Strike activity is clearly the least studied aspect of the history of labor movements, yet it may be the most revealing index of the situation and outlook of actual workers. Moreover strike activity has an important history of its own, related to but not described by the history of organized labor. Strikes have evolved. Various groups of workers developed an ability to mount new kinds of strikes at different times. In order to grasp this evolution we need some clear means of measurement. What follows is an effort to suggest some criteria, many of them obvious enough. The essay results from an ongoing study of workers in France, Belgium, Germany and Britain in the two decades before World War I. But while examples are chosen primarily from this area and period, the effort is meant to be quite open-ended. There is no need to expect uniform patterns of strike activity in a given stage of industrialization; but there is every reason to hope that sufficiently general standards of measurement can be developed to measure key differences and to specify problems that require deeper study in terms of fundamental causation.

The failure of the Popular Front government of 1936–1937 was at least two-fold: from the national standpoint it was able neither to formulate a foreign policy of anti-fascism nor to bring France out of the economic crisis; from the narrower political perspective it was unable to prevent a growing sense of disillusionment and recrimination among its constituents. Both aspects have received increasing attention from historians in recent years, although not always with sufficient regard for the extent to which the two problems might be separable. Greater intervention on behalf of the Spanish Republicans, for example, might not have saved the Spanish Republic, but even so would have gone far toward satisfying Blum's constituents and blunting communist criticism of his government. Abandonment of the forty-hour week, on the other hand, while adding to the deceptions of the left, might have permitted the achievement of the economic upturn upon which the hopes of the Popular Front ultimately rested. Spain and finances – war and economics, the twin chief concerns of western civilization in our century as A. J. P. Taylor has facetiously suggested – are the issues in terms of which most analysts of Blum's double failure have proceeded. But there is another which may have been equally important, and which appears to have been of greater significance in the eyes of contemporaries. This was the question of the relationship of the Blum government and the French administration. The increasingly blurred distinction between politics and administration characteristic of contemporary Gaullism, as well as the rigidity and resistance to innovation typical of the crisis-prone French bureaucratic style, suggest in any case a re-evaluation of the recent past in terms what Michel Crozier has aptly called “the bureaucratic phenomenon”.

The myth or reality of widespread social unrest in Britain in the period immediately before the First World War has attracted increasing attention among historians in recent years. Debate has centred upon two main themes, namely the character and impact of contemporary labour unrest, and the situation and prospects of the Liberal Party. Was British labour fundamentally disaffected from existing forms of industrial relations and from Parliamentary democracy? Was the pre-1914 Liberal Party already in decline and unable to withstand the advance of the Labour Party? Several recent writers have returned sceptical or largely negative conclusions to questions of this kind. In so doing they have sought to dispel a popularly held notion of incipient social breakdown and imminent social change, proposed amongst others by Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England.

