Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890-1930

Front matter

IM

Routledge Studies in Modern History

CORPORATE POLICING,

Contents

List of tables

List of figures

List of contributors

PART 1 Institutional responses 2 Policies and practices against labour movement in the late

Russian Empire VOLODYMYR KULIKOV AND IRINA SHILNIKOVA

Violence against strikers in the rural peripheries of the Iberian Peninsula, 1890—1915 ASSUMPTA CASTILLO CANIZ

The Swedish labour market c. 1870-1914: a labour market regime without repression?

ERIK BENGTSSON

State authorities, municipal forces and military intervention in the policing of strikes in Austria-Hungary, 1890—1914 CLAIRE MORELON vi

Contents

6 Employers of the world, unite!: the transnational mobilisation of industrialists around World War I PIERRE EICHENBERGER

PART 2 Strikebreaking tactics and practices 7 Anti-labour repression in the in-between spaces of empire

the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes and the steamship workers of the “China Line” (1900—20) CHARLES BÉGUÉ FAWELL

In the name of constitutionalism and Islam: the murky world of labour politics in Calcutta's docklands PRERNA AGARWAL

Cairo, Athens, Salonica: strikebreaking and the anti-labour practices of employers and the state in the early twentieth-century cigarette industry

In reaction to revolution: anti-strike mentalities and practices in the Russian radical right, 1905—14 GEORGE GILBERT

*We can kill striking workers without being prosecuted": armed bands of strikebreakers in late Imperial Germany AMERIGO CARUSO

PART3 Civic and industrial vigilantism

The wild west of employer anti-unionism: the glorification

of vigilantism and individualism in the early twentieth-century United States

Vigilant citizens: the case of the Volunteer Police Force, 1911-14 ALESSANDRO SALUPPO

Contents vii

From “state protection” to “private defence”: strikebreaking, civilian armed mobilisation and the rise of Italian fascism 242 MATTEO MILLAN

Conclusion: strikebreaking and the fault lines of mass society,

Index 268

Tables

2.1 Repressive practices against strikers in Russian industry in the period from 1895 to 1904 2.2 Share of the strikes resulting in total or partial satisfaction of the strikers’ demands, including those which were accompanied by some repressive practices 11.1 Workers killed by German strikebreakers, strikebreaking agents and armed employers between 1906 and 1914

Figures

2.1 Number of strikes in the Russian Empire from 1870 to 1894 25 2.2 What happens to workers after the strike 26 2.3 Number of strikes in the Russian Empire from 1895 to early 1917 27

Contributors

Editors

Matteo Millan is associate professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Padova, Italy. Before coming to Padova, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Oxford and Dublin. In 2015, he obtained a major grant from the European Research Council to lead the broad comparative project “The Dark Side of the Belle Epoque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War". He has published extensively on the history of fascism and pre-1914 armed associationism in Europe.

Alessandro Saluppo is an ERC post-doctoral researcher at the University of Padova. His current research is devoted to private industrial policing, strikebreaking and anti-labour violence in Europe before the First World War. His works on armed groups, paramilitaries and militias, with respect to both the pre-war and interwar periods, have been published on peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Contributors

Prerna Agarwal was a postdoctoral fellow at the Economic History Department, London School of Economics (LSE) (2017-19). In July 2018, she received her PhD in history and contemporary India at King's College London. She is currently based in New Delhi and working on editing her PhD thesis into a monograph, which relates to trade unions and political cultures in Calcutta's docklands.

Erik Bengtsson is an associate senior lecturer in economic history at Lund University in Sweden. He got his PhD from Gothenburg University in 2013 with the dissertation Essays on Trade Unions and Functional Income Distribution. His research concerns historical political economy and income and wealth distribution, in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. At present, his research focuses on (a) a project on farmer politicians in Swedish modernisation c. 1770—1950 and (b) a project estimating the Swedish income distribution 1862— 1970, building on a new dataset.

