by Stephen Yellin
I have written about 2 major milestones in the march to World War I in the last 2 weeks: the 100th anniversaries of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wifeby a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo and the issuing of the “blank check” by Germany to its Austrian ally in the assassination’s aftermath. With both governments publically maintaining silence it appeared that the initial concerns of war over the Archduke’s murder were unfounded. Other European leaders and the civilian population turned their attention elsewhere.
And there was much to be paid attention to. The notion that Europe prior to the outbreak of war 1914 was at peace or that its citizens were innocently concerned with material things is a myth. The truth is that Europe in 1914 was in turmoil if not outright war. Violent strikes, militant suffragettes, a particularly shocking political sex scandal and more were in the news 100 years ago this month, as was the increasing likelihood of civil war in Great Britain. A “general European war” was not.
In this article I will touch on several of the major “current events” stories of 1914 that were overshadowed by the “breaking news” of late July 1914.
Great Britain: violence and police brutality in the fight for Women’s Suffrage
Most readers will be familiar with the American Women’s Suffrage movement which formally commenced in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention and ended in victory with the 19th Amendment of 1920. “Suffragettes” (a term originally coined by a male journalist as a term of derision) were a powerful force in another liberal democracy giving them the right to vote in 1918: Great Britain. Yet a significant difference exists in their otherwise joint story: in Great Britain a radical wing of the movement broke windows, torched buildings and went on hunger strikes in an attempt to pressure Parliament into giving women the vote. They were members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and their leader was Emmeline Pankhurst.
Photograph of Emmeline Pankhurst, 1913.
“Deeds, not words was to be our motto” was Pankhurst’s claim about WSPU in 1914, 11 years after she founded the militant organization. Pankhurst, a veteran campaigner for women’s suffrage had lost patience with repeated failures by Parliament to pass suffrage bills. (It should be noted that denying women the right to vote was the “mainstream” political stance in Great Britain at this time, as it was in the United States.) The WSPU stood apart from the major political parties in that its members were exclusively dedicated to winning the right to vote. What set them apart from other women’s suffrage groups was their willingness to use every tactic available, including violence to achieve their goal.
That Pankhurst described herself as a “soldier” on the “field of battle” commanding a “suffrage army” is no coincidence. She and her “army” including all 3 of her daughters would be frequently arrested in the years between 1905 and 1914.
Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested in May 1914 after attempting to deliver a suffrage petition to King George V in person.
When Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s government refused to support a suffrage bill 2 WSPU members hurled rocks through the windows of the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street.
Further legislative defeats in Parliament were followed by increasingly militant acts such as setting fire to numerous public places in London, including Westminster Abbey, and burning the slogan “Votes for Women” into MP-frequented golf courses with sulfuric acid. The police responded by physically manhandling protesters before sending them in jail. A particularly egregious display of police brutality occurred in 1910 when the Home Secretary (essentially a Homeland Security/Attorney General combo) sic’d the police on protesters in what was known as “Black Friday”. The Home Secretary was none other than Winston Churchill.
When imprisoned suffragettes began going on hunger strikes in further protest the government began resorting to force feeding the inmates. This sparked a public outcry and forced the Asquith government to pass a law releasing prisoners whose health was threatened by refusing to eat. Another particularly shocking incident occurred in May 1913 when Emily Davison was fatally trampled when attempting to place a WSPU banner on King George V’s horse while it was running the Epsom Derby. The year before Davison had spent a 6-year prison sentence for arson while being force-fed along with fellow suffragettes. Despite the government crackdown WSPU’s campaign was still very much ongoing in July 1914 with no end in sight.
The immediate aftermath of Emily Davison being trampled by the King's horse, May 1913.
France: Madame Caillaux and her “crime of passion”
While Emmeline Pankhurst and her suffragette army routinely broke the law to protest injustice another woman was on trial for committing a far more serious crime. Henriette Caillaux was no suffragette, however: she was the wife of France’s Finance Minister, a former Prime Minister and one of the most powerful political figures in the Third Republic. She was also guilty of murder.
Photograph of Henriette Caillaux, taken between 1910 and 1915.
Henriette (nee Raynouard) was a married mother of 2 when she met and began an affair with Joseph Caillaux in 1907. Caillaux, who was also married at the time, was becoming a regular appearance in the merry-go-round of governments that led France during the seven decades of its Third Republic; he was serving as Finance Minister for the second time in 5 years at the time he met Henriette and would take the post again in 1913-14. They divorced their respective spouses to marry each other; the couple held joint assets of 1.5 million francs making them among the wealthiest couples in France, and certainly among its most powerful.
