Urban Structure, Religion, and Language: Belgian Workers, 1880-1914. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

Between 1880 and 1914, workers in Dutch-speaking Ghent, French-speaking Liege, and bilingual Brussels created strikingly different and sometimes rival working class movements. This thesis examines how factors such as urban geography, industrial structure, religion, and language helped or hindered the organizing of Belgian workers. Socialists in all three cities emphasized electoral politics, general strikes, and anticlericalism, but otherwise adopted very different tactics. In Ghent, Socialist textileworkers organized a network of cooperatives, unions, and insurance societies that drew together skilled and unskilled workers. In Brussels, by contrast, Socialist craft unions refused to organize unskilled workers, and in Liege, Socialist miners' and metallurgists' unions remained weak and fragmented. Catholics in Ghent and Brussels organized a progressive workers' movement to compete with the Socialists. In Liege, however, Catholic paternalism prevented a true Catholic workers' movement from emerging. Like the Socialists, the Catholics in Ghent organized skilled and unskilled workers and created a network of cooperatives, unions and insurance societies. Catholics in Brussels organized unskilled and Flemish workers whom the Socialist craft unions had neglected. In Ghent and Brussels, Catholic unions also drew heavily upon Flemish linguistic nationalism to recruit workers. Just before World War I, in part responding to the Catholics, Socialists in Brussels transformed their craft unions into much larger, industrial unions. In Liege, at the same time, large Socialist unions emerged, in part inspired by syndicalist ideas. The study of workers in these three cities reveals how by 1914 Socialism and democratic Catholicism had emerged together, and often antagonistically, as new kinds of working class movements. Although labor history has often focused on the creation of working class solidarity, the Belgian experience shows how regional and national movements were built up out of competing economic, linguistic, and religious interests of workers.