 per cent in the capital.8 In fact the proportion of independent craftsmen within the industrial population was higher. Such craftsmen amounted to 16.14 per cent of the capital’s workforce. However, in just over half the workshops (53 per cent) the owners worked alone, without journeymen. Hence the economic and social positions of such small producers were nearer to those of the industrial worker than to those of ‘the classical lower middle class’, the real petty bourgeoisie.9 The Jews were well represented within the modern capitalist sector of the economy. They amounted to close on 60 per cent of merchants and financiers, though only some 21 per cent of big manufacturers.10 Within Budapest the government, ministries and most of the public offices were concentrated on the right side of the Danube. The character of the castle district was determined not only by the presence of the royal castle but also by some ministerial buildings and the palaces of the aristocracy. The industry and trade of Budapest were concentrated on the left side of the Danube, in Pest, with four-fifths of the population living there. According to a contemporary description Test was in the possession of the masses and the tools that defined the spiritual and moral outlook of the city’.11 The traditional social structure of Hungary was seriously disturbed in Budapest by two new social formations: industrial workers and the urban capitalist bourgeoisie. Budapest became the scene of their organisation. It was in the capital that their parties and their societies were founded and their programmes formulated. Though the interests of the working class and the middle class clashed, they had ambitions in common. Both wished to be accepted by the ‘historical classes’, traditional society, and both wished to attain social and political roles commensurate with their new, powerful standing in Hungary’s economy. A prerequisite for achieving these goals was the democratisation of the whole social system. II

FORERUNNERS OF DEMOCRATISATION

Two new parties were established in the late nineteenth century. The differences between the old parties had hinged on their attitudes to relations between Austria and Hungary and how they

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judged the Compromise of 1867. In contrast the new parties represented class interests and their politics centred on social problems. The Social Democratic Party (SDP), the party of the industrial workers, was formed in December 1890. The major strength of the party stemmed from the trade unions, which developed into a major force over a decade. In Hungary the party and the unions were interwoven, with joint membership. In the early years of the twentieth century 28 per cent of industrial workers were members of the Social Democratic Trade Union in Hungary, according to the Trade Union Internationale. If this is accurate, then the Hungarian trade union movement did not lag far behind those of Britain, Germany and Sweden.12 Trade unionism in Hungary was heavily concentrated in Budapest. Hence the Hungarian workers’ movement was a movement of the capital. By the beginning of the twentieth century the SDP was the only organised mass party in Hungary, the bourgeois parties being clubbish in character. The SDP’s programme, as adopted in 1903, was Marxist. It identified a class struggle in society and it declared that its ultimate aim was the creation of a socialist state. But, given Hungary’s relative backwardness, it argued that in the short term Hungary needed to follow the route of the western democracies. Hence it called for reforms, above all the attainment of full political rights for the industrial worker. Its first aim was to achieve universal suffrage and the secret ballot. The existing franchise excluded not only the workers but also a significant part of the lower middle class. While in Vienna the SDP had seats in the Parliament, in Budapest the SDP had no representation in either the Parliament or the Municipal Assembly. Hence before the First World War the largest political demonstrations in Budapest were those to demand the widening of the franchise, and they were supported not only by the workers’ movement but also by lower middle-class people. The middle-class organisations also began in Budapest. The first party to stand for bourgeois and petty bourgeois interests was formed in 1894. This was the Democratic Party, founded in Budapest, on the left bank of the Danube, by the lawyer Vilmos Vázsonyi. Like the SDP, its foremost demand was reform of the franchise. Its other policies included liquidating entailed estates, providing free elementary education and achieving the complete separation of church and state. Part of its programme was intended to appeal particularly to the working class, including the introduction of the 8-hour working day and other social reforms.13

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However, the spiritual and ideological pressures for modernisation and democratisation were not confined to party political frameworks. A lead was given in this by an intellectual group which turned to Britain and France for inspiration for Hungarian renewal, so breaking with the traditional German orientation of Hungarian cultural life. As Dezsö Kosztolányi, a well-known writer of the period, wrote in his memoirs of himself and his fellow students: ‘They pronounce the name of Herbert Spencer in the hollow-sounding, obscure corridors of the university as a slogan to overthrow the world.’14 The intellectual pioneers of democracy assembled around Oskár Jászi who, from that time until his death (both when living in Hungary and after emigrating), was the spiritual leader of Hungarian democracy. In 1900 they established a review entitled Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century). In 1901 the Társadalomtudományi Társaság (the Society of Social Science) was founded. This was fully taken over by Jászi and his followers in 1905. They also brought to life that society’s Free School, which held a series of lectures on contemporary issues for organised workers and young intellectuals. In 1908 they became associated with Freemasonry, with Jászi the head of a separate lodge; and this connection was the prime reason why in Hungary Freemasonry was linked with progressive change. Indeed the middle-class democratic programme was largely formulated in Jászi’s lodge. In 1914 Jászi and his circle founded the Országos Polgári Radikális Part (the Bourgeois-Radical Party).15 Oskár Jászi and his associates called themselves bourgeois democrats in spite of the fact that they did not represent the interests of the bourgeoisie at all. They did this because they did not wish to compete with Social Democracy or to arouse the SDP’s suspicion and jealousy. Jászi and his followers felt that despite all the recent rapid economic and social change, the old order remained predominant in Hungary. They were familiar with the works of various writers, including Karl Marx, whose writings pointed to the contradictions inherent in western European capitalist societies. Hence Jászi and his circle not only vigorously criticised the existing order in Hungary but also went further, being the group which accepted several elements of Marx’s criticism of capitalism (though with several reservations). They acknowledged the importance of the role of economic factors in the life of society, but denied that these factors played an exclusive role in it or that a direct relationship existed between economy, society and politics. In 1907 Jászi summed up their views: Though it may sound paradoxical, I have the courage to say: Hungary will either

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become socialist or it will cease to exist.’16 Their concept of socialism had nothing to do with the systems of state socialism that emerged after 1917. But in the short term they too aimed to create a ‘Western European Hungary’ from ‘feudal Hungary’, for they felt that it was impossible to achieve socialism without first having experienced modern industrial capitalism and bourgeois democracy.17 So various radical thinkers judged the Hungarian situation in basically similar ways. These included men such as Ervin Szabó, a syndicalist, and Péter Ágoston and Zsigmond Kunfi, Social Democrats, as well as Oskár Jászi. As a result there was close cooperation between many of the radical and socialist intellectuals. Hungarian middle-class radicalism was always predominantly urban, though it was not insensitive to the problems of the agrarian population. Also, stemming from the structure of Hungarian society, the Jews were greatly represented among the radical and the socialist leaderships. Budapest was also the scene of radical changes in literature and the arts. Hungarian literature had been traditionally sensitive to political and social problems. At the beginning of the twentieth century it experienced a veritable revolution. Endre Ady, Hungary’s greatest twentieth-century poet, published his first volume in 1906. Ady combined poetry with a commitment to public life, and his work in effect drew a demarcation line between progressivism and conservatism. He became the symbol of all modern endeavours. The bourgeois democrats were among the first to recognise Ady’s significance and they put his name on their banner. In 1908 a new periodical, Nyugat (West), was launched, its title making quite explicit its orientation. Nyugat became the forum of the modern Hungarian literary elite. Its publication was made possible through sponsorship by some members of the new wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie. In the early 1910s a group of avant-garde writers and artists assembled around Lajos Kassák. They regarded themselves as activists and socialists, the sole representatives of a ‘new art’ which had to turn to the masses. At the same time that Ady’s Uj Versek (New Poems) appeared, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály published their first folk-song collection, thereby showing the world a new kind of music. It was also in that period that painters established their group ‘The Eights’ (the name coming from the number of participants), who were much influenced by Cézanne. This group included Károly Kernstok, a radical democrat, Róbert Berény, the artist who later painted the posters of the Hungarian council republic, and Ödön Márffy, a Freemason. In 1903, following proposals made by György Lukács, young intellectuals and

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artists founded the Thalia Society to put on modern plays, staging them by the latest theatrical means. The Thalia Society performed plays for workers. György Lukács and his companions established the Vasárnapi Kör (Sunday Circle) with the participation, among others, of Arnold Hauser (art critic), Károly Mannheim, Mihály and Károly Polányi, Anna Lesznai (sociologists), Károly Tolnai (literary critic) and Béni Ferenczy (sculptor).18 The early campaigners for democracy also had to face the serious problems arising from the multi-ethnic composition of the Dual Monarchy and of Hungary. They took the view that the nationalist ethnic conflicts were due to the restrictions on democracy in Hungary, which prevented the non-Hungarian populations from asserting their rights. Those on the Left had a simple belief in the efficacy of democracy and socialism, feeling that the attainment of these would automatically put an end to national conflicts. Oskár Jászi prepared a solution to the nationality issue (eventually published in 1918) which became known as ‘Eastern Switzerland’ or the ‘Danubian United States’. 19 This scheme was based on the proposition that the state structure of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy had become rigid and so was unable to keep pace with the growth of national aspirations throughout the empire. Jászi wanted to transform the Dual Monarchy into a federal union of states with each member-state taking part on a basis of democratic equality. One such member would be Hungary, with its territory intact. While preserving the economic advantages of the monarchy, this federal solution would have given the individual member-states national freedom. Such a federal transformation of the monarchy would not have been alien to the age.20 But the idea was rejected by the political leadership of the non-Hungarian people and was also heavily attacked within Hungarian nationalist circles. Before 1918 not a single Hungarian political group had called for the federal restructuring of Hungary, let alone for its territorial dismemberment. This changed in 1918. That October, just before the collapse of the Dual Monarchy and its system, the leadership of the SDP called for a federal transformation of Hungary. The party hoped that by this policy the territorial integrity of the country would be maintained. The leadership of the SDP wrote: ‘We believe that a Hungary based on…the federation of free and democratic nations with equal rights is a better and safer support of the society of nations, of their progress and prosperity, than a dismembered, crippled Hungary deprived of its elementary living requirements and conditions.’21 But the Hungarian democrats no longer had any

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say in solving the nationality question. This was decided by the victorious entente powers. III

CITY OF REVOLUTIONS

The world war, with its immense burdens and with the accompanying deterioration of living conditions, progressively increased dissatisfaction with the system of government of the Dual Monarchy. There was a growing demand for the dismissal of the regime responsible for the war, for an early peace and for democratic reforms. During the war Count Mihály Karólyi and his Party of Independence joined those calling for change. This added significant numbers of the middle class to the democratic opposition.22 From 1917 this opposition acted increasingly in a united manner. In June 1917, a Voting Rights Alliance was formed in Budapest to press for the introduction of universal suffrage and the secret ballot. As conditions in Budapest deteriorated, the Municipal Assembly (in which the Vázsony Democratic Party was strong) supported the opposition, as did the liberal mayor, István Bárczy. Budapest was to be the centre of the actions which, along with the collapse of the army, finally undermined the regime. In January and June 1918 the SDP promoted major strikes, which spread out across the country from the capital. On 25 October 1918 the Hungarian national Council was established in the city, its membership practically stemming from the Voting Rights Alliance. Mihály Károlyi was its president. Its programme was drawn up by Oskár Jászi. Following the military defeat of the central powers, the AustroHungarian Dual Monarchy collapsed in November 1918. This brought about a crisis affecting the whole area of the empire. It hit Hungary particularly hard as it was accompanied by serious national conflict. In contrast, elsewhere the end of the Dual Monarchy was marked by a period of national renewal and liberation. This difference provides a large part of the explanation of why in Hungary the process led not only to a bourgeois democratic revolution but also to a Russian-style proletarian dictatorship. The bourgeois democratic revolution of 1918 and the proletarian dictatorship of 1919 can be seen as attempts to find a way out of the political and nationality crisis. The failure of these attempts was largely determined by external power politics: by the victorious entente powers and by the interests of their ‘little allies’.

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The starting-point and the centre of the Hungarian revolution was Budapest. The city was the source of their strength, and was where the revolutions held out longest. The countryside followed events in Budapest. In the case of the council republic, the regime lost the support of the countryside sooner than it lost the support of the capital. On 31 October 1918, workers, soldiers and young people occupied public buildings and those of strategic importance in the city. King Károly IV appointed Mihály Károlyi Prime Minister. This was the first independent Hungarian government formed in Budapest since the March revolution of 1848. It was a coalition made up of representatives of Károlyi’s Party of Independence, the SDP and the National Radical Party. The campaigners for democracy felt that the time to achieve their old aims had arrived, but the circumstances which had brought them to power made this impossible. The entente powers regarded the new bourgeois democratic government as the successor of the defeated Dual Monarchy. Therefore they gave it no outside support. 23 The government was weakened internally by the SDP losing support among the working class as a result of its participation in the coalition. The SDP’s position was in part undermined by the activities of the Communist Party. This had been established under the leadership of Béla Kun in Budapest on 24 November 1918. Its founders were mostly former prisoners of war who had become Bolsheviks in Russia. The Communist Party rejected slow, legal reforms; instead it called for immediate radical changes, as in Russia, the overthrow of the bourgeois democracy and a new, second revolution. Its urban supporters were made up mainly of returned prisoners of war, soldiers, the unemployed, various groups of workers and intellectuals. It also received sympathetic support from some Social Democratic leaders.24 The division of working-class support between the SDP and the Communist Party in Budapest was clearly shown during the events of February and March 1919. Some of the workers clearly approved when the police, after hesitating at length, arrested the Communist leaders. After a few days many workers’ sympathies went to the Communists. A sizeable number of the workers in the largest factories were willing to take direct action to release the Communists and to press the government to resign. The fall of the bourgeois democratic system was brought about primarily by external factors, above all by the military occupation of the greater part of the country’s territory. 25 As for internal factors, the Károlyi government was shaken by the large-scale dissatisfaction which grew up against it and in which class and

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national interests were intermingled. By March 1919 the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that the bourgeois parties could no longer undertake to govern the country. But neither could the Social Democrats nor the Communists do so alone. In Budapest on 21 March 1919 the two parties agreed to take power jointly. It was on this basis that Hungary was declared a council republic, an ally of Soviet Russia. 26 By their short-sightedness in denying their support to Hungarian bourgeois democracy, the great powers had caused the bourgeois democratic revolution to fail and had discredited the middle-class radicals. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the spring of 1919, the content of radicalism underwent a major transformation. Before 1918 radicalism had had the western European meaning— bourgeois radicalism, one which opposed the feudal remnants of the old order. From the autumn of 1918, however, radicalism turned against bourgeois democracy at a time when much of the power of the old order remained intact and when democracy was just beginning to build up its institutions. Before 1918 and for a short time during the bourgeois democratic revolution the main current of radicalism was still pressing for the democratisation of society. However, these radicals were increasingly superseded in influence by the communists and left-wing socialists. For radicalism came to mean taking a stand against the Károlyi government and supporting Bolshevik ideas. In Budapest the proletarian dictatorship was established peacefully and without resistance. Even the bourgeois and petty bourgeois did not oppose the new regime as they hoped that the new government would prevent the occupation of further parts of Hungary and stop the annexation of Hungarian-inhabited areas by other states. Nor, given the critical state of the country, did the radical democrats attack the new regime. The radical writers and artists greeted the new power with enthusiasm and, at least in its early days, co-operated warmly with Béla Kun’s government. They maintained the prominent roles they had enjoyed in cultural and scientific life during the period of bourgeois democracy. Bartók, Kodály, Ernö Dohnányi (the composer and musician), Béni Ferenczy, Sandor Korda (later Sir Alexander Korda) and others became members of the various art directorates and commissions. Zsigmond Kunfi and György Lukács directed state education.27 Béla Kun’s government had just under a single peaceful month of existence. For on 16 April Romanian armies and then, on 26 April, Czechoslovak armies attacked Hungary on the pretext of defending

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Europe from the spread of Bolshevism. In pratice they hoped to gain more territory from Hungary. By May the area under the authority of the Hungarian Council Republic had shrunk to a smaller size than that under Károlyi’s government. Budapest became even more important than before. In order to defend the capital and to counter-attack the invading armies all the industrial workers had to be mobilised. The government received widespread support from them in spite of deteriorating living conditions. However, the government’s recruiting appeal did not mobilise the peasantry, for it had failed to secure the peasants’ support when it had nationalised rather than redistributed among the peasants the land of the great estates. On 1 May 1919, when the Romanian and Czechoslovak armies were only 100 kilometres from the capital and it seemed only a matter of time before Béla Kun’s government would resign, Jászi warned that counter-revolution and a brutal white terror would follow the red revolution. From late April 1919 Kun’s government had applied ever more repressive measures against the middle and lower middle classes and the peasants, and it had also restricted the activities of the noncommunist intellectuals. The enthusiasm which had first greeted the council republic was evaporating fast. Movements against the government took place mostly in the countryside but there was an attempt made in Budapest on 24 June to overthrow the government by force. These attempts failed due to the remaining power of the government which was used brutally to suppress opposition and the by then poorly organised and relatively weak forces of the counterrevolution. By July the most striking feature of the situation was the widespread apathy towards Kun’s government, even after its military defeat and the declaration by the great powers that they intended to liquidate it. Both revolutions reorganised the administrative and political leadership of the capital. In spite of the change of its name and of personnel, the function of the Municipal Assembly of Budapest became much more significant in 1918–19 than it had been before 1918. Already under the bourgeois democracy the Municipal Assembly had begun to take over the role of Parliament, and it really operated as the Parliament during the period of the council republic. (The highest body of the council system, the National Meeting of the Councils, was convened only once, in June 1919.) Béla Kun’s government brought all major issues and problems to be discussed and decided on by this body, which during this period was called the Budapest Central Workers’ Council.

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On 2 May 1919, when the superior power of the external armies had broken the resistance of the still half-organised red army and the fall of the proletarian dictatorship appeared imminent, the Budapest Central Workers’ Council voted against surrender and for the organisation of resistance. On 1 August that same body discussed the consequences both of the failure of the Hungarian military counterattack against the Romanian army and of the resignation of Béla Kun’s government. The council entrusted the formation of a new government to those social democrats and trade union leaders who had played no part in the soviet republic.28 The fall of the council republic was primarily due to international power relations. The world revolution predicted by Lenin and the Comintern remained an illusion and Hungary became completely isolated. By August 1919 the basis of support for the proletarian dictatorship had diminished drastically not only in the countryside but also in the capital. The middle and lower middle classes had long rejected the Kun government. The industrial workers, who bore the heaviest burdens, became disappointed and exhausted. The SDP and the trade unions soon regained much influence among them. There was widespread support among the capital’s workers for the trade union leaders’ proposals to moderate the dictatorship and to come to an agreement with the entente powers. The Romanian army did not stop at the line of the River Tisza but on 3 and 4 August marched into Budapest. This was the first time that this had happened since the beginning of the Turkish occupation in the sixteenth century. After a short transitional period, a new right-wing and nationalist group came to power on 6 August. It remained in power for twenty-five years. Miklós Horthy’s regime was overthrown only in 1944–5 during the Second World War. Until the autumn of 1918 the supporters of liberalism, democracy and socialism had been able to march together in the fight against the ancien régime. What had proved to be divisive between the oppositional groups had been their attitudes to the bourgeois democracy and later to the proletarian dictatorship. The military collapse of the monarchy and the dismemberment of historic Hungary before the signing of the peace treaty, as well as the spread of the Bolshevik ideology and the appearance of the Communist Party, all accelerated and made more dramatic this polarisation. By 1919 the bourgeois democratic and the socialist tendencies had become separated, though neither group represented a uniform and unchanging attitude. The majority of the bourgeois liberals were

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unable to accept the moves to the left of Karólyi’s regime, and the greater number of the radicals did not approve of these either. Nor did these groups approve of the proletarian dictatorship; they deplored its methods and most of its measures. Though the social democrats entered into an alliance with the communists, they did so because of the special circumstances of the time rather than out of preference for such a coalition. The failure of 1918 and 1919 compromised radicalism—whether bourgeois or socialist—for a long time. The enforced emigration of not only the communist leaders but also many of the leading social democrats and liberals greatly weakened the opposition which remained in Hungary. Indeed it never recovered during the inter-war period. The new counter-revolutionary regime held Budapest to be a guilty city because it had been dominated by liberal ideas and liberal politicians before 1918 and then had become the centre of two revolutions. In the inter-war years conservative and right-wing parties ruled in City Hall, Budapest. Yet the liberal and democratic bourgeois parties remained strong in the city and the SDP won seats in the Municipal Assembly. As for Parliament, most seats in Budapest were won by liberal-democratic and SDP candidates. So the democratic trends and traditions of the capital survived the worst years of reaction. NOTES 1 About dualistic Hungary: Péter Hanák (ed.), One Thousand Years: a Concise History of Hungary (Budapest, 1988), chs III and IV; or Peter F.Sugar (general ed.), History of Hungary (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1990), chs XIV-XVI. On the history of Budapest in the period discussed: Lajos I.Illyefalvy, Budapest 1873-tól napjainkig [Budapest from 1873 to the Present Day] (Budapest, 1945); and György Spira and Károly Vörös, Budapest története a márciusi forradalomtól az oszirózsás forradalomig [The History of Budapest from the March Revolution to the Asters Revolution], the fourth volume of the history of Budapest (Budapest, 1978). 2 Sources from the Past of Budapest, vol. II, Sources to the History of Budapest 1873–1919, ed. Mária H.Kohut (Budapest, 1971), p. 97; hereafter cited as Sources. Magyar Statisztikai Közlemények [Hungarian Statistical Publications], Uj sorozat [new series], vol. 52, pp. 563–4; hereafter cited as HSP. 3 HSP, vol. 42, pp. 12–13, and vol. 52, pp. 1022, 1042. 4 HSP, vol. 42, pp. 563–4. 5 Vilmos Vázsonyi beszédei és irásai [Speeches and Articles of Vilmos Vázsonyi], ed. Hugó Csergo and József Balassa, vol. I (Budapest, 1927).

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16 17 18

19

20

21 22

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HSP, vol. 42, pp. 563–4. Sources, vol. II, pp. 170, 172. ibid. ibid. György Markos, 50 család és cselédei [Fifty Families and their Servants] (Budapest, 1947). Wolff Károly élete és politikája, alkotásai [The Life and Politics and Productions of Károly Wolff], ed. Endre Szigethy (Budapest, 1943), p. 24. István Schlett, A szociáldemokrácia és a magyar társadalom 1914-ig [Social Democracy and Hungarian Society up to 1914] (Budapest, 1982), p. 229. Zsuzsa L.Nagy, The Liberal Opposition in Hungary, 1919–1945 (Budapest, 1983), pp. 19–23. Dezso Kosztolányi, ‘László Négyessy’, in Irók, festok, tudosok [Writers, Painters, Scholars] (Budapest, 1958), vol. II, p. 310. A szociográfia elso magyar mühelye [The First Workshop of Hungarian Sociography], ed. György Litván and László Szücs, especially Introduction (Budapest, 1973), vols I and II . Zsuzsa L.Nagy, Szabadkomüvesség a XX. században [Freemasonry in the Twentieth Century] (Budapest, 1977), pp. 24–33. Oskár Jászi, Uj Magyarország felé. Beszélgetések a szocializmusról [Towards a New Hungary: Conversations about Socialism] (Budapest, 1907), p. 187. Oskár Jászi, ‘Az uj Magyarország felé’ [Towards the new Hungary], Huszadik Század [Twentieth Century] I (1907), p. 5. Zsuzsa L.Nagy, ‘Gli intelletuali ungheresi e le rivoluzioni del 1918– 1919’, in Venezia, Italia e Ungheria tra decadentismo e avanguardia (Budapest, 1990), pp. 243–54. Charles Dautrey et Jean-Claude Guerlain (eds), L’Activisme hongrois (Paris, 1979). Oskár Jászi, A Monarchia jovöje: a dualizmus bukása és a Dunai Egyesült Államok [The Future of the Monarchy: the Collapse of Dualism and the Danubian United States] (Budapest, 1918; reprinted 1988). Géza Jeszenszky, ‘A dunai államszövetség eszméje Nagy-Britanniában és az Egyesült Államokban az dso világháboru alatt’ [The ideas of a Danubian Confederation in Great Britain and the USS during World War I], Századok [Centuries] 2 (1988) Népszava [People’s Voice], 8 October 1918. About the period of the revolutions see: Tibor Hajdu, Az 1918-as magyarországi polgári demokratikus forradalom [The Bourgeois Democratic Revolution of Hungary in 1918] (Budapest, 1968). Tibor Hajdu, A Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság [The Council Republic of Hungary] (Budapest, 1969): Peter Pastor (ed), Revolutions and Interventions in Hungary and its Neighbour States, 1918–1919, vol. XX, War and Society in East Central Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1988). See Zsuzsa L.Nagy, A párizsi békekonferencia és Magyarország 1918–1919 [The Paris Peace Conference of Hungary, 1918–1919 ] (Budapest, 1965).

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24 Hajdu, Az 1918-as, chapter 5. 25 Though the Peace treaty of Trianon was signed only on 4 June 1920, by the end of 1918 Hungary had already lost 70 per cent of her former territory and 60 per cent of her inhabitants. 26 Hadju, Az 1918-as, chapter 8. 27 See note 18. 28 Hajdu, A Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság, pp. 182–3, 352–3.

5

Vienna: a city in the years of radical change 1917–20 Hans Hautmann

Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century was the metropolis of a state which in area was second largest and in population third largest in Europe. As ‘Imperial Capital and Residence’ of the Habsburg monarchy, as the political, economic and cultural focal point of an enormous empire inhabited by eleven nations, Vienna experienced at this time a rapid increase in population. Between 1900 and 1910 the number of inhabitants rose from 1.6 to 2.1 million. In this respect Vienna stood fourth among the great cities of Europe (behind London, Paris and Berlin), and eighth by world standards. Early twentieth-century Vienna brings to most people’s minds first of all the aura of a fin-de-siècle aristocratic and upper-class culture. It was the urban melting pot which, fuelled by the tensions, lines of fracture and contradictions of the infinitely faceted society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bestowed on the world outstanding performances in every field of art and science with men like Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, Theodor Herzl and Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach. Too often, however, admirers of this glittering cultural epoch overlook the other side of the coin: the Vienna of smoking factory chimneys and droning workshops in the city’s outskirts, the Vienna of the wretched tenement blocks in which the mass of the population lived in primitively-equipped, small, unhealthy, overcrowded and, in relation to what was offered, far too expensive flats. Economically and socially Vienna, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was one of the most important industrial centres of the Dual Monarchy, the largest and most important concentration of the Austrian working class, the stronghold of the Social Democratic

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Party and the unions. A million people, half the inhabitants of the city, were employed or of working age in the year 1910. After deducting the self-employed, 805,314 persons fell into the category of wageearners; of these, after deducting salaried employees and domestic staff, 567,539 or 56.4 per cent of all employed were blue-collar workers and day-labourers. The majority of these half-million Viennese workers were employed in very small, small, or mediumsized businesses (1–5, 5–25, 25–100 employees) within manufacturing industry and the service trades. Roughly 100,000 worked in large firms with mechanised production (upwards of 100 employees), of which 48,000 were to be found in 21 firms with over 1,000 employees, 20,000 in 30 firms with from 500 to 1,000 employees, 25,000 in 124 firms with from 100 to 500 employees, and the remainder in firms whose workforce approached 100. It is to this other Vienna, the Vienna of the working people, that we must turn. For it was the workforce (or, more precisely, the industrial proletariat in large and medium-sized concerns) which, as in other European countries, was in the forefront of developments during the years 1917 to 1920 and, activated, politicised and mobilised on the widest scale, came to the fore as a revolutionary factor. How this happened, what stages the revolutionary period between 1917 and 1920 passed through, what consequences followed and what role Vienna played as the main arena of the Austrian revolution, where the decisive initiatives occurred, is to be outlined below. I

THE PLUNGE INTO REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS

The Austrian revolution was not a precise event which can be narrowed down to a specific date, but a process which commenced in October-November 1918 and came to an end in summer-autumn 1920. As with every other revolution, this process had as prerequisite an existing revolutionary crisis, embracing all sections of the social order, which in Austria broke out as early as New Year 1916–17, and lasted, with periods of acute revolutionary tension (January 1918; April 1919), as well as periods of abatement (July-November 1918; August 1919-March 1920), until the summer of 1920. When the First World War began and the leadership of the Social Democratic Party and trade unions solemnly proclaimed a ‘truce’ vindicating the war of the rulers as a ‘just defensive war’, the organised industrial workforce was the only social group in Vienna and other parts of Austria which held itself aloof from the orgy of chauvinism and jingoistic collective hysteria. It did not, however,

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adopt a position overtly opposed to the war. Its attitude was characterised by feelings of subjugation, helplessness, paralysis and resignation to a supposed fate. This acceptance of the state of war, which must not be mistaken for approval, gradually changed from October-November 1914, after the dreadful experiences of the bloody battles in Galicia and the Balkans, into an anti-war position, which none the less restricted itself to passive forms for another two years. The fact that the workers experienced a serious deterioration in their standard of living from August 1914 contributed to the absence of any positive commitment to the war. Dissatisfaction with such bad living conditions brought about the radicalisation of the Viennese workforce which found expression in violent strikes and mass agitation from the spring of 1917 on. Five factors should be mentioned, as follows. (1) The deterioration in the material situation marked by the shortage of foodstuffs, which in the winter of 1916–17 worsened into famine; the rise in prices, which for those goods controlled by maximum-price regulations showed an increase of between 300 and 1,000 per cent between 1914 and 1918, and for black market goods constantly stood above the 1,000 per cent mark; falling real wages, which in 1916–17 amounted to only 64 per cent and in 1917–18 only 37 per cent of the real wages level of 1913–14; the rise in the accident rate at work; increased sickness and mortality—in Vienna the number of deaths exceeded births by 25,443 in 1917 and by 32,240 in 1918. (2) The deterioration in the social situation seen in the repeal of regulations concerning Sundays and holidays; the extension of working hours in factories important to the war economy up to 13 hours a day; the reintroduction of night-work for women and juveniles—prohibited since 1885; the subjection of all factories of military importance to the ‘War Production Law’ (Kriegsleistungsgesetz) —which meant for the personnel that the civil ordinances of industrial law were set aside, the wage-rate was fixed by government decree, giving notice or changing jobs was no longer possible, a ban on strikes was in force and the workers were subject to the military penal and disciplinary authority of the military manager, usually an elderly, pensioned officer, now incumbent alongside the works management. (3) The deterioration in the political situation exemplified in the Austrian half of the empire by the prorogation of Parliament, which was reconvened only in May 1917; the annulment of citizens’ basic and civil rights, such as freedom of the individual, privacy of the post,

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right of assembly or association, as well as freedom of speech and of the press; the abolition of trial by jury; the transference of all political offences from civil to military jurisdiction and thereby substantially more stringent punishment. (4) The intensified ‘class-struggle from above’ (Klassenkampf von oben) in the factories, where the industrialists, protected by the dictatorial apparatus of war and the militarisation of working conditions, ruthlessly exploited all opportunities for maximising profits, emphasised more brusquely than ever the master’s prerogative and, hand in hand with the military managers, acted against the workers with repressive measures and cynical chicanery. This constant provocation, which was a slap in the face for elementary feelings of justice, human dignity and fair treatment, was for most workers even more unbearable than want and deprivation. At one particular level it must have aroused an understanding of the necessity for energetic, collective resistance. (5) The increasingly transparent deepening of class divisions flew in the face of the ‘class-levelling common destiny’ vaunted by the propaganda machinery of those in power. Not only did the manifestly enormous increase in profits and dividends in those branches of industry working for armaments cause outrage, despite all efforts to disguise this, but even more to the point was the fact that the much-affirmed ‘equality of sacrifice’ in the consumer sector stood in sharp contradiction to reality. The black market which evolved out of the emergency as a matter of course turned the term ‘scarcity of commodities’ into a relative concept. Even in the worst two years of famine, 1917 and 1918, it was possible for some affluent people to purchase goods in any desired quantities. Anyone possessing money or valuables could at any time provide for himself not only well, but abundantly by way of the black market. In Vienna’s night-spots the well-off, profiteers and black marketeers gadded about openly, and in the officers’ messes the finest dishes were served up to the very end—a state of affairs (superbly portrayed by Karl Kraus in several scenes of his The Last Days of Mankind) which provoked and infuriated the working population enormously. II

MAY 1917

One important consequence of these circumstances was that the policy of party truce, pursued by Austrian Social Democracy since August 1914, led to a growing estrangement between the party

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apparatus and the working masses, indeed finally developed into open conflict. This can be discerned from the heavy losses in membership: the Viennese party organisation declined from roughly 50,000 members in July 1914 to 10,000 in July 1916; the number of members of Social Democratic unions in Vienna fell from 156,367 in the last year of peace, 1913, to 66,583 in the year 1916. Apart from reasons for this dictated by the war (e.g. conscription for military service), the political motive of protest against the socio-patriotic stance of the party executive, which manifested itself amongst some Viennese workers in demonstrative absence from organisational life, was also decisive. The unprecedented social restructuring of the industrial workforce in the war years (the introduction of women, juveniles and unskilled workers on a huge scale into the industrial process) led to the fact that only a small proportion of workers employed in the militarised factories belonged to unions; here Social Democracy forfeited to an alarming extent the position laboriously built up over decades. In order to halt this tendency the party swung its policies in the direction of centrism and pacifism at New Year, 1916–17. The intention behind this of bridging the rift with the working masses was not, however, realised, because several simultaneous and connected events now brought about with elemental force the outbreak of the revolutionary crisis in Austria. Included among these was the assassination of the Austrian Prime Minister Stürgkh in October 1916, by Friedrich Adler, and even more the latter’s courageous appearance before the special court in May 1917, where he scathingly criticised the right-wing policy of the party executive, the serious deterioration in the supply position during the famine winter of 1916–17, and the long-distance effect of the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia in March 1917, which posed to the Austrian workers with compelling logic the question, why was not more done in their land than just championing peace with mere words? In a largely spontaneous process the Austrian workforce won back its political self-confidence; a radicalisation of the masses began like an avalanche. The industrial centres (the Vienna Basin, Upper Styria) were overrun from January 1917 by a wave of strikes which reached Vienna in May. From 23 to 26 May 1917, 42,000 Viennese metalworkers in 47 metallurgical and 89 engineering works downed tools. Two features of the movement showed that the situation had changed fundamentally compared with the previous years.

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First, independently of one another, that is, without central direction from the unions or the party, there was a call in most of the strike-bound factories to entrust the workers’ own elected shop stewards with the control and distribution of foodstuffs. Here we have the first attempt to apply to Austrian circumstances the concept of workers’ councils as practised in Russia—or at least in the way the workers understood it in the absence of more precise information. The experiment was attempted in one sector, food supply, an area of notable government failure. Second, the striking workers made known their displeasure with the attitude of the Social Democratic Party and the union leadership. The leading officials, Franz Domes and August Siegl, called in for negotiations in Vienna over the resumption of work, were accused of ‘betraying the cause of the workers’. The state of tension between leadership and grass-roots was, therefore, in no way at an end, even though at this time, as a result of the mobilisation and politicisation of the masses, there was already a renewed and strong influx into the Social Democratic organisations. Indeed it further intensified, because the party still opposed the transition to extra-parliamentary mass conflict, now on the agenda and autonomously carried out by the factory workforce. The workers wanted to see from Social Democracy action marked by just as much energy as they themselves were prepared to give; the party and union leadership, however, continued their endeavours to prevent strikes and did everything to settle existing disputes as quickly as possible. III

JANUARY 1918

The wave of strikes in the spring of 1917 forced the imperial government to depart from wartime dictatorial and demagogic methods and to make social and political concessions to the workers. The changes that were soon introduced included rent control, the establishment of a ‘Public Food Office’, the setting-up of ‘complaints commissions’ in the militarised concerns, the formation of a separate ‘Ministry of Social Welfare’, the moderation of press censorship, the recall of the Austrian Parliament after an enforced recess of three years and the creation of greater political opportunities for the Social Democratic Party including permitting once more public and freely accessible gatherings. These concessions were a major reason for the temporary decline in mass conflict.

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It may be observed in general that the frequency of strikes in the years 1917 to 1920 in Vienna and the other Austrian industrial centres showed a distinctly seasonal rhythm. All large-scale disputes and disturbances occurred in the first half of the year, in late winter, spring and early summer. The abatement of strikes each time in the second half of the year, in summer and autumn, had a quite simple basis: in these months the food shortage tended to ease somewhat as a consequence of the newly brought-in harvest and thereby temporarily lessened the angry mood of the workforce. However, news of the triumph of the October revolution in Russia put an abrupt end to efforts at pacification by the ruling circles. The effect on the Austrian workers of the Bolshevik seizure of power was even greater and more lasting than the fall of the tsar in March 1917, because now at last the much longed-for conclusion of peace was moving into the realm of possibility, and it had been demonstrated that the workforce could win power. In 1917–18 Russia and the revolutionary Russian proletariat enjoyed unrivalled popularity and sympathy among the Viennese workers. The slogan that in one’s own country, too, one must ‘speak Russian’ to those in power, was on every tongue. When the peace negotiations of Brest-Litovsk, followed with great attentiveness by the workers, were unexpectedly protracted on account of the equivocal stance of the central powers, who aimed at imperialistic conquests, the disquiet grew from day to day. It was directed not least against the Social Democratic Party leadership, which was accused of continuing to tolerate imperial government policy in spite of its left-wing words. At the beginning of January 1918, stormy debates erupted during party peace rallies. The spark was finally thrown into the gunpowder keg by the government when, on the morning of 14 January 1918, it decreed a drastic cut in the already meagre ration of flour and bread. With this began the January strike, the greatest revolutionary strike action in the whole history of the Austrian labour movement. Within a few days it spread out from the Daimler-Motoren-Werk in Wiener Neustdat to all the Austrian industrial centres and was from the outset a political general strike, a strike for peace. At the highpoint of the dispute, on 19 January, there were 113,000 strikers in Vienna, 125,000 in the remainder of Lower Austria and 750,000 in the whole of Austria-Hungary. In Vienna the workers in the armaments, metal and engineering factories (the Arsenal, Fiat-Werke, Clayton & Shuttleworth, Siemens-Schuckert, Warchalowski-Werke, etc.) were

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joined by workers from the railway workshops, the printworkers, craftsmen from small and very small businesses, employees in the legal practices and even shopgirls and seamstresses from the grand fashion houses. When the first workers’ councils began to form spontaneously in a series of strike-bound works, the Social Democratic Party took by the horns the bull it could no longer avoid and, of its own accord, called upon the strikers to erect workers’ councils everywhere. The purpose behind this, to win back its lost control over the masses and to regain its hold over the movement, was fulfilled. After the proclamation of a four-point programme of demands, which the imperial government at once formally promised to carry out, the Social Democratic Party executive succeeded in obtaining a resolution of the Viennese Workers’ Council to end the strike. In spite of the fierce resistance of many workers the action began to crumble away on 21 January. On 24 January the great general strike, which had brought the system of rule in Austria to the very edge of the abyss, was at an end. IV

JUNE 1918

After this violent eruption the situation still remained unstable for several months. The Social Democratic Party leadership, which was informed about events at the naval base of the Imperial and Royal Navy in South Dalmatia, did not dare break the news embargo imposed by the War Ministry on the Cattaro naval mutiny (1–3 February 1918), because it feared further strike action by the workers. Its efforts were directed towards creating conditions which would prevent a repetition of the January events, when the party executive was caught completely unawares by the dynamism of the strike movement. To this end, it was resolved in February 1918 to make the Workers’ Council a permanent device, to institutionalise it. An article of organisation was adopted the main effect of which was to remove almost entirely the possibility of initiatives from below after a directive from above, and the Workers’ Council could only be summoned if, in the view of the party leadership, a ‘need’ existed. Such a need did present itself once again before the end of the monarchy, when, from mid-May 1918 onward, a renewed wave of strikes, proceeding from Lower Austria, Styria and Upper Austria, reached Vienna. The causal factor in the capital was similar to that of January 1918: on 17 June the ‘Public Food Office’ announced without

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warning an immediate cut in the bread ration, restricted to Vienna. According to this order the weekly amount of bread was to be a threequarter loaf (1,120 grammes) for workers in heavy industry, and a half-loaf (630 grammes) for normal consumers. Already in the morning of 17 June 1918, there were disturbances in Vienna. In the food markets working-class women protested, bread-vans were stopped and looted. On 19 June 48,000 Viennese workers, once again mainly the workforces of the armament and metal-processing concerns, were on strike. The Social Democratic Party now promptly summoned the Viennese Workers’ Council, which commenced negotiations with the ‘Public Food Office’ over compensatory supplies of other foodstuffs (horsemeat, dried vegetables) and extra pay. When concessions were made the strikers complied with the appeal of the Workers’ Council for the strike to end. The June strike 1918 belongs alongside the January strike 1918 and the May strike 1917 as the three greatest mass actions of Viennese workers during the First World War. It went off less dramatically, however, than the other two. Whilst the strikes of May 1917 and January 1918, inspired by the revolutions in Russia, took on the character of aggressive action with pronounced political objectives, the strike in June 1918, remaining within the framework of economic demands, was, rather, a defensive action on the part of hungry and desperate workers. V

NOVEMBER 1918

After the June strike the revolutionary waves receded. Until the end of the monarchy no further strike of any note took place in Vienna, nor indeed in the rest of Austria, let alone mass action. Why this should be is not simple to set out. Here, as so often in human history, events followed a course which is not easy to explain rationally. One is least in danger of error, however, if one regards the symptoms of exhaustion which overcame the workers after the great strikes of spring 1917 and of January and June 1918 as the main cause. Powerful mass movements are not arbitrarily and infinitely maintainable, but like other social phenomena are subject to the rhythm of upswing and downswing. The physical and psychological exhaustion of the workforce after four years of war, hunger and want became so great in the summer and autumn of 1918 that it no longer led to protest action but turned into a mood of resignation and a passive waiting for the end of the horror. In addition to this, the

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imperial regime abstained from all provocation of the working masses during these months and moreover, stricken by the psychosis of ruin and the marasmus of the decaying multinational state, was in any case no longer capable of action. Here we run up against a fact of the greatest importance to the entire course of the Austrian revolution, namely the paradox that in October-November 1918—precisely at a time when fundamental changes were being enacted in the state superstructure and especially in Vienna itself—no revolutionary situation was at hand and the activities of the masses, compared with the period 1916–17 to 1920, were at rock bottom. In contrast to Germany, the proclamation of the republic in Austria in November 1918 was not the result of a popular insurrection, but the consequence of a collapse of the monarchical-authoritarian system of state rule caused primarily by external factors (defeat in war; secession of the Slav peoples). Even the concordance between the Social Democratic Party leadership and the grass-roots during the entire revolutionary crisis of the years 1917 to 1920 was never greater than in November 1918. Certainly the activities characteristic of the Viennese workers in November 1918 appear rather subdued only if compared with the periods both before and after. In contrast to periods of calmer evolutionary development they were still tremendous. (One has in mind the great demonstrations and mass rallies in Vienna on 30 and 31 October, as well as on 12 November 1918.) They bore, however, more the character of a celebration of democratic and republican achievements so recently achieved; they were largely in line with the Social Democratic thesis of ‘standing still’ on the basis of the ‘free people’s state’ and its ‘consolidation’, and continued, in the main, to show no pronounced socialist inclination towards overcoming the capitalist class system. The reason for this phenomenon was that the revolution had at the very first attempt brought about such a wealth of perceptible results that the thoughts and actions of the masses in the period from November 1918 to February 1919 were completely under its spell. The Habsburg dynasty, symbol of the centuries-old immovability of all that exists, had fallen. Nearly all the political and social demands of the Hainfeld programme of Social Democracy from 1889 had been realised at one stroke, or their realisation had moved within reach. The all-surpassing wish of the masses for the ending of the war could be regarded as fulfilled by the new republican representatives of the supreme authority with

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the conclusion of the Armistice of Padua on 3 November 1918. The place of the Imperial Army was taken by the voluntary People’s Militia, whose members wore the red colours of the revolution on their cockades. The police, the gendarmerie, the judiciary and the official apparatus, which once had forbidden so many workers’ rallies, suppressed progressive movements and let the ‘common people’ feel the force of their authority, now did not show themselves to working people and never ventured a step without the assent of Social Democratic officials. Among the workers the feeling prevailed that power was already in their hands and that with the proclamation of the republic on 12 November 1918 the much dreamed-of ‘people’s state’, frequently also embellished with the epithet ‘socialist’, had been won. All this resulted in the elation of the masses at the supposed easy victory over the forces of the old order, induced an atmosphere of devout confidence in the justice and vigour of Social Democratic policy and led to the fact that for the moment scarcely a thought was given to the bourgeois nature of the newly gained parliamentarydemocratic system, which left the foundations of the socio-economic status quo untouched. In these circumstances it was only logical that the Communist Party of German Austria, founded in Vienna on 3 November 1918, did not succeed in penetrating the phalanx of the organised industrial workforce and eked out a shadowy existence until spring 1919. Only among the soldiers of the Viennese Militia did it possess a certain influence in the form of the ‘Red Guard’. Generally speaking, in November 1918, it was the soldiers rather than the workers who, for the time being, played the most active and compelling revolutionary role. They formed councils which became the real bearers of authority within the republican militia. The new armed forces in Austria had a basically proletarian stamp and could not be employed for counter-revolutionary purposes. In this respect conditions differed significantly from those in Germany. And the fact that soldiers’ councils rather than bourgeois officers constituted the determining element was the circumstance, among the abundant range of changed social combinations, which most disturbed the propertied classes in Austria. For the first time divested of the most important instrument of power for safeguarding their authority, they were totally dependent upon the Social Democratic Party leadership exercising and retaining its moderating influence upon the mass of the soldiers against the continued pressure for radical social change.

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VI

SPRING 1919

At about the end of January or beginning of February 1919, however, the revolutionary crisis intensified once more. The economic situation had not improved with the proclamation of the republic; on the contrary it had got steadily worse. Industrial production was depressed, inflation advanced, the number of unemployed rose sharply: from 46,000 in December 1918 to 186,000 in May 1919 (131,000 of these in Vienna alone). The misery of tens of thousands of war-disabled and repatriated soldiers was enormous. In February 1919, it came to hunger demonstrations in Linz and Graz which ended with outbursts of despair, looting and bloody gun-battles. The relative calm and discipline which had characterised the conduct of the workforce in the first phase of the revolution broke down. The inability of the Social Democratic-bourgeois coalition government to solve the problems facing it resulted in a radicalisation of public opinion, the demand for socialisation of the factories and the call for power to workers’ councils. The leadership of the Social Democratic Party responded quickly. It decided upon a reform of the Viennese Workers’ Council, to revalue this grass-roots-orientated organisation. At the beginning of March 1919 it was resolved at a national conference of the workers’ councils in Vienna to change the articles of organisation to the effect that Communists and members of other socialist groupings should also now be eligible to vote and to stand for election to the Workers’ Council. General preliminary elections for workers’ councils covering the whole of Austria were called for the spring of 1919. In Vienna about 500,000 workers took part in them. The Social Democrats received 90 per cent, the Communists and other left-wing splinter parties 10 per cent of the mandate. The Social Democratic Party hoped to achieve two things by the reorganisation of the Workers’ Council. First, it wanted to channel into properly regulated paths the rapidly growing influence of the Communists, whom, at first, it had not taken seriously, had ignored and sought to hush up. With the help of the Workers’ Council as ‘Parliament of the Working Class’ the inner-proletarian conflicts between reformist and revolutionary forces were to be moved away from the street into a committee, into a peaceful, democratic test of strength between majority and minority. Second, it hoped to create a means of pressure supported by the

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working masses vis-à-vis the bourgeois camp, in order to push through those social reforms which could prevent an escalation of the conflicts. The revolutionary post-war crisis in Vienna and Austria reached its zenith when, in March-April 1919, council republics came into being in Hungary and Munich. These events gave the Communist Party above all enormous impetus. Within a few weeks its membership rose from 3,000, in February 1919, to 10,000 in March and 40,000 in May-June 1919. It organised large demonstrations of the unemployed, of the war-disabled and repatriated soldiers, among whose ranks its supporters did most of their recruiting. Hungarian Communist emissaries, who agitated in meetings for the setting-up of council power in Austria and generously supported the Communist Party financially, inflamed the mood further. On 17 April and 15 June 1919, Vienna became the scene of serious disturbances, when armed engagements erupted between Communist demonstrators and the police. In total they claimed 23 dead and 134 seriously wounded. In this situation, which threatened to tear society apart, Social Democracy succeeded by using the ultimatum to force from the bourgeois forces large-scale socio-political reforms (state unemployment benefit, a disability compensation law, the 8-hour day, a factory councils’ law, a workers’ holidays law). In this way it not only kept the organised industrial workforce from going over to the Communists, but also understood how to present the reform measures to the masses as steps on its ‘way to Socialism’, a way which made superfluous a risky, council-republican experiment demanding bloody sacrifices. Here lay the deepest masspsychological root of the failure of Communist efforts in their fight for the council republic in spring 1919. The violent suppression of council Hungary and council Munich, which confirmed Social Democratic warnings, made the thought of establishing proletarian rule totally obsolete in August 1919, and the acute revolutionary situation came to an end. A further change of historic dimensions in Vienna was that Social Democracy gained an important victory in the elections for the City Council on 4 May 1919, winning an absolute majority and taking over from the ruling Christian-Socials. It has maintained this dominant position, interrupted only by the period of the Fascist dictators between 1934 and 1945, until today in superior fashion. With 4 May 1919 begins the era of ‘Red’ Vienna, which was underpinned by virtue of the fact that under the new

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constitution Vienna became a federal province with increased rights, above all the right to levy its own taxes. The greater financial resources, even within the arrangement dividing taxes between the federation and the provinces, enabled the Social Democratic city administration to realise its local government principles within Vienna, measures such as municipal housing, school reform, public health and social policy, which were to arouse the admiration of the whole world during the 1920s. VII SPRING 1920

The fall of the Hungarian Council Republic on 1 August 1919 had profound consequences for Austrian domestic affairs. It removed the immediate danger to the bourgeois power base, gave a great boost to the anti-Marxist forces and weakened the position of the labour movement. In the National Assembly resistance stiffened towards legislative initiatives demanded by the working masses (socialisation, the capital levy), and the bourgeois parties succeeded in delaying further social reforms and impairing existing ones (for example, the granting of unemployment benefit). In Vienna, where the labour movement had dominated the public scene almost exclusively since November 1918, anti-Semitic disturbances and a wave of anti-Marxist meetings and demonstrations commenced in autumn 1919, in the course of which there were pogrom-type riots and protesting workers were subjected to beatings. The propaganda attacks concentrated upon the institution of the workers’ council, and in particular upon the executive authority of these councils in the fight against illicit trading, profiteering and the hoarding of foodstuffs. The charge against them was that they had cast doubt upon the authority of government offices and paved the way for ‘anarchy’. The leadership of the Social Democratic Party proved itself disconcerted and irresolute in the face of this abruptly intensified pressure at all social levels. As a reaction to this a left-wing oppositional tendency began to develop in the Workers’ Council which criticised the too-compliant stance of the party towards the Christian-Socials and the continuation of the government coalition. As the focus of its agitation it made the demand, popular among the workforce, for a capital levy, which was to force the propertied classes to share the consequences of the war and make a justified contribution to the relief of poverty. With the foundation of the ‘Social Democratic Association of Revolutionary Workers’

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Councils’ (Sozial-demokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft revolutionärer Arbeiter-räte) (SARA) on 14 October 1919, these forces created an organisational centre whose influence upon the grass-roots in the factories steadily increased. The renewed deterioration in the supply situation during the winter of 1919–20 and the growing anger of the workforce over the practices of the Christian-Socials, which was combined with increasing impatience with the policies of the Social Democratic Party executive, who held to the now unpopular policy of class cooperation in the coalition government, broke through tempestuously in spring 1920, under the influence of an external event. News of the Kapp putsch in Germany triggered off great feeling among the Austrian workers, including a determination to rise up and defend themselves. On 14 March 1920, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Vienna held one of the largest rallies which this city had ever seen. Over 100,000 workers, among them 4,000 militiamen, pointedly armed and with weapons shouldered, moved for hours on end along the Ringstrasse. The renewed upturn in mass activity, which broke out in March 1920, lasted all through the spring. Austria was seized by a further wave of strikes, such as the railwaymen’s dispute, disturbances, as in Neunkirchen, Vöcklabruck, Linz and Graz, and gigantic demonstrations of workers like the one on 10 May in Vienna, when 250,000 people took to the streets in favour of the capital levy and against reactionary intrigue. In contrast to the revolutionary hightide of spring 1919, when socialist demands and objectives were the centre of attention, the efforts of the workers in spring 1920 were primarily directed against a continuation of the coalition. In the fertile soil of this mood SARA grew within a few months to become the most significant left-wing opposition ever in the history of Austrian Social Democracy, and a force which directly endangered the Austro-Marxist dogma of ‘unity of the party at any price’. It reached the height of its influence at the Third National Conference of Workers’ Councils (31 May to 2 June 1920, in Vienna), when, against the will of the party leadership, it pushed through a resolution formulated as an ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of the Social Democratic Party from the coalition government even before the end of the spring session of the National Assembly (20 June 1920) in the event of a further delay on the capital levy.

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VIII THE END OF THE REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS

The party executive now had to recognise that every further insistence on the coalition brought on the danger of a split in the Social Democratic movement. It took up the gauntlet thrown down by a Christian-Social member in a sitting of Parliament on 11 June 1920, and broke up the coalition. With this step, which was greeted with jubilation by the working masses, the wind was taken out of SARA’s sails and the unity of the party re-established. With the break-up of the coalition came those changes in summer and autumn 1920 which, when taken together, signify the end of the revolutionary crisis in Austria. What in the downswing phase of the Austrian revolution, starting in August 1919, had first of all been recognisable only in isolated symptoms and had developed in a slow, creeping process, without resounding drumbeats, now acquired its full, qualitative character. The economic power of the propertied classes, which had remained untouched by the revolution, now helped their supporters to swing the political balance of power in their favour and to take political possession of multifarious government and non-government instruments relatively quickly. The bourgeoisie was now so far strengthened and its control so far secured that it no longer needed class co-operation in the government with Social Democracy. The period of progressive reforms, which was reflected in significant gains for the working masses in the areas of democracy and social legislation, came to an end. In the new National Council elections on 17 October 1920, Social Democracy forfeited its simple majority and lost 14 per cent of the votes, because many people belonging to the middle classes (civil servants, white-collar workers, the petty bourgeoisie, small farmers), who in February 1919, under the influence of the war and of the revolutionary impetus, had voted Social Democratic, now returned to the camp of the bourgeois parties. The councils’ movement declined and had to hand over its positions of power once more to the official machinery of the state and the traditional representation of interests (trade unions, co-operatives, social insurance bodies, chambers of labour (Arbeiterkammern)). With the adoption of the Federal Constitution on 1 October 1920, the Austrian state took on the form it was to retain until 1933–4. Through all the events mentioned, the contradictory nature of the Austrian revolution, the blatant disparity between its character and its driving force, evaporated once and for all. While the

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activities of its main driving force, the working class, declined, and the latter, flagging in its struggle and weakened in its selfconfidence, turned once more to ‘normal’, everyday proletarian life, the character of the revolution revealed itself as clearly and nakedly bourgeois. IX

SUMMARY

The city of Vienna during the years 1917 to 1920 was not the only, but was the most important, centre of the revolutionary activities of Austrian workers. It was the Viennese workforce which, with its struggles for peace and bread, with its great strikes and mass action, contributed most to the undermining and removal of the old Austrian authoritarian regime. In Vienna, at the beginning of the republic, those confrontations took place which not only determined the course of the Austrian revolution but also brought to working people in the new state a perceptible improvement in their democratic, social and political rights and scope for effective action. Out of the ‘Imperial Capital and Residence’, in which the workforce had played an inferior political role in stark contradiction to its numerical strength, owing to the privileged franchise in municipal representation, arose ‘Red Vienna’, which in the 1920s became the scene of probably the most superb example ever of Social Democratic local government policy. Alongside these positive changes, however, the negative ones must not be overlooked. Vienna, the radiant metropolis of a great power, fell back to become the oversized capital (nicknamed ‘Bighead’) of a pitifully small state, lurching from one economic crisis to another, against which the feelings of antipathy, even hatred, of the antiMarxist, Catholic-conservative, Alpine population began to be directed—to such an extent that they were to lead to civil war fifteen years later. Most acute and lasting, however, were the demographic consequences of this turbulent period. In the year 1920 Vienna had 477,000 fewer inhabitants than would have been expected without the war and its after-effects. This disastrous outcome resulted from a rise in the death-rate (caused among other things by the devastating Spanish influenza epidemic in the winter of 1918–19), the sudden and steep fall in the number of births and the excessive emigration (at least 150,000 Viennese Czechs went back to the Czechoslovak Republic from 1918 to 1920). Typical results were the sharp increase in the surplus of women and a serious shift in the age-structure of the

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Viennese population towards the older. After 1918 Vienna never again reached the pre-First World War size. It has shrunk in the meantime (1981) to 1.5 million inhabitants and because of that is the only one, to our knowledge, of the established cities of over a million in the world, whose population incessantly declines in number. Perhaps, though, events of the most recent past, which have rescued Vienna from its position peripheral to the former Communist countries with their impenetrable borders, will halt this trend.

