The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

In the hope of warding off the Bolsheviks, they agreed to persuade their comrades at home to attend the international socialist conference that Petrograd had called to meet in Stockholm on 1 July.23 The French Socialists duly withdrew their ministers from the French cabinet. But, after General Pétain had restored order to the Western Front by court-martialling several thousand French mutineers, Paris was not about to risk further pacifist contamination. The passports of the French Socialists were summarily cancelled and Lloyd George’s government promptly followed suit. The effect was to split the British labour movement, between the pro-war majority and a vocal oppositional minority that now stretched beyond the ranks of the Independent Labour Party.