The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War’ (ERC-StG 2015 - PREWArAs) is a five-year comparative project led by Professor Matteo Millan and based at the University of Padova (Italy). The project investigates armed associationism and political violence in Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, the United Kingdom, Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) that occurred about 30 years before the outbreak of the First World War.
Too often, the period before the Great War has been characterised by reassuring images of optimism and abundance associated with the Belle Époque, in sharp contrast with the carnage of the trenches. The goal of this project is, instead, to investigate how and to what extent organised political violence and armed associations permeated European societies even before the outbreak of the Great War, which is precisely where (Central-Western Europe) and when (the so-called Belle Époque), allegedly, they should not have been present. From long-established shooting clubs to militia in fancy uniforms, from strikebreaking gangs to private and corporate police corps, armed associations were a familiar presence in Europe. Groups were newly established to pursue vigilante activities, while long-established militias or shooting clubs were reactivated around new and very contemporary objectives. Handling weapons was a vehicle for defending social hierarchies, order and productivity as well as for instilling patriotic values and preparing young men for the defence of the country. The argument put forward in the project is that, despite some continuities, private police, strikebreaking and crime control groups as well as many patriotic groups were largely new forms of organisations established to face the challenges of mass politics; in other words, they were not fossilised remains from the past but a product of new times characterised by rapid and profound changes in social, political and cultural contexts.
Such ambitious tasks are being pursued by establishing a coherent comparative framework for considering the main European states of the time using a multi-scale approach. This approach is allowing the project team to carry out extensive comparative research and consider various armed associations in relation both to their discrete national and local environments and to the wider European contexts.
The objectives are twofold. On one hand, the project is aimed at filling a gap in current scholarship by investigating the role, membership, patterns of action and impact of armed associations throughout the continent. Familiar armed associations, such as traditional shooting clubs, will be compared and related to less familiar ones, such as private police or civic militias. On the other hand, the project is aimed at employing armed associations as an angle to think afresh crucial issues in the current historiographical agenda, such as the crises of liberal democracies, the relationship between the democratic system and organised violence, the implementation of so-called state monopoly over physical violence and the causes and effects of WWI. Such a joint approach promises to reshape our current narratives, which view the nineteenth century as the favourite playground for stories of progress and the twentieth century for atrocities: the Belle Époque comes as a compelling phase of transition on whose dark side armed associations shed new light.
