ABSTRACT
The end of the century witnessed a crisis of liberalism and the emergence of a new "age of organization." Adolphe Thiers may be taken as a symbol of the passing liberal era: a man of great personal culture, suspicious of democracy and sympathetic to an aggressive entrepreneurialism. The push toward organization was in large part a response to economic depression. The emergence of new, industrial economies since mid-century—Germany and the United States are the prime examples—had intensified international competition for markets. Exclusion of foreign manufactures from the domestic market offered short-term relief from unwelcome competition, and most industrial economies experimented with protectionism. Ligue syndicale ideology to be sure contained a potent dose of cultural and economic reaction—of antimodernism in Volkov's phrase—and it is tempting to categorize the Ligue as reactionary ab initio. The Ligue syndicale was a partisan of the omnicompetent, unicameral legislature, undaunted by liberal second thoughts about the tyranny of the majority.
