Rechercher des liens de filiation possibles entre la Commune et le mouvement boulangiste présente au premier abord un caractère paradoxal. Car le général Boulanger, officier de carrière, a combattu les Communards dans les rangs de l'armée de Versailles. Et les adversaires de Boulanger dans le mouvement ouvrier et socialiste n'ont pas manqué de rappeler ce souvenir. C'est ce que fait notamment l'ouvrier Avronsart, dans une interview de Boulanger dont l'authenticité fut d'ailleurs contestée. Plus tard, lorsque Boulanger pose sa candidature à l'élection partielle de la Seine, se constitue contre lui un groupe qui s'intitule précisément «la Commune» et qui présente la candidature de Protot. Tout serait à citer de la proclamation de ce groupe, dont nous nous bornerons à extraire ce raccourci historique quelque peu hardi:

«Robespierre tue la Commune et fait Bonaparte; Cavaignac tue la Commune et refait Bonaparte; M. Thiers tue la Commune et voilà Boulanger.»

The great strike movement in France in the summer of 1936, which took its peculiar form of action in a series of stay-in strikes, can only be explained by the general state of mind of the French working-class in the spring of 1936. France had found itself for the last two years in a state of growing social and political fermentation. The danger of the militant social and political reaction, which manifested itself particularly clearly in February 1934, had roused the socially and politically progressive elements in France and enabled the reconciliation of the two great labour parties. It also surmounted the discord in the trade-unions and led to the formation of the “Popular Front”, which gained a glorious victory at the elections of deputies on April 26th and May 3rd 1936. In the course of this development of events the social consciousness of the working-class was strengthened. The feeling no longer to have to accept meekly the privations they had had to suffer during the years of depression, and no longer to stand deprived of their rights by their employers, gradually grew stronger. The beginning of 1936 marked a tremendous growth of the membership in the trade-unions and everywhere in the working-class there was a state of ferment. Characteristic of this development is, above all, the fact that in the beginning of the movement of 1936 the material claims, the claims for raising wages, often played a less prominent part and fell back behind the aspiration for mitigation of the social inferiority of the working-class, that is to say, the actual acknowledgement of the workman's right to join a trade-union, the realization of the system of collective contracts, the admittance of representatives of the workers in the different industries.

The primary aim of this article is to problematize the WIDF's interpretations of the rights of women from (post)colonial countries and its tactics in working for and together with these women. It shows that, in the context of rapid geopolitical changes – the growing anti-colonial struggle and Cold War competition – the WIDF had to change its ideology, ways of working, and communication strategies in order to keep its leading position in transnational work for women's rights and to maintain the sympathies of women from countries outside Europe. The main focus is on the contradictions, negotiations, and adjustments inside the WIDF with respect to the new political situation and the demands of women from Africa and Asia, in particular, during the highest period of anticolonial transformation (1950s to early 1970s). This article also pays attention to Soviet ideas on the emancipation of women and, in particular, to the influence of Soviet experiences of emancipating women from non-Slavic (Eastern and Southern) parts of the USSR on the WIDF's perception of and policies for the improvement of the situation of women in Asia and Africa. This article is based primarily on analysis of the WIDF's archival documents preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, along with the WIDF's official publications.

In one of the supreme ironies of history, the austere Lycurgan system at Sparta failed in its primary aim – the fossilization of martial virtue – and succeeded in military victories, the heady profits of which undermined the precarious communism of the bivouac state. Conditioned to repress fear, the Spartan compensated by indulging greed – bribery, not cowardice, was his fatal weakness. After the collapse of the Spartan Empire at the Battle of Leuctra in 371, mercenary service became the principal Spartan occupation, even for Xenophon's model officer and gentleman, King Agesilaus. With landed estates encroaching on the traditional lots and great fortunes swollen by the gains of empire and mercenary adventure, the common Spartan found himself reduced to an equality of obligation only. The inflation and economic stress of the Hellenistic era intensified the imbalance between wealth and poverty in Lacedaemon. In a brief reign (244–241), the idealistic young King Agis IV tried to revive Sparta's military glory by restoring „Lycurgan ways” and did effect the abolition of debts but failed to redistribute land lots – his agent, Agesilaus, avoided the issue until a counter-revolutionary coup led by the deposed King Leonidas overthrew the reformers and lynched Agis. In 227, Leonidas' son, Cleomenes III, seized power and completed the aborted reforms of Agis-his subsequent success forced his rival for leadership of the Peloponnse, Aratus of Sicyon, into an alliance with Macedon, and Cleomenes was defeated at Sellasia in 222 to die shortly after in exile in Egypt.

