Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I

by Charles Maier, Charles Maier (Preface by)

Overview

Charles Maier, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history, published Recasting Bourgeois Europe as his first book in 1975. Based on extensive archival research, the book examines how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization.

Arguing that a common trajectory calls for a multi country analysis, Maier provides a comparative history of three European nations and argues that they did not simply return to a prewar status quo, but achieved a new balance of state authority and interest group representation. While most previous accounts presented the decade as a prelude to the Depression and dictatorships, Maier suggests that the stabilization of the 1920s, vulnerable as it was, foreshadowed the more enduring political stability achieved after World War II.

The immense and ambitious scope of this book, its ability to follow diverse histories in detail, and its effort to explain stabilization—and not just revolution or breakdown—have made it a classic of European history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400873708
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/27/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	680
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University. His many books include Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, and Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

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Recasting Bourgeois Europe

Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade After World War I

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By Charles S. Maier

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7370-8

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CHAPTER 1

THE DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL CONFLICT AT THE END OF WORLD WAR I

The defense of bourgeois Europe must be mapped in three dimensions — in terms of class, elite, and interest groups. Class is the most troublesome variable — troublesome first to define, then to apply in concrete historical situations. What distinguished class, insofar as the historian encounters it, was not directly a group's relationship to the means of production or its relative wealth, but a sense of an overriding collective struggle for independence or hegemony. "Classes are valuable as myths, forces that constantly renew themselves and contend for power," wrote the young Italian antifascist, Piero Gobetti, in 1924. "In the messianic struggle of two ideal principles — the one alive as dream, the other as economic and political reality — history does not admit of solutions of continuity, but employs myths, faith, and illusion to renew its eternity." Influenced by the Marxism of his Turin contemporary, Antonio Gramsci, Gobetti did not blink at the fact that society was profoundly divided. Indeed, he insisted that social progress had to start from a frank recognition of real inequalities — a view that appalled many Italian liberals. On the other hand, Gobetti never accepted the Marxist view that the proletariat's perspective on society was more objective and correct than the bourgeois: the collective self-appraisals upon which class was based, he suggested instead, were necessarily limited in insight on both sides.

The view of class that follows is akin to Gobetti's. The nomenclature of class is used here to convey what Europeans perceived as the fundamental social antagonisms arising from the unequal distribution of power and authority. Class divisions doubtless derive in large measure from structural economic situations, from the positions that men occupy in the world of work or consumption. But stratification, whether based on economic power or on wealth, produces class division only insofar as there is awareness of collective competition for power and the right to distribute rewards. Class affiliation, whether expressed as "bourgeois" or in other coded terms, thus represented an allegiance and a collective commitment.

Overlapping the idea of class but not identical to it was the notion of elite. Turn-of-the-century sociologists were newly preoccupied with the concept. Mosca in part, then Pareto maintained that the elites in different fields of endeavor generated a selection of the forceful and intelligent who came to wield influence and power in society as a whole. While a class could not really be discussed without at least implicit reference to an opposing class, the elite could be defined independently as a privileged stratum enjoying power, wealth, honor, or combinations of all three.

What makes the historian's task difficult is that elites were usually designated by a term suggesting class: the Italians referred to the ruling or "directing" class — though sometimes with more precision to the ruling stratum (ceta dirigente). Along with the French, they employed the term "bourgeoisie" much as Anglo-American usage today employs "upper class," more to suggest an elite than a class strictly speaking. In his last and fragmentary reflections on the problem, Max Weber sought to clear away this sort of ambiguity. Elites were groups enjoying elevated status; classes represented divisions of the economic world. But two principles of class structure existed side by side: "occupational classes," ranking those with differing professional and market-place advantages, and "property classes," arrayed according to wealth and styles of consumption. Weber's occupational classes verged upon being interest groups, while privileged property classes, he admitted, formed the nuclei for social elites defined according to prestige and honor. Weber's distinction helps the historian to illuminate some revealing national differences in class perception. French commentators tended to define class in terms of consumption and style of life; Germans, too, never forgot these distinctions but increasingly emphasized class rivalry in the world of production. The difference makes sense in light of the fact that by the late nineteenth century the French bourgeoisie had achieved status as a social elite, while German bourgeois groups were still battling for uncertain .power and prestige.

