Expanding Political Participation in Western Europe

Ordinary people everywhere in the West were becoming aware of politics through newspapers, which, combined with industrial and imperial progress, were important in developing a sense of citizenship in a nation. After 1880, western European countries moved toward mass politics more rapidly than did countries to the east, thanks in part to the rise of mass journalism—itself the product of imperial and industrial development. The invention of automatic typesetting and the production of newsprint from wood pulp lowered the costs of printing, and the telephone allowed reporters to communicate news to their papers almost instantly. Once literary in content, many daily newspapers now emphasized sensational news, using banner headlines, dramatic pictures, and gruesome or lurid details—particularly about murders and sexual scandals—to sell papers. In the hustle and bustle of industrial society, one editor wrote that “you must strike your reader right between the eyes.” Stories of imperial adventurers and exaggerated accounts of exploited women workers, some in the white slave trade, drew ordinary people to the mass press.

Journalism created a national community of up-to-date citizens, whether or not they could vote. Unlike the book, the newspaper was meant not for quiet reflection at home or in the upper-class club but for quick reading of attention-grabbing stories on mass transportation and on the streets. Elites complained that the sensationalist press was a sign of social decay, but in western Europe increasing political literacy opened the political process to wider participation.

A change in political campaigning was one example of this widening participation. In the fall of 1879, William Gladstone (1809–1898), leader of the British Liberals, whose party was then out of power, took a train trip across Britain to campaign for a seat in the House of Commons. During his campaign, Gladstone addressed thousands of workers, arguing for the people of India and Africa to have more rights and summoning his audiences to “honest, manful, humble effort” in the middle-class tradition of “hard work.” Newspapers around the country reported on his trip, and these accounts, along with mass meetings, fueled public interest in politics. Gladstone’s campaign was successful, and he took the post of prime minister for the second of the four nonconsecutive terms he served between 1868 and 1894.

Other changes fostered the growth of political participation in Britain. The Ballot Act of 1872 made voting secret, a reform that reduced the ability of landlords and employers to control how their workers voted. The Reform Act of 1884 doubled the electorate to around 4.5 million men, enfranchising many urban workers and artisans and thus further diminishing traditional aristocratic influence in the countryside. To win the votes of the newly enfranchised, Liberal and Conservative parties alike established national political clubs that competed with small cliques of parliamentary elites for control of party politics. Broadly based interest groups such as unions and national political clubs opened up politics by appealing to many more voters.

British political reforms immediately affected Irish politics by arming poor tenant farmers with the secret ballot. The political climate in Ireland was explosive mainly because of the repressive tactics of absentee landlords, many of them English and Protestant, who drove Irish tenants from their land in order to charge higher rents to newcomers. In 1879, opponents of these landlords formed the Irish National Land League and launched fiery protests. Irish tenants elected a solid bloc of nationalist representatives to the British Parliament, who, voting as a group, had sufficient strength to defeat either the Conservatives or the Liberals. Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891) demanded British support for home rule—a system giving Ireland its own parliament—in return for Irish votes. Conservatives called home rule “a conspiracy against the honor of Britain,” and when they were in power (1885–1886 and 1886–1892), they cracked down on Irish activism. Scandals reported in the press, some of them totally invented, weakened Parnell’s influence. In 1890, the news broke of his affair with a married woman, and he died in disgrace soon after, as the media shaped politics. Still, Irish home rule remained a heated political issue, as did the determination to end Ireland’s colonial status.

France’s Third Republic replaced the Second Empire. The republic was shaky at the start because the monarchist political factions—Bonapartist, Orléanist, and Bourbon—all struggled to destroy it. Their failure to do so led in 1875 to the adoption of a new constitution, which created a ceremonial presidency and a premier (prime minister) dependent on support from the elected Chamber of Deputies. An alliance of businessmen, shopkeepers, professionals, and rural property owners hoped the new system would prevent the kind of strongman politics that had seen previous republics give way to the rule of emperors and the return of monarchs.

Fragile at birth, the Third Republic would remain so until World War II. Economic downturns, widespread corruption, and growing anti-Semitism fueled by a highly partisan and monarchist press kept the Third Republic on shaky ground. Newspaper stories about members of the Chamber of Deputies selling their votes to business interests and about the alleged trickery of Jewish businessmen manipulating the economy added to the instability. As a result, the public also blamed Jews for problems in the republican government and the economy.

In 1889, those disgusted by the messiness of parliamentary politics backed Georges Boulanger, a dashing and highly popular general, in his attempt to take over the government. Boulanger soon lost his nerve, however, thereby saving the French from rule by another strongman. Still, Boulanger’s popularity showed that in hard economic times, liberal values based on constitutions, elections, and the rights of citizens could be called into question by someone promising easy solutions.

Republican leaders attempted to strengthen citizen loyalty by instituting compulsory and free public education in the 1880s. In public schools, secular teachers who supported republicanism replaced the Catholic clergy, who usually favored a return to monarchy. A common curriculum—identical in every schoolhouse in the country—featured patriotic reading books and courses in French geography, literature, and history. The government established secular public high schools for young women, seen as the educators of future citizens, while mandatory military service for men inculcated pride in the republic rather than in the monarchy or the church.

Although many western European leaders believed in economic liberalism, constitutions, and efficient government, these ideals did not always translate into universal male suffrage and citizens’ rights in the less powerful western European countries. Spain and Belgium abruptly awarded suffrage to all men in 1890 and 1893, respectively, while remaining monarchies. An alliance of conservative landowners and the Catholic church dominated Spain, although there was increasingly lively urban activism in the industrial centers of Barcelona and Bilbao. Reform in the Netherlands increased male suffrage to only 14 percent by the mid-1890s, and an 1887 law in Italy gave the vote to all men who had a primary school education, also 14 percent of the male population. Without receiving the benefits of nation building—education, urban improvements, industrial progress, and the vote—the average Italian in the south felt less loyalty to the new nation than fear of the devastating effects of national taxes and the draft on the family economy.