In terms of production volume, most Ottoman state factories cannot be regarded as success stories, yet the labour relations they initiated, engendered, and supervised were important for the emergence of factory labour in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic. One of those state factories was the Imperial Fez Factory, where, throughout the nineteenth century, approximately 500 workers were employed, making it the second highest concentration of industrial workers in the empire after the Imperial Arsenal. Very recently, a limited number of wage ledgers for the fez factory became available for research. Those ledgers provide unprecedented information not only on remuneration but also on the production process and labour-control practices in the fez factory. Those ledgers enable us, for the first time, to formulate research questions within the framework of a broad labour history, in particular for the Ottoman factory workforce in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the effects of the ethno-religious characteristics and gender of Ottoman factory labourers on employment practices and wage-earning at the fez factory.

“MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH BAKUNIN is in San Francisco ”, announced the front page of Herzen's Kolokol November 1861. “HE IS FREE!Bakunin left Siberia via Japan and is on his way to England. We joyfully bring this news to all Bakunin's friends.” Arrested in Chemnitz in May 1849, Bakunin had been extradited to Russia in 1851 and, after six years in the Peter-Paul and Schlürg fortresses, condemned to perpetual banishment in Siberia. On June 17, 1861, however, he began his dramatic escape. Setting out from Irkutsk, he sailed down the Amur to Nikolaevsk, where he boarded a government vessel plying the Siberian coast. Once at sea, he transferred to an American sailing ship, the Vickery, which was trading in Japanese ports, and reached Japan on August 16th. A month later, on September 17th, he sailed from Yokohama on another American vessel, the Carrington, bound for San Francisco. He arrived four weeks later, completing, in Herzen's description, “the very longest escape in a geographical sense”.

This article offers a sensitive reading of oppositional political cartoons in Togo in the early 1990s, during the period of structural adjustment, which was accompanied by the swift reversal of democratizing trends and the restoration of authoritarian rule. Togolese satirists perceived this moment as a moment of “fraudonomics”, thus contesting rampant corruption and clientelism in politics. They poked fun at the president, local politicians, businesspeople, and bureaucrats of the international institutions. The article begins by examining the making of satirical newspapers with a focus on the biographies of the satirists. As students, they started out on the adventure of publication with their own money and learned most of their drawing and printing techniques as work progressed. Secondly, an analysis of the readership shows that, although the satirical newspapers were a crucial element of the media in the early 1990s, it was mostly an elitist and urban phenomenon. The third section analyses the changing visual repertoire of contention through in-depth analysis of four selected caricatures.

Welchen Platz nimmt die Bibliographic der Arbeiterbewegung und des Sozialismus heute ein und wie füllt sie ihn aus? Der beträchtliche Aufschwung, den in den letzten 15 Jahren die Historiographie auf diesem Gebiet erfahren hat, fand seinen Ausdruck auch in erheblich vermehrter bibliographischer Tätigkeit. Die Zahl der in den letzten 10 bis 15 Jahren veröffentlichten Bibliographien ist bedeutend höher als die der im vorhergegangenen halben Jahrhundert gedruckten. Der Historiker der Arbeiterbewegung, wie übrigens auch manche seiner Kollegen anderer Spezialgebiete, benutzt häufig die ihm von den Hilfs-wissenschaften zur Verfügung gestellten Arbeitsinstrumente, insbesondere Bibliographien, ohne die ihrer Herstellung eigenen Bedingungen und Probleme näher zu kennen. Dies mangelnde Verständnis ist der Forschung im allgemeinen abträglich und führt, wie wir weiterhin sehen werden, zu Kraftvergeudung. In einzelnen Fällen kann man sich des Eindrucks nicht erwehren, die Geschichtsschreibung sei der Bibliographie vorausgeeilt, die unumgängliche bibliographische Vorbereitung der Arbeit durch den Historiker sei unzulänglich gewesen oder jedenfalls nicht von dem dazu berufenen Spezialisten durchgeführt worden. Die eigentliche Ursache solcher Erscheinungen ist weniger in Uebereilung des Historikers oder im Zurückbleiben des Bibliographen zu suchen, sondern vielmehr in mangelnder Koordination beider Tätigkeiten und infolgedessen ungenügend formulierten Ansprüchen an die Qualität der von der Hilfswissenschaft geforderten Arbeit. Auf die Frage der Koordination werden wir noch zurückkommen. Wenden wir uns zuerst, ohne jegliche polemische Absicht, einigen Fragen zu, die uns für den Bibliographen wesentlich zu sein scheinen. 1. Die Isolierung der Bibliographen fährt zu einer bedeutenden Kraft-verschwendung. Gar nicht selten unternehmen zwei oder mehr Forscher ungewusst und unabhängig voneinander eine gleiche Arbeit.