Still, despite the analytic clarity of Weber's categories, it is easier to discuss conflicts here in terms of class, elite, and interest groups. Weber's rigorous terminology was aimed more at classifying the social-structural determinants of class than at probing the ordinary language of group competition. Participants and observers did not readily separate the rewards of power, social rank, and economic success, since each ultimately depended upon the others. Even the distinction between class as a perceived "conflict group" and elite as a privileged stratum must be imposed ex post facto. In the turmoil of social conflict, concepts of class defense and elite defense remained snarled and intertwined. It is easier to keep the concept of interest group separate from that of class and elite. Interest groups claimed less of their members' identity than classes or elites, and they sought more tangible and professional objectives. From the late nineteenth century on, they emerged ever more centrally as points of orientation for political and economic rivalry. The treatment here, then, can usefully follow the order suggested by these three dimensions of social division: first the preoccupations embodied in the language of class (and sometimes of elite), then the actual precariousness of elite positions, and finally the strategy of interest groups.

Naturally there remain analytic problems. Men were members of classes or elites and of interest groups simultaneously: the entrepreneur was both steel industrialist and bourgeois. As he was to learn, it was easier to defend his specific prerogatives as industrialist than his privileges as bourgeois, for the goals were more concrete and the tactics clearer. Nevertheless, in different countries the defense of class or elite status was initially more compelling and not always easily separable from interest-group affiliation. In Germany the defense of corporate interest came to override that of class, so that businessmen came to feel that to defend the power of the entrepreneur was to defend the essential attribute of their social position. In Italy, on the other hand, the corporatist defense of industry and agriculture was only slowly disengaged from the more general political reaction on the part of the "directing class." Yet in each country, through the 1920's, it became clearer that successful conservative action required corporate organization and identity. Preoccupations about class or elite status might catalyze political defense, but new interest-group and corporatist strategies became increasingly important to its success.

THE LANGUAGE OF CLASS ANXIETY (1900–1925)

If the proletarian supposedly had no fatherland, the bourgeois certainly did. His class awareness (and, of course, that of the worker as well) was molded within a national history and culture. Conservatives throughout Europe were preoccupied with class divisions and the vulnerability of their own favored stations in life, but their sense of vulnerability emerged in different language and day-to-day disputes. French social defensiveness was revealed directly by continuing justification and discussion of the bourgeoisie, while in Germany the fixation with the Social Democratic Party and in Italy the defense of "liberalism" disclosed underlying class malaise.

These differences emerged within a pervasive anxiety about social polarization. Admittedly, this concern had changed everywhere from the raw fear of urban jacquerie, which had marked the middle third of the nineteenth century with its June days and Paris Commune. Violent uprising was the product not of industrialized society but of the transition to that society — the explosion of workers and humble businessmen who were urbanized but not necessarily in factories or unions and who took to the streets for lack of more institutionalized alternatives. By about 1900 in France and Germany, perhaps a decade later in Italy, the major threat from the working class appeared less one of primitive upheaval than of long-term rivalry through political machines and industrial unions. Vocabulary and rhetorical images of social division had evolved correspondingly, from the premodern notions of rank and station to the language of class, from mob to proletariat, from concern for "the social question" to social democracy.

