Mass Politics, the New Right & Antisemitism, 1870–1914
- Explain how expanding suffrage transformed political organization
- Analyze the emergence of a new radical right distinct from traditional conservatism
- Connect the Dreyfus Affair to the origins of political Zionism
When voters became a mass
Between 1870 and 1914 the male electorate expanded dramatically — universal male suffrage in the German Empire from 1871, in France under the Third Republic, in Britain by stages in 1867 and 1884. Politics changed shape in response. Mass parties appeared with permanent organizations, paid staff, newspapers and membership dues, of which the German Social Democratic Party was the largest in the world. Campaigning became a matter of rallies and the popular press rather than of influence among notables. Women’s suffrage movements organized on the same model, with the British WSPU turning to militant tactics after decades of petitioning achieved nothing.
A new kind of right
Traditional conservatism had defended throne, altar and aristocracy against the masses. The new radical right did something different: it mobilized the masses on nationalist, anti-socialist and frequently antisemitic lines. Karl Lueger’s Christian Social party won Vienna on that platform; the Pan-German and Action Française movements worked similar ground. This matters because it breaks the neat left-right line students often assume — these movements were populist and modern in method while being antidemocratic in aim, and they are the recognizable ancestors of the interwar far right in Unit 8.
Dreyfus and the making of political Zionism
In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain, was convicted of treason on forged evidence and sent to Devil’s Island. When the real culprit was identified and the army suppressed the finding, France split. Émile Zola’s J’accuse…! (1898) accused the general staff publicly and forced the issue; Dreyfusards invoked truth and individual rights, anti-Dreyfusards the honor of the army and the nation. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated in 1906. Theodor Herzl covered the affair as a journalist and drew a conclusion: if assimilated Jews could be treated this way in the country of the Rights of Man, assimilation offered no security. Der Judenstaat (1896) and the First Zionist Congress (1897) followed.
Distinguish older religious anti-Judaism from the racial antisemitism of this period. The older form targeted a religion and could in principle be escaped by conversion; the newer claimed a biological category that conversion could not change, and it borrowed the prestige of science to say so. That shift is what makes late-nineteenth-century antisemitism a new phenomenon and not a continuation.
Briefly explain ONE way the expansion of the male franchise changed European politics, and explain ONE consequence of the Dreyfus Affair.
- 1.Identify the organizational consequence rather than simply saying more people voted.
- 2.Reaching a mass electorate required permanent party organizations, membership, newspapers and rallies — the model of the German Social Democrats and of the new nationalist right alike.
- 3.Give a specific consequence of Dreyfus and trace the causal step.
- 4.Herzl concluded from the affair that assimilation could not protect Jews even in republican France, and founded political Zionism, publishing Der Judenstaat in 1896 and convening the First Zionist Congress in 1897.
The “new right” of the late nineteenth century differed from traditional conservatism in that it —
Zola’s *J’accuse…!* was significant chiefly because it —
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
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