Contributors xi

Thanasis Betas graduated from the Department of History and Archaeology, School of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He continued postgraduate studies and obtained a master’s degree from the University of Crete. He received his PhD, with his dissertation entitled “Matsagos Cigarette Industry in Volos, 1918-1972, Labour and Survival in Volos” — on a scholarship from the European Program “Heraclitus II” — at the University of Thessaly. He has worked in research programs at the University of Thessaly, the Cultural Foundation of Piraeus Bank and the International Institute of Social History (The Netherlands). His current research project entitled *Filter-Cigarettes . . . Business Strategies, Technological Changes and Organisational Innovations in the Greek Tobacco Industry Between 1945-1973” is financed by the Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH, Athens). He is currently working as a research fellow in the rescue and recording of the Historical Archive of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (Athens). He is a member of the Greek Economic History Association, the Greek Network for the History of Labour and Labour Movement, the Portuguese Economic and Social History Association and the Oral History Association of Volos.

Assumpta Castillo Caniz is a PhD candidate at the University of Padua working on the Spanish and the Portuguese cases within the ERC project “The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War". She has participated in several international conferences and has also published several works on the revolutionary process and the intra-community violence in the Republican rearguard during the Spanish Civil War, including “El forastero en la guerra civil española. Las dinámicas intra y extracomunitarias de la violencia en la retaguardia republicana" (Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar, 2014), and *Anarchism and the countryside: Old and new stumbling blocks in the study of rural collectivization during the Spanish Civil War" (International Journal of Iberian Studies, 2016). Her main research lines include the study of political violence between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the exploration of responses and alternatives to the Western capitalist model and the development of anti-democratic political cultures both in their practical and cultural forms.

Amerigo Caruso is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Greifswald (Germany). His current research project investigates how different political regimes reacted in times of turmoil and widespread insecurity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has published widely on political history, the history of ideas, nationalism and social conflicts. His recent publications include “Blut und Eisen auch im Innern". Soziale Konflikte, Massenpolitik und Gewalt in Deutschland vor 1914 (Campus, 2021) and a guest-edited issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies on historical identities and the process of nation-building in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany.

xii Contributors

Martin Conway is professor of contemporary European history at the University of Oxford and is a fellow of Balliol College. He has published a number of books on aspects of the history of mid-twentieth-century Europe, and his most recent book is Western Europe s Democratic Age 1945-68 (2020).

Pierre Eichenberger is permanent lecturer at the University of Lausanne. He carried out research and taught at the universities of Zurich and Yale and at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, New School for Social Research (New York). He is the author of Mainmise sur l'État social: Mobilisation patronale et caisses de compensation en Suisse (1908-1960) (2016).

Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1979. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge (1975—79). Trained originally as a modern German historian, he also works in modern British history, as well as on a general European front. He is interested in both the history of the left and the right; history and film; historiography; and history and theory. He has recently begun teaching a large new undergraduate course on the history of terrorism. His earliest works were Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980, 1991) and (with David Blackbourn) The Peculiarities of German History (1980, 1984). More recent books include Forging Democracy: A History of the Left in Europe. 1850-2000 (2002); A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005); (with Keith Nield) The Future of Class in History (2007); and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930—1945 (2013). He co-edited German Colonialism in a Global Age (2014), German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures (2016) and Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (2020). He is writing a general history of Europe in the twentieth century and a new study of the German right, Genealogies of Nazism: Conservatives, Radical Nationalists, Fascists in Germany, 1860—1930.

Charles Bégué Fawell is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago, where he is currently teaching and writing his dissertation, *In-Between Empires: Transit and Sovereignty along the Maritime Highways of Imperial France and Britain, 1870—1930". Based on archival research in France, the UK and Vietnam, the project re-examines the everyday histories of steamship voyages between West Europe and East Asia during the era of High Imperialism. Steamships of the colonial era, it argues, were both microcosms of empire and floating borderlands, where mobile encounters revealed the fault lines of imperial sovereignty and a nascent regime of global governance.

George Gilbert is lecturer in modern Russian history at the University of Southampton. His publications include 7he Radical Right in late Imperial Russia (2016), and, as editor, Reading Russian Sources: A Student's Guide to Text and Visual Sources from Russia s History (2020). He has also written a number of articles on various aspects of the social, cultural and political history of Russia's late Imperial period.

Contributors xiii

Vilja Hulden is instructor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work focuses on early twentieth-century employer organisations, especially on publicity and lobbying, a topic on which she is currently completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Individual Rights and Collective Action: Employers, Workers, and the Closed Shop, under advance contract with the University of Illinois Press. Her new project, Speaking to the State, analyses patterns in who appeared as witnesses at congressional hearings.

