Between 1871 and 1914 a total of 34 million migrants left Europe for the Americas, 25 million of whom became permanent settlers.140 Migrants to the Americas originated from various parts of Europe both industrialized and rural, their origins changing in the course of the years. In the 1870s the top labour-exporting European countries (relative to population) were the United Kingdom, Norway, and Portugal; by 1913 the top labour-exporters were Italy, Portugal, Spain (and the United Kingdom again).141 The overall movement of people has continued to increase, with ups and down. By 1990 international migrants numbered 154 million. In 2013, according to the United Nations, this figure reached 232 million.142 Middle Eastern wars further increased the flow of refugees.
As new nations appeared and were constructed, and older ones were redefined and reconstructed, the ‘demos’ itself changed ceaselessly, acquiring ever more rights, including the right to citizenship and, with it, the right to vote.
13
Suffrage
The discontent facing nascent capitalism took many forms. There was discontent from the industrial workers: wages were too low, working conditions too harsh. There was discontent from rural workers whose situation was often worse than those in industry, and much of it was suppressed or disguised because many migrated. There was discontent from the middle classes, always anxious about their chronically unstable position. Yet none of this really threatened the stability of advanced capitalist countries in the decades leading to the First World War. Only in unindustrialized countries such as the Tsarist Empire were there serious near-revolutionary threats, notably in 1905. There was indeed little trouble in Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, and Germany, though at the time, as is often the case, an air of unexceptional hysteria prevailed among the established classes always fearful of any real or imagined challenge to their position.
On 13 November 1887 in Trafalgar Square in London a large demonstration took place against unemployment and British repression in Ireland. It was organized by the Social Democratic Federation and the Irish National League and joined by eminent personalities including George Bernard Shaw, the feminist Annie Besant, the anarchist Charlotte Wilson, and William Morris of the Social Democratic Federation. It was the first ‘Bloody Sunday’ in a long history of bloody Sundays in Europe and North America (Wikipedia lists twenty), although there were few injured and no dead. In North America, at the time, the most famous instance of repression was the Haymarket ‘Massacre’ on 4 May 1886 following a demonstration in favour of the eight-hour day. The violence never surged out of control but eleven people died, seven of whom were policemen.
Belgium was more rebellious and the casualties were greater: on 29 March 1886, in Roux, in French-speaking Belgium, the army was called in to quell a miners’ strike that had turned into a riot, resulting in many dead.1 On 1 May 1891 in Fourmies, an industrial town in the north of France, the army intervened to disband a demonstration in favour of the eight-hour, resulting in nine people killed, including a twelve-year-old, and thirty wounded.2 The ruling elites, haunted by the fear of communism, socialism, and anarchism were, as is often the case, anxious and ready to use repression. The ‘spectre haunting Europe’ was not just a poetic image used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe communism in the opening lines of their famous manifesto.
Matters were more serious in Italy. In 1894 a stato d’assedio (state of emergency) in Sicily was proclaimed by Francesco Crispi, then both Prime Minister and Interior Minister, against the so-called Fasci siciliani. This was a largely rural movement with no connections with what was later the Fascist movement. The name alluded to the strength gained from solidarity: fasci means bundle – a single stick can be broken but not a bundle of sticks. The Fasci siciliani, which grew significantly between 1891 and 1893, was made up of agricultural workers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers, though there were some industrial workers, especially those in textiles, hurt by higher industrial productivity in the north of the country. Their conditions could be dire. An impoverished rural worker told the journalist Adolfo Rossi that he could find work for only half the year: ‘So how do you cope, the rest of the time? We gather grass, we cook it and eat it without salt.’3
According to the southern historian and politician Pasquale Villari, writing at the time, by November 1893 the movement had a membership of more than 300,000.4 The fasci wanted fair rents, higher wages, and lower local taxes. Many Sicilian workers and peasants had looked forward to a better life after Italian unification, but such hopes had been dashed. Of course, the landless wanted land. In the words of a Sicilian dialect saying, similar in sentiment to those of land workers everywhere: La terra e’ di cu’ la zappa, no di cu’ porta cappa (‘The land belongs to those who till the soil, not to those who wear a cape’).5
The agrarian question and the enormous disparity in power and wealth between landlords and rural workers could not have been resolved, as Francesco Crispi’s predecessor, the liberal Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, hoped, by the state refusing to take sides. By being neutral the state was, in effect, leaving untouched the power of landlords. Crispi eventually intervened, and brutally, against the fasci.
