To this day, the mere mention of Léon Blum and the Front populaire in French rightist circles can instantly transform a quiet conversation into a fine display of Gallic political passion. Startling at first, such violent reactions, so many years after the fact, become more intelligible when viewed in proper perspective. For, to the many Frenchmen who remain convinced that they lived under communism from June, 1936, to June, 1937, l'expérience Blum was indeed a “Nightmare in Red”.

In the late eighteen-seventies, the German Social Democratic Party, while still healing the wounds of old battles between Lassalleans and Eisenachers, was confronted by foes who delivered attacks on two levels. On the one level, Bismarck and his supporters fought energetically to annihilate the party with the passage of the Socialist Law (October 21, 1878). After some initial faltering steps, the Social Democrats found a firm footing and struggled successfully to preserve their political existence. The movement was preserved, even though the party organization, its affiliates and its newspapers were suppressed. On another level, the Social Democrats faced an ideological challenge. Their political suppression broadly paralleled the emergence of a conservative socialism which flourished for a short time in a variety of forms. Whatever clothing it wore, conservative socialism aimed to undermine the growing appeal of Social Democracy to the working-men of Germany. A theory of State Socialism was the most attractive garment designed by conservative social thought. The response of the Social Democratic Party to the various facets of this conservative socialism is a significant chapter in the history of the German socialist movement.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries militant and class-conscious European and American workers have generally supported democratic and socialist movements and parties. Workers attracted by antidemocratic and reactionary organizations and regimes have usually come from the dregs of their class, from Marx's famous Lumpenproletariat (true, the leadership has often included disappointed ex-Marxists). At times, however, this generalization must be qualified. Today, for example, the trade unions that favor Peron in Argentina include the kind of activist worker usually to be found in Social Democratic and Marxist movements. During the final decade of the Second Empire a somewhat similar attitude towards an anti-democratic regime emerged among some French workers. In the 1860's a significant minority of workers, often better educated than the average and with a long record of service to the working class, urged support of the Second Empire and often became devoted followers of Napoleon III. This article examines the motives and the activities of such Bonapartist inclined workers.

Trade unionism has always involved the settlement of industrial disputes by negotiations between workers' representatives and employers. On occasions in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries demands made by workers or employers were granted without question by the other side; at other times the demands were rejected out of hand and this was acquiesced in by the other side. In between these extremes lay a number of possible outcomes. Demands were sometimes conceded after strikes or lockouts or they were moderated and then accepted. The precise outcome depended upon the state of the labour market, and hence the degree of labour organization, and the cost position of the employers. These factors not only varied over time but differed in their intensity between industries and firms at any one point of time. The extreme situations occurred at high and low levels of employment. In the competition for labour, which a high level of employment implies, employers readily gave way to collective demands but as commodity markets deteriorated and the volume of production declined, they at first resisted claims which would have increased labour costs and then deliberately set out to cut wages, lengthen hours and intensify work. Workers commonly resisted initial attempts to reduce labour costs so that a spate of strikes and lockouts ensued. At the onset of the depression in 1819 and at the first suggestion of wage reductions the Lancashire miners, the North Staffordshire potters and the Nottingham framework knitters all responded by striking. The Glasgow cotton spinners resisted wage cuts in 1837 as did the London building workers and miners and textile workers in the midlands and north in 1841 and the typographical workers in 1846. Frequently, however, these disputes resulted in compromise settlements which were superseded by other compromises as trade conditions got worse.

La lettre de Pierre Kropotkine à Max Nettlau, l'historien distingué de l'anarchisme, que nous publions ici fut écrite dans la première partie de l'année 1902. Elle traite surtout de l'individualisme et ainsi jette de nouvelles lumières non seulement sur les idées politiques de Kropotkine mais aussi sur les idées morales qu'il développa en grande partie dans La Morale anarchiste, L'Entr'aide, L'Ethique et Spravedlivost' i nravstvennost' [Justice et moralité]. Parlant de l'individualisme et critiquant l'étroitesse de l'individualisme bourgeois (qu'il met en contraste avec son propre conception d'individuation), Kropotkine touche inévitablement d'autres problèmes – révolution, liberté, syndicalisme – qui intéressent non seulement ceux qui étudient ses idées mais aussi tous ceux qui s'occupent de questions sociales.

A letter from Dmitrii Blagoev, Bulgarian Social Democrat and later leader of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, has been preserved in the archive of A. N. Potresov at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. In reply to an inquiry fromD. Kol'tsov, who was preparing a Russian edition of Alphonse Thun's well-known history of the Russian revolutionary movement, Blagoev wrote twelve pages describing his activity in 1883–85 as a member of the first significant Social Democratic circle in Russia. Kol'tsov published extracts from the letter in his edition of Thun, including the Social Democratic program which Blagoev had published in Bulgaria subsequent to his expulsion from Russia in 1885. Kol'tsov's pen, however, struck out some of the more interesting biographical passages, and corrected Blagoev's good, if somewhat erratic Russian. It is particularly interesting to note Blagoev's references to the intellectual bases for a socialist Weltanschauung in the middle 1880's: Lassalle, Lavrov and Chernyshevskii appear beside Marx in the posts of honor. No less interesting is the question which Blagoev raised in this letter – whether the lack of clarity of Socialist views in 1885 was connected in any way with the rise of Economism among workers and socialist intellectuals in the Russian capital during the closing years of the last century. Literature on the Blagoev circle is not lacking, but there is a shortage of sound studies on the relationships between Marxism and indigenous Russian political philosophies between 1880 and 1895.