Wie kaum ein anderer Theoretiker des Austromarxismus hat sich Otto Bauer eingehend mit dem Faschismus beschäftigt. Sein Beitrag zur gedanklichen Durchdringung des historischen Rohmaterials hat auch heute kaum an Aktualität verloren. Zwar hat der Geschichtsprozeß seit den Analysen Bauers neue „Fakten” gehefert, die er wohl nicht geringer geschätzt hätte, als er es in seinen theoretischen und praktisch-politischen Arbeiten tat, die auch manche Einzelheiten seiner Darstellungen korrigieren oder ergänzen; zu einer grundsätzlichen Revision seiner Begriffsbestimmung des Faschismus in seinen letzten Lebensjahren sind weder Optimismus bezüglich der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung in den ehemals faschistischen Ländern noch der Stand der heutigen Faschismusdiskussion Anlaß genug. Bauers Faschismus-interpretation beschränkt sich nicht auf die vorgeblich „objektive” Aneinanderreihung deskriptiver Satze - solche sind gewiB auch nötig –, sie hat vielmehr den Vorzug, im Rahmen einer exfliziten Theorie der Gesellschaft zu stehen und einen echten Erklärungsversuch anzuvisieren. Faschismus bleibt so nicht ein letztlich Unerklärbares, er wird aber auch wegen Bauers hoher Apperzeptionsfähigkeit nicht zur leeren Formel, die einerseits den historisch-empirischen Befund negiert, andererseits jede Form terroristischer Unterdrückung oder alle Formen bürgerlicher Herrschaft überhaupt gleichsetzt. Bauer hütet sich auch meist vor dem polemischen Gebrauch des Wortes Faschismus, der gerade in den letzten Jahren wieder auf der bürgerlichen Seite, aber auch bei der Linken nicht selten zu beobachten ist, obwohl gerade er nach 1934 alien Anlaß gehabt hätte; auch in der tiefsten Verbitterung nach der Niederlage der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie ist er im Stande, zwischen dem eigentlichen Faschismus in seiner italienischen und deutschen Spielart und halb- oder scheinfaschistischen Dikta-turen wie dem „christlichen Ständestaat” Dollfuß' zu differenzieren.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the emergence and development, between 1904 and 1914, of the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions. A main conclusion is that the ATTI, in being mainly concerned with its members' employment interests, was implicitly a trade union despite continual protestations by both officers and members that the Association was a professional body and would not “degenerate into a mere trades union […]. For people of education, like teachers, […] it is wrong to begin at the salary end”. In the first place, therefore, this paper is an investigation into certain aspects of the early history of a white-collar union, in this case the organization whose membership was drawn initially from among a small group of teachers in local authority technical institutes in England at the beginning of this century. Secondly, however, insofar as the technical teachers of this period saw themselves as professional people for whom trade unionism was inappropriate, the case-study also, in passing, illustrates the common conflict over the goals sought by most teachers' organizations at some time during their evolution as to whether they “should be concerned only with professional matters or should also fight for better salaries”.

The Labour and Socialist Convention held at Leeds on 3 June 1917 was held expressly “to follow Russia”. It adopted four resolutions, the most celebrated of which called for the establishment of what have been termed “extra-Parliamentary Soviets with sovereign powers”. It was described shortly afterwards as “the most spectacular piece of utter folly for which [the Socialist left] during the whole war-period, was responsible – which is saying not a little”. A contemporary journal held that many of the ILP men had become “avowed Syndicalists or Bolsheviks”; and the King, in conversation with Will Thorne after the latter's visit to Russia on behalf of the government, expressed some concern about what had taken place. He “seemed greatly disturbed at the famous Leeds Conference”, Thorne recorded. Thome's reply, however, had “seemed to relieve his mind”. F. W. Jowett, a member of the group which issued invitations to the Convention, referred to it to the end of his life as the “highest point of revolutionary fervour he had seen in this country”.

1971 konnte das 100-jährige Bestehen der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung gefeiert werden. Ihre Geschichte begann als die Geschichte der dänischen Sektion in der Internationalen Arbeiterassoziation: noch bevor nämlich der Internationale Arbeiterverein in Dänemark (Den internationale Arbejderforening i Danmark) von seinem Gründer, dem Reserveleutnant, Hauslehrer und ehemaligen Postschreiber Louis Albert François Pio ein festes Organisationsgebäude verschrieben bekam, hatte dieser Kontakt mit Marx in London aufgenommen und ihm in einem Brief die politischen Ziele und programmatischen Vorstellungen der noch zu konstituierenden dänischen Sektion der IAA annonciert (18. September 1871). Die Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der der erst am 15. Oktober 1871 mit einem organisatorischen Dach versehene dänische Arbeiterverein der IAA als dänische Sektion angekündigt wurde, lässt vorbereitende Kontakte zwischen London und Kopenhagen vermuten. Es darf angenommen werden, dass Pio und die Gefolgsleute der ersten Stunde feste Vorstellungen über die theoretischen und organisatorischen Grundlagen der IAA und einzelner Sektionen als Richtschnur für ihr Unternehmen gehegt haben müssen, kurz: dass ihnen die internationale Arbeiterbewegung ein Begriff war. Dafür sprechen auch Pios erste schriftstellerischen Versuche im Dienste des Sozialismus: die Socialistiske Blade I und II mögen noch so dilettantisch gewesen sein – die Absicht, die Lage der dänischen Unterklasse mit Hilfe der sozialistischen Theorie zuerst zu definieren, dann die Betroffenen zu organisieren, wird erkenntlich. Ohne Informationen, ohne Kontakte zur IAA hätte Pio jedoch kaum einen Buchstaben zu Papier bringen können.