The Sicilian movement was largely non-violent (land occupation, demonstrations, etc.). One of its leaders, Rosario Garibaldi Bosco, always denied ever planning an insurrection, though probably because he thought the time was not ripe.6 The subsequent repression was harsh. Between December 1893 (when Giolitti resigned) and January 1894, troops killed ninety-two activists during demonstrations. Only one soldier died.7 In the two weeks following the start of the emergency (1 January 1894), about a thousand activists were sent to detention centres in various islands of the south without trial.8 At the same time thousands of ‘subversives’, designated as such by local mayors, were removed from electoral registers, thus reducing the electorate from circa 250,000 to just under 125,000.9 A new crime, incitement to class hatred, was introduced that was clearly aimed at anarchists and socialists. Class hatred, declared Prime Minister Crispi (a southerner himself), becomes dangerous when the lower orders (la plebe) take literally propositions such as ‘property is theft’.10 A public prosecutor blamed anarchists for inciting ‘the ignorant plebs’ to reject all laws, all authority, marriage, the family, private property, the state, and the motherland, and to embrace revolution, arson, murders, robberies, and massacres.11 In reality concessions could have placated the Fasci siciliani: where local taxes were decreased there were fewer demonstrations.12
Unrest continued throughout southern Italy. Giuseppe Zanardelli, Prime Minister from 1901 to 1903, responding, in 1901, in the Chamber of Deputies to those who accused him of being soft on strikers, declared that labour conflicts did not seriously threaten people or property and that frequent strikes did not require repression.13 Yet in the province of Foggia, strikes by railway workers resulted in the death of eight strikers in September 1902, three in May 1904, and four in March 1905, all killed by government troops.
There had also been unrest in 1898 against a steep increase in the price of grain, and hence of bread (partly due to the increase in international wheat prices after the Spanish-American wars). The protests were relatively peaceful but in May 1898, in Milan, Italy’s second city after Naples, the army, under General Bava Beccaris, gunned down unarmed demonstrators causing perhaps as many as one hundred dead.14 Socialist leaders, including Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff, were jailed. Bava Beccaris was decorated by King Umberto I (who was, in turn, killed by an anarchist in 1900).
