Cardinal Richelieu's spectacular military intervention in Italy in 1629 plunged his ministry into a desperate crisis from which it only narrowly emerged intact. It marked the definitive departure of France upon the difficult road of outright opposition to the Habsburg hegemony in Europe. This policy – as the cardinal well knew – was in many ways potentially counter-productive, with a risk factor so high that failure might well entail the end, not only of his personal career, but with it the adolescent Bourbon state. Indeed, his initiative had the almost immediate consequence of a rebellious challenge from a prince of the blood and his domestic allies, amounting to a prototype fronde des princes. For decades to come, French society was to be impoverished by the manifold negative impact of war, while political stability was persistently affected by the unrelenting material and ideological pressures of continuous hostilities.

The virus of violent, personal vendetta had poisoned the blood of elite society in Piedmont by the time the country was formally annexed to France in April 1802. The turbulent events of the period 1794–1801 had inflamed and then politicized a society ‘whose customs steadfastly retained something of the unruly and fiercesome’, as Sauli d'Igliano, the son of a petty count from Ceva, chose to describe it when writing of his childhood in the mid-1790s. The revolutionary process unleashed and, finally, entrenched that penchant for violence among ‘men of the second order’ that Giuseppe Baretti had informed the whole of Europe of a generation earlier in his widely read An account of the manners and customs of Italy: ‘they are withal so punctilious and so ready to draw the sword, that more duels are fought in Piedmont than in the rest of Italy taken together’. The venom of revolution mingled with the poison of personal vendettas and brought their ferocity to the centre of political life. It was a virus the French would strive to stamp out, but one that would malinger in the subalpine body politic throughout their own rule and long after they had gone. As late as 1813, a substantial landowner of Bene, in southern Piedmont complained of his patriot maire's ‘despotisme et ses actes arbitraires…sans nombre’.

The suffrage for the German Reichstag had by the 1890s become the most potent symbol of democratic ideas in imperial Germany. ‘Universal, equal, secret, and direct’, as contemporaries described it, the Reichstag suffrage stood in contrast to restrictive state suffrages as a model of liberty and fairness. By the turn of the century, 70–80 per cent of adult male German citizens took advantage of their right to participate in this, the freest of all German political arenas.

Like the ‘Tory in clogs’ of Edwardian Britain, the Unionist working man has generally eluded the historian of modern Ireland. Indeed, to some extent, the image of Irish Unionism, whether popular or scholarly, has been supplied by the apologetic biographers of the ‘great men’ of loyalism, and by the rhetoric of political opponents like Michael Farrell: at any rate the historiography of the movement is peopled with irredentist squires and Anglo-Irish peers, bowler-hatted Orange artisans – Engel's ‘Protestant brag-garts’ – and cynical industrial barons. The existence of a more popular Unionism is acknowledged, though only in a context (the militancy of 1912, the bravura of 12 July marches) when it may not be ignored: even so, as with an older scholarly attitude towards popular British toryism, there has been a tendency among historians to treat mass Unionism as a freak of progress, demanding apologetic explanation rather than sustained illumination. With the institutions of popular Conservatism now, after thirty years of historical research, a firm feature of the British historical landscape, the need to reveal something of the electoral base of Ulster Unionism is all the more apparent. This is particularly true of the rural hinterland of the loyalist movement which, even more than Belfast, has been the victim of neglect.

The thirteenth edition of The campaign guide: A handbook for unionist speakers was published on the eve of the Great War. This massive 900 page Guide, like its predecessors, was ‘prepared with a view to giving to Unionist Candidates and Speakers…a handy reference work covering the whole field of contemporary political controversy.’ The fourth largest chapter in the book (74 pages) dealt with Ireland and was reflective of the ‘present position’of ‘THE IRISH QUESTION’ being ‘in the front rank of political controversy’ Four years later Election notes, an 87 page pamphlet assembled prior to the 1918 election as a hasty substitute for what would have been an entirely inappropriate Campaign guide, had no chapter on Ireland, no reference to the Irish question in the index and, in fact, conveyed not a single word on the subject.

The working class's experience of the tax system is an important aspect of its relationship with the state. This article examines the nature of this connexion during the First World War and its aftermath when fiscal policy was subject to intense political pressure. Two themes are paramount, those of resistance and appropriation. From the point of view of governments the less tax collection encouraged class-based opposition the better. Because the level of tax payments depended on varied circumstances within social groups – caused by family size or patterns of consumption, for example – the lines of differentiation were more finely drawn than the contours of social class. Many tax payments affected the individual as a citizen within the political system rather than as a producer within the economy. The articulation of resentment about tax burdens with conflicts in the economy was not therefore automatic. However, when governments were closely involved in the running of the economy, as in the First World War, it was helpful to use the tax system as an instrument of social justice, so that efforts to generate a common purpose might not be impaired by resentment of the disproportionate gains of others. In these circumstances taxpayers might well be encouraged to see the tax system as a way of appropriating or limiting the wealth of other classes, in a way which did bring it into closer relationship with the economy.