The First Revolution of the Twentieth Century: Fears of Socialism and Anti-Labour Mobilisation in Europe After the Russian Revolution of 1905

Abstract

In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe experienced labour conflicts, unprecedented in their character, intensity and scope. From the waves of strikes and social conflicts of the pre-war era, through the ordeal of the First World War, and the extraordinary violence of the post-1917 upheavals, the revolutionary potential of mass strikes never ceased to torment those who were assigned, or self-appointed, to protect the threatened order. The purpose of this article is to analyse the repertoire of actions and ideas of right-wing civil defence leagues, vigilante organisations, private police and yellow unions which emerged at the end of the century, and most noticeably in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1905. This phenomenon is considered in a comparative and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on the most industrialised societies of pre-war Europe: France, Germany and Great Britain. The article provides a systematisation and assessment of the different forms, types and characteristics of this process of relative privatisation and realignment in security roles, outlying trends and shared clusters of ideological beliefs in violent activity across various industries and national contexts. The article shows how the pre-war experience of vigilantism, anti-socialism and nationalism would represent a key incentive to the development of governmental strikebreaking schemes as well as an important situational antecedent for citizens’ militias and right-wing paramilitary organisations in the aftermath of the Great War.

Introduction

“The French Revolution dominated the nineteenth century: will the Russian Revolution dominate the twentieth?” The unconventional newspaper editor and spiritualist W. T. Stead rhetorically asked in a long article published in the 1906 February issue of the Independent Review. In almost millenarian tones, Stead prophesised that the Russian upheaval would have been felt across the globe and a new world might have possibly emerged out of its convulsions.¹ While this prediction was fully satisfied only after the October Revolution, the events of 1905 constituted a decisive and often unrecognised step in the history of social movements.² The “springtime of peoples,” as one historian defined the temporary destabilisation of Tsarist power in meaningful allusion to the revolutions of 1848,³ acted as a powerful catalyst for the emergence of new paradigms concerning political and industrial action.

In the heat of the Russian revolution of 1905, an international movement of protest arose, which amalgamated—under different national conditions and within the diversity of socialist tendencies—calls for political reform, extension of the suffrage and social justice. This popular mobilisation culminated in strike activity of unprecedented scale and scope all over Europe which continued without major interruption until the outbreak of the First World War. In Austria-Hungary, the influence of the Russian example stirred the Electoral Reform Campaign of 1905, which took place against the background of imposing mass demonstrations and labour stoppages, and revived the Social Democratic movement from years of passivity.⁴ In Germany, Russian revolutionary reverberations produced an aggravation of the forms of political and ideological antagonism, which resulted in the radicalisation of nationalism and anti-socialist propaganda.⁵ In France, the October General Strike in Saint Petersburg resonated to some extent upon the revolutionary élan of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and materialised through the massive mobilisations of workers and citizens of the Republic in the strike peaks of 1906 and 1907.⁶ Concomitantly, violence-saturated industrial unrest unceasingly raged throughout Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.⁷ Also in Britain, the echoes of revolution loudly rang through political and industrial landscapes. After the general election of 1906 in which the Labour party established itself as an independent political force, an unsteady upswing development of unions and strikes came into effect, up until the qualitative breakthrough of the immediate pre-war years.⁸

Much as the great tremors of bygone revolutionary eras and the more recent experiences of workers’ insurrection, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian crisis heightened fears of social disintegration and decay among conservative ranks, revivifying imageries of “revolt of the plebs” and parleying a political lexicon teemed with pathological metaphors.⁹ Contagion anxieties traversed the continent, playing on and interweaving with the extreme susceptibility of domestic and international actualities.¹⁰

Almost everywhere in Europe, the 1905 shock generated an irreversible rethinking of public order and national security through the expanding of the role of government as well as the approval of constitutional or statutory emergency powers to enforce social discipline.¹¹ At the same time, the nationalism of these years served to cement the anti-socialist and anti-internationalist front by transmuting industrial unrest into domestic disloyalty and stimulated the onset of nationalist campaigns of social defence around Europe. This wave of conservative and nationalist reactions, which more or less ambiguously interfaced with State repression, wound up testing, deforming and sometimes overstepping the porous boundaries of the State’s monopoly of force.

