Labour unrest was not the only form of protest in the later 19th century. In many continental nations (but not in Britain or Scandinavia), nationalist organizations drew the attention of discontented shopkeepers and others in the lower middle class who felt pressed by new business forms, such as department stores and elaborate managerial bureaucracies, but who were also hostile to socialism and the union movement. Nationalist riots surfaced periodically in many countries around such issues as setbacks in imperialist competition or internal political scandals. Some of the riots and accompanying organizations were also anti-Semitic, holding Jews responsible for big business and socialism alike. France witnessed the most important agitation from the radical right, through organizations like the Action Française; but anti-Semitic political movements also developed in Germany and Austria.
Important women’s movements completed the new roster of mass protests. The basic conditions of women did not change greatly in western Europe during the second half of the 19th century, with the significant exception of the rapidly declining birth rate. The steady spread of primary education increased female literacy, bringing it nearly equal to male levels by 1900. A growing minority of middle-class women also entered secondary schools, and by the 1870s a handful reached universities and professional schools. Several separate women’s colleges were founded in centres such as Oxford and Cambridge, and, against heavy resistance, a few women became doctors and lawyers. For somewhat larger numbers of women, new jobs in the service sector of the economy, such as telephone operators, primary-school teachers, and nurses, provided opportunities for work before marriage. Gradually some older sectors of employment, such as domestic service, began to decline. Nevertheless, emphasis on a domestic sphere for women changed little. Public schools, while teaching literacy, also taught the importance of household skills and support for a working husband.
These were the circumstances that produced increasingly active feminist movements, sometimes independently and sometimes in association with socialist parties. Feminist leaders sought greater equality under the law, an attack on a double-standard sexuality that advantaged men. Above all, they came to concentrate on winning the vote. Massive petitions in Britain, accompanied by considerable violence after 1900, signaled Europe’s most active feminist movement, drawing mainly on middle-class ranks. Feminists in Scandinavia were successful in winning voting rights after 1900. Almost everywhere, feminist pressures added to the new variety of mass protest action. Conditions in eastern Europe
Social conditions in eastern and southern Europe differed substantially from those of the west, but there were some common elements. Middle- and upper-class women in Russia, for example, surged into new educational and professional opportunities in some numbers. Growing cities and factories produced some trade union activity, on the part of skilled groups such as the printers and metalworkers, that resembled efforts elsewhere.
Rural conditions, however, were vastly different from those in western Europe. Eastern and southern Europe remained dominated by the peasantry, as urbanization, though rapid, was at a far earlier stage. Peasant conditions were generally poor. Amid growing population pressure, many peasants suffered from a lack of land in areas dominated by large estates. One result was rapid emigration, to the Americas and elsewhere, from Spain, southern Italy, and eastern Europe. Another result was recurrent unrest. Peasants in southern Spain, loosely organized under anarchist banners, rose almost once a decade in the late 19th century, seizing land and burning estate records.
The social and economic situation was most complex in Russia. Stung by the loss of the Crimean War (1854–56) to Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, literally in their own backyard, Russian leaders decided on a modernization program. The key ingredient was an end to the rigid manorial system, and in 1861 Alexander II, a reform-minded tsar, issued the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing the serfs. This act sought to produce a freer labour market but also to protect the status of the nobility. As a result, noble landlords retained some of the best land and were paid for the loss of their servile labour; in turn, serfs, though technically in control of most land, owed redemption payments to the state. This arrangement produced important changes in the countryside. Peasants did develop some commercial habits, aided by gradually spreading education and literacy. More and more peasants migrated, temporarily or permanently, to cities, where they swelled the manufacturing labour force and also the ranks of urban poor. Rural unrest continued, however, as peasants resented their taxes and payments and the large estates that remained.
From the 1870s the Russian government also launched a program of industrial development, beginning with the construction of a national rail network capped by the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Factory industry was encouraged; much of it was held under foreign ownership, though a native entrepreneurial class emerged. Large factories developed to produce textiles and to process metals. Conditions remained poor, however, and combined with the unfamiliar pace of factory work and rural grievances to spur recurrent worker unrest. Illegal strikes and unions became increasingly prominent after 1900. A minority of urban workers, especially in St. Petersburg and Moscow, were won to socialist doctrines, and a well-organized Marxist movement arose, its leadership after 1900 increasingly dominated by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, a creative theorist who adapted Marxist theory to the Russian situation and who concentrated single-mindedly on creating the network of underground cells that could foment outright revolution. Russia was embarked on a genuine industrial revolution; with its massive size and resources, it ranked among world leaders in many categories of production by 1900. However, it operated in an exceptionally unstable social and political climate. The emergence of the industrial state Political patterns
During the second half of the 19th century, politics and socioeconomic conditions became increasingly intertwined in Europe, producing a new definition of government functions, including a greatly expanded state and a new political spectrum. Linkage to cultural trends also showed through an interest in hard-headed realism. Predictably, political conditions in eastern Europe, though mirroring some of the general developments, remained distinctive.
The decades between 1850 and 1870 served as a crucial turning point in European politics and diplomacy, somewhat surprisingly given the apparent victory of conservative forces over the revolutions of 1848. Reactionary impulses did surface during these years. A Conservative Party eager to hold the line against further change emerged in Prussia. A number of governments made new arrangements with the Roman Catholic church to encourage religion against political attacks. Pope Pius IX, who had been chased from Rome during the final surge of agitation in 1848, turned adamantly against new political ideas. In the Syllabus of Errors accompanying the encyclical Quanta cura (“With What Great Care,” 1864), he denounced liberalism and nationalism and insisted on the duty of Roman Catholic rulers to protect the established church, even against religious toleration. The proclamation of papal infallibility (1870) was widely seen as another move to firm up church authority against change.