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Cet article propose une analyse comparative et transnationale du mouvement contre-internationaliste Jaune. Créé dans la France du tournant du XXe siècle, celui-ci déborda rapidement le cadre national et, lors des années qui précédèrent la Première Guerre mondiale, s’étendit notamment en Allemagne. La comparaison révèle comment ce mouvement se développa de part et d’autre du Rhin, à travers des différences tenant à la dimension politique, que les connexions transnationales mettent en lumière. This article offers a comparative and transnational analysis of the Yellow counter-internationalist movement. Created in France at the turn of the twentieth century, this movement rapidly expanded beyond the national framework, particularly in Germany in the years preceding the First World War. The comparative approach reveals how this movement developed on both sides of the Rhine in keeping with different political contexts – variations underscored by the movement’s transnational connections.

Prospero Balbo, the head of a leading Piedmontese noble family, followed a career path similar to that of the versatile French statesman Talleyrand. In the aftermath of 1789, Balbo served under four different regimes: the Old Regime monarchy, the Russian provisional administration of Piedmont in 1799, the Napoleonic empire, and the restored Savoy monarchy. After the short-lived revolutionary movement of 1821 in Sardinia-Piedmont, Prospero lost his job as interior minister and his son, Cesare, was forced into exile. The revolutionary waves of 1820–1821 were the most recent of numerous disruptive events and regime changes that jeopardized Europe and the Atlantic world between the late 1770 s and the early 1820 s. These five decades of revolutionary upheavals, wars, and persistent insecurity forced the traditional elites to mobilize their material, cultural, and social resources to preserve their prestige and power. Based on extensive archival research, this article examines the resilience-strengthening resources and strategies implemented by members of the Balbo family during periods of political turmoil. In doing so, the article aims to develop an analytical and conceptual framework to describe historical processes in terms of resilience and vulnerability. This new approach enables us to look afresh at elite transformations and at the dynamics of political change and continuity in early nineteenth-century Europe.

This special issue reconsiders the process of nation-building in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany before nationalism formed, for the majority of people, the dominant group identity. We will arg...

The decade before the First World War saw a heightened level of social and political conflicts throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Strikes in pre-1914 central Europe have largely been examined as part of the development of the workers’ movement, but much less often from the perspective of the employers and government elites. Their strategies to counteract “strike terrorism” included hiring replacement workers through private strikebreaking agents, who provided a variety of services such as recruitment, transportation, housing, and providing “willing workers” with weapons for their self-defense. The discourses around “strike terrorism,” and the repressive strategies to counter it, are a lens through which we can look afresh at some of the most crucial issues in the history of central European empires in the prewar years, namely the structure of violence embedded in social conflicts, migration, growing political antagonism, and fears surrounding social democracy. This article analyzes the public debate around the protection of “willing workers” as well as concrete episodes of antilabor violence in a transnational framework. It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns.

I protagonisti del Congresso di Vienna non erano pacifisti, ma riuscirono a limitare il ricorso alla guerra. Essi non erano liberali, ma seppero essere realisti. Memori dell’esperienza rivoluzionaria e napoleonica posero il concetto di equilibrio al centro del nuovo ordine internazionale. Il presente saggio ripercorre e analizza i contributi emersi dal dibattito in occasione del bicentenario del Congresso di Vienna. La leggenda nera che stigmatizzava la Restaurazione come mero anacronismo e stata sostituita da un’interpretazione aperta del sistema post-napoleonico come "prosecuzione della rivoluzione con altri mezzi". Se la costruzione di un ordine internazionale moderno e l’emersione di una cultura europea basata su cooperazione e sicurezza appaiono come le maggiori conquiste del 1815, la limitazione delle riforme liberali, la demonizzazione del dissenso politico e il trasferimento delle tensioni dai centri di potere verso le "periferie" furono, invece, i principali effetti collaterali causati dal Congresso di Vienna.

For a long time, historians have written about topics that include questions relating to a given society’s management of threats and risks. However, they did not use ‘risk’ as a category of analysis. Similarly, historians have extensively researched revolutions, social conflicts and disruptive events without elaborating a conceptual framework for security or resilience, and without historicizing these concepts. Since the turn of the millennium, the situation has changed fundamentally and risk, security and resilience have become new buzz words in historical research. These elastic concepts seem to provide the right degree of abstraction, interdisciplinary theory and contemporary relevance that historians need for their work. This article sheds light on how the notions of risk, security and resilience emerged, spread and influenced our present understanding of history and historiography. To what extent does this indicate a changing perspective in historiography? Or do recent developments in the field point to the reinvention of interpretative traditions using more fashionable concepts?

Amerigo Caruso argues that despite the rise of the political mass market along with modern ideologies and new public information strategies, elitist ideas of moderation and anti-extremist rhetoric maintained positive connotations. In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, the elite-based juste milieu culture often converged with aspects of modern politics such as the demand for pragmatism, efficiency, and technocratic expertise. Finally, the rhetoric of realism, the search for national cohesion and the consolidation of expanded elites of aristocracy and middle-class notables also contributed to upholding the juste milieu tradition and reorienting the politics of moderation at the mid-century.

In nineteenth-century Europe, ideological paradigms, symbolic languages, and sentiments used to imagine and communicate political authority and cultural identity operated into increasingly complex and polyvalent frameworks, rearranging the interactions between dynastic rulership and nationhood. The clash or, alternatively, the convergence between the conservative and the liberal political narratives resulted from long-term transformations as well as from the resilience of the Old Regime, with a major transformative impetus provided by the shock of the ‘failed revolution’ in 1848. New argumentations patterns and models like the juste milieu, the roi bourgeois, the octroi constitution, as well as the democratic-populist legitimation of charismatic leaders circulated transnationally, engendering profound institutional and cultural transformations between 1847 and 1851. To study these transformations, this chapter analyses a wide variety of sources, from political texts to everyday objects and literature. The chapter demonstrates how these contributed towards renegotiating the relationships between dynastic rulership, constitutionalism, and nation-state, changing perceptions of Prussia and Sardinia-Piedmont in Italy and Germany. The monarchies were now framed as having a natural and teleological mission to lead the formation of nation-states.