From this premise, this article paves the way for a comparative and transnational analysis of anti-labour mobilisation in France, Germany and Great Britain in the volatile years preceding the outbreak of World War I. While much work has been devoted to socialist parties, trade unions and revolutionary organisations, the experiences of anti-socialist and anti-labour mobilisation, in particular before 1914, have not received the same degree of scholarly attention. Most of the existing research in this field rests on national experiences and generally does not go beyond the political discourse of the extreme right.¹²

This article begins by outlining the impact of revolutionary fears on the specific political systems, on the patterns of patriotic cognition and action, and, more generally, on the renegotiation of the boundaries of national belonging and citizenship. Based on extensive archival research, the second section of the article analyses the formation of right-wing civil defence leagues, self-defence committees, private polices, yellow unions and strikebreaking bodies, which in formal or informal partnerships with law-enforcement agencies, mobilised to counter industrial militancy and the risk of revolutionary escalation. This article intends to provide a systematisation of the different forms, types and characteristics of this largely forgotten experience of counter-mobilisation. We will highlight similarities and differences between leading imperial and industrial nations of pre-war Europe by using a combination of the methods of comparative and transnational history.¹³ This allows for important insights concerning national and international patterns of State repression and privatisation of coercive tasks, vigilante behaviours and its effects on State’s institutions and means of physical coercion.

The article also sheds light on transnational schemes of labour repression, which advanced in a symbiotic relationship with the internationalisation of class struggle. The analysis of international employer organisations and trans-border organised strikebreaking serves to show how, within the interstices of nationalism and the escalating arms race, the opposition to the working-class movement also produced international public–private cooperation.

Finally, the article concludes by showing how the pre-war experience of anti-labour vigilantism represented a key incentive to the development of governmental strikebreaking schemes involving civilian volunteers as well as an important situational antecedent for paramilitary organisations in the interwar years. The goal is to provide a new frame of analysis to understand the fractures and tensions that came to the fore in the most industrialised societies of pre-war Europe during and in the aftermath of the Russian crisis. The aim is not only to demystify the general picture of cohesion that defined British, French and German polities, but also to reveal how certain expressions of ideological polarisation and counter-revolutionary violence antedated the war.

The Revolution of the Twentieth Century

European reactions to the “Revolution of the Twentieth Century,” as W. T. Stead labelled it, were more revelatory of the tensions inscribed in the process of democratisation rather than a response to concrete risks of revolutionary contagion.¹⁴ The stirring of popular revolt against Tsarist authoritarianism injected a new sense of urgency in the political arena.¹⁵ In the multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Edwardian Britain, and to a lesser extent in France, the Russian Revolution heightened pre-existing fears of social and political disintegration. Unquestionably, after the upset of 1905, the rise of the labour movement and social democratic parties appeared more threatening than ever.

In the light of the British general election of 1906, the defeated conservative leader Arthur Balfour scathingly gauged the Labour Representation Committee’s electoral breakthrough as “the faint echo of the same movement which has produced massacres in Saint Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin.”¹⁶ The rise of the Labour Party, for Balfour, was nonetheless only the prologue of a drama in which the Liberal Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman had the unenvied part of “a mere cork dancing on a torrent which he cannot control.”¹⁷ The mutual inspiration and cross-fertilisation among social movements in different European regions was clearly tangible and caused painful twinges for conservatives, who never forgot the transnational quality of the revolutions of 1789, 1820, 1830 and 1848.

In Germany, mounting social tensions and popular protest generated a wider public debate—notably launched by Rosa Luxemburg—on political mass strike and democratic change. Concomitantly with the revolutionary unrest in Russia, mass demonstrations for the universal suffrage took place in Vienna, Prague, Dresden and Hamburg.¹⁸ In the immediate aftermath of the “Red Wednesday” riot of January 1906 in Hamburg, the police of the Hanseatic city was firmly convinced that public protest was the prelude to a social revolution inspired by the Russian movement.¹⁹ As the first anniversary of the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 approached, army troops were prepared to storm revolutionary barricades that were expected to appear in German cities.²⁰ The majority of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Free Trade Unions, however, opposed the idea of the general strike as a political weapon.²¹ This situation changed suddenly in the early summer of 1914, when the SPD established a “mass strike fund” and party pragmatists had come to accept extra-parliamentary action, and in particular the mass strike, as a potential weapon to force democratisation.²²