6

The interregnum: Turin, Fiat and industrial conflict between war and Fascism Giuseppe Berta

I

Of the three cities constituting North Italy’s ‘industrial triangle’ (Turin, Milan and Genoa), Turin was most lastingly affected by the aftermath of the First World War and the social conflict it produced. Not that the struggle between workers and industrialists was any more fierce or radical here. Nor was the period of union militancy more prolonged. Indeed, it would be fair to say that labour conflicts went on for longer elsewhere. Milan, for example, was the city that gave birth, in late August 1920, to the movement that was to culminate a month later in the occupation of the factories.1 Turin, however, was the industrial city whose manufacturing structure was most extensively transformed by the aftermath of the war. It was during the war, in fact, that the foundations were laid for Fiat’s dominance of Italy’s private industrial sector. Before the war, Turin’s industrial system was still highly diversified; after it the city began to develop the ‘company town’ features that were to intensify in subsequent decades, assuming social dimensions that endowed the city with a unique position in the political geography of the country. Turin became a more homogeneously manufacturing city than either Milan or Genoa and was dominated by a concentration of industrial power symbolised by the charismatic leadership of Giovanni Agnelli, the founder, major shareholder and Chief Executive Officer of Fiat.2 If Turin’s history appears to be so strongly marked by the four years (1917–20) of agitation and revolutionary turbulence that convulsed Italian life, it is because the city’s travails seemed to sum up all the alternatives, all the lacerations, of the post-war period. It is therefore at the level of symbols rather than real events that we should

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analyse the unique experience of Turin and its industry during the two years (1919–20) known as the ‘Biennio Rosso’, a period engraved upon the nation’s collective memory, partly since it is seen as preparatory to the advent of the Fascist regime. Among the workers, on the other hand, the symbolic value of post-war Turin lies in the fact that it was then that the archetypes of a new, Communist, political tradition took shape and were eventually to replace the earlier tradition of reformist Socialism. The ideologies that were developed in 1919–20 to explain the successes and failures of the workers’ struggle against Fiat were subsequently used for over half a century as the cultural benchmark for the Italian workers’ movement even when they were found to be clearly at odds with the practical realities of life in the factories and the world of work as a whole. The aim of the following pages is to summarise the changes experienced by Turin’s industry during and after the First World War. At the same time, an attempt will be made to raise a number of questions and propose certain hypotheses about the nature of the social conflict during the Biennio Rosso, in the hope that we can see a little further than the ideological tradition. II

In his periodic review of the Italian economy, that methodical observer, the economist Riccardo Bachi, when speaking of 1918, pointed out that Fiat had not reached that last year of the war unprepared to tackle the difficult ‘shift to a peacetime economy’.3 However, in the minutes of the company board meeting drawn up on the very day of the Italian victory we glimpse an anxious note that is highly symptomatic. Clearly Fiat’s top management were aware of the huge conversion problems that they would soon be facing, over all of which there loomed the question of labour. We read that the ‘working masses were not in an amenable mood’: as soon as they could rid themselves of the constraints of ‘industrial mobilisation’ the workers were going to use the weapons of strikes and unrest as means of winning all the improvements to which they felt their contribution to the war effort had entitled them. The first signals along these lines were unmistakable: the workers were not satisfied with the ‘day off’ they were granted by the management on Armistice Day ‘to celebrate the capture of Italy’s lost territories’ (Istria and Trento) and had announced that they would not be turning up for work on the following day or possibly on the day after that either.4

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For Fiat, the conversion of the company factories to peacetime use meant, first and foremost, solving the workforce problem, reestablishing the rules and the control mechanisms that had been abolished in order to satisfy the requirements of military production. Effectively the company had been run by outsiders for four years. There can be no doubt that at least in Italy it took the Great War to generate the big manufacturing company. The war had diverted the energies of society towards the factories. At Fiat, new sources of labour, hitherto considered incompatible with the organisation of the engineering industry, had been swept into the workshops and departments in order to expand production capacity. There were women, adolescents, farm labourers uprooted from the countryside and ‘urbanised’ in the space of a few months, and immigrants forcibly recruited in Italy’s overseas colonies. None was properly trained. All were set to work on motor vehicle manufacture, a trade that right up to the outbreak of war had been the prerogative of a proud working-class elite. These are well-known features of the general trend towards total mobilisation in wartime. Once the way of waging war was industrialised, factory discipline was extended to sections of society hitherto untouched by it. As the techniques of warfare were mechanised, the industrial production of war material gradually absorbed increasing numbers of the labour force behind the lines. The infantryman in the trenches and the industrial worker in the city became complementary, symbolic figures despite the apparent difference in their roles, since both were subject to the imperatives of an impersonal discipline.5 The scale of Fiat’s escalating expansion starting from the first year of the war is revealed by the figures for registered new workers. In December 1916 ‘the need to increase output’ had already boosted workforce numbers to 16,000 from the mere 3,500 of August 1915.6 It seemed a stunning figure at the time, but was soon forgotten; a year later the company was already employing 23,000 workers and by the end of the war the figure had reached 40,150.7 Of course the new workers were quite different from their pre-war equivalents. (As Fiat put it, ‘many of the real workers’ had been called up in the first half of 1915 and had to be replaced with what the company could find on the labour market where numbers had vastly increased but quality had declined.) There was good reason to hesitate over calling the new people industrial workers: most of the latest recruits ‘had absolutely no experience of engineering work in general or Fiat processes in particular’.8 What is more, in 1916 the urban growth of Turin reached its peak,

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absorbing far more immigrants than other northern cities except for Genoa: the population rose to 525,264 inhabitants compared to 430,464 in 1911 (if we make the latter figure equal to 100, the 1916 figure is 122). It was industry that attracted a heterogeneous flow of new migrants to Turin. Then, just as the war ended, the city began to shrink as the scaling-down of manufacturing activities threw people out of work.9 III

In a sense, therefore, the war put an end to the industrial pre-history of Turin and of Fiat, or, more accurately, we might say it constituted the incubation phase that precedes development. Simultaneously the sun also set on the elitist atmosphere that had enveloped the city’s first steps in industrial experience, marked originally by pride in forming a unique enclave in which an aristocracy of skilled workers marched side by side (despite the occasional conflict) with an aristocracy of entrepreneurs. The sudden flood of labour into the city threatened, from the start, to upset everything, since the economic rationale that had until then supported the natural expansion of the industrial system was visibly incapable of controlling growth of such abnormal dimensions. Fiat was quickly forced to develop an emergency regime in order to minimise the expansion of its internal structures. The ‘dilution’ of the car workers’ craft purity following the arrival of a heterogeneous mass of people in the factory was the most urgent problem to be tackled during the initial phase of war production. As ‘the old 1914 labour force’ disappeared, engulfed by the tide of new workers, it was essential to impose a system on a horde of unskilled labourers, many of them women, who had absolutely no knowledge of the specific practices involved in industrial employment. It must be said that without the exceptional regulations established by the Industrial Mobilisation Committees a company like Fiat would have derived little benefit from the employment of such inexperienced workers. The ‘waste of labour due to the lack of skills among the new workers’ was obvious. Had there not been indiscriminate recourse to overtime, output would have been less than satisfactory. ‘The workforce created in these conditions had to be employed not only by day, but also by night, in order to obtain maximum output from the machinery.’ 10 To the detriment of efficiency, the larger workforce had to work longer hours. Ironic as it may seem, the advent of the large factory forced

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the management to abandon any attempt to rationalise the working process. In fact Fiat was never so far from Taylorism as when it impressed its contemporaries, still unaccustomed to the triumphs of industrialism, with the extent and speed of its growth. The other side of the coin was the severity of the impact on industrial organisation, exacerbated by thousands and thousands of improvised factory workers forced to adapt to a new environment in which they spent most of their time. During the war the official working week was 70 hours. In actual fact, in Fiat constant recourse to overtime raised this to 75 or even more. And the entire factory population had to adapt to this regime: from women to adolescents, from speedily urbanised peasants to workers accustomed at most to part-time or occasional employment, not to mention the growing mass of forced labour, prisoners of war ordered into overalls, the Libyan deportees engaged in the humblest manual work. Clearly this heterogeneous collection of individuals and social groups could develop no cohesive sense of collective identity from such temporary and precarious aggregation. As one student of urban migrations at the start of this century has usefully reminded us, industrial employment in the Turin of 1900–20 was not capable of creating a stable group and produced no ‘class’ as understood by first the Socialist, then the Communist, agitators of the period.11 The workforce was too heterogeneous, too diversified even to be counted with any accuracy: for years no one knew exactly how many people were employed by Fiat. This workforce (or at least the wage-earners among them) was not even paid at standard rates. The rough and ready work methods demanded ‘a more general approach to the calculation of labour costs’ essentially on the basis of work ‘obtainable from the machinery’ and on the ‘total cost of labour’ but not on ‘itemised prices’. Piece-work rates were no longer applicable and even the basic principles of industrial accounting were slackened to the point of disappearance. For the entire duration of the war Fiat reduced and simplified its book-keeping to a minimal level in order—or this was the management’s justification —to concentrate every effort on ‘obtaining the output to satisfy the Military Authorities’.12 In such circumstances, when all systems of economic calculation had been abandoned, only the extraordinary support of the Italian state kept the company on an even keel. Without government assistance (tax relief), without guarantees (military orders were unrelated to the usual pattern of supply and demand that governed

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peacetime market logic) and without the labour policy introduced by industrial mobilisation (involving a concerted effort by workers and employers, disciplined dispute procedures, centralised collective bargaining), an industrial organisation so profoundly changed, so abnormal, could not have survived.13 However influential, state intervention alone was no substitute for an internal workshop hierarchy. Indeed it was needed more than ever to guide, supervise and co-ordinate the activities of an almost totally inexperienced workforce. And that hierarchy had to be built up from scratch and made big enough to balance the increase in the workforce. Fiat’s solution was both simple and inevitable, given the speed of the transformation of the company’s social system. In order to ‘train and direct’ the new workforce, it was decided ‘to make the best of the senior workmen into foremen’ and therefore take them out of effective production work. 14 This promotion of skilled workers gave some formal legitimacy to the technical authority of the worker’s craft and skills as a universally valid hierarchical value within the workshop. Even before the war, the craft ethos had proved an effective substitute for management skills that had yet to be developed. Now, however, it became the cornerstone of factory organisation. This does not mean, however, that the workers promoted were the only beneficiaries. It might be claimed that the application of industrial discipline was tempered precisely where it was harshest by being delegated to the only core of workers with any substantial industrial tradition left in the plants. From the company’s angle this operation, which upgraded the prewar worker to the point of recognising him as the foundation stone of authority in the factory, was bound to have certain effects. The new foremen were hardly likely to sever their links with a recent past that was so dominated by their sense of collective solidarity, itself based on a common craft. Hence there is no reason to conclude that the new responsibilities of foremen promoted from the shop-floor automatically diminished their solidarity with the workmates they were now directing. The skilled workers were the most deeply imbued with the code of solidarity and the craft group ethic. Quite a few had been involved in the battles of the Giolitti period and retained an alert eye for the openings and weapons offered by collective action. In addition, their present joint responsibility for orderly production gave them greater management powers. It may well be that the post-war tendency to claim worker control of the factories, i.e. power over the organisation and methods of production, was stimulated by the work

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practices of the war years when an embryonic form of joint management was achieved. As it took the decisions required to plug the holes in an organisation as stately as it was unstable in the first year of the Great War, Fiat must have known it would face some hard times when things returned to normal. The biggest danger derived from the company’s loss of control over the flow of labour, in itself a cause of uncertainty. Then, however diligent and reliable in the exercise of their responsibilities for production, the middle-ranking workshop hierarchy had been delegated authority that reinforced their negotiating position in a way they were unlikely readily to cede. For these reasons and others again, Bachi may well be right in claiming that Fiat was not unaware of the problems it would be facing as soon as the cease-fire was ordered. There was every reason to believe that the end of the war would coincide with the opening of a new front inside the factory and that this conflagration was to be feared. For Fiat, preparing for peacetime meant regaining control over the workforce and it is no coincidence that little more than three weeks after the Armistice, the company had prepared a plan for the gradual dismissal of workers no longer needed when military orders declined. The plan was to lay off some 8,000 workers in December 1918:5,000 forced workers (prisoners of war and Libyans) were to be dismissed and the voluntary resignation of a further 3,000 people was much desired.15 The company hoped to guide redundancies in such a way as to minimise the unrest that was considered inevitable. It had long been recognised that most of the workers who had been conscripted so swiftly into the factories would not be prepared to tolerate even for a single day after the war what they had put up with for so long during it. Once the wartime regulations on labour disputes were revoked, the workers would explode into intense agitation in the hope of regaining the social autonomy they had been denied during the war and of winning back in pay what inflation had cost them. The first warning signals came in 1917, when significant outbreaks of urban protest revealed the extent of the working class’s dissatisfaction with the protraction of the war economy. Subsequently the latent insubordination became explicit in the Fiat workers’ response to the Italian victory despite the company’s efforts to pass off the strike as a patriotic holiday.

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IV

It was only within the limits described (centred on a gradual reduction of the labour force combined with a not too hostile approach to pay increases) that Fiat was able to gird its loins for the post-war period. The management was under no illusion that the most acute elements of discord or the consequent traumas could be eliminated a priori. Still, who could have predicted the conflict of the Biennio Rosso? Not even the most up-to-date industrial managements had any comparable experience to go by. In the Italy of Giolitti, the union battle was fought on a much more restricted field between opponents who understood each other, knowing well what each wanted and why. Even on those occasions when the confrontation assumed a more violent form, forcing even the more reformist union to adopt a more aggressive approach, as in 1912 or even more in 1913 when Liberal Italy was put to its first real test (before the war imposed a general freeze); even then the battle was always fought over the classic questions of factory discipline and its application, pay-scales for piece-work, hours and the more complex question of wages. 16 Federazione Italiana Operai Metallurgici (FIOM) (the reforming Socialist engineering workers’ union) was still an elite association of highly skilled workers that tended to make its voice heard outside the factory gates and to protect its members in the labour market rather than on the shop-floor.17 This was the system of free (i.e. not subject to government control) collective bargaining adopted in Fiat. It was a process that had intensified the management’s dealings with the unions and had earned Agnelli’s respect for the expertise of negotiators like Buozzi and Colombino. From late 1918 on, these precedents served for little. The post-war FIOM was no longer what it had been a few years earlier. Certainly it was no longer the compact association once deeply rooted in the nation’s industrial cities. Its membership had risen from no more than 11,471 in 1914 to 96,196 in 1919, peaking at 151,930 a year later (and quickly slumping to 107,000 in 1921 after the great hopes had died).18 In this new situation union involvement was bound to be widespread and to include heterogeneous groups of workers whom the war had deprived of the ritual passage through the phases of worker training. The war had deprived them of the into their condition as workers and accustomed them to the habits apprenticeship phase that should have gradually assimilated them of factory life. Union

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protection of the workers’ interests therefore began to assume different forms, now promulgated by a substantial staff of union professionals (FIOM had a staff of thirty-three functionaries in 1920). Both the union’s overall support of workers’ claims and its handling of shop-floor disputes increased, the latter under pressure of competition from the rival revolutionary groups that were developing, the most important in Turin being the group centred on the magazine Ordine Nuovo. These groups, as we shall see, were counting on radicalising the factories by a policy of incorporating the action of the union’s shop-floor representatives—the shop committee—into the new factory councils. V

In any event, by the end of the war the first signs of the Biennio Rosso were visible to all observers. They were evident in the tendency, seen throughout the labour movement, to follow up the attainment of a general improvement by advancing specific claims. In a word, all industrial workers began to use the language of the unions. It is therefore wrong to associate the Biennio Rosso with the image of a militant movement developed by the workers in opposition to the attitudes of other not strictly proletarian segments of society. For Fiat, 1919 began with a strike by whitecollar workers from which these workers derived substantial economic benefits.19 It is easy to see how that happened when we remember the massive wartime increase in clerical staff numbers to handle the extra book-keeping demanded by the vastly expanded workforce. The dispute proceeded along similar lines to those adopted by the unions on behalf of manual workers. The clerical workers held their meetings in the Labour Office and always included a large percentage of women, to the point that meetings were always chaired by one of the women—the Signorine as they were called at the time. The strike even won the support of the manual workers, who refused to accept advances on their pay packets when the striking clerical staff had not completed their negotiations, in order to force the hand of the Fiat management.20 No sooner were the clerical staff back at work than the ‘technicians’ put forward an even more costly claim.21 At this point, however, Fiat could no longer hide its fears of spiralling conflict that seemed to be never-endingly fuelled by every successful claim. The very success of one struggle triggered off new claims, the successful conclusion of one battle providing ammunition for the next. In this

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way each class of workers transmitted its own bellicosity to the others, so helping to stimulate ever-rising expectations. Initially the Biennio Rosso was a generalised round of pay increases to all manual and professional workers; this, moreover, at a time when the historic decision to create an 8-hour working day (in February 1919) had forced costs up. Since these were no more than the first hints of the egalitarianism that would later reduce pay differentials, it seemed as if all categories were being pushed up the pay scale and particularly the worst-off. Thus, in a situation in which everyone was expecting substantial improvements, the claims of one category boosted those of another in an upward spiral that worried the management all the more as it recognised the pointlessness of further economic concessions. There was no longer any guarantee that satisfaction of demands would reduce the risk of further disputes. In fact the opposite might happen and the workers become more demanding as long as the company proved conciliatory. It was this that must have convinced Fiat’s managing director Giovanni Agnelli, despite his habitual caution in his dealings with the workers, that he had to take a resolute stand against the tide of demands. By late spring 1919, Agnelli had had enough of playing the silent partner, the conciliatory ‘modern industrialist’ popular with his workers, who would have preferred, as he said jokingly to a delegation from the striking clerical workers, ‘to replace him with one of those Chinese dolls that do nothing but nod’. It had indeed seemed for a time that the clerical workers, again in Agnelli’s own words, ‘were getting everything they wanted and the manual workers as well’.22 Now, however, they were not to be satisfied with money and were attacking the very foundations of industrial organisation. It has been pointed out that nothing reveals the dimensions of the turbulence in the factories during the Biennio Rosso more than the ‘800 disputes’ arising in the Fiat Centro plant alone ‘between October 1919 and March 1920 over pay scale changes, group and individual promotions, disciplinary matters’. 23 Among other exasperated witnesses, the economist Giuseppe Prato has left us an acid portrait of the manufacturing and managerial paralysis afflicting a company condemned to systematic under-utilisation of its production capacity. The central management of Fiat with its 15,000 workers was forced to spend whole days discussing futile minor details with the shop stewards. Against the unambiguous terms of the regulations to which they had agreed, the shop

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stewards were taking all powers upon themselves and thereby destroying the organisation of companies. The foremen had become ‘purely decorative figures’. The so-called ‘clock strike’ (in protest against the introduction of summer-time) led by the militant minority of the Turin labour movement, i.e. the Communists of Ordine Nuovo, faced the company with the ultimate question: Was it still possible to maintain discipline in the factories and were the unions prepared to accept the rules that they had agreed to?24 With the endemic insubordination that the very size of its factory seemed to amplify to the point of revolution, Fiat constituted a negative symbol for many commentators on Italy’s economic and social scene. It was the example of how far the seeds of indiscipline sown by the upheavals of the wartime regime had been left to grow and bear fruit. VI

Most people believed that Communist agitation was responsible for the chaos and anarchy that reigned in the factory. However, a careful reading of the programmes and ideas promulgated by the Turin militants in their own journals would soon have revealed that the Communists would very quickly have restored order and discipline. Of course, they intended it to be a new kind of order. Convinced that the abolition of capitalist ownership was a viable political option, the Communists were already outlining the foundations of a new political and economic system to replace the existing one. On 13 September 1919, the editor of Ordine Nuovo, Antonio Gramsci himself, announced the creation of a commissar’s council in the Fiat Brevetti factory. Convinced that other workshops in Turin and nation-wide would soon follow suit, Gramsci stated that the new system for worker representation had happened quickly and easily, ‘proof that the proletarian methods of delegation were inherently superior to the parliamentary methods of the bourgeoisie’. The elections had been held without any work stoppages, he claimed. Furthermore the representative function of the council was no more than ‘an offshoot of work’.25 In practice, the entire workforce of the factory voted, for revolutionary practice, feeling itself to be concerned with the entire proletariat, disdained the trade unionists’ distinction between union members and other workers. Hence, the elected officers were not answerable solely to union members. In Fiat Brevetti, some 2,000

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workers (with no more than ‘three or four abstentions’, observed Gramsci) had elected delegates or ‘commissars’ for each factory division. As it happened, all thirty-two ‘commissars’ elected were actually members of FIOM. For Gramsci and his revolutionary comrades, on the verge, by this time, of severing their connections with socialists of all kinds, the factory council was no longer a union body appointed to protect workers’ interests, as was the shop committee (that remained as the executive of the new council). The council was rather a rehearsal for worker self-government: a ‘fighting force’ in the short term, but ready to transform itself into an instrument of government after the revolution. In retrospect, the councils that were created in Fiat, of which the Gramscian Communists were the supporters and ideologues, seem to represent an attempt to create an alternative model of functional democracy to the representative democracy of the bourgeois parties. They were created to express the will of the producer, not that of an undifferentiated citizen. They proposed to encapsulate political functions within the economic and productive functions of the nation. Essentially, they constituted an extreme version of a totalitarian industrial democracy that aimed to expropriate capitalist ownership of the companies as a parasitic and irrelevant inessential. The managerial function attributed to the council clearly reveals an ideologised image of the situation created in the factory during the First World War when shop-floor management was essentially delegated to the core of skilled workers. There has been much discussion of whether the majority of workers involved approved of the self-governing powers attributed by Gramsci to the councils. For many of them, the councils probably represented a simple extension of the union organisations that backed up the monitoring and negotiating activities of the shop stewards on a more ‘grass-roots’ level. In any event, it is easy to see why Agnelli responded to the intensified activities of bodies set up to deprive him of his entrepreneurial rights by refusing to recognise the commissars and by dealing only with the shop stewards accepted by the management in the agreement of February 1919. However, what was really created in September 1919 in Fiat was a stereotyped image of Turin, the ‘laboratory city’, that was to last: the concept of an industrial city that was rehearsing in its great factories the battles of a nation-wide class war. In actual fact the ‘council’ movement was to remain largely confined to Turin,

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which was estimated to have at least 85 active factory councils by 1920. It is also the factory council that endowed Turin Communism with its distinctive identity as a model of political emancipation which hinged on knowledge and control of the production cycle, aimed at making factory organisation the nucleus of social change. The councils, however, were to prove a transient phenomenon. In practice, the experiment began and ended in 1920: from the spring with its unsuccessful ‘clock strike’ to the autumn when the factory occupation campaign ran out of steam having exhausted the labour movement’s capacity to mobilise.26 Yet there were many that year who believed that the labour movement stood at least on the threshold of government if not on the verge of a genuine Russian-style revolution. In Turin in particular, the occupation of the factories had been long and violent, with an aftermath that prevented any return to normal operations until well into October. Among the many who gave vent to their fear of an apparently inevitable outright war was Agnelli, who reached the point of offering the labour movement’s institutions the opportunity to acquire Fiat stock and transform the company into a co-operative. Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo Communists announced their willingness to examine the proposal, but nothing was done. There was too little unanimity within the Socialist party and its unions, constituting the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGL), for agreement on any concrete objective involving national government and economic management. It took the industrial crisis of 1921 to re-establish the old order. It was the weapon Fiat needed to end its long struggle with the workers and in the spring, at the end of a new dispute that included a lock-out, an agreement was signed with the unions that authorised the lay-off of 2,600 workers. These included many of the militants who had caused such tumult in the factories during the Biennio Rosso. By late 1921, the Fiat workforce numbered 9,045 compared to 13,775 a year earlier: a drastic cut which is the measure of the loss of negotiating power by the workers’ movement. Furthermore the contract opened a period of outright war between the Socialist and Communist members of FIOM that was not to end until the Fascist regime revoked union rights. However, from 1921 on, industrial relations were no longer a problem for Fiat, which observed the restoration of peace in its factories with considerable satisfaction.27

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VII

In 1924, Gramsci reviewed the events of the Biennio Rosso in two private letters to a friend, the Turin intellectual Zino Zini, and substantially revised his original opinions. The letters reveal Gramsci’s bitterness at the political defeat and take a highly critical view of the hopes and political utopias of a year or two earlier. On rereading Ordine Nuovo the Communist leader decided that it was a good thing that the revolution had never happened. He was convinced that the inevitable counter-revolution would easily have defeated a Socialist party that was confused in its militancy and ‘a working class that saw the world through rose-coloured spectacles and was fonder of songs and fanfares than sacrifices’. Indeed, he added, the behaviour of the Italian workers who emigrated to Russia at the advent of Fascism proved that they could never have retained power if they had won it in 1920: the Italian political émigrés refused to accept the suffering imposed by the revolution; they expected ‘to be exempt and did everything they could to protect themselves’. For the Communist Gramsci, the Fascism that had restored factory discipline had also stiffened the proletarian backbone, weakened in the cause of better pay and by a militancy which had led to a total abdication of responsibility and the abandonment of social restraints. He went on: ‘Fascism…transformed our people…it endowed them with fortitude, a healthier morality, a resistance to evil they had never possessed, a depth of feeling that had never existed before.’28 After the convulsions of 1919–20, not even Gramsci could see any revolutionary value in the workers’ pugnacity. Ultimately, he too accepted the view of the majority that social turbulence was a sign of immaturity in a nation that war had rushed too hurriedly through the processes of a delayed industrialisation. Paradoxically, Gramsci came to agree with people like Bachi who observed that for the Italian working class the keynote of the post-war period had been ‘a passionate desire for a better standard of living, for extra purchasing power’.29 However paradoxical it may seem, in other words even Gramsci, the revolutionary, eventually accepted the thesis widely shared by the bourgeois classes after the war: that the social position of industrial workers had changed utterly almost overnight. And changed for the better. The life-styles and behaviour patterns of the factory worker no longer conformed to the stereotype of the industrial worker painted by Liberal Italy. The image was no longer

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the one of virtuous poverty (or essential moral sobriety) so often evoked by the idea of the hard-working proletarian who spent most of his life at the workbench. Second (and even more outrageously to contemporary observers) the workers who had benefited economically from the unexpected side-effects of the war and the post-war period, gave no sign of satisfaction with their improved condition. On the contrary they were organising and striking for more, for substantial improvements that taken to extremes would have culminated in the abandonment of any attempt to achieve efficiency in production. Turin, moreover, showed the phenomenon at its worst, the behaviour of its workers reflecting the failures and corruption of a generation that had achieved prosperity but lost all moral fibre. In actual fact, even a Liberal economist like Prato, who had unreservedly participated in the wave of anti-worker feeling, was forced as early as 1925 to admit the truth over the question of workers’ pay. There had indeed been pay rises in Turin (Prato was referring to Fiat figures) but at an infinitely lower rate than suggested by right-wing propaganda.30 As for living standards, we know enough today, thanks to the meticulous research of Vera Zamagni, 31 to conclude that the strikes of 1919 brought pay increases that more than made up for the ground lost during the war and made the workers substantially better off than they had been before the war. For a time, indeed, wages rose faster than the cost of living, proving that the postwar struggle for better conditions had been a success. However it was the introduction of the long-desired 8-hour day which did most to improve the workers’ situation. The fact that the Turin workers were less well-off than the exaggerated claims reported was not enough, however, to absolve them of ‘immorality’ in the eyes of many commentators, including Prato himself. This was exemplified, he felt, by ‘the widening gap between income and saving’, since even in the years when real wages were highest, saving was minimal among the urban working classes. Furthermore, the birth rate decreased, despite the increase in the number of marriages in 1919–20 as working families enjoyed greater economic security.32 High wages, increased spending, the reduction of industrial differentials to the point of their elimination: these were held to be the evils deriving from the Biennio Rosso. The post-war period, it was felt, had converted the Italian working class to hedonism together with an unhealthy attempt to imitate the habits and spending patterns of the middle class. This, it was claimed, was the sole cause of the

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widespread unrest that could only be tamed by the authoritarian intervention of the state to restore the jettisoned principle of social hierarchy. It is surprising that the drastic revaluation of the strikes and the reluctance to attribute any specific significance to them is based on an inaccurate estimate of the improvement in the workers’ living standards and its damaging effects on the efficiency of the industrial system. What almost all observers, whether outsiders or protagonists, agree on is the disorderly, ‘anarchic’, spontaneous character of the unrest during the Biennio Rosso. Even someone like Gramsci, who had devoted all his energies to ‘politicising’ the workers’ struggle, had to admit in the end that the workers had fought to eradicate existing factory discipline and not to re-create it in a new, socialist form. Hence the working class took all the blame for a social situation of which workers were more the product than the cause. However distorted, this picture of the Biennio Rosso does suggest a possible interpretation of the period that has little in common with the political explanations cherished as part of its heritage by the labour movement, with its emphasis on ‘control’ and selfgovernment in production as the decisive factors in the collective action. For the vast majority of Italian workers, including those in Fiat, ‘control’, whether in its revolutionary, Ordine Nuovo version or in the reformist, legislative version of the union leadership, probably meant very little. Or at least meant little ideologically, but a great deal if control meant putting an end to the complex of exceptional circumstances that had circumscribed their life and work during the war years.33 For most Italian workers, who were unskilled labourers, their only experience was of the factory where they had spent four long years between 1915 and 1918, a place of forced labour and long hours, of minimal autonomy and freedom both as individuals and as a group. Peace, with the advent of protective legislation, shorter hours and the restoration of the union’s right to take strike action, suddenly changed everything and released forces that had been repressed for too long. The doyen of Italy’s Liberal economists, Luigi Einaudi, was the first to recognise the contradiction between the enforced cooperation imposed by the industrial mobilisation authorities, which should have sown the seeds of an embryonic system of guarantees for the workers, and the sudden release of collective potential that came

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with the Armistice. As he noted, ‘where military discipline had been harshest and the workers should have been most grateful for the government’s conciliatory measures and pay rates, the unrest was most violent’.34 It is against this social background that we should measure the unrest of 1919–20. The factories in which the skilled workers supported the strikes, producing massive protest marches, were populated by a youthful workforce in which women had acquired equal rights. Most of the enthusiasm came from the 20-year-olds, who demonstrated in the hope of a life that for the first time would offer the prospect of some leisure time. This generation had no memory of the constraints and fears that ruled their fathers: and even socialist, unionised fathers were aghast at the forest of hands that went up whenever a strike was proposed. What is more, the war had given these young people just enough spare cash to spend in their free time and they had no intention of sitting over a glass of wine for hours as their fathers had done. Working-class recreation was taking on new forms. Young workers were offered a range of new opportunities, from the highly appealing collective spectacle of the cinema to sport, and football in particular. It was in the 1920s in fact that football lost its final vestiges of an elite image and attracted a growing crowd of young workers, whether as players or merely as spectators eager to follow the fortunes of the club teams which were beginning to produce their first professional players. Diligent readers of the newspapers published in September 1920 who are willing to divert their attention from the occupation of the factories will notice that tempers were frayed on the football pitches as well. There the competitive spirit was regrettably uncontrolled, leading the supporters of rival teams to abandon any principle of fair play: indeed they did not hesitate to come to actual blows. The working class dreamed of something else as well: the bicycle, the symbol and instrument of free movement that could release the worker from the confines of the district where he had always lived, or the village where she was born.35 It was phenomena of this kind that led scandalised observers to lament the destruction of class differences in post-war Italy. Higher pay was not enough to destroy the class system but the distinction between the needs and spending habits of the working class and the life-style traditionally reserved for the middle classes was becoming less absolute. At the same time there was increasing awareness that it was the ‘middle classes…who had paid for the increasing

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prosperity of the manual workers’. All this tended to eclipse the ‘respect for law and order’, ‘widespread liberty’ and ‘calm good sense’ that were once held to characterise Turin’s society and traditions.36 In other words the transformation of post-war society both real and imaginary was depriving the middle classes of their legitimacy and their traditional function of political mediation. Once the workers’ leaders took to the streets, Turin for the majority of observers began to look like a no man’s land that retained only the shadows of authority. At that point, when political negotiation had no room left for manoeuvre, a trial of strength was the only option left. And that is what happened in Turin after the autumn of 1920, well before the arrival of Fascism as an alternative. It took time and the industrial crisis to put an end to the impasse. The winter that followed the occupation of the factories doused the flames of the Biennio Rosso. In the memory of many industrial workers that period remained as a time of great hopes, a sort of pause between the war years of 1914–18 and the still longer years of the Fascist regime. NOTES 1 Cf. Paolo Spriano, L’occupazione delle fabbriche. Settembre 1920 (Turin, 1968). 2 Cf. Valerio Castronovo, Giovanni Agnelli (Turin, 1971). 3 Cf. Riccardo Bachi, L’Italia economica nell’anno 1918. Annuario della vita commerciale, industriale, agraria, bancaria,finanziaria e della politica economica, vol. X (Città di Castello, Milan, Rome and Naples, 1919), p. 143. 4 Fiat 1915–1930. Verbali del consiglio di amministrazione (Milan, 1991), vol. I, pp. 260, 262. 5 Ernst Jünger, ‘La mobilitazione totale’ (Italian translation of an article first published in 1930), Il Mulino XXXIV, 5 (1985), pp. 753–70. 6 Cf. Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, p. 138. 7 Cf. Stefano Musso, Gli operai di Torino 1900–1920, with a foreword by Francesco Ciafaloni (Milan, 1980), p. 135. 8 Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, p. 138. 9 Cf. Giuseppe Prato, Il Piemonte e gli effetti della guerra sulla sua vita economica e sociale (Bari and New Haven, Conn., 1925), pp. 166, 169, 173. 10 Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, pp. 138–40. 11 Maurizio Gribaudi, Mondo operaio e mito operaio. Spazi e percorsi sociali a Torino nel primo Novecento (Turin, 1987), p. 159. 12 Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, p. 140. 13 For these problems, see in general Luigi Tomassini, ‘Intervento dello stato e politica salariale durante la prima guerra mondiale: esperimenti e

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14 15 16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33

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studi per la determinazione di una “scala mobile” delle retribuzioni operaie’ , Annali della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli XXII (1982), pp. 87–184. Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, p. 138. ibid., p. 303. For a disputable analysis of the industrial conflicts preceding the war, see Simonetta Ortaggi, Il prezzo del lavoro. Torino e l’industria italiana nel primo Novecento, with a foreword by David Montgomery (Turin, 1988). Cf. Guiseppe Berta, ‘Un caso di industrialismo sindacale: la Fiom del primo Novecento’, in Giuseppe Berta, Lavoro, solidarietà, conflitti. Studi sulla storia delle politiche e delle relazioni di lavoro (Rome, 1983), pp. 51–85. Cf. Bruno Buozzi, ‘Cinque anni di lotte intense e di opere feconde’ (report to the Sixth National Conference of the FIOM, Milan 24–6 April 1924), in Bruno Buozzi, Scritti e discorsi, ed. E.Guglielmo Epifani, with a foreword by Piero Boni (Rome, 1975), p. 185. Cf. Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, pp. 303, 307. Cf. La Stampa, 17 March 1919. Cf. Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, pp. 316, 318, 320, 324. La Stampa, 17 March 1919. See also Castronovo, op. cit., p. 199. Stefano Musso, La gestione della forza lavoro sotto il fascismo. Razionalizzazione e contrattazione collettiva nell’industria metallurgica torinese (1910–1940) (Milan, 1987), p. 35. Prato, op. cit., p. 148. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo 1919–1920, ed. Valentino Gerratana and Antonio A.Santucci (Turin, 1987), pp. 201–2, 208–12. Cf. Castronovo, op. cit., pp. 213–95. Cf. Fiat 1915–1930, vol. I, p. 501. ‘Due lettere inedite di Gramsci’, Rinascita XXI, 17 (1964). The letters are introduced by an editorial note signed ‘p. t.’ [Palmiro Togliatti]. Riccardo Bachi, L’Italia economica nell’anno 1919. Annuario della vita commerciale, industriale, agraria, bancaria, finanziaria e della politica economica, vol. XI (Città di Castello, Milan, Rome and Naples, 1920), pp. 198–9. See Prato, op. cit., p. 132. Vera Zamagni, ‘Did the standard of living of Italian industrial workers really improve after World War I?’, paper submitted to the international colloquium on ‘Labour Movements and Revolutionary Potential in Europe at the End of World War I’ (Graz, 5–8 June 1989). For a comparison with the pre-war level of wages, see Vera Zamagni, ‘I salari giornalieri degli operai dell’industria nell’età giolittiana (1898–1913)’, Rivista di storia economica (new series) I, 2 (1984), pp. 183–221. Prato, op. cit., pp. 195, 173. On the notion and definition of workers’ control, see the classical research by Carter L.Goodrich, The Frontier of Control: A Study in British Workshop Politics (1st edn, New York, 1920; revised edn, London, 1975).

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34 Luigi Einaudi, La condotta economica e gli effetti sociali della guerra italiana (Bari and New Haven, Conn., 1933), p. 311. 35 For a tentative approach to this field of study, see Stefano Pivato, ‘Lo sport fra ideologia e loisir’ , Vita civile degli italiani V (Milan, 1991), pp. 100–15. 36 Prato, op. cit., pp. 228, 236.

7

Paris 1917–20: labour protest and popular politics Roger Magraw

I

PARIS ON THE EVE OF THE GREAT WAR

Between 1789 and 1871 Paris earned the reputation as the European capital of urban revolution. Its economy had been dominated by smallscale consumer industry. Hence ‘artisans’ had been in the vanguard of popular militancy—furniture-makers, shoemakers, tailors, building craftsmen and skilled metalworkers. However, from the 1850s Haussmann’s urban renewal projects had begun to transform the nature of central Paris. Historic popular quartiers were demolished. A world of bourgeois apartments, boulevards, department stores, tourism and conspicuous consumption was created. Electoral politics in the central arrondissements in the early Third Republic were dominated by conservative Republicanism or, during the depression of the 1880–90s, by the volatile Boulangist and anti-Semitic new Right. Meanwhile major changes were occurring in the structures and geographical location of the working class. 1 The decline of the ‘artisanate’ became absolute rather than relative. Authentic ‘craftsmen’ still survived at the upmarket end of the jewellery, furniture and clothing trades and in hundreds of small metalwork ateliers. But most furniture-makers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now merely assembled pieces prefabricated in the provinces and were confined to repetitive subdivided tasks. As apprenticeships declined, artisans now urged their sons to acquire educational qualifications necessary for white-collar jobs in such rapidly expanding sectors as the Post Office (P.T.T.), the civil service, or banking and commerce. Paris’s status as a centre of tourism and elite consumerism increased employment prospects for cooks, waiters, hotel servants and shop assistants. Inevitably the wages, status

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and perceived social identity of such employees varied widely. However, it would be misleading to categorise all of them as ‘petty bourgeois’, as a French ‘Mittelstand’ divorced completely from bluecollar labour organisations. Shop assistants, waiters, chefs and foodworkers did join syndicalist-led strikes. Minor fonctionnaires stubbornly resisted government attempts to deny them unionisation rights and the declining working conditions and status of public employees constituted a process of de facto ‘proletarianisation’.2 Meanwhile a new, ‘spatially marginalised’, authentic proletariat was emerging in the banlieues on the peripheries of the city whose population quadrupled to over 1 million between 1870 and 1914. The complex of goods stations and railway-sidings around Saint-Ouen, La Chapelle and Pantin permitted the import of raw materials for heavy engineering, metallurgical and chemical plants. The proportion of workers employed in factories of more than 500 employees was three times higher in the banlieue than in Paris. But while some suburbs were essentially industrial, others (e.g. Bobigny) were ‘dormitories’ for workers who used the new tramway network to commute to their place of employment.3 Many of this ‘new’ proletariat were recent rural migrants who moved directly into the banlieue—for accommodation was scarce and rents rising fast in old popular quartiers such as the 20th arrondissement. Many, like the Bretons employed in the rubber and electric cable plants in the north-west banlieue of Bézons, lacked previous labour traditions. They had little contact with the radical artisan culture of Paris and few of them joined trade unions. Rapid changes in the technology and managerial strategies of engineering firms began to undermine the job-control culture of skilled workers. Resentments against time-and-motion study, speedups and piece-work bonus systems erupted in a wave of engineering strikes, a ‘revolt against discipline’, in the 1900s. This coincided with a syndicalist-led strike offensive spearheaded by the building craftsmen and navvies of the Fédération du Bâtiment (FB).4 But unionisation levels remained low, and by 1910–14 even miltant syndicalists were realising that the myth of an imminent general strike was no longer sufficient to sustain rank-and-file workers through prolonged, bruising and increasingly unsuccessful disputes. Some argued for a complete rethinking of union strategy. Merrheim, leader of the Fédération des Métaux (FM) was denounced by Parisian shop-floor militants when he advocated a more cautious, thoughtful policy which recognised the realities of capitalist strength.5 The leader of the Confédération Général du Travail (CGT), Jouhaux, was also urging a new realism which would

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build larger, more disciplined unions, allied more closely to the Socialist Party (SFIO). Although SFIO growth in the Paris region was steady rather than spectacular, the sheer scale of social problems in faubourgs like Belleville and in the banlieues did provide issues which permitted the party to capture six banlieue municipalities by 1914.6 The laissez-faire dogmatism of the Republican establishment ruled out effective government intervention in the spheres of housing or commuter transport.7 Hence in Bobigny the SFIO manifesto of 1910 appealed to those workers who had fled Paris’s ‘high rents’ only to live in suburbs with ‘absurdly poor transport, rutted streets, insufficient lighting, mounds of garbage, no drinking water and (inadequate) schools’.8 II

PARISIAN WORKERS IN THE EARLY YEARS OF WAR (1914–16)

The sheer rapidity of the slide into war and the widespread assumption, shared by most workers, that Republican France was the innocent victim of kaiserist aggression, simply overwhelmed syndicalist attempts to organise a coherent anti-war movement.9 The call-up of workers into the army then decimated union membership. The strike rate in Paris during the early years of the war fell to extremely low levels—although hard-core FB syndicalists employed on the building sites strengthening the city’s fortifications staged brief walk-outs in an effort to defend union payment scales. Some were arrested. Meanwhile the Paris-based CGT leadership was drawn inexorably into participation in official labour mobilisation projects. CGT and SFIO reformists established a joint Comité d’Action with the immediate aim of providing for the families of mobilised workers. In the longer term, such reformists hoped, the labour movement would be able to consolidate a national ‘presence’ which would ensure that henceforth it would be consulted by bureaucrats and industrialists on key issues of economic and social policy.10 War accelerated industrial trends already apparent in the Paris region. Some of the productive capacity lost when the Germans occupied northern and eastern departments was relocated in the Parisian banlieues, whose population expanded by nearly 300,000 in the wartime years. By 1917 some 300,000 Parisian workers were engaged in war production. Many were mobilisés—conscripts sent back from the trenches because of their industrial skills but remaining under military discipline. Women continued to work in the garment sector, but were also employed on the buses and the Métro and by June

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1915 made up 18 per cent of Parisian war industry workers. By 1917 this had risen above 25 per cent. A further 2.4 per cent of war workers in 1916 were immigrants. Predictably it proved difficult for an emasculated labour movement to secure a foothold among this heterogeneous labour force. Mobilisés risked being returned to the trenches if they stepped out of line. Male workers’ fears of ‘dilution’ poisoned relations between the FM and women metalworkers. Though some recent migrants employed in Parisian war industries (e.g. miners in the département of Nord) had union traditions, many were rustics for whom war work represented a chance to earn higher wages. Cultural and linguistic barriers and the xenophobia of many French workers precluded any easy assimilation of immigrant workers into the unions. The city’s mood was volatile. Morale was vulnerable to rumours of military set-back or to disruption of food and coal supplies. Yet the authorities were generally ‘satisfied’ with workers’ ‘sound’ morale. Municipal works projects eased unemployment problems caused by the industrial dislocation provoked by the mass mobilisation of August 1914. The government introduced family and cost-of-living allowances and a separation allowance for wives of mobilised workers. As war production boomed in 1915–16 police reports indicated that ‘the population is contented’. Moreover, Paris was sufficiently close to the front for workers to perceive the Germans as a genuine military threat. CGT leaders were loyal to the Union Sacrée and became enmeshed in bureaucratic allocation of labour. Tenant protests at landlord evasion of rent-controls appeared to be the main source of social tensions.11 Initially, therefore, the war appeared to consolidate a national consensus which transcended class and political divisions. By late 1916, however, workers’ frustrations were increasing. Conditions of work in war industries appeared tolerable when it was assumed that the war would be brief. But as it dragged on into its third winter the FM’s relaunched journal (Union des Métaux) denounced the Union Sacrée as a fraud which permitted employers to repress legitimate union demands. Hatry’s study of the Renault works emphasises the growing tensions which were to engender the industrial explosion of spring 1917. 12 Renault had quadrupled its labour force (to 20,000) and increased its production by 600 per cent. The sheer size of its Boulogne-Billancourt plant—which specialised in tanks, armoured cars and shells—made Renault the prime symbol of the usine de guerre. Like his fellow war-industrialist, Renault vigorously resisted

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efforts to restrict his profits. (Citroën received government subsidies to re-equip his Javel plant. Yet he paid only 1 per cent tax on his inflated war-profits.) He pioneered assembly-line production and ‘scientific management’. However, even ‘progressive’ industrialists like Renault remained ambivalent about full-scale ‘Taylorism’ — preferring to take advantage of war orders and of the vulnerability of non-unionised labour to increase production and profits by imposing longer hours, speed-ups and piece-rate systems whilst utilising existing machinery. Renault was suspicious that ‘Taylorism’ gave excessive power to engineers and feared that socialist Minister of Munitions Albert Thomas might exploit the wartime conjoncture to link industrial rationalisation to state dirigisme and to greater trade union power. War increased demand for standardised products, made by semi-skilled assembly-line workers. And the heterogeneous, illorganised Parisian engineering labour force was not well placed to resist de-skilling. The FM’s efforts to become an industrial rather than a craft union had suffered major defeats before 1914—when its national membership stood at a pitiful 25,000 and its footholds in Parisian heavy-engineering were precarious. FB activists, accustomed to the relative job-autonomy of craft-workers on the building sites, were appalled by the severity of shop-floor discipline at Renault when they took jobs there in 1915. Many skilled engineering workers, the natural cadres for shop-floor union leadership, were mobilisés who were inhibited from overt involvement in disputes. They remained vulnerable to pseudopopulist propaganda, voiced in the rhetoric of neo-Jacobin egalitarian nationalism, which scoffed at their supposed ‘industrial grievances’ and portrayed them as ‘shirkers’ (embusqués) with ‘cushy’ factory jobs allowing them to evade the ‘blood tax’ (impôt du sang) paid by their fellow citizens in the trenches.13 By 1917, 30 per cent of Renault workers were mobilisés, 15 per cent were foreign or colonial and 30 per cent were female—as against 4 per cent in 1914. In 1913 twothirds of Renault workers were ‘skilled’, by 1917 under two-fifths. Skilled union cadres were often alarmed at the ‘dilution’ threat posed by women, whose employment ‘is a threat to the working class…. When men return…from the front…it will be difficult for them to compete with these latter, who will have a certain competence…and will be receiving lower wages.’ Pressure of war production targets increased work-pace and worsened conditions. A 12-hour shift became the norm. Many workers at Boulogne-Billancourt faced long and tiring commuter journeys to the distant banlieue on overcrowded trams. Exhaustion contributed to

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industrial accidents. Twenty-six died when a ceiling collapsed during installation of new machinery. Unlike Citroën, Renault was never noted for his ‘paternalism’. But management did seek to offset the harshness of the shop-floor regime by introducing canteens, medical services, sports facilities and crèches. In conjunction with fellow engineering employers Renault developed sophisticated screening processes to weed out potential ‘trouble-makers’. Skilled workers who protested at ‘dilution’ were sacked in 1916. However, in spring 1917 Renault was at the centre of strike agitation which, briefly, appeared to threaten the patriotic/ productivist consensus. War factories like Boulogne-Billancourt were ambiguous entities. Inevitably they were the target of an incessant barrage of official productivist propaganda. Yet they were also huge working-class bastions.14 War weariness was growing. Deteriorating working conditions became harder to tolerate as workers heard of huge, untaxed employer profits and as they faced a sudden upsurge in prices. The prices of foodstuffs in Paris had remained steady throughout 1916. Now they doubled between January and July 1917, far outstripping pay rises. Parisian price fluctuations appear to have been more extreme than those in the provinces—though overall price inflation there was as high if not higher overall. 15 Police reports emphasised open public hostility to ‘war profiteers’. As Becker’s map of public opinion suggests, in the Seine region—as in Limoges and the Rhône—the spring of 1917 strikes were ‘contaminated’ by ‘pacifist’ rhetorical overtones.16 At mass rallies on May Day, the first since 1914, orators won applause for praising the February revolution or calling for peace. A one-day strike was held by 10,000 buildingworkers. A Union des Syndicats de la Seine was established to coordinate workers’ demands. Women workers were prominent in the Parisian strike-wave. The diminutive term ‘munitionnettes’, coined to describe the city’s 100,000 female war workers, captures the tone of condescension with which they were treated by the press and by official discourse.17 Before 1914 the ideology of domesticity had emphasised the harmful physical and moral effects of heavy industry on women workers, and the ‘protective’ industrial legislation of the 1890s had been designed, de facto, to exclude them from better-paid ‘male’ sectors. The imperatives of war production changed official priorities. ‘Protective’ legislation was, duly, suspended. Now journalists and politicians voiced their amazed admiration for the ‘plucky’ and ‘cheerful’ munitionnettes—former servants, shop assistants, seamstresses and housewives—who now applied their ‘female’ dexterity and patience to the task of cutting shell-

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fuses. Sixty per cent of Citroën’s shell-makers were female. A small number of women secured jobs as fitters or welders. But few entered such male bastions as the toolroom or aviation plants like Blériot, still reliant on ‘craft’ labour. Women’s war work aroused fierce controversy in Paris. Radical feminists welcomed it as symbolising an escape from the employment ghetto. As sexual segmentation of the labour market crumbled, so wage-differentials were eroded. Seamstresses trebled their wages by moving into engineering. In 1913 male engineering workers were paid 40 per cent more than women. By 1917–18 this gap was only 18 per cent. However, socialist-feminist Marcelle Capy was less optimistic about wartime trends. One-quarter of the 659 women war workers killed in 1917 in industrial accidents worked in Paris. Women employed at Pathé-Frères (Vincennes) were exposed to noxious chemicals which caused skin diseases and stillbirths. Meanwhile right-wing and medical experts insisted that factory work remained incompatible with women’s ‘natural’ roles as repos du guerrier, nurse, comforter and mother of babies who would constitute the next generation of soldiers. Patriotic postcards constantly emphasised—often via risqué imagery—that the patriotic duty of young Frenchwomen was to make love in order to procreate for the army of the 1930s. 18 Yet, since women were also needed in war industry, some Parisian employers sought to square the circle by provision of factory crèches and breast-feeding facilities. Women workers’ own voices were rarely heard. By 1917–18 the FM had 14,000 women members in Paris. But despite the efforts of an inter-union action committee which sought to encourage a participatory role for women, most union debate remained a discourse by male activists about women. The consensus was that war production was leading more to the emaciation than to the emancipation of women workers. Huge war plants like DelaunayBelleville were veritable ‘female penitentiaries’ in which levels of exploitation reminiscent of the early Industrial Revolution were being revived ‘under the cover of a democratic war’. The professed desire to save women from this ‘industrial holocaust’ did, doubtless, reflect some genuine humanitarian concern. But too often it stemmed from fear of ‘dilution’ and from atavistic loyalty to the ideology of domesticity. In September 1917 the FM’s Parisian committee claimed that ‘the systematic introduction of women into workshops…is in absolute opposition to the…existence of home and family’. Anti-war FB syndicalist Péricat admitted that economic necessity forced many women into war factories. Yet they were not simply passive victims.

