ABSTRACT
The quarter-century preceding the First World War has very recently passed entirely out of living memory. Since the past fifty years have been, all things considered, a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity in Europe, the contrast between a dark and cloudy present and a pre-1914 era of sunlit afternoons has begun to fade. The war itself involved an unprecedented slaughter of combatants, as well as enormous economic, social and political upheaval. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of prosperity, especially in comparison to the troubled decades after 1870, but this prosperity was the result of rapid and unsettling economic changes. The dynamic and unsettling character of the era is certainly apparent in the main political events. The quarter-century before 1914 was crowded with vehement controversies, mass actions, including a revolution in Europe's largest country, and a whole series of smaller wars and diplomatic confrontations leading up to the First World War.
