Preliminary Programme

An external exile during Fascism, an internal exile afterwards: the ‘white Bolshevik’ Guido Miglioli crossed and re-crossed the hostile terrain between Catholicism and Communism in continuous pursuit of an unrealised meeting point between Rome and Moscow. A study of Miglioli’s personal and political vicissitudes makes it possible to interweave local, national and transnational history. It is a history of economic and cultural change in the countryside of the Po Valley; and of the struggles against interventionism in the Great War, when Miglioli was active both among the peasantry in Cremona in northern Italy and as a Popular Party MP in Rome. After several years of Fascist persecution, Miglioli began the long period of exile in France, Russia, Germany, Belgium and Yugoslavia. A European network of social and political contacts emerged, to serve a dual purpose of resuscitating the anti-fascist struggle in Italy and of launching a campaign for the liberation of the peasantry in Europe from economic exploitation and cultural oppression.
The understanding of politics in early 20th-century Europe has often been distorted by a historiographical focus on the Communist versus Fascist alternative, which has neglected the culturally and politically complex area in between. Although marginal in Britain and in protestant Europe (where some interesting attempts to reconcile Christianity and Marxism can also be found), Catholic-Communism was rooted in Catholic countries and in Italy in particular. Its leaders addressed the centuries-long hopes of the peasant masses by emphasising the Communist message which they believed lay at the heart of Christianity.
In 1925 Miglioli spent six months in the Soviet Union, where he studied the condition of the peasantry and land reform. He then moved to Paris, where he published several books on the subject, declaring Russia to be his second motherland. During his wandering around Europe he met both Italian and foreign socialists, communists and Catholics. In his book ‘With Rome and with Moscow’, written in 1945 on his return to Cremona, where he was preparing new peasant struggles in a now democratic Italy, Miglioli (a Communist Party candidate in the 1948 elections) reconstructed those encounters and his attempts to build a Christian peasant International during his exile.
After his death in 1954, his legacy was claimed by the Catholic left, in the attempt to lay to rest his unresolved dilemma, from his defence of his Communist choice while remaining a Catholic, to his subsequent disappointment with the Italian Communist Party, which failed to understand his ‘peasant Christianity’. Despite his frustration, he left a profound legacy for European Christian pacifism in the 1950s and 1960s. (Show less)

Emile Pouget is one of the iconic figures of the pre-WW1 French anarchist and syndicalist movement. He is known – and revered – for his journalistic work, having set up a string of influential working-class papers such as Le Père Peinard and La Sociale (1889-1894; 1894-1895; 1896-1902), and also for his role in evolving the strategies of the general strike, sabotage and revolutionary syndicalism. This list, which is not exhaustive, should also comprise Pouget’s substantial contribution to international anarchism (in the 1890s) and international syndicalism (from 1896 to the eve of the war). Pouget’s transnational militancy was manifold, taking the shape of both symbolical appeals and celebrations and concrete organisational work, especially with Britain and Spain. This activism is all the more remarkable as it took place in the context of an increasingly transnational labour movement in an age of fast-paced globalisation (an evolution in which Pouget partook), in which the national nonetheless remained of prime importance (a fact which may account for the recurring oversight of Pouget’s international activism). However, whilst the international dimension of Pouget’s militant activities was commonly acknowledged by his contemporaries, many of whom were dedicated internationalists, most historiographical works centring on or featuring him have ignored this aspect of his colourful career.
This paper will depict and account for these contradictions in Pouget’s career and in subsequent historiography, and put them in context by comparing and contrasting them with contemporary French militants such as Louise Michel or Jean Grave, with a view to identifying Pouget’s own brand of internationalism and transnational activism. (Show less)

Flora Tristan conveyed her political ideas through travel writing on Peru, London and France and militancy when she published her call for a Union ouvrière and set out to proselytise the workers in twenty-two towns of France. This paper will reflect on the significance of her contribution to promoting feminist and working class solidarity in her standing after her death in 1844 when nascent international socialism was spreading and would have such a strong impact from 1848 onwards. During the first months of the Second Republic there was a commemoration ceremony at her graveside that cemented the memory of Tristan as being one of the first to promote a Universal Workers Union. Less prominence was given then to the fact that she was proposed that women should have a position of equality within the organisation. Yet with the demise of the Second Republic her feminist socialist ideas did not totally fall on stony ground during the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century although her acolytes claimed that her originality had been overlooked and her memory neglected in favour of Marx. I shall examine the manner in which her feminist socialist Internationalism was remembered and forgotten in militants’ writings and how her trans-ideological position added a complex dimension to her transnational reputation, one that was commemorated in a different manner by feminists of the late twentieth century. (Show less)

This paper will consider Ellen Wilkinson’s biography from the perspective of challenging national and chronological boundaries. It will consider her political travels to the USSR, Germany, USA, France, Bulgaria, India, Ireland, Spain, Belgium. These trips took a variety of forms: pilgrimage, journalism, conference attendance, witness to injustice, solidarity. These journeys relied upon a variety of overlapping networks to which Ellen Wilkinson belonged: the unions, the peace movement, the women’s movement, the Labour and Socialist International, the Comintern, especially the Muenzenberg-Katz circle. These activities were constitutive of her politics and were incorporated through journalism and campaigning into her domestic political persona and activity. Without serious attention to this global dimension of her politics, our understanding of Ellen Wilkinson is attenuated and distorted. Ellen Wilkinson tested the boundaries of the state with solidarity for refugees, advocating entry visas for those in her campaigning networks and drew the attention of security services of the states to which she travelled.
After her death, Ellen Wilkinson became part of the Labour Party’s memory of its Golden Age of the 1945 government, within which she was Minister of Education. She is also remembered for her participation in the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 and therefore has a special place in the systems of representations related to unemployment, the 1930s and protest. Ellen Wilkinson has entered the pantheon of heroes for certain circumscribed audiences: the post-1960s women’s movement has also claimed Ellen Wilkinson as a feminist pioneer, and both the North East and the North West have honoured her as a celebrated daughter. (Show less)