Intellect, Culture, and Society 1850-1914 (1 янв 1850 г. – 1 янв 1914 г.)

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As the nation-state extended voting rights and welfare benefits to more and more people, the question of national loyalty became increasingly important as they tried to win the allegiance of their people. German and Italian unification brought together states and people of different customs, loyalties, and languages. Class differences dampened national unity in Britain. France was divided between languages and rural versus urban. However, by the 1890s, most ordinary people accepted nationalism.

Centralized institutions imposed nationally reached even the lowliest citizen. Force military conscription exposed young males to patriotic values. Free compulsory education leveled out language differences and taught about national traditions. Patriotic images of leaders or events promoted a sense of national solidarity. A common currency and standard of measurement abated regional differences in Germany and Italy. Improved transportation and communication connected citizens. Literary rates and compulsory education increased, and more people were exposed to history or current events through newspapers, magazines, and books. Intellectuals, politicians, and ideologues promoted national pride. National symbols, rituals, and holidays were exposed to ordinary people.

The feminist movement grew. Progress was slow and hard-won, yet they did gain various rights.

Women faced obstacles in employment due to the idea of separate spheres and a gender division of labor. They were subordinate to the husbands by law and lacked many basic legal rights. Women in England had no legal identity and thus no right to own property, and in France, the Napoleonic Code enshrined the principle of female subordination and gave few legal rights.

Women like Mary Wollstonecraft campaigned for equal rights and access to higher education, professional employment, and the vote. They argued that women simply had to have more opportunities, and paid employment would break up the monotony of middle-class existence. In the decade before World War I, the British women’s suffrage movement reached its height. The Federation of German Women’s Association had an impact on the revised German Civil Code of 1906, which granted women gains in family law and property rights. Some socialist women favored the liberation of the entire working class through Marxist revolution.

In the last third of the 1800s, nationalism took more populist and exclusionary tones. A growing understanding of racial differences fueled racism. Some, like Count Arthur de Gobineau, who’s On the Inequality of the Human Races promoted the idea of a superior Aryan race, saw racial superiority as scientific, which partially rose both from Enlightenment thought and Social Darwinism. These ideas were used to justify imperial expansion.

For many, Jews were the ultimate outsiders. By the 1870s, Jews had gained many legal and civil rights, yet they still faced discrimination. Anti-Semitism geared up after the 1873 stock market crash. Built on nationalism and racial pseudoscience, anti-Semites stirred up resentment against Jews based on the biological threat of their “blood”, which were only exasperated by false accounts that claimed members of the First Zionist Congress planned to dominate the globe in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Anti-Semitism was particularly popular among conservatives, extreme nationalists, and those who felt threatened by Jewish competition in the workforce. Some politicians combined anti-Jewish sentiment with large-scale public works programs like Karl Lueger and his Christian Socialist Party. He tried to limit Jewish immigration and used anti-Semitic rhetoric to appeal to the worst instincts of the electorate.

Anti-Semitism was especially prominent in Eastern Europe. In Russia’s Pale of Settlement, officials used these ideas to channel popular discontent away from the government and onto Jews. Pogroms, popular anti-Jewish riots, occurred in waves between 1881 and 1884 and in Odessa in 1905, which killed at least 400.
Out of this movement grew Zionism. Zionists like Theodor Herzl argued that Christian Europeans would never overcome their hate and advocated for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Some embraced this, but many emigrated.

Socialist parties grew rapidly in this time. As the consolidation of labor unions and the turn to Marxist “revisionism” promised real practical improvements for workers, Marxism became more mainstream.

The most successful socialist party was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) which was the most popular party in Germany. Russian exiles in Switzerland with the Russian Social Democratic Party, France with the French Section of the Workers International, Belgium, and Austria-Hungary also had strong socialist parties. Marxists sought an international organization. Marx helped form the socialist International Working Men’s Association, also known as the First International. He used the annual international meetings to espouse doctrines of socialist revolution, but his ideas eventually frightened his followers and the group collapsed in 1876. The sentiment remained, however, and several years after his death socialist leaders formed the Second International, which lasted from 1889-1914. Many joined the cause while elites and the conservative middle-class feared its growth.

On the whole, socialism wasn’t really radical and revolutionary. As they grew, they looked more towards gradual change and steady improvement for the working class. As workers gained the right to vote and other benefits, they focused more on elections. Workers’ standard of living rose gradually but substantially after 1850, and the quality of life in urban areas improved. Once seen as subversive, unions won more rights. These “new model unions” concentrated on winning better wages and hours through collective bargaining and compromise, which helped pave the way for a full acceptance of unions.

Germany is a model of the transformation of socialism. Unions were previously oppressed but gained more members (from 270,000 in 1895 to 3 million in 1912 out of a male industrial workforce of almost 8 million). Union activists focused on bread-and-butter issues and engaged more in collective bargaining. Marxist revisionism was an effort to update Marx’s doctrines to reflect current realities. Many socialists, like Eduard Bernstein, argued that they should reform their doctrines to meet the changed conditions. The movement, not the final goal, was the point. These views were denounced by radical Marxists but followed by socialists like Jean Jaures. Jaures was previously against revisionism but remained a gradualist and optimistic secular humanist.

By the early 20th century, socialist parties had clear-cut national characteristics. Those in Russia and Austro-Hungary tended to be most radical, Germans talked revolution and practiced reformism, the French talked and tried to practice revolution, the British Labour Party was committed to gradual reform. In Spain and Italy, Marxist socialism was weak.

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