Postwar Eurasia I: War is politics by other means
Peter Moller, The Great War: Aftermath (New York: Academy, 1961)
… The Great War didn’t end in June 1897 any more than it began in March 1893. That date only marked the end of the general conflict between the great powers. The subsidiary conflicts – some of them involving one or more great powers, others not – existed before and continued afterward. Madeleine N’Diaye, in
The Fifteen Years’ War, has in fact argued that the Great War was merely the most active phase of a global conflict that began in the late 1880s and continued until 1904, in which the political and social verities of the nineteenth century were overthrown and a new order began to take their place. While N’Diaye’s dates are as arbitrary as any others – the new order continued to develop well after 1904, and was creating conflicts of its own by that time – the fact remains that the wars and political disputes of the Great War’s immediate aftermath cannot easily be separated from the war itself.
The conflicts of 1898 through 1904 were all distinct, but had several common causes. The war had shattered the people’s faith in the traditional political class, and many of the soldiers returning from the battlefield had been radicalized by their experience. The role of women in war production and the promotion of lower middle-class and even working-class soldiers to officer ranks upset nineteenth-century social hierarchies, and the newly empowered classes were in no mood to step aside now that the war was over. The imperial powers’ reliance on their dominions and colonial empires for troops and supplies created expectations on the colonies’ part that their imperial masters were loath to fulfill. The border shifts and new nations created by the peace settlement engendered their own conflicts as restive minorities, or those caught on the “wrong” side of the border, sought to rectify the situation. And economic dislocation was added to political dislocation, as wartime contracts ended and industrial workers – including returning veterans – found themselves without work as their employers retooled…
… In few places were as many of these factors at play than in Hungary – which, not coincidentally, would experience the longest and bitterest of the postwar conflicts, with its 1904 ending date providing the bookend for N’Diaye’s Fifteen Years’ War. The regency council that took power at the end of the war – itself deeply divided as to whether Hungary should have a liberal constitution or a more authoritarian one – faced almost immediate rebellion in Croatia, Slovakia, the Burgenland and Transylvania, as well as a workers’ republic that had been declared in Budapest by returning veterans, many of them Jewish. And, incredibly, the civil strife also took on the aspect of an eighteenth-century war of succession, with two members of the council – both claiming descent from the Bethlen family – claiming the title of king with the support of loyal army officers and militias recruited from unemployed veterans.
Much of Hungary was in a state of chaos by early 1898, with the council having firm control only in an area running from approximately Szeged to Pécs. The power vacuum was compounded by ethnic groups settling scores, with or without the support of one of the contending factions. In areas where Hungarians were in the majority, ethnic Germans, Slovaks, Croats and Romanians became targets of pogroms, and where they were in the minority, the Hungarians themselves became targets. Jews were attacked nearly everywhere outside Budapest and Debrecen, although in Slovakia and the Banat, some were able to side with the rebel factions.
Inside Budapest and Debrecen, the socialists – whose leadership was considerably more radical than those in France and Russia – attacked suspected class enemies. And as those inside the country took advantage of the chaos, so too did those outside; volunteers poured into the Burgenland from Germany and Austria, and the Romanian army invaded northern Transylvania and the parts of the Banat that remained to Hungary.
In the face of so many threats, the regency council had to perform radical triage. It conceded Slovakia and Croatia for the time being, resulting in triumphant proclamations of independence in Zagreb and Bratislava, and declined to confront either of the royal claimants, at least one of whom was himself fighting the Slovaks. Instead, it stood on the defensive in Burgenland and Transylvania, moved to crush the republicans in Budapest before their movement could spread to other large cities, and occupied Debrecen and Oradea where workers’ committees had taken informal control of many neighborhoods.
The council expected to take Budapest within a week, but it held out for six months, defended fanatically by veterans who fought a street-by-street battle. By the time the capital fell in late November 1898, much of the city was in ruins and more than 150,000 people – a fifth of the prewar population – were dead. Unlike the prior urban battles in Köln and Strasbourg, the majority of casualties in Budapest were civilians; both sides prevented them from evacuating, and the government troops often treated them as enemy fighters. Thousands more died in the reprisal killings enacted by the army against anyone suspected of being a leftist, along with summary executions in the other occupied cities. The horrified world drew two lessons: that the length and ferocity of the Budapest siege had turned the regency council decisively in favor of authoritarian rule, and that ideological wars are fought with far less mercy than territorial ones.
