ABSTRACT
[Published in the monthly paper produced for local societies by the CWS, the article reproduced below is an account of the ICA congress that took place in Manchester in July 1902, written by Édouard de Boyve (1840–1923) and translated from l’Emancipation, a French co-operative journal that de Boyve had founded in 1887. Born in Paris into a solid bourgeois family, de Boyve’s mother was English and his natural bilingualism aided international links. An advocate of the Rochdale model of co-operation, in 1883 de Boyve established a consumer co-operative at Nimes and three years later he struck up a close relationship with the political economist Charles Gide. De Boyve regarded co-operation as a solution to the antagonism between capital and labour, a healing balm that would render class conflict unnecessary. Other French co-operators took a different view and the socialists split in 1895, though they rejoined in 1912. [Ellen Furlough, Consumer Co-operation in France: the Politics of Consumption, 1834–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)] As we have noted, middle-class leaders such as Greening, Neale and de Boyve provided much of the initial impetus behind the formal international organisation of co-operation, de Boyve regarding the ICA as a defence against socialist internationalism. [Peter Gurney, “‘A Higher State of Civilisation and Happiness’: Internationalism in the British Co-operative Movement between, c. 1869–1918”, in Frits van Holthoon and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Internationalism in the Labour Movement 1830–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 561] The article illustrates just how deeply embedded the practice of internationalism was within the culture of the British movement at this time. The CWS was clearly trying to prove its credentials in Manchester against the profit-sharers who had sought to corral internationalism for their own ends. However, de Boyve’s report also reveals the limits to this wider view as he notes how at the celebratory dinner English delegates sang “God Save the King” after the first toast, and 100 guests “Socialists, Anarchists, or otherwise, felt bound to take part, by rising, in this manifestation of respect for the Sovereign who represents, to English eyes, that British power of which they are proud”.]