In France, the violence of Bloody Sunday in Russia shocked the public opinion.²³ However, unlike Britain and Germany, the 1905 Revolution did not generate the same degree of fears in regard to an upcoming workers’ rebellion—and this in spite that the country was entering a period of heightened labour conflict and political protest. This difference can be related to the French republican regime—an exception in a so-called Belle Époque dominated by monarchies—and its model of citizenship which inevitably made the revolutionary and democratic claims of 1905 less compelling. However, after three major waves of violent strikes between 1904 and 1911, the relations between French State authorities and the working class were quite deteriorated.²⁴ The outrage for the events in Saint Petersburg had not yet died away when the radical government, under the leadership of Georges Clemenceau, took on a brutal repression of labour unrest, reviving the ominous memories of Fourmies (1891) and Châlons-sur-Marne (1900). In the biennium 1907–1908, with the army being called in with disconcerting frequency, there were 20 persons killed and other 667 wounded during strikes.²⁵ At the same time the Radical Party, which was dominated by the employers from the Republican Committee of Commerce and Industry, was drifting rightward in the political pendulum. It called for the dissolution of the CGT and increasingly stigmatised the socialists for their alleged anti-patriotism.²⁶

In Britain, the spectacle of rebelling masses in Eastern and Central Europe played upon the apprehensions of some of the Liberal government members in the amendment of the classic principles of limited government and laissez faire.²⁷ The progressive encroachment of “New Liberalism” on economic and social policies, with its systemic implications on the relationship between the State and individuals and private enterprises, synchronised with a new phase of labour militancy.²⁸ The early twentieth century nadir of trade unionism caused by the succession of hostile court decisions came to an end under the increased parliamentary pressure of Labour. The passage of the Trade Disputes Act of 1906, which shielded trade unions from the “unconscious class prejudice” of the judges, elicited a physiological backlash of industrial unrest.²⁹ This trend, signalled by the cold statistics of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, gradually developed momentum, reaching its apogee in the paroxysms of the “Great Unrest” (1910–1914).³⁰ The extraordinary confluence of multiple predicaments, including the constitutional crisis of 1909–1911, the “scandalous” campaign of the suffragettes, the Agadir incident and the armed mobilisation of Ulster, gave to the “workers’ revolt” an undeserved ominous gleam.³¹ The shock of the summer of 1911, in which transport workers aptly showed to the public how a nationwide general strike might have “placed the country in the rigor of death”³² drove some representatives of industrial capitalism into defiance of the State monopoly of force.³³ Concomitantly, in a dangerous mélange of virulent partisanship and bombastic rhetoric, the opposition by Ulsterites to the Home Rule developed into outright subversion following the Larne Gun Running and the Curragh incident.³⁴

Amid and in the aftermath of the revolutionary wave of 1905, a sense of impending catastrophe increasingly permeated the imaginaries of ruling class circles. This atmosphere profusely leaked down in the social ladder, eliciting nervous reactions from industrialists, financiers, national efficient advocates and patriotic middle classes.³⁵ In the eyes of German conservatives, the perceived urgency to preserve law and order against “strike terrorism” was deeply linked with the cohesion of the national community. Already in 1889, the governmental newspaper Neueste Mittheilungen argued that “citizens who are loyal to the State increasingly feared that a social revolution will take over and brutally destroy the traditions of a civilised past.”³⁶ The roots of these revolutionary fears reached deep into the political discourse carried out by European conservatives against the French Revolution. In the context of the political impasse of the Wilhelmine State and the increasing international tensions, the long-lasting conservative discourse against nineteenth-century revolutions and the new perception of a threatened order in mass society influenced the radicalisation of nationalist, militarist, racist and anti-socialist discourses, with each contributing to reinforce the other.