In the meantime, the council’s position on the western and Transylvania-Banat fronts had deteriorated to the point where it had lost control of much of the Burgenland and was on the verge of being cut off from the Magyar enclave in eastern Transylvania. It moved quickly to strengthen these fronts with troops drawn from Budapest, making some initial gains against the rebels and Freikorps companies in the Burgenland. But then Austria, unwilling to let the Burgenland slip out of its fingers, sent its army to join the volunteers, and once that army crossed the border, the Hungarian gains were quickly reversed. The council once again performed triage: in June 1899, it made its peace with Austria and agreed to cede the disputed territory.
The fight against Romania, however, had begun to swing in the council’s favor. The Romanian army was larger, but it lacked the experience of the Hungarian veterans, and the tactics learned so painfully during the Great War began to have an effect. By late 1899, the Romanians had been pushed out of most of the territory they occupied, and in a couple of places, the Hungarian army had crossed into Romanian territory. The war was entering its second phase as the century dawned: the western border was secure, the battle against the Romanians had settled into trench warfare and partisan activity behind Hungarian lines, and the council once again moved on Croatia, which was in the midst of its own three-cornered civil war between a pro-Habsburg faction, one which supported autonomy within Hungary, and a third that favored strict independence and neutrality…
… The victory in Burgenland was a balm for Austria after the crushing defeat of the Great War, and the presence of many German volunteers on the Austrian side did much to reconcile the former enemies. Regiments from Dalmatia and Carniola also fought on the Burgenland front, and while their participation was minor, it reassured the Austrians that the other remaining Habsburg kingdoms were still part of their family. As a result, Austria – which had been bubbling with radicalism in the months immediately after the war, and which was facing a significant separatist movement in Vorarlberg – was in a much calmer mood when the time came to elect a constitutional assembly.
The election, which took place in August 1899, was the first to be held under universal male suffrage, and reflected Austria’s fundamentally conservative nature. The left got almost no votes outside Vienna, and the parties of the Catholic and royalist right did well. But at the same time, the far right and the extreme nationalists fared poorly, and both the National Liberals and the new Catholic liberal parties won widespread support throughout the country. The assembly would be dominated by the National Liberals and the Social Catholics, who favored progressive labor legislation and Bismarckian social insurance, and the constitution, announced at the beginning of December, was a liberal one with responsible government and guarantees of civil liberties.
Another remarkable thing about the assembly, and the parliament which would follow, was the number of Jewish representatives. There was some anti-Semitic backlash in the wake of the war, but it was outweighed by an unexpected wave of philo-Semitism. Many Austrians had taken to heart Wilhelm II’s taunt about how the Slovenes, the Dalmatians and the Jews were their only loyal minorities, and it became common for the popular press and politicians to lionize all three.
A case in point was Karl Lüger’s campaign for mayor of Vienna on the Social Catholic ticket. Before the war, Lüger had dabbled in anti-Semitic rhetoric; now, however, he campaigned alongside Jewish candidates from the allied National Liberal party and praised the Viennese Jews for their sobriety and patriotism. Several Jews, most of them army officers, even ran as independent city council candidates supporting Social Catholic policies. His rejection of his prewar anti-Semitism no doubt cost him some votes, but he won the election in a landslide, and his municipal cabinet would include Jews as well as Czechs, Slovenes and Poles. Of course, Vienna was not all of Austria, but the image of “Austrian tolerance” that so characterized the twentieth century was starting to be built…
… The turmoil in Hungary had its echoes in Fiume, which was under joint Italian, Habsburg and Hungarian administration. After Croatia declared independence, the pro-Habsburg and pro-independence factions claimed to have succeeded to Hungary’s rights in the city, and many of their back-benchers argued that Croatia should annex Fiume outright. This idea had considerable support in the countryside surrounding the city, where ethnic Croatians were the majority, and with Italy still engaged in reconquering Venetia, an increasing number felt that the time was ripe.
