ABSTRACT
The political mobilisation of the German working class during the period of industrialisation and its emergence as an effective political force was, of course, also stimulated by ideological developments. The emerging German working-class movement was not yet generally imbued with revolutionary sentiment and its members had much less experience of the industrial struggle than their British brethren. The separation of the socialist organisations from the bourgeois democracy was by the end of the 1860s an accomplished fact but, locally, ties were not so easily severed and the class-conscious quasi-revolutionary sentiment of the independent working-class movement could not be hived off so easily from the merely democratic and radical. The harsh treatment of Social Democrats during the years 1886–1888 strengthened the sense of isolation and the feeling of antagonism between the politically conscious working class and the bourgeois state.