The notion of “security” conquered not only the field of crime repression, diplomacy and international relations but also the context of industrial production and labour relations. In this context of growing “securitisation,” the orchestrated perception of internal and external threats became one of the central characteristics of early twentieth-century nationalism. Not only the so-called Bülow Bloc in Wilhelmine Germany but also Aristide Briand’s government in France portrayed industrial unrest as a threat to national security.³⁷ In 1906, the year with the highest number of industrial unrest in the pre-war period, the narrative of German encirclement emerged as a recurrent element of political discourses.³⁸ The emergence of an “othering” discourse was not only related to the perception of external enemies but also to the opportunity to more vigorously stigmatise the supposed non-patriotism of labour and socialist movements.

Patterns of Counter-Revolutionary Mobilisation Before 1917

The prognosis of W. T. Stead that the “masses in every country will be more turbulent and less manageable”³⁹ as the result of the Russian ferment met early validation in the increased level of social and political mobilisation across the continent. This section specifically focuses on the plurality of anti-labour, nationalist and counter-revolutionary organisations, which moved on the porous boundaries between legal and extra-legal responses to revolutionary fears. Despite strides in the privatisation of law enforcement, there is no denying that the State remained the primary actor against potential subversion. By the late nineteenth century, new forms of popular protest and transnational security challenges—as the one brought by anarchist terrorism—accelerated the modernisation of State repressive apparatuses and spawned ground-breaking forms of international cooperation among them.⁴⁰

At the end of 1905, in Saint Petersburg, the Director of the French bank Crédit Lyonnais gave an account of counter-revolutionary groups that operated in a “grey zone” between State-led repression and organised private violence.⁴¹ He observed that the Tsarist police and administration used civil monarchists and nationalists to provoke the violent repression of revolutionary movements.⁴² Often called “Black Hundreds” (or tchernossotensy, because they reproduced the military organisation of the Cossacks groups or sotnias), the monarchist armed bands—made of fanatic and opportunistic déclassés—acted secretly on behalf of the official police. They were linked to the Tsarist State and to the far right and nationalist Union for the Russian People (URP).⁴³

These anti-revolutionary Russian formations were closely related to strikebreaking associations in Western Europe. In particular, they were linked to Fédération Nationale des Jaunes de France (FNJF), whose specific raison d’être was the violent intimidation and repression of unionised workers.⁴⁴ In September 1907, the nationalist leaders of the Russian URP, who had contacts with the FNJF, announced the creation of a “new Yellow movement in Russia.”⁴⁵ This transnational dissemination of “yellow” organisations was closely related to international partnerships between large corporations such as Schneider armaments and the Putilov company , where the strike which led to Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg started.⁴⁶ Schneider reached several agreements with Putilov already in the 1890s, while negotiations for the Franco-Russian military-financial alliance were going on. The Schneider weapons factory was based in Le Creusot in Eastern France, where the Jaune movement emerged.

The “yellow” movement fostered a counter-internationalist culture and also had connections in Imperial Germany and Switzerland. In 1907, one of the most active agitators for the Imperial League against Social Democracy, Rudolf Lebius, founded the Federation of German yellow unions (Gelber Arbeiterbund) in Berlin. He was directly inspired by Pierre Biétry, the leader of the Jaune movement. Between 1906 and 1907, the nobleman Raymond Klöckler von Veldegg, who was Biétry’s right-hand, travelled across South Germany and Switzerland with the aim of organising “yellow” propaganda. He founded two newspapers both named Gelbe Arbeiter-Zeitung in Zurich and, then, in Stuttgart.⁴⁷ The ideological foundation of the yellow movement laid on counter-internationalism, and the transnational propaganda organised by Biétry, Veldegg and Lebius tried to legitimise corporatist and nationalist ideas on the one hand, while intimidating and explicitly threatening striking workers on the other.