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The lure of high wages and of ‘luxuries’ (silk stockings, perfumes, cinema…) blinded Parisiennes to the butchery in the trenches. ‘If the female element were not so egotistic, the war would be ended long ago…. But women think only of money to buy jewellery.’ Male workers felt uneasy that war was permitting women excessive social and sexual freedom, symbolised by short skirts and short hair. The xenophobia which disfigured Parisian popular protest in 1917–18 reflected alarm at sexual relationships between Frenchwomen and immigrants. Despite Péricat, there is evidence that female workers, who made up around one-third of the audience at the strike rallies of spring 1917, responded to ‘pacifist’ oratory by chanting for the return of ‘our poilus’ from the army. Yet the trigger for female strikes had, clearly, been price inflation. The first women strikers had been seamstresses—whose 11day dispute, shrewdly exploiting the labour shortage in their sector caused by the exodus into war industry, won them the 5 1/2-day ‘English week’. Milliners won double pay for overtime rush jobs. Only later did female war-sector workers strike. Mostly they demanded payrises to compensate for food-price inflation, though an 11-day strike at Dion (Puteaux) raised the issues of brutal foremen and of leave for those with menfolk home from the trenches. These spring 1917 strikes, Becker argues, reflected the ‘moral and physical fatigue of workers…not the birth of a revolutionary spirit’. The Union Sacrée remained largely intact. ‘Revolutionary defeatism’ was espoused only by a handful of syndicalist militants.19 Yet the authorities were worried. The failure of the Nivelle offensive dimmed hopes for a quick end to the war. Army mutinies in May and June briefly ‘legitimised’ industrial protest by lifting the ‘moral interdiction’ on strikes. With morale reported as ‘bad’ in fifteen départements, ‘loyal’ army units were mobilised to protect banlieue factories. However, the ease with which Albert Thomas defused tensions in Parisian war plants illustrates the obvious limits of any ‘anti-war’ mood. He granted a cost-of-living award for war workers, introduced conciliation and arbitration machinery and gave workers the right to elect shop stewards (délégués ouvriers) to voice shop-floor grievances.20 However, volatile industrial relations at Renault in autumn 1917 suggest that these measures had failed to resolve underlying grievances. In September 80 per cent of Renault workers voted to strike against ‘inadequate’ pay rises; 57,000 Parisian war workers took similar action. Renault, like most Parisian bosses, resented the imposition of délégués ouvriers as unwarranted dirigiste interference in

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his factory. He sought to insist that only ‘loyal’ long-term company employees should be eligible for these posts and to use the system to channel management orders downwards. However, leading syndicalist anti-war militants (Michelet, Bigot, Le Bihan) became the dominant shop stewards. They complained to Thomas of threats to send them to the trenches. In turn Thomas warned them to confine themselves to economistic issues and to stop provoking Renault with calls for French ‘soviets’.21 In November shop stewards from leading Parisian engineering firms denounced Thomas’s support for ‘war-profiteer’ industrialists. Yet such activists lacked a clear strategy, organisational base and mass support. The Bolshevik coup failed to stimulate any immediate popular response. Parisian strike levels in October-November were 80 per cent lower than in May-June. Even so the police reported a tense, gloomy mood and fragile morale. Different social classes were blaming each other for failure to contribute to the war effort. However, there was no sense of immediate crisis. Improved food supplies dulled the edge of worker protest, and army mutinies had been contained. Nor was there any prospect that Merrheim’s FM would provide organised leadership for any anti-war industrial agitation. Merrheim had been an early critic of the Union Sacrée. But as a union bureaucrat he had been drawn, willy-nilly, into a pragmatic role in labour allocation. He had lost his earlier faith in syndicalist ‘direct action’ strategies.22 Implicitly he had come to share the same ground as Jouhaux—de facto support for the war tempered by support for multilateral attempts to secure a ‘Wilsonian’ peace. Moreover, even militant Renault shop steward Michelet accepted that political consciousness within the Parisian war factories was simply too weak to sustain a mass anti-war movement. The immediate priority was for the FM to put down firm organisational roots in the capital’s engineering plants. (‘The mass of the working class is too cowardly. We need to teach them what trade union organisation means.’) The fresh wave of strikes in May 1918 witnessed more vociferous anti-war propaganda than had been the case in 1917. The exact scale of Parisian strikes is unclear. The official Statistique des Grèves shows a mere 27,000 strikers. Yet since there was mass support from Renault, Citroën, Hotchkiss and other key factories J.-L. Robert suggests that 200,000 would be a more plausible estimate, since ANF7 12970–13023 files record conflicts absent from the ‘official’ statistics. Syndicalist rail-worker Sirolle won cheers at mass rallies by calling for the return of troops from the carnage of the trenches. Yet

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even ‘revolutionary defeatists’ like Péricat admitted that the timing of the strikes was ill-chosen. The tough Clemenceau was unlikely to make concessions. Brest-Litovsk had released German troops for a western offensive which, briefly, appeared to threaten Paris itself. In such circumstances, FM organiser Lenoir insisted, revolutionary defeatism was ‘criminal’. The 1918 strikes were smaller and less extensive than those of the previous spring. They were more dominated by male metalworkers. Anti-war activists failed to articulate their case in such a way as to attract many female war workers. Whereas in 1917 army mutinies legitimised strikes, the course of the war now inhibited militancy.23 Though cavalry had to be used to protect strike-breakers, the arrest of activists and the sending of a few hundred mobilisés to the trenches broke the back of protest. At Renault fourteen militants were sacked and shop steward Bigot was sent to the front. An anticipated protest strike at the plant failed to occur. ‘Firm action dampened the ardour of hotheads who now fear redeployment’ exulted one police report.24 During the last eighteen months of the war rising prices, deteriorating work-conditions and war weariness prompted Parisian workers to lend an ear to ‘pacifist’ and ‘Bolshevik’ rhetoric. However, by 1918 food supplies had improved and inflation was less acute. Since the German offensive could be blamed on Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks had lost popularity. In the last resort even militants realised that the Union Sacrée, though under pressure, had not cracked.25 Yet, as J.-L.Robert emphasises, the lines of fissure which produced the 1920–1 labour schism were already apparent. Neo-syndicalist shop-floor militants in Parisian war-plants had lost patience even with Merrheim and their own FM union leaders. Many flirted with direct action as the only tactic capable of ending the war. Some already envisaged a split in the labour movement as the only way to evade the clutches of a reformist leadership tainted by wartime class-collaboration.26 III

PARIS AND THE POST-WAR LABOUR UNREST 1918–20

Industrial militancy

The post-war years witnessed an unprecedented wave of militancy in industrial France. Union membership rose to a new peak of nearly 2 million by mid-1920. Strike levels in 1919–20 surpassed the previous high points of 1906 and 1910. Then the tide turned. Strike defeats led to demoralisation and falling union membership. Rising unemployment

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and post-war industrial re-structuring undercut union strength. Party and union schisms then further eroded labour cohesion. Parisian workers spearheaded this labour agitation. Violent demonstrations in the capital on May Day 1919 acted as a catalyst for the metalworkers’ strikes of May–June. One year later Paris was one of the key locations for the railway general strikes, perhaps the last stand of classic syndicalism. Three possible explanations of the scale and nature of post-war unrest have been suggested. Elite refusal to offer socio-economic reform

In the elections of 1919 parties of the Centre and the Right, capitalising on the euphoria of war triumph, swept to comfortable victory. The SFIO increased its 1914 vote by 300,000 to 1.8 million. But, lacking electoral allies, it won only 11 per cent of parliamentary seats with 23 per cent of the votes. Many workers had been sustained through wartime hardships by the promise of social rewards during post-war reconstruction. Moreover, wartime economic dirigisme had made workers (e.g. railmen) question whether laissez-faire was realy sacrosanct and had made a planned economy appear more feasible. Yet now, ignoring the advice of reformist bureaucrats, conservatives dismantled wartime planning machinery with indecent haste. A ‘Patronat de Combat’

Simultaneously the patronat rejected the schemes of reformist CGT and SFIO leaders and of reformist bureaucrats for a ‘tripartism’ in which unions, bureaucrats and employers would collaborate in economic planning and industrial rationalisation. Parisian employers like Renault were determined to cut short the shop steward experiment, to reassert management prerogatives and to prevent industry-wide collective bargaining. They lobbied to kill a proposed Social Insurance Bill, insisting that compulsory contributions were alien to the ‘French mentality’. And they sought to evade, wherever possible, the one major post-war labour reform: the Eight-Hour Day Act of April 1919.27 The dawning of the ‘age of the métallo’

One could correlate post-war unrest with the new prominence within the Parisian—and French—working class of the semi-skilled metalworker. Easily cut steels, machine-tools and turret-lathes,

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assembly-lines and time-and-motion study, subdivided tasks and greater power for engineers, foremen and office-planners had become features of Parisian engineering before 1914. The term ‘métallo’ dates from that time. Wartime production needs had swollen the demand for ‘semi-skilled’ machine-operators—though skilled workers survived in maintenance and toolroom sectors of big engineering plants and in the countless small boîtes of the 11th, 19th and 20th arrondissements. (Although there were 11,000 small engineering and metallurgical plants in Paris, some 50,000, or 25 per cent, of the city’s métallos were, by 1918, employed in a mere 0.5 per cent of factories.) As in Turin, Clydeside and Berlin it was the mixing together of such craftsmen, with their union traditions, with younger, more volatile, semi-skilled operatives—embittered by wartime experiences—which proved a singularly explosive formula. Métallos, living together in expanding banlieues (Puteaux, Clichy, Levallois…), developed their own mythology. They portrayed themselves as tough, independent-minded and engaged in vital, dirty, sometimes dangerous jobs requiring strength, stamina and skill. Their macho, frondeur image was easier to sustain once the proportion of women in the Parisian metal sector slipped below 10 per cent in 1920. In 1913, 10 per cent of French strikers were metalworkers. During the war this rose to 20 per cent, by 1919 to 33 per cent. It was the quasi-insurrectionary Parisian metal strike of May–June 1919 which set the tone for post-war labour politics. In the inter-war years the métallo became the key figure in Communist Party iconography. The Paris metalworkers’ strike (May–June 1919)

In late April 1919, Parliament rushed through the Eight-Hour Day Act in the hope of heading off worker unrest—a hope rudely dashed by events of the following weeks. Rapid inflation since the end of the war had helped fuel popular unrest—although one should note that prices were stable or falling in Paris by May 1919 and that métallos were among the best-paid of the city’s workers. Unemployment was a looming threat as, for example, aviation factories shed labour once war orders dried up. Militants found a receptive audience for denunciation of Allied intervention in Russia and in April 100,000 Parisian workers had marched to protest at the acquittal of Jaurès’s assassin. Predictably in such a climate May Day demonstrations degenerated into massive confrontations with police and troops in which 600 workers were arrested and hundreds, mainly building workers and

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metalworkers, were injured—two fatally. Images of police brutality were to pervade the rhetoric of strike-leaders in the following weeks. FM leaders sought to avert industrial confrontation. Merrheim hoped to create a large, disciplined industrial union capable of bargaining with the patronat, of securing some influence in the reorganisation of work necessitated by technological change and scientific management. ‘Those who believe that one can consume more and produce less deceive the working masses and prepare them for a future of unspeakable suffering.’ He refused to be ‘dragged along by the unorganised masses, by the unchained crowd’ —or by young, ‘revolutionary’ hotheads, neophytes with no sense of union discipline. Before 1914 syndicalist leaders like Merrheim himself had appeared to be chiefs without Indians, urging revolutionary general strikes to workers who appeared interested only in piecemeal economistic demands. Now, ironically, disillusioned ex-syndicalists found themselves seeking to restrain the volatile militancy of the rank and file….28 For a tough patronat, backed by the ruthless Clemenceau, would take pleasure in crushing unplanned and political strikes. Many Parisian employers were eager to use strikes as an excuse to lay off workers in order to reduce wage bills. Citroën appeared to be trying to incite a strike by publishing draconian new workshop regulations and by ignoring the Eight-Hour Day Act. Rising unemployment and the dispersal of militant groups of mobilisés made it unlikely that provincial centres of wartime unrest (Saint-Etienne, Bourges…) would offer support to a Parisian strike. Yet Parisian rank-and-file metalworkers were in no mood to back down. Their suspicions of official FM leaders were intensified by rumours of a productivity deal signed with the metal-employers’ federation (UIM) involving union co-operation in the speed-ups and bonus systems in return for employer guarantees to respect the 8-hour day. Even the moderate Prost, leader of the craft engineers, was ‘stupefied’ at the failure of FM officials to consult him or his members.29 Inspired by rumours of labour insurgency in Clydeside, Italy and Germany, and by Soviet resistance to Allied intervention, neosyndicalists were simply carried away by euphoric expectation of an imminent European revolution. Though the FM was still small by comparison with the British Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) or the German Deutscher Metallarbeiter-Verband (DMV) it had increased its membership tenfold since 1913. One last push, militants urged, would topple capitalism’s tottering edifice. In such a context a purely economistic reading of metalworkers’ strikes is simply

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unconvincing. Precise ideologies or strategic plans were of little significance. ‘Bolshevism, Spartacism, Syndicalism—all this means the same under different names’, Monatte claimed. Yet even activists expressed alarm at the impetuosity of the rank and file. Obscure local shop stewards improvised factory committee networks to co-ordinate the strikes—but were aware that they themselves lacked ‘weight’ and that strikers’ impatience might play into employers’ hands. Quasi-revolutionary rhetoric dominated the mass rallies held throughout the banlieue. French naval mutineers in the Black Sea were eulogised. There were calls for workers’ control of the factories and appeals to troops to mutiny and to run ‘old Clemenceau’ out of Paris. Mayor Phillipe of Saint-Denis called for a workers’ council, a ‘new 1871’…. Indeed the strengths and weaknesses of the far Left can be seen in microcosm in Saint-Denis which, before 1914, had established a reputation as the archetypal industrial faubourg, notorious for its polluted atmosphere. It had become a major war production centre. In 1916 there had been 11,722 industrial accidents there—including one which killed 32 workers.30 The wartime socialist municipality had pioneered social initiatives such as bulk purchase of foodstuffs, or municipal workshops for warwidows. By 1918 the municipal budget was 200 per cent higher in real terms than in 1914. Initially the ruling group were neo-Jacobin patriots. But by 1917–18 many councillors were evoking not the FrancoPrussian War but the Commune. Delegates from the Moscow soviets were given official receptions. Leading local shop stewards (Hubert of Delaunay-Belleville, Bestel of Hotchkiss) were allies of Péricat in May 1918. Hundreds of those arrested or injured on May Day 1919 were from Saint-Denis. Subsequent strikes were backed by 16,000 local métallos. Bestel’s speeches emphasised the bankruptcy of western capitalism (‘Let us turn our eyes to the East…’). Yet in calmer moments he lamented low levels of unionisation in local factories and the absence of an overall strategy. Socialist councillors organised soupes communistes to feed the strikers, but the threat of arrest forced the mayor to adopt a lower profile. By 21 June the FM tried to end the strike via a deal in which the employers guaranteed to introduce the 8-hour day without speed-ups or pay cuts. Activists denounced this ‘sell-out’. But many privately admitted that a successful general strike would require better organisation and wider support. Parisian métro and chemical workers had shown some solidarity with the metalworkers. Railmen and

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dockers had ‘blacked’ cargoes destined for Russia. But provincial solidarity was minimal. Merrheim blamed the strike on ‘savage cohorts from the streets who had only one thought—hatred’. Its main supporters had been semiskilled métallos from large banlieue engineering plants, many not even union members. In retrospect even militants admitted that volatile mass meetings, swayed by facile ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, had played too great a role—at the expense of detailed strategic planning. In the aftermath of the strike some prominent activists (e.g. Pothion of the Compagnie Générale de Construction) were sacked. Though Paris métallos were to come out again in May 1920 in solidarity with the railworkers, rising unemployment and employer counter-offensives took toll of union strength and militancy. Banlieue aviation firms (Bréguet, Hispano-Suiz, Potez etc.) laid off thousands as military orders declined and Citroën and Renault ‘rationalised’ to adjust to the peacetime economy. Unionisation levels collapsed dramatically in the Parisian engineering sector— and remained low until the Popular Front. However, the shop-floor was only one possible arena of activity for metalworker militants. In Saint-Denis half of the working-class municipal councillors were métallos. Throughout the banlieue many of the activists from the 1919 strikes were prominent in the formation of the Communist Party (PC). Among these was Bestel, who insisted that only a revolutionary party and a political strategy could break the cycle of industrial confrontation, strike defeat and despair.31 The emergence of the ‘red belt’

In 1919 the Left’s one consolation for strike defeats and national electoral failure was the consolidation of its hold on the banlieues. The SFIO won twenty-four municipalities—seventeen more than in 1914.32 By 1920–1 many of these had transferred their allegiance to the PC, though within months shrewd socialist politicians like M.Sellier had succeeded in capitalising on factional in-fighting on the far left to recapture Aubervilliers, Pantin and Bondy. Before the war the banlieue had proved difficult terrain for the SFIO, which had struggled to secure a hold on the loyalties of rural migrants who had flooded in to work in new heavy industries located on greenfield sites remote geographically and culturally from old artisan Paris. By the 1930s this area had become the notorious ‘red belt’. The 1919 strikes mark one step in the emergence of militancy there. Equally significant were post-war tenants’ movements whose campaigning on

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housing provision and social amenities prefigures the activism of lotissement dwellers and tenants in the low-cost working-class housing blocks of Habitation à Bon Marché (HBM) so shrewdly championed by the PC in the 1920s and 1930s. The tenants’ organisations provide evidence for the consolidation of community solidarities during the wartime years, a feature underplayed by Noiriel who simply emphasises the anomie of uprooted provincials lost in the vast, featureless, impersonal suburbs.33 But whereas before 1914 migrants from different regions tended to form exclusive ghettos in some parts of Paris, now shared wartime experiences, sufferings and problems created a new sense of collective identity in the banlieues. With channels of party or trade union mobilisation blocked by the war, new informal linkages were needed for social action. Neighbourhood networks proliferated. Consumer co-operatives multiplied. The sociability of cafés brought together skilled and semi-skilled workers and helped to transcend sectionalism at the point of production. Immigration and the war production boom made many banlieues more solidly proletarian. Bobigny, whose population rose 700 per cent between 1906 and 1914, was 44 per cent ‘proletarian’ on the eve of the war, 60 per cent by 1921.34 The first community protests had been over food prices. Then neighbourhood groups began to denounce ‘bungling bureaucrats’ for the inadequate public amenities. Improved banlieue transport, water, sewage and educational and health provision were demanded. But housing proved the main mobilising issue Before 1914 popular action had remained largely confined to sporadic rent protests. Anarchists had specialised in providing squads to help working-class tenants perform ‘moonlight flits’ to evade rent payments. But tenants’ associations had been tiny. The influx of wartime labour had worsened an already acute housing crisis. There was little wartime residential construction, and after 1918 rebuilding priorities concentrated on France’s shattered war zones. The population of Paris’s insalubrious and overcrowded lodging-houses (garnis) swelled by a third to 390,000. In 1919 a Seine Tenants’ Association soon boasted 80 branches and 50,000 members.35 Its bastions included Levallois, Clichy, Saint-Ouen, Surenes and the old 18th arrondissement. For the first time an organised popular housing campaign emerged demanding not merely ‘fair rents’ but public funding for affordable popular dwellings. There was anger when the Senate rejected the Loucheur Bill (1920) for the building of 500,000 new homes. Co-operative schemes for house repair

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and construction, furniture storage and removal, and home insurance multiplied. The tenants’ movement displayed several distinctive features, as described below. (1) Its tone was set by blue-collar workers, though it had whitecollar members in areas like Picpus. Meetings were held in trade union buildings and often made donations to strike funds. (2) Its rhetoric was ‘revolutionary’. Examples of Petrograd workers confiscating elite apartments were cited with approval. Expropriation of landlords was demanded. ‘Direct action’ squads which helped tenants resist eviction were manned by war veterans who expressed outrage at returning from the trenches to find landlords raising rents. No longer did tenants seek to do a ‘moonlight flit’. There was a new emphasis on staying and resisting— possibly a reflection of the desire of workers to establish some ‘roots’ in the new banlieues. (3) It demanded that new public housing projects should be planned to provide shopping amenities, children’s play facilities and so on. Working-class women were prominent in such agitation—as in spontaneous resistance to evictions. Although only two branches were headed by females, women were present in large numbers at Tenants’ Association meetings. (In contrast the role of women workers in post-war strikes was limited. Women were the first to lose their jobs in the post-war industrial readjustments. By 1920 only 14 per cent of Parisian metalworkers were female. Factory crèche facilities were closed. Wage differentials between male and female workers widened from 18 per cent to 31 per cent. War losses gave an impetus to pro-natalist lobbies. Yet many working-class marriages failed to survive the strains of war. Men returning from the trenches often could not cope with the independence which wives had acquired in their absence. Divorce rates in 1920 were double the levels of 1913.)36 (4) Though few Parisian industrialists provided the type of company housing typical of ‘paternalist’ provincial coal and metallurgical firms, Parisian workers were openly hostile to surveillance of their apartment blocks by concierges appointed by employers. (5) Some Parisian socialist municipalities flirted with grandiose schemes of ‘garden-cities’ in the banlieues—on the model of ‘ParisJardin’ at Draveil. Conversely the PC was openly sceptical about such ‘utopian’ illusions. Much of the debate on such issues occurred, however, within the leadership of the labour movement. Its language echoed bourgeois alarm at the prospect of undisciplined working-class children

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roaming the streets while their fathers sat in bars. Workers themselves appeared wary of ambitious municipal housing schemes, suspecting that left-wing authorities would impose restrictive rules and regulations. By 1921 the volatile tenants’ movement was in decline—victim of internecine PC-SFIO feuding. Yet it had offered a foretaste of the community-based mobilisations which by the 1930s transformed the sprawling and hitherto politically amorphous banlieues into the ‘red belt’. As J.Cronin insists, the European post-war labour unrest must be correlated—as in ‘red Vienna’ —with the wartime consolidation of working-class residential solidarities.37 The railway strike of May 1920

The railway general strike of May 1920, the apogee of post-war neosyndicalism, was not a specifically Parisian phenomenon. Yet Paris with its mainline stations, railway-sidings, goods-yards, locomotive repair workshops and rail-company housing estates had, quite obviously, a massive concentration of railway workers. Initially railworkers had been viewed as a stable, moderate workforce—loyal to the quasi-military hierarchies of ‘paternalistic’ rail companies. However, in 1910 a build-up of grievances had provoked a major strike during which the hitherto-exclusive drivers’ craft union had identified with the other railway personnel and espoused syndicalist rhetoric. Bitter memories of the mass sackings which followed the strike’s defeat lingered on. During the war the rail network came under intense pressure. Railworkers were placed under quasi-military discipline, making strikes impossible. But by 1917–18 resentments at the acute pressures of work fostered the rapid expansion of a united industrial union, the Fédération Nationale des Cheminots (FNC) which by 1919 claimed 300,000 members (80 per cent of the workforce). Wartime experiences emphasised the rationality of running the rail network as a single national system and intensified union demands for nationalisation of the private companies. These latter faced a crisis as war damage and the potential costs of the 8-hour day created financial pressures which necessitated cost-cutting rationalisation. Management thus sought to erode union power, to cut cost-of-living allowances and to ‘Taylorise’ locomotive workshops. When Parliament rejected a railnationalisation Bill syndicalists captured control of the FNC and called a national strike.38 As in the 1919 metal strikes, activists were again alarmed by the volatile militancy of some of the rank and file. ‘Today’, one claimed, ‘it

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is the masses who have overtaken the militants.’ A reluctant CGT leadership, drawn into backing the dispute, sought to call out selected groups of workers on a rota basis to support the railmen. Parisian métallos, misunderstanding the strategy, struck prematurely (6 May). FB construction workers proved, predictably, to be the staunchest of the railmen’s Parisian allies. However, the strike was doomed. Government and employers had made advance preparations. Troops, grandes écoles students and bourgeois volunteers kept services running. The army occupied Paris mainline stations. There were threats to arrest union leaders. In Paris strike support was patchy. Locomotive repair engineers and employees of the Paris-Lyon-Marseille (PLM) company gave solid backing. But employees of the Nord company, recently exposed to the enlightened management policies of maverick neo-Saint-Simonian technocrat R.Dautry, continued to work. In the aftermath of defeat the FNC lost 80 per cent of its members. Alternative labour traditions Blue-collar and white-collar workers

In the bitter recriminations which followed this disaster angry railmen criticised other Parisian workers for their lukewarm solidarity. ‘Where were you last May?’ they enquired of representatives of the city’s fonctionnaires. Paris, it is important to remember, was not simply a city of war industries and of blue-collar workers. As the nation’s capital it possessed a huge, heterogeneous army of white-collar and minor civil service employees, postal workers, tax-officials, employees of government ministries and of town halls. What was the impact of wartime experiences on their consciousness and behaviour?39 Significantly, on balance, no huge gulf emerged between such employees and blue-collar workers. They did not develop into a Mittelstand hostile to trade unionism. Indeed after 1920 it was precisely public service employees who became the backbone of a (reformist) CGT which was desperately weak in private industry. Initially, as the personnel of the Republican state, they had been peculiarly susceptible to the mood of Jacobin patriotism. As the war dragged on, however, they grew angry at the erosion of working and living standards. The 1906 law guaranteeing a weekly rest-day was ignored. By July 1916 spokesmen for postal workers at mass rallies were denouncing Radical and SFIO deputies for failing in their duty to

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defend state employees. Postal workers, customs officials and (female) employees of the Finance Ministry were prominent in mass demonstrations in May 1917. They cited three grievances: 1 a virtual pay-freeze imposed on public employees (inexorable erosion of wage-differentials between blue- and white-collar workers accelerated the latter’s ‘proletarianisation’) 2 government’s stubborn refusal to concede unionisation rights (Droit Syndical) 3 rising rents—which pushed some postal workers into tenants’ protests. By 1918, orators at public sector employee rallies were rejecting the ‘snobbery’ which kept them aloof from blue-collar unionism. Thousands flooded into ‘Amicales’ which functioned, de facto, as surrogate unions. Of 1,750 Parisian primary schoolteachers mobilised in the war, nearly two-thirds had been killed or wounded. In 1919 the survivors were understandably outraged when the military governor sought to ban meetings called to debate unionisation rights. Postal workers struck for the restoration of weekly rest-days. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1920 at mass rallies Parisian public employees openly defied the government ban on their ‘illegal’ unions—a ‘new revocation of the Edict of Nantes’. Postal leader Lartique claimed that the aim was to reduce fonctionnaires to ‘docile servants’, and to distance them from the CGT. No such cordon sanitaire between blue- and white-collar workers was sustainable. After 1920 Parisian fonctionnaires became the bed-rock of the CGT, key advocates of a gradualist unionism which sought reform via pressure on government. Michaud

An evocative account of the mood of popular Paris in 1917–20 can be found in the autobiography of R.Michaud, an anarchist shoemaker employed in the workshops of the city’s older quartiers.40 It provides a necessary reminder that the rise of Communism among the semiskilled métallos of large-scale banlieue war industries should not be allowed to obscure the survival of an older popular culture of work, sociability and politics. Michaud was raised by a long-suffering widowed mother who took in sewing. A deferential conservative, she believed that the poor should be grateful to the rich who gave them employment. They lived

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in the 13th arrondissement, where a sub-proletariat of recent migrants lived in filthy, overcrowded apartments which lacked piped water. There was much violence, some mutual aid, a great deal of ‘resigned conformity’. Michaud’s first jobs were in small workshops, many of which were experimenting with home-grown variants of ‘scientific management’. He exasperated his mother by being sacked regularly for standing up to foremen. But he desired to become a qualified, skilled boot-maker. In the diverse world of Parisian shoemaking, factories employing machine-minders still coexisted with small ateliers and independent ‘artisan’ producers—the ‘last nomads of the industrial world, resistant to discipline, proud of their craft’. During the war Michaud imbibed the rudiments of union discipline from a skilled mobilisé, a militant made prudent by fear of the trenches. It was a world where mobilisés, women workers, young workers and immigrants made up an ill-organised and exploitable workforce. In 1914 Michaud was a Jacobin patriot. By 1916 he had espoused pacifism and anarchism, though ignorant of its doctrines. He admired Péricat and the Bolsheviks—whose ‘all power to the soviets’ call he perceived as a form of anarcho-syndicalism. Angered by the apparent passivity of workers in the face of wartime suffering, he became elated by the strikes of 1917–18. On the ‘cruel and bloody’ May Day of 1919 he fought alongside railmen and building-workers who, refusing to be intimidated by the army, unfurled revolutionary banners. He became an unofficial shop steward. Yet such activists were easily isolated and victimised. Shoeworkers, he lamented, turned to the union when they had grievances, expected it to be militant and effective—yet rarely paid their dues and abandoned it once the dispute ended. Michaud was sustained by a still-flourishing anarcho-syndicalist counter-culture. Anarchist squads defended working-class tenants. At weekends they took trips to the countryside—stealing farmers’ fruit and desecrating war memorials. They were forever singing (‘The world of work sang a lot in those days. The repertoire was extensive, ranging from revolutionary songs to romantic ballads…. We sang, too, of crafts and traditions, of suffering and hopes.’) One ‘tradition’ was macadam—the lovingly transmitted repertoire of feigned injuries which enabled workers to secure days off work whilst collecting accident insurance! This was a world of idealism, free love, birth-control propaganda, vegetarianism. Michaud supported the Workers’ Opposition in Russia and clashed with PC organisers. When called up for conscription he

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escaped from the barracks and took refuge in Lyons. Yet, like so many young workers who participated in the heady journées of 1919–20, Michaud gradually lost faith in his revolutionary dreams. Strike defeats convinced him that the anarcho-syndicalist vision of a revolutionary Great Day which would usher in a world of workers’ control was utopian. Parisian workers would have to learn to organise and to plan more carefully. The labour militancy of 1919–20 proved ephemeral because too many strikers lacked real roots in the labour movement. Faced with strike defeats their volatile militancy ebbed away as rapidly as it had arisen. CONCLUSION

Briefly in 1917–20 Parisian workers appeared to be reviving the city’s revolutionary heritage. But tough government and employer countermeasures, labour schism and rising unemployment undermined labour militancy. The changing international conjoncture and the relative passivity of provincial France left Parisian activists isolated. Michaud’s autobiography emphasises that vestiges of the radicalism of historic artisan quartiers still survived. But just as the defeat of the Commune had signalled the death-knell of the insurrectionary tradition, so the collapse of the quasi-insurrectionary strikes of 1919–20 exploded the syndicalist myth of the revolutionary general strike. And henceforth the red hordes who still sought to challenge the reconsolidation of bourgeois hegemony were located in the outlying banlieues rather than in Paris itself. NOTES 1 L.Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris 1871–1914 (Baltimore, Md, 1984). 2 J.Wishnia, The Proletarianizing of the Fonctionnaires: Civil Service Workers and the Labor Movement under the Third Republic (Baton Rouge, La, 1990). L.Young, ‘Mobilising food, restaurant and café workers: Paris 1900–14’, PhD thesis, New York University, 1981. 3 T.Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley, Calif., 1990). 4 M.McMechan, ‘The building trades of France 1907–1914’, PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1973. 5 N.Papayanis, A.Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism (The Hague, 1985). 6 G.Jacquemet, Belleville au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1984). 7 A.Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris 1850–1900 (Madison, Wis., 1985). 8 Stovall, op. cit.

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J.J.Becker, The Great War and the French People, tr. Arnold Pomerans (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1985 [Paris, 1980]). J.Horne, ‘Le Comité d’Action, (CGT-PS) et l’origine du réformisme…en temps de guerre’, Le Mouvement social 122 (1983), pp. 33–60. Becker, op. cit. G.Hatry, Renault: usine de guerre 1914–18 (Paris, 1978). J.Horne, ‘“L’impôt du sang”: Republican rhetoric and industrial warfare in France 1914–1918’, Social History 14, 2 (1989), pp. 201–23. M.Gallo, ‘Quelques aspects de la mentalité et des comportements ouvriers dans les usines de guerre: 1914–18’, Le Mouvement social 56 (1966), pp. 3–34. L.Singer-Kérel, Le Coût de vie à Paris 1840–1954 (Paris, 1961). Becker, op. cit. M.Dubesset, ‘Les munitionnettes de la Seine 1914–18’, in P. F r i d e n s o n ( e d . ) , L ’ Au t re Fro n t ( Pa r i s , 1 9 7 7 ) . J . - L . R o b e r t , ‘Women and work in France during the First World War’, in R.Wall and J.Winter (eds), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1988). M.-M.Huss, ‘Pronatalism and the popular ideology of the child in wartime France: the evidence of the picture postcard’, in ibid. Becker, op. cit. A.Hennebicque, ‘A.Thomas et le régime des usines de guerre’, in Fridenson (ed.), op. cit. Hatry, op. cit. Papayanis, op. cit. J.-L.Robert, ‘Ouvriers et mouvement ouvrier parisiens pendant la Grande Guerre et l’immédiate après-guerre’ , doctoral thesis, University of Paris I, 1989. Hatry, op. cit. Becker, op. cit. J.-L.Robert, La Scission syndicale de 1921: essai de reconnaissance de formes (Paris, 1980). A.Moutet, ‘Patrons de progrès ou patrons de combat?’ Recherches 32–3 (1978), pp. 449–92. Papayanis, op. cit. B.Abhervé, ‘Les origines de la grève des métallurgistes parisiens, juin 1919’, Le Mouvement social 93 (1975), pp. 75–85. Brunet, J. St Denis: la ville rouge 1890–1939 (Paris, 1980). ibid. Stovall, op. cit. G.Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th centuries (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1990). Stovall, op. cit. S.Magri, ‘Le mouvement des locataires à Paris et dans sa banlieue 1919–25’, Le Mouvement social 137 (1986), pp. 55–76. Robert, ‘Women and work’, op. cit.

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37 J.Cronin, ‘Labour insurgency and class formation: comparative perspectives on the crisis of 1917–20 in Europe’, Social Science History 4 (1980), pp. 125–52. S.Magri and C.Topalov (eds) Villes ouvrières (Paris, 1989). 38 A.Jones, ‘The French railway strikes of 1920: new syndicalist ideas and emergent communism’, French Historical Studies 12, 4 (1982), pp. 508–40. 39 Wishnia, op. cit. 40 R.Michaud, J’avais vingt ans: un jeune ouvrier au début du siècle (Paris, 1967).

8

Working-class mobilisation on the Clyde 1917–20 John Foster

Civic Guard—It was arranged that the Deputation when again interviewing the Lord Provost of Glasgow should suggest the formation of a Civic Guard, it being felt that quite a number of loyal workmen and Employers would join the Guard with a view to opposing the Strikers and protecting workmen against ‘massed picketing’ or intimidation…. Demobilised Soldiers—Discussion took place on whether the Employers should issue a manifesto to the effect that two months from this date should there be a number of demobilised soldiers still out of employment, the Employers would either by reduced hours or other means give them employment. It was remitted to the Deputation to consider what action, if any, should be taken in the matter. Our opening quotation comes from the minutes of a joint meeting of the Clyde Shipbuilders Association and the Engineering Employers Federation held in Glasgow in the midst of the 40-hour strike on 31 January 1919.1 There were 134 employers present. Between them they controlled the great bulk of Clydeside’s 300,000-strong industrial workforce and the quotation highlights two of their most immediate concerns: the grip then exercised over the region by mass pickets and the uncertain political orientation of the thousands of ex-soldiers who had arrived back in Glasgow over the previous four weeks. This chapter will be examining two aspects of this working-class challenge as it emerged on the Clyde in the three years after 1917: how far it had any sort of socialist content, and why, within Britain, Clydeside seems to have been viewed with such exceptional apprehension by the political establishment. Our argument will be that this radicalism did indeed encompass a form of socialist consciousness and that its occurrence was ultimately a product of the uneven character of economic and social development in Britain.

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I

CIVIC GUARDS AND CIVIC SOCIETY

Gallacher, in his Revolt on the Clyde, commented that if he and his colleagues had been professional revolutionaries, they would— after the conflict in George Square on 31 January 1919—have called on the demonstrators to march north to Glasgow’s Maryhill barracks rather than south to Glasgow Green.2 This comment has been freely used by recent historians to demonstrate the untutored, naive and almost clownish character of the Clyde shop stewards—an assessment which is linked to a minimisation of the importance of industrial militancy in the development of Labour politics on Clydeside. The two most important of these reinterpretations are those by Iain McLean and Alastair Reid.3 Iain McLean directs his attack at what he sees as the crude reductionism of the original conception of Red Clydeside. He challenges the assumption that the transformation in class identity, as manifested by the rise in the Labour vote, resulted in any simple way from the scale of strike action during the First World War. On the contrary, he claims, the real rise in Labour voting came not in 1918 but between 1919 and 1922 and was a consequence of the community politics of housing and welfare. What is more, McLean presents this broadening of Labour support as contingent upon the destruction of the power of the conservative skilled elite who, he claims, had largely monopolised trade union institutions on Clydeside before the First World War. He focuses his analysis on the first two years of the war, 1915 and 1916, when Marxist industrial activists from the British Socialist Party (BSP) and Socialist Labour Party (SLP) held leading positions within the shop stewards movement. He claims that this leadership, though ostensibly leftwing, was trapped by the conservative and sectional objectives of its members. It was only as a result of the defeat of these industrial militants and their Marxist leaders in March 1916 that the way was opened for a broader, pluralist and community-orientated Labour Party. Alastair Reid looks at wartime industrial relations in the shipyards, and focuses on the role of Ministry of Munitions and Board of Trade officials. He argues that these civil servants enjoyed a relative freedom as agents of the state and that, in their pursuit of efficient war production, they repeatedly found it necessary to challenge the outmoded practices of the shipyard managements. This brought them into active alliance with the trade union officers and created an environment for wartime collective bargaining which prevented any

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significant rank-and-file revolt. More important still, this alliance transformed assumptions in the labour movement about the role of the state and provided the soil in which reformist classalliance politics could flourish. It is the contention here that both these accounts are seriously misconceived. Worse still, the reinterpretation of events has served to obscure what is special about the wartime politics of Clydeside. As we hope to show, it was the region’s failure to follow the British pattern, its temporary rejection of reformist politics, which has most to tell us about the nature of social stability both on Clydeside and in Britain at the end of the war. The main flaws in the accounts provided by McLean and Reid stem from mistakes in methodology. McLean uses a very limited set of variables in his analysis of electoral behavior. He correlates Labour voting from 1918 to 1923 with indicators of overcrowding and unemployment for constituencies within Glasgow. Yet he fails to provide any statistics on the regional incidence of strike activity over the same years. His key piece of evidence for the community derivation of the Labour vote is the timing of its increase—after the end of the war and after the 1918 general election. McLean’s inference, underlined by his concentration on the defeat of the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) in 1916, is that the high point of industrial militancy occurred well before 1918 and therefore the increase in the Labour vote between 1919 and 1922 is to be attributed to the Labour Party’s activity in the community. The actual figures for industrial action on Clydeside tell a very different story (Figure 1). Strikes associated with the dilution disputes of 1915–16 represented a relatively small fragment of the wartime total. The highest levels of wartime strike action were reached in 1918 and these themselves were dwarfed by the scale of strike action in 1919.4 If McLean wished to prove his case on the non-importance of workplace militancy, he should at least have attempted to test for any relation between Labour voting and the geography of strike action, and this brings us to the next methodological weakness in his work: its geographical limitation to the city of Glasgow. Most large-scale industrial production, shipbuilding, coal-mining or steel production, was either on the edge of the city’s formal boundaries or in the hinterland beyond, and it was in precisely these industries that most of Red Clyde’s industrial militancy occurred. When we broaden the geographical focus, we find three highly significant phenomena (Figure 2).5 First of all, candidates taking pro-Third International

Source: Board of Trade Labour Gazette, 1914–19

Figure 1 Days lost each quarter in the west of Scotland

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positions, whether members of the Communist Party or the Independent Labour Party (ILP), were receiving relatively large votes on Clydeside between 1918 and 1923. Second, votes for these candidates increased after the 1918 general election in roughly the same proportion as those for more reformist Labour candidates. Third, support for the Left candidates tended to coincide with the presence of large shipbuilding, mining, or steel labour forces (Govan, Greenock, Kelvingrove and Motherwell). Taken together, these points seem to make it very difficult to sustain the central thrust of McLean’s argument. At minimum they leave open the supposition that the rise in class voting and changes in the level and scope of industrial action could be connected. Turning to Alastair Reid’s work, its main weakness is simply that he ends his study of shipyard politics in 1918 just a few months before the biggest rank-and-file revolt in the history of British industrial relations, the 40-hour strike of January 1919. This would not matter so much if he had not make the shipyard workforce the main carriers of the new corporativist, class-alliance Labourism. It was, however—as we will see—these same shipyard workers, or at least the younger ones among them, who were the principal supporters of anti-social democratic, left-wing politics in 1919. The main value of the work by McLean and Reid is consequently negative. They tried to bring Clydeside’s experience into conformity with a reformist British norm and failed. Here we will take the opposite position. We will seek to explore the significance of Clydeside’s exceptionalism: its high levels of industrially based class mobilisation and, within this, the existence of a short period in which the example of the Russian revolution seems to have been sufficiently powerful to induce sections of the workforce to envisage a wider challenge to state power. Our hypothesis is that these responses were not arbitrary or erratic. On the contrary, they were founded in the particular evolution of industrial society in Scotland: most notably the degree to which organised labour had been denied wider civic recognition and legitimacy. From at least the middle of the nineteenth century Scotland’s labour relations practices seem to have diverged sharply from those in England. There appears to have been no sequel to the move towards collective bargaining which took place south of the border. The research by R.H.Campbell, Hamish Fraser and Joseph Melling has fairly conclusively established three distinctive features of industrial relations in the west of Scotland.6 First, the creation of large-scale heavy industry on Clydeside from the 1850s and 1860s

Figure 2 Votes of selected Labour candidates Source: F.W.S.Craig, British Parliamentary Statistics, 1918–1945 (London, 1977)

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was consciously predicated on the existence of lower wage levels than in England. Second, this stance was linked to a general refusal to concede collective bargaining rights even to skilled workers. Third, Clydeside capital managed to maintain a significant wage differential until the end of the nineteenth century. Conversely, like Belfast, Clydeside employers tended to rely on much more archaic methods of labour control. The most important of these used an ethnically divided labour reserve and the exploitation of the strongly cyclical nature of heavy industry production to make regular reductions in the size of their workforce. A small permanent core of loyalist, non-union skilled workers and chargehands were made responsible for rehiring the general workforce during periods of expansion. Lowland Scots gained the great majority of skilled jobs. Highland immigrants were left with semi-skilled positions and the Irish with most labouring ones.7 So, although Clydeside’s workforce contained a particularly high concentration of skilled industrial workers, and the phenomenal growth of its shipbuilding and engineering depended on this, it took a long, protracted struggle to establish effective trade unionism in heavy industry. In the 1890s the Webbs found the level of unionisation in Scotland to be still 20 per cent below that in England. The final drive for unionisation among skilled workers in the shipyards took place only in the 1880s and virtually coincided with the first wave of unionisation among the unskilled. Still in the 1900s the response of management was one of limited toleration. Active use was made of fluctuations in demand to enforce purges of militants and to roll back trade union influence on the shop-floor. Southall’s work on union unemployment statistics bears eloquent testimony to the volatility of industrial production and the higher fluctuations in unemployment among skilled workers.8 This difficult process of unionisation produced a labour movement with rather special characteristics. Formal trade union structures outside the workplace—often not recognised by employers—were seen as relatively less important than workgroup collectivism and workshop control. This workgroup control tended to be exercised in a sectional way which incorporated and defended the existing ethnic segmentation. At the same time these workgroup identities were inherently combative, locked in a continual battle with management and sensitive to anything inside or outside the workplace which might shift the balance of power between labour and capital. Politically within the workforce, these contradictions were often reflected in a sharp clash between different concepts of

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class organisation. Already in the early 1890s the yards were providing a mass base for those arguing for advanced socialist positions, who championed the unskilled, opposed ethnic discrimination and supported independent labour representation. But the yards also remained a base for ethnic politics, Liberal Unionism and Masonic organisation. As far as shipyard management was concerned, control depended on an adroit use of these tensions, the manipulation of the rival claims of craft sectionalism and the coercive sanction of dismissal—matched with a knowledge of where to draw the line in given labour market conditions. The contrast with the established patterns of collective bargaining in England was, therefore, stark. Union recognition was still new and fragile in the 1900s. Many major employers, Babcock, Coats, Singer, remained intransigently anti-union. Even where unions were recognised, both sides knew that their existence depended entirely on the robustness of workshop organisation. This distinctiveness was mirrored outside the workplace in Scotland’s civil institutions. Scotland’s early adoption of mercantile capitalism in the seventeenth century left the country with an archaic form of presbyterian social governance which survived largely intact well into the nineteenth century. In the quasi-rural areas of large-scale industrial producton, iron, coal, steel and shipbuilding, this often quite all-encompassing form of social control was reinforced rather than dismantled as big employers sought to secure a cohesive grip over all aspects of the social infrastructure. To this extent organised labour as such, even when expressing the interests of a subordinate class segment, failed to find the same political space and legitimacy enjoyed by the labour movement in England. There was nothing like the dense network of linkages between organised labour and the two parties of property, particularly the Liberals, as existed in most parts of industrial England. Mass politics remained with inherited, mainly religiously defined structures into the 1900s and the Scottish employer class concentrated far more on buttressing these identities with populist versions of liberal market ideology than seeking alliances with labour. Labour politics as such developed outside this system, and the emphasis from the beginning was on independent labour representation. The Scottish Labour Party, forerunner of the ILP, was formed in 1888 specifically because the Lanarkshire Liberals refused to endorse the candidates of the newly created Lanarkshire miners union. Unlike England, support for the ILP came from the

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organised trade union movement, and it seems to have been this that gave the Clydeside ILP its particular strength and its unusually proletarian character. The new wave of Scottish trades councils formed in heavy industry localities between 1890 and 1893 was crucial in this respect. Their revolt against the British Trades Union Congress (TUC), culminating in the establishment of the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) in 1897, was largely on the issue of independent labour representation. The STUC—unlike the TUC —was committed both to the social ownership of the means of production and independent labour representation from its formation. The same contrasts were carried forward into the new century. There was no parallel in Scotland to the electoral pact negotiated between the Liberals and the Labour Representation Committee in 1903, and, again unlike England, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) remained affiliated to the Scottish Workers Representation Committee. So although the pre-1914 Labour vote was much smaller in Scotland, reflecting in part the smaller size of trade union membership and the more hostile social environment, the content of that Labour vote was significantly different. Of necessity those who did vote Labour saw themselves far more involved in a direct challenge to capital and—no less important—to its social power as vested in local institutions.9 This distinctively Scottish configuration is of particular interest when we consider some of the wider frameworks now being developed to identify what kinds of social structure could lead towards socialist rather than social democratic politics. In her analysis of pre-revolutionary mass politics in Russia, Diane Koenker has stressed the significance of ‘civic’ social institutions. 10 In contrast to most parts of western Europe, tsarist governments had not permitted the growth of non-governmental social organisations which had a public character and which could express diverse sectional interests including those of organised labour. In consequence there was no political space for autonomous organisations representing working people and no scope for the development of cross-class alliance politics. In these circumstances, once the shell of tsarist rule was broken, organisations directly expressing class interests quickly solidified as the only vehicles of mass politics. Large-scale capital stood posed against workers, and the institutions of dual power, the soviets, originally organisations of mass type, were speedily transformed into direct expressions of working-class power.

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Within a spectrum of possible structures Clydeside would seem to be at least somewhat further along the line towards the Russian end of Koenker’s scale than most parts of industrial England. Civic institutions of a kind had long existed. But because of their origin (and perhaps particularly because of the role they played in the reproduction of Scotland’s national identity and culture), they had little class autonomy and tended to be seen as the direct manifestation of local bourgeois class control. There were no obvious intermediary bodies between organised labour and the regional exercise of civic or political power. A somewhat similar—or at least complementary—analysis to that of Koenker is provided by Igor Klyamkin’s redefinition of the concept of the Labour Aristocracy.11 Klyamkin argues that in recent usage the Labour Aristocracy has often been posed simply in material terms: the existence of income differentials which permitted a stratum of workers to detach itself from the rest in terms of culture and life experience. Klyamkin notes that this definition fails to explain why in Petrograd it was precisely the better-paid, skilled section of the workforce which provided the firmest base for revolutionary politics. If, on the other hand, a closer examination is made of Lenin’s own use of the term, the response of these workers becomes entirely comprehensible. The key element in Lenin’s definition, Klyamkin argues, was not income differentials. It was how these differentials were secured. In certain countries in western Europe, notably Germany and England, the organisations of skilled workers had won a status within the wider political system—in terms of legal rights and incorporation in certain semi-state institutions such as insurance schemes—which conferred a privileged standing in the workplace and directly enhanced their ability to bargain. In Russia this was not the case. The differentials secured by the skilled workers depended directly on the strength of their class organisation. This concept of the Labour Aristocracy is not of course exactly congruent with the processes described by Koenker. It shares Koenker’s stress on the interrelationship between labour’s wider legal and political involvement and the formation of attitudes inside the workplace and the intellectual horizons within which this took place. Labour aristocratic workers subjectively saw their workplace rights as at least in part to be dependent on the external status of their class organisations within the existing state structure. In terms of application, on the other hand, the two concepts remain distinct. Lenin was concerned with the active process by which certain types of class attitude were formed. Those using the concept of ‘civic

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society’ are more concerned with the way in which such attitudes, once formed, can be buffered and diffused in moments of acute social and economic crisis through the existence of an intermediary set of cross-class public organisations. But objectively the phenomena being described are not dissimilar. They concern the degree to which political space has been created, always at a certain economic cost, for the existence of non-governmental institutions which articulate the interests of a diversity of social groups but which in particular incorporate the organised working class and do so in a way which impinges in real terms on governmental decision-making. It is certainly true, looking at skilled workers on Clydeside, that they were indeed mostly members of unions which at British level were incorporated in this way. At the same time, and critically in terms of the subjective perception of workers, its local articulation was fractured. Local employers opposed unions as such, and were correspondingly reluctant to see organised labour entering the sphere of civic society to negotiate the character of local social provision. Our argument is therefore as follows. Clydeside possessed a distinctive social heritage which was in part a product of economically uneven development within Britain. The region’s lack of developed civic institutions and the absence of a true Labour Aristocracy predisposed its workforce to respond in a particularly active way to the transformation in industrial power produced by wartime full employment. The removal of the sanction of dismissal— amid mass unemployment—led fairly quickly to the posing of questions about class power both within the workplace and in society at large. To this extent, Clydeside was able to relate in a particularly direct fashion to models of social change provided by the Bolshevik revolution. In what follows we will seek to show that the general strike of January 1919 was not a bolt from the blue. On the contrary, it stemmed from a transformation of political consciousness which had taken place over the previous four years and its leaders, far from being political novices, reveal relatively sophisticated attitudes to state power. II

CLYDESIDE AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Our first area of evidence concerns the particular way in which industrial relations on the Clyde were transformed by the outbreak of war. The weakness and immaturity of Clydeside’s collective bargaining were soon revealed. Managements, especially in nonunionised areas, found themselves unable to handle the new power

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relations produced by full employment, and the state was increasingly forced to intervene. By the first half of 1915 over 20 per cent of all UK referrals to the government’s arbitration service were being generated by the 6 per cent of the workforce in the west of Scotland. 12 In heavy industry, which came under the direct authority of the munitions tribunals, the well-established tactics of workshop collectivism were carried forward into the courts. Workers sought to intimidate tribunal chairmen and central government became sufficiently alarmed at the elasticity with which the law was being interpreted to sack two tribunal chairmen.13 Even with all the efforts of the arbitration services Clydeside remained significantly more strike-prone than other industrial regions in Britain. Moreover, the peculiar starkness of class positions within Clydeside’s industrial relations appears to have been quickly projected on to the state apparatus. Reid’s claims about a neutral or even benign perception of the wartime state appear to have little basis on the Clyde. Most histories of Red Clydeside have followed the ‘Official History of the Ministry of Munitions’ and highlighted the 1915 dilution strikes in the engineering industry as the first key flashpoint. Strategically, however, in terms of Clydeside opinion, the 1915 shipyard strikes over leaving certificates were probably far more important. The Munitions Act gave managements far-reaching powers to discipline and dismiss workers. The most notable was the introduction of the leaving certificate without which re-employment was not legal. This appeared to be a direct attempt to restore the coercive threat of the unemployed reserve in war conditions. Its first use in the shipyards produced a sharp reaction. The shop stewards and Govan Trade Council went over the heads of the official unions and threatened a general strike across all yards on the Clyde. Officials at the Ministry of Munitions viewed the situation as especially dangerous because it seemed to combine and generalise a whole series of class-related grievances. Isaac Mitchell wrote: ‘the trouble has originated at Fairfields [in Govan, over unfair dismissals] but the men were full of other grievances…an untoward incident might precipitate a stoppage at any stage, such as the decision by the sheriff authorising the eviction of families because they were resisting the rise in rents.’ This fear that the anger would spill over to other issues, including those in the community, proved correct and it was the shipyards, rather than the engineering industry, that came out on strike in November 1915 to demand a rent freeze. The reaction by the authorities was to avoid confrontation with the 80,000 workforce in the yards and tactical retreats were made on both leaving certificates and rents in autumn 1915.14

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Over the following two years industrial relations in the shipyards seem to have been characterised by a tacit acceptance of labour’s new power. Dilution was not seriously pursued. Government purchases of warships were on a ‘cost plus’ basis which left the yard employers relatively unconcerned about the price of labour. In the struggle to complete orders there was illicit competition between yard managements to secure workers, a high level of unreported lightning strikes (Macassey claimed fifty a week early in 1917) and a prevalence of unreported and illegal wage deals. The Committee on Production was told that ‘the names of firms were torn off pay sheets before they were handed out’. At the beginning of 1918 the Ministry of Labour mounted a direct attack on what it considered to be the lax supervision exercised by the Admiralty and those in charge of shipbuilding. ‘The Ministry of Labour believes that there is something radically wrong with the employers on the Clyde as well as the men. The whole atmosphere on the Clyde denotes a moral rot, and such an atmosphere cannot ordinarily arise where relationships between employers and men are honourable, even though they are not harmonious. There is a tendency to conceal facts on both sides.’15 This situation in the yards, though undoubtedly more extreme, seems to have been reflected in most workplaces across Clydeside. A new shop-floor power was experienced—and nowhere more so than where unions had previously not existed and where conditions were worst. This is a facet of wartime industrial relations that seems to have escaped those who have recently sought to separate the formation of political attitudes ‘in the community’ from what was happening at work. The war economy demanded an unprecedented mobilisation. In a region where the female participation ratio had been traditionally low (compared to Lancashire or the Midlands of England), women entered the workforce on a massive scale and their experience was inevitably moulded by the wartime conditions. Work was now—as against peacetime—an environment where power was to be exercised. At home, as individuals, working people were largely powerless to resist the economic costs of war in terms of price inflation, food shortages and fixed pensions. To the extent that something could be done, it was through collective action that linked the workplace and the local community—and, because it was in general illegal, it demanded a quite conscious decision to defy both the legal authorities and the official trade union movement. Looking at the sequence of strikes in Figure 1 (p. 152), it is notable that, although the bulk of days lost were in heavy industry, there was a

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broad spread of strike action through female-employing ‘other’ areas; these included chemicals, printing, laundry work and food preparation. Our immediate concern, however, is with the cumulative transformation of attitudes over a period of years, encompassing perceptions of power in the workplace and social relations outside, and how far this process interlocked at a certain stage with wider international shifts in the perceived potential of class action revealed by the Russion revolution. If we examine the strikes of 1915–16, it is probably correct to say that they were basically about the exercise of power within the workplace and the local community. They sought to defend existing workshop arrangements, to generalise the right to collective bargaining across all areas of employment and to use that power defensively within the local community to stop rent rises and profiteering. They did not, at a mass level, seek to challenge the war or the existing state system. When appearing before munitions tribunals in 1915, shop stewards went out of their way to declare that they were more patriotic than the yard managements. The slogans of the rent strikers in November 1915 equated the landlords with the ‘Huns’ being fought on the continent. The main public concerns of both the shipyard shop stewards in early autumn 1915 and the Clyde Workers Committee in the winter of 1915–16 related to attempts by the state to intervene within the workshop in ways that would shift the balance back in favour of capital.16 When we move on to 1917 and the early winter of 1918, there appears to have been a definite change in mass attitudes. The issues of peace and of the post-war political system were seen to be central ones both by many workers and by government propagandists. At this point it is important to note the way in which knowledge of the two Russian revolutions reached the Clyde. The first, of February 1917, was welcomed at governmental level and received massive press coverage. Up to that point Britain’s most important continental ally had been an extremely oppressive autocracy, and in propaganda terms this made it quite difficult to portray Britain’s war aims, as against Germany’s, as socially progressive. The establishment of a reforming, democratic government, purged of ‘Prussian’ influence and with a popular base, was presented as a major strengthening of the Allied war effort. At the same time, however, the mass, dual power character of the revolution could not be hidden. Its origin was in the revolt which had occurred in the factories and army units. Its demand for peace, although blurred by the Kerensky government’s

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‘fight while we negotiate’ position, found a powerful echo on Clydeside. So did the fact that governmental power was now held by various kinds of socialist (in name at least) and that its popular legitimacy rested in part on the existence of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, the ‘soviets’. The Glasgow May Day demonstration of 1917 was the biggest so far. The British Socialist Party paper, The Call, commented: ‘The red badge of Socialism was much in evidence and one felt that since May 1915 a great change had come over the spirit of the people of Glasgow. The influence of the Revolution in Russia was everywhere manifest.’ The following week there was a mass meeting in support of the revolution held in Glasgow’s biggest civic hall and addressed by Bob Smillie, the miners’ leader, George Lansbury of the Labour Party, William Shaw of Glasgow Trades Council and Helen Crawford of the Women’s Peace Crusade and the ILP. At the end of May up to 100,000 demonstrated on Glasgow Green against the granting of the Freedom of City to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and at the beginning of June there was a demonstration through the streets of Glasgow demanding the release of the BSP leader and Scottish Labour College organiser John Maclean and the Russian émigré Petrov—joined by 200 sailors from a Russian warship anchored in the Clyde.17 In his war memoirs Lloyd George comments on the impact of the first Russian revolution on the industrial unrest which characterised the third quarter of 1917: ‘The Russian Revolution lit up the skies with a lurid flash of hope for all who were dissatisfied with the existing order of things…. In Russia, they pointed out, the workmen formed a separate authority coordinate with the government…. Why not in Britain? This was the question asked in every workshop and at every street corner.’ It is of course important to disentangle responses by the general mass of workers on the Clyde from those of the much smaller core of political activists in the ILP, BSP and the SLP, and it is particularly important to do so for the second revolution, which went virtually unreported in the highly censored mass circulation press. In mid-November the Glasgow Herald was still claiming that the Kerensky government remained in power and that the ‘pro-German riots’ had been put down.18 Yet, it is clear, especially from government sources, that by the end of the year discontent with the war itself was a major factor in industrial relations. By then the contradictions inherent in government labour policy were coming home to roost. The Admiralty’s policy of backing away from any firm commitment on dilution or wage control in shipbuilding had allowed severe

