LAUSR

One of the legacies of the Russian revolution was to vindicate a Marxist vulgate against other forms of socialist thought, be they ‘utopian’ as Marx and above all, Engels had derogatively called earlier socialist views – or ‘revisionist’, i.e. the set of ideas promoted by Eduard Bernstein, according to which revolution was not the only way towards the achievement of a democratic socialist society. This had long-lasting consequences on the way in which the history of the European left was told in the twentieth century, as these movements were increasingly presented as disconnected and immature. The tides turned with the fall of the USSR, the collapse or deep mutations of socialist regimes and the loss of influence of the main western Communist Parties coupled with the redefinition of social democracy in Western Europe. Ever since, non-Marxist political ideologies have received increased scholarly attention. In nineteenth-century political history more specifically, historians have recovered a variety of ‘utopian’, ‘idealist’ or ‘reformist’ strands in the European left. For the first half of the century, this has led to a better understanding of early socialist movements such as Fourierism in France and Owenism in Britain. For the period from the 1880s to the First World War, a similar concern has allowed more in-depth work into ‘heterodox’ movements as they gained ground in national politics, impacting for instance Jaurès’s specific understanding of socialism in France and the Fabians’ position in the UK. But beyond specific case studies, there has been no large-scale synthesis of the development of the left in Europe in the nineteenth century – though there has been timely scholarship on the twentieth century. Throughout Europe, the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century saw an increasing fragmentation within socialist movements. In 1901, the German Social Democratic Party explicitly rejected Bernstein’s gradualist approach. However, it continued to gain ground throughout Europe before the outbreak of the First World War, weakening the position of orthodox Marxists in many countries. This led to fierce counter-attacks. For instance, in ‘What is to be done?’ published in 1902, Lenin considered the main nonMarxist movements together and explained that they posed a threat to the development of ‘revolutionary Social Democracy’. In a footnote, he commented: