Since there was no separate Labour party until the 1890s, these developments would appear to have had no clear parallels further to the left. But English workers had already produced impressive, albeit impermanent, national organizations with clear political goals before 1850, in the forms of Chartism and Owenite socialism, phenomena on a scale that none of their continental counterparts could match, and like the distinguishing features of English economic and political life in general, testimony to the existence of networks that gave the country a more effective integration. In the decades when liberals and conservatives were evolving the rudiments of national party organizations, working-class activists made significant moves in the direction of formal organization too. Perhaps the chief of these, the formation of a Labour Representation League in 1869, occurred in the context of the continuing ties between liberals and workers; some of the latter to be sure would have preferred their own organizations, but their efforts to foster them, for instance in keeping the heritage of Chartism alive, produced meager results, in part because they were able to raise little money. The League was founded by workers disappointed at the failure of any working-class candidates to win seats in Parliament in the first election after the Second Reform Bill, but willing to take advantage of the greater resources possessed by liberals to seek better results. Its aims were to register workers to vote and organize support for liberal candidates considered favorable to workers’ causes.36 The League’s founders were members of the Trades Union Congress, the same organization out of which the Independent Labour Party would emerge in the 1890s, but in the 1860s the TUC was still chiefly a regional body, founded in Manchester in 1867 at least in part to counter the influence of the London Trades Council, itself set up in 1860. These developments suggest that the modern Labour Party, like the liberals, emerged as regional forms of organization acquired greater potential to become national, but with a different rhythm, markedly slower at the start but very rapid in the more favorable conditions of the century’s end. The process by which this occurred, however, had much to do with the continuing relations between workers and the liberals, which in turn requires our attention because of what they reveal about middle-class politics.
In a sense all three of the major political groupings in existence before 1914 were class parties, but given what we have seen about class identity as a basis of politics, this left room for considerable uncertainty, especially where the middle class was concerned. The liberal social base was widely acknowledged to lie in the middle classes, but just where the boundaries of this group stood was far from clear. In addition, a class identity for the Party was often rejected by those loyal to it in favor of a different one, according to which it stood not for any social group but for a kind of political trinity of liberty, Parliament, and progress, rooted in the Whig triumph of 1688. This formula was not independent of social reference, but its content lay in the cross-class alliance of aristocrats and wealthy gentry with London merchants and bankers that had been the foundation of the Parliamentary victory over the Stuarts, and which was reconstituted in nineteenth-century terms by the Reform Bill of 1832. At the moment when the name “Liberal” was supplanting that of “Whig” in the 1830s, however, a rival interpretation of the same trinity was abroad, based in an alternative social configuration. This was the radical program being put forward by some of those agitating for suffrage reform; for instance in the Birmingham Political Union founded by the banker and industrialist Thomas Atwood in 1829. Attwood saw the social basis of his movement as “the industrious classes,” the mix of middle and working classes to which many in his time appealed, and like others with a similar vision, he and his associates did not think the 1832 settlement had gone far enough.37 Chamberlain’s Caucus sought to give this orientation more purchase on the Liberal Party as a whole, but its successes were not sufficient to put an end to the old Whig politics within it. The first liberal government whose composition can be described as “unequivocally middle-class” was not formed until 1906, under Campbell-Bannerman, and even then landed aristocrats still held important ministries. The eventual decline of such figures is better understood not in class terms, since cooperation across classes continued, but as a corollary of the weakening of traditional deference and notability.38 All through the nineteenth century liberalism would exhibit both a Whig face and a radical face, a duality that highlighted the uncertain meaning of the connection between the Party and the middle classes: to appeal to them as a social base remained as much a rhetorical strategy as a material ground of action, just as it had been in the 1830s and 1840s.
One thing that lay behind this uncertainty was the prominence of deep divisions within the middle class, a situation to which recent historians have given considerable attention. As one of them points out, the persistence of aristocratic influence in national politics meant that middle-class power long remained chiefly local in character, exhibited in towns and cities where manufacturers, bankers, traders, and professionals led efforts to rebuild, clean up, and improve urban life. “The power of the middle class as a group was focused and to some extent circumscribed by, the urban and the local, at least before 1900.” Even within the confines of Leeds or Manchester, however, “the middle class was a fragile formation, marked by distinctions of wealth, religious identity and political affiliation and subject to the constant pressures of economic competition,” possessed at best of a “precarious unity” that was always in danger of dissolving. Simon Gunn, who provides this description, believes that all the same the middle class in each city found unity through its civic and cultural activities, working to improve comfort and safety, attending concerts and belonging to clubs, all activities that unfolded in a sphere of “consensus and reconciliation.”39 As noted in Chapter 1, such claims may be true up to a point, but only so long as we recognize that the unity fostered in this way does not do away with the divisions it takes as a premise, it merely coexists with them; on whatever basis it may have been founded, the sense of common purpose middle-class people developed in the nineteenth century, or have since, has never been sufficient to overcome internal oppositions of principle and interest at critical moments.
The history of the Liberal Party shows these relationships in action. Both Whiggism and radicalism sought to unify at least a large swath of the broad spectrum of the middle classes, but the efforts of both ended up giving new relief to the divisions they sought to overcome. The most revelatory moment came with the crisis provoked when Gladstone endorsed Home Rule for Ireland in 1886, which exposed oppositions within both radicalism and the Party as a whole. One current within radicalism favored a wholehearted and largely class-based attack on the remnants of aristocratic power everywhere, often dubbed “feudalism,” and this impulse fed support for Home Rule, since aristocratic landowners were among the chief beneficiaries (and to many the villains) of the existing regime in Ireland. But other radicals were among the strongest opponents of Home Rule, since for them the sphere in which traditional and hierarchical power was most objectionable was religion. Some of these were Dissenters and some secularists, but both saw in Irish self-rule the specter of Catholic ascendancy, especially in education. (Many radicals in England also fought the official recognition given to Anglican schools by the 1870 Act that established universal primary education.) These were the chief grounds on which Chamberlain and his faction deserted the Gladstonian official Party for Unionism, allying themselves on this issue with conservatives (and beginning an association that would lead some of them to join the Tories later on). There was both irony and confusion in this move to the right, since the strength of the Chamberlain radicals inside the Party, and in particular their advocacy of social reform measures, was already driving some more moderate liberals in the same conservative direction, impelled by the linked fears of greater government interference in private life and higher taxes. This exodus was enlarged by the Irish issue too, since moderate liberals, and especially landowners, had their own reasons to draw back from what seemed to
many a radical turn. At the same time, the new Irish policy pushed some workers previously attracted to Gladstone away from the liberals as well, moved by anxiety that an independent Ireland would lead to higher levels of immigration and thus competition for jobs; some of these people, however, were already being drawn toward specifically working-class and socialist organizations, whose growth was nurtured by the economic difficulties that spread through Europe in the 1880s. All these divisions inside the Party were brought to a boil by Gladstone’s conversion of 1886, but they had long simmered inside it.40
These disengagements and defections would weaken the liberals in the next decades, but the Party’s later fate had most to do with its relations to workers, since it was the Independent Labour Party that would become the chief alternative to the conservatives after 1914. The path toward this outcome, however, was one that sought to strengthen the longstanding alliance between workers and liberals, and it ended with the Party’s adoption of the “New Liberalism” exemplified by the measures enacted under the government led by Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George in their “People’s Budget” of 1909 – most famously the beginnings of a graduated income tax, government-sponsored old-age pensions, and unemployment insurance. Moves in this direction were already visible in the 1860s and 1870s, in the cooperation radical liberals sought to establish with groups of working-class democrats who favored suffrage extension rather than direct action as the most promising route to social reform. Some liberals sought to establish closer relations with such workers by rejecting the principles of laisser-faire advocated by leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League, and to which many workers were opposed. Middle-class and working-class radicals were also brought closer in the same years by continental issues, moved by a common enthusiasm for nationalist movements in Italy and Hungary and by shared opposition to authoritarian regimes such as the Bonapartist Second Empire.41
Parallel to these moves in another realm were the economic and social analyses provided by L. T. Hobhouse and John A. Hobson. Both argued that the liberal vision of a society able to nurture the independence and self-development of individuals could only be fulfilled through social reforms that reduced inequality, opened up opportunities to those denied them, and lessened the power of the rich. Their economic justification for this program involved significant departures from classical liberal theory; in particular “the two Hobs” sought to show that the economy could be made more efficient and more productive if consumption levels were boosted through raising the level of wages, thus enlarging the market for goods. This went directly against the classical economists’ notion that workers had to be paid out of a limited “wages fund,” so that any increase in pay meant a decline in the number of people who could be employed. (It should be noted, however, that such views were not unheard of among earlier liberals. One reform-minded businessman wrote in the Chartist paper The Northern Star in 1838 that “it is the undoubted interest of all the middle classes to support the interest of and promote the prosperity of the working class. My experience goes to prove that the more the working classes receive in wages, the more I receive in the way of business and that my profits are in ratio to the remuneration of labour.”)42 Here economics ceased to be “the dismal science” of ineluctable limitations on life and well-being exemplified by Ricardo and Malthus. Like such earlier schools as mercantilism and physiocracy, these writers still regarded nature as the source of limits to what work and exchange could provide, a view that marked them as belonging to the phase in economic history Richard Price calls the “economy of manufacture.” By contrast Hobson and Hobhouse reflected the new conditions of the emerging modern industrial economy, which they recognized as capable – despite its limits and potential for harm – of expanding its output to provide much greater well-being, provided it be regulated by principles in accord with the possibilities it generated.43
All these currents in the Party were tied up with the cooperation the leadership undertook with workers determined to organize politically on their own, and who formed the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1900. Liberal and LRC candidates worked together in local elections in 1903, a strategy that helped to achieve a liberal victory, the Party’s first since 1885, and that brought twenty-nine “Lib–Lab” candidates to Westminster. The collaboration continued at the next election in 1910, when the liberal victory probably owed still more to LRC support. That liberal leaders such as Gladstone’s son Herbert believed the Party could be strengthened by its cooperation with the LRC may have been based partly on idealism and partly on a false expectation that the elder Gladstone’s appeal to workers (which partook of old-style notability while shading off into what Weber saw as a modern form of charsima) could be preserved in the changed conditions of the end of the century.
Such visions proved illusory, however, for several reasons. One was that the Party found itself caught between its traditional attempt to support workers and gain their loyalty, and the conviction cherished by many of its members that it stood above class. Liberals enacted legislation aimed at improving the situation of workers, and they gave support to unions, but high-minded Party figures insisted that workers’ interests be pursued in ways that gave equal weight to those of other groups and classes. A separate Labour Party, as one Liberal leader declared, was “wrong in principle.” In moments of considerable economic difficulty, when conflicts between employers and workers could turn sharp and bitter, claims to preserve a balance among diverse interests could easily appear to laborers as too favorable to business owners, and the support liberals offered unions usually fell short of what workers hoped for and expected. After unions were declared liable for damages to employers caused by strikes in the (in)famous Taff Vale decision of 1901, liberals worked to have the verdict reversed; but they rejected union demands for complete immunity from responsibility for actions by their agents, on the grounds that such protection would be unfair to other kinds of organizations, since they did not enjoy it. Similarly, even those liberals who favored certain forms of public ownership for public works (the policies that gave birth to what was called “municipal socialism” in Birmingham and other places) refused to accept the construal of such departures as inroads against capitalism, in the way some labour activists did. In addition (and most damaging of all, in G. R. Searle’s view), the Party failed to put up workers as liberal candidates in places where they had a good likelihood of being elected, in general underestimating the degree to which workers, excited by their new capacity to vote and organize, wanted to be represented by people who spoke and dressed as they did. Whether these limits should be attributed to the Liberals’ status as a “governing party,” as one writer has suggested, or to their rejection of class politics, is perhaps not resolvable; either way of understanding the situation points at once to the Party’s aspiration to represent workers, and to its limits.44
In any case, it was the new conditions of organized politics at the end of the century, more than any deep ideological gap between liberals and workers, that produced the dilemmas of liberal politics and led to the foundation of a separate Labour Party. That Party’s later history would show that liberal and Parliamentary principles remained powerful within it, especially those embodied in the People’s Budget of 1909, the program of consumption-based growth proposed by “the two Hobs,” and the kinds of cooperation that developed between radical middle-class liberals and working-class democrats in the 1860s and 1870s. Class hostility was surely one element in the support workers gave to the new organizations, but class conflict by itself cannot provide an explanation for the turn to a separate Party because its intensity at the end of the century was surely much lower than it had been in the 1840s, when even England seemed close to revolution. The decline of the Liberal Party testifies to the difficulty of keeping an organization whose chief social base lay in the broad middle classes united in the conditions of the fin-de-siècle, and to the way that liberals were almost fated to contribute to their Party’s decline by at once encouraging a
nd resisting the independent working-class organization that worked against them. The many uncertainties about what a middle-class politics could amount to in practice meant that the vague “community of sentiment” of the mid century was a better basis for liberal integration and loyalty than the more abstract and mediated politics that replaced it. We shall see that the same was largely true for France and Germany, in their different ways, as well.
6 France and bourgeois France: from teleocracy to autonomy
In French history one theme has often dominated discussions of both the structure of national life and the coming of modernity, namely the centralizing role of the state. The state’s importance in creating a unified territory and nation cannot be gainsaid; it occupies a major part in the account developed in Chapter 3 and it will continue to do so here. But recent writers have made it clear that one reason why centralization has so often taken center stage in France, both in actual life and in the way historians have portrayed it, is that regional and local contrasts and the independence to which they testify have persisted too, providing the continuing material on which centralizing efforts have worked. François Guizot, as we saw above, justified the role he assigned to the state in creating national unity in part on grounds that the new monarchy still faced many of the internal divisions confronted by the old one, and a number of recent historians have emphasized the enduring power of local differences in French history; a short list would have to include Eugen Weber, Pierre Rosanvallon, Stéphane Gerson, Susan Carol Rogers, and Gérard Noiriel.1 Here we draw on their work in order to sharpen our focus on the ways people whose lives were often dominated by their local situations came to be drawn into the expanding and thickening networks that opened the way to new forms of modernity and of bourgeois life during the nineteenth century.
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 24