At the end of the century there was widespread anxiety about social unrest, and understandably so since it is almost impossible to foresee the long-term consequences of any event. Strikes may degenerate into a riot; a riot may degenerate into a revolution. Or repression may quell a protest once and for all, and matters may remain calm and without major consequences. With hindsight it is easy to be wise. At the time there was anxiety as well as hope. Proponents of universal suffrage argued that if everyone could vote there
would be less popular discontent. The Belgian Socialist leader, César de Paepe, in his pamphlet on universal suffrage declared that ‘If we want universal suffrage, it is in order to avoid a revolution.’15
Of course, the bien pensants were anxious not only about unrest but also about universal suffrage, since no one could tell what the masses would do with their votes. They were less anxious about extending the suffrage to the ‘respectable workers’ but terrified of extending it to the ‘dangerous classes’ (i.e. the poor). Yet by the First World War, even universal manhood suffrage had become the norm in the so-called ‘civilized world’, though there were numerous exceptions. The road had been long, even though the direction to take had been worked out centuries ago by some, such as the Levellers during the Putney Debates of 1647 who wanted the suffrage extended to most males. David Hume, in 1752, argued that some form of popular representation, albeit of ‘tradesmen and merchants’, that is ‘the middling rank of men’, is the ‘firmest basis of liberty’ and ‘good for peace and prosperity’.16
Yan Fu, a leading Chinese intellectual (see Chapter 3), wrote in 1895 that the superiority of the West resided in the particular link between the people and their government and that this link depended on the fact that they elected representatives, and that these representatives were not ‘imposed by superior authorities’: ‘When the English speak of England and the French of France … they speak as when we speak of our parents with a sincere ardour and attachment which appears to come from a deep love.’17 And he added: ‘In case of war between us and westerners, their people will fight for a public thing, a common good, while the Chinese people will fight like slaves for the benefit of their masters.’18
Maybe Yan Fu had read Letters to a Chinese Official by the American populist politician and scourge of large corporations, William Jennings Bryan, who, while admitting that wealth influenced the outcome of American elections, extolled the sense of unity and power that was acquired through the suffrage: ‘The people choose their representatives, retain them in office as long as they like and depose them when they please.’19
Building the nation and building the citizenry were seen as part of the same process. But is there a direct connection between the expansion of the suffrage and the level of industrialization? The connection between modern industry and the suffrage is to be made, but it is not obvious. The common idea was that the suffrage was a European invention, born in old and stable countries of which Britain was the paragon. The evidence only partly confirms the assumption. In the race towards universal manhood suffrage, the pioneers were not the British, but European states such as Belgium, Switzerland and Germany or settlers in new states such as the USA, Australia and New Zealand (though in all these cases many were excluded on ground of race.) Almost all Latin American countries had universal manhood suffrage before 1914. Some had it in the mid-nineteenth century, though they reintroduced restrictions later, notably Colombia and Peru.20 Others, such as Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, and Cuba, extended the suffrage to women before the Second World War (and hence before Italy, France, and Belgium); others, such as Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela, after 1945, Mexico in 1953, and Paraguay only in 1961.21
The table below (p. 316) gives an idea of the spread of the suffrage for national elections in selected countries before 1914. In some cases the suffrage had been expanded for local elections in advance of national ones. For instance, in the United Kingdom, under the Municipal Franchise Act 1869, unmarried women paying local taxes could vote in local elections; in the United States, women could vote in some territories (i.e. before statehood) such as Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870; in Canada women in Manitoba could vote in 1916 ahead of federal enfranchisement (1918); after 1959, women could vote in some Swiss cantons but gained the vote for federal elections only in 1971.
There were often exclusion clauses other than that of gender: being too young, not being a citizen, belonging to the ‘wrong’ race or religion, being too poor or not rich enough, being a convicted criminal, being illiterate, etc. Exclusion by age has remained the most obvious and the least controversial since a minimum voting age is unavoidable. In the period we are examining the usual ‘majority’ age was twenty-one or higher. Only later in the twentieth century would this be lowered to eighteen. No one ever contemplated disenfranchising the very old; and lack of mental awareness (dementia, etc.) was seldom a criterion for disenfranchisement, though in the UK certified ‘lunatics’ are barred from voting along with convicted criminals and members of the House of Lords.