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disparities to arise with wages in other war industries. It had also contributed to a serious labour shortage. The Ministry of Munitions attempted to solve these problems in industries under its own control by offering a 12 per cent war bonus. This served only to set off a series of follow-up wage claims which produced the biggest wave of strike action at any time during the war. On Clydeside government investigators saw these claims, which quickly spread back into the shipyards, as a manifestation of a wider disenchantment. The Ministry of Munitions chief investigator in Glasgow described the letter published in the Daily Telegraph by the ex-Cabinet minister Lord Lansdowne (and which revealed government disagreements about peace plans) as having a ‘deplorable’ effect. On 15 December 1917 he wrote that ‘it has done much to raise the status of the “peace by negotiation” propagandists…many workers, already war weary, are disposed to regard such doctrines as being more weighty…. The early months of 1918 may reveal industrial action with a view to the achievement of political ends—the termination of war conditions.’ A fortnight later he wrote of ‘the tendency on the part of the rank and file to repudiate trade union officials and constitutional channels of negotiation and take matters into their own hands’. Sir Thomas Munro, Scottish Secretary of State, visiting Glasgow in January 1918, also felt that the industrial action then taking place was principally political in origin. He reported that the ‘12 1/2% advance was not, in his opinion, an active factor in the situation, and that unrest was due to the activities of a pacifist and revolutionary section of the men industriously working on the general dissatisfaction that existed. This element had been prominent in the Clyde area more than in any other district.’ Munro’s diagnosis was confirmed when a mass meeting of Clyde shop stewards barracked the National Service minister, Geddes, and passed a resolution calling for an immediate armistice with no annexations. By then, the first weeks of 1918, the terms of the Bolsheviks’ Brest-Litovsk peace and the publication of the Allies’ secret treaties had made sufficient impact on public opinion to cause the Cabinet serious alarm. New war aims were to be framed which, according to Tom Jones of the Cabinet secretariat, were intended to appear ‘ultrademocratic’.19 It is instructive to compare the resolution of this crisis with that two years before. On that occasion, November 1915 to March 1916, the concessions were domestic and economic: action on rents and a limitation of the assault on workshop power. On this occasion a key

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factor seems to have been promises about the post-war settlement. This direct response to the arguments of the anti-war socialists appears to have been quite as important as the 12 1/2 per cent. For on 13 February 1918 the Ministry of Munitions reported the positive effect of ‘the local resolutions emanating from workshops and shipyards through the medium of the War Aims Committee’.20 This government propaganda agency, which operated on a relatively mass scale (organising and preparing speakers’ notes for upwards of 500 meetings a week), had as part of its confidential remit the objective of dwelling ‘on the democratic developments and improvements in the lot of the working classes which state control and other war changes had already secured’. Its budget for the six months from October 1917 shows special allocations being made for the Clyde amounting to about 5 per cent of total expenditure. It was also at this point that Beaverbrook as Minister of Information, although formally only responsible for external propaganda, took it upon himself to launch drives ‘to repopularise the war’ in Clydeside and South Wales.21 This propaganda work was matched by a considerable amount of low-level but well-focused political repression: raiding of offices and homes, seizure of publications and the selective ‘comb-out’ conscription of key industrial activists. Leading figures in the Russian refugee community were arrested and in April 1918 John Maclean himself. But despite this, and despite the wholesale payment of the 12 1/2 per cent, this attempt at pacification seems to have been far less successful than that in early 1916. There are two main areas of evidence. One is the May Day strike of 1918 and the other is continuing concern at official level about support for direct action in industry. The strike, the first May Day involving a stoppage on a working day, was planned from at least February and won support from the Trades Council and progressively most other labour organisations in the city. The leading force behind it was the BSP and its allies in the ILP and the CWC. Estimates of attendance vary between 90,000 and 100,000. Although it was clearly an illegal defiance of the government, no attempt was made to disperse it. The resolutions put at the nineteen platforms on Glasgow Green all demanded the release of Maclean, an immediate end to the war and pledged support for the Russian revolution. At the more general level of underlying attitudes in industry official concern was focused on the continuing scale of direct action and of unofficial wage demands. In September demands were raised in the shipyards for a £5 a week minimum, and by the end of the month The Call was noting that

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‘distrust of [union] “leaders” is rapidly developing into repudiation’. At the beginning of October two leading officials at the Ministry of Munitions, Sir Stephenson Kent and Humbert Wolfe, were arguing for a far more interventionist state policy. The war, they argued, had destroyed the authority of official trade union leaders, especially among semi-skilled and unskilled, and the only way to answer grievances about profiteering and the lack of stability in remuneration was by total regulation of wages and profits. Without such intervention they foresaw a serious crisis as likely to arise in the near future.22 Finally, before examining the 1919 strike, a few points need to be made about the impact of the war on Clydeside’s socialists. Recent research by Mackinlay and Melling has stressed the degree to which the ILP on Clydeside was quite different in its social base and orientation to that elsewhere in Britain. 23 As we have seen, the Clydeside ILP was industrially based and had always possessed a strong Marxist element. During the war these tendencies had been strengthened by its involvement in the movements of rank-and-file revolt, both in industry and the localities, and its increasingly close association with the Marxist BSP and SLP. Mackinlay has established that the firmest base for its Marxist wing, and its biggest branches in terms of membership, lay in the shipyard communities of Partick and Govan. It was these branches which provided the main support for ILP affiliation to the Third International passed at Scottish conference of 1919 and 1920. The links with the BSP and SLP were already strong well before the Russian revolutions—forged under the pressure of common semi-legal struggle. Speakers were regularly exchanged in the localities and in January 1917 the three organisations combined to open the Glasgow Socialist Club.24 The impact of the Russian revolutions, and particularly of the November Bolshevik revolution, appears to have pushed the Clydeside rank and file further to the left. Gallacher’s description of ‘huge meetings’ and ‘extraordinary heights of enthusiasm’ is borne out by contemporary reports in the Labour press. Oral testimony from shipyard workers talks of ‘tremendous interest among the apprentices’ and of workshop debates around the idea of world revolution. At the same time, and no less important, there also seems to have been a strategic re-evaluation among the leadership cadre within both the ILP and the BSP. The Russians had shown how revolution could be made, and three critical lessons appear to have been drawn. The first concerned the use of direct action, on both the industrial and military fronts, to force a revolutionary peace. The Second International had

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signally failed to deliver. The news of the Russian peace policy filtered through to Clydeside in December 1917 at the height of the bonus crisis. What are described as overflow meetings in Glasgow’s biggest hall in January 1918 show Ramsay MacDonald having to pay fulsome tribute to Lenin—to what the Glasgow ILP paper Forward called ‘stormy applause’.25 The second lesson concerned the character of workers’ power. This concept was not a new one to the somewhat syndicalist, workshop-based traditions of Clydeside. In December 1917 Gallacher was writing in The Call drawing parallels between the shop stewards movement in Britain and the new system of soviet power in Russia. The difference was that this rather undefined general concept had now been given sharp organisational form. The role of the workers’ councils as an expression of direct democracy seems to have struck home very quickly. As early as mid-January 1918 John Wheatley was writing a series of articles in Forward in which he disputed the relevance of the soviet model for Britain and defended constitutional socialism. Forward, despite the proreformist editorial policy of Tom Johnston, felt it necessary to carry an answering series of articles from the Parkhead Marxian Forum (probably Tom Bell). The language of the exchanges is important. Wheatley stressed the role of representative institutions in combining individual freedom with the realisation of social justice. His opponent argued that the class power of capital could only be broken by constituting a new system of state power directly responsible to the workers. Harry McShane, writing long after the event, comments: ‘we had known only working class revolt. Now we could talk about working class power…. Lenin’s State and Revolution helped enormously. Before the Socialist Labour Party idea of workshop action had been counterposed to parliamentary action; now we saw the unity of all types of action.’26 The third lesson concerned the need for socialist organisation within the armed forces. Again this was not a new idea to British socialists who had sought to procure mutiny more than once in the years between 1911 and 1914. Now the example of Russia, where military mutinies had played a critical role, gave this concept a new practicality. The slogan of ‘Workers’ and Soldiers’ Committees’ had already been raised in the summer of 1917, and in Glasgow the report back from the Leeds Convention seems, despite being banned by the authorities, to have met with considerably more support than elsewhere. The Glasgow BSP also took on itself the task, if not to organise, at least to secure dominance within the Discharged

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Servicemen’s Association. Gallacher claims BSP nominees were winning the majority of elected positions by autumn 1917. By February 1918, when it claimed 3,000 members, its secretary was writing to the BSP paper, The Call, describing demonstrations to stop the eviction of a soldier’s wife. By the summer of 1918 its members were holding demonstrations in sufficiently close proximity to meetings organised by the Left to prevent their being broken up by the police.27 III

THE 1919 STRIKE AND CLASS POLITICS

At the end of 1918 the government was acutely aware of the social problems likely to arise with the return of servicemen to civilian life, and was planning for a very slow, cautious demobilisation. On 1 December 1918 the Scottish Secretary Munro addressed a memorandum to the Cabinet which spoke of the ‘deep resentment’ among workers at the ‘too rapid discharge’ from the National Factories and the inadequate level of out-of-work benefit. He continued: ‘The risk that exists, and which cannot be overlooked, is that a dangerous situation may arise at any moment if large numbers of workers are thrown out of employment without adequate provision. I am especially apprehensive of the attitude of discharged soldiers and sailors who are banded together in an organisation which is insistent on its demands and somewhat aggressive.’28 The policy of slow demobilisation collapsed during the last days of December in face of army mutinies in northern France and the home counties. Within four weeks, by 30 January 1919, a million men had been released from the colours, and the Clydeside authorities were faced with the situation they feared most. According to Shinwell, many of the mutineers had been in Scottish regiments, and these men now found themselves back home with little or no prospect of employment.29 It was against this background that the Clydeside socialists launched their bid for strike action to enforce a 40-hour week. The evidence suggests considerable prior thought and discussion about the dynamics of the situation, the nature of the demand and the organisational base from which the strike should be run. In The Call for 23 January 1919, in the same issue that reported the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, John Maclean contributed the front-page article under the heading ‘Now’s the Day, Now’s the Hour’. He argued that attitudes within the working class in Britain as a whole did not match the objective needs of the moment: this was a general strike to force

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Britain’s military withdrawal from Russia. The majority were ‘not generally to our way of thinking’. At the same time Maclean believed that there was support for strike action to enforce shorter hours and so maintain labour’s wartime bargaining strength. This, therefore, had to be the key priority for action—as the basis for shifting the balance of class forces in a way which would prepare workers for a challenge to state power within the year. Intelligence reports on Maclean’s speeches in Lancashire confirm this thinking—noting his conviction that the miners should lead the action and his claim that the socialists were having great success within the army. ‘He thinks that with the miners, the transport workers, the railway workers and the engineers on strike, and the Army, Navy and Police either sympathetic or powerless, the government of the country can be transferred to the workers either peacefully or forcibly.’30 The west of Scotland appears to have been seen as the linchpin of the operation with considerable thought given to an organisational base for any initial mobilisation. The national organiser of the BSP arrived on Clydeside in late November 1918 and remained till his arrest on 31 January 1919. A body called the West of Scotland Soviet was established in December and secured affiliations from a number of bodies including the biggest ILP branch, Govan Central. Tactically, the Left seems to have considered it important to have an organisation at the centre which would not succumb to pressure from the official movement. Eventually, the Trades Council and the CWC together seem to have been cast in this role—an important model for the Trades Councils constituting themselves as Councils of Action in 1920 and again in 1926. It was as joint secretary of this body that Glasgow Trades and Labour Council secretary, William Shaw, officially wrote to the BSP in mid-January ‘to request the assistance of your speakers all over the country to refer to the stoppage of work, and shorter working week, which takes place on Monday, 27 January and to advise all workers to down tools on that date’. The manifesto for the strike, issued in mid-January, posed its objectives in directly class terms— although limiting their scope to what Maclean had recognised as feasible earlier in that month. The reduction of hours to 40 had the explicit objective of creating employment for those discharged and thereby maintaining the favourable balance of power between labour and capital which had existed during the war.31 In considering the development of the strike three things stand out: the relatively small size of the initial core of strikers, the speed of the strike’s subsequent spread within Scotland and the very

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disappointing response elsewhere. Reports to the Clyde Shipbuilders Association indicate that about 14,000 shipyard workers downed tools immediately and enthusiastically in support of what was a shop steward-led strike without official backing from the unions at British level. Although numerically quite large, this represented only 25 per cent of the workforce and probably reflects a generational division between the younger men politicised during the war and the older generation who still owed allegiance to the official unions. What frightened the authorities was the very rapid spread of the strike after day one. There seem to have been two sides to this process. One was the use of mass pickets. These pickets appear to have gained their mass character, sometimes thousands strong, by drawing in the women already discharged from munitions work and the demobilised soldiers who had recently arrived in the city. Gallacher claimed official support from the Glasgow Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Soldiers and Sailors in The Call on 30 January. As we have seen, the Clyde employers specifically discussed at their meeting of 31 January how they could drive a wedge between the strikers and the discharged soldiers without undercutting their existing stance of ‘no response to unofficial action’. Oral testimony indicates that there were very significant numbers of ex-soldiers among the 60,000 in George Square and the effectiveness with which the demonstrators fought back against the police was largely a consequence of this.32 The other aspect of the strike’s spread was its speed outside Glasgow and the apparent spontaneity of the response. Even in Glasgow it would seem unrealistic to put everything down to coercion by the mass pickets. The 60,000 in George Square presumably attended of their own volition and all the evidence indicates that once the movement started it gained a momentum of its own. The issue of Call published on 30 January speaks of the response as being ‘beyond the highest expectation of even the most enthusiastic’ and this is echoed by intelligence reports for Scotland. The rapid spread of the strike to coal, iron, engineering and ship-repair on the east of Scotland would seem to show a mass understanding of the significance of what was being fought for—both in terms of work for those demobilised from the war and the maintenance of labour’s wartime power at the point of production. Alan Campbell has recently demonstrated the depth of Marxist education work in the mining communities around Glasgow and the impact which this had on ability of the Marxist Left to mobilise support in January 1919 and win control of the union structures between 1919 and 1921.33

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Against this stands the very disappointing response outside Scotland. Belfast was fine—a complete general strike and if anything even more worrying to the Cabinet than Clydeside. There were some strike decisions in the giant wartime production complex in the East End of London—in the shipyards and docks. There was also some preparation for action in South Wales. But in the industrial heartland of England, in Tyneside, south Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Midlands, responses were slow (Coventry seems to have been the only exception). Intelligence reports for early February describe the strike leaders as saying that the Clydeside’s mobilisation had been too early: Gallacher and Shinwell had been ‘too successful’. It would seem to be for this reason that Gallacher was so keen to avoid a physical force confrontation on 31 January. He was bound by existing tactical decisions. The objective at that point was to defend full employment with the purpose of consolidating an alliance between workers and ex-soldiers. There was no immediate intent to challenge state power. Although with the hindsight of sixteen years, Gallacher might have felt that revolutionary surprise would have been the best tactic, on 31 January 1919 he was anxious above all to deprive the government of the excuse for military intervention and arrests. Cabinet discussions over the previous two days had been precisely about how to precipitate a confrontation which would allow the use of troops in circumstances which would isolate the leaders and in which the troops would remain loyal to the government (it was eventually agreed that Scottish troops would be safer than English). Once military intervention had taken place and English support had not materialised, the Clydeside leadership was unanimous that work should be resumed as quickly as possible.34 It was not, however, a capitulation. All the evidence shows that the local prestige of the shop stewards movement was, if anything, enhanced. The accredited membership of the shop stewards organisation on Clydeside continued to increase through 1919. The one-day strike on May Day 1919 was even bigger than that of 1918. In some shipyards workers refused to recognise their union officials, and the Clyde Shipbuilders Association (CSA) remained very apprehensive about future outbreaks. No attempt was made to victimise militants. Nationally the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF) sought to work with the official trade union leadership to ‘give a definite status to the shop stewards and to constitutionalise the “Movement”’. In Scotland there was an even more drastic break with past practice when the Scottish engineering employers association insisted that member firms

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formalise factory bargaining by recognising union representatives. On the political front 1919 marked the high point of pro-Third International support within the ILP. Military intelligence reports for May 1919 show grave concern at the influence of Marxist doctrine among the working class and the inability of the school of Social Study at the University (which was ‘on the right lines’) to ‘reach the workers’.35 Finally, therefore, to return to our hypothesis. This was that Clydeside’s post-war radicalism did indeed reflect a degree of mass socialist consciousness, that the tactics of its leaders were relatively sophisticated and not unaffected by the Russian revolution and, critically, that the uneven response was a product of the quite different type of social development in Scotland prior to the First World War. No doubt arguments will continue on just how red the Clyde was in 1919. But for future research it is perhaps the comparative exploration of social differentiation within the United Kingdom that is likely to prove of greatest interest. Here we have argued that a critical factor was the presence or absence of political structures which led workers to see their bargaining strength as dependent on legal privileges within the existing state system—and, no less important, to experience its embodiment in the social fabric of their own region. The relative absence of such structures in Scotland was, as we have suggested, connected to the comparative weakness of Scottish capital. How far was this also the case in Belfast and perhaps South Wales? Conversely for the period after 1919, what new configuration of material and social circumstances permitted the re-establishment of more stable political relations in the areas at risk? NOTES 1 Strathclyde Record Office, TD 241/1/18 f. 149. 2 W.Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde (London, 1936), p. 233. 3 Iain McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (Cambridge, 1983) and Alastair Reid, ‘Dilution, trade unionism and the state in Britain during the First World War’, in S.Tolliday and J.Zeitlin (eds), Shopfloor Bargaining and the State (Edinburgh, 1985). 4 Monthly reports in the Board of Trade Labour Gazette, 1914–19, checked for selected periods against Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), MUN 5/5 and 1/15. 5 F.W.S.Craig, British Parliamentary Statistics, 1918–1945 (London, 1977). Kelvingrove, which included the shipbuilding and docking community of Anderston, was contested by the Communist Aitken Ferguson in 1922 and again in the 1923 by-election. Neil McLean,

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7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

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elected MP for Govan in December 1918, was a leading member of the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign and chaired a number of the strike meetings in January 1919. Walton Newbold, standing as a Communist, was elected MP for Motherwell in 1922. Arthur Geddes, Communist, stood as official Labour candidate in Greenock and twice came near victory as well as trouncing the unofficial right-wing Labour candidate. Further information can be found in J.Foster, ‘Strike action and working-class politics on Clydeside 1914–1919 ’, International Review of Social History, XXXV (1990), pp. 33–70. R.H.Campbell, The Rise and Fall of Scottish Industry 1707–1939 (Edinburgh, 1980); J.Melling, ‘Scottish industrialists and the changing character of class relations in the Clyde region’, in T.Dickson (ed.), Capital and Class (Edinburgh, 1982); H.Fraser, Conflict and Class: Scottish Workers, 1700–1938 (Edinburgh, 1988). C.Campbell, ‘The making of a Clydeside working class’, Our History 78 (1986), pp. 1–31. H.Southall, ‘The origins of the depressed areas’, Economic History Review XLI (1988), pp. 236–58; R.J.Morris, ‘The ILP 1893–1932: an introduction’, in A.McKinlay and R.J.Morris, The ILP on Clydeside 1893–1932 (Manchester, 1991). James Smyth, ‘The struggle for identity, 1888–1906’, in ibid., pp. 20–55. Diane Koenker, Moscow Worke rs and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1981). I.Klyamkin, ‘The October revolution and the issue of the subject in history’, Social Sciences, USSR Academy of Sciences 4 (1988), pp. 93–111. Monthly returns listed in the Board of Trade Labour Gazette. G.Rubin, War, Law and Labour (Oxford, 1987), pp. 64–107. ‘Official History of the Ministry of Munitions’ (unpublished internal history; copy held in the PRO), vol. IV, pp. 50–5; D.Englander, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain (Oxford, 1983), ch. 10. PRO ADM 116/1602: memorandum from L.Macassey, 24 April 1918; PRO ADM 116/1602: Ministry of Labour, 12 February 1918. Rubin, op. cit., and J.Melling, Rent Strikes! (Edinburgh, 1983). The Call, 10 May, 17 May and 7 June 1917. D.Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London, 1938 [1934]), vol. II, p. 1148; Glasgow Herald, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15 and 17 November 1917. ‘Official History’, vol. II, pp. 91–2 and vol. V, pp. 177–92; PRO ADM 116/1608, 12 February 1918; PRO MUN 2/28, labour reports, week ending 15 December 1917, p. 14 and PRO MUN 2/14, week ending 2 February 1918; PRO CAB WC GT 3597; Gallacher, op. cit., pp. 179–85; Tom Bell, Pioneering Days (London, 1941), pp. 152–4 ; Tom Jones, Whitehall Diaries, ed. K.Middlemas (London, 1969), entries for January 1918, pp. 42–4. PRO MUN 2/14, week ending 13 February 1918. PRO INF 4/4A, ‘Home publicity during the Great War’ and INF 4/8 ‘The Ministry of Information’. The papers of the War Aims Committee and the Ministry of Information appear to have gone

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32

33

34

35

John Foster missing in the inter-war period. The materials in INF 4/ are those collected together at the beginning of the Second World War when the ministry was re-established. Janet Adam Smith mentions Beaverbrook’s activities in John Buchan (London, 1965), p. 212(Buchan was Beaverbrook’s director of intelligence). The Call, 7, 21 and 28 March 1918 for arrests; May Day preparations —The Call, 21 February and 9 May 1918; Forward, 4 May 1918; Glasgow Herald, 2 May 1918; The Call, 19 and 26 September 1918; PRO MUN 5/51 and 300/61: memo dated 4 October 1918. McKinlay and Morris (eds), op. cit., especially the introduction. The Call, 18 January 1917. Gallacher, op. cit., p. 175; tape-recorded interview with Finlay Hart in STUC archive; Forward, 12 January 1918. Forward, 26 January and 23 March 1918; The Call, 28 December 1918; Harry McShane and Joan Smith, No Mean Fighter (London, 1978), p. 94. The Call, 16 August 1917; Gallacher, op. cit., pp. 67–8 and 159; W. Caven, secretary, to The Call, 21 February 1918; Caledun in The Call, 8 August 1918. PRO CAB 24/71 GT 6427, 1 December 1918. A.Rothstein, The Soldiers’ Strikes of 1919 (London, 1980); E.Shinwell, I’ve Lived Through It All (London, 1973), pp. 42–3; Glasgow Herald, 8 January 1919 for unrest among the police and 11 January (Leith Fort) and 13 January (Stirling) for unrest in the army; PRO AIR 1/557 16/ 15/51, on Forth garrison; PRO CAB 24/ 74 GT 6744, demobilisation report, 30 January 1919. The Call, 23 January 1919; PRO CAB 24/74 GT 6713, fortnightly report for 28 January 1919. For George Ebury’s arrival, The Call, 21 November 1918; W. of Scotland Soviet—Glasgow ILP minute book, 17 January 1919 (I am grateful to Dr Alan McKinlay for this reference); The Call, 23 January 1919 for letter to BSP; Glasgow Herald, 20 January 1919 for the strike committee’s ‘Call to Arms ’. CSA commentary on strike, Strathclyde RO, TD 241/1/18 ff. 141–9; PRO MUN 1/17 day book for 31 January 1919, and MUN 5/18, area report; 1 February 1919; tape-recorded interviews with Tommy Graham, Bob Saunders, Jimmy Ferguson and Finlay Hart in STUC archive. PRO MUN 1/17 and 5/18 as above; PRO CAB 24/74 GT 6772; Alan Campbell, ‘From independent collier to militant miner’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal 24 (1989), using military intelligence reports from PRO AIR 1/560 on coalfields. Security overviews were undertaken in Cabinet discussions on 31 January and 3 February 1919 (PRO CAB 23/9); CAB 24/74 GT 6713 for Ministry of Labour survey of industrial unrest for first week in February; reports on Gallacher being too successful in CAB 24/75 GT 6816, 10 February. Alan McKinlay, ‘Strategy, ideology and organisation’, in McKinlay and Morris, op. cit., p. 142 for accredited shop stewards and

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prestige of leaders; Strathclyde RO TD 241/1/18, minutes for 13 and 25 March 1919 on attitudes of workers in Hendersons and Beardmores and 14 February on Beardmores’ proposals for victimisation; McKinlay, op. cit., p. 142 for position of Engineering Employers Federation; Alan Campbell, op. cit., p. 15 cites the GHQ Intelligence Summaries on the strength of Marxist doctrine from PRO AIR 1/554 16/15/59.

9

Demobilisation in Germany 1918–19: the gradual erosion of the powers of the soldiers’ councils Wolfram Wette

By demobilisation we have to understand a very complex process, namely the overall process of changes in the military, economic and social fields, through which a society in a state of war is transformed into one in a state of peace after the ending of hostilities. I

APPROACHES TO THE PROBLEM AND THE STATE OF RESEARCH

During the First World War the state in Germany—as was also the case in the other belligerent countries—intervened in the economy and society more vigorously than ever before with directives and controls. The demands of the state were already tending to be total: the whole of society was to be organised to meet the requirements of the war. Accordingly, demobilisation was also seen in the main as a task to be planned and executed by the state. Consideration and planning had to be devoted to those measures required by the anticipated relaxation or removal of state control in the event of demobilisation. In the field of military demobilisation special preparations were to be made on the part of the military leadership. These referred to the return home of millions of soldiers from the various fronts as well as the immense problems of material disarmament and mass releases from war service. Whether war production could be successfully converted to peacetime production and the millions of people quickly released from war service and as smoothly as possible returned to a livelihood and work, depended upon the most harmonious possible co-operation of the authorities with the employer and employee organisations, and these with one another. In view of these and other considerations there was a general conviction among the organisers of demobilisation in Germany that with the victorious end of the war—no other end could be imagined

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—the anticipated demobilisation had to be carefully planned and properly executed if there were to be no risk of it ending in a complete breakdown of military discipline and in potentially even more serious social unrest. In this lay the enormous, politically explosive nature of the problem of demobilisation. Among other things, it was the fear of social unrest which led the state roughly as far back as 1916 to face both the outline and the detailed planning of the later demobilisation. External and internal developments at the end of the war, in the autumn of 1918—the military defeat, the outbreak of the November revolution and the conclusion of the Armistice—whilst not completely upsetting the demobilisation plans, nevertheless set in motion a dynamic process which could no longer be contained by such plans, commands and controls. Thereby the authority of the state itself was called in question to some extent. When discipline began to falter in many places, the military leadership experienced its real defeat. It was now forced to realise that in addition to its military power, the political power which had accrued to it in the course of the war was suddenly dissolving into thin air. Now it even had to fear that it would not be able as a technical military body to dissolve the army (militär-technische Liquidationsinstitution1) and fulfil the role which was assigned to it by the Council of People’s Commissars. With that the function and and raison d’être of the officers seemed to be called in question, at least for a short space of time. In the end the course of the German revolution of 1918–19 was, on the whole, decisively influenced by the demobilisation. Both from the point of view of time and in the very nature of the event, a close connection existed between the rapid process of mass releases from war service on the one hand, and the decline of the initially powerful soldiers’ councils movement on the other. In view of this obvious causality it is remarkable that the problem of military demobilisation and its consequences has remained to a large extent neglected in the extensive literature on the German revolution of 1918–19. 2 Only recently have some significant aspects of demobilisation after the First World War been scrutinised. The results were presented in 1981 at a conference held in London on ‘Social Processes of Demobilisation after the First World War’. 3 These were directed towards a comparative examination of conditions in France, Germany and Great Britain. The focal point of academic interest was, however, not the military demobilisation but, on the one hand, the question of reintegrating the mass armies into the peacetime economy and, on the other, the problem, examined in

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more detail for the first time, of how the state perceived its responsibilities towards the war-disabled and surviving dependants. The earlier military aspect of demobilisation did not enjoy any comparable intensive interest, which among other things might have been due to the comparative starting-point of that conference. For only in Germany did that direct connection exist between military demobilisation and the course of revolution. It is to this connection that particular attention is paid in this contribution. In view of that prevalent tendency in research on the councils to relate prospects of successful revolution to the councils movement, the American historian Gerald D.Feldman, who has a profound knowledge of the subject-matter, has warned: ‘No matter how unpleasant it may be, we have reached a point, where a reversal of the direction of research could benefit our historical understanding. Instead of concentrating, as hitherto, on the question of how the loser might have won, one ought to ask oneself, how the winner was able to win.’4 If the question is posed from this angle, how the decline of the soldiers’ councils movement can be explained, then the problem of demobilisation assumes its full importance for the first time. For the conjecture is obvious, that with the demobilisation of personnel— metaphorically speaking—the ground was cut from under the feet of the soldiers’ councils as revolutionary authorities. The demobilisation of personnel at the end of the First World War constituted a social process of change on an enormous scale. On Armistice Day (11 November 1918) about 8 million German soldiers were under arms, of which—according to the corresponding estimates of the People’s Deputy, Barth (Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD)) and of the Prussian War Minister, General Scheüch 5 — roughly 6 million were outside Germany and the remainder inside, in the homeland. Up to the end of the year 1918 this figure decreased to about 3 million; by the end of January 1919 it was about 1 million; and in mid-February 1919 the demobilisation of personnel was for the most part concluded.6 This means that between mid-November and midJanuary, that is, in three months, 7 million German males left the army or the navy and returned either to civilian employment or at least to their families. It is difficult to imagine in the abstract what this colossal reintegration process was like, and research, as already noted, is so far only in the initial stages.7 That is why only a few of the questions connected with this process of change can be touched upon in what follows. In this connection the military demobilisation in the Reich and in the Baltic city of Kiel, from which the German revolution took its starting-point in 1918, is at the centre of our attention.

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DEMOBILISATION IN THE REICH: PLANNING AND PRACTICE

When the war came to an end, the great majority of soldiers, understandably enough, had no greater desire than to return to their families as quickly as possible. Everyone wanted to be back home by Christmas at the latest. The Council of People’s Commissars took this wish into account and supported it. In its decree to the Commanderin-Chief on 12 November 1918,8 one day after the conclusion of the Armistice, it informed the troops: ‘The People’s Government is imbued with the wish that after the unspeakable suffering and incredible privations every one of our soldiers should return home in the shortest possible time.’ At the same time, however, the government must have feared that the urge to go home might prove stronger for many soldiers than the readiness to maintain military discipline. For this reason the government added: ‘This objective [the speediest possible return] can only be achieved, however, if the demobilisation proceeds according to a well-ordered plan. If individual units stream back arbitrarily, then they seriously jeopardise themselves, their comrades and the homeland. The consequence would be chaos, with famine and want.’ In practice the military commands took their guidelines from the already available demobilisation plans which, in a generalised form, regulated the execution of the mass releases from military service, following the end of the war, as well as a wealth of other matters relating to the change-over of the army and navy to peacetime status. The ‘Demobilisation Plan for the Navy’9 was issued as early as 1916, the ‘Demobilisation Plan for the German Army’10 in spring 1918. In the identical introduction to both plans it was emphasised that ‘it was in the nature of things that only general guidelines could be given’. These would have to be ‘adapted to the circumstances’. ‘Necessary alterations’ would have to be made in particular circumstances. The military authorities had instructions to make preparations for demobilisation. In fact in the execution of the demobilisation, officially set in motion with the Armistice on 11 November 1918, ‘a number of alterations [had to] be made and arranged’,11 as the Berlin War Ministry later confirmed. Not everything ran quite according to programme, in spite of the early outline planning and the later detailed instructions, for many of the troops stationed within the Reich headed for home directly on their own initiative, and the troops of the front-line formations frequently did likewise as soon as their units had reached the borders of the Reich.

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After the long war many a soldier had no sympathy for ponderous, bureaucratic discharge procedures. These were felt in many cases to delay unnecessarily the most rapid return possible to their families. For this reason, even at that time, it was scarcely possible to gain an accurate overall view of the actual course of the demobilisation of personnel. The retrospective observer cannot help getting the impression that the Supreme Command, the Prussian War Ministry and the Reich Naval Office stood to a great extent helpless in face of the phenomenen of spontaneous demobilisation, and that their efforts to carry out the releases according to an orderly plan met with only limited success. On 19 November 1918, the Prussian War Ministry gave instructions that there was no longer a need to wait for the general command to demobilise: the formations returning to their home garrison were to be released immediately on arrival, provided they were not required for special employment in border protection or for security purposes.12 The same order decreed the release of those belonging to all the older age-groups up to and including that of 1895.13 This meant that all soldiers called up for war service who were over 24 could be released immediately. Only the age-groups born in 1896–9, that is, the 20- to 23-year-old soldiers, were excluded from this first great phase of releases. The War Ministry guidelines and the similarly worded instructions of the Reich Naval Office14 followed the general objective of transferring the army and navy first of all from their wartime establishment ‘on to a general peacetime footing’,15 that is to say, to bring them down to the manpower levels of summer 1914, before the start of the war. According to the demobilisation plans for the army and navy, normal release was to proceed in the following manner: the soldiers would have their military passes handed out at the reserve units due to replace them. As this process frequently proved impracticable in practice, because the reserve units were a long way away, the military authorities saw themselves forced to authorise temporary releases16 and legitimise them. This meant that the soldiers could be demobilised by the unit with which they happened to be, as a rule their field unit, through the issuing of a simple discharge certificate. III

THE POLITICAL DIMENSION

Then, on 31 December 1918, the Reich government issued the general demobilisation order. 17 It ordained that on 10 January 1919, all formations which happened to be in their peacetime stations were to be

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disbanded. The Prussian War Ministry ordered, in addition, the release of the hitherto retained age-groups, 1896, 1897 and 1898, by the end of January 1919,18 so that apart from the professional soldiers only the conscripts of the 1899 age-group, that is, the 20-year-old soldiers, had to remain in barracks. This involved those young men who had been called up prematurely at the end of the war and who in normal peacetime circumstances would have begun their military service on 1 January 1919. The retention of this youngest age-group met with intense protests from left-wing opponents of the Council of People’s Commissars. One member of the KPD-controlled ‘Reich Committee of the 1896–99 Agegroups’ demanded the immediate release of these age-groups from the old army and, into the bargain, called for demonstrations in support of this demand on 5 January. 19 The Independent Socialists and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards also supported this request.20 With this the whole issue of demobilisation was politicised. It became—along with the dismissal of the Berlin Chief of Police Emil Eichhorn (USPD) —one of those factors which triggered off the January disturbances in Berlin. These events were preceded by violent argument, in the Cabinet and in the Central Council. The USPD People’s Commissar, Hugo Haase, took the view that the War Ministry would not release the 1898–9 agegroups ‘simply in order to maintain the old power of militarism’.21 For that reason Independent Socialist members of the government rejected the draft version of the Demobilisation Law in the Cabinet.22 Right up to its breakdown the Coalition Cabinet was unable to agree on this question.23 Ebert had to ward off the accusation that he wished to retain part of the standing army. In this connection, however, he put forward the view that everything was a question of practicability; obviously the millions of soldiers could not be released in a single day; agreement on the release of the still retained 1898–9 age-groups would have to be reached after the New Year. 24 On the other hand the Independent Socialist ministers in the Prussian Cabinet also saw the delay as a political issue25 and supported the demand of their colleagues Haase, Dittmann and Barth. IV

MASS DESERTIONS

In spite of the carefully prepared demobilisation plans the disbanding of the millions-strong army proceeded by no means everywhere according to the intentions of the military authorities. Even in September 1918, that is, several weeks before the formal conclusion of

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the Armistice treaty, about 750,000 soldiers of the Imperial Army are said to have deserted.26 After the Armistice, on 11 November, military demobilisation then developed in many places into a furious process, scarcely any longer under the control of the responsible authorities. It is true that the officers of front-line troops in co-operation with the soldiers’ councils did succeed, as a rule, in leading their units intact back to their home garrison. Upon the soldiers’ arrival at the peacetime garrison, however, an irresistible urge took possession of them: to discard their uniforms at once and go home. It is certainly a myth that this disintegration was caused by the ‘subversive influence of the local soldiers’ councils’ and by ‘infected reserve units’.27 These influences were unnecessary. A typical instance of the uncontrollable disintegration of homeward-bound front-line troops is the conduct of the 35,000-strong units under the command of the Army Corps Lequis from the Western Front, which ceremoniously marched into Berlin in December 1918, and then simply melted away until only about 2,000 men remained.28 The flooding-back of masses of soldiers and the largely spontaneous, scarcely regulable, disbanding of many units, left the officers of the Supreme Command with the impression that they had been divested of all their instruments of power. The Quartermaster General, General Groener, complained on 14 December in a communication addressed to the People’s Commissars: Everyone wants to go home; all consideration of the enemy, horses and materials and the maintenance of a peacetime army is unimportant. The influence of local workers’ and soldiers’ councils leads to whole units forcing their departure out of turn…. The Supreme Command is helpless, since no counteraction is taken by the government. If the authority of the state is not restored, the whole army must disintegrate. The soldiers’ councils must disappear.29 These remarks of Groener’s show once more that to a great extent the Supreme Command had to watch these trends towards dissolution both in the Home Army—the ‘reserve units’ —and also in the returning Western Army helplessly. The attacks of the officers upon the soldiers’ councils, which often issued independent discharge papers and thereby accelerated the rate of demobilisation, were at this point precisely an indirect admission of this helplessness. From Groener’s point of view it was entirely logical, in view of the rapid break-up of the old army, to speculate on future military levels and trends and to present the

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People’s Deputies with a demand for the creation of ‘an army of volunteers’ as early as the middle of December 1918.30 V

THE STATE OF THE DEMOBILISATION OF PERSONNEL, NEW YEAR 1918–19

In the six weeks between the conclusion of the Armistice treaty and Christmas 1918, throughout the country about 5 million German soldiers left military service, and in January 1919 yet another 2 million followed them. The chairman of the German Armistice Commission, Matthias Erzberger, stated in a speech on 15 January 1919: ‘The German Army has vanished.’31 By and large this was correct, but not entirely. For even though German demobilisation had taken place at a rapid pace, all the same at the end of January 1919 there were still about 1 million soldiers in place, which corresponded roughly to the establishment before the beginning of the world war. To facilitate the reintegration of the approximately 7 million discharged men into normal working life, the Reich government had already set up, on 12 November 1918, a ‘Reich Office for Economic Demobilisation’ —called the Demobilisation Office for short—under the direction of a special minister, namely State Secretary Dr Josef Koeth. 32 The Council of People’s Commissars assigned to him as assistants the politicians Otto Büchner (USPD) and Oswald Schumann (Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD)), who were, however, scarcely equal to the task.33 As the conversion from armaments to peacetime production got under way only gradually and the labour market was active only to a limited extent,34 the process of reintegration was in no way trouble-free, in spite of the activity of the Demobilisation Office and co-operation between the employers’ organisations and the trade unions. In view of these difficulties the War Ministry and the Reich Naval Office decreed at the beginning of January35 that—along with the professional soldiers—those men ‘who still have not found any employment opportunity in civilian life in spite of all endeavours’ might also voluntarily remain with the service. Furthermore it was decreed in the War Ministry’s instruction: In order to introduce men quickly to their civilian occupation, the reserve units must contact the employment offices. For men who do not take advantage of the work opportunities arranged for them by the employment offices the entitlement to remain in military service elapses. The barracks are not intended for work-shy people. The

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soldiers’ councils will need to direct their particular attention to this in the interests of other people. The state indisputably fulfilled its social obligations in so far as it did not simply turn out on the street persons willing to work but unable to find jobs during the period of transition from war to peace production; it helped secure their livelihood in the short term through the opportunity of remaining voluntarily in service. However, apart from the social aspect this decree also had an indirect political one. For it contributed not insignificantly to the fact that those mercenary types who could not see any meaning appropriate to them in civil employment, were now able to preserve their military métier by volunteering. The Freikorps, which came into being in large numbers from January 1919, drew to a large extent from this reservoir. Consequently, there was another result of government demobilisation policy. All those soldiers who were thoroughly fed up with the war and the military and now wanted to follow their civil vocation got their discharge. Those who were already professional soldiers or else wanted to become such, because the prospect of an existence as worker, white-collar employee, or official, was unattractive to them, were omitted from demobilisation. From this personnel situation stemmed the outlines of a future military staffing policy. Indeed one can go still further and conclude that there was a connection between the demobilisation policy, on the one hand, and the eventual failure of the attempts of the Army Minister, Gustav Noske, to create an army loyal to the republic, on the other. VI

CASE STUDY: THE DEMOBILISATION IN THE REVOLUTIONARY BALTIC CITY OF KIEL

In what follows, the process of demobilisation in the Baltic city of Kiel, where the revolution had its starting-point, will be examined in more detail. From 7 November 1918, there was no longer an admiral in office as governor of Kiel, but a civilian, namely the PD Reichstag Deputy Noske, who had peviously made a name for himself as his party’s expert on naval matters. Noske had been sent to Kiel by the Reich government on 4 November, in order to exert a calming influence. After examining the local conditions, he had concluded that he would best be able to do justice to this task if he had himself elected to the office of governor. The election did actually take place and ‘Berlin’ confirmed the deputy in his office. Thus it came about that Noske bore responsibility for the demobilisation in Kiel, which

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involved not only carrying out the release of naval personnel but also the disarming of warships, as required under the Armistice treaty, and their handing-over to the British. With reference to the special study by Dirk Dähnhardt on the revolution in Kiel it can be said ‘that in Kiel disarmament and demobilisation by and large were carried out smoothly’,36 thanks in fact to the understanding co-operation of all the Kiel authorities involved as well as thanks to Noske’s skills of management and integration. Beyond this fairly generally held observation it has not hitherto been known in detail how the demobilisation of personnel in Kiel occurred. That is regrettable, not only with regard to the analysis of the policy, or rather administrative activity, of Noske in this field, but also to an even greater extent because the demobilisation should not be seen simply as a technical winding-up process. Rather it concerns a political process, in the course of which the whole social structure of the Baltic city fundamentally changed, as well as its political power structure. The political fate of the soldiers’ council movement can hardly be grasped adequately without a detailed knowledge of the demobilisation. Due to ample documentation, the individual stages of the mass release of personnel in Kiel, during the governorship of Noske, can be fully understood. The Government Orders provide information about the way in which Noske exercised his administrative function. Significantly more informative, however, is the ‘Résumé of the course of demobilisation to date with particular regard to the effects of radical political change and the implementation of the Armistice conditions’,37 written by the later station-commander, Admiral Meurer, on the command of the Reich Naval Office38 at the end of April 1919, which— based upon the accounts of experience of all the sections and units under the control of Station B39 —gives an insight into the actual course of the demobilisation. At the beginning of the revolution about 50,000 military personnel were stationed in Kiel. 40 Taking into account that the number of gainfully employed people in Kiel at the time amounted to about 100,000, of whom 70 per cent were workers and only 30 per cent salaried employees and self-employed,41 then two things become clear: Kiel had an altogether atypical social structure and the proportion of military personnel was excessively high. Even during the war the military authorities in Kiel were conscious of the fact that when the expected demobilisation did take place they would have to cope with considerable organisational problems. To be on the safe side the ‘Transportbureau Kiel’ 42 consulted Kiel

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Headquarters,43 asking for it to be taken into account that, after the decision on demobilisation, approximately 40,000 men would have to be moved from Kiel and that at least 40 special trains would be required.44 At this point it was still assumed that the demobilisation could be carried out according to plan and without external interference after a victorious ending to the war. It appeared, therefore, first and foremost as an organisational and transportational problem. VII ‘WILDCAT RELEASES’

When, in November 1918, the revolutionary disturbances broke out in Kiel and a little later the Armistice became known, things went only rarely ‘according to plan’. Already in the days of the conflict, between 3 and 7 November 1918, a number of sailors’ delegations left Kiel for various cities of the Reich in order to report on developments in the Baltic city and to carry further afield the revolutionary spark which had been kindled there.45 How many sailors quietly left the Baltic Station simply in order to return to their families is not known in detail. Their number must, however, have been considerable. After the announcement of the Armistice a second wave of spontaneous demobilisation began. That is to say, many sailors left Kiel of their own accord, without waiting for the issue of discharge papers. Now ‘things [were] in such a state of flux’, the Station Command summed up in retrospect, that there could be no question of applying the demobilisation arrangements and, therefore, of action as planned in practically any field…. If, at the beginning of the revolution, numerous wildcat releases had already taken place, or in many cases people simply left their posts, then the impulse for release after the conclusion of the Armistice was so strong and found such expression that it had to be permitted through far-reaching accommodating arrangements. So there were ‘overhasty, unregulated releases’.46 Following a directive from the Reich Naval Office (RNO), Noske ordered, as a first measure, the release of those conscripts born in the years 1870 and 1871.47 On 13 November, without waiting for further orders from the RNO, he gave instructions for the release as planned of naval personnel with special skills, who were urgently required in administration and industry:

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Employees and workers of the gas, electricity and water works, the railways, narrow-gauge railways and tramways, the inland waterways, public transport officials, trade organisations, employees’ and employers’ associations, trade unions etc., employment agency officials, workers and employees of the mining, agricultural and forestry industries. Especially important are general fitters, smiths and gas-fitters from the electricity and gas works.48 These skilled groups were to be provided ‘immediately’ with temporary discharge certificates and sent home. In the interests of the economy Noske also suggested early on to older reserve officers that they should get leave from the Station Command before the general demobilisation.49 Only in the middle of November, when Noske had long got the personnel demobilisation under way of his own accord, did the RNO issue ‘Guidelines for the release of naval personnel’,50 which effectively anticipated the general demobilisation. The personnel requirements for commerce and industry, according to the guidelines of the (RNO, must be covered, first of all, from the Home Army and the navy since the Western Army was still on the return march. The releases should ‘to the greatest possible extent take place in accord with the needs of economic life’. The RNO made the volume of daily releases solely dependent upon practical considerations, namely, upon the capability of the railways. The Baltic Naval Station was obliged to ensure ‘that the necessary personnel for the implementation of the Armistice conditions’ were retained. For this task, apart from the regular servicemen, the younger age-groups (1896–8) so far excluded from release were available. As could be foreseen, the transportation of servicemen and accompanying civilians from Kiel turned into a difficult problem to resolve. Since the first days of the revolution there had been ‘a terrible traffic muddle’. 51 The normal railway traffic was nowhere near sufficient to carry the multitude of people leaving Kiel upon their discharge. For this reason, in the period from 15 to 29 November 1918, the railway administration in Altona put on, daily,52 two or three special trains which travelled to Hamburg and Berlin and were able to take up to 1,500 persons per train. This measure made possible the transportation of roughly 30,000 persons in the second half of November. Over and above that Noske arranged for the deployment of transport ships in the direction of Stettin and Danzig.53 In this phase of mass releases, during which nearly 2,000 people left Kiel daily, Governor Noske had to worry about the possibility that there

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would soon not even be enough trained staff for the administrative execution of demobilisation as well as for the de-commissioning and handing-over of the warships in the internment ports.54 The shortage of trained personnel, capable of attending to the formalities of the normal discharge and the paying-out of allowances, did in fact lead to severe difficulties. As Admiral Meurer later discovered, ‘the wildcat nature of the releases set their stamp upon the whole demobilisation’.55 It also led to the loss of many staff papers and administrative files, which not only seriously prolonged and made more expensive the entire operation, but also caused inconvenience for many, who later put forward salary, wage, pension and other personal claims.56 VIII EROSION OF THE POWER OF THE SOLDIERS’ COUNCILS

If the Reich Naval Office in its release guidelines from mid-November 1918 in practice initiated the general demobilisation, then it unquestionably pursued therein a quite definite political aim as well. Though it states in the guidelines, still somewhat vaguely, that the mass releases are in the interests of the navy itself, ‘in order to avoid pile-ups of personnel in the naval garrisons’,57 the ‘Command of Fortifications of the Reich Naval Base Kiel’ revealed quite plainly in its report on the demobilisation what it really was about. After the outbreak of the Sailors’ Revolution, the report states that it would have been clear to any sensible person that it was now a question of ‘letting off as much steam as possible from the overheated, seething boiler, i.e. carrying out releases on a massive scale’.58 This example shows that, from the point of view of the naval command, the precipitate mass releases not only had a negative side, which involved the extensive breakdown of military discipline, but were, at the same time, highly welcome politically, since they provided hope that soon the mass of rebelling sailors would have disappeared from the birthplace of the revolution, Kiel, and with that an orderly state of affairs would return gradually. The fact that from as early as November 1918 the sailors were leaving the Baltic city of Kiel by the thousand, virtually in full flight, testifies to the limited nature of their political goals. At the end of October they had prevented the bold sally by the fleet and, in the conflict resulting from this insubordination, they had been victorious. With the Armistice the sailors’ main objective, namely the speedy ending of hostilities, was achieved. If, alongside the longing for peace, a change in political conditions was also striven for, this

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objective seemed to have been fulfilled with the assumption of government by the Council of People’s Commissars in Berlin and by Noske’s appointment to the office of governor in Kiel. A readiness on the part of the Kiel sailors to become involved in a continuation of the revolution after the largely bloodless, though nevertheless successful, November coup, had the support of only a slender majority. Consequently, there was no reason for them to remain any longer in the Baltic city. As prescribed in the demobilisation plan, Noske ordered, in November 1918, measures designed to provide an overall view of the state of releases. All sections dealing with releases in his command area were to give appropriate reports to the Station-Command, for the first time on 1 December 1918, and from then on every fourteen days.59 This planned system of reporting came to naught, because most of the sections did not supply the required reports. The Station Command, therefore, was not in a position to gain a continuous, fairly exact, overall view of the progress of demobilisation.60 Since the particulars on the state of the releases were ‘totally insufficient’, the fortnightly compilations could not be put together. Yet the individual reports, too, contain statements of a generalised nature. Thus, for instance, the Inspectorate of the Torpedo Service, in its demobilisation report,61 came to the following conclusion: The current approximate result of the releases is as follows: of the effective strength from before the Revolution of the individual companies, 1/3 of the people to be released have been released with military papers. In the case of 1/3 the negotiations are still undecided, and with 1/3 all particulars are lacking. So far as other naval units in the Baltic Station sector were concerned the quota of normal releases was significantly higher. All the same, from the sketchy reports it can be calculated that, on the date in question, 1 December 1918, more than 15,000 naval personnel of the Kiel garrison had been provided with discharge papers.62 If Noske, on 4 December in the Government Order of the Day, announced that the release of inactive personnel at this point in the Baltic area had been largely implemented,63 then he certainly had in mind not only the roughly 15,000 released normally but also the large number of those who had left of their own accord. With the aid of the military special trains put on since mid-November, as well as the ships intended for transportation, it can be estimated that up to Christmas 1918 about 40,000 naval personnel must have left Kiel. By 1 January the number of

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normal releases had risen to an estimated 24,000 men,64 so that it can be said—with reservations—that more than a third of the naval personnel of the Kiel garrison demobilised spontaneously and informally. Of the roughly 50,000 military personnel who were stationed in Kiel at the beginning of the revolution, more than four-fifths had left at the end of 1918. Those servicemen who still remained in the command area of the Baltic Naval Station were almost exclusively professional people; that is, petty officers, warrant officers and officers.65 The sailors who had begun the revolution and in a few days led it to success, were largely at home with their families by Christmas. What the departure of some 40,000 sailors from the city which had given the signal for the German revolution meant for the legitimacy of the instruments of power, newly created by the revolution, and in particular for the Supreme Soldiers’ Council of Kiel, is obvious. With the progress of the mass releases the soldiers’ council was increasingly divested of its power-base. As a result the composition of the Supreme Soldiers’ Council had already changed at the beginning of December 1918. Now, to an increasing extent, warrant officers were voted on to the council. One of them, Fritz Riefstahl, a signaller, set the tone in the Supreme Soldiers’ Council from then on. IX

THE RETURN OF THE PROFESSIONAL SERVICEMEN

With its dwindling legitimacy, the influence of the soldiers’ council in the political struggle for power in Kiel necessarily changed. As the setting-up of the ‘Iron Naval Brigade Kiel’ was to indicate, military professional organisations, such as the Warrant Officers Federation and the Petty Officers Association, even in the middle of December 1918, were more influential institutions than the Supreme Soldiers’ Council, which was simply overlooked when this volunteer unit was founded. When Noske dissolved the naval councils at the end of February 1919, on the grounds that after the successful execution of the demobilisation and the settingup of release bureaux there was no longer any justification for their continued existence,66 the Kiel Supreme Soldiers’ Council, for want of mass support, could only express verbal protests. The demobilisation in the sphere of the the Baltic Naval Station proceeded, all in all, rather more quickly than in the army in the field. This was due both to the special circumstances in Kiel—the personnel due for release did not have to be returned to Kiel from outside, but were for the most part already on the spot—and to the political decision taken by the Reich Naval Office and the Kiel governor, Noske, to let off as quickly as possible as much steam as

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possible from the ‘seething boiler’ Kiel. This course of events, involving the accelerated mass releases from military service, offers a further explanation of the fact that the revolution in Kiel quickly died down. The speedy demobilisation caused both the decline of the Kiel sailors’ movement and the progressive loss of influence by the Kiel Supreme Soldiers’ Council. ‘The real cause of the soldiers’ councils’ demise was that there were no more soldiers.’67 Now it was only a question of time before the naval officers would win back their old positions of power. NOTES 1 2

3

4

5 6

Expression of U.Kluge, Soldatenräte und Revolution. Studien zur Militärpolitik in Deutschland 1918/19 (Göttingen, 1975), p. 206 and passim. In the compilation of relevant literature arranged under 37 subjecttopics by G.P.Meyer, Bibliographie zur deutschen Revolution 1918/ 19 (Göttingen, 1977), the demobilisation question is notable by its absence. Even the comprehensive standard work on the Soldiers’ Councils Movement by Kluge does not accord the phenomenon of mass releases from war service the appropriate attention. The most important contributions were published in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 ( 1983 ): ‘Die Organisierung des Friedens: Demobilmachung 1918–1920’, with essays by G.D.Feldmann on ‘Die Demobilmachung und die Sozialordnung der Zwischenkriegszeit in Europa’, by A.Prost on demobilisation in France, by D.Englander on the same in Great Britain and by R.Bessel on female labour and demobilisation in Germany, as well as by M.Geyer on war victim welfare in France, Germany and Great Britain. G.D.Feldmann, ‘Wirtschafts- und sozialpolitische Probleme der deutschen Demobilmachung 1918/19’, in H.Mommsen et al. (eds), Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1974), pp. 618–36(here citing p. 618). A revised version of this essay, under the title ‘Economic and social problems of the German demobilization, 1918–19’, appears in Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), pp. 1–23 . Contributions to this discussion by J.Kocka, P. B.Johnson, W.J.Mommsen, S.H.Armitage, E.W.Hawley, H.A. Winkler and H.Homburg, D.H.Aldcroft, C.S.Maier and G.D. Feldmann appear in ibid., pp. 24– 47. Like Feldmann’s accounts, they revolve around the socioeconomic dimension of demobilisation (just as do the contributions mentioned in note 3), not around the military one. Cabinet sitting on 16 November 1918, in Die Regierung der Volksbeauftragten 1918/19, rev. S.Miller assisted by H.Potthoff, vol. I (Düsseldorf, 1969), p. 63 f. The Democratic Reich Finance Minister Schiffer announced these figures on 15 February 1919, in the National Assembly. Verhandlungen NV, vol. 326, p. 93 f.