Volodymyr Kulikov is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at Central European University. Besides CEU, he teaches at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and at the Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine. He specialises in the business history of Eastern Europe, with a particular interest in the history of enterprises, collective action problem, big business and industrialisation in the Russian Empire. In 2019, he received a research grant from The Shevchenko Scientific Society in the USA, which was partly used to collect archival materials for the research presented in this book.

Claire Morelon is ERC-postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Padova working on Austria-Hungary within the project “The Dark Side of the Belle Epoque”. Her publications include “Sounds of Loss: Church Bells, Place, and Time in the Habsburg Empire during the First World War", Past & Present (2019) and the edited volume Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 (2018).

Chad Pearson teaches history at Collin College. He is the author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (2016) and co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (2017). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Capital s Terrorists: Anti-Labor Violence in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Irina Shilnikova obtained a PhD in history in 2001 at the Yaroslavl State University in Russia. She is an associate professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. She worked as a leading researcher at the Yaroslavl State Archive, and later as assistant professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. Between 2008 and 2019 she held the position of assistant professor at the Higher School of Economics. Her research interests include the economic and social history of the late Russian Empire, labour history and cliometrics. She has authored and co-authored four monographs as well as numerous articles on the labour and business history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Russia (the 1920s and 1930s).

Acknowledgements

This volume came out of the workshop “Industrial vigilantism, strikebreaking and patterns of anti-labour violence, 1890s—1930s. A comparative and transnational perspective” held at the University of Oxford in October 2018. The event was organised under the auspices of the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World of the University of Padua, the University of Oxford’s Faculty of History and the Oxford Centre for European History (OCEH). We are hugely grateful to all of them.

The workshop was one of the first outcomes of the European Research Council (ERC)-funded project “The Dark Side of the Belle Epoque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War". During the workshop, we were surprised to find how much the research we were (and are still) conducting on Central-Western Europe shared communalities and interests with that of scholars working in other parts of the globe. Thus, we decided to collect various contributions on the significantly underestimated, though crucial, phenomenon of anti-labour militancy from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. We would like to personally thank all the contributors of this volume for having accepted such an endeavour: some of them are colleagues in Padova, while others come from other institutions. It was a great pleasure and was surely academically and scientifically stimulating to work with all of them.

Martin Conway has been an indispensable and invaluable collaborator in getting the manuscript shaped. It has been an extraordinary privilege to work with him. We are also much indebted to Geoff Eley who has served as a keynote speaker at the Oxford workshop and generously accepted to write the preface for this volume. We benefitted greatly from the help of Giulia Albanese who has offered her treasured comments and insights throughout the trajectory of this project. We are also thankful to Tom Buchanan, Patricia Calvin and Marc Mulholland for trying out the arguments of this book at the workshop. In connection to the workshop, we owe a large debt of gratitude to Laura Jimenez Aguado, Gianluca Marchiori, Matthew Myers, Romain Bonnet and Marco Maria Aterrano. Finally, we would like to thank Rob Langham and Max Novick for having believed in this book project before it was even conceived.

The book has received funding from the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (G.A. 677199 — ERC-StG2015 "The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations before the First World War").

Foreword

Coercion at work, violence in politics: what changed between 1890 and 1930?

Geoff Eley

Dimensions of violence

The years covered by the extremely rich studies presented in this volume formed a vital watershed in the shifting relationship of violence to the structure and conduct of politics. The character and meanings of violence itself are anything but transparent and straightforward. Any full and persuasive treatment would require the kind of elaborate conceptual work that exceeds the modest scope of these observations. Definition would proceed on multiple fronts. The first would separate agency from structure, distinguishing “physical assault” and the “use of physical force".! On the one hand, there is violence as the visible, tangible, directly experienced or witnessed material damage to persons or property, the actual blood, pain and shock, and the sensory horror or thrill of wreckage and destruction that such damage produces; on the other hand, there is violence as the more abstracted, distanced, mediated application of physical force to produce damage and harm elsewhere, and through it the securing of social and political objectives.

