Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918-1940

Kevin Passmore, Chris Millington, Kevin Passmore, Chris Millington

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137515957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The essays in this book concern manifestations of political violence in the democracies of interwar Europe. While research in this area usually focuses on the countries that fell to fascism, the authors demonstrate that violence remained a part of political competition in the democratic regimes of Western Europe too.

1

Political Violence in Italy and Germany after the First World War

Mark Jones

On 4 November 1918, many Italians celebrated victory in the First World War. With total fatalities estimated at around 600,000, the price of victory was tremendous.¹ Nevertheless, when the defeat of Austria was completed, even some opponents of Italy’s entry to the war in May 1915 expressed delight. Turin’s La Stampa newspaper announced that victory amounted to the realisation of the ‘dreams of the poets, the hopes of the martyrs, and the burning desires of the entire Italian soul’.² Victory tasted equally fine to the war’s most ardent supporters. One of their leading spokesmen, Benito Mussolini, the future Duce, wrote ‘now that the Patria is no longer mutilated, the light of victory opens the eyes of the blind and the injured no longer feel their wounds, while mothers bless the sacrifice of their fallen sons’.³ In Rome, Turin, Pisa, Genoa and elsewhere, these patriotic discourses were matched by the formation of small crowds that celebrated in the streets. They included refugees from the territories of Northeast Italy that had been lost and regained during the final year of the war, as well as natives of the terra irredenta – those parts of the defeated Austro–Hungarian Empire that were, in the eyes of Italian nationalists, about to be reunited with their Italian motherland.⁴

The contrast with Germany on the same day could not have been more apparent. While patriotic crowds celebrated victory and Mussolini thought that the cry of Viva, Viva, Viva, L’Italia could be heard from the Alps to Sicily, in the Imperial German naval garrison at Kiel, an armed crowd had taken control of the city’s historic centre. They were marching under the red flag and they too had been victorious. In just under 24 hours they had successfully challenged the authority of the naval command, forcing the release of sailors arrested for their role in a recent mutiny. Over the course of the next seven days – while Italians celebrated victory – in Germany demands for an end to war and greater democratisation transformed the sailors’ rebellion into a nationwide revolution.⁵ When it reached Berlin on 9 November, the Imperial state collapsed like a ‘house of cards’ and with the support of large pro-revolutionary crowds Germany was proclaimed a republic.⁶ Two days later, the armistice on the Western Front made clear what everybody already knew: after more than four years of suffering and some two million military dead, Germany was defeated.⁷ For the imperial military and political elite, the unthinkable had just taken place. In this moment of mental anguish many contemporary Germans thought that they faced Armageddon.⁸

The contrast between victory and defeat is central to the ebbs and flows of modern European history and as these glimpses of November 1918 already suggest, the cases provided by Italy and Germany after the First World War are no different: the contrast between victory and defeat shaped the initial dynamics of post-war politics in both countries. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the acceleration and deceleration of both countries’ experiences of political violence after the First World War without reference to the different starting points provided by the war’s outcome. For the ten million Italian and German men still serving in their nation’s armed forces in November 1918 (out of a total of around 18 to 19 million mobilised by both states over the duration of the entire war), the contrast was of profound importance. As a consequence of victory, the military demobilisation of the Italian armies was determined from above; it was a slow and controlled process, the stages of which changed in accordance with the needs of government.⁹ While the oldest men – about a third of the total – were on their way home by Christmas 1918, the majority had to wait until 1919, whereas the youngest classes, with the partial exception of students, did not get out until early 1920.¹⁰ The contrast with Germany could not be starker: across vast swathes of European territory that included the garrison towns of the German Empire and stretched from the last posts on the Western Front to the German military’s furthest gains in the East, the pace of German military demobilisation was controlled from ‘below’.¹¹ Within six to eight weeks of the armistice, an army that numbered some six million men at the start of November was no longer a political or military factor; and in the space of at most just four months, it had ceased to exist entirely.¹²

Germany

Even though most German veterans demobilised in order to return home and turn their backs on violence, the instability caused by the sudden disintegration of the German armies was one of the most significant factors in German politics in the post-armistice period.¹³ A world in which the German armies, in many people’s eyes the foremost symbols of national identity and power, no longer existed really was a world turned upside down.¹⁴ Their disintegration opened the door to a range of new possibilities: it created a power vacuum that many groups wanted to exploit, including activist minorities seeking to emulate the methods of Russian Bolshevism. Faced with the dangers of further revolution, the government that was formed by the compromises of November 1918 chose to punitively suppress any threats to the new political order. Over the course of 1919 they brutally put down poorly led uprisings in Berlin, Bremen and Munich; as well as ordering the rump of the German armies, led by die hard officers and aided by schoolboy warriors, to militarily occupy urban areas that had been key spaces during the November revolution in towns and cities across Central and Western Germany. Known to contemporaries as Freikorps, or government soldiers, the state-supported military units that carried out this violence consisted of between 25,000 and 50,000 men by the end of January 1919; a figure that would eventually rise to somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 men before the volunteer units were either disbanded or incorporated into the new German Army.¹⁵