This change did not mean, however, that bourgeois spokesmen could be less concerned. On the eve of the new century, Vilfredo Pareto warned that "slowly but surely the socialist tide is rising in almost every country of Europe. State socialism is opening the way to revolutionary socialism." Pareto was less worried about the potential for violence of the working-class movement than its political challenge to a bourgeoisie that had come to doubt its own moral authority. The socialists were only the latest contender in a ceaseless struggle between aspiring and established elites, a struggle in which the bourgeoisie had grown soft because of misplaced humanitarianism, "its tearful apparatus of sentimentality and asceticism." The political maverick, Georges Sorel, also arrived at a diagnosis of bourgeois flabbiness: "In the course of the nineteenth century," he reflected during the last weeks of peace in July 1914, "the bourgeoisie was so troubled by the fear of revolution that it accepted out of resignation the claims of a democracy whose inevitable triumph had been predicted by so many ideologies." The task of Sorel's famous myth, with its incitement to class tension and creative violence, was to reinvigorate the elites as well as the proletarian challengers. Both Sorel and Pareto shared a new and still unusual bourgeois hostility to liberalism. Yet it was significant that in decrying a crisis of European culture, they summoned up the rhetoric of class confrontation. Social conflict had become preoccupying enough to call into question the entire legacy of Enlightenment rationality and humanism.

While Pareto and Sorel saw the humanistic teachings of liberalism as the major symptom of class default, for most European spokesmen liberalism really suggested a doctrine of class defense. Because it had once attacked estatist society in the cause of equal opportunity, liberalism justified the hierarchies formed subsequently as meritocratic. By 1900, liberalism in all the Continental countries was narrowing into a nostalgic defense of an uncontested bourgeois leadership. The danger now was that what liberals held valuable would be swamped by democratization: "The failure of liberalism might very well be the characteristic trait of the nineteenth century," the French literary critic, Émile Faguet, typically lamented. "Everything, it seems to me, is pushing toward the triumph of an integral equality.... Europe is thus heading toward despotism by tending toward collectivism. In this regard there cannot be the slightest illusion."

Nowhere was the stress upon liberalism as a class concept so intense as in Italy, where the Risorgimento had legitimized the historical role of the liberals in unifying the country. But from describing a vanguard of patriots engaged in nation building and modernization, the designation of liberalism had become a mantle for class politics. The Liberal Party, confessed one of its most conservative leaders, Antonio Salandra, in 1912,

is not a class party.... Still, it cannot be denied that it finds its strength above all in the middle class, in what with an expression that is vague and poorly defined but not devoid of content, is usually called the bourgeoisie. The Italian bourgeoisie can boast of a dual title to glory: first it was the principal architect of the Risorgimento and the founder of the new united state. Since then, it has been the agent of the wonderful economic development of so many sections of the country.... It is still by far superior to other classes and other possible groupings of our society, who remain quite far from the day when they will dispose of as many of the elements of vigor and virtuous discipline needed to govern a state.

Salandra's Liberal Party represented no more than a network of local political associations. But it claimed a moral and ideological pre-eminence and had encountered few challenges for a generation. The liberals of the nineteenth century composed virtually the whole body politic of the Italian nation before the rise of socialism in the 1890's. They comprised the business classes and civil servants throughout the peninsula, the progressive gentry of Piedmont or Tuscany, the lawyers and the so-called humanistic petty bourgeoisie of the Southern urban centers-Masons and spiritual heirs of the Carbonari. Traditionalist conservatism, often tied to the great landlords or the "black aristocracy," largely defaulted in the political arena; for it had been closely connected with Catholic resistance to the conquest of Rome, and until 1904 the Vatican did not permit its faithful to participate in the politics of the despoiling state. Within the broad liberal camp, moreover, the divisions that did arise between right and left, the more conservative and the more democratic, usually yielded to the blandishments of trasformismo. Epitomized by the 1882 reconciliation of the Left with its former opponents of the "Old Right," trasformismo was the practice of joining with the opposition to erase ideological distinctions and construct a broad liberal coalition based on patronage and the enjoyment of power. Thus, with the exception of republicans, radicals, and occasional socialists on the left and the handful of clericals on the right, to belong to the political class or to sit in parliament meant to commit oneself as a liberal.