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7 See the works mentioned in notes 3, 4 and 32. 8 ‘Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars to the Army in the Field’, 12 November 1918, in G.A.Ritter and S.Miller (eds), Die deutsche Revolution 1918–1919. Dokumente (Hamburg, 1975), p. 101 f. 9 Demobilmachungsplan für die Kaiserliche Marine (Dem. Pl.) (Berlin, 1916). This involves a draft no. 3, classified ‘secret’, 35 pages long, and was issued as a printed item in 1916 by the Reich Naval Office. In BA-MA (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv), Freiburg i. Br., RM (Reichsmarine) 31/v. 1797. 10 Demobilmachungsplan für das Deutsche Heer (Dem. Pl.) (Berlin, 1918). This was signed by Kaiser Wilhelm II on 4 March 1918. The printed plan available comprises 299 pages. 11 Demobilmachungs-Handbuch. With approval of the War Ministry, rev. K.Gössgen, government auditor, privy secretary in the War Ministry (Berlin 1919), p. 1. 12 Verfügung des Kriegsministeriums D.Nr. 5252/18 AM, in ArmeeVerordnungsblatt (1918), p. 694 f. 13 ibid., p. 695. 14 Cf. Verfügung des R.M.A. [Reichsmarine-amt] vom 25 November 1918, in BA-MA RM23/1, B1.31. 15 Armee-Verordnungsblatt (1918), p. 694 f. 16 Cf. Demobilmachungs-Handbuch, no. 42, para. 5, p. 51, as well as pp. 64–7. 17 Demobilmachungs- u. Landsturmauflösungsbefehl. Signed by Ebert and Scheidemann for the Reich government as well as by Scheüch and, Göhre for the Prussian War Ministry. Reprinted in Reichsgesetzblatt 1919, half-year 1, p. 1; Armee-Verordnungsblatt, 1919, p. 9; Demobilmachungs-Handbuch, p. 4 f. 18 Demobilmachungs-Handbuch, pp. 31 and 62. 19 Pamphlet text in Dokumente u. Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, II/3 ([East] Berlin, 1958), doc. no. 2 pp. 5–6 ff.; at the same time there was a call for the formation of a red army. In this context cf. also the report of the investigating committee into the January disturbances in Berlin, in Sammlung der Drucksachen der verfassungsgebenden Preussischen Landesversammlung. Tagung 1919/21, vol. 15 (Berlin, 1921), p. 7682 (hereafter cited as Januar-Unruhen). 20 E.Heilmann, Die Noskegarde (Berlin, n. d. [1919]), p. 14. 21 Thus Haase in the sitting of the Cabinet and Central Council on 28 December 1918, in Die Regierung der Volksbeauftragten, vol. II, no. 78, p. 108; also in Der Zentralrat der Deutschen sozialistischen Republik, 19.12.1918–8.4.1919. Vom ersten zum zweiten Rätekongress, rev. E. Kolb assisted by R.Rürup (Leiden, 1968), p. 74. 22 According to Haase. See Zentralrat, p. 74. 23 Ebert in ibid., p. 80. 24 ibid., pp. 80 and 87. Cf. also Die Regierung der Volksbeauftragten, vol. II, no. 78, p. 128. 25 Cf. The remarks of Minister Ströbel in the sitting of the Central Council with the Prussian Cabinet on 2 January 1919, in Zentralrat, no. 25, p. 173.

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26 Since autumn 1917, spreading symptoms of disintegration in the army on the Western Front had found evident expression in the ‘shirking’ behind the front; cf. Militär u. Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg 1914–1918, rev. W.Deist (Düsseldorf, 1970), no. 458, p. 1226 f. and the admonishments cited there. These ‘shirkers’ amounted to some 750,000 to 1 million men. 27 Darstellungen aus den Nachkriegskämpfen deutscher Truppen u. Freikorps, series 2, vol. 6: ‘Die Wirren in der Reichshauptstadt und im nördlichen Deutschland 1918–1920’ (Berlin, 1940), p. 11 (hereafter cited as ‘Wirren’). 28 Cf. the account of Major v. Hammerstein of the Prussian War Ministry before the Investigating Committee of the Prussian Assembly, in Januar-Unruhen, p. 7706 as well as Groener’s statement in ‘Der Dolchstossprozess in München. Oktober-November 1925’ (Munich, n.d. [1925]), p. 224. Quoted in E.Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 5 (Stuttgart, 1978), p. 813. 29 Letter of Groener’s reprinted in ‘Wirren’, p. 10 f. 30 ibid.; on these plans of the Supreme Command cf. Kluge, op. cit., p. 283 f. 31 Erzberger speech during the sitting of the Armistice Commission on 15 January 1919, in Trier, in Der Waffenstillstand 1918–1919, vol. I (Berlin, 1928), p. 150. 32 Cf. the ‘Erlass über die Errichtung des Reichsamtes für die wirtschaftliche Demobilmachung’, in RGBI. 1918, p. 1304 f. During the war Lieutenant-Colonel Koeth (1870–1936) was head of the Raw Materials Section in the Reich Economic Office. On 10 February 1919, Koeth was appointed Reich Minister for Economic Demobilisation. Later he held office for a short time (6 October to 23 November 1923) as Reich Economic Minister in Stresemann’s second Cabinet. On social and economic demobilisation collectively cf. the works mentioned in notes 3 and 4. 33 H.Homburg, ‘Gewerkschaften, Unternehmer u. Staat in der Demobilmachungsphase (November 1918 bis Mai 1919). Überlegungen am Beispiel des Düsseldorfer Regierungsbezirks’, typescript (Freiburg, 1973), p. 62. 34 In this connection cf. Koeth’s remarks in the sitting of the Reich Conference in Berlin on 25 November 1918, in Regierung der Volksbeauftragten, vol. I, pp. 205–7. Printed item in BA-MA, RM29/ 9, B1.205–85 (here citing B1.276); cf. also the later account by Koeth, ‘Die wirtschaftliche Demobilmachung. Ihre Aufgaben u. ihre Organe’, in Handbuch der Politik, vol. IV (3rd edn, Berlin, 1921). 35 ‘Erlass des Kriegsministeriums vom 4. Januar 1919’, in Demobilmachungs-Handbuch, p. 31. ‘Ausführungsbestimmungen des R.M.A. zum Demobilmachungsbefehl’, in Marine-Verordnungs-Blatt (1919), no. 2, p. 3. 36 D.Dähnhardt, Revolution in Kiel. Der Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik 1918/19 (Neumünster, 1978), p. 120. 37 ‘Befehl des Staatssekretärs des Reichs-Marine-Amts No. AIV 430 vom 4. Februar 1919 an die Stations-kommandos in Kiel und in Wilhelmshaven’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.1822.

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38 Meurer’s ‘Darstellung der Demobilmachung’ is a typed report, 24 pages long, in BA-MA, RM31/v.1822. 39 These empirical reports are likewise contained in the records: BAMA, RM31/v.1822. 40 Dähnhardt, op. cit., p. 27, with reference to the statistical sources upon which this figure was based. G.Noske, Von Kiel bis Kapp. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Berlin, 1920), p. 26, spoke of ‘more than about 80,000 men’ being under his command. To them, of course, belonged also units which were not stationed in the Kiel Garrison in November 1918. 41 Dähnhardt, op. cit., p. 28. 42 Apparently a civil transport body. 43 Communication from Transportbureau Kiel to the Kiel Headquarters, 3 July 1918, in BA-MA, RM31/v.1823. 44 At the same time the Transportbureau pointed out that the number of those due for release would even rise to 60,000, if the troops of the Marine Corps in Flandern and Kiel were demobilised. 45 This is described by L.Popp, Ursprung u. Entwicklung der November-Revolution 1918. Wie die deutsche Republik entstand (Kiel, n.d. [1919]), p. 26. 46 Meurer, op. cit., pp. 1 and 3. 47 ‘Gouvernements-Tagesbefehl Nr. 3 vom 10.11.1918, Ziff. 12’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.2394, B1.4. 48 ‘Governements-u. Stations-Tagesbefehl Nr. 6 vom 13.11.1918, Ziff. 6’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.2394, B1.9 f. 49 Gouvernements-u. Stations-Tagesbefehl Nr. 7 vom 14.11.1918, Ziff. 19’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.2394, B1.16 f. 50 Repetition in ‘Gouvernements-u. Stations-Tagesbefehl Nr. 9 vom 16.11.1918, Ziff. 16’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.2394, B1.26. 51 ‘Bericht der Bahnhofskommandantur Kiel an die Station O vom 9. April 1919’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.1822. 52 ibid., there is mention of two special military trains daily. Noske announced in ‘Gouvernements-u. Stations-Tagesbefehl Nr. 8 vom 15.11.1918, Ziff. 10’ the daily deployment of three special trains, in BA-MA RM31/v.2394, B1.22. On the suspension of the special train traffic on 29 November 1918, see ibid., p. 62. 53 ‘Bericht der Bahnhofskommandantur Kiel’, op. cit. Meurer, op. cit., p. 9, ch. ‘Abtransport der Entlassenen’. 54 Cf. ‘Gouvernements-u. Stations-Tagesbefehl Nr. 7 vom 14.11.1918, Ziff. 20, 25, 26’, also ‘Nr. 9 vom 16.11.1918, Ziff. 12’ in BA-MA, RM31/ v.2394, B1.16–19 and 25. 55 Meurer, op. cit., p. 4. 56 ibid., p. 10, section ‘Verluste an Verwaltungsunterlagen’. 57 Repetition of the guidelines in ‘Gouvernements-u. StationsTagesbefehl Nr. 9 vom 16.11.1918, Ziff. 16’, in BA-MA, RM31/ v.2394, B1.26. 58 Report of 15 March 1919, in BA-MA, RM31/v.1822. 59 Daily reports on the demobilisation had been ordered in ‘Gouvernements-u. Stations-Tagesbefehl Nr. 13 vom 20. Nov. 1918, Ziff. 18’. ‘Befehl Nr. 16 vom 22. Nov. 1918 (II. Ausgabe), Ziff. IX’

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63 64 65

66 67

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contained the order for fortnightly reviews. BA-MA, RM31/v.2394, B1.46 and 51. Meurer, op. cit., section ‘Berichterstattung’. ‘Bericht der Inspektion des Torpedowesens über die Demobilmachung vom 29. März 1919’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.1822. The Naval Transport Office reported on 3 December 1918 that, during the period 16–30 November 1918, 13,618 released men had been moved. However, substantially more people had travelled who had not been booked for transport by the naval units. ‘Meldung des Transportbüros’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.1807. ‘Gouvernements-u. Stations-Tagesbefehl Nr. 28 vom 4. Dez. 1918, Anlage, Ziff. 2’, in BA-MA, RM31/v.2349, B1.81. Estimated on the basis of the incomplete numerical data in the Demobilisation-Special-Records of the Imperial Command of the Baltic Naval Station. BA-MA, RM31/v.1807. Meurer, op. cit., reports, p. 5: ‘Apart from professional soldiers, those retained for winding up operations and members of volunteer units, the only men still in service after 31 March [1919] are, therefore, those enlisted in 1918.’ ‘Verfügung Reichswehrminister Noske vom 23. Febr. 1919’, in BAMA, RM23/6, B1.15. H.Kraschutzki, ‘Im Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat Bremerhaven November 1918-Januar 1919’, typescript (in author’s possession) from 5 January 1982, p. 17.

10 The Hungarian peasantry and the revolutions of 1918–19 Ignác Romsics

As a consequence of the relatively small industrial sector in Hungary, nearly two-thirds of the population of the country lived off the land before the First World War. Statistical records around the turn of the century reveal that agriculture provided a living for 65.7 per cent of the overall population in 1900, and for 61.9 per cent in 1910. If the noble owners of large and medium-sized estates and the agrarian intelligentsia are excluded, and the intermediate groups fluctuating between agriculture and the other branches of economic life are included, one can assume that the proportion of peasantry to the total population amounted to between 62 and 66 per cent in those years. The various strata or classes within the peasantry were primarily determined, among many other factors, by the amount of land they possessed. The absolute size of the peasant population and its size in relation to the overall population of the country is set out in Table 1. Owing to the multinational character of Hungary, a significant part of the peasantry belonged to the Romanian, Slovak, southern Slav and German nationalities. The relatively advanced state of bourgeois development in Hungarian society was reflected in the fact that while the Hungarians made up 54 per cent of the total population, their share in the peasantry was but 47 per cent, the national minorities accounting for the remaining 53 per cent The proportion of the Hungarians within the landed peasantry was 40 per cent, while that of the other nationalities was 60. Their proportion within the agrarian proletariat was 59 per cent against other nationalities’ 41 per cent.1 In the two decades between the turn of the century and the revolutions of 1918 and 1919 two tendencies can be detected in the development of the living conditions of the peasantry. The wealthy peasants and the upper layer of owners of medium-sized holdings

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managed to make use of the relatively favourable conditions of production and marketing after the turn of the century and acquired a significant surplus income. Their enhanced material well-being naturally influenced their conditions of life and their way of thinking as well. Although the villages were invariably led by the usual triumvirate of the village notary, the clergyman and the schoolmaster, the big farmers, who were increasingly accumulating wealth and political self-consciousness, began to be more and more influential as village mayors, members of the village council, church leaders, or principals of the farmers’ unions. We cannot, however, call this a full integration into modern civic society. The changes that took place in the early twentieth century were only the beginning of the process. Table 1 The peasantry in Hungary, 1910

1 yoke=0.575 hectares. Source: Péter Hanák, ‘Magyarország társadalma a századforduló idején’, in Magyarország története 1890–1918 (Budapest, 1978), vol. 1.

At the same time, the lower strata of the peasantry, primarily the daylabourers and those with dwarf-sized holdings of one or two yokes2 of land, lived in a state of constant privation. The stagnating bad conditions of the agrarian proletariat were due to several factors. One of the most important was the rapid increase of the rural population. To this demographic factor were added the extreme inequalities of distribution of landed property, the unhealthy preponderance of the large and medium estates, the restricted circulation of estates and the high price of the land. As a consequence, the majority of the poor peasants could not make an acceptable living either as wage labourers or as independent farmers. The otherwise dynamically growing industry was incapable of absorbing the masses of agricultural labourers threatened by permanent unemployment.

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The nature of peasant movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries varied greatly in accordance with the changing material and social tendencies of the age. The agrarian socialist movements that developed from the 1890s, and which stood for a full equality of wealth, following the spirit of the early communistic utopias, were primarily welcome among the landless and the poor peasants with the smallest possible plots, especially among the quickly increasing population of the densely populated counties beyond the River Tisza (or Theiss) where there were too many large estates suffocating the tiny holdings. There were two trends within the agrarian socialist movement, namely the egalitarian and the communistic. The former wished to seize the large estates and divide them equally among the poor, while the latter stood for collectivisation. The harvest strikes, demonstrations and other movements of the poor peasants at the end of the nineteenth century were the first signs of their getting more and more collectively selfconscious. These actions were the first stages of the movement and could easily be suppressed by the police and the gendarmerie. Their defeat boosted emigration, primarily to the United States after the turn of the century. This reached a peak in the years between 1905 and 1907. These three years saw more than half a million leave Hungary. (Demographers put the number of those emigrating to the USA between 1867 and 1918 at 2 million and of those remaining there for good at 1.5 million.) Three-quarters of the emigrants came from the ranks of the peasantry, and about half of them came from among the agricultural labourers and the estate servants. Thirty-three per cent of the emigrants were Hungarians, and the others were recruited from among the Slovak, German, Romanian and southern Slav nationalities. Thus emigration affected the non-Hungarian peoples of the country disproportionately. 3 In spite of emigration and police repression, socialist thought struck root firmly among the poor peasants. There were nearly 700 branches of the Agrarian Socialist Union of the Social Democratic Party (a Szociáldemokrata Párt Földmunkásszovetsége) in the years between 1905 and 1908, with more than 70,000 members.4 The agrarian socialist movement frightened not only the owners of large and medium estates, but also the wealthy peasants, who were equally interested in cutting down the wages of the day-labourers and the servants or farmhands. This and other common interests of the big farmers producing for the market (e.g. taxation, customs policy, the problems of marketing, etc.) provided grounds for some militant owners of medium and big estates to organise country interests along

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agrarian neo-conservative lines. The German Bund der Landwirte served as an example for the Hungarian Farmers’ Union (Magyar Gazdaszövetség), founded in 1896, which soon came to control hundreds of local farmers’ associations and agricultural credit societies. It had about 100,000 members during the First World War, and the number of the local credit societies or co-operatives amounted to at least 1,500.5 The formation of several other peasant parties, alongside the Agrarian Socialists and the neo-conservative agrarian movement, indicated the rising political consciousness and growing activity of the peasantry. It was the Transdanubian party of the landowning peasantry with medium-sized holdings, under the name National Independence and Forty-Eighter Farmers Party (Országos Függetlenségi és 48-as Gazdapárt) that came to be the most outstanding among them. The party was created in 1909 and was led by István Nagyatádi Szabó. In everyday usage it came to be called the Smallholders Party (Kisgazdapárt), which also indicated that it meant to organise the middle strata of the peasantry ranging from those with dwarf-sized holdings of a few yokes to the well-to-do owners of medium-sized plots. The backbone of the party’s programme was the expropriation of a certain part of the large estates with compensation paid by the state. This land should then be redistributed, the party argued, to smallholders who would gladly have cultivated more land had they had some additional yokes, either in the form of ownership, or as tenure, or through tenant co-operatives. Further demands included the introduction of universal suffrage and the secret ballot, a regular health insurance for the agricultural labourers and the creation of regular opportunities for work for the unemployed day-labourers by compulsory investments in the large estates by their owners. By the end of the war the Smallholders Party had grown to be significant even on a national scale. The national party meeting on 13 October 1918 entertained the representatives of as many as seventeen counties out of the sixty-three.6 The First World War accelerated material, cultural and political changes in a rural society which was still somewhat secluded from the world and which was concerned in a rather apolitical manner almost exclusively with the minor joys and sorrows of everyday life. Nearly all those men who had neither emigrated to America nor become pick-andshovel men working sometimes far away from their villages, now ‘went abroad’ as soldiers. Those who came home on leave spoke of the people of the Russian plains or the Dinaric Alps as easily as they had used to speak about the weekly market of the neighbouring peasant town or

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about the country fair. The mobilised peasant masses also became acquainted with the modern techniques of warfare, modern artillery, the principles of ballistics, the compass, binoculars, or Morse sounderkeys, and with driving cars. In cases where the former peasant happened to become, let us say, even a warrant officer commanding a squad of soldiers for months, he acquired a new kind of self-respect or self-consciousness, too. Coming home, he consequently thought himself able to fulfil public duties or offices he had never practised before. One of the lasting effects of the war on the mentality of the peasantry was therefore the widening of their world-view and the strengthening of their self-respect. The other was, however, their becoming acquainted with the modern techniques of killing and the consequent devaluation of human life. Before the war, the peasants would probably have been incapable of committing violence, plundering and lynching on the scale that occurred in the months after the war. The social and political differences among the recruited peasants were temporarily blurred by their common fate in the trenches. The various strata of the peasantry marched to the front in 1914 and 1915 with a fairly similar enthusiasm and came back, such as survived, sharing a common disillusionment and despair. The change in their attitude was reflected from 1917 onwards in disobedience to orders, desertion and unrest. The social differences of those remaining at home (i.e. the women, the children and the elderly people) were, however, further sharpened by the war years. The primary beneficiaries of the war were the wealthy peasants, who generally were not even recruited into the army owing to their role in the national economy. Taking advantage of the soon emerging shortage of foodstuffs, while evading the fixed ceiling on prices and the decree on requisitioning, this layer of the peasantry accumulated a significant surplus income in these years. The medium-sized farmers also profited by the war, though to a lesser degree. They hid fat, flour and grain in underground pits or in holes beneath their dung-heaps and even raised poultry and pigs in such hidingplaces and sold them on the black market for fantastic prices from as early as 1917 and 1918. For these, townspeople traded their precious belongings. This was the time when pianos, Persian rugs and silver cutlery appeared in the cottages of the well-to-do peasants.7 In contrast, the families of small peasants, those with dwarfsized holdings and agricultural labourers definitely suffered from the effects of the war. The loss of the men’s wages and of their payment in kind was only partially offset by war relief. Their originally low living

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standard was declining radically, thereby contributing to changes in their views about the war, the world and politics in general. Judging from letters written by peasants in those years, one can conclude that one of the deep-rooted basic aspects of peasant thinking, the antagonism between the rich and the poor, was coming gradually to the forefront in the world of the poor peasants as the war years went by. Many of them thought that social differences, poverty and suffering were part of an ancient and unchangeable, almost divine rule; but again many of them began to seek more earthly explanations for their misery. Their attitude soon resembled the bitterness of the old peasant revolts and the agrarian socialist movements of the turn of the century. Especially difficult was the life of the war-widows left on their own with three, four or even more children. From 1917 onwards, the majority of the poor peasant families could no longer buy clothes and fuel. The most poverty-stricken could only get their everyday food with the greatest difficulties.8 Rural discontent manifested itself in 1917 and even more markedly in the spring and summer of 1918 in spontaneous food riots. Starving women repeatedly prevented the transport of collected grain, broke into shops and threatened the ‘rich’ and the local representatives of state power, i.e. the notary, the gendarme, etc. These spontaneous rural riots of 1917 and 1918 had two common characteristics. First, they broke out mainly in market towns and in bigger villages where a greater number of relatively more enlightened families of poor peasants lived together and where it was more difficult to obtain food than on the estates and in the smaller villages. Second, riots usually occurred in the weeks when the crops of the previous year had already been consumed and the new crops were not yet distributed, i.e. in July and August. The chronology of the rural food riots corresponded therefore to their content, namely to the fact that they hardly ever had any direct political element in them and generally served to fulfil instinctive and temporary social demands. In the weeks after the harvest and the distribution of the new crop in 1918 the countryside still appeared calm. The social and psychological roots of a revolution existed among the peasantry, but the sign for the outbreak of general discontent was given by the events in the capital.9 The revolution triumphed in Budapest on 31 October 1918. From that time on quite up to mid-November a real peasant revolt swept across the country. The first riots were again started by the starving local population, just as in the summers of 1917 and 1918, but they

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were soon joined in early November by the masses of armed soldiers coming home from the fronts. The reports and telegrams concerning these riots unanimously prove that the movements in early November closely resembled the food riots of 1917 and 1918 both in their character and in their content. The peasants rarely put forth any political demands, their only aim being to stop starvation and misery. The mills, the stores, the granaries and the shops were in the greatest danger and most of them were looted. The former soldiers also made use of their firearms and their newly acquired special skills in hunting for game in the forest-ranges of the large estates. Hundreds of animals were shot, some even with machineguns. Firewood was also gathered in the forests belonging to the large estates in the vicinity of the villages. There were also many victims of the November riots. The incensed people, who often emptied wine-cellars and pubs, generally turned against the ‘rich’, i.e. the landlords, the rural merchants and the men who carried out the measures causing their misery, the village notaries and the war commissioners of crops. Although the majority managed to escape, quite a number fell victim to the elemental rage of the people.10 The ‘main army’ of the peasant revolt was made up of the poorest and mostly landless agricultural proletarians. They were also joined, however, by many owners of small and even medium plots as well. Although the latters’ families did not live in privation, or at least not to the degree the others did, the ancient wish to acquire land captured them too. The wealthy big farmers with 50 to 200 yokes naturally took sides with the big landlords from the very beginning. If any of them joined the discontented masses, this must have been due to personal grievances, a mix-up of roles, or some thirst for revenge stemming from the past.11 The early November mass riots had no significant nationality features. Hungarian peasants attacked their mainly Hungarian landlords and village notaries just as fiercely as their fellows belonging to other nationalities did, and non-Hungarian landlords and their estates were to face a fate similar to that of the Hungarian ones in the neighbourhood. In regions with a mixed population the peasants belonging to different nationalities often combined forces. The peasantry of the national minorities expressed in November 1918 no national goals and was the object of, rather than the active party in, the separatist aspirations and movements in late 1918 and early 1919 when the old framework of the country was de facto breaking up.12

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Measures against the mass movements of early November were taken by the local organs of the revolution, i.e. the national councils and the newly organised armed forces, the so-called national guard and the people’s guard. To pour oil on troubled waters, the foodstuffs in the stores were then distributed and some unpopular local leaders were removed. Where these measures proved insufficient, the members of the national guard resorted to violence. In this way, riots came to an end in the market towns and in the bigger villages by about 5 November, and in the far-away smaller villages which were not as accessible, a few days later. Unrest after the middle of November was still not infrequent, but remained totally isolated and was neither general nor lasting. The relative unity of the landless and the landowning peasants as soldiers soon came to an end as order was restored in the country. The commanders of the units of the national guard were generally reserve officers with at least secondary education (e.g. teachers, engineers, bailiffs, etc.) and the rank and file was made up mainly of young farmers or smallholders’ sons. The short ecstasy of coming home and pillaging having come to an end, they began to realise that following the take-over of the granaries of the large estates attention might be turned to the households of the medium and large landowning peasants. (This in fact happened in some places.) This realisation and experience soon washed away the former feeling of solidarity and restored the prewar hierarchy of society. The reform programme of the revolution contributed to the strengthening of the differentiation of interests and orientations among the various layers of the peasantry from late 1918 and early 1919. The leaders of the revolution chose the west European type of liberal democracy as their political ideal. They wished primarily to reform the political superstructure of the state in a democratic manner, i.e. to divide church and state, to extend political rights, to introduce universal suffrage and the secret ballot, etc., as well as to achieve a better distribution of landed property. The Land Reform Act of 15 February 1919 expropriated lay estates exceeding 500 yokes and ecclesiastical estates above 200 yokes. The revolution wanted to create nationalised land plots of 5 to 20 yokes that would be easily able to support a family. The Act, however, did not exclude the possibility of co-operatives and ‘workers’ plots’ of 1 or 2 yokes, either.13 The various strata of the peasantry reacted differently to the reform projects of the government, especially to the intended land reform. The landowning peasants wanted to have more land but at the same

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time abhorred land reform as the violation of the sanctity of private property. The latter consideration was naturally more characteristic of the medium and big farmers, who—as László Németh put it—did not want to see ‘the land they had worked for by the sweat of their brow given to the farmhands’. This layer of farmers was not at all sympathetic to the other efforts of the revolution. They called them ‘sacrilege’ and hoped that this ‘era without laws and gendarmes’ would not last long.14 The neo-conservative agrarian leadership of the Farmers Party Union opposed to the revolution could gain further support in the country at the turn of 1918 and 1919. The newly founded political party of the organisation, the National Farmers Party (Országos Földmívespárt), founded in December 1918, had as many rural organisations in early 1919 (namely 382) as the prorevolutionary Smallholders Party.15 The lower layers of the peasantry, i.e. those with dwarf-sized holdings, the small peasants and the poorer medium-sized owners, could be considered firm supporters of the revolution. Their political party, the Smallholders Party of István Nagyatádi Szabó, became more and more radical after the victory of the revolution and, putting all its former caution aside, began to demand the socialisation of all estates above 200 yokes, or even above 100 yokes if necessary. The party’s new programme of November 1919 set out as its policy for the distribution of the land: 1 2

rounding out all dwarf-holdings and small peasants’ plots to 15 yokes; distribution of plots below 10 yokes to the landless.

The spirit of this project was similar to that of the government’s bill passed somewhat later. The Smallholders Party also supported the other reform measures of the government. Its November programme contained the same political reforms (such as the abolition of the system which favoured the highest taxpayers and the abolition of the Upper House) as were proposed by the government. It was a sign of rapprochement between the ‘urban revolution’ and the lower and middle strata of the landed peasantry that Nagyatádi became a member of the National Council in January 1918; that he was the first from among the ranks of the peasantry to become a member of the revolutionary government in January 1919; and that the Smallholders Party, which at first had united with the National Farmers Party in January that year, after a few weeks broke with it and approached Károlyi’s democratic party instead. The fusion of

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Károlyi’s party and the Smallholders was announced on 24 February. The lower and middle strata of the landed peasantry looked upon Nagyatádi and the government with confidence and waited for the execution of the land reforms with impatience, but in an orderly way.16 The political stance of the poor landless peasants was different both from that of the cautiously anti-revolutionary wealthy peasants and from that of the small and medium landowning peasantry who formed the social basis of the revolution. The social unrest of early November subsided among them only temporarily and started anew in early 1919. One of its main causes was the further worsening of living conditions. The foodstuffs distributed in early November were consumed by late January and early February, and the various kinds of relief granted by the government and the local leaders proved but a temporary and inadequate help. The government did not wish to resort to requisitioning the surplus of the medium and big farmers, which was quite understandable on its part. Those remaining without supplies in early 1919 amounted to one-third of the rural population and half of the citizens of the country towns. The overwhelming majority of them were agrarian proletarians. The difficulties were further enhanced by large-scale unemployment. Owing to their uncertainty concerning the future ownership of their lands, the medium and big landowners and even the wealthy peasants in some places felt disinclined to start cultivation in spring. At the same time, the landless themselves were reluctant in hiring out their labour for fear they would not get a plot if they had a contract for that year. Others who were willing to work found the old day-wages insufficient. In early 1919 much higher wages were therefore given to the farmhands and the day-labourers throughout the country.17 The third cause of discontent among the poor peasants was the belated formulation of the Land Reform Act, its content (they found the 500- and 200-yoke ceiling too high and the compulsory compensation unjust), its slow execution, and the fear that they would be at a disadvantage in the distribution of the land compared to the landed peasants with capital, draught animals and experience in production. This was the cause of the arbitrary occupation of estates in some counties and of certain settlements from early 1919. This movement was not only supported but often even inspired by the Communist Party (founded in November 1918), which wished to develop the revolution further, and also by the left wing of the governing Social Democratic Party.

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The attitude of the peasantry to the Hungarian Council Republic (21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919) was primarily determined by its solution to the land question. The decree of 3 April 1919 issued by the Revolutionary Governing Council (Forradalmi Kormányzótanács) socialised all medium and large estates. (The lower ceiling was, however, not defined by the decree, but common usage and a later decree put it generally at 75 yokes.) Contrary to the aims of the bourgeois democratic revolution, these estates were not parcelled out by the council republic. Instead state farms and co-operatives were set up on them.18 What were the reactions of the various peasant strata to this measure? The wealthy peasants whose farms fell under socialisation were naturally against the revolution from the very beginning. The lower strata of the landed peasants appear not to have been enthusiastic about the decree, but they were alarmed by the uncertainty of the lower ceiling. Their opinion on the decree on agriculture was expressed by a group of their representatives in early April in an address to the Revolutionary Governing Council: Many of us smallholders came together on Sunday and discussed the events. The others asked me [one of them wrote] to put down our opinion. We are but simple peasant citizens of this country, but take the advice we give you! You are wrong in not fixing in the decree the size of a smallholding…. Fix it, please, at 200 yokes or otherwise there will be great trouble in the country, for there are very many of us who will not put up with being robbed of our land after a lifetime of painstaking hard work.19 Certain other measures of the council republic also caused uneasiness among the landed peasantry. These included the breaking of the cultural influence of the churches by the secularisation of church schools, the elimination of clerical teachers and the prohibition of religious education in schools. The decree of the governing council on this subject was naturally not read by many. Rumours spread that the council republic wanted to ‘break up family ties’, to make free love compulsory and to close the churches. These false rumours caused open resistance in the very first days. However, the attitude of the landed peasantry as a whole was at first characterised not by open opposition, but much more by passive resistance and an effort to gain from the food shortage in the towns by profiteering and bag-trading. It can be considered symbolic that István Nagyatádi Szabó retired immediately to his native village

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when the council republic was proclaimed and did not accept any of the political posts offered to him. He did not even express an opinion on the events. The majority of the peasantry did the same and whispered only to confidants that ‘this regime would not last long, anyway’. They even objected to the new ways: ‘that the coachman was the master and the lords were ushered out of the carriages and the Communists got in instead. The power was theirs and nobody dared say a word.’20 Besides open and passive resistance, there was also an attempt on the part of some small and medium peasants to infiltrate the revolution’s local organs of power. In the beginning, 26 per cent of the members of the village councils in the region between the Danube and the Tisza were small, medium and wealthy peasants, 24 per cent were dwarf-holders and a mere 27 per cent belonged to the agrarian proletariat. This tendency might have served to blur the edge of the revolution.21 The poor peasants, i.e. the agrarian proletariat and the dwarfholders, welcomed the council republic as their own. Those of them who greeted it with enthusiasm included many who had been organised even before the war or had felt drawn to the socialist movement, to say nothing of those who had become acquainted with social democratic or communist ideology during the liberal democratic revolution. Most members of the councils and most leaders of the directorates in the villages and country towns came from their ranks and they fought side by side with the workers in the Red Army as well. It can be assumed that the distribution of the nationalised big and medium-sized estates could have mobilised the passive and cautious rural masses as well and could have won them over to the revolution’s side, even though they held the traditional order and hierarchy of the village to be natural. The failure to carry out such a redistribution disappointed them. Their mood and reaction to the decree on the land were well mirrored by a report from a big village (Kecel) written by two emissaries of Jenö Landler: I tried to read them out the decree on the land reform no. XXXVIII. Point 1 [Hungary’s soil belongs to the society of labourers. Those who do not work cannot own any land any more.] was heartily welcomed but when I read out paragraph 2 [All medium and large estates, together with all their belongings, are to become properties of the proletarian state.] a terrible storm broke out and people were shouting ‘Down with Communism!’,

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‘Down with the rascals!’, ‘Arrest that rogue!’, ‘We do not let the state take away anything!’22 The discontent of the general and day-labourers was also caused by very low wages. The official wage per hour for an adult man was hardly more than 2 crowns, while the industrial skilled workers earned 4 to 8.5 crowns and the unskilled ones got 2.5 to 6.5 crowns per hour. Discontent owing to low wages was general and at some places, e.g. at Kiskunhalas and Kecskemét, it even led to small riots.23 The position of the estate servants was more favourable, and their mood was also less pessimistic. The longing for plots of their own was not so strong in them, if it was there at all, so they had less to be disillusioned about. Their wages had risen significantly before the council republic occurred, so they were generally content with them.24 The relationship between the council republic and the peasantry, which was full of tensions as early as March and April, became still worse by May and June. The originally hostile wealthy peasants were joined in summer by ever more significant groups of the so far passive small and medium owners. The change in the attitude and activity of these groups was primarily due to the changes in their material circumstances and their opportunities to prosper. The partly legal, partly underground free trade that at first offered significant income for those peasants who had sufficient supplies declined by May and completely ceased by June. One cause of this was the quickly decreasing quantity of industrial goods, the other was the disappearance of the old, so-called ‘blue money’ that was thought to be reliable. The populations of the capital and of the other cities were starving. This and the demands of the army made requisitioning necessary again. The response of those peasants affected was defiance. They fought against the requisitioning soldiers and red guards, they hid their supplies or fed them to their animals and they even destroyed them rather than give them away. The landed peasants were also drawn into active opposition because the majority of their representatives in the councils and directorates who had got there in early April were one by one ushered out of the revolution’s local organs of power in May.25 The disappointment of the agrarian proletariat over the postponed distribution of land was later added to by the shortage of food and other commodities. Wages were paid in ‘white money’, the official means of payment, but people could not buy anything with it at official prices. The wage-earning peasants therefore began to demand their wages in ‘blue

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money’ and went on strike in several regions of the country; for example, in Somogy County, one of the more revolutionary in earlier days.26 The changed situation was reflected also in the growing number of counter-revolutionary movements. The national and local newspapers wrote of twice as many riots or plots of this kind between 15 May and 15 June as in the two previous months together.27 Even the mass basis of these actions had grown significantly from a few dozen people to several thousands. Their range and duration also increased. The most significant counter-revolutionary uprising in the country took place along the Danube in the neighbourhood of Kalocsa from 18 June to 25 June and covered several districts of two counties. The proportion of the population taking part in it varied between 10 and 45 per cent.28 The leaders of the rural counter-revolutionary movements were usually major supporters of the old regime (landlords, bailiffs, army officers, officers of the gendarmerie, district magistrates, etc.) and their lieutenants came from the ranks of young farmers who had formerly been warrant officers or non-commissioned officers during the war. The main body was recruited from among the landed peasants, but the representatives of other strata, for example, poor peasants, also joined them in some places. After the suppression of the counter-revolution along the Danube, thirty-four people were committed for trial at Solt. Ten of them were small, medium and wealthy peasants, but eighteen were dwarf-holders and totally landless general labourers.29 The aims and interests of the old ruling elite and the social groups traditionally linked to it naturally differed greatly from those of the various peasant masses. The basis of their alliance was their mutual anti-Bolshevism. They entertained, however, quite different ideas as to the nature of politics after the defeat of the council republic. In contrast with the basically conservative large estate owners and big capitalists who strove to re-create the conditions that had existed before the revolution, and also in contrast to the army officers who not only wished to re-establish the former status quo but who entertained totalitarian ideas as well, the peasants mostly cherished democratic views. So the various groups providing the social basis of the counterrevolution represented conflicting interests that became evident very soon after the fall of the council republic. The overthrow of the republic and the victory of the counterrevolution were primarily welcome among those wealthy and well-todo medium peasants whose plots were in real danger during the revolutionary regime and whose status in the village had been shaken. This layer of the peasantry regained and reinforced its influence in the villages and mostly retained it up until the late 1940s.

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The democratic movement of the lower strata of the landed peasantry, i.e. the dwarf-holders, smallholders and poorer medium holders, that continued for a while after the failure of the revolutions, was worn down through political means by the counter-revolutionary regime. Although the ‘society of smallholders’ that had taken an active part in the defeat of the council republic came to be called ‘the social backbone of the country’ and its role ‘historical’, and in spite of the fact that its leader István Nagyatádi Szabó was made Minister of Agriculture for life, its important political demands (such as general suffrage, secret ballot, the freedom of the press, the abolition of the influence of the biggest taxpayers, called ‘virilism’, and the democratic transformation of administration), which would have guaranteed the smallholder’s interests, were deliberately ignored. The decreasing opportunities for an independent smallholder policy were reflected in the ever smaller number of the peasant representatives in the House of Commons. They represented 15 per cent in 1920, 7.4 per cent in 1922, 3.6 per cent in 1926, 2.85 per cent in 1931 and a mere 2.0 per cent in 1935. Nagyatádi’s party, which had been the strongest one in Parliament in 1920, was reduced to a faction of the basically conservative government party from 1922 onwards. 30 The only significant result of which the democratic smallholder movement could boast was the land reform of 1920. Compared with the reform proposals of the bourgeois democratic revolution, which aimed at the total abolition of the large estates, the land reform of the counter-revolutionary regime proved to be quite moderate. It affected only 8.5 per cent of the country’s arable land and resulted in the reduction of the territory of estates above 1,000 yokes by 14 per cent and of those between 500 and 1,000 yokes by 5.5 per cent. It was still a significant gain for more than 100,000 dwarf-holders and small peasants to get a few of the distributed 1.2 million yokes.31 This contributed greatly to their peace for a decade and their acceptance of the fact that the majority of their political demands were filed away by the government. With the agrarian proletariat the regime applied the policy of ‘carrot and stick’. The bloody wave of terror in the country affected primarily those poor peasants who had played leading roles in the council republic, just as in urban areas it centred on left-wing intellectuals, workers and the Jewish population. There were thousands of victims of the officers’ detachments and of the Romanian army which occupied two-thirds of the country. Half or nearly half of them were poor peasants. Several thousands of them

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were put on trial and imprisoned for their role in the revolutions. That part of the peasantry that got involved with socialist ideas before the war or in 1918 and 1919 was, so as to say, beheaded by this and was left without leaders for a long time. The simple participants in the events were punished as well. Twenty-five per cent of the estate servants on the state-owned estates were dismissed on account of their activity in the revolutions.32 Another element of the state policy towards the poor peasants was to give them land, providing more and more plots to the landless daylabourers. So the majority of the 1.2 million yokes standing at the government’s disposal were given to them instead of the dwarf-holders and small peasants. Nearly 200,000 people got from 1 to 3 yokes each.33 Although these small plots were not enough for a family to live off, they usefully absorbed the energies of this poorest layer of daylabourers and enhanced their respect for private property and civil order. Moreover, a dwarf-holding did enable a day-labourer’s family to produce part of the food it needed. As a result of the regime’s policy of ‘carrot and stick’, the agrarian proletariat ceased to be a political factor for about a decade. It is very characteristic of the situation that the farmers’ trade union of the Social Democratic Party had merely 1,700 members as late as 1930,34 which was only equivalent to 2.5 per cent of the Farmers Union’s membership in 1905–8. The underground Communist Party, which had only a few hundred members anyway, saw even fewer poor peasants in its ranks. Thus the peasant policy of the counter-revolutionary regime proved to be successful, though only temporarily and only in the symptomatic treatment of affairs. It did not, however, offer a remedy for the basic problems of the Hungarian peasant society, i.e. the unhealthy distribution of landed property and overpopulation in agriculture. The question of the land, namely the peasant question, remained, therefore, one of the basic problems of Hungarian society to be solved in the future. This problem remained threatening, with occasional flare-ups, right up to the radical transformation of society after 1945. NOTES 1

2

Péter Hanák, ‘Magyarország társadalma a századforduló idején’ [Hungarian society around the turn of the century], in Magyarország története 1890–1918 [History of Hungary 1890–1918], vol. 1, ed. Péter Hanák (Budapest, 1978), pp. 480–507. 1 yoke (Katastraljoch)=0.575 hectares.

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3 Hanák, ‘Magyarország’, pp. 412–13. More recent research puts the number of those remaining abroad at a few hundred thousand less. See Julianna Puskás, Kivándorló magyarok az Egyesült Allamokban, 1880–1940 [Hungarian Emigrants to the United States, 1880–1940] (Budapest, 1982). 4 Lajos Varga, ‘Az MSZDP és az agrárkérdés a századelon’ [The Social Democratic Party of Hungary and the Agrarian Question in the Early Twentieth Century], in Antal Juhász and Józef Sipos (eds), Parasztkérdés 1890–1930 [The Agrarian Problem] (Szeged, 1985), p. 69. 5 István Király ‘Nagyatádi és pártja az I. világháború alatt’ [Nagyatádi and his party during the First World War], Agrártörténeti Szemle [Review of Agrarian History] 1–2 (1972), p. 177, and Mihály Károlyi, Az új Magyarországért [For a new Hungary] (Budapest, 1968), p. 307. 6 István Király ‘Nagyatádi Szabó István és pártja az elso világháború elott’ [István Nagyatádi Szabó and his party before the First World War], in MTA Dunántúli Tudományos Intézete E r t e ke z é s e i 1 9 6 4 – 1 9 6 5 [ P u b l i c a t i o n s o f t h e Tr a n s d a n u b i a n Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1964– 1965] (Budapest, 1966), pp. 367–421; and József Sipos, ‘Parasztpártok a polgári demokratikus forradalomban’ [Peasant parties in the bourgeois democratic revolution], in Múzeumi kutatások Csongrád megyében [Research in the Museums of Csongrád County] (1983). 7 Ignác Romsics, ‘A gazdagparasztság és a forradalmak kora. Két forrás a XX. századi magyar parasztság politikai tudatához’ [The wealthy peasants and the age of revolutions. Two sources on the political consciousness of Hungarian peasantry in the twentieth century], Történelmi Szemle [Historical Review] 22 (1979), pp. 127– 47. 8 Péter Hanák, ‘Népi levelek az elso világháborúból’ [Civilian letters from the First World War], Valóság [Reality] 3 (1973), pp. 62–87, and Ignác Romsics ‘Levelek a frontra’ [Letters to the front], Forrás [Spring] 7–8 (1974), pp. 56–60. 9 Ignác Romsics, A Duna-Tisza köze hatalmi-politikai viszonyai 1918– 19-ben [Power Relations in the Region between the Danube and the Tisza Rivers in 1918 and 1919] (Budapest, 1982), pp. 30–2. 10 Tibor Hajdu, Az 1918-as magyarországi polgári demokratikus forradalom [The Bourgeois Democratic Revolution of Hungary in 1918] (Budapest, 1968), pp. 92–100. 11 See László Németh, Negyven év—Horváthné meghal—Gyász [Forty Years—Mrs Horváth Dies—Mourning] (Budapest, 1974), pp. 150– 238. 12 Hajdu, Az 1918-as, pp. 101–3, and Zoltán Szász, ‘Forradalmak és nemzeti mozgalmak a Monarchia összeomlása után 1918–1919’ [Revolutions and the movements of the nationalities after the dissolution of the monarchy, 1918–1919], in Erdély története [The History of Transylvania], general ed. Béla Köpeczi, vol. 3 (Budapest, 1986), pp. 1704–6.

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13 Az 1919. évi törvények gyujteménye [The Collection of the Acts of 1919] (Budapest, 1919), pp. 84–143. 14 Németh, op. cit., pp. 182 and 192. 15 József Sipos, ‘Az Országos Kisgazda- és Földmivespárt megalakítása, 1919 január’ [The formation of the National Smallholders and Farmers Party in January 1919], manuscript, p. 15. 16 Gyula Mérei, A magyar októberi forradalom és a polgári pártok [The October Revolution in Hungary and Bourgeois Parties] (Budapest, 1969), pp. 188–92, and Sipos, ‘Parasztpártok’, pp. 80–4. 17 Romsics, A Duna-Tisza, pp. 56–7. 18 Tanácsköztársasági Törvénytár [Code of the Council Republic], ed. Jeno Pongrácz (Budapest, 1919), vol. 1, p. 56. 19 Országos Levéltár [National Archives] Budapest L. 17. 47/1919. 20 Romsics, A Duna-Tisza, pp. 78–80, and Romsics, ‘A gazdagparasztság’, p. 142. 21 Romsics, A Duna-Tisza, p. 84. 22 Párttörténeti Intézet Archivuma [Archives of the Institute for Party History] Budapest 642. f. 1919–IV–742, vol. 3, p. 269. 23 Tanácsköztársasági Törvénytár, vol. 3, pp. 48–50, vol. 2, pp. 32–3. Cf. Romsics, A Duna-Tisza, p. 95. 24 Tibor Hajdu, A Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság [The Hungarian Council Republic] (Budapest, 1969), pp. 391–2. 25 Zsuzsa L.Nagy, Forradalom és ellenforradalom a Dunántúlon 1919 [Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Transdanubia in 1919] (Budapest, 1961), pp. 116–23. 26 Sándor Kávássy, Latinca Sándor (Budapest, 1973), pp. 112–13. 27 A Magyar Tanácsköztársaság sajtójának repertóriuma [Repertory of Press in the Hungarian Council Republic], ed. Lászlóné Kálmán (Budapest, 1968), pp. 160–78. 28 Romsics, A Duna-Tisza, pp. 130–42. 29 Párttörténeti Intézet Archivuma, Budapest 609. f. 35/1919 no number, vol. 1, pp. 54–9. 30 Károly Mészáros, ‘Nagyatádi Szabó István programja és programfeladása 1919–1921’ [The programme of István Nagyatádi Szabó and its abandonment in 1919–1921], József Sipos, ‘A Kisgazdapárt struktúrája és a bethleni konszolidáció, [The structure of the Smallholders Party and consolidation in the Bethlen era] and József Nagy, ‘A kis-gazda csoport muködése az Egységes Pártban’ [The activity of the group of smallholders in the United Party] , in Parasztkérdés 1890–1930, pp. 164–99, 200–32, 233–58. For the numbers of the peasant representa tives in Parliament and the House of Commons see Nemzetgyulési és Országgyulési Almanachok [Almanacs of the National Assembly and the Parliament] for the years 1920 to 1931 (Budapest, 1920–31). 31 Mihály Kerék, A magyar földkérdés [The Hungarian Land Question] (Budapest, 1939), pp. 198–9 and Országos Levéltár Budapest K. 468. unit 18 C/5. 32 Dezso Nemes, Az ellenforradalom története Magyarországon, 1919– 1921 [The History of the Counter-Revolution in Hungary, 1919–

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1921] (Budapest, 1962), pp. 91–116, and Hajdu, A Magyarországi, p. 379. 33 Kerék, op. cit., pp. 198–9. 34 Magyarország története 1918–1919, 1919–1945 [Hungarian History 1918–1919, 1919–1945], general ed. György Ránki (Budapest, 1976), p. 263.

11 The fear of revolution in rural Austria: the case of Tyrol Elisabeth Dietrich

I

The troubled relationship of the provinces to the capital, Vienna, in the final days of the Habsburg monarchy has long served as a startingpoint in historiography, especially within the framework of constitutional history, for attempted explanations of the crisis-ridden development of the first republic. Inevitably, research was at first focused only on the initial phase of the post-war crisis in which the decisive steps were undertaken to create a new state order. Very often the provinces have been ascribed an independent revolutionary development in this period, and the revolutionary events which occurred there have been described as being a process set off from, if not running counter to, the national development. In this process, a ‘federalism of the provinces’ is supposed to have opposed the ‘centralism of the national government’.1 Yet in actuality, it can be shown that the ‘revolutionary events’ up to the law of 14 November 1918, concerning the assumption of state authority in the provinces (St.G.Bl. 24/1918), happened ‘concurrently’, so that it is not correct to speak of a ‘birth defect’ in this sense.2 Starting in mid-November, however, a widespread ‘break-with-Vienna movement’ was discernible in the provinces, as was an obvious deterioration of relations between the provinces. Whereas the latter, as Ernst Hanisch implied, 3 was due chiefly to the intense conflicts over the apportionment of resources and the distribution of expenses among the provinces, tensions between the provinces and Vienna flared up on several levels. Vienna, as a large city, a metropolis, a former seat of a royal empire and now the country’s capital, became increasingly the focus of a very emotionally conducted, critical debate in the provinces during the course of this crisis.

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As it was, the situation in the Austrian capital had already become extremely difficult during the war. The first shortages in provisions occurred as early as 1914 in the city, which by 1915 had attempted to counter this by centrally regulating prices and distribution.4 Bread and flour were rationed from April 1915; sugar rationing followed in March 1916 and milk rationing in May of that year. Coffee became rationed in June and fat in September of 1916. The last foodstuff to be rationed was meat in September 1918. The quality of bread during the war worsened. In 1914 it consisted of a mixture of barley meal, corn meal and potato flour, about 30 per cent each; by 1918 it was made almost solely from corn meal. By the end of the war, the supply of foodstuffs for the city’s market was completely exhausted. The lack of food and heating resources, the drop in the nutritional value of what food was available, decreasing real wages and increasing working hours led together to registered deaths beginning to outnumber registered births in Vienna. Whereas in 1914 the population had decreased by ‘only’ 7,761 people, in 1918 this figure had reached an alarming 32,240. 5 Tuberculosis, pneumonia and infectious diseases spread everywhere at worse levels than ever before, and even ‘old’ diseases reappeared, such as the ‘hunger oedema’ prevalent among Viennese children. A government survey in 1919 of approximately 185,000 schoolchildren in Vienna6 unmasked the horrifying reality of the hunger crisis: about 96,000 children were classified as being ‘very undernourished’; 63,000 as ‘undernourished’; 19,000 as ‘somewhat undernourished’; and only 7,800 measured up to medical standards. It should therefore not come as a surprise that women and youths were the chief participants in the growing number of hunger demonstrations in the cities as the war came to an end. In addition to this, from 1915 Vienna was being forced to cope with an unabating influx of eastern European refugees.7 Following the capitulation, the ranks of the unemployed swelled as demobilisation brought wave after wave of returning soldiers. In Vienna alone the number of destitute job-seekers had reached 131,500 by May 1919.8 Besides these difficult economic and social problems, Vienna had to come to terms with its drastic loss of prestige which ensued with the collapse of the monarchy. The metropolis no longer held its central position in an empire of 50 million subjects; it had been banished to the periphery of a small country that was as yet unstable and undefined. However, by the end of the war, one-third of the 6.5 million population of German Austria lived in the former monarchical capital, which seemed to lend

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credibility to the economic concerns of the provinces that they would be ‘crushed’ by Vienna. Up until the end of 1919, alienation particularly between the Alpine regions and Vienna increased to such a degree that political observers considered the ‘viability’ of a German-Austrian state to be out of the question.9 Another factor contributing to this was the differences to be found in the social structures of metropolitan populations, especially Vienna, and those of the primarily agrarian regions.10 These made for an abundance of prejudices that thrived on the surface of political propaganda. However, it was not solely the Viennese intellectual elite that remained ‘foreign’ to the provinces. In the countryside after 1918, the greatest fear was the coming from abroad of the ‘red revolution’ that would spread throughout the country once it had reached the cities, especially Vienna. Revolution had to be countered by any suitable means. It would be wrong to reduce the increasingly perceptible contours of conflict between the provinces and the metropoles, the cities and the countryside, the various parties and population groups, to being merely the issue of ‘distribution’ in an economy of scarcity. Ernst Hanisch11 analysed the crisis of the post-war period on four levels, each of which strained the political climate of the new republic enormously. For one, integrative factors such as the emperor, the military and the centralised bureaucracy disappeared with the demise of the Habsburg monarchy, thus offering the provinces an unusually large political field of manoeuvrability in the first weeks following the end of the war. During this crisis of integration (Hanisch), the provinces developed their own foreign and trade policies, as can be illustrated particularly well for Tyrol, as well as an autonomous national security policy (meaning primarily military policy). Closely related to this was the issue of ‘legitimacy’ in which the legal jurisdiction between provincial and national government needed to be clarified. Although the issue of a ‘counter-legitimacy’, namely that of the council movement, was hardly a pressing one, the differences between the provinces and Vienna became all the more heated. The confrontation between the periphery and the centre thus also became a class conflict, although not exclusively. Last but not least, the demise of the Habsburg monarchy posed the question of identity. The strongly felt differences in political and economic interests between Vienna and the provinces during this identity crisis cultivated an outgrowth of separatist and reactionary trends which were most obvious in Tyrol.