Several reports of the French police corroborate the fact that the FNJF did not have a popular base, although, at its peak (1904–1908) it counted on 35.000 nationalist activists.⁴⁸ According to these police reports, yellow leaders were well-armed and ready to use their weapons against unionised workers: “We are armed (…) and we will fire on our aggressors in all the cases for our self-defence” stated one of the FNJF strikebreakers in 1905.⁴⁹

Violent repression carried out by armed strikebreakers was a truly transnational phenomenon as the strong connections of the French “yellow” movement with Russian and German groups clearly demonstrated. In Wilhelmine Germany, the yellow and patriotic unions were ideologically and regionally more differentiated than in France. However, they spread more rapidly and reached a peak in 1913 with almost 280,000 members.⁵⁰ The Federation of yellow unions led by Lebius was linked with strikebreaker agent Karl Katzmarek who was well-known for his brutality.⁵¹ German strikebreaker agents often operated in Austria and Switzerland where they killed two striking workers in 1912 and 1914, respectively.⁵² According to the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, “German Pinkertons” had also been employed as private security guards by Baltic landowners that felt threatened by the revolutionary movements of 1905.⁵³ The spread of armed anti-labour bodies and the unprecedented surge of professional strikebreakers were important aspects within the broader framework of authoritarian responses to social conflicts. More than replacing striking workers, the main aim of armed strikebreakers was the aggressive assertion and protection of property rights against the growth of trade unions. According to the German economist Lujo Brentano, who wrote a long essay about the problem of protecting the so-called “willing workers” from “strike terrorism” in 1912, the professionalisation and militarisation of strikebreakers was a form of “indirect violent repression” that industrialists and anti-socialist politicians organised against the growing number of strikes.⁵⁴ Following Brentano, these repressive practices imitated the American private security market.⁵⁵

Along with Lebius’ and Veldegg’s yellows, a Federation of so-called patriotic workers unions was founded in 1907 in Hamburg (Bund vaterländischer Arbeitervereine). This umbrella organisation was supported by the Imperial League against Social Democracy and was joined by 37 pre-existing associations of “imperial-loyal” workers (reichstreu). A variety of similar “yellow” unions rose after the turn of the century, and the German veterans’ associations had also joined the State-supported effort against the socialist threat.⁵⁶ In Austria, insecurity towards social and political change also contributed to popularising patriotism around 1900 and veterans’ associations increasingly emphasised their “imperial, loyal-German attitude” and hostility to socialism.⁵⁷

Also the reactions of British industrialists against the social reforms of the Liberal government and the legalisation of “peaceful picketing” went to the extreme length of threatening the privatisation of security. The Liberal commitment to reinforcing procedures for the resolution of labour disputes through statutory conciliation and arbitration as well as the rise of total labour costs stemming from welfare provisions were perceived by representatives of industrial capital as an outright assault to managerial prerogatives and proprietorial rights.⁵⁸ “The government was determined to make the men as strong as the master,” liberal politician and future governor general of the Union of South Africa, Herbert Gladstone, appears to have said to a delegation of the Employers Parliamentary Committee during the discussion of the Trade Disputes Bill.⁵⁹

After the Trade Disputes Act of 1906, British employers’ associations and firms began to look at the United States of America, where a vast market for private security provided armed protection and investigative services to corporations and commercial entities since the late nineteenth century, in order to find an efficient prophylaxis against crescent trade unionism. While apprehensions of revolutionary contamination had not yet dawned upon the moods of political and economic elites, George Livesey, Chairman of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, underscored the necessity for employers to begin planning the organisation “of a force such as the Pinkerton police of America for the protection of men who wish to work in face of strike.”⁶⁰ In the same menacing manner, the General Manager of the Shipping Federation, Cuthbert Laws, publicly invoked the murky American world of corporate polices, detective agencies and vigilantes as a necessary (and importable) model for industrial defence.⁶¹ Perhaps inspired by these bellicose views, William Collison the controversial founder of the National Free Labour Association of Great Britain—the most notorious British union busting in the pre-war era—toured the United States in search of advice and guidance from commercial strikebreakers and leading advocates of the “open shop.”⁶²

This thrust towards privatisation of security, more announced than concretely pursued, was intertwined with accusations against the Liberals of stirring up “industrial insubordination.”⁶³ When the great champion of late Victorian libertarianism Lord Elcho, who presided the Liberty and Property Defence League and the Employers’ Parliamentary Council, informed the captains of the British industry that the government did not perceive the gravity of the issues involved in the Trade Disputes Act,⁶⁴ the shipowners claimed for themselves the right of self-defence.⁶⁵ In the meantime, after “the compromise of 1907,” which came to embody the emergence of State interventionism in the industrial field, railway companies accelerated the professionalisation of their own constables.⁶⁶