This distinction moves from the immediacy of the particular act to the more complicated chain of agency involved in the designing of policy, the implementing of plans, the sending of an order or the pressing of a button. It is this distancing effect, or displacement effect, that shapes violence as we move down the twentieth century. Clearly there were instances earlier, but during the last century the scale, speed, logistical effectiveness, applied technologies and general normativities of politically motivated violence become ratcheted so relentlessly higher, especially when perpetrated by states. One version of that story travels from the trenches of the First World War; another version runs from the bombing of Iraqi villages in 1920 through the Strategic Bombing Offensive, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all the way down to 2003’s “Shock and Awe”.

Equally important are the concepts of structural or systemic violence and their cognate proposition of symbolic violence. These further elaborate the aforementioned displacement effect — the production and productivity of violence elsewhere, its projection and transference outside and beyond the immediately encountered everydayness of the practical circumstances where the particular act happens to land. “Structural violence” has been classically studied in its colonial settings. Thus South Asian historian Gyan Pandey refers to the “routine violence”

xvi Foreword that becomes endemic to the structural circumstances and mundane dynamics of the effects of a public power on its society (say, British rule in India). He sees violence not as an exceptional event — as something that is not “temporary, occasional, even abnormal”, not an “interruption”, not “merely transitional, a birthmark, or a departure” and definitely not “premodern”, a trace of earlier practices, or a cultural formation that ought to have been superseded. Instead, Pandey argues, violence is “a much more general and continuous aspect of modern life”.

Originating with Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence was used by Alf Liidtke in re-grounding an argument about nineteenth-century Prussian militarism in the social practices of policing in everyday life.? It describes the latent and unspoken, habituated or unconscious modalities of domination deeply and insidiously inscribed in everyday social practices and relations. It considers how generally distributed forms of injury or damage, like class rule, gender domination, ethnocultural “othering” or racism, work to ensure the “misrecognition of power relations". It describes the foisting of modalities of perception onto subordinated subjects who then accommodate to the given terms of the social order, naturalise it and come to believe in its necessity and justice. As such unreflected normativities become reproduced, given relations of domination get secured. The governed participate in the justice of their own naturalised subjection. Symbolic violence may even be more efficacious, precisely by grounding the social order's legitimacy in this imprinting of power relations on the very practices and habits of cognition of individuals.* Another version of this radically culturalist understanding of the political consequences of violence — of how popular acquiescence in a form of rule may become naturalised under the threat of physical violence as much as its actuality — can be found in post-Foucauldian treatments of governmentality and surveillance.

To grasp the full complexities of the violence of early twentieth-century labour history, these wider socio-cultural meanings will certainly be needed. In reconstructing the cultures of conformity and coercion, order and acquiescence, incentives and intimidation, whose consequences structured the management of labour markets and the labour process in the widely varying contexts covered by this volume, the socio-cultural perspectives enabled by concepts like "structural" and “symbolic” violence will have to be explored. In grasping the prevalence and efficacy of strikebreaking and vigilantism, or the two-way dynamics of workplace discipline and shopfloor practices, we surely will need the same.

In what follows, though, I approach issues of violence during 1890-1930 as a problem for democracy in the normative sense — as a wilful political challenge to the functioning and legitimacy of the emergent political forms and practices of those years. Relevant here is that classic claim to the monopoly over the legitimate use of political force seen by Max Weber as a hallmark of statehood and vital for the European state-making of the later-nineteenth century. I complicate that story by a two-step argument: first, by emphasising aspects of its unevenness before 1914, especially its contested and unfinished character; second, by showing how the turmoil after 1918—19 threw that process of the monopolising of the legitimate use of force drastically into question. If the extensive repertoire of

Foreword xvii anti-labour violence forms a prime feature of the pre-1914 histories, then fascism supplies the framing for what follows. In a nutshell: the prevalence of political violence in the 1920s and 1930s signifies a breakdown in the norms and ideals of democracy, publicness and civility whose efficacy became cumulatively established after the 1860s.

Expanding civility, 1860 to 1914: violence constrained

At the largest scale of analysis, two interconnected questions defined this terrain:

e What were the processes, under conditions of constitutional democracy, that enabled the large-scale use of political violence for the purposes of sustained collective mobilisation aiming at democracy's destruction?

e What was the relationship between the forms of anti-labour violence and this larger context of violence at the level of the polity and the state?