Literacy tests were often a way of disenfranchising the lower classes. Thus in Brazil the Saraiva Law of 1881 enfranchised all men, including blacks, as long as they could pass a literacy test. Since the overwhelming majority of Brazilians (and blacks in particular) were illiterate, they were effectively disenfranchised. In fact, Brazil was an interesting case study of having elections without democracy since elections were regularly held under the empire (1822–89), the First Republic (1889–1930), and subsequent dictatorships, but they were often fraudulent, voters were intimidated and outcomes predetermined, even though a higher proportion of the population could vote than in Great Britain.22 Indeed, elections in Latin America ‘were almost exclusively defined by fraud or violence’, though it does not follow that they were useless, since their purpose was to find a modus vivendi between competing elites.23
Ecuador abolished the literacy test only in 1978 (by then there had been seventeen constitutions since 1830). Yet as early as 1861, Ecuador had abolished all property requirements for the suffrage. Women were enfranchised in 1929, the same year as in Great Britain and well before France.24 In Argentina, as elsewhere, only citizens could vote, but the ratio of citizens to non-citizens was rather skewed since many of the inhabitants were newly arrived immigrants. Those qualified (i.e. adult males holding citizenship) represented only 20 per cent of the total population.25
Women were usually ‘citizens’ but of second rank. They were part of the nation, in the sense that they were French, English, German, Italian, and so on, but they could not vote and many of their other rights (such as the right to own property) were curtailed. In Britain it was only in 1882 with the Married Women’s Property Act that women were allowed to own property individually after marriage.
Nowadays the limitation of the suffrage to the male population does not exist anywhere in the world: if there are elections at all, everyone can vote – even in Saudi Arabia (since 2015), where people can vote only in municipal elections. Before the First World War, however, women were allowed to vote in general elections only in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, and Norway. Some men, such as John Stuart Mill, advocated female suffrage (The Subjection of Women, 1869, written with his wife Harriet Taylor) on equal terms with men without abolishing property or financial qualifications – a position held by suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst. The founding programme of the Second International (1889) was in favour of universal female suffrage, a position reaffirmed at its Seventh Congress held in Stuttgart in 1907 when the first International Conference of Socialist Women was launched.
In spite of the long struggle for the enfranchisement of women, female suffrage has not brought about a major change in party alignment. Although women originally perhaps tended to vote more conservatively than men, the difference was minor. Class, religious and regional issues have been of greater importance. Even today there is still no considerable women-based party, the way there are class or religion-based or ethnic or regionally based parties.
Here is a table depicting the spread of universal manhood suffrage and universal suffrage in some countries:
Table 11 The Spread of the Suffrage for General Elections before 1914: Selected Countries
Country Universal Manhood Suffrage for Central/Federal Assemblies Female Suffrage
Australia The (self-governing) colony of South Australia (the only colony, out of six, without a ‘convict past’) introduced universal manhood suffrage in 1856. Other colonies followed. The Franchise A
ct of 1902 extended the franchise to all men and women for federal elections. Aborigines obtained the vote only in 1962. 1902
Austria-Hungary 1907 universal manhood suffrage in the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Suffrage remained restricted in Hungary. 1918
Belgium After the general strike of 1893 universal manhood suffrage was introduced (but some had more than one vote). Proportional representation introduced in 1899; universal manhood suffrage introduced in 1919 and war widows allowed to vote. 1948
Canada Chinese, Japanese, and other ‘Asiatic’ people and aboriginal people excluded in decades leading to the First World War. Only in 1960 were all the descendants of the original inhabitants allowed to vote. Some provinces had female suffrage before 1918. 1918
Denmark Universal manhood suffrage 1849 (suffrage in 1834 confined to male property owners). 1915
Finland Until 1917, Finland was an autonomous principality within the Russian Empire. It adopted universal suffrage in 1906. 1906
France The Convention nationale of 1792 was elected by all males. Then suffrage was restricted until the Constitution of the Third Republic in 1875, which established universal manhood suffrage. Universal suffrage established in 1944. 1944
Germany Universal manhood suffrage: 1871. 1919
Iran In 1962 the Shah introduced female suffrage as part of the reforms of his modernizing ‘White Revolution’. The Revolution of 1979 (led by the Ayatollah Khomeini) maintained women’s right to vote. 1963
Italy Universal manhood suffrage: 1913. 1946
Japan Universal manhood suffrage: 1925. 1946
Netherlands Universal manhood suffrage: 1917. 1919
New Zealand In 1867 Maori men had four reserved seats and acquired voting rights on equal terms only in 1948. Women were allowed to stand for parliament only after 1919. 1893
The Anxious Triumph Page 45
