9 - Revolution from the Right: Against Equality

Summary

The early decades of the twentieth century initially seemed devastating for the European Right, especially for its adherence to traditional hierarchies. The spread of democracy and rise of mass politics undermined the rule of the nobility and the monarchy; feminism questioned established gender roles; industrialization and urbanization swallowed up the cherished countryside; increasingly militant workers challenged the economic order. The slaughterhouse of World War I and the political upheavals that followed seemed to only accelerate this crisis. Across Central Europe, monarchical empires collapsed in democratic revolutions, women gained legal equality, and socialist mass parties entered the realm of power. On the most profound level, some of the traditional Right’s most basic ideological pillars, especially the belief that society had to relish “natural” and traditional inequalities, seemed deeply shaken. While Europeans continued to live in a tight web of hierarchies – whether colonial, religious, gendered, or economic – many contemporaries believed that with the new society of the masses, equality was sweeping the continent.