In between his second and third gigs as Finance Minister Caillaux got to serve as Prime Minister in 1911 but was forced out after 6 months when it was discovered he’d secretly negotiated with Germany to prevent war over Morocco. Nevertheless he regained his old post in 1913 and began pushing for a progressive income tax as a much-needed financial reform. This drew the ire of the conservative parties and their political supporters including the editor of one of the country’s biggest newspapers, Le Figaro. Its editor Gaston Calmette began to publish daily attacks on Caillaux and his record including accusations of corruption and obstruction of justice.
Joseph Caillaux
Gaston Calmette
(As a side note: the Third Republic’s political instability was less chaotic than its nearly 100 “fallen” governments between 1870 and 1940 would indicate; most “new” governments consisted of a few departments getting new ministers as coalition partners shifted.)
Calmette then began publishing secretly stolen, private letters of Caillaux in which he stated his opposition to the very income tax he had introduced as Finance Minister. Despite this clear breach of his privacy – sufficient cause for a duel in early 20th century France – Caillaux chose not to take action. Fearing that Calmette had access to her and her husband’s love letters – letters that proved they’d had an affair while he was still married to his first wife – Madame Caillaux chose to take matters into her own hands to protect her husband’s reputation.
At 5PM on March 16th, 1914 Henriette entered the offices of Le Figaro and asked to see Calmette. She wore a fur coat, one presumes of the highest fashion, and kept her hands in a fur muff. She waited for an hour for Calmette’s return to his desk; rather surprisingly, in light of his expose of her husband, Calmette agreed to see her alone. “I cannot refuse to receive a woman,” explained the editor. A few words were exchanged; then Henriette pulled a .32 Browning automatic pistol from her muff and fired 6 shots at Calmette. The editor was hit 4 times and died of his wounds 6 hours later. Henriette made no effort to leave the scene but insisted on being driven by her chauffeur to police headquarters rather than ride in a police van; the police, in light of her social rank consented and waited until her arrival to charge her with the murder.
Madame Caillaux shooting Gaston Calmette in his office, March 16th 1914.
Her trial began on July 20th and almost monopolized French news coverage whilst it ran. President Raymond Poincare was forced to give a deposition (a first for any head of state) while many of the witnesses were also well-known and powerful public figures. The fact that French courts had few restrictions on the conduct of the accused, the attorneys and the witnesses meant a melodramatic atmosphere surrounded the trial from start to finish. While there was no doubt Madame Caillaux had killed Calmette her attorney, Fernand Labori, had a brilliant legal defense to get her off the hook for murder.
Banking on the highly chauvinistic attitudes held by most Frenchmen of the era, Labori argued that his client had committed an “act of passion”; he claimed that as a woman she could not control her emotions and had decided to kill Calmette without premeditation.
With France’s leaders on a diplomatic trip to its Russian allies in St. Petersburg (more on this next week) there was little incentive for the press and the public to be concerned with rising tensions in the far-off Balkans.
The class war: strikes and Socialism
In November 1912 a major political gathering took place in Berne, Switzerland. The participants came from each of the “Great Powers” of Europe and most of its lesser ones, and its participants represented workers and their families from every industrialized nation. Overcoming personal and ideological rivalries they issued a joint Manifesto, calling on all workers to go on strike if their governments attempted to go to war. The organization was the Second International, the United Nations of international socialism, and its 1912 Manifesto something every government took notice of:
If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.
Jean Jaures, leading French Socialist and powerful anti-war orator.
This was no idle threat. Europeans in the years before 1914 saw strikes and workplace shutdowns take place on a regular basis as factory workers demanded safe working conditions, higher wages and the right of collective bargaining with their employers. Both government and employer crackdowns failed to restore order for long.
A wave of strikes paralyzed the German economy in May 1914; in Russia the number of strikes swelled from 222 in 1910 to 3,534 in 1914. British coal miners and dockworkers were capable of bringing their sector of the economy to a halt as they did on several occasions prior to 1914. A strike of dockworkers shut down St. Petersburg's shipyards as the Tsar and his government received their French allies for a meeting in July 1914.
Ask an ordinary person about Karl Marx and they will bring up Communism and the Russian Revolution (assuming they don’t lump him in with his comedian “brothers”). Yet Marx never expected Russia to be the birthplace of the “revolution of the proletariat”; rather, he believed it would come from the more highly industrialized and hence more “bourgeois” economies of Western Europe. As the newly created wealth of the Industrial Revolution failed to improve the lives of those whose toil made it possible, the ranks of self-identified Socialists swelled in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Socialist parties sprung up in Great Britain (the Labour Party), France (the SFIO or “French Section of the Worker’s International”) and later on in Russia (Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were part of the Second International, too). Their message of working class unity crossed national boundaries and enabled them to hold international conferences to determine a common strategy for political progress. The parties earned the loyalty of working class supporters by organizing educational, charitable and social activities along with traditional political activity.
