522Chapter 26
Act (1875) set stiff criminal penalties for compelling a
person to commit (or not commit) an act such as join-
ing a strike. Armed with such legislation, and the pro-
management sentiments that produced it, governments
did not hesitate to use military force against disruptive
workers in Britain or France just as in Russia. Unem-
ployed workers demonstrated in central London in the
fall of 1887. The government responded by banning la-
bor marches. When workers persisted, they were met
by armed police in the “bloody Sunday” clash of No-
vember 1887. Three of the unemployed were killed and
several hundred injured. Similarly, strikes by coal min-
ers in the Ruhr valley in 1889 led to violent clashes
(known as the Herne riots) when the German govern-
ment called out two battalions of infantry and a
squadron of cavalry to oppose the strikers. French
troops fired on strikers at the northern industrial town
of Fourmies in 1891, killing nine and wounding thirty-
five; the conservative government responded to the
massacre by arresting Karl Marx’s son-in-law, who had
spoken there two days earlier, for inciting a riot. At
Lodz (in Russian Poland), forty-six workers were killed
in a clash in 1892; ninety-two died in a confrontation in
Sicily in 1893. And Georges Clemenceau, who had
risen to political prominence as a democratic radical
and friend of workers, did not hesitate to call out the
troops against French strikers in 1906; he even seemed
to relish being called “the number one cop in France.”
Workers responded with another form of mass
politics—supporting political parties that promised to
create governments sympathetic to them. This con-
verted socialism from a theory into a mass movement.
Socialist parties were typically led by intellectuals who
combined a program of political democracy with social
benefits. The Austrian Socialist Party was led by a
physician, the Belgian Socialist Party by a lawyer, and
the French and German parties by professors. The fore-
most French socialist, Jean Jaurès, began his career by
writing a Latin dissertation to earn a professorship at
the University of Toulouse. The clearest example of
middle-class intellectuals shaping socialism was the
Fabian Society founded in Britain in 1883. Its leaders
were a novelist (H. G. Wells), a dramatist (George
Bernard Shaw), and a brilliant couple (Sidney and Beat-
rice Webb) who founded both a university (the London
School of Economics) and several periodicals. Such
leaders espoused democratic socialism and believed
they would ultimately win an electoral majority. They
called for radical democracy similar to the Chartist pro-
gram of the 1830s or the advanced constitutions of
1848; universal suffrage (often including women’s suf-
frage), secret ballots, salaried representatives, and pro-
portional representation were typical political
objectives. The eight-hour working day, government
regulation of working conditions, and free medical care
were typical social goals of democratic socialism.
All over Europe, however, democratic socialists
contended with Marxists for control of working-class
political movements. Philosophical disputes, such as
the abolition of private property, separated these two
wings of the socialist movement. The greatest of these
disagreements involved the seizure of power. Marxists
expected the working-class victory to come through vi-
olent revolution. “Force,” Marx and Engels wrote, “isUnion membership
Country 1890 1900 1905 1910 1913
Britain 1,576,000 2,022,000 1,997,000 2,565,000 4,135,000
Germany 344,000 851,000 1,650,000 2,435,000 3,024,000
United States 869,000 1,959,000 2,184,000 2,753,000
France 203,000 358,000 400,000
Russia 123,000
Austria-Hungary 47,000 135,000 482,000
Sweden 180,000 136,000
Belgium 13,000 43,000 116,000
Spain 3,000 41,000
Source: Compiled from data in Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences(New York, N.Y.: Macmillan, 1937), 8:9–41.TABLE 26.4The Growth of Union Membership in the Early Twentieth Century