Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PREWArAs (The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War)

Teaser

The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War’ (ERC-StG 2015 - PREWArAs) is a five-year comparative project led by Professor Matteo Millan and based at the University of Padova (Italy). The project...

Summary

The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War’ (ERC-StG 2015 - PREWArAs) is a five-year comparative project led by Professor Matteo Millan and based at the University of Padova (Italy). The project investigates armed associationism and political violence in Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, the United Kingdom, Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) that occurred about 30 years before the outbreak of the First World War.
Too often, the period before the Great War has been characterised by reassuring images of optimism and abundance associated with the Belle Époque, in sharp contrast with the carnage of the trenches. The goal of this project is, instead, to investigate how and to what extent organised political violence and armed associations permeated European societies even before the outbreak of the Great War, which is precisely where (Central-Western Europe) and when (the so-called Belle Époque), allegedly, they should not have been present. From long-established shooting clubs to militia in fancy uniforms, from strikebreaking gangs to private and corporate police corps, armed associations were a familiar presence in Europe. Groups were newly established to pursue vigilante activities, while long-established militias or shooting clubs were reactivated around new and very contemporary objectives. Handling weapons was a vehicle for defending social hierarchies, order and productivity as well as for instilling patriotic values and preparing young men for the defence of the country. The argument put forward in the project is that, despite some continuities, private police, strikebreaking and crime control groups as well as many patriotic groups were largely new forms of organisations established to face the challenges of mass politics; in other words, they were not fossilised remains from the past but a product of new times characterised by rapid and profound changes in social, political and cultural contexts.
Such ambitious tasks are being pursued by establishing a coherent comparative framework for considering the main European states of the time using a multi-scale approach. This approach is allowing the project team to carry out extensive comparative research and consider various armed associations in relation both to their discrete national and local environments and to the wider European contexts.
The objectives are twofold. On one hand, the project is aimed at filling a gap in current scholarship by investigating the role, membership, patterns of action and impact of armed associations throughout the continent. Familiar armed associations, such as traditional shooting clubs, will be compared and related to less familiar ones, such as private police or militias. On the other hand, the project is aimed at employing armed associations as an angle to think afresh crucial issues in the current historiographical agenda, such as the crises of liberal democracies, the relationship between the democratic system and organised violence, the implementation of so-called state monopoly over physical violence and the causes and effects of WWI. Such a joint approach promises to reshape our current narratives, which view the nineteenth century as the favourite playground for stories of progress and the twentieth century for atrocities: the Belle Époque comes as a compelling phase of transition on whose dark side armed associations shed new light.

