Introduction

Abstract

We identify historical epochs both by their successes and by their failures. During the half-century from 1890 to 1939 the accelerating pace of economic and social change led Europe both to the most brilliant of successes and to the most abysmal of failures. A series of events centring on 1890 signalled the beginning of movements which revolutionised the life of Europe and of the world. The Berlin Congress of 1885 opened the age of the ‘new imperialism’, the apogee of Europe’s dominion over the rest of the world. The construction of the all-steel Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1889, the provision of high voltage electrical current over an entire region of western Germany in 1891 and the creation of the modern automobile in Britain in 1895 announced the ‘second industrial revolution’ and unprecedented economic growth. However, along with political and economic expansion came international insecurity and domestic conflict. In 1891 Russia imposed protective tariffs to create a ‘national industry’ for self-defence, Germany desperately sought both European allies and overseas acquisitions, and in 1898 Britain and France very nearly went to war over disputed territory in Africa. In 1890 Bismarck’s fall allowed German socialists to campaign openly, and they won 35 seats in the Reichstag; in 1894 German landlords and peasants founded the Agrarian League to defend traditional rural values against urban, industrial radicalism. The pattern repeated itself across Europe. In France the struggle between left and right crystallised in 1894 in the debate over the fate of Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain accused of being a spy, which pitted socialists, intellectuals and the cultural avant-garde against the conservative military establishment, the Catholic church and a new extreme right wing including those who condemned Dreyfus simply because he was a Jew.