Politics of the Extreme and World War I (^) ‹ 173
In Great Britain, the socialist organization, known as the Fabian Society, counseled against
revolution but argued that the cause of the working classes could be furthered through
political solutions. The Fabian Society’s ultimate goal was a society in which the parts of the
economy that were crucial to people’s survival and comfort, such as heat and water, should
be owned by the state and regulated by experts employed by the government. In France,
socialist parties banded together to join the French Socialist Party under the leadership of
Jean Jaurès. The fortunes of the French Socialist Party in elections improved steadily in the
first years of the twentieth century, and by 1914, it was a major power in French politics.
In Germany the Social Democrats, led by August Bebel, were the most successful
socialist party in Europe. The Social Democrats espoused the “revisionist socialism” of
Eduard Bernstein, who urged socialist parties to cooperate with bourgeois liberals in order
to earn immediate gains for the working class. By 1914, the Social Democrats were the
largest political party in Germany.
Women’s Suffrage Movements and Feminism
Always left out of liberal reforms and sometimes excluded from labor unions, women of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries formed political movements of their own.
Feminist groups campaigning for women’s rights united in 1878 to convene in Paris for the
International Congress of Women’s Rights.
In Great Britain, the movement focused mostly on the issue of women’s suffrage, or
voting rights. The movement went through three distinct phases:
• A pioneering phase from 1866 to 1870, during which suffrage agitation focused on the
Reform Act of 1867 and won a number of successes at the level of local government
through petitioning and pamphleteering
• A period of relative dormancy from 1870 to 1905
• A period of militancy from 1905 to 1914, during which the National Union of Women’s
Suffrage Societies, headed by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, campaigned vigorously for
women’s voting rights, and the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline
Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, campaigned, often violently, for a
broader notion of women’s rights
On the Continent, feminists such as Louise Michel in France and Clara Zetkin in
Germany folded their movements into the broader cause of workers’ rights and politically
supported socialist parties.Anarchist Activity
People under the more oppressive regimes, where even liberal reform was resisted, turned to
anarchism. Theoreticians like Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin urged the elimination
of any form of state authority that oppressed human freedom, and ordinary people enacted
the doctrine, first through the method of the “general strike” (massive work stoppages
designed to bring the economy to a halt) and later, and more often, through assassination
attempts on the lives of government officials. Political assassinations in the first years of the
twentieth century included King Umberto I of Italy and President William McKinley of
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