A Revolution for Socialist Reforms: The Belgian General Strike for Universal Suffrage

Abstract

On 10 August 1890, more than 75,000 men and women demonstrated in the streets of Brussels for universal suffrage. Before dispersing, the self-declared 'workers and democrats of Belgium' pledged 'to struggle unceasingly until the day when the people have won a fatherland of their own through the establishment of universal suffrage'.1 Marx's revolutionary prophecy and Belgian legends of proletarian mobilization inspired the demonstrators. Few of them understood the irony of embarking on a revolution to secure suffrage and a place within the Belgian nation. Perhaps nowhere else in Europe were revolutionary conditions more promising at the end of the nineteenth century; Marx had referred to heavily industrialized Belgium as 'the hell of the proletariat'. Not surprisingly, the 1890 strike spread rapidly. A vast railway network linked commuting workers throughout the densely populated mining and manufacturing regions of the Borinage, Verviers and Flanders. The leaders of the nascent Belgian Workers' Party reacted quickly, convening an extraordinary congress. Miners from the Borinage, the coal basin centred in Mons, pressed the Socialist leaders to declare a general strike. Socialist delegates from the traditionally more quiescent northern region of Flanders and the Brussels capital counselled patience. In the end, the delegates to the congress agreed to a compromise that tied the escalating demonstrations to the Socialists' campaign for political reform. The future president of the Second International, the young Emile Vandervelde, convinced the Belgian Socialist leaders to agree to declare a general strike if the Belgian parliament voted down the pending resolution to allow universal manhood suffrage. For the first time, the Belgian Workers' Party had linked the revolutionary strategy that was their heritage with their evolving political goals.