Matters came to a head in August 1899 when Josip Radić, an adventurer who had led a commando company during the war and who now supported the pro-independence party, marched into Fiume with an army of three hundred volunteers and briefly seized the city. By this time, however, the political equation had changed: Croatia was under renewed assault from the Hungarian regional council and didn’t want to forfeit the chance of Habsburg or Italian support. Both the provisional government in Zagreb and Radić’s own faction disavowed his coup, and within three days, a joint force from Italy and Carniola expelled him and restored the status quo. The Hungarian seats on the city administration would, however, remain vacant until the end of that country’s civil war, and the ethnic Croatians in the hinterland would continue to be restive…
… Jules Verne’s first premiership was a time of great optimism: the war was over, it seemed that an honorable peace was in the offing, and the prime minister encouraged the nation to look to the future. Futurism as a coherent ideology was still some time in the future – Verne’s second term would be its formative period – but pieces of it can be seen in his policies of 1897-98.
He was not unique in looking ahead to a future of fiacres, aircraft and megaprojects, nor was his support of scientific and industrial research unprecedented. No prior government, however, made as great an effort to involve public institutions and citizens in long-range planning, nor had any earlier prime minister viewed the creation of the future as a participatory project. Verne transformed the
École Polytechnique into a true research institute, founded the School for the Study of Peace, offered prizes for innovations in engineering and public health, and inaugurated an annual contest for “Hundred-Year Plans,” knowing that any such plan would be obsolete long before its conclusion but wanting to encourage citizens to think about France’s long-term future and how to build it. The first contest included many bizarre and incoherent entries, but it also gave the French avant-garde a chance to showcase its visions, and it would inspire a generation of authors and cinema directors to set their stories in the future.
The Verne government also subsidized cultural institutions in order to bring the arts within the reach of the working class, and directed much of the funding to works that were optimistic and experimental. The beneficiaries of this funding included Georges Méliès, an amateur inventor and stage magician who had spent the war in automotive research and who translated that knowledge into cinematic special effects. His spectaculars such as
2000 AD,
The Dance of the Fiacres and
Journey to the Center of the Earth were widely imitated and became staples of French cinema, and public art took on a futuristic and avant-garde cast.
Not all the Verne government’s projects were as palatable to modern tastes; like most progressives of the time, he supported eugenics and introduced bills to allow “therapeutic” abortions and sterilization of people with mental or physical defects. He was not racist in his eugenic views as many contemporaries were – if anything, he was almost Carlsenist in his belief that the ideal human would combine the strengths of all races – but laws to “improve the race” and purge it of defects would prove prone to abuse.
Other reforms of Verne’s, while more genuinely progressive, would not be realized in his first term. He offered subsidies for experimental schools that used Italian theories of self-directed learning, but only a few would open by the end of the century, and a woman suffrage bill failed narrowly in February 1898.
The Verne era ended abruptly in April of the same year. The day after the peace treaty was signed, he resigned as he had promised, and requested that the Emperor dissolve the legislature and call new elections. He did not run as a candidate or sponsor a party, although several candidates ran as independent “futurists;” instead, the election was fought primarily by the socialists, the populist right, and the clerical conservatives. The latter two factions, discredited by the war, attempted to recoup by portraying the peace settlement as a surrender, but the war-weary public wasn’t persuaded. When the polls closed on April 21, the socialist parties had won 46 percent of the seats on 39 percent of the vote, with the right-wing factions far behind. They quickly formed a coalition with independent deputies and a few small liberal and centrist parties, and for the first time in its history, France had a socialist prime minister.
The opening weeks of the new government surprised many with their moderation, but during the preceding twenty years, the socialists had become inured to parliamentary politics and compromise. They instituted a woman suffrage bill – successfully this time – and made the education system fully secular, but they didn’t restrict or expropriate the church. They expanded social insurance, and offered loans and for workers’ cooperatives to buy out their factories and create self-managed enterprises, but didn’t pursue a program of wholesale nationalization. The workings of government were marked by nothing more than continuity.
But the country descended into civil war all the same, over the question of empire. In June, the government brought forward a package of colonial reforms: Gabon would become an integral province, the Latin Right would be expanded and greater rights afforded to colonial subjects who won French citizenship, and the franchise would be granted to all Gabonais and Algerians.
It was the last of these that caused a firestorm. Many conservatives who had come to terms with Islam still found the
candomble and Bwiti faiths of Gabon entirely unacceptable. An Algerian franchise was, in their eyes, even worse. The European settlers – who had been instrumental in bringing down the Leclair government and paving the socialists’ road to power – feared that they would lose political and economic control of the province. And while many Algerians had fought for France, many others had fought against it, and the public was ill inclined to reward them. The government noted that whites were the majority in many Algerian cities and would retain control of the municipal councils, and argued that recognition of the Algerians’ rights was the only way to ensure their loyalty, but its opponents were not mollified.
