INDUSTRIALIZATION AND SOCIAL RADICALISM: British and French Workers' Movements and the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Crisis.

This article discusses the British and French workers' movements during the mid-nineteenth century crises. Since France's revolution and the British Chartist movement, numerous writers have linked the progress of industrialization to radical politics. Marx, like some other contemporaries, tended to draw examples of political radicalism and socialism from the French Second Republic, and a model of capitalist industrialization from Great Britain. This was misleading, for the more industrial country was the less radical. The confusion did not necessarily originate with Marx and other radicals. French Legitimists--men of order--conceived popular agitation as both stemming from and producing disorder. The proportioned classes of both France and Britain had long seen the poorer sort as lacking in self-control, irrational, and in need of moral discipline. Underestimating the extent of organization it took to produce a food riot or political protest, they saw these as results of failures of order and discipline. It was but a short step from this long-standing view to the notion that industrialization brought a breakdown in the moral order, in which people's baser passions were set free to wreak havoc on respectable life.