In the workplace, in labour markets, in the economy more broadly, anti-labour violence was constitutive for the rise of political movements demanding authoritarian rule and dismantling of democracy. At the same time, the precise forms and varying prevalence of anti-labour violence, society by society, were directly connected to the strength or weakness of each society's democratising capacities. The political violence we associate with fascism after 1918—19 overwhelmed and largely subsumed the more isolable forms of action already developing before 1914. The recourse to violence after 1918 bespoke a political logic, whether intended or entailed, that abrogated those political rules whose purpose was to contain the use of physical force, while organising and enabling the pluralist cohabiting of differences.

I understand fascism in the early twentieth century as the recourse to organised collective violence in the midst of an extreme polarisation of differences heading for a general crisis of society. And here is a really stark contrast. The recourse to political violence — to repressive and coercive forms of rule, to guns rather than words, to beating up your opponents rather than denouncing them from the speaker's platform — was ultimately what distinguished fascism in Germany, Italy and elsewhere from earlier forms of right-wing or conservative politics. But at the same time, violence was not exactly absent from the conduct of politics before 1914, least of all in the countless settings of labour conflict across the various countries of capitalist industrialisation. So we need to begin by drawing some distinctions.

With the exception of Britain, where labour stayed far longer inside an older liberal framework of politics, ensuring that specifically socialist politics remained far more locally contained, Europe had three distinct geographies of working-class politics before 1914:

e One was what I have called the central and northern European Social Democratic core, where an emergent model of socialist parliamentarianism and xvii Foreword associated trade unionism dominated labour movements from the 1890s. It encompassed those parties attaining more than 25 per cent of the popular vote in democratic elections before 1914.

* A second pattern described the western Mediterranean, where anarcho-syndicalism weakened the socialist parties and rendered working-class politics more volatile, devolving it onto locally based chambers of labour, where the functions of trade unions and parties were practically mixed.

e The final pattern occurred in the broad eastern border zone of Russia, the Balkans, and much of Austria-Hungary, where weak and uneven industrialisation combined with repressive political systems to impede socialist parties or force them underground.

At the level of states and their national polities, liberal constitutionalism was just as crucial as the extent of industrialisation in shaping the initial rise of socialist parties and labour movements. Where industry made little progress, so too did socialism. But industrialisation was not an infallible guide to socialism's strength: Bulgaria, East Galicia, Finland, Norway and Sweden all showed socialist parties winning major rural support, as did many localities and regions elsewhere. Legality, a functioning parliamentary constitution and a more democratic franchise could be as enabling for socialist emergence as growth of industry. Conversely, a repressive polity (e.g. Russian autocracy) held back the political expression of popular militancy, just as a discriminatory franchise in heavily industrialised Belgium successfully depressed the Belgian socialists’ electoral performance. If the polity's early liberalisation could compensate for the absence of capitalist industry, then in the more industrial economies an absence of liberalisation might still hamper a labour movement’s rise. The “constitutional factor" could either anticipate or impede the consequences of industrial class formation.

Any robust liberal constitutionalism required a liberal system of the rule of law. Under the European constitutional settlements of 1867—71, a functioning parliamentary constitution usually secured the classic civil freedoms, including rights of association and assembly, plus the legalising of trade unions. Unsurprisingly, the western Mediterranean pattern of weaker socialist parties was accompanied not only by a thinness of parliamentary culture but also by far greater police repression and anti-labour violence. Indeed, with its preference for direct action and community-based militancy, syndicalism directly responded to the viciousness of policing, deployment of troops and the failure of a parliamentary socialist party to bring government under constraint of law. This was precisely the Italian dialectic during 1901—03: while Giolitti walked his tightrope of legislative negotiations with parliamentary socialists, the police were killing strikers in a series of “proletarian massacres” that claimed 40 deaths between June 1901 and September 1904. Beneath this comparison of states and whole societies were examples galore of police repression, vigilantism and employer-initiated violence in central and northern Europe too — inside particular strikes, particular plants and particular communities, especially during the pan-European insurgencies of 1904—07 and

Foreword xix

1911-13. Drawing out such locally bounded or situated dynamics is precisely the great virtue of the papers collected in this volume.