The reforms came to a vote amid dire threats that the country would be torn apart if it passed. The integration of Gabon and the expansion of the Latin Right passed easily, but the citizenship bills faced opposition even within the coalition; the Gabonais franchise passed by four votes, and the Algerian franchise by one. The right’s response was immediate: it walked out of parliament, declared that the government was illegitimate, and called upon the army to overthrow it.
The garrisons in much of Algeria and parts of southern France, as well as scattered units in the north, heeded this call, as did many city councils. There were also several days of confused street fighting in Paris itself, as right-wing gangs and returning Papal Legion veterans sought to seize control of the capital. But the initial push failed to bring the government down; the majority of soldiers stayed loyal, and gangs of workers and miners from the industrial north descended on Paris and overwhelmed the rightist militias. The opposition deputies, by now decamped to Avignon, declared themselves the legitimate government of France and attempted to consolidate their forces for an offensive. The French Civil War had begun.
The war was bitterly fought but relatively short; although the rebels won some victories, the government began with the upper hand and never lost it. A key turning point occurred when Napoleon V openly supported the government, declaring that he was “emperor of the socialists too” – an act that ensured that France would remain an empire even under socialist rule, and which went far toward redeeming his wartime fecklessness. The rebels responded by declaring the establishment of the “French State” – in the absence of any legitimist claimants to the throne, a kingdom was out of the question – but both domestic and international legitimacy swung decisively toward the government.
The first stage of the war was something unprecedented in modern warfare: a highly mobile affair of trains, motor wagons and fast fiacres, with company and battalion-size units staging lightning raids to capture strategic towns and roads. This was made possible by the scattered nature of both sides’ forces and the fact that they were still consolidating; much of the war in the north was decided this way before the large armies marched. In one case, government forces conducted the first aerial raid, with a squad of paratroopers jumping from a dirigible to land in a rebel-held city and assault their positions from the rear while a mobile force attacked from the front.
By the end of 1898, the action had settled into more conventional warfare. The main government army pushed south to attack the rebel trench lines and relieve Marseilles, while a corps under the command of General Joseph Joffre moved to secure the loyalist bastion of Languedoc, cut the State off from Spanish volunteers, and get around the rebel flank. In the meantime, troops from Senegal and the Kingdom of the Arabs set out to cross the Atlas Mountains and take the rebel troops in Algeria from behind. They were aided, surprisingly, by the Toucouleur, who had remained neutral through the war but now supported the government in exchange for free use of the Port of Dakar. Aguibou Tall, worried about his country’s increasing economic dependence on trade with the Malê states, had found his alternative. And both the Senegalese
tirailleurs and troops from loyalist Gabon moved to take control of French Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire from their rebel governors, helped by guerrilla warfare and sabotage from the local populations.
The government regained full control of metropolitan France by July 1899, at a cost of 50,000 dead. The last rebel strongholds in Algeria held out somewhat longer, with the State’s final capital in Bône falling only in October. Most of the State’s leadership escaped into exile, with the others facing summary reprisals or arrest for treason; there was surprisingly little resistance among the general population, with war-weariness and futility by this time overcoming fear of socialist rule.
A new election was called for December, with the size of the
corps législatif increased to 663 seats to account for the newly enfranchised Algerians and Gabonais. Somewhat to the socialists’ surprise, they performed worse in this election than in the previous one; women tended to be more religious and conservative than male voters, and the Algerians voted for independent mukhtars and Sufi teachers. The socialists’ share of the parliament fell to 43 percent – 287 seats, some 45 short of a majority, and the worst they would do for twenty-five years. Verne, running again as a peacemaker and this time heading a formal Futurist party, won 71 seats, and the socialists, treading lightly in the wake of the war, supported him for the premiership rather than nominating their own candidate. Verne’s second government – a coalition of socialists, futurists, liberals and Muslim independents – would be more successful than the first, and would set the stage for the “Red Twenty…”
…. France’s troubles, like Hungary’s, had ripples beyond its borders. One of the first countries to be affected was Belgium, which was home to both a growing trade union movement and an unusually right-wing Catholic political establishment. Although Belgium had avoided invasion and had escaped largely without penalty at the Washington conference, its economy was suffering from the loss of commercial links to Britain and Germany, and the decision to allow transit rights to the French army was widely viewed as a blunder. There was a growing loss of trust in the government, and both the left and right – the latter reinforced by tens of thousands of returning Legion veterans – became increasingly radical.
