The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  May Day, last of the four resolutions, was agreed on in response to a message from the American Federation of Labor, which planned to open its campaign for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. It was adopted at the suggestion of a French trade unionist, but the result was divisive because the Germans refused to commit themselves to a gesture likely to anger officialdom and evoke reprisals.

  Nevertheless it was the Germans who spoke with most authority in the International. As the oldest and largest of the Socialist parties, the German party enjoyed the greatest prestige and, by virtue of the fact that Marx was a German, regarded itself as the Petrine rock, not to mention the Vatican, of Socialism. In 1890, released from the anti-Socialist law, it won 1,400,000 votes, nearly 20 per cent of the total, and thirty-five seats, in the elections for the Reichstag, a victory that dazed Socialists in the rest of the world. In practice, the German Social-Democratic party, as a result of its successes among the voters and its close ties with the trade unions, adapted itself to the possible. In theory it remained stoutly Marxist and at its Erfurt Congress in 1891 restated the Marxian view of history as official.

  The Erfurt Program reaffirmed that the middle class, small businessmen and farmers, were being squeezed out, sinking along with the proletariat into increasing misery, and that the greater the masses grew in number, increasing the pool of labour, the sharper became the division between exploiters and exploited. Since the ultimate solution of public ownership could only be accomplished through the conquest of political power, the program of the party must be to gain political control, using trade unions as the source of votes but maintaining direction of policy in the party.

  The Erfurt order for political action stamped its image upon the Second International, though not without the furious resistance of the Anarchists and their friends whose split with the Marxists on this issue had broken up the First International. Although not invited to the Congress of Zurich in 1893, the Anarchists arrived anyway, whereat August Bebel, the German chairman, a master of Marxian abuse, harangued them for having “neither program nor principles.” In Zurich, “accustomed to German methods,” he had no difficulty in having them expelled by force. In protest against such methods, Amilcare Cipriani resigned as a delegate. The Anarchists retired to conduct a diminutive counter-Congress in a café while the majority unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing the “necessity of organizing the workers for political action.” Only those parties and groups accepting this principle could henceforth call themselves Socialists and take part in Congresses of the International. Not wishing to cut themselves off from their foundations, they made an exception for trade unions, which in future were to be admitted without being required to subscribe to the political principle. According to the Belgian delegate Emile Vandervelde, these difficult problems were solved in an atmosphere of “profound calm.” It seemed anything but calm to a young British trade-union delegate, J. R. Clynes of the cotton workers, who had never been abroad before. He was astonished at the “verbal orgies” and violence of the Latin and Slav delegates and at the flareups of hostility in which one delegate flourished a knife and “everyone was yelling and struggling.” Among Socialists, human bellicosity found its vent in factionalism whose vehemence Clynes tactlessly ascribed to “national rivalries and hatreds growing out of past wars.”

  Going for a swim in the Lake of Zurich Clynes saw “a ruddy beard on the surface of the water floating gently towards me” which proved to be attached to Bernard Shaw, also a delegate to the Congress, representing the Fabian Society. Having already discounted Marx and revolution, Shaw did not spare his contempt, in his reports of the Congress, for Wilhelm Liebknecht’s duping of his followers with the “rhetoric of the barricade.” The German leaders, he decided thereafter, were forty years out of date. At sixty-seven, Liebknecht, founder of the party in 1875, was now its elder statesman. Descended from a long line of university professors reaching back to the Eighteenth Century, he had been imprisoned for his role in the bourgeois revolution of 1848, and afterwards lived in exile in England for thirteen years, where he studied with Marx. When he died in 1900 a crowd of an estimated hundred thousand mourners and spectators lined the streets along the route of his four-hour funeral procession.

  By all but Shaw the German party was considered the hope of Socialism, bearer of the torch in the country from which Marx expected revolution to come. Everyone was impressed by its size and strength, its wonderful organization, its twenty-eight secretaries and organizers, its training program for party workers, and its mounting membership. In the elections of 1893 the Social-Democrats increased their votes to 1,750,000, close to 25 per cent of the total, more than those of any other single party. Since it was against principle to join forces with any bourgeois party, the Social-Democrats in the Reichstag remained, despite their numbers, a relatively impotent group in what was in any case an impotent body. The fact of their existence, however, exerted a silent pressure which made the Government more reasonable toward concessions. The Kaiser, who in the first careless rapture of his dismissal of Bismarck had lifted the anti-Socialist law in 1890, recovered quickly. By 1895 he had decided that the Social-Democrats were a “gang of traitors” who “do not deserve the name of Germans” and by 1897 that the party “which does not stop attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the last stump.” In 1895 Liebknecht was arrested on a charge of lèse-majesté for a speech of which Shaw said that it could have been made “by Mr. Arthur Balfour to the Primrose League tomorrow with the approbation of England.” But this was no special mark of repression, since it could happen to anyone in Germany.

  National tended to outweigh class traits among the German Socialists: they were more obedient than bold. For all its size the party did not venture to play host to an International Socialist Congress on German soil until 1907. Despite fiery speeches its leaders were prudent in action; they restricted May Day demonstrations to the evening so as not to interfere with work. Work stoppage, said Liebknecht, was general strike and “a general strike is general nonsense.” In Munich no May Day demonstration was permitted until 1901 and then only on condition that it took place outside city limits and did not form crowds in the streets on the way. Columns of Socialists, “their pockets bulging with radishes,” accompanied by wives and children, marched briskly in dead silence through the city to a beer garden on the outskirts where they drank beer and munched their radishes and struck a Russian exile as “not at all resembling a May Day celebration of working-class triumph.”

  They were better off, however, than any Russian worker. Under the heavy throb of German industrial expansion, employment was increasing faster than the population. Unions, under these conditions, were successful in raising wages. Social legislation, originally bestowed from above by Bismarck to weld labour to his state, was the most advanced of any country. By 1903, 18,000,000 workers were insured against accident, 13,000,000 against old age and 11,000,000 against illness, with a total annual expenditure of $100,000,000 in social welfare benefits. Laws regulated wages, hours, time off, grievance procedures, safety measures, and the number of factory windows and toilets. With characteristic thoroughness Germany’s rulers wanted to ensure physical efficiency, leaving as little as possible to chance and bringing everything possible under orderly rule. Professor Delbrück in 1897 publicly supported the right of collective bargaining on the ground that labour peace was necessary for national unity and national defense. To keep labour quiet by judicious concessions was considered the best method of smothering the Social-Democrats, whom the possessing class regarded with increasing enmity and fear.

  August Bebel, the party’s dictator, was believed by the bourgeoisie to be a kind of “shadow-Kaiser.” A small-boned, narrow little man with white hair and goatee, he had been born in a barracks in 1840, the same year as Czar Reed. His father was an Army corporal and his mother a domestic servant. Taking up the carpenter’s trade, he had joined the labour movement in the days of Lassalle; and on a charge of
incitement to treason had been sentenced to four years in prison, a punishment fruitful in producing Socialists. In prison Bebel read much, received visits from Liebknecht and wrote a magisterial history of Woman and Socialism. His brains, Mommsen said, if divided among a dozen Junkers from east of the Elbe, were enough to make each of them shine among his peers. In the Reichstag, where he had debated Bismarck in “savage accents,” Bebel was the spokesman of poverty and misery, loved and admired by the workers, who felt him to be a comrade. He would remain “the deadly enemy of this bourgeois society and this political order” until it was destroyed, he proclaimed at a party Congress in 1903. This was traditional verbiage. In fact, Bebel had no great illusions about the mass of his followers. “Look at those fellows,” he said in 1892 to a correspondent of the London Times as they watched a march of a battalion of Prussian Guards; “80 per cent of them are Berliners and Social-Democrats but if there was trouble they would shoot me down at a word of command from above.”

  Of the outstanding figures of the Second International only he and Keir Hardie were of working-class origin. Karl Kautsky, fourteen years younger than Bebel, thinker and writer of the party and formulator of the Erfurt Program, whose commentaries on doctrine provided the text of endless discussion, was the son of intellectuals, a painter and a novelist. Viktor Adler of Austria was a doctor, Emile Vandervelde was the son of wealthy parents whom he described as “models of bourgeois virtue,” and Jaurès of France came from the petty bourgeoisie.

  As a doctor, Adler knew the human damage caused by undernourishment, overwork and squalor. He wanted to lead the workers to a new existence of “health, culture, liberty and dignity.” Born of a wealthy Jewish family of Prague, he had studied medicine in order to treat the poor. Dressed in rags like a bricklayer, he investigated conditions in the Viennese brickyards where workers lived in company barracks guarded like prisons, five or six families to a dormitory room, and were paid in chits valid only in company stores. Before founding the Austrian party in 1889 he traveled in Germany, England and Switzerland to study workers’ lives and social legislation which might be introduced in Austria. He was a short, scraggy, rather fragile figure with bushy hair and moustache, gold-rimmed spectacles, a pale face and one shoulder bent forward. Next to music he loved Ibsen and Shelley. Accepting revolution as the ultimate goal, he believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fit the worker physically and intellectually for his destiny. The struggle to secure these reforms against that “despotism mitigated by slovenliness,” as he described the Hapsburg regime, was often discouraging and gradually wore down the edge of Adler’s faith. Trotsky, who knew him in the early 1900’s, found him a skeptic who had come to tolerate everything and adapt himself to everything.

  In Belgium, whose population was the densest in Europe and where the process of industrialization had been fierce and rapid, the life of the working class was, in the words of one observer, an “inferno.” Textile factories, steel mills, mines, quarries, docks and wharves used up labour as a mill grinds grain. Twenty-five per cent of all workers earned less than the equivalent of forty cents a day; another 25 per cent earned between forty and sixty cents. An investigation in Brussels showed 34 per cent of working-class families living in a single room. The Belgian illiteracy rate was the highest in northern Europe because child labour was used to such an extent that few had a chance to go to school. Concerned with “something more profound than doctrine,” the labour movement had founded the Belgian Workers’ Party in 1885 without the usual schisms because it could not afford them. The most solidified, disciplined and serious of the European Socialist parties, it was markedly proletarian though led by the ardent Vandervelde. A lawyer by training, an eloquent and admired speaker and prolific writer on labour problems, Vandervelde was “gushed” over by female Socialists who found him “charming and physically attractive.” Together with the unions, the party organized a system of cooperatives where workers bought Socialist bread and Socialist shoes, drank Socialist beer, arranged for Socialist vacations, and obtained a Socialist education at the Université Nouvelle, where the French Anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus lectured. Founded by Vandervelde and others in 1894, the same year the Fabians founded the London School of Economics, the Belgian school capped a Socialist world created inside a capitalist society.

  By virtue of the extended suffrage won with workers’ lives, the Belgian Workers’ Party in 1894 elected twenty-eight deputies to the most bourgeois parliament in Europe. The advent of this solid bloc “firmly and recklessly prepared to take up arms against every institution of the existing regime” created a thrill of fear in the ruling class and a sudden vision among the faithful that Belgium might be the land where Socialism would first be realized. When a second attempt by general strike to win suffrage on the one-man-one-vote principle was called in 1902, many in the movement were reluctant to risk the gains that had been made, but the militants prevailed. Still aggressive and strong, the ruling class suppressed the strike by “murderous fusillade” in the streets of Louvain. Eight strikers were killed and it took the party many years to recover from the defeat.

  If Germany had Marx, France had her Revolution and her Commune. Her Socialism was more spirited but, owing to its extreme factionalism, less solid and therefore less authoritative than Germany’s. The Marxist matrix was the French Workers’ Party, founded by Jules Guesde in consultation with Marx and Engels in 1879. Two years later Paul Brousse seceded to form the Possibilists on the principle that the emancipation of the workers was possible without revolution. Edouard Vaillant, heir of the old Communard Blanqui, headed a separate Socialist Revolutionary Party from which an extreme wing split off called the Allemanists for its leader, Jean Allemane. Guesde was the self-appointed keeper of the Marxian conscience, tirelessly preaching against backsliders and false idols. With thin black hair worn almost to his shoulders, the face of an emaciated Jesus and a pince-nez on his long didactic nose, he was a zealot who never for an instant relaxed total battle against the capitalist system. “Torquemada in eyeglasses” was a contemporary’s epithet and Zola described him talking “with a whole range of passionate gesticulations and a perpetual cough.” For Guesde nothing short of revolution was of any value; no touch of cooperation with the enemy classes permissible. He was an Impossibilist. He belonged to that category of Marxists rendered gloomy by their own prophecies of catastrophe. Mankind, absorbed by materialist districtions, was deteriorating. Postponed much longer, Socialism might not come in time to save it. “What will we Socialists do with a humanity so degraded?” he asked during the Dreyfus Affair. “We will come too late; the human material will be rotten when the time comes to build our house.”

