Faculty Research Fellow
James Retallack (D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1983) is University Professor of History, focussing on Europe from 1770 to 1945. His research interests include German regional history, antisemitism, elections, and historiography. He is the author of thirteen monographs, the most recent of which is Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918 (Oxford University Press, 2017). He has also published a volume of online documents and images on Bismarckian Germany for the German Historical Institute, Washington DC. He is General Editor of “Oxford Studies in Modern European History” and was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2011. He has held grants, fellowships, and research prizes from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the SSHRC of Canada, and the Killam Program at the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2012-2013 he held a six-month Faculty Research Fellowship with the Jackman Humanities Institute, and we are delighted to welcome him back.
Fellowship Project—August Bebel: Labour, Class, and Social Democracy in a Global Age, 1840-1913
This project will support work on my biography of August Bebel (1840-1913), who began adult life as an apprentice turner making doorknobs and window-pulls from buffalo horn but rose to become leader of the largest and most powerful socialist party in the world before the First World War. In the coming year I will draft Chapter 3 on the 1870s, which was one of the fullest and most dramatic decades of Bebel’s career. In 1870, from the floor of the Reichstag, Bebel attacked Chancellor Otto von Bismarck—and Prussia itself—for launching a war against France and annexing Alsace and Lorraine. Almost a year later, he defended the Paris Commune in the same forum. The result? A spectacular trial for treason that dominated European headlines for weeks. The expected guilty verdict put Bebel under lock and key for more than two years. Although the term did not yet exist, Bebel was the first “political prisoner” of the new German Empire. During that time he read voraciously and learned the rudiments of Marxism. He drafted one of the best-sellers of the nineteenth century, Woman and Socialism. And he corresponded clandestinely with his wife Julie and others in the rapidly expanding German labour movement. The SPD became an outlawed party for twelve years, beginning in 1878 with passage of Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law. Soon Bebel was on the run again from gendarmes, spies, and local officials, all of whom were cheered on by an upper middle class (Bürgertum) that saw him as Germany’s own Robespierre. Chapter 3 will introduce and integrate some of the most compelling themes in my book: war and violence, peacemaking and nation-building, state repression and “class justice”, the spectre of revolution, gender relations, and the dawn of modern mass politics in Germany. My book is planned at roughly 400 printed pages for the trade market: it has the working title August Bebel: A Life for Social Democracy and a projected completion date of 2025. This fellowship will also provide me with time to supervise a local arrangements committee of graduate students to host an international conference in May 2023 on “Labour, Class, and Social Democracy in the Global Age of August Bebel (1840-1918)”. The year 2023 marks the 110th anniversary of August Bebel’s death and the 160th anniversary of the founding of Germany’s first labour party.