The socialist victory in France’s 1898 election horrified many Belgian businessmen and clerics, who feared that the same thing might happen in their own country’s upcoming election or, alternatively, that a loss for the left might trigger an uprising. In June, a coalition of army officers, ex-Legionnaires and business leaders staged a pre-emptive coup, dissolving the parliament and suspending elections indefinitely. The new regime quickly moved to suppress opposition parties and convene a carefully selected assembly to draft a constitution.
Many existing political institutions, including the parliament and the monarchy, would survive. Representative government would become an emasculated and strictly controlled affair, however, and while the king’s formal powers were increased, he was relegated to a symbolic role in practice. The new Belgian government was a cooperative project of the military, the Legion, the industrialists and the church, and when it eventually developed an ideological foundation, it would emphasize all these things.
In the meantime, Legionnaires from Belgium volunteered in droves to fight on the side of the French State, and exiled trade unionists flocked to the emperor’s banner…
… In 1897, Spain had enjoyed thirty years of stability under a liberal constitution and a permanent coalition of moderate parties on the right and left. It had been spared the horrors of war, and had even prospered as France’s conduit for maritime trade. By 1898, though, that stability was in grave danger. The end of the war brought severe economic dislocation as France began trading through its own ports again and its military stopped placing orders in Spanish factories. And at the same time, nearly three quarters of a million Papal Legion veterans returned home, many to poverty and unemployment.
The result was an increase in radicalism, particularly in Madrid and the industrial cities of Catalonia and the Basque Country. Strikes and demonstrations by socialist and anarchist groups became common, and the returning Legionnaires found themselves on both sides: Catalan industrialists happily recruited unemployed soldiers as strikebreakers, while other Legionnaires joined the Catholic trade unions in opposition to both the industrialists and the left. Street fights between rival political gangs were an everyday occurrence, and in the October 1898 Barcelona municipal election, the coalition parties were reduced to a minority with the council divided between nationalists and radicals of the left and right.
The French civil war added fuel to the fire, especially since the Pope – who continued to act as if he were an independent head of state – strongly supported the French State while the Spanish government continued to recognize the Empire. The official Spanish policy toward the war was one of strict neutrality, but the Pope ordered priests and bishops to preach in favor of the rebellion, and the conservative Catholic parties openly recruited volunteers for the State’s forces. At the same time, many leftists volunteered to fight for the Empire, and sometimes fought pitched battles with the ex-Legionnaires before they ever left Spain.
In some ways, the civil war actually benefitted Spain: the factories were once again busy filling military orders (although in some cases, this would delay their shift to consumer production) and many unemployed troublemakers once again left the country. But the conflict in the streets, the political radicalization and the Pope’s freelance foreign policy were becoming unsustainable. Matters came to a head when the Bishop of Seu de Urgell, acting as co-prince of Andorra, led a small army recruited from his see to open the passes through the Pyrenees after the Andorran council closed them. The bishop’s forces were defeated by the Andorran militia at Santa Coloma, but the Spanish government realized that further incursions could drag Spain into the war, and it sent army units to take control of the border regions.
The occupation of Seu de Urgell and the closure of the border drew protests from the Pope and the upper Spanish clergy, many of whom were his appointees. The Pope was proving to be a very difficult guest, and parties on the left (including even some of the Catholic liberals, who resented his thumb on the scale of internal politics) increasingly demanded his expulsion. The government, realizing that this would be politically explosive, was unwilling to go so far just yet. Instead, it negotiated with the Pope, warning him that it would exercise its ancient prerogative of appointing Spanish bishops if the papacy did not make more moderate appointments, and offering incentives for him to stay out of international politics. These discussions continued through much of 1899, but they were largely unproductive, and the Spanish empire’s citizens watched anxiously as the tensions increased…
… Even Andorra would be caught in the blowback from the French conflict, and ironically, it became entangled precisely because of its efforts to stay neutral. The fight at Santa Coloma was the only real battle that would take place on Andorran soil, but there would be a number of smaller skirmishes in which the Andorran militia stopped both Legion infiltrators and anarchists from crossing over to France. But even more than that, General Joffre sent veteran sergeants to train the citizens’ militia into an army, and the militia’s increasing importance made it into a pathway for young men to be recognized as leaders.
