At the top of European society a new upper class formed as big business took shape, representing a partial amalgam of aristocratic landowners and corporate magnates. This upper class wielded immense political influence, for example, in supporting government armaments buildups that provided markets for heavy industrial goods and jobs for aristocratic military officers.
Along with modifications in social structure came important shifts in popular behaviour, some of them cutting across class lines. As a result of growing production, prosperity increased throughout most of western Europe. Major economic recessions interrupted this prosperity, as factory output could outstrip demand and as investment speculation could, relatedly, outstrip real economic gains. Speculative bank crises and economic downturns occurred in the mid-1850s and particularly in the middle years of both the 1870s and ’90s, causing substantial hardship and even wider uncertainty. Nevertheless, the general trend in standards of living for most groups was upward, allowing ordinary people to improve their diets and housing and maintain a small margin for additional purchases. The success of mass newspapers, for example, which reached several million subscribers by the 1890s, depended on the ability to pay as well as on literacy. A bicycle craze, beginning among the middle classes in the 1880s and gradually spreading downward, represented a consumer passion for a more expensive item. Improvement in standards of living was aided by a general reduction in the birth rate, which developed rapidly among urban workers and even peasants. Families increasingly regarded children as an expense, to be weighed against other possibilities, and altered traditional behaviour accordingly. Reduction in the birth rate was achieved in part by sexual abstinence but also by the use of birth control devices, which had been widely available since the vulcanization of rubber in the 1840s, and by illegal abortions, while infanticide continued in rural areas. Completing the installation of a new demographic regime was a rapid decline in infant mortality after 1880.
Rising living standards were accompanied by increased leisure time. Workers pressed for a workday of 12, then 10 hours, and shortly after 1900 a few groups began to demand an even shorter period. Scattered vacation days also were introduced, and the “English weekend,” which allowed time off on Saturday afternoons as well as Sundays, spread widely. Middle-class groups, for their part, loosened their previous work ethic in order to accommodate a wider range of leisure activities.
The second half of the 19th century witnessed the birth of modern leisure in western Europe and, to an extent, beyond. Team sports were played in middle-class schools and through a variety of amateur and professional teams. Many sports, such as soccer (football), had originated in traditional games but now gained standardized rules, increasing specialization among players, and the impassioned record-keeping appropriate to an industrial age. Sports commanded widespread participation among various social groups and served as the basis for extensive commercial operations. Huge stadiums and professional leagues signaled the advent of a new level of spectatorship. While many sports primarily focused on male interests, women began to participate in tennis and entire families in pastimes such as croquet and bicycling.
Leisure options were by no means confined to sports. Mass newspapers emphasized entertaining feature stories rather than politics. Parks and museums open to the public became standard urban features. Train excursions to beaches won wide patronage from factory workers as well as middle-class vacationers. A popular theatre expanded in the cities; British music-hall, typical of the genre, combined song and satire, poking fun at life’s tribulations and providing an escapist emphasis on pleasure-seeking. After 1900, similar themes spilled into the new visual technology that soon coalesced into early motion pictures. The rise of organized labour and mass protests
Mass leisure coexisted interestingly with the final major social development of the later 19th century, the escalating forms of class conflict. Pressed by the rapid pace and often dulling routine of work, antagonized by a faceless corporate management structure seemingly bent on efficiency at all costs, workers in various categories developed more active protest modes in the later 19th century. They were aided by their growing familiarity with basic industrial conditions, which facilitated the formation of relevant demands and made organization more feasible. Legal changes, spreading widely in western Europe after 1870, reduced political barriers to unionization and strikes, though clashes with government forces remained a common part of labour unrest.
Not surprisingly, given the mood of reaction following the failures of the 1848 revolutions, the 1850s constituted a period of relative placidity in labour relations. Skilled workers in Britain formed a conservative craft union movement, known as New Model Unionism, that urged calm negotiation and respectability; a number of durable trade unions were formed as a result, and a minority of workers gained experience in national organization. Miners and factory workers rose in strikes occasionally, signaling a class-based tension with management in many areas, but no consistent pattern developed.
The depression of the 1870s, which brought new hardship and reminded workers of the uncertainty of their lot, encouraged a wider range of agitation, and by the 1890s mass unionism surfaced throughout western Europe. Not only artisans but also factory workers and relatively unskilled groups, such as dockers, showed a growing ability to form national unions that made use of the sheer power of numbers, even in default of special skills, to press for gains. Strike rates increased steadily. In 1892 French workers struck 261 times against 500 companies; most of the efforts remained small and local, and only 50,000 workers were involved. By 1906, the peak French strike year before 1914, 1,309 strikes brought 438,000 workers off the job. British and German strike rates were higher still; in Britain, more than 2,000,000 workers struck between 1909 and 1913. A number of nationwide strikes showed labour’s new muscle.
Unionization formed the second prong of the new labour surge. Along with mass unions in individual industries, general federations formed at the national level, such as the British Trades Union Congress and the French and Italian general confederations of labour. Unions provided social and material benefits for members along with their protest action; in many industries they managed to win collective bargaining procedures with employers, though this was far from a uniform pattern in an atmosphere of bitter competition over management rights; and they could influence governmental decisions in the labour area.
The rise of organized labour signaled an unprecedented development in the history of European popular protest. Never before had so many people been formally organized; never before had withdrawal of labour served as the chief protest weapon. Many workers joined a sweeping ideological fervor to their protest. Many were socialists, and a number of trade union movements were tightly linked to the rising socialist parties; this was particularly true in Germany and Austria. In other areas, especially France and Italy, an alternative syndicalist ideology won many adherents in the union movement; syndicalists urged that direct action through strikes should topple governments and usher in a new age in which organizations of workers would control production. Against these varied revolutionary currents, many workers saw in unions and strikes primarily a means to compensate for changes in their work environment, through higher pay (as a reward for less pleasant labour) and shorter hours. Even here, there was an ability to seek new ends rather than appealing to past standards. Overall, pragmatism battled with ideology in most labour movements, and in point of fact none of the large organizations aimed primarily at revolution.