The difference between the violence of the fascists and these pre-1914 forms must be sharply marked. Violence and use of force were nothing new. The state’s coercive resources were always deployed against certain kinds of opposition, whether by routine application of the law for protection of persons and property or for maintaining law and order, or by curtailment of civil liberties under pressure of national emergency, as in wartime or a general strike. Under constitutional governance between the 1860s and 1914, a wide spectrum of restrictive and authoritarian systems of public policing were embraced, whether through army, gendarmerie, citizens’ militia or uniformed police as such. Coercion in that sense was an entirely typical dimension of legally constituted governing authority, whatever the political complexion. Use of force supplied predictable sanction against actions transgressing allowable boundaries of social and political dissent.

Privately organised coercion was likewise commonly found in societies undergoing capitalist economic development in the later nineteenth century: strikebreaking, vigilantism, economic paternalism and servile labour, especially in the countryside, were all entirely plentiful. The balance of public jurisdiction and such privately organised coercion, society by society, varied in extremely complex and subtle ways, including of course the forms and extent of practical collusion and fully articulated integration, whether clandestine, tacitly accepted or openly acknowledged. How this distribution of coercive tasks and practices worked to shape the boundaries of public order could be very complex: the large-scale autonomies of neo-seigneurial jurisdiction on big landed estates and the capitalist prerogatives of spatially isolated extractive industry, single-industry settlements, and company towns are only the most obvious instances of how that worked. As a number of the essays show, ships were another instance of the same kind. Nor did the incidence of privately deployed coercion necessarily correlate with strength of constitutional government or liberal systems of the rule of law. Such violence was far more prevalent, even endemic, in the United States before 1914 than in Germany, for example. To take a single notorious case: in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, a combined assault by National Guard and company enforcers massacred some two dozen people, including women and children, with aggregate death toll of nearly 200 lives during the strike. Nothing remotely like this happened during the German industrialisation before 1914.5 In July 1917, the Phelps Dodge Corporation used cattle cars to deport 1,300 striking copper miners and supporters from the company town of Bisbee, Arizona, to the New Mexico desert 200 miles away, aided by 2,000 deputised vigilantes commanded by the county sheriff. It was preceded by a smaller deportation from the company town of Jerome.

In Germany pre-1914, such privately organised coercion was becoming ever-more visibly reined in. Armed force was gathered steadily inside the state’s jurisdictional realm. Beginning in the 1860s, state-managed repression became itself ever-more strictly subject to constitutional limitations, which by the 1900s seemed more and more secure. Precisely when measured by these pre-1914 xx Foreword precedents, fascist violence after 1918-19 was something shockingly new. Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law of 1878—90; the harassment, deporting and imprisonment of left-wing activists; and the unleashing of police or troops against strikers and demonstrators — all these were one thing. But terror, first by means of a militarist and violently confrontational style of politics (1919-23, 1928-33), then as a principle of state organisation (post-1933), was quite another.

Violence returns, 1914-23: fascism as breach

The years 1914—23 were a crucial watershed. The disaster befalling the German right in 1918 — the doubled trauma of military defeat and popular-democratic revolution — viciously radicalised its emotional and ideological temper. During the civil-war-like disorders prevailing for most of the years 1918—23, there was ample scope for the resentful militancy of the returning "front soldiers" and their civilian compatriots, simultaneously elevated and brutalised by the wartime, morally enraged by the dissolution of familiar values they saw accompanying the revolutionary circumstances of the new Republic's foundation. The paramilitary formations coalescing across Germany from the end of 1918 became the practical medium for mobilising and deploying this counter-revolutionary anger, together with the völkisch and anti-Semitic associations mushrooming during the same time.

Much of that momentum persisted into the Weimar Republic’s years of so-called relative stability between 1923-24 and 1928-29. Its instituted forms then contributed vitally to the full-scale national-political arrival of the Nazi Party between the elections of 1928 and 1930. This passage from the counter-revolutionary confusion of 1918—23 to the growing concentration of right-wing energies around the Nazis during the Republic's demise needs far more detailed explication. But the new willingness to use political violence against one's opponents was impossible to ignore. Moreover, hatred of the left, meaning not only communists and Social Democrats but also pacifists, feminists, left liberals and any other defenders of democracy, supplied vital impetus behind this right-wing political violence.