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6 - Workers: did war prevent or provoke revolution?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Jay Winter
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Antoine Prost
Affiliation:
Université de Paris I
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Summary

In this book, why do we distinguish the history of workers from that of the home front? The reason is because of the powerful relationship between war and revolution, on which there is a huge historical literature. This body of writing followed the same path as did other kinds of history, from a political to a social approach. In brief, the history of workers has replaced the history of labour movements. In this field, the periodization is a bit different than that we have seen in other chapters. The shift from the first to the second configuration happened later, and without an apparent rupture. The third configuration exists only in a sketchy form.

This particular chronology reflects the importance of the political character of this body of historical writing. As a narrative of secular messianism, the history of the labour movement has been framed as that of the epic of the chosen people marching towards its liberation. To understand how and why the revolution so widely expected happened in Russia, and not in other countries, was a central concern for the whole left, socialist, anarchist, communist, or Trotskyist, with different emphases here and there. In France, the strong influence of the Communist party, from the 1920s to 1968, imposed a division of the labour movement between the good and the bad, the revolutionary and reformists, reflected in a kind of history embedded in value judgments implicit or at times explicit.

Type
Chapter
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The Great War in History
Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present
, pp. 126 - 151
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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