An important moment of escalation in Germany’s post-war conflicts which had no parallel in the Italian context occurred on 9 March 1919 when Gustav Noske, the Social Democratic defence minister who presided over the Freikorps’ formation, proclaimed that ‘the gruesomeness and bestiality of the Spartacists fighting against us forces me to issue the following order: every person who is encountered fighting against government troops with a weapon in hand is to be immediately shot’.¹⁶ Noske’s order came almost a week into a ten day period of violence in parts of central and Eastern Berlin which began with the proclamation of a strike on 3 March 1919. When the violence that followed came to an end, 75 government soldiers had been killed in fighting which many contemporaries understood as having been triggered by an armed uprising that was supposed to conclude with the Bolshevisation of Germany. Over the course of the same period, the government side used artillery and heavy machine guns, backed up by aeroplanes and armoured cars. Estimates put the total number of fatalities at around 1,200 – including armed rebels and a significant number of civilians.¹⁷ The same patterns of state supported violence were repeated at the end of April, when government soldiers marched into Munich to demonstrate state power following a short-lived attempt to establish a government of councils in the Bavarian capital. The week of reprisals that followed left between 600 and 1,000 people dead, the majority of whom were civilians. As was the case with Berlin, the balance of fatalities was extremely one-sided: over the course of their operations in Munich, government soldiers lost only 38 men.¹⁸ Cultural ideas that fused the threats of the German underworld with those of Russian Bolshevism, backed up by a handful of real incidents of brutal anti-government violence, provided supporters of the state’s use of force with the imagery and discourses that allowed contemporaries to accept and approve of such one-sided casualty figures – many contemporaries even considered violence undertaken by pro-government soldiers as a necessary counter-balance to threats of disorder. When Noske defended his execution order in the National Assembly in Weimar, even after it was pointed out that the original atrocity allegation that led to its proclamation was untrue, his robust defence of state killing without trial was celebrated by a majority of elected deputies.¹⁹

It is the combination of the ruthlessness of government soldiers – a term rarely used to describe them in the historiography – and the uncompromising support they received from wide sections of German society, including all of the major parties as well as a majority of the political press, that allows us to conceptualise the physical destruction they unleashed as the new state’s foundation violence. It was the point when the new state, and its rulers, decided that the best way to secure their rule was through the use of overwhelming displays of state power – a feature of state formation in modern Europe for which there is a long line of examples including 19th-century France’s ‘foundation massacres’, as well as multiple instances in the new states that emerged from the ‘shatter zones’ that were left behind by the European Empires vanquished by defeat in the First World War.²⁰ It could take place because of an inversion of roles: at the time when government soldiers committed their most excessive violence, they were allowed to continue doing so without sanction from the watching society, because the cultural imagery of the enemy presented him as the real perpetrator of atrocity. With a large tract of public opinion behind them, on the few occasions when government soldiers were brought to trial for their excessive violence, they were acquitted: judicial leniency to government soldiers was an important aspect of the cultural mobilisation which accompanied the cycles of violent atrocity.²¹

The first waves of explosive violence were followed by a brief period of interlude; a micro-moment of stabilisation that lasted from June 1919 until March 1920, when the Kapp Putsch and the events that followed triggered new waves of violent conflict. These included a series of so-called ‘red uprisings’ that were largely the projections of conservatives, partially reflective of their fear, and partially the product of an internal culture of war that required such threatening imagery to sanction the degree of force used to repress it. As was the case the previous year, Freikorps soldiers’ behaviour was defined by atrocities, including the killing of prisoners outside of combat, and claims of sexualised violence against enemy women.²²

Italy

While Germany was rocked by brief but brutally violent conflicts during the first five months of 1919 and again in 1920, in Italy, the pace of social and political conflict was decidedly slower. Although it was not the only factor, the state’s control of military demobilisation was one of the most important: it was only in June and July 1919, the point at which some two million men had been demobilised, that Italy witnessed the first major waves of urban and rural social unrest since the armistice. Much of this unrest was a result of demobilised peasant soldiers’ demands for land ownership and urban anger at rising food prices. Up to that point, the level of post-war violence had been low. Even though Prime Minister Orlando’s ‘government of victory’ failed to use that victory to transcend old rivalries, and while political discourses radicalised at the same time, the first winter and spring of the post-war period was quite peaceful. Indeed, the first six months of 1919 saw the fewest fatalities as a result of political and social clashes of any six-month period from the armistice to the end of the cycle of Italian post-war violence in late 1922.²³

Whereas left-wing radicals’ attempts to create revolutionary citadels triggered bursts of state-sponsored violence unlike anything that had occurred in Germany since the suppression of the revolutions of 1848, in Italy, the conduct of protestors, and that of the army and military police, at first followed more traditional lines of urban and rural protest.²⁴ In June ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918-1940
• 1. Political Violence in Italy and Germany after the First World War
• 2. Fighting Fascism with Its Own Weapons: A Common Dark Side?
• 3. Kamerad or Genosse? The Contested Frontkämpfer Identity in Weimar Revolutionary Politics
• 4. Violence, Body, Politics: Paradoxes in Interwar Germany
• 5. Necessary Evil, Last Resort or Totally Unacceptable? Social Democratic Discussions on Political Violence in Germany and the Netherlands
• 6. Duelling with Words and Fists: Meeting Hall Violence in Interwar France
• 7. The Colonial Roots of Political Violence in France: The Croix de Feu, the Popular Front and the Riots of 22 March 1936 in Morocco
• 8. Lighting the Fuse: Terrorism as Violent Political Discourse in Interwar France
• 9. Gendarmes Facing Political Violence: Belgium, 1918–1940
• 10. Narratives of Violence: Fascists and Jews in 1930s Britain
• Bibliography
• Index