The labor historians Perlman and Taft provide us with an acceptable, if general, introduction to the National Civic Federation:

“The national organization was an outgrowth of the Chicago Civic Federation, organized in 1893, to bring about better relations between capital and labor and to promote the study of civic problems. The Chicago Civic Federation succeeded in averting a number of labor controversies, and in 1900, its chief promoter, Ralph Easley, sought to extend its range of activities. He founded the National Civic Federation, composed of capitalists, labor leaders, and representatives of the public.”

It is well known that in England the last four decades of the nineteenth century witnessed both the growing importance of the coal-mining industry and the continuation of widespread voluntary charity. But the absence of detailed local studies has made it easy to assume that, as colliery districts did not enjoy the same benevolent institutions as other areas, these were distinct, indeed almost separate, developments. Relegated to a footnote by the historian of English philanthropy, “the imposing sums collected to meet disasters” have been in this respect almost completely ignored.

Lassalles Testament ist das entscheidende Zeugnis dafür, wie ganz persönlich Lassalle den ADAV als seine eigenste Schöpfung auffaßte, wie sehr er die Organisation mit seiner Person identifizierte. Obwohl der Lassalle unwandelbar wohlgesinnte Franz Mehring die von Lassalle ausgesetzten Legate und Renten als dem Parteiinteresse dienend interpretierte, konnte er doch nicht umhin, das Testament als verhängnisvoll für die Weiterentwicklung des ADAV zu bezeichnen. Im zweiten Kapitel des vierten Buches seiner Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie findet sich dazu die folgende Passage: „Verhängnisvoller erwiesen sich die Bestimmungen des Testaments, die sich unmittelbar auf den Allgemeinen Deutschen Arbeiterverein bezogen. Lassalle empfahl dem Vereine, den Frankfurter Bevollmächtigten Bernhard Becker zu seinem Nachfolger zu wählen, und diesem band er auf die Seele, an der Organisation festzuhalten, die den Verein zum Siege führen werde, Verfügungen, die sich als Reflexe der Vahlteichschen Opposition erklären, aber, statt alte Verwirrung zu schlichten, nur neue Verwirrung angerichtet haben.”

“Captain Swing” had small success in the West Midlands. As Hobs-bawm and Rudé correctly point out, Staffordshire and Shropshire were among those “counties only marginally affected by the labourers' movement”. There were few cases of incendiarism and the whole episode in this area was somewhat anticlimacteric in character. Nevertheless the threat of “Captain Swing” in the last months of 1830 and into 1831 did not leave the West Midlands unmoved. It had the incidental effect of uncovering some of the otherwise subterranean rifts and divisions in rural society. In the fragments of evidence that survive, one can see that “Swing” induced a number of responses from the various sections of rural life in Staffordshire and Salop – attitudes were exposed and recriminations voiced. In effect, the fear of conflict rendered explicit social and economic circumstances which otherwise one can only guess at.

Joseph Rayner Stephens's active participation in the Chartist movement was limited to three months in the autumn of 1838. His Chartist career began in mid-September when he was elected as a delegate to the Convention by the men of Ashton-under-Lyne and had ended before he was arrested at the end of December. During that time he spoke at meetings not only in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire but also at places as far afield as Carlisle and Norwich. He was elected a delegate to the Convention at Ashton, at the great South Lancashire demonstration, at Stockport, and at Norwich. He was a commanding figure on Chartist platforms, and historians of the movement have devoted a great deal of attention to him. His vivid and forceful language, prominence in the early stages of the agitation, early arrest, and seeming recantation of Chartism all provide choice material for historians, who have been quick to exploit it. By all hands, Stephens is given credit for the part he played in arousing the working men of the North of England and for fostering in them a sense of identity to which the Chartists could appeal. This was a fundamentally important contribution to the development of the Chartist movement. But historians have not clearly raised two important questions about Stephens's role in the movement. First, did Stephens think when he was participating in the movement that its immediate goal – enactment of the People's Charter – was worth-while? Timing is important here for many historians have noted that he renounced the movement between the time of his arrest in December, 1838 and his trial in August, 1839. Second, did his impact on the agitation extend beyond arousing the men of the North? These questions are related, for his skepticism about Chartist goals helped to shape his impact on the movement.

