ABSTRACT
Moving to the immediate postwar, the penultimate chapter analyzes how surveillance agencies, practices, and attitudes became a permanent fixture of British and French society, rather than temporary wartime measures. In 1919 radical labor leaders in Britain and France led large-scale strikes for a 40-hour work week and faster demobilization. Intelligence officials feared the strikes, led by Marxists, could spark a communist revolution. In Glasgow, January strikes ended with the Battle of George Square as British police violently dispersed the tens of thousands of workers gathered at city hall. In Paris, French cavalry and the garde républicaine fought with protestors. Both protest movements ended when the general labor unions refused to join radical agitation. Nevertheless, both British and French government officials and intelligence agency heads used the threat of revolutionary subversion to justify the permanence of a mass domestic surveillance apparatus in peacetime.
