Maarten Van Ginderachter

General Introduction: Writing the Mass into a Mass Phenomenon

By the end of the 1990s, it seemed that virtually everything had been said about the history of nations and nationalism.1 When the dust settled from the fierce disputes between modernists and primordialists, an interpretive consensus seemed to emerge. On the one hand, scholars no longer contested the fundamentally constructed character of nations; yet, on the other, they acknowledged certain limits of such constructivist views. Accordingly, nineteenth-century states and nationalist movements did not invent nations at will and worked with protonational and ethnic identities. Further, nations had histories; indeed, they underwent processes of construction earlier and in a more complex way than die-hard modernists had previously maintained. To use the words of John Breuilly, the genesis of nations relied on a ‘relative construction’ at best (Breuilly, 2002). In a similar vein, the classic dichotomy between ethnic and civic varieties of nationalism turned out to be less clear-cut than formerly posited. Each and every nationalism contained both ethnic — or ethno-cultural — and civic elements, albeit in varying proportions (Dieckhoff, 1996).

Social democracy and national identity: The ethnic rift in the Belgian workers' party (1885-1914)

The image of the Belgian Workers’ Party as a solid party unchallenged by ethnic tensions and united around a common Belgianness does not stand up to historical scrutiny. Using the key concepts of imagined communities, ethnies, mythomoteur, and oppositional patriotism, this article argues that despite its undeniable integration into the political, social and economic structures of the Belgian nation-state, the BWP was ethnically divided between Flemish and Walloon socialists in the period 1885–1914.

Edward Joris: Caught Between Continents and Ideologies?

This chapter describes the ‘world according to Edward Joris’, a Flemish anarchist with modest roots and low self-esteem, who migrated to the Ottoman capital in search of work and adventure, became engaged in the Armenian Question and eventually in a terrorist plot, resulting in a death sentence and two years of imprisonment. This petite biographie addresses two central contradictions of Joris’s character: How does a flamingant socialist turn terrorist? And how does an internationalist deal with nationalism? The role and importance of transcultural personal encounters and experiences, as well as individual character traits, come to the fore in this chapter.

The Transnational Dimensions of the Early Socialist Pillars in Belgium and the Netherlands, c. 1885-1914: An Exploratory Essay

Maarten Van Ginderachter & Minte Kamphuis, De transnationale dimensies van de vroege socialistische zuilen in Belgie en Nederland, 1885-1914. Een verkennend essay. ; Verzuiling is in eerder onderzoek voornamelijk bestudeerd in een strikt nationale context of in internationale vergelijkingen. In dit verkennend essay wordt de vraag gesteld wat transnationale geschiedenis zou kunnen toevoegen aan de studie van de verzuiling, met de nadruk op de vroege socialistische verzuiling in Belgie en Nederland. Hoewel deze bijdrage de noodzaak erkent om de grensoverschrijdende contacten over staten heen te bestuderen, wijst ze ook op het blijvende belang van lokale socio-economische en culturele omstandigheden en de rol van de staat in het verzuilingsproces.

General Conclusion: Popular Nationhood — A Companion of European Modernities

When Raymond Poincare was elected President of the Third French Republic in January 1913, he honoured the custom to grant amnesty to some categories of prisoners. Poincare’s initiative did not satisfy the Parisian socialist deputy Marcel Sembat. In the Chamber of Deputies, Sembat urged the new government to extend the measure to deserters and draft evaders (the so-called ‘disobedient’, insoumis). After the press broadly publicized Sembat’s announcement, he received dozens of letters from deserters and draft evaders expressing their gratitude and encouraging him to continue his action. One of these deserters, Leon Morel, who lived in exile in Brussels (like most of them), alleged that Sembat had gained ‘the sympathies and the recognition of the 80,000 Frenchmen, deserters and draft evaders’. Their desertion, as this sentence suggests, had not deprived them of the will or the right to claim French nationhood. This was further substantiated in that same letter by a strong expression of repentance: ‘There is not one among us whose eyes do not become wet at the tones of the Marseillaise or at the sight of the three colours of that flag that we abandoned in a moment of aberration; we adore it as an idol, and we would all be present, please believe, when it ought to be defended!’1

An Urban Civilization: The Case of Municipal Autonomy in Belgian History 1830–1914

‘La commune c’est toute la nation.’1 This aphorism summarizes the central importance of the local level (that is, of communes or municipalities) in Belgium’s history. One might even say that the country was founded on a municipal revolution, rather than a national one. During the Belgian Revolution of 1830, it was indeed the Brussels city council that formed a provisional government to establish a national authority.2 On 8 December 1830, the National Congress, the interim parliament, acknowledged this explicitly, stating its desire ‘ to consolidate the victory of Brussels by rallying to it the interests of all municipalities’.3

Working class voices from late nineteenth century: 'propaganda pence' in a socialist paper in Ghent

‘Crooked Charles is completely bonkers, 0.10. Instead of a seat in the town council he’s got a seat reserved in the nut-house, 0.10.’ ‘Friends, what do you say? Should we give that blue smotherer who sends his children to the brethren schools a concert with tin pipes, 0.10.’ ‘I am glad to have received [the journal] Het Zweepken [The Little Whip], 0.16 I read it in the gents’, 0.10 And then I sent it to its proper destination 0.10.’

Contesting national symbols. Belgian belle époque socialism between rejection and appropriation

Socialism and nationalism have a troubled mutual history. ‘Reds have no fatherland and patriots denounce the supranational nature of class.’ At least, that is a still widely held belief. In academe, too, this ‘incompatibility thesis’ was once popular. Early historians of socialism, for instance, interpreted national identity as a false form of consciousness that obstructed the class awakening of the proletariat. Since the late 1960s, however, historic research has shown that there was no such thing as a predestined irreconcilability. Already, before the First World War, socialists’ ‘emotions oscillated in a multi-layered patchwork between alienation from, critical reception of and commitment to the nation-state’. An eminent way to examine this wide emotional range is to focus on their attitudes towards the most visible emblems of the nation: flag, anthem and national holiday. Although national symbols are a popular research subject, their place within working-class movements has been modestly debated. In spite of its title, Red Flag and Union Jack, national symbols are absent in Ward’s study of British Labour and patriotism. If studies broach the subject at all, some of the oblique references are still informed by the incompatibility thesis. A recent study of French Marxism, for instance, claimed that the Parti ouvrier français unequivocally ‘shunned France’s national symbols’ (tricolore, Marseillaise and Bastille Day) because they were bourgeois and aristocratic icons. However, even within French Marxism, attitudes were much more ambivalent and there were concerted attempts to appropriate the national emblems for the proletariat. This article offers a social-cultural approach to the study of political symbolism in the socialist movement of belle époque Belgium, broaching two moot issues in the literature. First, in the last decade pertinent criticisms have been vented against discourse studies that