It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years the history of working-class housing in the nineteenth century has been transformed. Many older historians, of course, took it for granted that the quality of houses built to meet the needs of the fast-growing urban population was uniformly bad, a testimony to the avarice of builders and landlords alike. Beliefs of this kind owed much to Engels, and to the Hammonds writing earlier this century about the life of the town labourter. One of the first suggestions that these views were really an over-simplified description of housing conditions came from Professor Ashworth in the 1950's, who pointed out that it was quite wrong to suppose that all nineteenth-century towns developed on the same lines, a kind of Coketown endlessly repeated. While not denying that there was a great deal of poor-quality building, more recently historians have made it clear that newer town housing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not necessarily worse than housing built earlier on, or worse than rural housing built at the same time; that new building varied in construction and amenities in the same town, and from town to town; that the skilled working classes were likely to live in better-quality housing than the unskilled; and that the segregation of working-class housing from middle-class housing, and of the better-off working classes from the labouring classes, again varied from town to town.

Edmund Dene Morel was born in Paris in 1873, the son of a French civil servant father and an English mother. Modestly educated in England, he emerged at age thirty from the obscurity of a clerkship in a Liverpool commercial firm to launch a journalistic crusade against the murderous exploitation of blacks on the rubber plantations of the Congo Free State. Largely as a result of this effort he became critical of what he considered the deviousness of the British Foreign Office, and by 1911 he was questioning the extent of the commitment to France in the Entente Cordiale. He was pro-German only in the sense that he opposed the prevalent anti-German hysteria and believed that an Anglo-German confrontation would be catastrophic for both countries. Morel was one of a number of free-trade, anti-imperialist, foreign- and imperial-affairs specialists associated with the pre-war Liberal Party; J. A. Hobson, H. N. Brailsford and E. G. Browne were others. But it was the war which made him the butt of nationalist fury and the victim of government prosecution for his advocacy of a negotiated peace and for his infuriating insistence that Germany's share of the blame for the war's origin was much less than that of Tsarist Russia or even of Britain's Liberal government.

The history of labour on public works construction is usually presented as a masculine experience, either because the workforce studied is mostly male, or because the labour of women remains unrecorded. Does the history of labour and wage on public works undergo change if we account for women labourers? This article examines this question in the context of famine public works in the second half of nineteenth-century India. State employment on public works was part of a famine relief programme and women, largely from agricultural labouring and small peasant families, worked on the construction of roads, railways, canals, and tanks. The article traces the development of task-gender association on famine public works both as a norm and in practice. Further, it analyses the evidence on negotiations made by women labourers themselves with the existing gendered notions of work and wage. This study contributes to the historiography of labour in a colonial context in two ways: first, it adds to the existing corpus on forms of labour extraction for construction work; and, second, it explores the question of women's work and remuneration outside factories, mills, and mines.

The present study is based on the vast number of letters written by and addressed to Lassalle, which have only been discovered during the last twenty years, and which have hitherto hardly been regarded seriously by historians. This study does not deal with the theories of the famous propagandist, but only with his political activity. It investigates his real motives for drafting the programme of the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein; for what he was agitating; and why he failed to attain his object. A short analysis of the internal situation of Prussia adds to a better understanding of the real possibilities, of Lassalle's schemes.

Special attention has been paid to the arguments which Lassalle used to convince Bismarck of the necessity of granting a general suffrage—the principal item of his programme—, and the analysis of his attitude towards the monarchial system of Poland and the caesarism of Napoleon III. His friend Rodbertus wanted to persuade him that caesarism was the "signatura temporis" for future Europe, and that consequently the dictatorial system had far better chances to succeed in solving the problem of the proletariat than democracy. But Lassalle was too much of a politician to let himself be persuaded that in the long run it would be possible to divorce the social elements from politics.

Finally the author compares the way in which Lassalle tried to influence the political outlook of his age with that of his rivals Marx and Engels.

Until 1916, though much had been written about Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy), nothing was known of the life of its author John Francis Bray, except that he was a journeyman printer in Leeds. In December of that year John Edwards published in the Socialist Review the results of research that he had made into Bray's career based on letters discovered in Leeds which had been written to Bray by his brothers. With these, he described Bray's life up to 1850 and discoveries of other letters by Alfred Mattison of Leeds brought the story up to 1854 which is the last date mentioned by Max Beer in his article on Bray in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.