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II

Developments in Tyrol were trumpeted resoundingly in the press: ‘We’re pulling out.’12 In this article, a clear signal was given that Tyrol would not consider ‘establishing a Bolshevik republic which would only lead to disaster’. ‘Where is the fool among us’, added the Volkszeitung, ‘who seriously considers establishing a Bolshevik dictatorship? Tyrol is the poorest of all the provinces in our republic. The population would hardly be able to last a week on that which is produced regionally. On top of this, Tyrol is—farming country! Power relations are determined by its social structure and can only be discarded by gradual development. The utopian communist does not choose this region for his experiments.’13 In Tyrol, as elsewhere, the Social Democrats were aware of the important status held by farmers (or the ‘anti-collective pigheaded peasantry’ as they were occasionally called there). Actually, at no point in the unrest during or following the war was there ever a real danger that the region would experience a political revolution in the sense of a decisive political takeover on the part of a radicalised Tyrolese working class. The council movement in Tyrol never succeeded in achieving more than insignificant supervisory and advisory functions. The Tyrolese Soldiers’ Council even declared that it did not wish to take a position on political issues. One reason for this pronounced weakness of the Tyrolese council movement was that it did not enjoy the unanimous support of the Tyrolese Social Democrats; another reason was rooted in the history of the workingclass movement in Tyrol, which until the First World War could rely only on a narrow base of support in contrast to Vienna or other industrial regions in Austria. Despite the fact that the Tyrolese Communist Party,14 founded in 1919, was not taken seriously and drew more ridicule than serious comment, and that the Tyrolese Social Democrats clearly distanced themselves from both the Munich and Hungarian council movements, the bourgeois camp made much propaganda out of the unremitting threat to Tyrol posed by a Bolshevik conspiracy. They also used this threat to justify the distribution of weapons to the citizens’ and farmers’ militias. Until the inter-war period Tyrol was predominantly an agrarian society. In 1900 its total population numbered approximately 852,000, of which 510,000 were said to be occupied in agriculture and forestry. Even though from the late nineteenth century there were indications that an occupational shift to the secondary and tertiary

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economic sectors was under way, the number of those occupied in agriculture still remained over the 50 per cent mark until after the First World War.15 According to the 1902 business census, 72 per cent of the farmsteads were purely family businesses, only 9 per cent of the farms could afford to hire seasonal labour temporarily and only 18 per cent of the farmers worked constantly with farmhands unrelated to the family.16 The predominance of family farms arose from the unfavourable property sizes in the agricultural landscape of Tyrol where nearly 52 per cent of the farms were no more than 2 hectares large and a further 21.6 per cent of farmed property ranged from 2 to 5 hectares in size.17 Due to the smallness of the farms and the heavy indebtedness of Tyrol’s farmers, the degree of mechanisation remained at an exceptionally low level until after the First World War. According to the 1902 business census, simple agricultural machinery was being used on about one-fifth of the farms.18 Tyrol’s degree of mechanisation was thus clearly below the average within the empire. The region must also be characterised as being backward with regards to production methods such as fertiliser usage. At this time, and certainly still in the inter-war period, Tyrolean agriculture was not capable of providing the region with a continuous supply of basic foodstuffs. This was particularly true for grain, which always needed to be imported in large quantities. Like agriculture, small business comprised the basis of the commercial trade and industry in Tyrol. According to the same 1902 census, a business in the Austrian Alpine region employed an average of 3.8 persons. Tyrol was listed in this initial census as averaging only 2.6 employees per business and had the least density of factory-type businesses within the Austrian half of the empire. 19 With a few exceptions (such as the provincial capital, Innsbruck) Tyrol did not develop regional concentrations of industrial settlements and so experienced only a small degree of working-class culture. 20 In evaluating the strength of the Social Democratic labour movement in Tyrol it is important to recognise that the working class still maintained numerous close relations and bonds with the agrarian population before the war, because of the relatively late industrialisation. In addition as Karl Kautsky emphasised, not an insignificant number of small farmers were forced to earn additional income through industrial wage labour, whereby they—as Kautsky argued —checked the development of a ‘proletarian’ mentality in the area.21 Closely linked to the late industrialisation was also a slow tempo of urbanisation. In 1900 more than 75 per cent of the population still lived in communities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, many in small

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villages and some in the smallest possible hamlets. Innsbruck did not surpass the 50,000 mark until 1910. Next in size to the provincial capital were Trient with a population of barely more than 30,000 and Bozen with 24,000 inhabitants.22 The distribution of political strength can be outlined in a similar broad manner to that used to describe the development of the economic sectors. Politically, Tyrol was predominantly conservative. The influence of liberal party groupings remained limited merely to the cities of Innsbruck, Bozen and Trient. Due to the franchise system, the Social Democrats were not represented in the provincial Diet until shortly prior to the war. A shift in political strength started only in the 1880s as a group which came to be called the ‘harsher tone’ formed within the ranks of the conservatives and began to attract more and more the support of the farmers and small businessmen. This group knew better than the old guard of Catholic conservatives how to articulate the problems of the economically pressed, heavily indebted small and middle-sized farmers as well as those of the small businessmen who had been badly burned by the business crisis. The Christian-Social Party that emerged from this group was founded in 1900 and was permitted to run in the elections for the first time in 1907. It is significant in the development of this party that it enjoyed from its very beginnings the silent support of the lower clergy in Tyrol and then, from 1909, public support. In addition to the socio-economic and political structures of Tyrol on the eve of the First World War, the impact of the related prejudices and mentalities that were the outgrowth of the historical traditions of the region should not be underestimated. The role they played in shaping the political confrontations which took place as the war ended and during the inflation period was particularly important. Naturally those mentalities, which were shared by large sectors of the population, were not unique to Tyrol. This holds especially true for anti-Semitism, for the rustic and ‘German-nationalist’ elements always exhibited a more or less virulent anti-Semitism in spite of a lack of Jews in Tyrol.23 Most likely, this was also the case with rural anti-socialism, which became rabid during the agricultural crisis. This is well displayed in administrative sources as well as in the agrarian press. Anti-socialism was basic to the Tyrolese Peasant League, founded in 1904.24 The clergy, which enjoyed a prominent political position in Tyrol’s history, played a special role in injecting and anchoring such resentments against workers and the labour movement. In both clerical and rural criticism of socialism we discover all those images of workers which were to manifest

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themselves again with vigour during the inflation period: the worker as Vaterlandslos or unpatriotic, anti-religious, immoral, alien, exploited by ‘parasitic’ socialist leaders, incited to revolution, and under the influence of a conspiring Jewry. Starting in the 1890s, the decade in which the Social Democratic Party was also founded in Tyrol, the propaganda of the clergy and that of the farmers’ representatives had converged to form a common line of argument. On the occasion of the First Tyrolese Catholic Conference in 1909, the abbot of Wilten made much of the military fitness of the people of Tyrol in his appeal to create agrarian home reserves against the Social Democrats, and the farmer leader and later provincial head, Schraffl, invoked ‘Tyrolese patriotism’, pointing to the religious homogeneity of the region threatened by Social Democracy, and reminded his countrymen of Tyrol’s age-old tradition as a bulwark in the western region of the monarchy.25 Of course such reactions as these must be intimately linked to historical social structures before they can be included in an overall assessment and interpretation. The same is true for other attitudes such as rural anti-urbanism and anti-modernism and for the more or less virulent anti-centralism. It is important that these attitudes, which repeatedly indicate feelings of being threatened, fell once again on fertile ground at the end of the war and contributed a great deal to the potential for social conflict in the whole area. In addition to the difficult problems of food supply and the distribution of the few resources available in an economy of scarcity, as well as the question of the political and national future of Austria in a very broad sense, the fact that Tyrol struggled to preserve its regional unity is important for the analysis of the pronounced anti-Vienna mood there during the immediate post-war period and of its reactionary policy towards the regional labour movement. Without this last point, it is not possible to interpret the reaction in Tyrol which was marked by the extremely harsh anti-Vienna campaigns, the separatist movement, the hostile attitude towards Social Democracy and the rapid formation of bourgeois-agrarian militias. It was feared in Tyrol that the southern part of the region would be lost for good by the annexation attempts forced through by Otto Bauer.26 From this perspective, the effort of German Austria to be annexed by the German empire was interpreted by the leading Volkspartei politicians in Tyrol as being a major handicap for the coming peace negotiations in which the borders to Italy were to be drawn up first. It should also be kept in mind that the expectations and efforts concerning the future position of Tyrol were vigorously rejected by the Social Democrats of the region from

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November 1918 until May 1919. For them, the only conceivable union for Tyrol was with German Austria. The opposition of the region’s own Social Democrats to the efforts being made to guarantee Tyrol’s autonomy was a central cause of the early end of the common political platform. Years after the end of the First World War, the Social Democrats were still being blamed for the loss of the southern part of Tyrol.27 The second dimension of the confrontation between Tyrol and Vienna, which had been escalating since November 1918, concerned issues of food supply and the distribution of the few resources available. Even before the war, Tyrol had seen itself as being ‘milked dry’ by the central bureaucracies in Vienna and by the military. Once Austria was at war, Italy’s southern Tyrol was declared an immediate war zone and northern Tyrol an extended war zone. The military was constantly present here and its purchasing and price policies dramatically worsened the supply problems. 28 One of the consequences of the ruthless requisition of cattle and other measures taken by the military bureaucracies was that the farmers of Tyrol were readier to part with the monarchy at the end of the war. Another consequence was that the serious food supply shortages, or, more specifically, the distribution of food, led to several hunger demonstrations in Tyrol. Thus these shortages were due not only to the unpopular centralised management but also to the ruthless actions taken by the army. Whereas the supply of provisions had functioned in some way or another during the war, it threatened completely to collapse immediately following the war’s end as nearly half a million starving and, as it turned out, plundering soldiers made their way home from the Southern Front via Tyrol in the course of demobilisation. Tyrol felt it had been abandoned, even ‘betrayed’,29 by Vienna in such a dangerous situation, without taking into consideration, of course, that Vienna was struggling at the same time to feed the starving population of a city of 2 million.30 This ‘let-down’ by the capital during these decisive days was not forgotten: it was used as a welcome argument in the following months during which the first serious conflicts between city and countryside arose. If the ‘break-with-Vienna movement’ was in essence the result of what Tyrol considered to be the disappointing position taken by Vienna concerning the preservation of regional unity and the provision and protection of Tyrol during the military retreat and not the result of a suddenly awakened desire for sovereignty, then the contrast between the absolute majority of the Volkspartei in Tyrol and the central authority in Vienna increased the virulent confrontation between

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Tyrol and Vienna, in which the Social Democrats developed the decisive initiatives. No longer did Tyrol wish to see the fate of the region in the hands of ‘Red, Jewish, atheist, ever demanding and never content’ Vienna. That is the reason why Tyrol’s declaration of accession to the Republic of Austria was made with explicit provisos, and why a popular referendum on the question of Anschluss to the German Reich was held in April 1921. If the issue of preserving regional unity led to sustained tensions between the Volkspartei and the Social Democrats in Tyrol, then the problems of supplying food and other provisions led to out-and-out confrontation. The Social Democrats had basically supported the despised system of centralised economic management that the farmers considered to be responsible for the wretched state of economic affairs. In light of the market distortions caused by the inflation, the illicit trade and black marketeering, the smuggling and the declining product quality, Social Democrats also demanded in Tyrol, as in other Austrian provinces, that drastic measures of control and repression be introduced—measures which the farmers felt to be further constrictions on their production conditions and so opposed. In fact, they even threatened to boycott and put up resistance to them. Because there were delivery boycotts in certain districts of Tyrol and because the measures taken by the provincial government dominated by Christian-Socials to punish these actions proved to be very cautious, the first truly serious hunger revolts erupted in Innsbruck in July 1919. 31 The emerging radicalisation reached its climax in December 1919 as the starving population of Innsbruck confronted the provincial government with ultimatums demanding an improvement in both food supply and distribution. At this demonstration, the city police for the first time found themselves unable to control the situation. It is characteristic of the circumstances in Tyrol that it was not the Volkswehr that was called in to control the situation, but the Innsbruck citizens’ militia and Italian occupation troops. The predominantly Social Democratic Volkswehr was confined to barracks during this unrest in order to prevent it from showing solidarity with the starving demonstrators.32 Tactical, spurof-the-moment decisions of this sort played an important role in preventing the further escalation of the situation in Tyrol. Just as successful were the efforts made by the provincial government to break strikes. An example of this is a strike by about 400 textile workers in Landeck that was broken by the threat of armed intervention by gendarmerie units. The decisive factor in this example, however, was that the entrepreneur succeeded in winning

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over about forty workers organised in Christian unions, thus splitting the striking labour force. The strike remained unsuccessful, not the least because the strikers lacked clear-sighted guidelines for conducting it as well as material and moral support from the party leadership.33 Undoubtedly the lack of coherent policies of the Social Democrats in Tyrol often undermined the efforts of the labour movement. This is definitely true with regard to the work of the councils, which the Social Democrat Franz Grüner himself labelled a ‘serious danger’; 34 he recommended preoccupying them with issues involving the food supply so that they could not interfere directly with the administration of the province. This also held true for the work in the Tyrol Diet, where several bills were tabled due to uncoordinated procedures. From fear of red revolution being infiltrated into the country it became a matter of course that soldiers returning home from the Eastern Front underwent border checks, that Spartacists apprehended at the frontier were extradited and that workers who had made common cause with them, such as those in Kufstein, were arrested. Yet this was only one aspect of the repression levelled against the labour movement. More effective, and perhaps also responsible for the caution displayed by the Social Democrats in Tyrol, was the more or less covert distribution of weapons to the citizens’ and farmers’ militias which had been formed during the turmoil of the final days of the monarchy. There were several decisive factors enabling the rapid organisation of these militias:35 first, they could fall back upon the organisational structures of the many older riflemen’s associations, the rearmament of which was argued to be justified by the fact that they had placed their weapon depots at the military’s disposal when the war broke out; second, it cannot be ignored that a great number of Tyrolean officers were armed, with the approval of the Italian command. Richard Steidle, a member of the province’s Armed Forces Committee since the end of the war, was able very quickly to form a well-organised and armed home militia in Tyrol in 1920 with the help of Bavarian officers. He succeeded because from the very start he was able to secure the complete support of the provincial government, the gendarmerie, the Tyrolese Peasant League and the bureaucracy, which had managed to survive the war without undergoing any major changes, especially at the level of district government (Bezirkshauptmannschaft). Initially, Steidle received financial support from Bavaria, then also from industry in Tyrol; moral support came from the conservative and anti-Semitic associations in his own country and from among the clergy. Three other factors that had a

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great impact were the far-reaching organisational and personnel involvement of the bourgeoisie, the large number of now unemployed officers of the imperial and royal forces, and an uncontrollable quantity of weapons in the region stemming from the days of retreat. By late 1922, the home militia in Tyrol had become the strongest paramilitary force in the province with over 12,000 men,36 with its own weapons depot in the basement of the seat of the provincial government, 37 and a series of military staff-like plans for mobilisation38 should unrest break out, including an exact list of names of those to be arrested. In 1923, it even claimed the commanding role in the Austrian home militia and announced its intention ‘to finally liquidate the revolution in Tyrol’.39 As mentioned in the beginning, feeling alienated from Vienna was not specific to Tyrol. Yet the reactions to the revolutionary events appear to have been particularly strong in Tyrol. However, with regard to the emergence of prejudices, there were indeed regional differences that may be attributed to the economic position of the provinces and their specific traditions. In Tyrol, the worri-some food supply and the issue of regional preservation affected the separatist politics and the organisation of conservative forces in this region and bequeathed it a special place in many respects among the ‘ranks of provincial revolutionaries’.40 NOTES

This chapter is a revised version of a paper presented at the international colloquium on ‘Labour Movements and Revolutionary Potential in Europe by the End of World War I’ (Graz, 5–8 June 1989). The original paper and additional, more comprehensive references can be found in Helmut Konrad and Karin M.Schmidlechner (eds), Revolutionäres Potential in Europa am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges. Die Rolle von Strukturen, Konjukturen und Massenbewegungen (Vienna, Cologne and Graz, 1991). 1

2 3

On this point see the criticism made by Gottfried Köfner, ‘ “Eine oder wieviele Revolutionen?” Das Verhältnis zwischen Staat und Ländern in Deutschösterreich im Oktober und November 1918’, Jahrbuch für Zeitgeschichte (1979), pp. 131–4. ibid., p. 131. Ernst Hanisch, ‘Provinz und Metropole. Gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Perspektiven der Beziehungsart des Bundeslandes Salzburg zu Wien (1918–1934)’, Beiträge zur Förderalismusdiskussion (Salzburg, 1981), p. 9.

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4 Hans Hautmann, Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Österreich 1918– 1924 (Vienna and Zurich, 1987), pp. 45–9. 5 ibid., p. 47. 6 Ulrich Kluge, Bauern, Agrarkrise und Volksernährung in der europäischen Zwischenkriegszeit. Studien zur Agrargesellschaft und wirtschaft der Republik Österreich 1918 bis 1938, Vierteljahrschrijt für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, supplementary issue 86 (Stuttgart, 1988), p. 37. 7 Köfner, op. cit., pp. 153–4; research has not yet addressed the question of whether the war refugees, particularly the Jews from the eastern parts of the monarchy, the majority of whom went to Vienna or more specifically were deported there from the provinces, not only contributed considerably to mounting social tension but may also have led to a hardening and qualitative change in antiSemitism. For this point I am indebted to Hermann J.W.Kuprian (University of Innsbruck), who is participating in a project on the subject of war refugees during and following the First World War, a project from which, among other things, a series of new perspectives on anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the first republic can be expected. 8 Kluge, op. cit., p. 33. 9 ibid., p. 87. 10 See in particular Hanisch on this point in reference to Salzburg, pp. 73–98, and the contributions on the developments of the provinces in the inter-war period in Erika Weinzirl and Kurt Skalnik (eds), Österreich 1918–1938. Geschichte der Ersten Republik, vol. 2 (Graz, Vienna and Cologne, 1983). 11 Hanisch, op. cit., pp. 70–2. 12 Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 14 November 1918, p. 1. 13 Volkszeitung, 21 May 1920. 14 Josef Riedmann, ‘Die Anfänge der kommunistischen Partei in Tirol nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Der Volkskommissar für Äußeres der UdSSR G.W.Tschitscherin in Tirol’, Das Fenster 26–9 (1980–1), pp. 2629–34. 15 With regard to the statistical data, see Birgit BologneseLeuchtenmüller, Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Berufsstruktur, Gesundheits- und Fürsorgewesen in Österreich 1750–1918 (Vienna, 1978). 16 See Ernst Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna and Munich, 1985), p. 381. 17 See Josef Krammer, ‘Analyse einer Ausbeutung I.Geschichte der Bauern in Österreich’, Sachen 2 (1976), pp. 30–2. 18 See Franz Greif, ‘Agrarstruktur und Agrarpolitik in Österreich 1880– 1980’, in Alois Mosser (ed.), Landwirtschaft und Raiffeisen. Geschichte, Strukturen, Institutionen (Vienna, 1986), p. 45. 19 Bruckmüller, op. cit., p. 384. 20 See Gerhard Oberkofler, Die Tiroler Arbeiterbewegung. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 2. Weltkrieges (Vienna, 1986), p. 159. 21 Karl Kautsky, ‘Erinnerungen und Gedanken aus Tirol’, Volkszeitung, 27–8 September 1923.

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22 See Ernö Deák, ‘Die städtische Entwicklung in der franziskojosephinischen Epoche. Eine quantitative Untersuchung’, in Erich Zöllner (ed.), Österreichs Städte und Märkte in ihrer Geschichte (Vienna, 1985), table 10, and Bolognese-Leuchtenmüller, op. cit., table 14. 23 See especially the special edition of ‘Sturzflüge’: Geschichte der Juden in Tirol 5 (1986), pp. 15–16. 24 As a source, see Friedrich Haider, 25 Jahre Tiroler Bauernbund. Sein Entstehen und seine Entwicklung im Lichte programmatischerErklärungen und Zeitungsberichte (Innsbruck, 1951), and Benedikt Erhard, Bauernbund und Politik. Zur Geschichte des Tiroler Baeuernbundes (Vienna and Munich, 1981). 25 See the speech given by Abbot Adrian Zacher at the First Tyrolese Catholic Conference in Neue Tiroler Stimmen, 22 May 1909. 26 In addition to other references, see especially Josef Riedmann, ‘Von der gefürsteten Grafschaft zum österreichischen Bundesland (1918– 1920)’, in Weinzierl and Skalnik (eds), op. cit., pp. 962–6, and Hermann J.W.Kuprian, ‘Tirol und die Anschlußfrage 1918 bis 1921’, in Thomas Albrich, Klaus Eisterer and Rolf Steininger (eds), Tirol und der Anschluß. Voraussetzungen, Entwicklungen, Rahmenbedingungen 1918–1938 (Innsbruck, 1988), pp. 43–74. 27 See Günther Pallaver, ‘“Ihr Deutsche, gebt uns Brüdern Raum/Da wir nach Norden schreiten.” Eine großdeutsche Lösung für Südtirol?’, in ibid., p. 242. 28 Concerning the supply situation in Tyrol, see, for the case of Innsbruck, Ernst Eigentler, ‘Tirol im Inneren während des Ersten Weltkrieges von 1914 bis 1918’, dissertation manuscript, University of Innsbruck, 1954, and Elisabeth Gasteiger, ‘Innsbruck 1918–1929. Politische Geschichte’, dissertation manuscript, University of Innsbruck, 1986. 29 Riedmann, ‘Grafschaft’, in Weinzierl and Skalnik (eds), op. cit., p. 962. 30 In addition to the previously cited literature, see Hanns Haas, ‘Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und die alliierte Lebensmittelversorgung Österreichs im Winter 1918/19’, MÖSTA 32 (1979), pp. 233–55; Gustav Gratz and Richard Schüller, Der wirtschaftliche Zusammenbruch Österreich-Ungarns. Die Tragödie der Erschöpfung (Vienna, 1930); Karl R.Stadler, Hypothek auf die Zukunft. Die Entstehung der Ersten Republik 1918–1921 (Vienna, Frankfurt and Zurich, 1968), pp. 201 and 229, as well as Hans Loewenfeld-Russ, Im Kampf gegen den Hunger. Aus den Erinnerungen des Staatssekretärs für Volksernährung 1918–1920, ed. Isabella Ackerl (Munich, 1986). 31 Josef Riedmann, ‘Das Bundesland Tirol 1918–1970’, Geschichte des Landes Tirol 4/II (19..), pp. 804–6. 32 ibid., p. 805. 33 Oberkofler, op. cit., p. 186. 34 See Josef Riedmann, ‘Verfassungsentwicklung und Demokratisierung in Tirol 1918–1920. Beiträge zur inneren Geschicte des Landes in den ersten Jahren nach dem Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges’, Tiroler Heimat 45 (1981), p. 77.

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35 In addition to the previously cited literature by Josef Riedmann, more on the history of the home militias in Tyrol can be found particularly in the following: Verena Lösch, ‘Geschichte der Tiroler Heimatwehr von ihren Anfängen bis zum Kornenburger Eid (1920– 1930)’, dissertation manuscript, University of Innsbruck, 1986; Richard Schober, ‘Die paramilitärischen Verbände in Tirol 1918– 1927’, in Albrich, Eisterer and Steininger (eds), op. cit., pp. 113– 4 1 , a n d t h e l i t e r a t u r e t h e r e c i t e d ; Wa l t e r Wi l t s c h eg g , D i e Heimwehr. Eine unwiderstehliche Volksbewegung? (Munich, 1985). 36 Riedmann, ‘Grafschaft’, p. 982. 37 See Lösch, op. cit., p. 81 f. 38 Tiroler Landesarchiv at Innsbruck, files on the ‘Selbstschutzverbandes’ (SSV), I/3, no. 58, entry 427, 429–43 and no. 67. 39 Newspaper report on the district festival of the home militia held on 22 October 1922, in the Allgemein Tiroler Anzeiger, 23 October 1922. 40 See Kuprian, op. cit., p. 56.

12 Lenin, Italy and fairy-tales 1919–20 Piero Melograni

I

It has often been held that in the Italian post-war period there was quite a strong revolutionary movement which was defeated by a coalition of reactionaries. These, in order to survive, are said to have organised the Fascist squadristi and to have called Mussolini into power. But the truth of the case is rather different. In the first place the revolutionary movement was not very strong and in some senses defeated itself, thanks to its mistakes and contradictions. The influence of Fascist squadristi began to be felt only after the Socialist movement had begun to decline. Furthermore, Italian big business indeed did finance and protect the Fascist squads, but only within certain limits, and in 1922 had no desire to see Mussolini in power. 1 II

The democratic parliamentary regime which remained in force until the coming of Fascism was certainly defective, but it did allow the different classes and parties to organise and express themselves. The success of the Socialist Party in the 1919 elections—when it gained 31 per cent of the parliamentary seats—is a demonstration of this. From many points of view the Socialist Party was an integral part of the political system in force. For many years the Socialist members of Parliament had been rubbing shoulders with the ministers and been well acquainted with the ministries, obtaining the passage of legislation and social welfare regulations. A large number of town councils were controlled by Socialists, including big city councils like Milan and Bologna. Socialist trade unions and co-operative societies administered a wide range of interests. Thus

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we could say that the existence of a democratic regime contributed to making the Italian situation in 1919–20 much less explosive than the Russian equivalent in 1917. Moreover, in 1919 Italy was at peace with the rest of the world, not at war. The Socialist reformers believed in gradual change and felt that it was not realistic in the Italy of 1919–20 to talk about a Socialist state. The ‘maximalists’ preached revolution, but they did not get ready for it, because they held that a revolution takes place by itself and should not be created (many of them, in their heart of hearts, did not believe in revolution, or even feared it). The Communists, like Amadeo Bordiga, Antonio Gramsci, or Umberto Terracini, did not hold either the reformists or the maximalists in high esteem and denied that a party prepared for revolution was already in existence. They founded such a party in 1921, when the Fascist squadrismo had already become a strong power. In 1919–20, it might have seemed that Italy was on the verge of a revolution. In the streets many were shouting, ‘Do what they did in Russia.’ The Italian Socialist Party announced in October 1919 that it had joined the Comintern. But the working class was not such as to force its leaders to move quickly towards a revolution. In an interview (dated 27 February) which appeared in the Manchester Guardian of 12 March 1920 the reformist leader Filippo Turati declared: ‘The plain truth is that the efficiency of the labouring classes has greatly decreased, and that these classes have acquired expensive habits and are bent solely on the enjoyment of life.’ But Antonio Gramsci himself, in a well-known letter to his comrade Zino Zini in 1924, made a harsh judgement of the weakness of the Italian working class in 1919–20. ‘At that time…with the Socialist Party as it was, with a working class which tended to see things through rosecoloured glasses and preferred songs and brass bands to sacrifices, we would have had attempts at a counter-revolution, which would have swept us away for ever.’2 Clara Zetkin, speaking at the Third Congress of the Comintern and referring to the day on which the Socialist leaders had decided not to extend the occupation of the factories (in September 1920), stated that it was not a question of accusing the Italian Socialist Party alone: I see more than that [she said] for the uprisings in Italy at that time show that the masses had not progressed any further than their leaders, otherwise, comrades, if they really had been animated by a desire for revolution, if they had been aware of the situation, they

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would have hissed at the decision of their party leaders and hesitant trade unionists, and they would have become fully involved in the political struggle.3 Concerning the occupation of the factories in September 1920, much rhetorical ink has been wasted, but we must remember what Angelo Tasca tells us—he who was a witness of the occupation: the ‘red guards’ who were placed initially at the entrances of the factories in order to defend them from attacks from outside, were soon employed to prevent the ‘desertion’ of a fairly large number of the workers.4 For many years it has been said repeatedly that the failure of the factory occupations depended on the reformists’ desire for a moderate policy. But on examining the documents we find that in September 1920 the leadership of the Socialist Party was practically in the hands of the Communists (the secretary of the Socialist Party, Egidio Gennari, was to become one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party in 1921), and it was this same leadership with its Communist leanings which curbed any further developments in the occupation of the factories. Palmiro Togliatti himself, who spoke on 9 September 1920 at the decisive plenary session of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) and of the Socialist Party, made a speech in which he did not encourage in any way a revolutionary change in the movement.5 III

In order to understand what happened in Italy during the ‘Biennio Rosso’, the ‘red biennium 1919–20’, it is necessary to remember the position taken by Lenin concerning the Italian question. On 28 October 1919, Lenin wrote to the most authoritative leader of the Socialist Party, Giacinto Menotti Serrati, advising him against an uprising. Lenin began his letter by confessing that he did not know very much about what was happening in Italy. None the less, he urged his Italian comrades not to make any moves. Evidently, his motivation had to do with the international situation and with events within Russia, since he himself admitted he was not aware of the Italian events. ‘Britain and France,’ he wrote, ‘with the co-operation of the Italian bourgeoisie, may possibly try to provoke the Italian proletariat to a premature uprising in order the easier to crush it. But their provocation will fail.’ To counteract the risk of revolution being ‘premature’, the Italian Communists were to win ‘the entire industrial and the entire rural proletariat plus the small peasants’ to

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the Communist cause. This meant, of course, about 90 per cent of the entire working population. In other words, the Bolshevik leader was setting impossible conditions before authorising Italian Communists to seize power. Furthermore, he added that the revolution in Italy should take place only ‘after the proper moment is chosen internationally’. The Italian Socialist Party—in other words—was to leave that decision to the Comintern, but the Comintern was against an Italian revolution, as Lenin’s letter made clear.6 In October 1919, Angelica Balabanoff was in Moscow, acting as secretary of the Comintern, and read the letter before it was sent off. She telephoned Lenin immediately, advising him that his reference to premature uprising would favour the enemies of the revolution and asking him to reread the text, because it risked being badly misinterpreted. ‘It will play into the hands of the opponents,’ she said, ‘since it is they who claim that Italy is not ready for revolution.’ Lenin reread the letter, telephoned Angelica Balabanoff and told her that, after having thought carefully about the matter, he had no intention of changing a single word.7 The letter was published in Italy by Avanti! on 6 December 1919 and provoked a great stir. Some newspapers insinuated that it was possibly a false document forged by Serrati in order to quieten down the dangerous fiery spirits of many of his comrades. Scholar and politician Gaetano Salvemini remarked that the message ‘was widely considered a cold shower that Lenin had poured over the heads of Italian extremists’. 8 The nationalist leader Roberto Forges Davanzati suspected the letter was a forgery.9 A few months later, a Socialist member of Parliament, Cesare Alessandri, wrote that Italian Socialism had been transformed by the affair. Until then, as he put it, they thought they had to have ‘a ballot in one hand and a rifle in the other’; from then on, ‘we treasured Lenin’s strangely procrastinating advice and we repeated our old proverb, “chi va piano va sano e va lontano” [“Slow and steady wins the race”]’.10 On 28 December, Serrati replied to Lenin reassuring him that no rushed steps would be taken: ‘Neither sudden attacks nor excessive delay,’ he told Lenin. ‘In my opinion that is what our tactics should be. We have to work and wait patiently. Events will come to a head for us.’11 Italian Socialism was later faulted for these delaying tactics which contributed considerably to the downfall of the Italian Left and democracy. But at that time these tactics corresponded to Lenin’s plans. Karl Radek, who was still in Germany in December 1919, learned of Lenin’s letter to Serrati and used it to restrain all those outside Italy who

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were showing signs of revolutionary impatience. Radek had already managed to coax the German Communists into a more moderate position, but he was having trouble persuading the Austrians to follow suit. Lenin’s message helped him: ‘Thanks only to the appearance in Avanti! of a letter by Vladimir Ilyich to the Italian Socialists expressing the sense in which I acted,’ Radek wrote, ‘was it possible to convince the Austrian Central Committee.’12 The Italian Socialist Party received other communications from Moscow advising against revolution. In February 1920, for instance, Avanti! published an appeal signed by W.Degot and Elena Sokolovska, two representatives of the Comintern in Italy. Degot and Sokolovska did not advocate a clash with the bourgeoisie. They recommended ‘beginning the construction of a revolution’, but these beginnings were to be limited to ‘propaganda’. They mentioned the setting-up of soviets only very, very generally, and their most important request to the Socialist Party was to encourage Italy’s government as well as the bourgeoisie to recognise the Soviet Republic and to visit Russia, where ‘doors would be opened wide’ to them.13 Italian Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti was endorsing a foreign policy that was decidedly cordial towards Soviet Russia, for reasons of both domestic and international politics. On 7 February 1920, the same day Avanti! published Degot and Sokolovska’s appeal, the Prime Minister said in the Chamber of Deputies: The invitation extended to me to resume economic relations with Russia does not leave me indifferent…. For all the peoples of Europe, renewed relations with Russia are of prime importance, and this is especially true for Italy because of its geographic position, its deficiency in foreign trade and its shortage of means of mercantile transport. I have already made great efforts in this direction.14 Two months later, in April 1920, the Italian naval attaché at Stockholm, Manfredi Gravina, met Maxim Litvinov at Copenhagen and asked him if he felt the time was ripe for a revolution in Italy. Litvinov said to Gravina: We know quite well that a revolution would not be expedient in Italy today. The result would be an immediate declaration by France of a blockade—perhaps even a declaration of war. It would serve the purposes of French capitalism and imperialism, and this is certainly not what we want. Whatever our influence may count for, we in

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Moscow have been continuously advising against revolution in Italy.15 Between 21 and 22 September 1920, during the days when the factories were occupied, Angelica Balabanoff had an important conversation with Lenin: When I was about to say goodbye [Lenin] casually mentioned the news that had just been received from Italy: the occupation of factories and the peasants’ demonstrations. Lenin showed no enthusiasm over the news. When he asked my opinion I replied: ‘If you want to know what I think of the latest developments, I do not know any more than you do; we have both read the same news. But if you are referring to the general situation in Italy, I can only say that in no other European country are the masses so ready for social revolution and for socialism as in Italy.’ Then Lenin replied in an irritated tone: ‘For social revolution? But don’t you know that Italy lacks natural resources? Don’t you think about bread and coal? No, we do not want a repetition of the Hungarian defeat.’ And he went on enumerating the fatal consequences a revolution in Italy would bring at that time.16 On 7 November 1920, Lenin took up the subject again in an article in Pravda. He stated publicly that if the Italian proletariat were to triumph, economic restrictions on the part of Britain, France and the United States would be not only possible, but probable. And he added that an Italian revolution would not last long if it were not co-ordinated with that of another country in central Europe.17 It is also worth noticing the speech made by Grigori Zinoviev on 9 November 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. Referring to the occupation of the factories, Zinoviev clarified the matter saying: The disagreements between us and our Italian comrades did not arise because we advocated an immediate revolution. The International had never spoken in these terms…. It is right to admit that if we had taken over power in 1920, we would have had the same result as we had in Hungary…. It could well have been right not to have taken over power at that time. The matter is clear enough. Lenin was against a revolution in Italy and his instructions had an important part in holding back the Italian Left and in preventing it from working out a clear, autonomous, national, political line.

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IV

Did a revolutionary situation exist in Italy between 1919 and 1920? And, if it did, was it such as to favour a revolution of the Bolshevik type? It is difficult to reply to the first question with a yes or a no. But, if I had to choose, I would tend to say yes. The repercussions of modernisation and of the First World War had a deep effect on Italy. And the political set-up showed many signs of fragility, with a leadership which came largely from an elite that was unprepared to govern the masses. It is dangerous to write history on the basis of ‘ifs’. But it is very probable that ‘if’ the Socialist Party had been less obtuse and sectarian, the outcome of the political situation in Italy might well have been revolutionary, in the sense that Italy could have become a modern, democratic and parliamentary republic twenty-five years before 1946. On the other hand, I would answer no to the second question. The situation in Italy was not such as to favour a solution of the Bolshevik type. And yet I would like to note, concerning this, that the Socialists stated, in 1919, that they wanted ‘to act as Russia had’. But what actually happened in Russia in 1917? Had there been only a revolution of the Bolshevik type? Actually, the revolution which broke out in February 1917 at Petrograd was along the lines of a democratic revolution and had brought with it the fall of the tsar. The soviets were committees formed spontaneously immediately after the revolution. The taking-over of power by Lenin had been the result of all this. So, if in Italy there had been a desire ‘to act as Russia had’, it would have meant in the first place a revolution of a democratic republican nature. And the Italian soviets might well have been, as Angelo Tasca wrote, committees which formed spontaneously during the riots against the high cost of living (June–July 1919).18 The Italian revolution would probably have stopped there. But the fall of the monarchy, the establishing of a republic and a new constitution, with the inevitable change-over of the political class, would in themselves have meant results of no small account, especially if we take into consideration that, as things actually went, these same changes furthered the setting-up of Mussolini’s regime after only a short period of time. Many of the ‘subversive’ events of the biennium 1919–20 did not have any of the features of Leninism. The revolts against the high cost of living in June–July 1919 were spontaneous uprisings which remained without leadership and which were also approved of by Mussolini. The occupation of Fiume was the fruit of a military mutiny;

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Gabriele D’Annunzio took over the leadership of this seditious force. Being sectarians and day-dreamers, the Socialists did not realise that to revolutionise Italy it would have been possible to join in with the rebels led by D’Annunzio. At the beginning of 1920, the leader of the Italian anarchists, Alberto Malatesta, tried to reach an agreement with D’Annunzio’s followers in order to attempt a ‘march on Rome’ of a somewhat different kind from that of the Fascists. But the attempt failed just because of Socialist opposition.19 In 1919 various movements and Italian parties requested that a Constituent Assembly be convened. The Socialist Party did not associate itself with this request and in doing so made a substantial contribution to the preserving of the status quo. The revolutionary potential of the party was paralysed and consumed uselessly. As the anarchist Luigi Fabbri remarked, the revolution had not come, it had not been wanted. ‘But having hung like a threatening menace for over two years, it had been sufficient to stir up a counter-revolution. There was thus a counter-revolution without a revolution, a true and proper preventative counter-revolution; and Fascism was its most active and impressive feature.’20 V

The impact of the Bolshevik revolution on Italy was therefore highly contradictory. A large number of the Italian masses were excited by the myth of Lenin and that had great influence upon the whole leadership of the Italian Socialist Party. But Lenin exploited his charisma obeying the harsh necessities of foreign policy and the merciless laws of realpolitik, pursuing an aim that was rather different from the Italian masses’ dreams. What has been said about Italy can be explained by thinking of the situation then existing in Europe and even in the world, Soviet Russia being the heir of a gigantic Euro-Asiatic empire. Evidence shows that Lenin used all the parties of the Comintern as tools for his main purpose: to secure peace and international recognition of the Soviet state. Lenin was against revolution not only in Italy, but even in Germany, Austria and Hungary. I have tried to prove all this in my book on Lenin and the world revolution, to which the reader can refer.21 Lenin’s attitude towards Belá Kun was one of scorn and he let the Hungarian revolution fail. Documents show that even the Red Army’s advance right to the gates of Warsaw, in 1920, was not meant, in Lenin’s mind, to export the revolution, but to push Europe to call a new international peace

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conference, which should take the place of Versailles; this would have seen Lloyd George as president and the Russians sitting at the negotiating table. Lenin gave up the thought of a world revolution very soon. He had already done so on that day, 7 March 1918, when he said to his comrades in the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party: ‘Yes, we shall see the world revolution, but for the time being it is a very good fairy-tale, a very beautiful fairy-tale. I quite understand children liking beautiful fairy-tales. But I ask, is it proper for a serious revolutionary to believe in fairy-tales?’22 NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

This thesis is supported in my book, Gli industriali e Mussolini, rapporti tra confindustria e fascismo dal 1919 al 1929 (2nd edn, Milan, 1980). Gramsci’s letter is reprinted in G.Bosio, La grande paura, Settembre 1920: l’occupazione delle fabbriche (Rome, 1970), p. 20. Clara Zetkin’s speech is reprinted in P.Spriano, L’occupazione delle fabbriche, Settembre 1920 (Turin, 1964), p. 166. A.Tasca, Nascita e avvento del fascismo (Bari, 1965), vol. I, p. 126. Minutes of the meeting between Socialist trade unions and the Socialist Party, 9 September 1920, in Bosio, op. cit., pp. 17, 100–1. Palmiro Togliatti was secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 to 1964. V.I.Lenin, ‘To Comrade Serrati and to all Italian Communists’, Collected Works, vol. 30 (London, 1969), pp. 91–2. The letter was printed originally in Avanti! (Piedmont edn), 6 December 1919. A.Balabanoff, Lenin visto da vicino (Rome, 1959), pp. 118–19. G.Salvemini, ‘Lezioni di Harvard: l’Italia dal 1919 al 1929’, in Scritti sul fascismo, vol. I, ed. R.Vivarelli (Milan, 1961), pp. 494–5. L’Idea Nationale, 8 December 1919, p. 1. La Giustizia, 25 July 1920, pp. 1–2. For Serrati’s letter see Rinascita, 3 February 1967. K.Radek, ‘November’, in E.H.Carr, ‘Radek’s “Political Salon” in Berlin, 1919’, Soviet Studies 3 (1952), pp. 411–30. Avanti!, 7 February 1920. Camera dei Deputati: Discussioni, session of 7 February 1920, pp. 999–1000. For Nitti’s policies, see E.Serra, Nitti e la Russia (Bari, 1975); and G.Petracchi, La Russia rivoluzionaria nella politica italiana: le relazioni Italo-Sovietiche, 1917–1925 (Rome and Bari, 1982). Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Gabinetto, Serie speciale, Prima guerra mondiale, 19.29.9, Missioni Socialiste in Russia, box 206. A.Balabanoff, La mia vita di rivoluzionaria (Milan, 1979), pp. 227– 8. She had already related the episode in Ricordi di una socialista (Rome, 1946), pp. 331–2.

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17 V.I.Lenin, ‘On the struggle within the Italian Socialist Party’, op. cit., vol. 31 (London, 1970), p. 387. 18 See Tasca, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 27–8. 19 ibid., vol. 1, pp. 82–3. 20 L.Fabbri, Dittatura e revoluzione, 1921 (rpt. Cesena, 1971), pp. 185–6. 21 P.Melograni, Lenin e il mito della rivoluzione mondiale (Rome and Bari, 1985); translated into English as Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reasons of State, 1917–1920 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1989). 22 V.I.Lenin, ‘Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.): political report of the Central Committee, March 7’, op. cit., vol. 27 (London, 1964), p. 102.

13 The state and the challenge of labour in France 1917–20 John Horne

From the late nineteenth century, labour presented the French state with a triple challenge. First and most dramatic was the rise of trade unionism. This was accompanied by a sharp increase in strikes, culminating in a period of industrial militancy from 1904 to 1910 for which the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), founded in 1895, was widely held responsible. Labour relations became a matter of acute public concern and hence of public policy. The official response centred on the preservation of order, resulting in fierce clashes between strikers and troops. In 1908–9, the principal CGT leaders were imprisoned, and in 1910 a national rail strike was broken by the military mobilisation of the strikers.1 But there were also more constructive initiatives. Locally, prefects and justices were habitually called in as arbiters in industrial disputes. Nationally, attempts were made to reform labour relations, notably by Millerand in 1899–1900 (including an unsuccessful plan for compulsory arbitration) and by Briand in 1909. These efforts were hampered by the relatively low level of employer and worker organisation compared to other industrial societies, plus the often mutual hostility of the two parties and their shared suspicion of the state. But the creation of a full Ministry of Labour in 1906 testified to a persistent vein of bureaucratic reforming optimism in the field of labour relations.2 The second challenge consisted of the ‘social question’. This was scarcely new. Since the 1840s, the state had in some measure recognised the problems of industrial working conditions and urban poverty. But the ‘social question’ was accentuated by the depression of the 1880s and by rapid industrial growth from the mid-1890s. It gained added urgency from the corresponding rise of socialist and trade union movements which placed it firmly on the political agenda. Nor were they alone. Social Catholics, Christian Democrats, and left-wing

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Republicans (or Radicals) also attacked moderate Republican governments for their laissez-faire approach to the condition of the working class. In the years before the outbreak of war, new attempts were made, especially in reforming municipalities, to tackle questions such as unemployment, health and the acute housing shortage. Nationally, however, the minority status of the working class in a society still dominated by small businesses and peasant farmers placed a political brake on major reforming initiatives.3 Labour’s third challenge was the threat of violent revolution. Traditionally, revolution was an independent variable. It predated the rise of labour and was associated as much with conspiracy or the urban crowd as with trade unions. Bourgeois fear of barricades and streetfighting was reinforced by the Commune while the anarchist terrorism of the early 1890s renewed concern about conspiracies.4 Since 1848, however, the theme of labour had impinged on that of revolution.5 The working-class political culture which developed in the 1880s and 1890s adopted the language and symbols of revolution.6 When the CGT espoused an anarchist-inspired revolutionary syndicalism in the early 1900s, organised labour appeared to become the privileged vehicle of revolution. The bloody strikes of the same period apparently confirmed the worst fears of conservative crowd theorists that the irrational mob now wore an industrial face.7 Barricades and conspiracies by no means disappeared from the preoccupations of the state, but they were absorbed into the newer concern with social revolution via the labour movement. The Great War and the Russian revolution modified this threefold challenge by labour but did not fundamentally alter it. The war’s seismic impact on wages, prices and the labour market provoked a new phase of labour militancy from 1917 to 1920, resulting for the first time in something approaching a mass trade unionism. From 350,000 adherents in 1913, CGT membership, after collapsing in the face of military mobilisation, approached pre-war levels in 1917, doubled to just under 600,000 in 1918 and soared to a peak of nearly 1.5 million in early 1920. 8 The evolution of real living standards was complex and has not been definitively reconstructed. 9 But spiralling inflation during the war forced workers to seek wage rises while acute manpower shortages greatly increased their industrial leverage, despite legal constraints on striking. Post-war, the mass demobilisation was absorbed with unexpected ease while inflation intensified, so that industrial militancy continued to be driven by the same economic forces down to the slump in the winter of 1920–1.

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Labour militancy was also conditioned by changes in the workforce. The metallurgical and engineering industry expanded dramatically with the industrial mobilisation. The loss of the industrial north-east in 1914 helped redefine its geographical base. Munitions production burgeoned in Paris and its suburbs (the biggest single centre of war production), in older industrial centres (the Loire), in isolated state arsenals and in towns and cities with no tradition of large-scale factory production. Mobilised skilled workers, often from Paris and the north-east, were redistributed under military orders throughout France, bringing their labour traditions with them. At the same time, what amounted by 1916 to a labour famine resulted in widespread recruitment of women and foreigners as semi-skilled workers. A heterogeneous working class was thus created in the main munitions centres, providing the framework of industrial militancy from 1916 to 1919.10 From the autumn of 1919, engineering workers were forced on to the defensive when their industry readjusted to peace. But as industrial unrest spread to other sectors, the railway workforce took over as the nerve-centre of labour militancy.11 The ‘social question’ was initially effaced by the mood of wartime national unity. Social solidarity took the form of official and charitable support for serving soldiers and war victims. With around 8 million men mobilised, separation allowances for soldiers’ families were an excursion into mass social welfare. But since two-thirds of the army were from the peasantry and lower middle class, this was not seen in class terms. The ‘social question’ revived, however, in 1915–16, with pressure on working-class living standards and crowded munitions centres facing acute social problems. Albert Thomas, Socialist Minister of Armaments from 1915 to 1917, understood that measures of protection for workers were indispensable to the smooth prosecution of the war.12 The munitions effort also allowed labour to reinstate social issues on the political agenda. It turned the CGT, in particular, into the voice of a group which had become vital to the national effort, and enabled it to demand sweeping post-war reforms as the price for continued labour support.13 The threat of revolution likewise seemed to evaporate with the war. Public opinion held France to be the victim of premeditated aggression by Germany. The Ministry of the Interior’s Carnet B, or list of leading anti-war militants to be arrested on the outbreak of hostilities, was suspended. The military mobilisation proceeded smoothly and the CGT, the Socialist Party and even many anarchists fell in behind the national defence.14 By 1917, however, a current of

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politicised hostility to the war was discernible in labour circles and in May 1918 it provoked a series of strikes characterised by pacifism and a vaguely revolutionary mood. The theme of revolution none the less remained subordinated to pacifism until after the war. It was in 1919–20 that the Bolshevik revolution helped polarise organised labour between reformism and revolution and revitalised the language and symbolism of revolution itself. Yet if the schism of French socialism and the founding of the French Communist Party in December 1920 were the most dramatic outcome of this process, the real menace for the state in the critical two years following the war came rather from the association of revolutionary sentiment with trade union strength and militancy. In effect, the labour unrest of 1917–20 revived the pre-war spectre of revolution pursued by industrial means. Since the political complexion of the Bolshevik revolution was not fully apparent until 1920–1, revolutionary syndicalists chose to interpret it as the triumph of the general strike, rather than the party, and thus saw little conflict between events in Russia and their own revolutionary ethos.15 The state which confronted the multiple challenge of labour in 1917–20 was itself affected by the dynamic of war. On balance, its coercive capacities were strengthened. The police apparatus of the Ministry of the Interior had already been overhauled, notably under Clemenceau’s government (1906–9), in order to meet the threat from revolutionary syndicalism. Both the Sûreté Générale (the national police force outside Paris) and the Préfecture de Police de Paris, which answered for the security of the capital, had been strengthened and the number of special agents shadowing ‘subversive’ milieux increased. Shortages of police and of gendarmes (who came under the Ministry of War) persisted, however, resulting in recourse to the army. The problem of handling big labour disputes while avoiding quasi-military conflict had not been solved by 1914.16 During the war, the personnel of the Ministry of the Interior was partially exempt from the military mobilisation and the authorities thus benefited from continuity in the surveillance apparatus. The changed geography of labour militancy produced lacunae of coverage, as in the Paris suburbs.17 But down to 1919, the state had the double additional advantage of massive military might (which could be deployed internally) and of exceptional wartime powers. Around half a million of the 1.5 to 1.6 million munitions and aircraft workers in 1917–18 were mobilised men under military discipline (including most of the younger skilled workers who provided the key labour activists). For them, striking was illegal and the threat of the

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trenches a powerful antidote to militancy. The state enjoyed a panoply of powers under the ‘state of siege’ enabling it to suspend civil liberties and impose censorship on the press and the mail.18 The main weak points in this array of coercive strength were the theoretical possibility of military disaffection and the eventual post-war transition to normal peacetime powers. The war affected the state’s capacity for persuasion and co-option no less than its powers of coercion. The Interior was no simple ministry of repression but the pivot of a subtle and differentiated approach to organised labour. The Radical incumbent from 1914 to 1917, LouisJean Malvy, practised a ‘policy of confidence’ which assumed labour and working-class support for the war and gave trade unions maximum freedom under the ‘stage of seige’ to pursue their legitimate economic concerns.19 Intervention in the wartime economy also provided an unexampled opportunity for state action on labour and social issues. Albert Thomas drafted in a team of left-leaning academics as temporary civil servants in the Ministry of Armaments (including François Simiand and Mario Roques), and drew on the services of likeminded bureaucrats from the Ministry of Labour.20 Together, the two ministries represented a powerful centre of pragmatic state action, countering inflation by wage increases (often against employer resistance) and tackling some of the worst conditions in munitions centres. They were helped in this by the tendency of the war to overcome the organisational antipathies of labour, business and the state and to promote a limited ‘corporatism’ which favoured institutionalised contacts. This was manifest both in the machinery which Albert Thomas set in place in January 1917 for regularly revising wages across the war industries (a quid pro quo for the banning of strikes by civilian war workers) and in a host of tripartite commissions (state-labour-business) established to deal with various aspects of the industrial effort.21 More generally, the state benefited from its unprecedented concern with public opinion. Certainly, the state had long monitored currents of opposition. Public opinion had also played a role in pre-war industrial conflicts. But the acute sensitivity of the state to the importance of civilian morale during the war resulted in the first attempt at a comprehensive analysis of public opinion (going well beyond the surveillance of subversives) through systematic reports by police, prefects and the army, and through the monitoring of mail. The essence of this system survived the end of the ‘state of siege’, persisting until at least 1920. 22 The council of ministers, key departments and, locally, the prefects, thus possessed means, however

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imperfect, of gauging public attitudes to labour and revolution as well as to the war, and of evaluating the strength of both radical and conservative sentiment. The state’s response to the three-dimensional challenge of labour thus drew on both coercive and co-optive possibilities. It was by no means internally united, spanning as it did the ministries directly involved, the government as a whole, the army and the broader parliamentary majority. Its evolution from 1917 to 1920 was shaped by these internal considerations as well as by outside developments, and fell into four phases—two during the war itself, and two following the Armistice. The spring and summer of 1917 constitute the initial period. It was characterised by the first major strike wave of the war, which broke out among low-paid women workers in the Paris clothing industry and spread to the capital’s munitions workers, before igniting related actions across the country.23 This provided the testing-ground for organised labour’s place in the war effort as defined since 1914 by Malvy’s ‘policy of confidence’ and Albert Thomas’s interventionism. The three ministries of Armaments, Labour and the Interior took the lead in ending the unrest, with Malvy playing a key role since Thomas was absent on an official mission in Russia. The ministers and their officials presided over negotiations, settled the conflicts more or less in labour’s favour and urged collective bargaining to avoid future trouble. In the case of munitions, where the strikes were technically illegal, this meant strengthening the collective machinery for wages which Thomas had already established in January 1917. In that of clothing, employer recognition of trade unionism marked a major innovation.24 The official approach assumed that declining real wages largely explained and justified the strikes. It considered sympathetic state action and recognition of trade unions to be crucial for restoring social harmony to the war effort. But the spring strikes were one element in what turned out to be the most serious slump in French morale during the war. They coincided with the mutinies on the Western Front, following the disastrous French offensive of April, and with the increasing, though still limited, influence of scattered pacifist groups.25 It took little to encourage an opposed view of the strikes as part of a co-ordinated campaign of defeatism and even revolution. Malvy and his officials were broadly correct in pointing to the nonpolitical nature of the strikes and to the discrete and complex causes of the crisis of morale. The mutinies were essentially an angry but

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circumscribed response to impossible offensives on the deadlocked Western Front and a protest against poor conditions and scarce home leave.26 A major inquiry into civilian opinion in June 1917, ordered by Malvy and carried out by the prefects in each département, pointed to frustration over the April offensive, war weariness and material difficulties as the chief causes of low morale. The prefects were concerned. But they jumped to no conclusions about an underlying conspiracy, though some warned of the potentially dangerous influence of pacifism on a militant munitions labour force.27 The strikes and mutinies, however, drew almost instinctively on the traditional language and cultural symbols of revolution. Events in Russia and a xenophobic concern with foreigners and foreign influences in wartime France revived corresponding conservative fears of barricades and conspiracies. Generals seeking convenient explanations for the April fiasco and politicians sceptical of the new sympathy for organised labour readily discovered the sources of the crisis in revolutionary designs and ministerial laxity. Malvy, in consequence, came under intense and ultimately irresistible pressure. The Prefect of Police in Paris, his own subordinate, challenged his handling of the clothing workers’ strike in the capital and demanded the imprisonment of the CGT leadership. Malvy was supported by his government colleagues, and the prefect resigned. But Malvy faced increasing fire from the High Command and from parliamentary opinion incited by the extreme right-wing Action Française. In early August, he was forced to resign in turn by an attack which conflated his policy of ‘confidence’ in labour with sympathy for pacifists and revolutionaries.28 This revived readiness to identify industrial conflict with pacifism and revolution underlay the second phase in the state’s response to labour—from Clemenceau’s successful campaign for the premiership in the autumn of 1917 down to the Armistice. Clemenceau used the Right’s denunciation of pacifism and ‘treason’ to discredit incumbent ministers and, implicitly, their ‘confidence’ in organised labour. The language of pro-war patriotism and anti-pacifism was thus in part a coded intervention on the side of order in the social and industrial antagonisms generated by the war. Clemenceau’s own past reputation as the ‘strike-breaker’, the man who took on revolutionary syndicalism in 1906–9, reinforced this impression. When he came to power in November, Clemenceau forfeited socialist support (Thomas had already resigned from Armaments the previous September) and appeared to the Left to portend a period of social repression and parliamentary dictatorship.29

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The reality was more complex. The urgency of the munitions effort preserved labour’s industrial leverage while the obvious economic grievances of workers suggested tolerance in the matter of strikes. In labour relations, Clemenceau discreetly continued the approach of Malvy and Thomas. In this, he was supported by Louis Loucheur, Thomas’s successor (and erstwhile assistant) at Armaments. 30 Loucheur was a self-made industrialist, politically far-removed from Thomas, whose advisers he dismissed. But almost immediately, he settled an illegal strike in the Paris aircraft industry by forcing reluctant employers to concede wage increases and by promising to protect strike meetings and mobilised strikers. The pattern was repeated in a munitions strike at Bourges, in March 1918, when he prevented local management from taking punitive action. 31 Many strikes in 1918 continued to be resolved by the authorities, often in conjunction with trade union leaders, and the tendency towards collective bargaining increased rather than diminished. Loucheur also maintained, with some modifications, the system of officially recognised shop stewards (délégués d’atelier) instituted by Thomas at the behest of the metalworkers’ federation in 1917.32 Yet Clemenceau and Loucheur faced the threat of overtly pacifist labour agitation to a far greater extent than Malvy or Thomas. By rights, this should have sharply differentiated the two policies. Clemenceau, after all, had castigated Malvy not for settling the 1917 strikes but for ignoring what to him was their manifest connection with revolutionary defeatism.33 But here, too, Clemenceau’s action was nuanced. In practice, there was no easy distinction between economic grievances which rallied support from a broad penumbra of workers and the more politicised pacifism on which the core activists began to focus. There were many layers to the local labour militancy which crystallised in the heterogeneous working class of the major munitions centres from autumn 1917 to spring 1918. Intimidation or wholesale repression risked disaffecting workers and strengthening the hold of radical leaders. This was precisely the lesson which Albert Thomas drew from the inept attempt of the local authorities to transfer the radical leader of the Loire munitions workers, Clovis Andrieu, in December 1917. Thomas had been confidentially requested by Clemenceau to investigate the affair, and he urged the premier to avoid repression as an ‘act of confidence’ in the working class.34 Faced with the wave of uncoordinated but politicised strikes in May 1918, Clemenceau and Loucheur combined ‘confidence’ with judicious repression. They were aware from police intelligence of the multiple motives of the strikers, which spanned increased wages,

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opposition to mobilised men being returned to the front, advocacy of a negotiated peace, and the plans by a dissident CGT body, the Comité de Défense Syndicaliste (CDS), for a general strike to end the war.35 Helped by the fact that the CGT leadership remained committed to the war effort and condemned unofficial political strikes, the government sought to negotiate settlements to the economic demands while curbing political protest by force. The networks of radical militancy and the CDS were broken up and the activists imprisoned or transferred to front-line duty. The strikes of May 1918 were much the most serious domestic challenge faced by the state during the war. Probably over 200,000 workers struck (just under 15 per cent of the total munitions workforce), with sizeable minorities coming out in the major centres (in Paris, one-third). But the state was never seriously threatened. Wartime powers and the military force at its disposal enabled it to control and selectively repress the movement.36 Equally important, civilian morale had been revitalised by the twin effects of a renewed propaganda campaign following the 1917 crisis and by the salutory impact of the 1918 German offensive. Labour pacifists might dream of a Russian-style alliance with disaffected soldiers, but they remained isolated from broader public, and military, opinion. One militant in Courbevoie (Paris suburbs), clearly saw the reality, despite the dream, in March 1918: If the war goes on, we will have all the soldiers against us— since they’re jealous of the workers mobilised in the factories. If we carry out peace propaganda we will win their sympathy and if, as in Russia, a revolution or uprising occurs, they will pass with their arms and baggage to the side of the working class.37 Clemenceau’s response to the challenge of industrial conflict, even where this shaded into pacifism and revived the impulse of revolution, was a good deal more circumspect than his rhetoric. He was sensitive to his own past reputation and aware of the danger of social division in wartime, observing to a confidant in February 1918: ‘My weak point is the rear. I, of all people, cannot use troops. If France wants to russianise herself, she will have to do it without me.’38 Yet he was to some degree a prisoner of the circumstances and campaign which had brought him to power. His half-articulated defence of the social order against Malvy’s policies implicitly recognised the rallying power of antirevolutionary fear. This made it impossible for Clemenceau openly to incorporate into the national effort the reform aspirations of organised

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labour, as formulated by the CGT, since conservative opinion precisely conflated the labour movement and revolution. Significantly, Thomas and Malvy preached just such a reformist policy once they left office. Malvy in particular, during his trial for treason before the High Court in 1918, symbolised an alternative, progressive version of the war effort incorporating labour’s social aspirations.39 For Clemenceau, however, anti-revolutionary rhetoric cancelled out the ‘social question’. To the extent that his premiership resided above all on the political commitment to outright victory, this did not matter. But it excluded in advance any secondary compact around social reform. The prominence gained by social issues among trade unionists, local socialist organisations and reforming civil servants remained parallel to the official war effort rather than part of it. The Armistice opened a third phase in the state’s response to labour, lasting until the autumn of 1919. The dissolving imperative of victory and the gradual dismantling of special wartime powers combined with the reverse flow of a mass army into civilian life to increase the vulnerability of the state to unrest. Revolution in Germany and AustriaHungary, western counter-revolutionary intervention in Russia and the founding of the Comintern in March 1919, all provided a sombre international background. Yet these circumstances meant that the multiple challenge of labour could not be reduced to the simple formula of subversion any more than during the war. Apart from anything else, the dynamic of war, with its multiple sacrifices and shifting relations between social groups, begged the vital question of whether the return to peace would mark a return to the status quo ante—or to a changed social order. This is not to deny that the fear of revolution was an insistent theme of the entire post-war period. Theoretically, for the state, the danger of insurrection came from the army itself and from the potentially explosive combination of demobbed men, working-class social grievances and industrial militancy on the pattern of May 1918. There was a natural tendency to seek a revolutionary conspiracy behind this danger, which conservative opinion readily discovered in international Bolshevism. The principal semi-official propaganda body which had been formed to revive civilian morale in the spring of 1917, the Union des Grandes Associations Françaises contre la Propagande Ennemie, substituted bolchévisme for boches in 1919–20 as the national enemy.40 Rumours of Bolshevik agitators fomenting revolution in France with pocketfuls of gold were rife. As a sceptical Sûreté Générale report of August 1920 declared: ‘[the] legend has been spread all the more widely because the mass circulation press took it upon itself to cobble it

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together from the fantasies of secret gossip in Switzerland and Holland, gossip which revealed a total misunderstanding of how revolutionary circles work’.41 The state was by no means blasé about the dangers of revolutionary ‘infection’. From the end of the war, returning prisoners and the army of occupation in the Rhineland were monitored closely, as were links between Moscow and French labour militants, whether by propaganda, finance or personal contact.42 But as the above-mentioned report concluded, pro-Bolshevik groups in France (anarchist, socialist, trade union and Russian émigré) represented ‘an infinitesimal minority by comparison with the great majority of the population’. They had no ‘secret resources…supplied from outside’ and were internally divided. What really concerned the government was the stimulus given by external example to the revolutionary tendencies within French labour. The tangible problems confronting the state down to autumn 1919 were the demobilisation and industrial unrest. Demobilisation was accomplished amid a good deal of discontent and even indiscipline. The retention of a large standing army until the signing in June of the peace treaty with Germany frustrated soldiers impatient to return home. Demobilisation by age rather than by regiment fragmented military units and discipline, and the improvisation which characterised the whole operation provoked some bitterness. But apart from a few incidents—notably a mutiny in the Black Sea fleet—there was little politicised or subversive unrest. Demobbed men were reabsorbed relatively easily into the labour force (at the cost of the expulsion of women and foreigners) and the government provided fairly generous relief. The returning soldiers were victors, moreover, and the status of veteran, in what had been a socially heterogeneous army, translated into no single political identity.43 Labour unrest was another matter. The discontent which had been clearly signalled by both police intelligence and the CGT broke out in a disturbed May Day and a surge of strikes in May-June (accounting for nearly half the year’s strikes, and 62 per cent of strikers). In addition to being a continued reaction to inflation, the unrest also sprang from a sense of accumulated wartime sacrifice by the working class and from a demand for recognition of its social claims. This explains the ubiquitous call for the 8-hour day, as a response to physical ‘war weariness’ and also as a symbol of the workers’ claim to more leisure, better family conditions and an improved way of life.44 The state’s response was twofold. The strength of labour’s claims at this critical juncture of the reconversion to peace, with public order potentially threatened, thrust the ‘social question’ centre-stage. A

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temporary coalition of reforming forces—the CGT, civil servants from the Ministry of Labour, and some large-scale industrialists (including the influential professional organisations of coal and metallurgy) — found allies in Clemenceau and Loucheur, who understood the inescapable political necessity of the measure.45 The bulk of business opinion considered it a disaster in France’s reduced economic circumstances.46 But a consultative committee of labour and business representatives convoked by the Ministry of Labour won agreement for a bill which was rushed through Parliament in late April under threat of imminent CGT action. At the same time, an attempt was made to build on the corporatist tendencies of wartime labour relations. The 8-hour measure reinforced a law passed in March 1919 to promote collective bargaining, since it was to be implemented by regional agreements for each industry. 47 Much of the subsequent industrial conflict in May-June was related to this process. An unprecedented 557 collective contracts were signed in 1919, 331 involving reduction in work-time.48 Coercion was never absent as an option and, especially on May Day in Paris, there was a good deal of violence. But the government’s essential response in the late spring and early summer of 1919 was to reckon with the rapidly rising industrial strength of labour while choosing to acknowledge the legitimacy of a limited but permanent shift in the relationship of worker to employer, and of the working class to society at large. The 8-hour day was the high-water mark of post-war social reform. Although a Ministry of Hygiene and Social Assistance was created in 1920, it was another decade before the bases of national social insurance and housing policies were laid. Further social experimentation in the immediate post-war period was confined to the municipal level. The wider reform plans of the CGT, premissed on extended state involvement in the economy, were stranded by the reverse trend of state disengagement—a tendency which rapidly reduced the powers of the interventionalist ministries, Labour and Armaments (the latter becoming the much more marginal Ministry of Industrial Reconstitution before disappearing altogether in January 1920). Above all, employers who had been forced to concede wage increases and reductions in worktime for political reasons only awaited a change of economic conjuncture to curb the market strength of organised labour. By the winter of 1919–20, the state’s policy towards labour stood at a crossroads. Social reform to satisfy working-class aspirations and contain organised labour had been tested to its practical limits

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through the 8-hour day. Overall employer hostility to the measure was paralleled by strong parliamentary support for an end to economic controls. The conservative majority returned in the November general election made further major reforms unlikely. This did not necessarily invalidate the corporatist approach to labour relations. Legislation in 1920 sought to enhance both the juridical powers and liabilities of trade unions.49 New tripartite commissions on the wartime model were established in every département in February 1920 to monitor the cost of living.50 But the success of this approach during the war had turned on the state’s willingness to endorse basic trade union demands and apply pressure to employers. From the second half of 1919, the latter sought to reassert their authority against the unions. This was true even for heavy industry, which had absorbed wartime concessions most easily. 51 Against the continued development of mass trade unionism and in the face of a new wave of potentially revolutionary militancy, the state resolved its strategic quandary in favour of a repressive counter-offensive in conjunction with the employers. This dominated the final phase of its response to labour’s three-year surge of industrial strength. The railways provided the decisive battleground. They exemplified the low productivity and high costs which employers generally identified as the source of the post-war ‘crisis’. Heavily in deficit, their networks run down during the war, the private railway companies were squeezed between the demands of their workers and the imperative of returning to profitability.52 The state was deeply involved, both because it granted the (renewable) concessions to the companies to run the networks and because it had temporarily taken the system over during the war. It was thus preoccupied by the terms on which the railways were to be handed back to the companies as well as by their pivotal role in national reconstruction. The Millerand government of January 1920, and especially the ministry directly concerned, Public Works, were much more favourable to the companies and to the restoration of their authority than the Clemenceau administration had been in 1919.53 This reflected the conservative mood of the new parliament and the government’s clear commitment to ‘return to normal conditions of production and consumption’.54 The railways also focused the challenge of trade unionism to the state. With unionisation of 58 per cent in April 1920, the railway workers’ federation was a mass organisation.55 A strong reformist tradition placed the leadership firmly with the moderate CGT in demanding state action not only on professional issues but also to nationalise the industry. Additionally, there was a rapidly growing

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militant minority seeking to renew the revolutionary syndicalism of pre-war years. This was not confined to the cheminots (railway workers). Disorganised in the aftermath of the May 1918 strikes, industrial militancy revived in the metal industries in June 1919. In Paris, notably, the local metalworkers’ leadership lost control of a dispute over the implementation of the 8-hour day to revolutionary elements from the industrial suburbs.56 But it was above all the railway workforce, suddenly swollen (like the munitions centres during the war) by the recruitment of heterogeneous elements, to whom the established traditions of the industry and its unionism were alien, which provided the most fertile terrain for radical recruitment. Both the strength of trade unionism and the threat of revolutionary influence made a conflict inevitable. The railway strike which broke out in February 1920 none the less came as a surprise.57 Triggered by minor incidents, it spread rapidly and was made national on 27 February under strong pressure from the revolutionary minority. Although the strike never formally went beyond professional issues and remained under the control of the moderate national leadership, it revealed the extent of rank-and-file militancy and of a revived revolutionary syndicalism. It also demonstrated the potential of the railway workers’ federation for paralysing the transport system. Millerand, whose own past inclined him towards mediation in labour disputes, settled the strike in early March. But the government (and especially Le Trocquer, Minister of Public Works) collaborated with the railway companies deliberately to break the accord, especially its exemption of strikers from sanctions. The aim was to lance the boil of minority extremism at the almost inevitable cost of a renewed strike. Even Millerand refused further mediation, especially when, at the end of April, the revolutionaries won control of the national leadership.58 The conflict, however, was not two- but three-sided. The reformist majority of the CGT was on the defensive in early 1920, caught between revolutionary militancy and the employer counteroffensive against the gains of 1919. Although it continued to appeal to Millerand to maintain the interventionist posture of the wartime state, it also considered playing its trump card, the mass trade unionism which had emerged from the war. In late February, the CGT readied itself to declare a general strike in support of the railwaymen.59 When the revolutionary leaders of the railway workers’ federation launched a new strike on 1 May 1920, the reformist leadership of the CGT immediately converted it into a general strike for the nationalisation of the railways. Clearly intended to contain the revolutionary minority, the

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general strike also responded to the impasse of the majority by providing an industrial substitute for political action in favour of reform.60 The state, therefore, confronted not only the revolutionary threat of labour but also the consequences of reversing its own policy of ‘confidence’ in organised labour and of sympathetic intervention in industrial relations during and immediately after the war. In its own estimation, however, it was faced with the political use of industrial action in contravention of the fundamental trade union law of 1884, which restricted unions to purely professional concerns. Moreover, it had traditionally viewed the railways as a public service and national railway strikes (in 1898 and 1910) as intolerable attacks on the national interest.61 For a traditional threat, the state used traditional repression. In February, it prepared the mobilisation of the railwaymen (as in 1910) to bring them under military discipline.62 In both February and May, leading militants and those on picket lines were arrested for plotting against the security of the state or for obstructing the right to work. Dismissals of railway workers by the companies (18,000 after May) and other punishments were used to break up networks of militancy, with sanctions carefully graded to hit the most notorious militants hardest. In both strikes, police and gendarmes were used to protect the railway networks and maintain public order.63 But the state also innovated. The February strike revealed the insufficiency of the regular forces of order which had been a feature of major pre-war industrial conflicts and had resulted in recourse to the army (now heavily committed in Germany). An alternative, and novel, solution was inspired by the experience of mobilising civilian energies during the war. Use of civilian volunteers in the event of a general strike was first proposed by the Clemenceau government in September 1919. Plans for the emergency provisioning of each département from early February 1920 incorporated civilian resources. The flood of volunteers after an appeal from Millerand was one of the revelations of the February strike.64 In the period between the two strikes, the authorities together with the railway companies made a concerted effort to organise a civilian mobilisation capable of defeating a general stoppage. This took various forms. In Lyons, a private Civic Union had been founded in January to guard against ‘the revolution by way of a general strike’. Committed to maintaining essential services and reinforcing the forces of order, it operated during the February railway strike and was widely imitated, under the auspices of the Ministry of the

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Interior, before and during the general strike (the total of Civic Unions rose from 29 on 15 April to 65 on 14 May).65 The companies recruited specialists and over 9,000 technical students to service the railway system.66 Patriotic groups, the more conservative veterans organisations, and women’s voluntary nursing and aid associations also lent their support. In essence, the state tapped a strong current of elite and bourgeois solidarity against what was presented as an attack on the social and political order. The government also monitored public opinion along wartime lines, enabling it to judge its counter-offensive in a wider context. At the end of March, the Minister of the Interior asked the prefects of each département about the local nature of strikes, the outlook of the working class and other classes, and the likelihood of attempted revolution. The prefects identified the cheminots as the principal vector of union militancy. They indicated that local trade unionism in 32 per cent of départements either belonged to the revolutionary minority of the CGT or was impregnated with revolutionary language, but suggested that in only ten départements (13 per cent) was there any risk of an independent revolutionary initiative. Much more seriously, they felt that in twenty-eight départements (36 per cent) the local unions would obey a general strike order from the CGT.67 This suggested that the fundamental danger came from the labour discipline and solidarity built up over the previous three years, which threatened the entire economy and which the revolutionary minority might use to amplify its own influence. As Steeg, Minister of the Interior, summed it up during the general strike: Inspired by ideas from the Orient which have found a few conscious agents among us and a far greater number of blind instruments, a struggle has been fomented against the economic vitality of the fatherland.68 At the same time, the prefects pointed to the peasantry’s near-universal hostility to the idea of revolution (and sometimes to proletarians as such) and to the strong attachment to the established order of the bourgeoisie and classes moyennes (lower middle class), except for a minority of white-collar workers. The solidarity of the railwaymen and of the other workers called out on strike in successive waves by the CGT—although it varied by region and by service or sector—came nowhere near the economic paralysis feared by the authorities. The civic counter-mobilisation by the state, the social isolation of the strikers suggested by the prefects’ reports,

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and the internal divisions and confusion of the CGT, all contributed to the weakness of the action. The government rejected attempts by the CGT leadership to negotiate a settlement, choosing instead to seek the dissolution of the confederation under the 1884 law. Faced with the gradual erosion of the movement, the CGT was forced to order a return to work on 21 May, with the cheminots continuing until 28 May. The comprehensive defeat by the state of both moderate and revolutionary variants of trade unionism precipitated a rapid decline of union numbers ahead of the 1920–1 slump and prepared the way for the schism of the CGT. The war created an essentially artificial situation, judged by longerterm trends. It temporarily overcame the organisational weakness of both business and labour and provided the state with the means and motive for effective, institutionalised intervention in labour relations which had largely eluded it in the pre-war years. Exceptional situations generate their own lessons, and reforming elements within the state sought to translate aspects of wartime corporatism into peacetime arrangements, both by promoting more rational business representation and by consolidating a moderate, ‘responsible’ trade unionism pursuing legitimate concerns under the 1884 law. In the absence of a history of the Ministry of Labour in these years, it is not possible to say how effective the conciliatory state approach to labour relations in the private sector proved to be in the 1920s. Though its scope was clearly reduced by the reversal of trade union strength after 1920, it was pursued in the public sector and it revived in 1936, during the Popular Front. But the war also affected the other components of the challenge of labour. Pacifism and Bolshevism revived the autonomous revolutionary references of much of French working-class culture and triggered in turn a conservative obsession with international conspiracies and insurrection. In reality, such fears expressed deep resistance to claims for a change in the power and status of labour as much as a rational assessment of the likelihood of revolution. They helped mark the boundary of the underlying social compact in France which limited social reform and left the working class isolated. This explains the optical illusion of contemporary conservatives who could discern only the long arm of Moscow in the growth of the CGT or in its demands for substantial reform. Of course, the state and many employers were more discerning about the nature and scale of the revolutionary threat. But once the exceptional dynamic of wartime mobilisation receded, revealing the more permanent contours of French class relations, the state found that

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its latitude to accommodate the wartime status of labour and embark on social reform was severely restricted. At the same time, the threat to public order and economic recovery of mass trade unionism, as well as the more obvious menace from revolutionary labour, tilted the balance of government policy in favour of repression until labour’s strength had been destroyed. NOTES 1 J.Julliard, Clemenceau, briseur de grèves (Paris, 1964). 2 M.-G.Dézès, ‘Participation et démocratie sociale: l’expérience Briand de 1909’, Le Mouvement social 87 (1974), pp. 109–36; J.A.Tournerie, Le Ministère du travail: origines et premiers développements (Paris, 1971). 3 J.Stone, The Search for Social Peace: Reform Legislation in France, 1890–1914 (Albany, NY, 1985). 4 J.Rougerie, Procès des communards (Paris, 1964). 5 Notably through the episode of the national workshops, broken up in June 1848 as potentially revolutionary concentrations of organised labour (M.Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852, tr. Janet Lloyd, (Cambridge, 1983 [1973]), pp. 36–7, 56–7. 6 M.Perrot, Workers on Strike: France, 1871–1890, tr. Chris Turner (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1987 [1984]), pp. 227–42. 7 J . J u l l i a r d , ‘ T h é o r i e s y n d i c a l i s t e r é vo l u t i o n n a i r e e t p r a t i q u e gréviste’, in J.Julliard, Autonomie ouvrière (Paris, 1988), pp. 43– 68; S.Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y Fra n c e ( N ew H ave n , C o n n . , 1 9 8 1 ) , p p . 189–97. 8 J.-L.Robert, La Scission syndicale de 1921: essai de reconnaissance de formes (Paris, 1980), pp. 159–60. 9 J.-L.Robert, ‘Les Luttes ouvrières en France pendant la première guerre mondiale’, Cahiers d’histoire de l’institut Maurice Thorez 23 (1977), pp. 28–65; P.Fridenson, ‘The impact of the First World War on French workers’, in R.Wall and J.Winter (eds), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 239–40. 10 ibid., pp. 236–8; K.Amdur, Syndicalist Legacy: Trade Unions and Politics in Two French Cities in the Era of World War I (Urbana, Ill., 1986); J.Bond-Howard, ‘Le Syndicalisme minoritaire dans les usines d’armement de Bourges de 1914 à 1918’, Le Mouvement social 148 (1989), pp. 33–62; J.-L.Robert, ‘Ouvriers et mouvements ouvriers parisiens pendant la grande guerre et l’immédiat aprèsguerre’, doctoral thesis, University of Paris I, 1989; J.-L.Robert, ‘Women and work in France during the First World War’, in Wall and Winter (eds) op. cit., pp. 251–66; J.Horne, ‘Immigrant workers in France during World War I’, French Historical Studies 14, 1 (1985), pp. 57–88. 11 G.Ribeill, Les Cheminots en guerre, 1914–1920 (Paris, 1988).

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12 M.Rebérioux and P.Fridenson, ‘Albert Thomas, pivot du réformisme français’, Le Mouvement social 87 (1974), pp. 85–97; A.Hennebicque, ‘Albert Thomas et le régime des usines de guerre, 1915–17’, in P. Fridenson (ed.), 1914–1918: l’autre front (Cahiers du Mouvement social) (Paris, 1977), pp. 80–109; M.Fine, ‘Guerre et réformisme en France, 1914–1918’, in L.Murard and P.Zylberman (eds), ‘Le Soldat du travail’, Recherches 32–3 (1978), pp. 305–24. 13 J.Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1991), ch. 7. 14 J.-J.Becker, Le Carnet B: les pouvoirs publics et l’antimilitarisme avant la guerre de 1914 (Paris, 1973); J.-J.Becker, 1914: comment les français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris, 1977); J.Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France, vol. 2, De 1914 à nos jours (Paris, 1975), pp. 9–12. 15 A.Kriegel, Aux Origines du communisme français (Paris, 1964), vol. 2; A.Kriegel, ‘L’Opinion publique française et la révolution r u s s e ’ , i n V. Fa y e t a l ( e d s ) , L a R é v o l u t i o n d ’ o c t o b re e t l e m o u v e m e n t o u v r i e r e u ro p é e n ( Pa r i s , 1 9 6 7 ) , p p . 7 5 – 1 0 4 ; G.Frischmann, ‘La Révolution d’octobre 1917 et les syndicats français’, Cahiers de l’Institut CGT d’histoire sociale 3 (1982), pp. 11–30; K.Amdur, ‘La Tradition révolutionnaire entre syndicalisme et communisme dans la France de l’entre-deuxguerres’, Le Mouvement social 139 (1987), pp. 27–50; D.Berry, ‘The response of the French Anarchist Movement to the Russian revolution (1917–24) and to the Spanish revolution and civil war’, (DPhil thesis, University of Sussex, 1989), pp. 222–8. 16 A.F.Calhoun, ‘The politics of internal order: French government and revolutionary labor, 1898–1914’, PhD thesis, University of Princeton, 1973. 17 Archive of Service historique de l’armée de terre (hereafter cited as SHAT) (Vincennes), 7N 432, for exemptions. 18 P.Renouvin, The Forms of War Government in France (New Haven, Conn., 1927), pp. 27–52. 19 L.-J.Malvy, Mon Crime (Paris, 1921); Horne, Labour at War, ch. 2. 20 Simiand was the librarian of the Ministry of Labour as well as professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and, with Roques, became Thomas’s key collaborator. All three were alumni of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Arthur Fontaine, director of the Ministry of Labour, and Charles Dulot of the same ministry, both worked closely with Thomas during the war. 21 W.Oualid and C.Picquenard, Salaires et tarifs: conventions collectives et grèves (la politique du ministère de l’armement et du ministère du travail) (Paris, 1928). For contrasting views of wartime ‘corporatism’, see M.Fine, ‘Towards corporatism: the movement for capital-labour collaboration in France 1914–1936’, PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., 1971, and Horne, Labour at War, ch. 7. 22 Postal control and military reports on internal opinion ceased in mid-1919. But the more co-ordinated approach to police and prefects’ reports, initiated in 1917, continued.

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23 R.Picard, Les Grèves et la guerre (Paris, 1917), pp. 17–18; C.Morel, ‘Le Mouvement socialiste et syndicaliste en 1917 dans la région parisienne’, DES dissertation, University of Paris, 1958, p. 65–88; M. Dubesset, F.Thébaud and C.Vincent, ‘Les Munitionnettes de la Seine’, in Fridenson (ed.), 1914–1918: L’autre front, pp. 213–15; Robert, ‘Ouvriers et mouvement ouvrier parisiens’, pp. 1489–583. 24 Archives Nationales (herafter cited as AN) F22 170, reports on the clothing strikes; AN F7 13366, reports on the Paris munitions strike; Malvy, op. cit., pp. 60–74. 25 P.Renouvin, ‘L’Opinion publique et la guerre en 1917’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (January-March 1968), pp. 4– 23; J.-J. Becker, The Great War and the French People tr. Arnold Pomereins (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1985 [1980]), pp. 204–20. 26 G.Pedroncini, Les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris, 1967). 27 SHAT 16N 1538; Becker, The Great War and the French People, part 3, ch. 3. 28 Malvy, op. cit., pp. 77–9; H.Maunoury, Police de guerre, 1914–1919 (Paris: 1937), pp. 116–18; R.Poincaré, Au Service de la France, vol. ix, L’Année trouble: 1917 (Paris, 1932), pp. 154, 171–2; Pedroncini, op. cit., pp. 281–8. 29 D.R.Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London, 1974), pp. 286–7; J.-B.Duroselle, Clemenceau (Paris, 1988), pp. 610–37. 30 L.Loucheur, Carnets secrets 1908–1932 (Brussels, 1962); J.-M. Chevrier, ‘Le Rôle de Louis Loucheur dans l’économie de guerre, 1914–1918’, Maîtrise dissertation, University of Paris X-Nanterre, 1972; S.D.Carls, ‘Louis Loucheur: a French technocrat in government, 1916–1920’, PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1982. 31 AN F7 13366, reports on the September strike; Loucheur, op. cit., pp. 45–6; Carls, op. cit., pp. 180–1, 187; Robert, ‘Ouvriers et mouvement ouvrier parisiens’, pp. 667–8. 32 G.Hatry, ‘Les Délégués d’atelier aux usines de Renault’, in Fridenson (ed.), 1914–1918: l’autre front, pp. 222–35;Horne, Labour at War, pp. 176–96. 33 G.Clemenceau, Discours de guerre (Paris, 1934), p. 106 (speech of 22 July 1917). 34 AN 94 AP 139 (Thomas papers), Thomas to Clemenceau, 7 December 1917; G.Raffaelli, ‘Les Mouvements pacifistes dans les usines d’armement de la région de Saint-Etienne’, Actes du 98 e congrès national des sociétés savantes (Saint-Etienne, 1973), vol. ii, pp. 221–37; Becker, The Great War and the French People, pp. 266–76. 35 Horne, Labour at War, pp. 156–8, 183–6 and 212–4, for the CDS. 36 AN F7 13367 (for Paris); R.Picard, Le Mouvement syndical durant la guerre (Paris, 1927), p. 115; Raffaelli, op. cit.; Carls, op. cit., p. 252; Hatry, op. cit., pp. 232–5; Becker, The Great War and the French People, p. 289; Amdur, Syndicalist Legacy, pp. 92–3; BondHoward, op. cit.; Robert, ‘Ouvriers et mouvement ouvrier parisiens’, pp. 1674–5, 93.

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37 AN F7 13372, ‘La Propagande pacifiste: dans les milieux ouvriers’; J.Horne, ‘ “L’impôt du sang”: Republican rhetoric and industrial warfare in France, 1914–1918’, Social History, 14, 2 (1989), p. 221. 38 A Ferry, Les Carnets secrets d’Abel Ferry, 1914–1918 (Paris, 1957), p. 220. 39 The Left (CGT, Socialists and some Radicals) established a Coalition républicaine in February 1918 as an expression of this alternative version of the war effort, and actively campaigned on behalf of Malvy (Horne, Labour at War, pp. 172–6). 40 See in particular the union’s periodical, Toute la France debout pour la Victoire du Droit, which in the first few months of peace saw Bolshevism as a continuation of German wartime attempts to sabotage France. Anti-communism and social fear are treated more generally in S. Berstein and J.-J.Becker, L’Anti-Communisme en France, vol. 1 (Paris, 1987), esp. 63–86 . 41 AN F7 13090, ‘La Propagande bolchéviste en France’. 42 AN F7 13090, reports of the Ministry of War, 3 March, 10 March and 6 August 1919, on pro-Bolshevik propaganda in the army; Archives Départementales (hereafter cited as AD) Bas-Rhin (Strasbourg), AL 121 870, reports on prisoners and on the army of occupation; Kriegel, Aux Origines du communisme français, vol. ii, pp. 555–74, for contacts with Moscow. 43 P.Masson, La Marine française et la mer noire (Paris, 1982); A.Prost, ‘Die Demobilmachung, der Staat und die Kriegsteilnehmer in Frankreich ’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983), pp. 178–94. 44 G.Cross, A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), chs 6 and 7. 45 Ministère du Travail, ‘Travaux préparatoires de la loi du 23 avril 1919 (Paris, 1919); J.Cavaillé, La Journée de huit heures: la loi du 23 avril 1919 (Paris, 1919); J.-J.Mordacq, Le Ministère Clemenceau: journal d’un témoin, vol. iii, novembre 1918–juin 1919 (Paris, 1931), pp. 251–3; I.Lespinet, ‘La Journée de huit heures’, Maîtrise dissertation, University of Paris X-Nanterre, 1985. 46 E.g. inquiry conducted by La Journée industrielle, 16 February–18 April 1919. 47 G.Pirou, ‘The theory of the collective labour contract in France’, International Labour Review (January 1922), p. 37. 48 Bulletin du Ministère du Travail, June–August 1919, pp. 301–5, and November–December 1920, pp. 506–7; Oualid and Picquenard, op. cit., pp. 493–7. 49 A.Rossiter, ‘Experiments with corporatist politics in republican France 1916–1939’, PhD thesis, University of Oxford , 1986, pp. 73–126. 50 AD Ille-et-Vilaine, 6M 743, Commission d’études relatives au coût de la vie chère. 51 E.g. Union des Industries Minières et Métallurgiques (employer body dealing with labour issues), Assemblée générale du 17 février 1920 (Paris, 1920), pp. 5–8; Assemblée générale du 15 février 1921 (Paris, 1921), pp. 3–7; R.Pinot (secretary of the Comité des Forges, the ironmasters’ overall professional body), ‘Le Chef dans la grande

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55 56

57

58 59

60 61 62 63 64

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John Horne industrie’, Revue de France, 15 March 1921, pp. 109–22; G.Lefranc, Les Organisations patronales en France du passé au présent (Paris, 1976), pp. 74–5; C.Paillat, 1919: les illusions de la gloire (Paris, 1979), pp. 458–67. International Labour Office, Enquête sur la production, 5 vols (Paris, 1923–5), for the ‘crisis of productivity’. A.Dauzet, Le Siècle des chemins de fer en France (1821–1938) (Paris, 1948), pp. 269–77; Ribeill, op. cit., pp. 205, 220–1. AN 470 AP 55 (Millerand papers), ‘Note sur la politique économique’; Journal Officiel, Chambre des Députés, Débats, 22 January 1920, pp. 15–16; C.S.Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, NJ, 1975), pp. 91–109; R.F.Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 62–71. Ribeill, op. cit., p. 228. B.Abhervé, ‘Les origines de la grève des métallurgistes parisiens, juin 1919’, Le Mouvement social 93 (1975), pp. 75–85; J.-P.Brunet, Saint Denis, la ville rouge: socialisme et communisme dans la banlieue ouvrière, 1890–1939 (Paris, 1980), pp. 210–32; Robert, ‘Ouvriers et mouvement ouvrier parisiens’, pp. 1910–25. For the strikes of 1920, see A.Jones ‘The French railway strikes of January–May 1920: new syndicalist ideas and emergent communism’, French Historical Studies 12, 4 (1982), pp. 508–40; A Kriegel, La Grève des cheminots 1920 (Paris, 1988), a reprint of the relevant section of vol. ii of Aux Origines du communisme français; Ribeill, op. cit., pp. 211–306. Kriegel, La Grève des cheminots, pp. 104–6; Ribeill, op. cit., pp. 252–61. AN 470 AP 55, Jouhaux to Millerand, 21 February and 20 March 1920; AN F7 13924, ‘La CGT et la grève générale des cheminots’, 28 February 1920; AN 470 AP 55, note of the Ministry of the Interior, 20 March 1920. CGT, L’Action confédérale et la grève des cheminots (Paris, 1920), pp. 16–20. See the speeches of Millerand, Le Trocquer and Steeg to Parliament during the May strike, published as La Nation et les grèves (Paris, 1920). AN 470 AP 55, ‘Appel sous le drapeau des cheminots en cas de grève’, 27 February 1920. AN F7 13924, dossier of proceedings relating to February; Kriegel, La Grève des cheminots, pp. 66–8, 120–32, 189–94; Ribeill, op. cit., pp. 215–25, 252–65. AN F7 14608, ‘Grèves des services publics; personnel de remplacement… ’, (manuscript historical review by the direction of the Sûreté Générale, February 1921); Journal Officiel, Chambre des Députés, Débats, 28 February 1920, p. 368 (Millerand’s appeal). AN F7 14608, various documents on the civic unions of Lyons and Paris, and on their extension to other centres; AN F7 14608, ‘Note pour l’organisation des unions civiques en province’ (15 April

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figure); Le Temps, 14 May (for the May figure); Kriegel, La Grève des cheminots, pp. 109–12. 66 ibid., pp. 116–20. 67 AN 12970–13023 (and 13963 for the Rhône). The reports have been found for 77 out of 89 départements, and the percentages refer to this base. 68 Journal Officiel, Chambre des Députés, Débats, 20 May 1920, p. 1579.

14 The state and the challenge of labour in Britain 1917–20 Chris Wrigley

In Britain, during the latter part of the First World War and the two years after it, the propertied classes felt very threatened by the new strength of organised labour. Such concern was reinforced by an awareness of breakdowns of the social order in other parts of Europe. Lloyd George’s coalition government was adroit in taking short-term measures to cope with specific crises. It also adapted the powers and practices of the British state in order to be prepared to deal with more serious challenges. Given the revolutions and threats of revolution in central and eastern Europe, it is not surprising that many in authority in Britain were fearful of revolutionary movements in Britain. Such fears reached a peak in the first three months after the Armistice, when numerous leading members of the government expressed concern about the spread of Bolshevism in Britain. Thus Walter Long, the First Lord of the Admiralty, sent Lloyd George a series of alarmist memoranda. These included one of early January 1919, written by an anonymous secret service agent, which claimed that there were currently more Bolsheviks per head of population in Britain than there had been in Russia, and warned that if the government failed to take firm steps ‘there will be some sort of revolution in this country…before twelve months are past’.1 Though such fears were expressed at various times, especially after the Armistice, there does not appear to have been a potentially revolutionary situation in Britain.2 There was not an overall crisis of the old regime. Britain’s ruling class had not lost the war. Indeed Lloyd George, dubbed the Man Who Won the War, was firmly in charge, and had won a landslide victory in the general election of December 1918. Nor were the British people subjected to the Allied blockade or (excluding Ireland) to civil war. There were occasional disturbances in the big cities, notably Glasgow, Belfast and Liverpool, but there was never a wide-ranging and menacing upsurge of civil unrest.

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Nevertheless the British government was, on occasion, very alarmed at the challenge of the labour movement. There were two periods of special concern. The first was in late 1917 and early 1918 (up to the German offensive of 21 March 1918). This was to do with war weariness, concern at the wider incidence of conscription, scepticism as to the altruism of Britain’s war aims and a variety of industrial and social grievances. The second period was from the Armistice into 1920. This was more serious, especially in 1919. Then labour’s pent-up demands, which had been partly restrained during the war, were pressed from a position of strength in the post-war economic boom. The labour movement was determined not only to defend what had been won during the war, but to press for more pay, shorter hours, other improvements in working conditions and greater participation in the running of industry and to oppose British intervention in Russia and repression of nationalists in Ireland. In reality there was not one unified challenge by labour, but two or three. One major challenge was a constitutional challenge, by the Labour Party, which aimed at achieving majorities in Parliament and local government, and whose major figures were embarrassed by talk of ‘direct action’ and confrontation with employers. A second challenge was industrial, with the scale and success of industrial action seeming to change the balance of power in industry and appearing to offer a prospect of changing it in society as a whole. Linked to that, in a somewhat blurred fashion, was a revolutionary challenge, in reality of no great dimension but nevertheless providing a matter for anxiety in governing circles. I

THE REVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGE

Before the 1917 revolutions in Russia, the British government had been concerned about the coming together of various strands of dissent in Britain. From 1915 there had been talk of revolutionary socialism being a major influence in fostering industrial unrest in South Wales and the Clyde area. After the introduction of conscription in 1916 the government feared that anti-war propagandists, such as the No Conscription Fellowship and the Union of Democratic Control, might combine with industrial militants and, building on economic and social grievances, become a serious challenge. In December 1916, at the time when Lloyd George took over the premiership, one secret service writer was describing the situation as a crisis. His memorandum observed:

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The outstanding feature of the strike movement we are now considering and the one which differentiates the present situation from all previous troubles is the essential fact that the driving force behind this agitation is not an economic question at all, but has its roots as well as its cohesive force in widespread antagonism to the Military Service Act and in a common determination to withstand the advent of industrial conscription…. Every turn that is given to the screw of the Military Service Act swells the ranks of the movement and hardens the animosity of the extremists. As food gets dearer the economic factor will come into play and add its quota to what is already a sufficiently formidable combination.3 Fears of this kind were heightened during 1917. Before the major engineering strikes in May 1917, Lloyd George told the War Cabinet that ‘he had received indications from several sources of a very considerable and highly organised labour movement with seditious tendencies, which was developing in many industrial centres’. He observed that ‘At bottom there appeared to be genuine and legitimate grievances, but there was a danger of these being exploited by violent anarchists’.4 In the event the scale of unrest in the engineering centres in May 1917 surprised the militant shop stewards’ movement but it was not a revolutionary challenge. Similarly the famous Leeds Convention of 3 June 1917 was not in itself seen as a serious threat to the established order. At it resolutions were passed welcoming the February Russian revolution and calling on the British Government to follow the Russian government’s lead on foreign policy and war aims, to end the wartime system of compulsion within Britain, and, most notably, for ‘the formation of local workmen’s and soldiers’ councils’. It brought together revolutionaries and constitutionalists. But as Lloyd George observed, ‘as very many of the “delegates” attending it were individual enthusiasts who came without authority or instructions from any organised bodies, their votes bound no one but themselves’. The War Cabinet only took the precaution of requesting that the Secretary of State for War should enforce the King’s Regulations ‘to ensure that no soldiers in uniform attended the conference’ and censoring press reports of the speeches afterwards. The authorities were also quick to use the King’s Regulations to end attempts at forming workers’ and soldiers’ councils at Tunbridge Wells and Birmingham after the Leeds Convention.5

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By late 1917 the government was proposing to tighten the screw of conscription further to meet the manpower needs on the Western Front and was concerned at growing unrest in industry. In October Lloyd George was posing ‘the question…whether the people of these islands are prepared to undergo hardships and privations to see this thing through’. The government’s fear appears to have been less of revolutionary activists making any serious headway than that conditions could deteriorate and create opportunities for them. Thus George Barnes, the Labour War Cabinet member, wrote to Lloyd George observing that the majority of the working class ‘are as yet quite sound, but…the pacifist element is amongst them and there is a great deal of war weariness which might easily be turned to disaffection by any great reverse or untoward circumstances here at home’. The German offensive of 21 March 1918, which threatened to bring Germany victory in the west, revived British public support for the war. As Lloyd George later wrote, the measures taken that spring ‘were measures which only that crisis rendered psychologically possible. Had any attempt been made to enforce them previously, it would have provoked civil disturbance and domestic collapse.’6 Thus during the First World War, as far as revolutionary considerations were concerned, the government’s main concern was to do with preventing conditions from deteriorating to such an extent as to undermine morale and public order. As for revolutionary, or suspected revolutionary, groups, it monitored their activities and, on occasion, arrested people under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). Internal surveillance was extended further than its pre-war concerns of anarchists and Irish activists. By spring 1917 MI5 had compiled 250,000 cards and 27,000 personal files, going well beyond the estimated 70,000 adult enemy aliens resident in Britain at the outbreak of war. As well as MI5, several ministries and sections of the armed services were involved in surveillance of labour by 1917.7 In arresting the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee and deporting them in March 1915, the government felt it was dealing firmly with revolutionaries. Asquith reported to the king: It was shown that the principal danger of the situation depends not so much on the proceedings of the small (by comparison) number of workmen holding syndicalist views and revolutionary aims, as on the fear that the vastly larger body of patriotic and loyal trade unionists may be deluded by misrepresentation of the facts into expressing sympathy with the violent minority, believing them to be unjustly treated.8

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The government chose the unusual procedure of deportation rather than putting them on trial, as a trial would involve a delay of at least six weeks. The government also arrested individuals and closed down socialist newspapers under the powers of DORA. Thus in August 1917 E.D.Morel, secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, was arrested and, after a trial, sent to prison for six months for a technical breach of DORA. John Maclean, the Clydeside socialist, was sentenced to a total of eight years in prison during the war (of which he served twenty-two months) for opposition to recruiting and later to conscription, inciting soldiers and munitions workers not to do their duty, and sedition.9 The government also responded to what it deemed to be subversive views by approving internal propaganda. Immediately after the May 1917 engineering strikes were called off the War Cabinet discussed the activities of conscientious objectors. The Home Secretary observed ‘that whereas religious objectors were generally harmless, if abnormal, political objectors were often dangerous propagandists and their conduct in work centres constituted a grave scandal’. In early June the War Cabinet agreed ‘that the time had come to undertake an active campaign to counteract the pacifist movement, which at present had the field to itself’.10 This was undertaken by the National War Aims Committee (NWAC), an organisation based like the earlier Parliamentary Recruiting Committee on the constituency organisations of the political parties. It was formally launched by Lloyd George on 4 August 1917. Those in charge of official government propaganda tried to maintain a distance from the NWAC—but it did receive government funding and it did organise mobile cinema units which put on free showings of films supplied by the Ministry of Information (which was formed in March 1918). It did not confine its attention to pacifists. It was quick to direct campaigns to areas where there were strikes or complaints of low industrial productivity. Both John Buchan and Lord Beaverbrook, who successively were in charge of government propaganda from February 1917, recognised that for both external and internal propoganda the prime consideration was to disguise the source.11 For all the government’s concern, during the First World War the majority of the British working class continued to support the war until the end. The view of the government was probably that of Sir David Shackleton of the Ministry of Labour—that there was no serious likelihood of revolution ‘if the workers are convinced that the government is earnestly and sympathetically seeking a thorough

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remedy for the evils which undoubtedly exist’.12 The government did take steps to deal with high rent rises in 1915 and to investigate the wider causes of the May 1917 engineering strikes. The unrest of 1917 ensured that the government gave added emphasis to its post-war reconstruction plans. As in the Second World War, the promise of the fairer and better world to come was extremely important in maintaining working-class morale during wartime tribulations. The government, as in the Second World War, was also happy to trade on the popularity of the monarchy, encouraging royal visits to industrial areas during and after the war. With the Armistice in November 1918 such restraints as the war had engendered were removed. The continuation of intervention in Russia widened doubts as to the altruism of Britain’s war aims. After the hardships of the war and well-founded tales of profiteering among some of the rich, arguments for a major redistribution of wealth and power had special potency. The combination of specific industrial grievances, accumulated and bottled-up economic and social grievances from the war years, and awareness of dramatic events on the continent of Europe and in Ireland, all gave the unrest of 1919 a specially menacing character as far as the government and the propertied classes were concerned. Moreover, in the post-war economic boom Labour was in a strong position to press its demands. One area of major concern for the government was unrest in the forces of law and order. In the case of the army, there were several grounds for concern. First, there were the serious incidents over demobilisation in early January 1919, with troops demonstrating in Whitehall, Dover, other parts of England and Calais. While senior military men could warn that a soldiers’ delegation to the War Office ‘bore a dangerous resemblance to a soviet’, these demonstrations could be defused by more acceptable plans for demobilisation.13 However, the continuing unrest at Calais gave greater concern later in the month, as the mutinies there threatened supplies to other British forces on the continent, they occurred at the time of the major strikes in Belfast and Glasgow and the men’s demands included political issues. They asked not only for better pay and conditions and quicker demobilisation, but also recognition of their soldiers’ council and permission to attend the ‘Hands Off Russia’ rally at the Albert Hall, organised by the British Socialist Party.14 Second, there was also great concern about attempts to introduce trade unionism into the army. Sometime in late 1918 or early 1919 a body called the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen’s Union (SSAU) was

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formed. While this did not develop into a major body within the armed forces as the Police Union did within the police, nevertheless it was a potential focus for dissent. The authorities came to feel there was a ‘Bolshevik element’ in it, and took action against it when it became involved in moves to encourage men to discharge themselves from the army on 11 May 1919 (six months after the Armistice, i.e. arguably in line with the terms of enlistment under the Derby scheme which spoke of a duration of no more than six months ‘after the termination of hostilities’).15 Third, there was sporadic unrest among the armed forces over state policy. Troops exhausted by the war with Germany were not eager to volunteer for service in Russia. Rumours that men would be sent there rather than be demobilised had been among the causes of the mutinies of January 1919. In Russia itself there were several mutinies. There were also several similar incidents in the navy. While most dissent over state policy concerned Russia, some members of Irish regiments were appalled by British counter-terror in Ireland. In the Punjab a battalion of the Connaught Rangers mutinied, partly in protest at use of the Black and Tans. In the case of the police force, the government was taken by surprise in August 1918 by an effective strike over pay in London. Lloyd George sacked the Commissioner and settled the strike on terms favourable to the men. In so doing he made ambiguous remarks as to the rights of men to form a union, but was clear in saying that there could be no recognition in wartime. However, in March 1919 the War Cabinet announced that it would not recognise the union. Marston, the secretary of the Police Union, had undoubtedly encouraged them in this decision by speaking in front of Lloyd George at the National Industrial Conference of earlier ‘deliberate and persistent misdirection of the police in times of labour troubles’. He had also declared that ‘Henceforward the government must not use the Police Force as a tool against other sections of the nation’. Lloyd George, however, had probably decided to take a tough line with the Police Union at the time of the 1918 strike. For he appointed General Sir Nevil Macready as Commissioner; a man who had gained a tough reputation in dealing with strikers before the war. Faced with what were deemed to be serious threats to the reliability of the forces of law and order in carrying out government orders, the government response was firm indeed. In the cases of the mutinies at Calais in late January 1919 and in the Punjab in 1920, the dissidents’ camps were surrounded by brigades with machine-guns. There, as in Russia, those who were considered to be the ringleaders

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were brought before courts martial, and given exemplary sentences. In Russia, over a period of six months, eighty-seven men were courtmartialed, with thirteen receiving death sentences (later commuted). Of those men tried in the Punjab, fourteen received death sentences. For thirteen of these men, the sentences were commuted; but James Daly, an articulate nationalist, was executed. In the case of the Police Union, Macready laid careful plans during the months between the 1918 and 1919 strikes. When the police went on strike again all strikers were dismissed, regardless of years of previous service and good conduct. Macready ruthlessly broke the strike, and the government permitted only the tame Police Federation to represent those in the police.16 In addition, given doubts in early 1919 as to whether service personnel could be relied on to maintain ‘essential services’ during major strikes, the government created a strike-breaking organisation: the Supply and Transportation Organisation. In facing a strike by London underground workers and a threatened one by electricity power-station workers, doubts were expressed in the War Cabinet as to whether service personnel would help keep power-stations running and drive military transport to enable people to get to work. On the latter proposal Austen Chamberlain warned that ‘if the attempt to use soldiers for this purpose failed it might well lead to soldiers refusing to act in support of law and order, which they had hitherto, and notably at Glasgow, never failed to do’. Given the unrest in the armed forces and the example of Russia, the government looked to organising civilians for dealing with such industrial emergencies. By 7 February Hamar Greenwood (Under-Secretary at the Home Office) could advise the War Cabinet that a register had been made of ‘the names and addresses of large numbers of outside skilled men who would form the nucleus’ of such an organisation.17 Lloyd George later claimed that ‘before the end of the war preparations were being made by my Cabinet to meet any industrial crisis which would involve interference with the transport and food supplies of the country’. This may be the case. But there is little sign of such planning until the industrial crises of February 1919. The resulting Supply and Transport Organisation was used in the autumn of 1919 in order (as Lloyd George later put it) ‘to prevent the railway strike of 1919 from starving the nation’.18 Then the organisation used large quantities of military equipment, vehicles and some personnel as a nucleus, before adding to it civilian volunteers and their cars and lorries. Arthur Henderson, the secretary of the Labour Party, commented that he ‘realised that the government was better situated to

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meet a strike than they ever had been before, since the war machine could be put into operation against the men and could be used to smash the trade unions’.19 Thus in government eyes a key issue, naturally, was whether it could maintain essential services and social order if there was a crisis in British society. In early 1919 there were grounds for concern about the limits of obedience in the forces of law and order. Where dissent went beyond matters such as pay and conditions, it was stamped out firmly. Moreover, the government was quick to organise an alternative source of power. It enlisted civilians to break major strikes by organised labour (in 1919 by railwaymen; later, in 1926, the general strike). A serious threat to the established order in Britain would include widespread working-class unrest, either serious social disorder or major strike movements. In 1919 there were major strikes and threats of strikes, but none on its own amounted to a revolutionary threat. Yet cumulatively the unrest was substantial. There were the major strikes in Belfast and Glasgow of late January 1919, which broadened out beyond the engineers. In Belfast the strike for a 44-hour week soon became a general strike in the city and displayed some features of organisation which were to be common in many local strike committees during the general strike in 1926. Thus the Chief Secretary for Ireland informed the War Cabinet, ‘The workmen had formed a “Soviet” Committee, and this committee had received forty-seven applications from small traders for permission to use light.’ In Glasgow the strike action was less widespread, but the raising of the red flag on the City Hall and the overreaction of the authorities generally gave developments there special notoriety.20 A second major area of concern for the authorities was the threat of the Triple Alliance—of united action by miners, railwaymen and dockers. Moreover, this had a further dimension to it, in that strike action was threatened on two occasions in pursuit of what the government saw to be political demands: nationalisation of the mines and changes in government policy towards Russia and Ireland. In 1920, with the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign there was surprisingly wide-ranging support in the Labour movement for such ‘direct action’. The most famous incident was the refusal in May 1920 of East London dockers to load with ammunition and supplies the Jolly George, a ship which was bound for Poland to help that country’s campaign against Russia.21 A further threatening dimension of strikes in 1919 was the sheer number of them. In 1919 there were 1,352 strikes, involving some

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2,591,000 workpeople with a loss of 34,969,000 working days. In 1920 there were 1,607 strikes, involving some 1,932,000 workpeople with a loss of 26,568,000 working days. These figures were to be far higher than those for the 1920s and 1930s (excluding the general strike) and bore a worrying resemblance to those for the 1911 to 1913 period. Taken with the enhanced strength of the trade unions and the fastemerging political strength of the Labour Party, the strikes were alarming to the propertied classes. Whether such strikes presaged a major threat to the existing social order is another matter. Jim Cronin, in discussing the origins of the new militancy, has speculated: One possibility is that there is, or was, a certain threshold of working-class organisational strength, before which struggle is largely defensive and incapable of shifting the overall balance of social power, but beyond which the power of the workers becomes a more distinct threat to the prevailing social order, and that such a threshold was crossed in Britain during the war. The second possibility is that the war itself was the key factor in transforming strikes, both because of the edge it put upon workers’ grievances and because of its politicising effects.22 What is clear, is that the strikes and threats of strikes in 1919, and even in 1920, greatly alarmed many of the well-to-do. Indeed the fears of some Cabinet ministers as late as February 1920 were considerable.23 Overall, though, there appears to have been no real revolutionary threat in Britain in 1917–20. In assessing the fears within governing circles, it is important to remember that ‘Bolshevism’ was used loosely. It was applied to a range of attitudes including lack of deference to those who deemed themselves to be ‘social superiors’, to free love and even to mild socialist proposals. However, fears of what had happened in Russia enabled the government to carry forward exceptional powers from war to peace. II

THE INDUSTRIAL CHALLENGE

During the First World War some 4,970,000 men were enlisted in the army, 407,000 in the navy and 293,000 in the air force, out of a total male labour force of some 15 million. This left the remaining labour, especially skilled labour employed in essential war work, in a very strong bargaining position.