The violent paroxysms of the Belfast Dock Strike (1907) exposed how traditional strikebreaking methods—devoid of the protection of the army—were ineffective under the sheer weight of mass picketing and mass protest.⁶⁷ Instead, in the Nordic countries, as Gregory M. Lubbert wrote, coercive labour practices “reached such a level of refinement that strikebreakers were regularly imported from as far away as England.”⁶⁸ Scandinavian employer associations reconfigured the use of the lock-out—as seen in Denmark (1899) and in Sweden (1909)—into the logic of a “preventive war” against the growth of trade unionism.

Schemes of corporate resistance transcended narrow domestic settings and, in specular reflection to the internationalisation of labour militancy, employer’s associations and large corporations confederated in formidable international combinations. “The principal object is to fight the trade union organisations and the strikes by forming international organisations of strikebreakers,” the Deutsche Arbeitgeber Zeitung candidly announced in reference to the forthcoming constitution of the International Shipping Federation.⁶⁹

In Britain, the extraordinary wave of strikes of 1910–1914 alarmed the country to an extent that some contemporary observers spoke of an inexorable drift towards revolution and class warfare.⁷⁰ Comparisons were made with the “conditions noticed in Russia during the general strikes of 1905.”⁷¹ In this picture, the severe strain under which law-enforcement agencies were put by a good deal of disorders and violence, required, in a perplexing step backward in time, the heavy use of troops to restore order, and reignited discourses of privately contracted security and civic self-defence. A manufacturer of copper sulphates in London informed the Home Office that he made “complete preparations against any [strikers] attack” and that his employees were “fully armed.”⁷² Thus, while employer’s associations and companies returned to threaten or even actualise plans for private protection, the echoes of the violent affairs of Tonypandy, Liverpool and Llanelly increased the anxieties of the bourgeoisie and morphed into a code of moral conduct that expected every citizen to do his part. Also in Germany, armed strikebreakers were deployed to protect private companies in Berlin and Cologne.⁷³

This underlying fear of social disintegration acted potently on the vigilante spirit of those upper and middle classes to which nationalism had taught to tie social discipline to the fate of the national community. In Britain, Special Constables were “sworn in en masse” during major disturbances.⁷⁴ The conservative press incautiously appealed to the voluntary associations of citizens to avert social paralysis.⁷⁵ The Times went so far as to invoke the formation of permanent corps of strikebreakers in order to break the yoke of solidarity action and mass picketing.⁷⁶ The Frivilliga Skyddskåren (Public Security Brigade), which had contributed to defeat the 1909 Swedish general strike, represented the organisational model of reference. During the Great Unrest, “middle class” unions like the Liverpool Civic Service League and the Leeds Citizen’s League of Law and Order emerged to provide essential public services.⁷⁷ Among those who volunteered to keep the supply of gas and electricity as well as the regular volume of both passenger and cargo transportation during strikes unimpaired were numerous university students. At the University of Oxford, for example, a “Provisional Strike Emergency Committee” was established in 1912.⁷⁸ This type of mobilisation stood as an open testament to the military disciplinisation of the youth. Rather curious is the short-lived experience of the Volunteer Police Force (VPF). Founded by the Duke of Abercorn and generously subsidised by shipping and railway companies, the force was to assist the regular police in the preservation of law and order, to protect transportation facilities, to escort blackleg labour and “to supplement corps such as Special Constables, Lifeboat, Fire Brigade, Salvage and Ambulance.”⁷⁹ Dressed in an odd mix of police and military-looking uniforms and armed with batons, this civilian police sinisterly presaged the intolerant posturing of post-war right-wing political militias. Only the rigid opposition of the government prevented its territorial solidification.⁸⁰