This made itself felt during the run-up to the 1899 election. Traditionally, only heads of household could vote, and because of malapportionment, the government was dominated by a few families. But this time the young militiamen demonstrated in the streets of the capital demanding universal suffrage, and with no one capable of stopping them, the government was forced to give in. The election swept the ruling families out of power and brought in the “Sergeants’ Parliament,” a legislature dominated by small farmers and craftsmen whose base of support was the militiamen who had chosen them as leaders.
The Sergeants’ Parliament would enact several liberal reforms, but one of its most momentous acts was to declare that the Bishop of Seu de Urgell had forfeited his title as co-prince by invading Andorra, and to offer that title to the king of Spain in his stead. The Spanish crown accepted, touching off a decade of litigation in the courts of Andorra and Spain, but more importantly adding another item to the list of quarrels between the Spanish government and the Pope…
… The Washington accords ended Italy’s war with France and Austria, but the country was not yet at peace. The Republic of Venetia, propped up by Legionnaires who refused to demobilize when the Pope dissolved their army, still controlled much of the northeast, with the anarchist communes in Friuli and Venice city also outside state authority.
The Italian government, which was still rebuilding its administration in the north and repairing the infrastructure destroyed during the war, attempted at first to negotiate with the Venetians. While the records from this time are fragmentary, it is known that parts of the Venetian government, including many of the local magnates, wanted to surrender in exchange for amnesty and recognition of their property rights. But the former Legion commanders were of a different mind, and in April 1898, they overthrew the civilian government in Verona and took power as the Council of National Salvation. The talks with Italy were immediately broken off, and by summer, the Italian army moved in force to crush the breakaway republic.
The war in Venetia had always been brutal, but the final stage set new standards. The Venetian junta treated dissent – very loosely defined – with no mercy, and the Italian troops, led by a radically anti-clerical commander, treated supporters of the republic the same way. Before the government stepped in to countermand this general, the army shot more than five thousand prisoners of war as traitors or partisans, and summarily executed many Venetian officials at the same places where they had overseen the shooting of liberals and government loyalists during the war. Inevitably, many innocent people became victims of one side or the other. By the spring of 1899, Venetia had been pacified, but much of it was scorched earth, and the reoccupation would have a lasting legacy of resentment.
Friuli and Venice city fared somewhat better: the government had no love for anarchism, but they had at least fought on the right side during the war, and both agreed not to oppose the Italian army when it moved to retake control. Also, the law confiscating collaborators’ property led to tacit recognition of the peasants’ and workers’ cooperatives they had established during the war. The postwar years would see the growth of parallel institutions – on the one hand, the police and tax authorities reasserted control, but on the other hand, education and culture were increasingly administered by the cooperatives, and many people preferred their informal dispute resolution systems to the congested courts. These institutions would come into conflict, but in the immediate postwar years, the state and the anarchists largely ignored each other.
In the meantime, the government in Rome – which had now become the permanent capital – took a hard anti-clerical turn. The battle against the Legion had been particularly bitter on Italian soil, and the center-left coalition that won the 1898 elections was determined to evict the Church from the country’s political life. The Law on Church and State, enacted in May 1899, confiscated all ecclesiastical property other than church buildings, prohibited priests from giving political sermons or wearing clerical garb outside church, forbade outdoor worship services, and banned religious schools. These measures nominally applied to all religious groups – a Jewish school in Rome was among those shut down – but since nearly all religious institutions in Italy were Catholic, the Church was the primary target.
The law was broadly popular when it was enacted, but it would cause problems of its own. The confiscated Church property was supposed to be nationalized and leased at low rents to peasants and working-class city dwellers, but only about half of it was actually distributed in this way. The rest was rented to wealthy people with political connections, often from outside the area where the property was located, who became absentee landlords. The Vatican itself became a scandal, as some of the artwork supposedly destined for the national museum found its way into private hands. The fallout from the Vatican Affair would bring down the government and lead to the historic election of 1900, the first to take place under universal male suffrage…