Despite the original ruling party consensus, the spurts of industrialization and the growth of a militant labor movement sharpened political alternatives. The issues of how far to democratize the governing system — based until 1912 on a restricted suffrage that disenfranchised the Southern peasantry on grounds of illiteracy — how far to concede the right to strike, and how to deal with the new socialists in parliament, produced significant political differences by the first decade of the twentieth century. Seeking to keep political leadership in the hands of a reinvigorated but narrow political elite, Sidney Sonnino (Premier: 1906 and 1909–1910 ) envisaged a modernized restoration of the Old Right's conservative and administrative approach to governance. Financial and social reform accompanied a search for enhanced executive authority in an effort to hold back the encroachments of the new mass movements. Sonnino's attitude differed in emphasis but not in fundamental conception from that of the man who dominated the cabinets of 1901to 1914, Giovanni Giolitti (Interior Minister, then Premier, 1901–1903, 1903–1905, 1906–1909, 1911–1914). For Giolitti, the best way to manage Italy's dynamic industrialization without social upheaval was gradually to assimilate the working class into Italian politics. Rejecting the repression attempted during the late 1890's, Giolitti tolerated strikes and sought to treat labor's claims as interest-group grievances, not class attack. Rejecting, too, Sonnino's search for clear-cut political alignments, Giolitti became a master at manipulating broad and disparate coalitions of interests and shunned polarized, ideological blocs. His efforts to domesticate socialism, to win the reformist labor leaders to his program, and to deal with their aspirations as legitimate bargaining demands offended both right and left who desired ideological consistency. Nonsocialist radicals condemned Giolitti's iron hold over Southern political fiefs; the right distrusted his dissolution of the liberal governing elite. In this political context, therefore, to reassert the role of the Liberal "Party," as did Sonnino and his lieutenant Salandra, signified a disenchantment with the Giolittian program, a desire for bloc confrontation, and an unwillingness to surrender bourgeois power and influence.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Recasting Bourgeois Europe by Charles S. Maier. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Preface to the 2016 Reprinting ix
Preface to the 1988 Reprinting xix
Preface xxvii
Abbreviations xxxi
Introduction: From Bourgeois to Corporatist Europe 3
PART 1: THE CONTAINMENT OF THE LEFT
Chapter 1: The Dimensions of Social Conflict at the End of World War I 19
The Language of Class Anxiety (1900-1925) 22
Elites--Resilient and Vulnerable 39
Business Accommodation in Germany and France 53
Chapter 2: Politics among the Victors: Issues and Elections in November 1919 88
Bourgeois Cohesion in France 91
Bourgeois Disarray in Italy 109
Chapter 3: The Limits of Economic Restructuring 135
The Evolution of Leftist Objectives 136
Strategies of Bourgeois Defense 153
The Coal Crisis 194
PART II: THE FAILURE OF THE PARLIAMENTARY CENTER
Chapter 4: The Politics of Reparation 233
The Wager on "Fulfillment" 233
Reparation, Taxes, and the Demands of German Heavy Industry 249
The Bankruptcy of Moderation (1922) 272
Chapter 5: The Attrition of the Liberal Regime in Italy 305
The Political Ecology of Fascism 305
From Giolitti to Mussolini: The Liberals' Search for Order 322
PART III: PATHS TOWARD CORPORATIST STABILITY
Chapter 6: Between Nationalism and Corporatism: The Ruhr Conflict 355
Inflation, Social Democracy, and the Challenge to Sovereignty in Germany 356
Corporatist Forces voices Poincaré and Stresemann 387
Chapter 7: Majorities without Mandates: Issues and Elections in the Spring of 1924 421
The Limits of Mussolini's Majority 422
The Limits of Social Democratic Eclipse 440
The Limits of the Cartel des Gauches 458
Chapter 8: Achieving Stability 481
Inflation, Revaluation, and the Decomposition of Parliamentary Politics 483
Iron, Steel, and the International Organization of Capitalism 516
Corporative State in Corporatist Europe 545
Conclusion: The Structure and Limits of Stability 579
Bibliography 595
Index 609