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The Divided Class: Catholics vs. Socialists in Belgium, 1880–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Carl Strikwerda
Affiliation:
University of Kansas

Extract

The rise of working-class movements has recently been subjected to a great deal of historical scrutiny. Although this literature treats a variety of topics, much of it is devoted to different aspects of socialism: the radical, reformist, or utopian nature of socialism, the sociological roots of the movement among artisans and industrial workers, and the creation of an alternative, or socialist, subculture. One reason socialism has been investigated so intensively is that historians have assumed that socialism represented the authentic working-class ideology. Implicitly or explicitly, scholars have conveyed the idea that socialism alone promoted class consciousness, that socialism led workers to realize that they formed a distinct group and had to act together to defend their interests. Other movements among workers have been considered to be conservative and, as such, have been discounted as unrepresentative of workers' interests.

Type
Catholicism and the Frontiers of Conflict
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1988

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References

1 Among other examples, Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working Class Radicalism in Dusseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Moss, Bernard, The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1830–1914: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976)Google Scholar; Lidtke, Vernon, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

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6 Joll, James, The Second International, 1889–1914 (London, 1955), 97,122, 152–53, 171.Google Scholar In 1913, there were 126,745 socialist unionists in Belgium and 86,818 Catholic unionists (Commission syndicale du Parti ouvrier et des syndicats independents, Rapports présentés au congres syndical, juillet, 1914 (Brussels, 1914), 5657Google Scholar; and Scholl, S. H., ed., 150 Jaar Katholiek Arbeidersbeweging in België (1789–1939), 3 vols. (Brussels, 1965), II, appendix).Google Scholar By comparison, in Germany in 1913, there were 2,574,000 socialist unionists and 343,000 Catholic union members (Moses, , Trade Unionism, I, 211).Google Scholar

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10 Zolberg, Aristide, “The Making of Flemings and Walloons: Belgium, 1830–1914,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5:2 (1974), 179235CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clough, Sheperd B., The History of the Flemish Movement in Belgium (New York, 1930).Google Scholar

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35 Varlez, , “La federation,” 1.Google Scholar The Ghent socialists also helped create the Guesdist socialist federation in the Nord department in France (Strikwerda, Carl, “Regionalism and Internationalism: The Working-Class Movement in the Nord and the Belgian Connection, 1871–1914,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 12 [1984], 221–30).Google Scholar

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87 Labor historians could do much more comparative research on why, in some cases, communities of workers came together to form more-or-less unified movements, as in Britain or post-1945 Germany, and why in others, France or Italy, for example, divisions have persisted for decades. On the relationship between community and class, see Calhoun, Craig, “Community,” in History and Class, Neale, R. S., ed. (Oxford, 1983), 108–9. Calhoun, however, has preindustrial communities as his model, not modem communities or movements of workers that are smaller than the working class as a whole.Google Scholar