In Wilhelmine Germany, armed groups of auxiliary policemen (Zechenwehren) emerged as a new form of institutionalised vigilantism, showing remarkable similarities with the British special constabulary.⁸¹ They were recruited among clerks and foremen chosen by employers to oppose striking workers. During the largest pre-war mineworkers strike in 1905, more than 2500 auxiliary policemen joined anti-strike formations in 117 companies.⁸² They were paid by the employers but legally sanctioned and supervised by public officials. At the end of the administrative procedure, the Zechenwehren members legally obtained the temporary status of police officers and they had to wear uniforms similar to those of the police, with a black-white cockade, hat and armlet bearing the distinctive Prussian emblem. In Saxony, after the political unrest of 1905, leading conservatives advocated the creation of a Police Reserve Corps formed by private citizens, preferably members of military associations.⁸³ The proposal to create auxiliary units was finally implemented by Saxony’s interior ministry in 1917, when State authorities were increasingly worried about the risk of strikes and political upheaval.⁸⁴

Similarly with the British case, the initiative behind the formation of auxiliary units was supported from above and they were put under the authority of regular police forces.⁸⁵ Formally, regulated auxiliary groups such as the Special Constables and the Zechenwehren were not present in the French case, where anti-labour formations were rather organised on the margins or beyond the juridical framework. In the French case, where the delegating of policing functions to private bodies was not legally tolerated or constituted, the massive use of troops and police forces in industrial disputes was more frequent. However, despite the different strategic approach to policing and the lower number of military interventions in Westphalia, Prussian authorities “can hardly be described as more relaxed about the prospect of violence than their French counterparts.”⁸⁶

The case of the Habsburg Empire was very different from the French, the German and the British cases as many of the bourgeois self-defence and “patriotic workers” formations were supported by the Christian Social Party—a new political movement led by the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. In 1905, Lueger supported the creation of a civic guard (Scharfschützenkorps) aimed at defending private property against violent gangs and against the revolutionary threat posed by the working class.⁸⁷ Also, in the most economically advanced regions of Southern Europe, private police forces and semi-institutionalised militias were organised before World War One. The militia Somatén, supported by Catalan employers, had increasingly been involved in the repression of strikes and popular protest since the end of the nineteenth century. In Northern Italy, agrarians’ associations set up their own armed bodies to protect strikebreaking labour, while in major cities around the Po Valley, long-gone forms of volunteer civilian policing (i.e. pattuglie cittadine) were restored to tackle crime and protect properties.⁸⁸

The multifaceted and complex mosaic of anti-revolutionary movements in Europe outlined in this article showed that under the mounting pressure of labour, a general thrust towards the privatisation of repressive practices took place. Although the extraordinary diversity of socio-economic contexts and the varying democratising capacities of individual States argue against the existence of a homogeneous phenomenon, some generalisations are however possible. This demand for security privatisation was in part fuelled by propertied-classes’ perception that the governments were not entirely fulfilling their security expectations, and in part due to the States’ penchant to increase their repressive capacities by sub-allocating control tasks to private bodies—in particular during periods of intense domestic stress. This delegation of policing functions ensured legitimacy or, at least, projected a certain allure to privatised security.

While employers appear to have successfully coordinated anti-strike activities at regional and local levels, the often short-lived and highly fragmented nature of yellow, patriotic or middle-class unions wound up having only a palliative effect against the rise of socialism in Europe. Certainly, the anti-socialist and nationalist mobilisation contributed to a poisoning of the political atmosphere. Nationalist discourses became an integral part of labour conflicts, with the result of a more radical definition of internal enemies. In the last decade before 1914, these discourses, in co-existence with the real or perceived materialising of revolutionary threats and anti-patriotism made the demarcation between internal and external enemies less clear-cut. This promoted violent intolerance and aggression against the other within, de facto anticipating important attitudinal and psychological traits of the “cultures of war.”⁸⁹

Conclusion

The 1905 upheavals did not only emerge as an important turning point in the history of twentieth-century socialism and internationalism, but also as a critical moment of conservative and capitalist counter-mobilisation. Although revolutionary shock in Russia was not as contagious as many contemporaries assumed, it had nonetheless a radicalising impact on that pre-existing tide of anti-labour mobilisation, which had emerged at the turn of the century. From this premise, the article has underscored the structuring role of revolutionary fears on political and social realities in the pre-war years. Three decades after the Commune, the existence of a revolution on the continent, but maybe even more growing strike movements and Socialist electoral victories, awakened the spectre of social anarchy and property collectivisation. This fostered the mobilisation of a myriad of semi-institutionalised anti-labour organisations and groups in defence of social and industrial discipline. In Britain and Germany, these dynamics built upon a general context of escalated industrial conflict and labour electoral successes, which had radicalised conservative opposition and their methods of action. In the French case, it was not only the revolutionary narrative but also the connections of anti-labour and nationalist groups such as the FNJF with their German and Russian equivalents that expanded the reach of counterrevolution. In this case, 1905 was an important moment for the development of anti-socialist transnational networks.