Everybody imagines he knows about working conditions in Victorian England, particularly the excessively long hours resulting from the use of machinery to which the workers became increasingly enslaved. In the famous words of James Philip Kay, “Whilst the engine runs the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness.” It is equally well-known that the worst aspect of employment was the exploitation of women and small children in textile factories and mines. Factory conditions were causing disquiet as early as the 1780's, and the revelations of the witnesses before a succession of committees and commissions in the early part of the nineteenth century are too familiar to need repeating here. The same may be said of conditions in the mines. Who has not been moved by that description of girls at work in the mines of the West Riding – “Chained, belted, harnessed, like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half naked […] they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural”? Yet it is also common knowledge that factory and mine workers were only a minority among the working classes at the mid-century, numbering about 1¾ millions compared with the 5½ millions employed in non-mechanised industry. Agriculture and domestic service, in fact, employed twice the number of those working in manufacture and mining at this time.

During the Directory the Journal des hommes litres de tous les pays was a major spokesman for the repubhcans and its pages reflect the difficulties that the Babouvist Conspiracy created for them. Although the newspaper gave a sympathetic hearing to Babouvist ideas, it was aware that the conspiracy weakened the republican movement and favored the royalists and the moderates. One discovers in the columns of the Journal the interests, goals, and strategy of the Jacobins rather than merely the programs and rationale of the “unregenerated terrorists” of the Extreme Left. Accordingly, this newspaper is an important source on the problems and the objectives of French republicans from 1795 to 1800. After a brief description of the editorial staff and the circulation of the daily, this article will deal with its attitude towards the Babouvists and its major tendencies during the First Directory, the phase of this regime which ended with the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor Year V (September 4, 1797).

Stendhal, in La Chartreuse de Parme, described a minister of police who

“se garde bien de nier la conspiration, au contraire, seul avec le prince, et armé jusqu'aux dents, il visite tous les coins des appartements, regarde sous les lits et, en un mot, se livre à une foule d'actions ridicules dignes d'une vieille femme.”

Thus it is when conspiracy is in the air, and such fears were not without parallel in the administrations of the European states in years between 1815 and 1848. The European cabinets in this “age of Metternich” were beset by a fear of revolution, international conspiracy, carbonari and illuminati, and a widespread suspicion of subversion. The picture of clandestine organisation whether drawn in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Rome or Milan, was not vastly different nor entirely fictitious. The period was punctuated with armed revolts, coups, arrests of agitators, and the appearance of secret societies, often republican, dedicated to the overthrow of the existing order. It is not surprising that contemporaries and indeed some historians of the period exaggerated the links between these phenomena, even to the extent of occasionally suggesting that one principal organisation was at work with a series of national variants creating an international network. Revolt in Piedmont, Naples and Spain was readily conceived to have a connection with attempted coups elsewhere in Europe. Buonarroti, Mazzini, La Cecilia, Victor Cousin, General Lafayette and many others were observed by the police of Europe as they moved about the continent engaged on legitimate business and perhaps on work of a more subversive nature. The suspicion was constantly present that such men were the agents of international revolution. This was the case not least in the ranks of the French administration, where carbonarist activity came into prominence in 1821 and 1822 and a fear of traffic in revolution remained until the middle of the century.

Students of institutional charity must sometimes share Walter Bagehot's melancholy doubt “whether the benevolence of mankind does most harm or good”; but they do not dispute that philanthropists were ubiquitous in England by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Sir James Stephen called the period the age of charitable societies. “For the cure of every sorrow […] there are patrons, vice-presidents, and secretaries. For the diffusion of every blessing […] there is a committee.” Many issues raised by the expansion of philanthropy have been treated with considerable insight. But at least one question has largely escaped the historian: the role of charitable women among the “Fathers of the Victorians”.