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By Root 1183 0

per cent of all workers earned less than the equivalent of forty cents a day; another 25 per cent earned between forty and sixty cents. An investigation in Brussels showed 34 per cent of working-class families living in a single room. The Belgian illiteracy rate was the highest in northern Europe because child labour was used to such an extent that few had a chance to go to school. Concerned with “something more profound than doctrine,” the labour movement had founded the Belgian Workers’ Party in 1885 without the usual schisms because it could not afford them. The most solidified, disciplined and serious of the European Socialist parties, it was markedly proletarian though led by the ardent Vandervelde. A lawyer by training, an eloquent and admired speaker and prolific writer on labour problems, Vandervelde was “gushed” over by female Socialists who found him “charming and physically attractive.” Together with the unions, the party organized a system of cooperatives where workers bought Socialist bread and Socialist shoes, drank Socialist beer, arranged for Socialist vacations, and obtained a Socialist education at the Université Nouvelle, where the French Anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus lectured. Founded by Vandervelde and others in 1894, the same year the Fabians founded the London School of Economics, the Belgian school capped a Socialist world created inside a capitalist society.

By virtue of the extended suffrage won with workers’ lives, the Belgian Workers’ Party in 1894 elected twenty-eight deputies to the most bourgeois parliament in Europe. The advent of this solid bloc “firmly and recklessly prepared to take up arms against every institution of the existing regime” created a thrill of fear in the ruling class and a sudden vision among the faithful that Belgium might be the land where Socialism would first be realized. When a second attempt by general strike to win suffrage on the one-man-one-vote principle was called in 1902, many in the movement were reluctant to risk the gains that had been made, but the militants prevailed. Still aggressive and strong, the ruling class suppressed the strike by “murderous fusillade” in the streets of Louvain. Eight strikers were killed and it took the party many years to recover from the defeat.

If Germany had Marx, France had her Revolution and her Commune. Her Socialism was more spirited but, owing to its extreme factionalism, less solid and therefore less authoritative than Germany’s. The Marxist matrix was the French Workers’ Party, founded by Jules Guesde in consultation with Marx and Engels in 1879. Two years later Paul Brousse seceded to form the Possibilists on the principle that the emancipation of the workers was possible without revolution. Edouard Vaillant, heir of the old Communard Blanqui, headed a separate Socialist Revolutionary Party from which an extreme wing split off called the Allemanists for its leader, Jean Allemane. Guesde was the self-appointed keeper of the Marxian conscience, tirelessly preaching against backsliders and false idols. With thin black hair worn almost to his shoulders, the face of an emaciated Jesus and a pince-nez on his long didactic nose, he was a zealot who never for an instant relaxed total battle against the capitalist system. “Torquemada in eyeglasses” was a contemporary’s epithet and Zola described him talking “with a whole range of passionate gesticulations and a perpetual cough.” For Guesde nothing short of revolution was of any value; no touch of cooperation with the enemy classes permissible. He was an Impossibilist. He belonged to that category of Marxists rendered gloomy by their own prophecies of catastrophe. Mankind, absorbed by materialist districtions, was deteriorating. Postponed much longer, Socialism might not come in time to save it. “What will we Socialists do with a humanity so degraded?” he asked during the Dreyfus Affair. “We will come too late; the human material will be rotten when the time comes to build our house.”

In 1893 Socialists in France, as in Belgium, won an impressive electoral victory: