784 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also brought remark
able cultural achievement in Europe from Britain to Russia, as writers and
artists reacted to and against changes in the world they saw around them.
Beneath the tangible progress and increased prosperity of late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth-century Europe lurked cultural pessimism and artistic
rebellion, a modernist critique of the idea of progress itself. In 1904, the
German sociologist Max Weber wrote that “at some time or another the
color changes, the importance of uncritically accepted viewpoints is put in
doubt, the path is lost in the twilight.” To some, the fin de siecle seemed to
be such a time.
State Social ReformIn general, Karl Marx’s gloomy prediction that workers’ wages and overall
conditions of life would continue to decline had not been borne out in
late-nineteenth-century Europe. Yet economic uncertainty and grinding
poverty seemed to have engendered a social crisis of unmatched propor
tions. Descriptions of the dreary slums of blackened manufacturing towns
reached many readers through novels and surveys of working-class life.
Beginning in about 1870, as a result of the far-reaching, visible impact of
large-scale industrialization, states gradually began to intervene to assist
the poor. States and charitable organizations increasingly came to consider
poverty a social and not a moral problem. The political left in Western Eu
ropean states demanded measures of social reform. In France and Italy,
programs of subsidies for unwed mothers overcame the opposition of the
Catholic Church. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Sweden then imple
mented short paid maternity leaves for women who had insurance. Unpaid
maternity leaves were made possible in some other places. Organized assi
tance for the elderly lagged behind, in part because of the traditional
assumption that families were responsible for their care.
Confronted with the increased militancy of workers, some Western Eu
ropean employers sought to maintain worker loyalty through paternalistic
policies. They encouraged workers to form savings associations by match
ing whatever small sums the working-class families could put aside for the
future. A minority of manufacturers started funds for insurance and pen
sion plans, or provided basic company housing (especially in mining commu
nities). Yet such paternalistic policies, largely confined to Western Europe,
were far from being generalized. Some social reformers, many politicians,
and most workers demanded state intervention to protect workers from
some of the uncertainties and hardships of their labor.
Imperial Germany, not republican France or parliamentary Britain, first
provided workers some protection against personal and family disaster
stemming from work-related accidents. Germany’s domineering Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck sought to outbid the Catholic Center Party and the