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This was recognised early on. Thus Lloyd George, when writing to Ben Tillett late in August 1914, observed, ‘It is very difficult to gauge what the actual effect of war under modern conditions will be upon either capital or labour but one thing is already perfectly obvious—it must effect a revolutionary change in the relations of the state to both’.24 In a ‘war of production’ the government became the employer of a large proportion of the labour force. It was soon directly involved in wage negotiations covering large numbers of people. After one year of war food prices had gone up by 32 per cent. Wages were to lag behind prices for most groups of workers until after the war—though the gap became less wide in 1918 for many. The need for maximum production of munitions and other goods produced a climate of opinion in which the government could attempt to legislate good industrial relations. The government used DORA from early on in the war, but the key legislation was the Munitions of War Act of July 1915. This made statutory a voluntary agreement made between the government and the unions at a conference at the Treasury in March 1915. The Munitions Act’s main features were the banning of strikes and lock-outs and the substitution of compulsory arbitration for the duration of the war; the removal of restrictive practices in ‘controlled establishments’ (this allowed a worker to operate more machines, semi-skilled and unskilled workers to carry out work which hitherto had been the preserve of skilled workers, and other such changes); the enforcement of workshop regulations by special industrial courts called munitions tribunals; and increasing the mobility of labour (by means of a volunteer skilled mobile labour force) to war priority work but restricting the movement of labour away from such work. Faced with the wave of strikes after the end of the war, the government considered special peacetime legislation. In March 1919 the Cabinet reviewed a draft ‘Strikes (exceptional measures) Bill’ which was intended as a measure ‘countering coercion of the state and the community by strikes and other industrial disputes’. This would have been tough legislation, involving declaring strikes to be conspiracies against the state, arresting those inciting others to strike, seizing union funds and closing pubs in strike areas. However, the government did not proceed with it.25 To have done so then might well have inflamed the existing tense industrial situation, and anyway DORA provided extensive powers. As its additional powers under DORA were due to lapse in 1921, the government took the opportunity of the post-war labour unrest to provide itself with wide-ranging powers for peacetime use under the

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Emergency Powers Act 1920. This was (and is) a drastic measure, giving the government all-embracing powers. Under it a state of emergency can be declared at any time when it appears ‘to the government that the essential services of the country are threatened’. When that is done, the government is empowered to draw up a set of regulations and can ‘assume such powers and duties’ as is felt necessary to restore order and maintain supplies or ‘for any other purpose’. The Act was used during the 1921 mining dispute (and on later occasions). It has rightly been observed of the Act that when it is invoked, ‘In effect power resides totally with the executive and all pretence of parliamentary control is forsaken’.26 The powers given under DORA and then the Emergency Powers Act were so broad that, with the exception of the power workers, the Lloyd George Coalition government did not have to resort to special legislation to deal with specific disputes (unlike Asquith’s government and the 1912 mining dispute). In the case of electric power-station workers, the War Cabinet in early 1919 deemed theirs to be an essential industry warranting special restrictions on the labour force. Workers in the gas and water industries were covered by an 1875 Act, which enabled the government to have them imprisoned if they went on strike without giving what the authorities deemed to be reasonable warning. After the threat of a strike by London power workers in February 1919, the government extended these provisions by the Electricity Supply Act 1919, to cover electricity workers.27 The Supply and Transport Organisation complemented DORA and the Emergency Powers Act. Lloyd George saw this as a powerful weapon to use against a Triple Alliance strike. Indeed he wrote in mid1919 to Tom Jones, the Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, ‘Once the strike begins, it is imperative that the state should win. Failure to do so would inevitably lead to a Soviet Republic, so that we ought to have our plans well thought out.’ As well as using the strike-breaking organisation against the railwaymen in the autumn of 1919, Lloyd George also tried to mobilise public opinion on the government’s side. The First World War enhanced an awareness of the importance of public sympathy in defeating (or winning) industrial disputes. During the September 1919 railway dispute the government went in for unrestrained propaganda, spending considerable sums on newspaper and even cinema advertisements. In that dispute the blatant misrepresentation of the National Union of Railwaymen’s case was effectively parried by the union’s counter-publicity. By the time of the 1921 mining dispute the government had its publicity machine finely tuned. The

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man in charge of publicity then told the Cabinet that in the previous mining dispute in 1920 the government had sent ‘matter out to 900 newspapers via the Coalition and Unionist organisations…and the local organisations were paid, and the public suspected little or nothing’.28 The government also tried to allay industrial and wider workingclass discontent by redeeming its 1918 general election promises of social reconstruction. One feature of the unrest of 1915 to 1920 was its extensiveness. It was not confined to factories and workplaces. There was serious dissatisfaction in many working-class areas. Faced with unfair distribution of food and other resources, women had been prominent in campaigns for ‘fair shares’. Such mobilisation on a broad range of issues continued after the war and was very important in rallying support for Labour.29 Another aspect of government policy during the period of major unrest was to encourage greater trade union participation in British industry. The Commissions on Industrial Unrest set up after the May 1917 engineering strikes not only highlighted the need for social reform but also came out in favour of local joint committees (i.e. employers and unions) in industry. This gave impetus to the proposals of the Whitley Committee for three tiers of joint industrial councils. One feature of the years 1910 to 1921 in Britain was the willingness of governments to turn to joint committees when the industrial scene was especially turbulent. During the serious pre-war unrest the Liberal government had taken up the textile manufacturer Sir Charles Macara’s suggestions that a national joint committee should be created. When the National Industrial Council was set up in 1911 the declared aim was to bring together all those who shared the ideal of ‘the substitution in the industrial sphere of co-operation for antagonism in relations between employers and employed’. Joint committees were also used during the war by the Ministry of Munitions to ease in measures that would be unpopular at the workplace. Faced with the industrial turbulence of 1919, Lloyd George resorted again to setting up a national joint industrial council. The setting-up of the National Industrial Conference, a grand national body of over 800 leading industrialists and trade unionists, was greeted by commentators at home and abroad as a British alternative to Bolshevism. While the industrial scene was threatening, Lloyd George paid his respects to the National Industrial Conference. Once the situation was less threatening, as with the 1911 National Industrial Council, it was ignored.30

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The two national joint councils typify a frequent response to social unrest in democratic capitalist societies—a marshalling together of centre opinion and a display that ‘something was being done’. These moves built on a long tradition in British industrial relations, stretching back at least to the efforts of A.J.Mundella and others in the second half of the nineteenth century to diminish conflict in industrial relations. Leading trade unionists such as Arthur Henderson had been enthusiastic advocates of conciliation schemes since the 1890s.31 The government relied on trade union leaders to facilitate major industrial changes during the war. It made much of consequent rebellions on the shop-floor being aimed as much at the trade union establishment as the government. Lloyd George and his colleagues generally followed a policy of refusing to negotiate with unofficial strike leaders during the war—though at times, in practice, they did see them, albeit in the company of their trade union officials. In the early part of 1919 the government clung to this policy of using the trade union leaderships as bulwarks against a breakdown of order in industry. Thus Sir Robert Horne (Minister of Labour) observed that ‘the government could not hope to win through present and future labour battles unless they had the support of the trade union executives’ and Bonar Law commented that ‘the trade union organisation was the only thing between us and anarchy’.32 In the post-war years Lloyd George showed himself to be the master of short-term expedients to defuse immediately menacing situations, even if the means he employed resulted in long-term mistrust. As well as his building-up of expectations as to the importance attached by the government to the National Industrial Conference, there was also in 1919 the case of the Sankey Commission. Faced with an impending strike by the miners, Lloyd George avoided immediate confrontation (which was likely to alienate public opinion) by setting up in March 1919 a Commission of Inquiry under the high court judge Sir John Sankey. In setting up the inquiry Lloyd George clearly gave the impression that the government would accept its findings. But later, when the moment for strike action had passed, the government failed to adopt the majority report in favour of nationalising the mines. The interventions of the war and immediate post-war periods created expectations that the state would rectify injustices in industry as well as in social conditions. Where unfairness was manifest, the government was blamed. Moreover, some felt that the likelihood of government intervention in industrial clashes made both sides reluctant to move to a settlement. Austen Chamberlain complained in late January 1919 that

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In recent years there had been an increasing reliance placed on the government as the ultimate arbiter in labour disputes, with the result that strikes were prolonged by the fact that neither side would say the last word as to what they were prepared to concede, as they expected the government to be called in.33 Lloyd George’s political position in a coalition government, which worked with an outright Conservative majority in the House of Commons, depended in part on his reputation as a politician who could control both organised labour and social unrest. During the course of 1919 increasing numbers of Conservatives, and of the propertied classes generally, became more concerned about concessions to Labour, in terms both of cost and of bestowing status, than fearful of the overthrow of the existing social order. As a result Lloyd George had to exercise his political skills and the elasticity of his political principles (involving the drastic cutting of his social programme and the jettisoning of prominent Liberal Coalitionist colleagues) to stay in office. ‘Back to 1914’ and an end to intervention in industrial relations, industry and the economy became the orders of the day with Conservatives, Whitehall, much of the press and much of the middle class. III

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE

Arthur Henderson was perceptive when, in early 1920, he gave the verdict that in the 1918 general election the Labour Party had ‘polled its minimum vote’. 34 The 1919 local elections revealed a sizeable class vote for Labour, which in many places was a major surprise and which before long pushed all others into anti-socialist alliances. Labour made considerable gains in the county and district elections in April 1919 and further gains the following year. These were not restricted to the big cities or the traditional Labour areas. For example, in the small East Midland town of Loughborough Labour won nine out of fourteen seats coming up for election in 1919 and 1920, having never won a council seat there previously. Labour also did well in parliamentary by-elections. In 1919 it gained Bothwell, Lanarkshire by a massive 12,125 to 5,967 (overturning a Coalition Unionist majority of 332), Widnes by 11,404 to 10,417 (overturning a Coalition Unionist majority of 3,696) and Spen Valley in a three-way contest. It continued to do well in 1920

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and thereafter. Whereas the Labour movement’s industrial strength ebbed with the sharp economic recession of 1921–2, the Labour Party continued to make by-election gains up to the general election of November 1922. In 1920 the Labour Party won two by-elections. At Dartford (Kent) it turned a Coalition Liberal majority of 9,120 into a Labour one of 9,048. In the rural constituency of Norfolk South a Liberal majority of 5,219 was converted into a 2,118 majority for the veteran farmworkers’ trade unionist, George Edwards. In 1921 Labour turned out a Cabinet minister at Dudley, won Kirkcaldy, which it had not fought before, and won three other seats (though it lost Woolwich East, where Ramsay MacDonald was smeared in a scurrilous campaign). In 1922 Labour went on to score big wins in four by-elections. As well as winning seats, Labour came close to winning in constituencies it had not fought before—notably Bromley (Kent), Horncastle (Lincolnshire), Woodbridge (Suffolk) and the less surprising Hackney (London). During 1918 to 1922 Labour’s vote at by-elections was 554,504 compared to 275,045 in those constituencies at the general election of 1918. At the November 1922 general election Labour polled 4,235,457 votes compared with its previous 2,244,945 votes (with 414 candidates as against 361 earlier). In these years Labour’s leadership was anything but charismatic. MacDonald remained outside of Parliament until 1922. Willie Adamson, a miner, who was Leader from 1917 to 1921, made no great impact inside or outside of Parliament. Three moderate trade unionists were prominent in these years: Clynes (who succeeded Adamson as Leader) Henderson and J.H.Thomas. They were major figures in establishing Labour as a solid, worthy, constitutional party. Henderson and the others took a firm line against direct action and against Bolshevism. In September 1919 in a major speech in which he deplored these, he observed, The problem was to restore popular confidence in representative institutions and to guide the mass movement along the path of constitutional change and enable democracy to become master in its own house without violence and disorder. The First World War confirmed him in his belief in the desirability of joint committees of employers and employees in industry and generally of ‘the development of mutual confidence and closer co-operation between employers and employed’.35

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Hence Henderson, Clynes and the others were eager to join the National Industrial Conference (indeed Henderson called for its resurrection on two later occasions in the 1920s) and very strong in their condemnation of direct action. They warned that if Labour disregarded the result at the ballot box then it would later pay the penalty when it had won a majority and found a minority disrupting its social and economic policies. At the autumn 1919 Trades Union Congress (TUC) Henderson deemed it would be a calamity if the trade union movement withdrew its confidence in parliamentary methods at a time ‘when the people outside the movement more than inside believe that on the next appeal to the country Labour is going to triumph’.36 Thus the parliamentary road to socialism, in the eyes of many of the leaders of the Labour Party and trade union movement, set very restricted limits to action outside of elections and trade union negotiations. Indeed Henderson and others were nervous of unrest among the forces of law and order. Labour, when in office in 1924, was to acquiesce in the existence of the emergency strike-breaking organisation. Henderson himself was to express a fine sense of constitutional niceties when, as Home Secretary, he was faced with the issue of helping police officers sacked in the 1919 strike. He then informed the Commons: I have been a trade unionist for 41 years but…I draw a very wide distinction between an ordinary industrial dispute and a strike in what is a disciplinary service like the police force. Those of us who are prepared to bring about changes, either political or industrial, on constitutional lines, cannot make too clear the difference between the position of the military, the position of the police force or the position…of the fire brigade, so far as taking up a ‘down tools’ policy is concerned.37 So though there were not the dramatic and sizeable divisions in the British Labour movement between social democrats and communists that there were in much of continental Europe, nevertheless there were very substantial differences over policy. Sharply conflicting views about the desirability of using industrial action to press the government into making concessions was more notable among the leadership of major trade unions, including those of the Triple Alliance, than among the post-1918 Parliamentary Labour Party. As a result there were several occasions in 1919–21 when union policy was to support Triple Alliance action against the government yet leading members of the

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leading members of the unions concerned made clear their distaste for such a course. Indeed J.H.Thomas of the National Union of Railwaymen was repeatedly in contact with Lloyd George to try to achieve compromises, as, on fewer occasions, were several leading figures of the Miners’ Federation.38 Lloyd George, naturally, did not hesitate to exploit to the full such divisions within the Labour movement. Lloyd George and his associates also did not hesitate to use unscrupulously ‘guilt-by-association’ to smear the constitutional Labour figures in 1918 and 1919. Thus Henderson, who had supported the war effort with dogged loyalty between 1914 and 1917 and whose break with the government had come over the proposed Stockholm Conference which Henderson had seen as being essential to maintain his friend Kerensky in power and Russia in the war, was smeared in the 1918 general election and in his successful by-election campaign in the summer of 1919 as ‘Mr Ramsay MacDonald’s friend’ and as one who had urged ‘Don’t smash Germany’ and sought ‘easy peace terms’ afterwards. Moreover, Henderson’s stay in Russia in the summer of 1917 gave the opportunity for him to be damned as one who had ‘hob-nobbed’ with Lenin and Trotsky when there. This was a remarkable smear given that Henderson had not met them, had vigorously condemned Bolshevism both when in Russia and on his return to Britain, and as a leader of the revived Second International missed few opportunities to denounce the Third International. 39 MacDonald, whose views on Russia were similar, was vilified in like manner, not only over his role during the First World War, and was the victim of one of the foulest by-election campaigns in British history in early 1921. Lloyd George was also skilful in highlighting the Labour Party’s inconsistencies. He could point to the Independent Labour Party’s rhetoric against capitalism—and ask whether the Labour Party, if it obtained office, intended to end capitalism or make it work. Yet for all the Labour Party’s deficiencies, including poor leadership between 1917 and 1920 (excluding Henderson’s efforts at overhauling the party’s electoral machinery, programme and constitution), it did make a major challenge in these years. Henderson’s departure from office in 1917 and the reluctant acceptance by Clynes and others of the Labour Party Conference decision that they should leave Lloyd George’s government before the 1918 general election, resulted in fewer of the Labour right being discredited as ultra-patriots than was the case in France. Although the ‘Patriotic Right’ of Labour—those staying in office with Lloyd George and men such as Havelock Wilson

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and Captain Tupper of the Seamen’s Union—did well during the patriotic high-tide of the 1918 general election, they were left stranded thereafter. At the time the different and even conflicting aspects of the British Labour movement were blurred into one strong challenge to the existing social order. Thus one report by Scotland Yard in 1919 observed of British workers that ‘the number who are determined to have a revolution by constitutional means is certainly increasing’.40 Given reports of this kind, it is no wonder that among some of the propertied classes, especially in 1919, there was little discrimination between the ‘threat’ from men of such varying outlooks as Ramsay MacDonald, Robert Smillie and John Maclean. IV

THE RESPONSE OF BUSINESS AND THE PROPERTIED CLASSES

The various challenges of Labour were a subject of considerable concern to many of the propertied classes. The very number of different responses made by ad hoc bodies between 1917 and 1920 point to the uncoordinated nature of big and small business and the propertied classes generally. But though the response was fragmented, in its totality it was powerful. The First World War pushed many employers’ associations into a national organisation and, where employers’ associations had not existed, employers into setting up trade associations. In 1916 the Federation of British Industries (FBI) was formed very much as a counterbalance to the growing strength of the trade unions in the wartime economy. Yet many industrialists were equally worried about the wider challenge of labour in society. In the latter part of the war, when political parties were in a state of flux, businessmen became involved in many developments on the right. Lord Milner mobilised the influential in such bodies as the Royal Colonial Institute, the National Service League and the Socialist National Defence Committee to back not only causes such as conscription but also moves to establish ‘patriotic’ parties and pressure groups such as the British Workers’ League and the National Party. These pressed both for support for the empire and for moderate social reform. Men such as the industrialist Dudley Docker, who supported these bodies and also Whitley councils, had been exponents before 1914 of military training for the nation’s labour force, arguing that the habits of military discipline would carry over to the factory floor. 41 There was even talk of setting up a Businessmen’s Party.

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Funding anti-socialist bodies was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, but in 1917 to 1920 it developed on a much grander scale. Bodies such as the British Commonwealth Union, the British Empire Union, National Propaganda (later known as the Economic League), the Industrial League and the National Alliance of Employers and Employed (NAEE) had lists of supporters which were close to a rollcall of the leaders of Big Business and the employers’ federations. Thus those connected with the British Commonwealth Union included Sir Vincent Caillard, Dudley Docker, S.W.Noble, Viscount Furness and Vassar Smith. The British Empire Union proclaimed itself to be against Bolshevism, but in the appeals for money it made to big business it offered to ‘campaign against industrial unrest and Bolshevism’. Likewise National Propaganda, a body which asserted that its ‘whole propaganda is based upon impartial economic facts’, made clear that it would monitor ‘extremist activities’, ‘diminish unrest’ and prove ‘the vital necessity of increased production’. In similar vein, the People’s League, which was another organisation backed by many eminent businessmen, asserted that it was ‘strictly non-party’ but made it clear that ‘socialism and syndicalism, communism and schemes of nationalisation are to be uncompromisingly opposed’.42 Yet in the period of maximum threat to the existing social order, many of the pressure groups sponsored by businessmen were more than just anti-socialist bodies. They aimed to promote goodwill between employers and workers. In so doing they often advocated fairly substantial measures of industrial and social reform, albeit often combined with calls for such reforms to be balanced by higher productivity at work. In 1918–20 most of these bodies were warm supporters of Whitley councils in industry. The NAEE commented of the Industrial Reconstruction Council, ostensibly set up in February 1918 to specifically promote these joint bodies, that ‘while it advocates the formation of Whitley councils, [it] is principally concerned with the formation of an esprit de corps among all members of each trade, irrespective of their industrial position, for the general furtherance of the interests of the trade’.43 The NAEE, founded in late 1916 by the same group of businessmen who had been major forces behind the creation of the FBI, was itself a joint body of employers and moderate trade unionists and proclaimed the Whitley proposals to be very much in line with its own earlier proposals. It was well funded by industrialists and as late as 1921 had a headquarters staff of seventeen and a sizeable regional network. With this staff it was able to conduct a high level of propaganda activities in

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industrial centres, with its speakers holding forth at factory gate and street meetings on themes such as ‘Identity of Interests between Employers and Employed’, ‘Dangers of the Strike Weapon’ and ‘Conciliation versus Force in Industry’. The NAEE’s effectiveness depended not only on relatively lavish funding but also on the credibility it was given in trade union circles by having the early involvement of such leading trade unionists as Arthur Pugh, W.A.Appleton, Charles Duncan MP, James O’Grady MP, and J.T.Brownlie and the support of others such as Arthur Henderson, J.R.Clynes and Ernest Bevin. However, while in 1916–21 there were many employer-sponsored pressure groups which combined a message of co-operation between classes with condemnation of socialism and Bolshevism, there were others which represented something of a backlash against workingclass advances. In the months after the Armistice social reconstruction was more and more seen as a tax burden, not as an insurance policy against revolution, by increasing numbers of the propertied classes—though the levels of concern in Britain did not reach those of big business and the propertied classes in Italy after the war. One manifestation of this was the Middle Class Union, set up in March 1919, which drew support from those who felt threatened as either taxpayers or consumers. As one government memorandum of July 1919 observed, ‘there is no doubt that its members belong to the classes who would be only too anxious to help the government in the event of industrial unrest’. It soon came to proclaim its role in strikebreaking: ‘it can stem the flow of Bolshevism in this country; it can prevent the disaster of nationalisation; it can counteract the effect of national or sectional strikes far more effectively than by the use of the police; it can strengthen the hands of the government in dealing either with the demands or threats of extreme labour’. It was quite explicit that it saw one of its functions to be ‘to organise workers to conduct public utility services in any emergency’.44 In this it was following the urgings of the National Party which in February 1919 had published the advertisement: To Fight the Great Bolshevik menace. Organise! The National Party calls upon all Law-Abiding Citizens—upon the Great Middle Classes—Discharged Service Men—Patriotic Labour and all who resist the present efforts to paralyse the community, to establish an organisation to render attacks against the liberties of the people impossible.

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Two things to be done at once! 1. Large funds are required to provide an immediate organisation. 2. Volunteers are invited to sign on and hold themselves in readiness to carry on the vital services of the State. After the Lloyd George government had organised and used such an emergency strike-breaking body, the Middle Class Union in late 1920 could boast that it had provided several thousand volunteers during the Railway Strike in October 1919; maintained the supply of gas during the unofficial strike in North Middlesex in February 1920, pending the obtaining of sufficient ‘free labour’ …provided some five to six hundred volunteers to maintain essential services during a strike at Southampton in May 1920; undertook to supply a hundred qualified engineers as volunteers to maintain the electricity supply of Sheffield, and thus averted a threatened strike.45 With a mixture of concession and firmness the British propertied classes came through the turmoil of the immediate post-war years with their privileges and wealth mostly intact. From 1920, fears that concessions to Labour were too great were expressed through the ballot box, with rebel right-wing candidates contesting by-elections (with an Anti-Waste candidate winning one of the safest Conservative seats in June 1921), and with a revolt away from the coalition government among the Conservative Party rank and file. This culminated in the overthrow of Lloyd George and all those who maintained faith in coalition politics in October 1922. It also marked the end of belief in high-profile state intervention in industry in government circles for nearly a decade. V

SOME CONCLUSIONS

The urgent needs of the wartime economy had brought the state into all areas of the British economy. The government soon found itself involved in all aspects of industry and industrial relations— from modifying workplace practices to national wage bargaining. It also became involved in wider social provision. The Big State raised aspirations that where there were problems it should ensure that

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something was done to remedy them. In the post-war turmoil big business, like many politicians, was torn between maintaining an interventionist state and trying to reduce such roles in the hope that that would dampen down aspirations. In spite of figures such as Dudley Docker, most British industrialists soon moved in favour of ‘Back to 1914’. The 1921–2 recession gave employers the whip-hand again in dealing with labour. Yet the crisis years of 1917 to 1920 did leave the British state with stronger—or at least clearer—reserve powers than before 1914. In 1918 the former Liberal Cabinet minister, Lord Shaw of Dunfermline, complained to Herbert Samuel that ‘my view of the Defence of the Realm Act is that it did not warrant, and Parliament, unless it had been tricked, could not have sanctioned, the implications that compliant governments have put upon it’.46 Lloyd George was to provide the state with the continuance of virtually unlimited powers under the Emergency Powers Act 1920. Before the First World War the state had often used the military to ‘maintain order’ in industrial disputes—which, in effect, meant against the strikers. Some aspects of the tough side of the state had been revealed in Edwardian Britain. Keir Hardie in 1911 had complained that only the Liberals would dare to breach the constitution in using military force against railway strikers.47 Yet after the First World War the British state had a more brutal aspect. Tough measures were tried out in Ireland, Egypt, India and elsewhere. Moreover, the state mobilised anti-union volunteers into its emergency Supply and Transport Organisation—and made use of it. There was also greater surveillance of citizens, both by the state and by private industry. After the Russian revolution the propertied classes became more anxious about what they deemed to be internal subversion. Yet overall the challenges of Labour did not seriously threaten the existing social order in Britain. The economic pressures of the war and the post-war period did strengthen organised labour, though some of its gains of 1915–20 were lost in the 1921–2 recession and subsequently. Even in Labour’s powerful years, trade union gains decreased markedly from mid-1919 onwards. Where Labour grew lastingly stronger, it did so within the norms of British political life. The Labour Party developed as a constitutional alternative to the Conservatives— and in spite of its punctilious observance of parliamentary politics the older parties did not hesitate to smear its leaders with the Zinoviev letter (as in the 1924 general election) and the like. In Britain the tensions of 1917 to 1920 were contained within the

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parliamentary system. Most working people who wanted change wanted their ‘revolution by constitutional means’. Similarly those among the propertied classes alarmed by the prospect of paying for ‘a fit land for heroes to live in’ vented their concern by voting for AntiWaste candidates or pressing for a Conservative Party unsullied by contact with Lloyd George and his Coalition supporters. Yet during 1917–20 the system was under strain, and Lloyd George’s political skills played their part in ensuring that there was less upheaval in Britain than there might have been. But, overall, as one historian has recently commented, ‘Britain’s rulers had to make far fewer adjustments than most of their European counterparts to meet the postwar world’.48 NOTES 1

Long to Lloyd George, 9 January 1919, House of Lords Record Office (hereafter cited as HLRO), Lloyd George (hereafter LG) Papers F/33/ 2/3. 2 For a recent survey and bibliography see E.J.Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’, in R, Porter and M.Teich (eds), Revolution in History (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 5–46. 3 Notes on the Strike Movement by W.M.L., 15 December 1916, the Bodleian Library, Milner Papers, vol. 128, f 6. C.Wrigley, David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (Hassocks, E. Sx, 1976), pp. 180–3. 4 War Cabinet (hereafter WC) minutes, 6 April 1917, Public Record Office (hereafter cited as PRO), CAB 23–2–100. J.Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1976). Wrigley, Lloyd George and Labour, pp. 189–97. 5 David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol.4 (London, 1934), p. 1948. WC minutes, 25 May and 31 July 1917, PRO CAB 23–2–195 and 3–146. 6 Barnes to Lloyd George, 29 October 1917, HLRO LG F/4/2/14. Lord Riddell’s War Diary (London, 1933), p. 283(diary entry for 18 October 1917). Lloyd George, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 2614–15. 7 C.Andrew, Secret Service (London, 1985), pp. 174–5 and 192–6. B.Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State (London, 1987). N.Hiley, ‘Counter-espionage and security in Great Britain during the First World War’, English Historical Review 101 (1986), pp. 100–26. 8 Asquith to the king, 30 March 1915, the Bodleian Library, Asquith Papers, vol. 8, ff. 154–5. 9 W.Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–1921 (London, 1969), pp. 98, 126 and 132–3. N.Milton, John Maclean (London, 1974), pp. 112–40. 10 WC minutes, 22 May and 5 June 1917, PRO CAB 23–2–180/1 and 3–4.

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11 N.Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War (London, 1986), pp. 27–8 and 34–5. T.Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge, 1986), p. 734. 12 Ministry of Labour report, 6 September 1917, PRO CAB 24–25– 302. 13 WC, 8 January 1919, PRO CAB 23–9–5/6. C.E.Callwell, The Life of Sir Henry Wilson (London, 1927), pp. 161–2. For a recent survey of the government’s response to military unrest see C.Wrigley, Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour (Hemel Hempstead, Herts, 1990), pp. 24–49. 14 G.Dallas and D.Gill, The Unknown Army (London, 1985), pp. 94–9 and 113–20. A.Rothstein, The Soldiers’ Strikes of 1919 (London, 1980), pp. 69–70. 15 S.R.Ward, ‘Intelligence surveillance of British ex-servicemen, 1918– 1920’, Historical Journal 16, 1 (1973), pp. 179–88. D.Englander, ‘Troops and trade unions, 1919’, History Today 37, 3 (1987), pp. 8–13. Reports on Revolutionary Organisations, 7 and 14 March 1919, PRO CAB 24–79–64 and 175. 16 Rothstein, op. cit., pp. 44, 47, 55–8 and 78–81. A Carew, The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy 1900–1939 (Manchester, 1981), pp. 72–7. T. P. Kilfeather, The Connaught Rangers (Dublin, 1969), pp. 1–9 and 128–95. G.W.Reynolds and A.Judge, The Day the Police Went on Strike (London, 1968), pp. 53–68 and 102. Milner diary, 31 August 1918, the Bodleian Library, Milner Papers, vol. 281. Wrigley, Lloyd George and Challenge, pp. 53–76. 17 WC, 4 and 7 February 1919, PRO CAB 23–9–48 and 59. 18 In his foreward to G.Glasgow, General Strikes and Road Transport (London, 1926), p. 11. 19 R.Desmarais, ‘Lloyd George and the development of the British Government’s strikebreaking organisation’, International Review of Social History 20 (1975), pp. 1–15. See also K.Jeffrey and P.Hennessy, States of Emergency (London, 1983). 20 WC, 31 January 1919, PRO CAB 23–9–36. For recent surveys of industrial relations in this period see C.J.Wrigley, A History of British Industrial Relations, vol. 2, 1914–1939 (Brighton, E. Sx, 1986) and H.A.Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, Vol. 2, 1911–1933 (Oxford, 1985). For recent analyses of events in the Glasgow area see chapter 8 of this volume and J.Foster, ‘Strike action and working-class politics on Clydeside 1914–1919’, International Review of Social History 40 (1991), pp. 33–70. 21 S.R.Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution 1917– 1924 (Oxford, 1956), pp. 83–114. 22 J.E.Cronin, ‘Strikes and power in Britain 1870–1920’, International Review of Social History 32 (1987), pp. 144–67. 23 There is an account of their meeting of 2 Feburary 1920 which verges on the comic in Tom Jones, Whitehall Diaries, ed. K.Middlemas, vol. 1 (London, 1969), pp. 99–103. 24 Quoted in J.Schneer, Ben Tillett (London, 1982), p. 101.

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25 Wrigley, Lloyd George and Challenge, pp. 163–5. 26 T.Bunyan, The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain (London, 1977), pp. 52–3. 27 WC, 4 February 1919, PRO CAB 23–9–44. 28 Wrigley, Industrial Relations, pp. 79–81. P.Bagwell, The Railwaymen (London, 1963), p. 393. Jones, Whitehall Diaries, p. 139. 29 See J.Cronin, ‘Labor insurgency and class formation’, in J.Cronin and C.Sirianni (eds), Work, Community and Power (Philadelphia, Pa , 1 9 8 3 ) , e s p e c i a l l y p p . 3 9 – 4 0 , a n d a l s o M . S ava g e , T h e Dynamics of Working-Class Politics (Cambridge, 1987), especially chs 1 and 8. 30 R.Charles, The Development of Industrial Relations in Britain 1911–1939 (London, 1973), part 3. For conflicting interpretations of the National Industrial Conference see R.Lowe, ‘The failure of consensus in Britain: the National Industrial Conference, 1919–21’, Historical Journal 21 (1978), pp. 649–75, and Wrigley, Lloyd George and Challenge, pp. 130–42. 31 C.Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (Cardiff, 1990), pp. 6–9 and 44–6. 32 WC, 4 February 1919, PRO CAB 23–9–44. 33 WC, 28 January 1919, PRO CAB 23–9–30. Cronin, ‘Labor insurgency’, p. 32. 34 The Times, 9 January 1920. 35 The Times, 17 September 1919 and 16 January 1917. 36 Report of Trades Union Congress 1919, p. 311. 37 (Hansard) H.C.Deb 5s, 173, col. 1669, 15 May 1924. 38 Wrigley, Lloyd George and Challenge, pp. 300–2. 39 East Ham Echo, 15 November, 29 November and 6 December 1918. Widnes Guardian, 26 and 29 August 1919. 40 Quoted in J.Cronin, Labour and Society in Britain 1918–1979 (London, 1984), p. 27. 41 For a recent account of the National Party see C.Wrigley, ‘ “In the excess of their patriotism”, the National Party and threats of subversion’, in C.J.Wrigley (ed.), Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics (London, 1986). On Docker see R.P.T.Davenport-Hines, Dudley Docker (Cambridge, 1984). 42 On these and more see Independent Labour Party (ILP) Information Committee, Who Pays for the Attacks on Labour (n.d. [1920?]). For earlier bodies see K.D.Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (London, 1974). On the British Commonwealth Union see J.Turner, ‘The British Commonwealth Union and the general election of 1918’, English Historical Review 93 (1978), pp. 528–59. On the NAEE and the Industrial League see C.J.Wrigley, Trade unionists, employers and the cause of industrial unity and peace, 1916–1921’, in C.J.Wrigley and J.Shepherd (eds), On the Move (London, 1991), pp. 155–84. On National Propaganda/the Economic League, see A.J.McIvor, ‘Political blacklisting and anti-socialist activity between the wars’, Society for the Study of Labour History, Bulletin 53, 1 (1988), pp. 18–22. 43 NAEE Report, 1916–18, p. 20.

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44 B . Wa i t e s , A C l a s s S o c i e t y a t Wa r : E n g l a n d 1 9 1 4 – 1 9 1 8 (Leamington Spa, Warks, 1987), pp. 84–5 and 263–4. ILP, op. cit., p. 8. 45 Wrigley, ‘National Party’, pp. 110–11. ILP, op. cit., p. 8. 46 Letter, 19 January 1918; HLRO, Samuel Papers A/60/22. 47 In his October 1911 pamphlet, Killing No Murder: The Government and the Railway Strike. 48 C.J.Nottingham, ‘Recasting bourgeois Britain? The British state in the years which followed the First World War’, International Review of Social History 31 (1986), pp. 227–47.

15 Conclusion Chris Wrigley

The First World War and its aftermath shattered many illusions of the European Left. In spite of the upheavals of such a major war, the capitalist system of the advanced industrial nations did not collapse nor did the working people of those nations rise up and ‘follow Russia’, and so choose international socialism rather than jingoistic nationalism. Instead many divisions and contradictions within socialism and the labour movements which had been apparent before 1914 now became stark and contributed to the undermining of such opportunities as the Left had in 1919–20. Assessing whether the challenges of labour in central and western Europe in 1917–20 achieved much depends in part on the perspective and time-span adopted. Viewed from Moscow after 1920, hopes that the Bolshevik revolution would be part of first a wider European and then a world revolution had largely faded. The Russian revolution was isolated, and its defence came to be seen as depending on ‘socialism in one country’. Many later judgements have tended in some degree to echo the Third International’s line. The events of 1917–20 have frequently been gauged against some Marxist revolution. Any route to a noncapitalist economic system other than the Bolshevik one has often been deemed a delusion and any advances in material conditions gained in non-revolutionary ways have often been dismissed as ‘alleviations’ and as being only ‘economistic’ matters. This is hard on many labour movements which, unlike the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), had never adopted Marxist aims. Indeed some critics of the non-Bolshevik Left have also found the development of the Russian communist state both under Lenin and before Stalin’s ascendancy to be wanting, not least for stamping out even revolutionary socialist rivals and for failing to develop proletarian democracy. From such perspectives all the

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challenges of labour of 1917–20 are judged to have been varieties of failure. Britain’s labour movement was at the mild end of a European spectrum stretching from moderate to revolutionary social democracy. Indeed far from having adopted Marxist objectives, the Labour Party had adopted only socialist objectives in 1918. The social upheaval of war and the experience of state collectivism played major roles in this, and in the organisational rather than idealistic emphasis of that socialism. 1 Moreover, the war saw a transformation in the political position of the Labour Party. Before the war it had appeared to be something of an auxiliary force to the Liberals; in the December 1910 general election it had returned 42 MPs, most of whom depended for success on the electoral pact with the Liberals. Though Labour held many municipal seats and the trade unions were growing rapidly in size in the years immediately before the war, quite probably Labour’s prospects for wider electoral success would have been limited had not the war or some other major social and political upheaval occurred.2 Trade union membership expanded rapidly during the war and the post-war boom—rising from 3,681,000 in 1914 to 6,937,000 in 1920. This resulted in greater financial and organisational strength. Though membership fell off in the 1920s, until 1931 it still remained on average 21 per cent higher than in 1914. Hence viewed from early 1924 and the perspective of the extremely moderate democratic socialism of MacDonald and Henderson, the events of 1917–20 were important in transforming British Labour’s political position. Though Labour had still not broken out of its minority position in British politics and appealed much beyond its urban strongholds, it survived the political disaster of 1931 and its very limited achievements in office in 1924 and 1929–31 to remain the alternative party of government in Britain thereafter. In the case of Germany, the challenge of labour appears to have brought considerable success, if viewed from the 1920s and from a perspective of the democratic achievement of social reforms; but with the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933 such gains were destroyed. However, from the viewpoint of the Third International, Germany experienced the revolution which stopped short of substantial change. Though the largest socialist movement in the world, and from 1912 the largest party in the Reichstag, the SPD had been excluded from office until October 1918, the last days of the Kaiserreich. The

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November Revolution swept the moderate SPD leadership along faster and further than it expected, resulting in Scheidemann declaring a republic and then leading a government under the presidency of Friedrich Ebert. Though the SPD had adopted a Marxist programme at Erfurt in 1891, the second part of it contained demands which could be achieved gradually by constitutional means. Ebert in early November 1918 was succinct in his attitude to revolution: ‘I don’t want it; I hate it like sin.’ The SPD leadership loathed Bolshevism as much as did the British Parliamentary Labour Party; Scheidemann, when later summing up his attitude to his country’s becoming part of an international revolution, observed, ‘Germany to be therefore a Russian province, a branch of the Soviet? No, no, a thousand times no!’3 In their own terms, the moderate SPD leadership achieved many of their gradualist aims in 1918–19 and then as a minority member of most governments of the 1920s. The Weimar constitution itself took them a long way beyond 1914, and thereafter there was a massive increase in social welfare provision and a transformation in the relations between capital and labour. Indeed during Weimar Germany inequality was statistically significantly lower than for other European countries or the USA.4 Even so, by the late 1920s sluggish economic growth provided fewer opportunities for social amelioration. However, in fending off attempts at revolutionary change, SPD ministers buttressed many parts of the old order which were inimical to social democracy and failed to widen sufficiently the base of their own support to gain a majority in the Reichstag. After the use of the army and Freikorps against the revolutionary Left, Scheidemann’s warning of October 1919 to his erstwhile colleagues in government, ‘The enemy is on the Right’, was very appropriate. As with the Austrian Republic and the substantial social reforms associated with ‘Red Vienna’, the social gains made by Labour under Weimar were swept away by the Right in the 1930s. The challenges of Labour outside of Russia gave the existing social orders a terrific shaking, but the forces which could coalesce against Labour remained very strong. Only in Germany did an advanced industrial nation experience revolution; and there it was contained, with a wide spectrum of opinion, including much of the working class, favouring a republican parliamentary rather than a workers’ council system.5 With the ending of the war and later of the Allied blockade many of the economic pressures which had encouraged revolution were removed. Demobilisation both ended a menacing cause of disaffection and removed the more radical from the armed forces. (See, for example, chapter 9).

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In Britain, France and, for a while and to a lesser extent, Italy, the labour movements faced a triumphant state. There had been no collapse of authority in these democratic regimes, unlike the semifeudal ones of Russia and Hungary and the quasi-autocratic Kaiserreich. While there had been difficulties with food supplies and problems of inflation, there had been nothing like the experiences of the countries which underwent revolutions. Their governments had not failed miserably in supplying the essentials of life. They also had strong middle and upper classes who were willing to use their political power against labour, once they had overcome their fears of 1918–19. They did not suffer from a seriously disaffected countryside (if one excludes southern Ireland), as in Russia and Hungary. In these countries and Germany those in authority displayed flexibility in coping with labour. The state and employers went a long way in 1918–19 in meeting the rising expectations of labour, with major concessions on hours of work, wages and social welfare. In Britain a Conservative-dominated House of Commons was even forced to investigate wartime profiteering (though in so doing it evaded taking action). However, while giving way on conditions of work and trade union recognition, these states often took a tough line against potentially political strikes. Indeed increasingly strong lines were taken against strikers as public opinion permitted; thus, for example, the unduly strong action against railway workers in Britain in late 1919 and in France in 1920. Moreover, while wartime grievances had tended to unite the various groups of workers both as producers and consumers, politicians such as Lloyd George worked with skill to maximise working-class divisions. This was well illustrated when his Cabinet raised domestic coal prices in order to alienate working people as consumers from miners’ pay claims. Above all in Britain and France, the government moved to disengage itself from the economy and from direct involvement in industrial relations, thereby leaving free market forces and private employers, not the state, to take the blame for rolling back much of Labour’s wartime gains. Throughout central and western Europe there were powerful forces arrayed against organised labour. Armed forces of one kind or another were readily mustered, drawing on the old officer elites, landowners, peasants and the middle class. In Hungary Admiral Horthy rapidly raised a counter-revolutionary army with the eager encouragement of the British authorities and the acquiescence of the French.6 Fear of Allied intervention in Germany, as was taking

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place in Russia, and was to happen in Hungary, was one (but only one) reason for Ebert coming to terms with General Groener on 10 November 1918. In Germany the Freikorps rapidly recruited large numbers of men between December 1918 and early 1919.7 In the Austrian provinces counter-revolutionaries drew on arms brought back from the Italian front. In Italy D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume revived the memories of Garibaldi and his volunteers and boosted the Fascist and nationalist squads who terrorised labour movement activists in many regions. In Britain Lloyd George’s government had no difficulty in recruiting middle-class and nonunion working-class people to run its emergency supply organisation in the event of serious strikes. The presence of a strong middle class in a country often proved extremely important in thwarting organised labour’s ambitions. In Russia in February 1917 sizeable portions of the middle class were alienated from the tsarist regime, and their disaffection played a part in the downfall of the Russian monarchy. Nevertheless Russia and Hungary did not possess middle classes of the size of those of the western democracies and Germany. In Germany the middle class was shocked by military defeat and acquiescent in the ending of the Kaiserreich, but recovered to take a firm stance against the danger of a more radical revolution. In Britain, France and Italy, labour militancy and the taxation involved in providing enhanced social welfare fostered middle-class backlashes. The attitude of the peasantry, just like that of the armed forces, could have a decisive effect on the success or failure of revolutionary movements. In both Russia and Hungary the countryside was seriously disaffected. However, there was no lasting unity between the peasants and the socialist industrial workers. In Russia during the war of intervention most peasants saw the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil, the return of the landlords as the greater, and if necessary were willing to fight against the landowners in their own area.8 In Hungary, as shown in chapter 10, the peasants became alienated when the communists failed to distribute sufficient land and offended their religious sensibilities. In Bavaria peasant councils were set up; but the industrial workers distrusted the peasants and so vested no real political powers in the councils, and these councils showed no eagerness to police the rural areas against food-hoarding and black marketeering. 9 Elsewhere peasants were thoroughly hostile to urban socialists and were a counter-revolutionary force (see, for example, chapter 11). Hence in much of Europe it was common for the countryside to

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provide for the Right cordons sanitaires around red cities. Moreover, moves to democracy in societies which had a majority of peasants ended revolutionary or socialist dominance. Particularist and nationalist sentiments, as well as religious, were also likely to thwart labour movements. In Austria, other than Vienna and the eastern industrial area, people tended to identify with their provinces and to many peasants proselytising socialists were agents of urban Vienna, seeking cheap food for the city masses. Similarly in Bavaria there was widespread distaste for being dominated by Prussia, regardless of whether it was under the Kaiser or under socialists. In Germany risings by the revolutionary Left between 1919 and 1923 took place in an uncoordinated manner, and it was relatively easy for the Freikorps to deal with the red enclaves one by one. Then a centralised state used modern communications systems to deal with a regional Left; a contrast to Russia where the Bolsheviks controlled the state apparatus and the central railway network. Nationalism was a potent force, especially in Hungary, Italy and Germany. The collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and the territorial claims against the old Hungary by Romania and Czechoslovakia both played a decisive part in bringing about a Communist government and in defeating it (see, for example, chapter 4). In Hungary the issue of holding on to Transylvania and Slovakia remained very powerful; whereas in Austria, perhaps because the predominantly German population had hopes of an Anschluss, there was a readier acceptance of the reduced boundaries. 10 In Italy disappointed expectations of additional territory as a victor nation provided ample fuel for Mussolini, D’Annunzio and other Nationalists, just as the Paris Peace Conference’s decisions, which did not apply the principle of self-determination where it favoured Germany, aided the Right in that country. However, the challenge of labour in 1917–20 was also weakened by the divisions within the Left. The Bolshevik revolution had highlighted and exacerbated them. Advice from Moscow was often far from prescient (see, for example, chapter 12). Yet the advent of the Bolsheviks to power in Russia did provide an encouraging example, albeit not one desired to be followed in detail, for many European socialists. There is much to be said for Albert Lindemann’s assessment: that indigenous western conditions were the primary determinants of the misfortunes of Western socialist parties during the biennio

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rosso. The war brought out the profound divisions among pre-war revolutionary and non-revolutionary socialists; but, even more to the point, the war brought to the surface the deep differences between the revolutionaries themselves.11 The years 1917–20 displayed both the potential strength and the weakness of labour movements in Europe. The labour movements were not strong enough in themselves to bring about dramatic change. They needed unusual circumstances to provide an opportunity for major advances. Even when suitably major upheavals occurred in the years 1914–20, the degree of success of labour’s challenges depended on many other matters. These included the strength of capital, the political will and strength of the middle classes, the state of the army and navy, the relations between the rural and industrial areas and between the big cities and the provinces, the strength of the trade union movement, the unity or otherwise of the Left and its quality of leadership. Above all, the fortunes of labour’s challenges depended on the strength of the social and physical forces which could be mustered against labour. Much was learnt by the European labour movement from the struggles of 1917–20; but probably more was learnt from these years by labour’s enemies, as the 1930s were to show. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

On this, and the importance of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s vision of socialism, rather than those of R.H.Tawney and G.D.H.Cole, see J.M.Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War (London, 1972). D.Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1990), especially pp. 318–48. P.Scheidemann, Memoirs of a Social Democrat (London, 1929), pp. 560 and 581–2. J.G.Williamson, in discussing the Kuznets curve, in Y.S.Brenner, H.Kaelble and M.Thomas (eds), Income Distribution in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1991) pp. 58–9. For a discussion of important groups among the working class (metalworkers, miners and young workers) who were more radical, see D.Geary, ‘Radicalism and the German worker’, in R.J.Evans (ed.), Politics and Society in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), pp. 267– 86. Admiral Nicholas Horthy, Memoirs (London, 1956), pp. 100–1. For details of the main Freikorps see N.H.Jones, Hitler’s Heralds (London, 1987), pp. 249–65 and generally R.G.L.Waite, Vanguard of Nazism (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).

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F.L.Garsten, Revolution in Central Europe 1918–1919 (London, 1972), pp. 178–209. 10 T.Hajdu, ‘Socialist revolution in central Europe 1917–21’, in R.Porter and M.Teich (eds), Revolution in History (Cambridge, 1986), p. 112. 11 A.S.Lindemann, The ‘Red Years’: European Socialism versus Bolshevism, 1919–21 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), p. 290.

Index

Adamson, W. 277 Adler, F. 91 Ady, E. 77 Agnelli, G. 105, 112, 116, 117 Ágostin, P. 77 Alessandri, C. 232 Allied blockade 2, 10, 11, 18, 31, 46, 68, 262, 291 Andrieu, C. 246 anti-Semitism 220, 221, 223, 225 army desertions 3–4 Asquith, H.H. 265 Auer, E. 57, 58, 62 Augsburg 64 Austrian Revolution, 1918 10, 16, 33, 57, 88–104, 248 Auxiliary Service Law 5, 33

Bevin, E. 282 bicycles 24, 121 Birmingham 265 black market 7, 11, 31, 32, 33, 60, 68, 90, 200, 223, 293 Bologna 229 Bonar Law, A. 275 Borchardt, J. 28, 40 Bordiga, A. 230 Bremen 16, 28, 40, 45 Briand, A. 239 Brunswick 16, 26, 36, 43, 44, 45 Bry, G. 31 Buchan, J. 174, 266 Büchner, O. 183 Budapest 72–84 Bulgaria 56

Bachi, R. 106, 111, 118 Balabanoff, A. 232, 234 Balfour, A.J. 17 Bamberg 65, 66 Bárczy, I. 79 Barnes, G. 265 Bartók, B. 77, 82 Bauer, O. 221 Bautzen 44 Bavaria 37, 38, 51–69, 224–5, 294 Beaverbrook, Lord 165, 174, 266 Becker, J.J. 132 Belfast 171, 263, 267, 270 Belgium 13, 31 Bell, T. 167 Berény, R. 78 Berlin 5, 24–47, 136 Bernstein, E. 29, 40

Calais 267–8, 269 Campbell, A. 171 Campbell, R.H. 155 capital levy 100 Capy, M. 131 Chamberlain, A. 269, 276 Chemnitz 43 Clemenceau, G. 10, 134, 137, 242, 245–8, 250, 252, 253 Clynes, J.R. 8, 9, 277–8, 280, 282 coal 7, 61 Cohen, A. 30 co-operative movements 9–10, 39 Crawford, H. 163 Cronin, J. 142, 271 Cuxhaven 45 Czechoslovakia 82, 294 Dähnhardt, D. 185

298

Index

D’Annunzio, G. 236, 293, 294 Däumig, E. 44 Davanzati, R.F. 232 Degot, W. 233 demobilisation 17, 18–19, 38–9, 41, 46, 61, 106, 149, 168, 170, 176–91, 216, 240, 249, 267–8, 291–2 Docker, D. 281, 284 Dorrenbach, H. 36 Dresden 44 Duisberg 44 Duncan, C. 282 Düsseldorf 26, 44 Ebert, F. 27, 38, 41, 42, 44, 181, 291, 293 Eichorn, E. 44, 181 Einaudi, L. 120 Eisner, K. 36, 56, 58–9, 61–2 employers’ organisations 5–6, 137–8, 170, 172, 183, 187, 251, 274–5, 280–2 Erzberger, M. 183 Essen 36 Fabbri, L. 236 Fechenbach, F. 64 Feldman, G.D. 178 Ferenczy, B. 78, 82 Figes, O. 16 food shortages 8, 9–10, 12, 31, 32, 33, 46, 90, 93, 95, 162, 201–2, 205, 208, 216, 222, 223, 292 football 121 Frankfurt am Main 36 Fraser, W.H. 155 Freikorps 18, 39, 41, 42, 45, 46, 67, 184, 291, 293, 294 Gallacher, W. 159, 166, 167, 171 Geary, D. 12–13 Geddes, A. 164 Geiger, T. 51 Gennari, E. 231 Genoa 105 German Revolution, 1918 10, 16, 33, 35–47, 53, 69, 177, 248 Glasgow 5, 136, 262, 267, 269, 270 Göppingen 26 Gotha 29

Gramsci, A. 115–16, 117–18, 121, 230 Gravina, M. 233 Graz 16, 98, 101 Groener, W. 29, 41, 182–3, 293 Grüner, F. 224 Halle-Merseburg 45 Hamburg 25, 26, 28, 40, 44 Hanisch, E. 215, 217 Hardie, J.Keir 284 Hasek, J. 2–3 Henderson, A. 14, 270, 275, 276, 277– 80, 282, 290 Hitler, A. 24 Hodge, J. 14 Hoffman, J. 63, 64, 65, 66 Horne, J. 15 Horne, Sir R. 275 Horthy, M. 83, 292 housing 4–5, 19, 25, 32, 87, 100, 126, 127, 140–2, 150, 161, 162, 165, 240, 241 influenza 103 Innsbruck 219, 220, 223 Jászi, O. 76–8, 79, 82 Johnston, T. 167 Jouhaux, L. 127, 133 Kain, H. 52 Kapp putsch 45, 68 Károlyi, M. 79–82, 84, 205 Kassák, L. 77 Kautsky, K. 26, 29, 40, 219 Kent, Sir S. 166 Kiel 16, 18, 36, 44, 58 Klyamkin, I. 158 Kocha, J. 54 Kodály, Z. 77, 82 Koenker, D. 12, 157–8 Koeth, J. 183 Korda, S. 82 Kronstadt 18 Kun, B. 80–3, 237 Kunfi, Z. 77, 82 Landauer, G. 64, 65–6 Landler, J. 207

Index Lansbury, G. 163 Lansdowne, Lord 164 Leeds Convention, 1917 264–5 Legien, C. 45 Leipzig 26, 33, 43, 45 Lenin, V.I. 39, 40, 45, 83, 158–9, 167, 231–5, 236–7, 279, 289 Levien, M. 61 Leviné, E. 63, 64–5, 66–7 Liebknecht, K. 28, 38, 42, 169 Lindemann, A. 294 Linz 98, 101 Litvinov, M. 233–4 Liverpool 263 Lloyd George, D. 6, 17, 19, 163, 237, 262–6, 268–70, 272–6, 279–80, 282–5, 292 London 5, 7–8, 16 Long, W. 262 Loucheur, L, 246–7, 250 Lukács, G. 78, 82 Luxemburg, R. 28, 29, 40–1, 42, 44, 169 Macassey, L. 161 MacDonald, J.Ramsay 14, 167, 277, 279, 280, 290 MacKinlay, A. 166 McLean, I. 150–3 Maclean, J. 165, 166, 169–70, 266, 280 Macready, Sir N. 268–9 McShane, H. 167 Maier, C.S. 1 Malatesta, A. 236 Malvy, L.-J. 243, 244–6, 248 Mann, T. 60 Mannheim 45 Mehring, F. 28 Melling, J. 155, 166 Merrheim, A. 126, 133, 134, 136–7 metal workers 2, 4–7, 25–7, 29, 33, 41, 45, 47, 53, 74, 92–4, 125–6, 128– 34, 153, 168, 241, 263 Michaud, R. 145–6 Milan 15, 105, 229 Millerand, A. 239, 252–3 Milner, Lord 281 miners 16, 41, 44, 47, 128, 169, 171, 270–1, 273, 275–6, 279, 292

299

mobilisations 2, 34, 91, 107, 127–8 Monatte, P. 138 Morel, E.D. 266 Moscow 12 Mühsam, E. 61, 63, 65 Munich 36, 39, 45, 51–69, 99 munitions 2, 4–6, 14, 29–30, 31, 34, 127–8, 130–4, 138, 150–1, 164–6, 168, 241, 242–5, 246–7 Munitions of War Act, 1915 6–7, 272 Munro, Sir T. 164, 168 Mussolini, B. 229, 236, 294 Nagyatádi Szabó, I. 199, 204–5, 210 Németh, L. 204 Neurath, O. 66 Nitti, F.S. 233 Noske, G. 16, 39, 45, 184–91 Nuremberg 44 Ordine Nuovo 113, 115, 117, 118, 120 pacifism 13, 91, 130, 132, 145, 244–7, 263–4 Pannekoek, A. 28 Paris 8 peasant soldiers 2–3, 199–200, 202, 241 Péricat, R. 132, 138, 145 Petrograd 4, 7, 16, 18 Polányi, M. and K. 78 Prato, G. 114, 119 printing workers 29 profiteering 8–9, 33, 55, 60, 90, 130, 200, 267, 292 Radek, K. 233 railway workers 142–3, 146, 239, 251–5, 270 Reid, A. 150, 153, 160 Remscheid 16, 26, 43 restrictive practices 5 Riefstahl, F. 190 Robert, J.-L. 134 Romania 11, 82, 83, 211, 294 Roques, M. 243 Ruhr 4, 26, 44, 45 Russian railways 7 Russian Revolution, February 1917 1, 7, 10–12, 16, 33–4, 55, 91, 93, 95, 130, 162, 235, 264, 293

300

Index

Russian Revolution, October 1917 1, 2, 12, 33–4, 53, 55, 93, 95, 133, 153, 162, 166, 235, 242, 284, 292 sailors 36, 58, 94, 138, 178, 185–91, 247, 268, 272 Salvemini, G. 232 Sassoon, S. 3 Scheidemann, P. 38, 290 Schumann, O. 183 Seligman, M. 65 Sellier, H. 140 Serrati, G.M. 231–3 Shackleton, Sir D. 267 Shaw, Lord of Dunfermline 284 Shaw, W. 163, 169 Shinwell, E. 168, 171 shop stewards 5, 26–7, 29, 33, 36, 38, 40, 44, 67, 92, 114–16, 133, 134, 135, 138, 146, 150, 162, 164, 167, 169–72, 181, 246, 264 Simiand, F. 243 Smillie, R. 163, 280 social welfare 17, 29, 30, 47, 92, 99, 150, 158, 239–40, 241, 250–1, 274, 290, 293 Sokolovska, E. 233 Solingen 16, 26 Southall, H. 155 Spartacus League 15, 28, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 52, 61 Steidle, R. 224–5 strikes 6–9, 12, 19, 32–3, 38, 55–6, 68, 89, 91–5, 106, 111, 113–15, 119, 121, 127, 130, 133–9, 142–4, 146, 151, 161, 162, 165–6, 169–72, 224, 239, 240, 242, 244–7, 249–55, 263–4, 269–76, 283 Stuttgart 26, 28, 44 Szabó, E. 77 Szabó, I.N. 199, 204–5, 207, 210 Tasca, A. 231, 235 Taylor, A.J. P. 1 Taylorism 109, 129, 143

Terracini, U. 230 textile workers 25, 47, 224 Thomas, A. 9–10, 129, 132, 133, 241, 243, 244, 246, 248 Thomas, J.H. 277, 279 Tillett, B. 272 Togliatti, P. 231 Toller, E. 52, 63, 65, 66, 67 Trotsky, L. 40, 279 Turati, F. 230 Turin, 5, 9, 15, 105–22, 136 Turkey 56 Tyrol 217–25 unemployment 30, 46, 61, 98, 149, 168, 170, 197, 205, 216, 284 Vázsonyi, V. 73, 75, 79 Vienna 72, 87–104, 142, 215–18, 221–5, 294 Vollmar, G.von 57 Ward, S. 18 Webb, B. and S. 155 Wheatley, J. 167 Wildman, A.K. 3 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 12, 35, 38 Wilhelmshaven 44 Wilson, J.Havelock 280 Wilson, President W. 12, 38, 57, 133 Winter, J.M. 2 Wolfe, H. 166 women protestors 9, 11–12, 32, 34, 130–2, 141 woodworkers 29 youths 15, 16, 28, 31, 32, 34–5, 54, 91, 107, 121, 137, 145 Zahn, F. 53 Zamagni, V. 119 Zetkin, C. 28, 230 Zini, Z. 118, 230 Zinoviev, G. 234–5, 285