After the turn of the century, nationalism became more closely intertwined with anti-labour and anti-socialist positions. However, this interrelation was not always as straightforward as could be expected and requires to isolate some idiosyncrasies in the case studies. In the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, anti-socialist rhetoric often promoted a revival of a form of patriotism based on traditional values that did not necessarily coincide with the radical nationalist discourses present in the rest of society. Even in the British case, where strikebreaking and patriotic volunteers mobilised to defend conservative concepts such as law and order, anti-labour militancy was less closely related with radical nationalism than in France and Germany. In the Austrian and British cases, and partly also in Imperial Germany, the monarchy played an important role in upholding conservative worldviews. The adaptation of traditional forms of patriotism and the proliferation of radical nationalism could be used in different contexts as a powerful tool to provide workers with an alternative to socialism. In France, although the Jaune movement claimed to be the real representative of “socialist nationalism,” their anti-internationalism represented a perfect interplay of nationalist discourse and hatred against Socialists. The counter-internationalism of the “yellow” movement generated, paradoxically, processes of cross-fertilisation and transfer within Europe.⁹⁰ In all cases, anti-socialism was based on an exclusionary conception of the national community, which tended to ostracise those perceived as threats to its existence.

This increased aggression against internal enemies was also feeding off the growing threat of an external enemy in the lead-up to the First World War. In a context of international tensions and potential war, the risk posed by perceived traitors became more acute, reinforcing the boundaries that defined internal enemies.⁹¹ The labour conflicts and the arms race during 1905–1914 should thus not be viewed as two independent phenomena but as both sides of a process of radicalisation and securitisation (the transformation of labour disputes and political antagonism into matters of “national security”). Remarkably, in the context of growing antagonism between Europe’s great powers, forms of transnational collaboration among anti-labour groups emerged, for instance, between French and German yellow unions, or between British, French, German employers’ associations during dock strikes. This article has highlighted the existence of a supra-national milieu of anti-labour violence, which manifested itself through processes of interactions and transfers.

The First World War and the immediate post-war period saw the development of new social movements borne out from the experience of total mobilisation and the swelling of messianic expectations of social palingenesis. Although post-1917 paramilitary violence has been primarily interpreted as a reaction to Bolshevism and as a legacy of the brutalising effects of combat,⁹² the anti-socialist mobilisation, which grew more noticeably after the quasi-revolutionary momentum of 1905, sheds new light on the elements of continuity between the pre- and post-war years. In Germany and Britain, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 transmuted pre-war apprehension into open panic. While in Central Europe paramilitary forces and uniformed political armies went largely out of control after the imperial collapse of 1917/18, in Britain proposals for the creation of a national Citizen Guard were abortively commenced in favour of a continued reliance on the Special Constabulary.⁹³ The partial privatisation of security tasks in pre-war Europe, and the recognition of the plurality of the mixed public–private repressive practices examined in this article enables the better comprehension of the patterns of continuity and change before 1914 and after 1917. The government’s reliance on “loyal citizens” in defeating internal enemies, which distinctly emerged in the decade before 1914, escalated during the years of total war and revolution (1917–1923).

As noted by Charles Tilly, “street politics and parliamentary politics came to depend on each other” since the late nineteenth century.⁹⁴ In the last decade before the First World War, revolutionary fears resurfaced in the streets of European metropoles and in industrial areas. In this context, concerns of “national security” and virulent “othering” discourses emerged in order to counter the threat posed by popular protest and new social movements. Ideological polarisation and the urgency to defend the national community from the “enemy within,” which reached their most dramatic forms in the violent politics of the post-war years, thus had its embryonic and gestational stages in the so-called Belle Époque.