Work performed

From October 2016 to March 2019, the principal investigator (PI), Prof. Matteo Millan, devoted more than 80% of his working time to the project. From October to December 2016, he worked to prepare for the recruitment of the postdocs and lay the groundwork for the project. In particular, he developed the comparative methods and historiographical framework of the project.
In December 2016, the PI began recruiting members of the project team. After undertaking a rigorous and very competitive selection process, four postdocs were hired to work on the cases of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Austria-Hungary, respectively. The group work started in February 2017. The first four months were devoted to studying the literature relevant to each case study and to defining the main research questions. In the following four months (June–September 2017), the project team used interdisciplinary methods to determine the legal framework within which armed associations could have developed. Specific attention was paid to gun licences and permits, public security legislation, armed corps’ statutes and regulations and self-defence through a systematic examination of legislation, statute books, state and regional regulations, jurisprudence and sentences. This required specific interdisciplinary competencies in legal history. In October 2017, a PhD student joined the project team to investigate the cases of Spain and Portugal. The following 12 months (October 2017–September 2018) were devoted to research and the collection of sources (both in local and national archives and libraries and in secondary sources) on armed associations operating in the social field and labour conflicts, ranging from armed strikebreaking groups to private and corporate police. The postdoc researchers took several research trips throughout Europe to collect sources from national and private/corporate archives. The results were then shared and discussed among the project team members to identify differences and commonalities as well as transnational patterns. For example, the team was able to investigate patterns of action and organisational collaborations among strikebreaking gangs operating across the Austrian–German border or international employers’ associations devoted to strikebreaking, as in the case of the International Shipping Federation and the Yellow Federation. The following six months (October 2018–March 2019) were devoted to preparing the first outcomes of the investigation carried out in the previous months, with a particular focus on a special issue of European History Quarterly under preparation (to be published in October 2019). Other publications are currently under preparation, while the contract for an edited volume on the issue of social conflicts and strikebreaking between the 1900s and 1930s will be signed soon.
In the meantime, the PI and project team members pursued extensive scientific dissemination, delivering papers in seminars series (e.g. Sorbonne University Paris, Institute of Historical Research London, University of Oxford) and at conferences (e.g. Annual Conference of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies – Boston; European Consortium for Political research – Hamburg; International Conference: ‘A Period of Global Revolutions. Foreshadowing the 20th Century or Ending a Long Revolutionary Tradition?’ – Bielefeld). Three workshops were also organised to present the initial outcomes of the project and connect with leading scholars and ongoing research in related fields. The first workshop was organised in December 2017 at the University of Padova, giving the team the opportunity to present the results so far and to discuss them with leading scholars in the field in the postdocs’ respective countries. Two more workshops were organised in collaboration with the history faculty at Oxford University and École Française de Rome. Both workshops were advertised through a call for papers a

Final results

The project is aimed at challenging two main historiographical narratives. On one hand, it aims to offer a nuanced image of the period before the Great War by looking with scepticism at the conventional images of the ville lumière and unstoppable progress, technical developments and processes of democratisation which usually characterise the period and emphasising the constitutive role played by violent practices in the everyday lives of thousands upon thousands of European citizens. On the other hand, the project aims to reconsider the connections between the pre- and post-WWI periods. Historians have spent at least the last three decades stressing the crucial role that WWI played in unleashing – and basically creating – unprecedented levels of political violence across the continent. First, the so-called brutalisation theory and, more recently, more articulated and convincing approaches have underlined the impact of WWI and its aftermath on making Europe a violent continent well beyond the signing of the armistices. The joint approach which views, on one hand, 1914 as an epochal watershed affecting almost all aspects of society and politics and, on the other hand, pre-WWI Europe as a place and time of peace and progress or, at most, cultural decadence has brought about an underestimation of the organisation of violence in Europe during the Belle Époque.
By investigating and comparing a wide range of armed associations in multiple countries, the project aims, first of all, to fill a gap in our knowledge by considering a largely understudied subject. More importantly, it aims to use armed associations as an innovative angle to shed light on major historiographical topics, which nevertheless are of relevance to contemporary political and social debates. First, the project promises to defuse national stereotypes. Alleged national exceptionalities – from the ‘classical’ German Sonderweg to its Italian version, from French republican and revolutionary peculiarity to British difference, to Austro-Hungarian sickness – acquired different nuances. For example, the belief in the formative and educative value of drills and parades in pre-military groups was not a prerogative of authoritarian militaristic regimes (and much less of only fascist regimes), but it was equally rooted, say, in non-conformist Sunday schools in late 1880s Britain. Second, armed associations stressed state elites and legitimacy. On one hand, precisely because they were often legally authorised, they had some intrinsic legitimacy and represented the by-product of the rule of law; therefore, they could be hardly disbanded, as exemplified by the Ulster Volunteer Force. On the other hand, armed associations were helpful and even necessary in law enforcement especially, as in the case of the German Zechenwehr.
Therefore, in contrast to current interpretations, which see organised violence as a product of state weakness and collapse or a culture of war, the argument in this project is that armed associations were a response to processes of reconfiguration of traditional social and political balances.
At the end of the project, the team will produce a series of monographs on armed associationism in various countries, while the PI will work on a comparative book presenting the phenomenon in its entirety. Articles and edited books are currently under preparation.

Website & more info

More info: http://prewaras.eu.