Contesting the Nation-State’s Order at Home

Europeans did not simply sit by as the growing nation-state changed and often disrupted their lives. A better-informed urban working class protested the upheavals in everyday life caused when cities were ripped apart for improvements and when the growth of factories destroyed artisans’ livelihoods. Increasingly educated by public schools, urban workers frequented cafés and pubs to hear news and discuss economic and political events. After the post-1848 repression of worker organizations, unions gradually started to take shape, sometimes in secret because of continuing opposition from governments.

Many of the most outspoken labor activists were artisans struggling to survive in the new industrializing climate. They were attracted at first by the ideas of former printer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865). In the 1840s, Proudhon proclaimed, “Property is theft,” suggesting that property ownership robbed people of their rightful share of the earth’s benefits. He opposed the centralized state and proposed that society be organized instead around natural groupings of men in artisans’ workshops. (Women, he believed, should work in seclusion at home for their husbands’ comfort.) These workshops and a central bank crediting each worker for his labor would replace government.

As the nation-state expanded its power, workers were also drawn to anarchism, which maintained that the existence of the state was the root of social injustice. According to Russian nobleman and anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), the slightest infringement on freedom, especially by the central state and its laws, was unacceptable. Anarchism thus advocated the destruction of all state power. Its appeal grew as government grew in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Political theorist and labor organizer Karl Marx (1818–1883) opposed both doctrines as lacking the sound, scientific basis of his own theory, subsequently called Marxism. Marx’s analysis, appearing most notably in Das Kapital (Capital), adopted the liberal idea, dating back to John Locke in the seventeenth century, that human existence was defined by the necessity to work to fulfill basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. Using mathematical calculations of production and profit that would justify Realpolitik for the working classes, Marx held that the fundamental organization of any society derived from the relationships arising from work or production. This idea, known as materialism, meant that society rested on class relationships—such as those between serf and medieval lord, slave and master, or worker and capitalist. Marx called the class relationships that developed around work the mode of production—for instance, feudalism, slavery, or capitalism. He rejected the liberal focus on individual rights and emphasized instead the unequal class relations caused by those who had taken from workers control of the means of production—that is, the capital, land, tools, or factories that allowed basic human needs to be met.

Marx, like the politicians around him, took a tough-minded and realistic look at the economy, discarding the romantic views of the utopian socialists. He saw struggle, not warmhearted cooperation, as the means for bringing about change. Workers’ awareness of their oppression would produce class-consciousness, he argued, leading them to overthrow their exploiters. Society was not basically harmonious; instead social progress could occur only through conflict.

As the Franco-Prussian War ended, revolution and civil war erupted not only in Paris but also in other French cities—catching the attention of Marx as a sign that his predictions were coming true. As the Prussians laid siege to Paris in the winter of 1870–1871, causing many deaths from starvation and bitter cold, Parisians rose up and demanded new republican liberties, new systems of work, and a more balanced distribution of power between the central government and localities. On March 28, 1871, to counter what they saw as the despotism of the centralized government, they declared themselves a self-governing commune. One issue behind the unrest was the nation-state’s destruction of city life through urban renovation.

In the Paris Commune’s two months of existence, and while trying to maintain “communal” instead of “national” values, Parisians quickly developed a wide array of political clubs, local ceremonies, and self-managed workshops. Women workers, for example, banded together to make National Guard uniforms on a cooperative rather than a for-profit basis. The Commune proposed to liberate the worker and ensure “the absolute equality of women laborers.” Thus, a commune—in contrast to a republic—was meant to bring about social revolution. Communards, however, often disagreed on how to change society. Anticlericalism, feminism, socialism, and anarchism were but a few of the proposed routes to social justice.

In the meantime, the provisional government that succeeded the defeated Napoleon III stamped out similar uprisings in other French cities. In late May, the well-supplied national army crushed the Commune and shot tens of thousands of citizens on the streets. Parisian rebels, one citizen commented, “deserved no better judge than a soldier’s bullet.” The Communards had promoted a kind of antistate in an age of rising state power. Others saw the Commune as the work of the pétroleuse (“woman incendiary”)—a case of frenzied women running amok through the streets. While revolutionary men became heroes in the history books, writers were soon blaming the burning of Paris on women—“shameless slatterns, half-naked women, who kindled courage and breathed life into arson.”

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the rise of the Paris Commune, and the civil war were all horrendous blows to the French state. Yet in the struggle against the Commune, the nation-state once again showed its strengthening muscle. Executions and deportations by the thousands followed, and fear of workers spread across Europe.