  In 1893 Socialists in France, as in Belgium, won an impressive electoral victory: over half a million votes sending thirty-seven deputies to the Chamber. Dominant among them was the newly famous thirty-four-year-old Jean Jaurès, whose championship of the Carmaux strike in his home district of the Tarn had aroused sympathies all over France. The miners of Carmaux, an area of old and bitter labour disputes, succeeded in 1892 in electing as mayor the secretary of their union, a Socialist, who, upon being refused time off to perform his political duties, took it anyway and was thereupon dismissed from his job by the company. It was a blow at the intent of the vote, an insult to the suffrage understood by every heir of the Revolution. When the miners struck in protest, Jaurès, the former professor of philosophy, made himself their adviser, leader and spokesman. His opponent, the Marquis de Solages, master of Carmaux, owner of iron mines, glass works, timber forests, a title and a seat in parliament, was the epitome of capitalism with whom Jaurès fought an endless duel, through strikes and elections, that lasted most of his life. As a candidate of the French Workers’ Party, elected from Carmaux, Jaurès entered the Chamber.

  Short and heavy set, a “robust caryatid” with a “jubilant and humorous” face, Jaurès glowed with the warm vitality of the South. “Everything interested him, everything excited him,�
� said Vandervelde. With his voice which had the volume and range of an organ, his command of debate, his formidable intelligence, inexhaustible energy and unquenchable enthusiasm, he drew leadership upon himself. When he spoke he was in constant motion with bearded head thrown back or body thrust aggressively forward and short arms flailing. “His shoulders trembled and his knees shook under the burden of his thought. All the force of his immense culture and conviction were poured into words to guide the multitude who believed in him toward a better future.” He seemed to combine the solidity of earth with the mobility of fire. His phrasing was so admired that even political opponents would go to hear him as they would to hear Mounet-Sully speak Racine. Hearing him discuss astronomy at a dinner party, a guest wrote, “The walls of the room seemed to dissolve: we swam in the ether. The women forgot to re-powder their faces, the men to smoke, the servants to go in search of their own supper.” Remy de Gourmont said, “Jaurès thinks with his beard,” but the man who wrote Les Preuves and had been in youth the glory of the Ecole Normale thought more clearly than most. Although the French Socialist movement had no official chief, since it was constantly splitting and subdividing, uniting and splitting again, Jaurès, gradually replacing Guesde, came to be accepted as its leader.

  He was the authentic Socialist, not in doctrine, but in the essence of the idea and the cause. He believed that man was good, that society could be made good and the struggle to make it so was to be fought daily, by available means and within present realities. He fought it wherever it appeared: in the Fourmies fusillade, at Carmaux, in the lois scélérates, over the bill for the income tax, in the Dreyfus Affair. His Socialism did not stem from Marx; it was, he declared simply, “the product of history, of endless and timeless sufferings.” His Latin thesis for his doctorate was on the origins of German Socialism beginning with Luther, De primis socialismi germanici lineamentis apud Lutherum, Kant, Fichte et Hegel. Elected to the Chamber first as a Republican in 1885, when he was twenty-six and its youngest member, he had become discouraged with politics and had returned to the academic life as professor at the University of Toulouse, where his lectures were soon thronged by workmen and bourgeois townsmen as well as students and faculty. The labour struggles of Toulouse and the Tarn drew him back into public life and he announced himself a Socialist in 1890. Edouard Vaillant once said he never knew any kind of revolution Jaurès was not in favor of, but Jaurès’ idea of revolution was rather of taking over than of overthrowing the State. His Marxism was fluid: he was a patriot as much as an internationalist and believed in individual freedom no less strongly than in collectivism. “We Socialists also have a free spirit; we also feel restive under external restraint,” he said. If Socialist society of the future did not allow men to “walk and sing and meditate under the sky” whenever they chose, it would be unacceptable. He denied the Marxist concept of the bourgeois state as one in which the working class had no share. He saw the working class not as an outsider at the door waiting to take over but as part of the State now, needing to make itself felt now and needing to use the middle class as an ally in the struggle to reform society toward the realization of the Socialist ideal.