The largest Socialist movement was in Marx’s homeland, Germany. Otto Von Bismarck attempted to crush the movement by banning the Social Democratic party for over a decade and imprisoning its leaders; at the same time he introduced unprecedented economic and social legislation to improve the lot of German workers in an effort to woo them away from socialism. Bismarck’s legislation did wonders for the working class – shorter hours, time off for sickness and injury and pensions for retired workers ala Social Security – but failed to stop the movement’s momentum. In the 1912 elections for the Reichstag the Social Democrats doubled their previous vote total and became the single largest political party in Germany.
August Bebel, co-founder and leader of German Social Democratic Party
In July 1914 the crowned heads and political elites of Europe could not be sure their nation’s workers, who would make up the bulk of their conscript armies and make their mobilization plans, would even support them if they made the decision to go to war. If the workers went on strike to stop a war then their governments would have been unable to wage it.
Great Britain and Ireland: civil war over Home Rule
Another kind of war appeared to be brewing in the British Isles in 1914 but of a more immediate and menacing nature than the inevitable worker’s revolution preached by the Second International. It was a crisis sparked by not only the increasingly forceful demands by Irish Catholics for autonomy from Great Britain (“Home Rule”) but by the equally forceful refusal of Irish Protestants in Ulster to accept it. The crisis not only threatened to start a civil war in Ireland but pitted the British military and political leaders against each other. A “British Civil War” seemed quite possible in July 1914.
The crisis was the flashpoint of a decades-long battle by Irish nationalists to break off from direct control by the British authorities in London (full independence was a minority view at this point). The demand of the Irish Parliamentary Party was for what Canada and Australia have today; namely, autonomous self-government while remaining part of the British Commonwealth. This did not sit well with much of the British public. Two previous attempts by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone to pass a Home Rule bill in 1886 and 1893 had been blocked in Parliament by the reactionary House of Lords, while many Liberals bolted the party in response and thus brought down the government.
H.H. Asquith
John Redmond, leader of Irish Parliamentary Party
In 1910, however, the Liberals and Conservatives deadlocked in the elections with the Irish Parliamentarians holding the balance of power.
Prime Minister Asquith made a deal with IP leader John Redmond: in return for Irish support in ending the veto power of the Lords, thus enabling social and economic reform to finally take place, the Liberals would make a third attempt at passing Home Rule for Ireland. In 1912 such a bill was introduced, and was met by the same vociferous opposition as before. The slogan of the predominantly Protestant Northern Irish in the 6 provinces of Ulster was
“Home Rule means Rome Rule”. They refused to be led by a government which would almost certainly compose entirely of Irish Catholics that, in their view, would take their marching orders from the Pope.
Backed by prominent British political leaders such as the Solicitor General (an Ulster Protestant) and the leadership of the Conservative Party, the Irish Protestants formed the Ulster Volunteers in January 1913; by 1914 some 100,000 Volunteers were prepared to fight the government to block Home Rule. When Asquith ordered military units to Ulster in March 1914 to prevent an insurrection following the bill’s passage, 61 officers – including General Hubert Gough and 2 of his 3 colonels – resigned rather than obey the order. The so-called “Curragh Incident” not only embarrassed the government but sparked the resignation of the British Army’s commanding general and the War Secretary in protest. It also compelled Irish Catholics to form their own paramilitary force, the Irish Volunteers. Both sides received shipments of arms and ammunition from none other than Imperial Germany; the Kaiser’s advisors saw an opportunity to weaken the power of the country they saw as their greatest threat.
Photograph of General Hubert Gough, leader of "Curragh Incident".
Faced with the prospect of bloodshed the Liberal government attempted to create a compromise: the Ulster provinces would be “temporarily excluded” from Irish Home Rule.
This drew the ire of the Irish Parliamentarians and left the government in a bind: if the IP bolted the Liberals would lose their majority and a new election would have to be called, one the Liberals were likely to lose. The alternative, however seemed to be civil war in Ireland and a schism in the British military. In a desperate attempt to prevent catastrophe King George V held an emergency conference at Buckingham Palace, where the 2 Irish movements met face-to-face for (incredibly) the first time. The conference broke down on July 24th and the parties went home without resolving the crisis.
Later that day the British cabinet met to discuss the next steps. It was then that Foreign Secretary Edward Grey informed his colleagues that Austria-Hungary had issued a 48-hour ultimatum to the Serbian government that Belgrade could not possibly accept without surrendering its autonomy. The “peace of Europe” was about to be shattered.