When Napoleon returned from exile on the island of Elba, he immediately set about gathering the support that he hoped would re-establish him as ruler of France. No sooner had he disembarked at Antibes on 1 March 1815 than he began issuing proclamations in which he portrayed himself as the leading soldier of the Republic and a man of the Revolution. His appeals found a welcome response in the French populace that astonished his opponents and perhaps surprised the emperor as well. Napoleon had changed the very nature of Bonapartism by allying himself with the tradition of the Revolution, and the federation movement which swept across France during the six weeks prior to Waterloo was a direct response to his new appeal.

This article sets out to examine the relationship between party politics and social reform in the Second World War. The issue of government policy towards reform was raised initially by Richard Titmuss, who argued in his official history of social policy that the experience of total war and the arrival of Churchill's coalition in 1940 led to a fundamentally new attitude on welfare issues. The exposure of widespread social deprivation, Titmuss claimed, made central government fully conscious for the first time of the need for reconstruction; the reforms subsequently proposed or enacted by the coalition were therefore an important prelude to the introduction of a ‘welfare state’ by the post-war Labour administration. These claims have not been borne out by more recent studies of individual wartime policies, but as a general guide to social reform in the period the ideas of Richard Titmuss have never been entirely displaced. In fact the significance of wartime policy, and its close relationship with post-war reform, has been reaffirmed in the most comprehensive study of British politics during the war – Paul Addison's The road to 1945. For Addison, the influence of Labour ministers in the coalition made the government the most radical since Asquith's Liberal administration in the Edwardian period. The war, he notes, clearly placed on the agenda the major items of the post-war welfare state: social security for all, a national health service, full employment policies, improved education and housing, and a new system, of family allowances.

On 27 January 1806, in a house of commons newly integrating the momentous events of Trafalgar, Nelson's death, and Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz, the obsequies of William Pitt commenced. Lord Lascelles proposed that the late prime minister be honoured as had been his father twenty-eight years before, with a public funeral. The motion eventually passed but the inter-party wrangle that it caused was unseemly. William Windham, who had served as Pitt's Secretary at War between 1794 and 1801, wondered why such unusual honours were proposed for Pitt, given both the precarious situation of the current war (so unlike the Great Commoner's contribution to British glory) and the fact that Edmund Burke's death in 1797 had elicited no such designs. ‘In every point of comparison that could be made,’ said Windham, ‘Mr Burke stood upon the same level with Mr Pitt, and I do not see the reason for the difference.’ In retrospect, it may appear odd that any leading politician thought Burke was entitled to a state funeral. He had been neither war leader nor prime minister, the usual recipients of public funerals. Few others in the political nation in 1797, whig or Pittite, shared Windham's judgement on this matter. That Windham thought the Pittites should have shared his judgement was the source of his bitterness in his speech to the House. If Burke's acknowledged enemies, the Foxite whigs, had opposed public honours for Burke, Windham would not have been surprised,

But that was not the case; it was not from them that the objection came, but from gentlemen on the other side of the house [Pittites], who took Mr Burke as the leader of their opinions, who cried him up to the skies, who founded themselves upon what he had done, but who were afraid, that if they consented to such honours, it would appear as if they approved of all the sentiments of that great man some of which were, perhaps, of too high a tone for them to relish.

‘So Arthur Balfour is really leader – and Tory Democracy, the genuine article, at an end!’ Conventional historical wisdom has endorsed Randolph Churchill's judgement of 1891, attributing the demise of tory democracy partly to Balfour himself and partly to the inexorable forces of class division. Balfour's tactical ingenuity secured the defeat of Joseph Chamberlain's tariff reform, a valiant bid to revive tory democracy and turn back the tide of class politics; thereafter the Liberals, anxious to retain their working-class support, made the running on social reform, while the Unionists fell back on ‘negative’ policies and the middle-class vote. Yet perhaps historians have become the prisoners of their own orthodoxy. Though the ideology, the policies and the electoral bases of the new Liberalism have been extensively explored, the Unionists have been relatively neglected. Because it is assumed that before 1914 the Conservative party was devoid of proposals for social reform, one of the most obvious sources for such proposals has been overlooked: the Unionist Social Reform Committee of 1911 to 1914.

In 1975, Max Beloff wrote an article entitled ‘The Whitehall factor: the role of the higher civil service, 1919–39’, which historians have been singularly slow to exploit. Influenced, no doubt, by the publication in the same year of the Crossman Diaries, Beloff argued that no modern political history could be complete which ignores the influence of the civil service on policy-making. ‘The anonymity of the civil service’, he argued, ‘may or may not be a valuable convention of the constitution: it is one which the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ The peril was greatest, he suggested, for the inter-war period because it was then that higher civil servants in Britain ‘probably reached the height of [their] corporate influence’. In contrast to their predecessors, they controlled a far more centralized machine whose influence had been greatly extended by increasingly interventionist policies. In contrast to their successors, they were a highly compact group – being a mere 500 in number.

The Central African Federation (1953–63) was the most controversial large-scale imperial exercise in constructive state-building ever undertaken by the British government. It appears now as a quite extraordinary mistake, an aberration of history (‘like the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem’), a deviation from the inevitable historical trend of decolonization. Paradoxically, one of its principal architects, Andrew Cohen (head of the African department of the colonial office) is also credited with having set the course for planned African decolonization as a whole. There have already been several attempts to explain how an error so interesting and surprising, so large and portentous, came to be made. No one, however, has yet presented an analysis based on British government archives, and the authoritative evidence that they alone can provide.

Léon Blum's reply to interpellations on 6 June 1936 sums up the entire problem of interpreting the economic policy of the Popular Front. In terms of popular sovereignty, that policy ought to have been – in the light of parliamentary practicalities, it could only be – an implementation of the programme commun, as published at the beginning of 1936, after lengthy negotiations between the main elements in the Popular Front alliance. And yet it was not to be so. On the credit side, the 1936–7 government is remembered for instituting paid holidays and orderly collective bargaining; in the no man's land where academic debate is fought out, lie the famous 40 hours law to restrict the working week, and an ineffectual set of price controls; on the debit side, at any rate in its implementation, is the devaluation of September 1936, with the attendant failure to institute any exchange control. None of these key measures featured in the joint manifesto. They were all decided in the first four months of the legislature, after which the government remained continually on the defensive in economic and financial policy. This has led Georges Lefranc, one of the best-known historians of the Popular Front, to describe the period from October 1936 to February 1937 as ‘la pause implicite’, even though it was only on 24 January 1937 at the earliest, or more explicitly in the third week of February, that Blum acknowledged the reality which had been impending for the last five months – the necessity for ‘a pause’.

When thinking of Churchill's attitude towards the Soviet Union one automatically thinks of him as the most outspoken of the advocates of armed intervention during the civil war, or as the author of the speech in Fulton, Missouri, which many people regard as the opening salvo in the Cold War. During the war, however, when the Soviet Union became a great ally without whose help the war in Europe could never have been won, his attitude was bound to be quite different. Even before the Germans launched ‘Operation Barbarossa’ thus forcing the Soviets into the Allied camp, Churchill had been thinking of the Russians as possible partners in the struggle against Nazi Germany, for however much he detested the Soviet regime, his passionate determination to destroy Nazism was a far more powerful emotion, and, as he put it, if Hitler were to invade Hell he would promptly sign a pact with the Devil.

British policy towards Germany during the period of occupation aimed at preventing a resurgence of German military might in the future, whilst ensuring stable economic conditions in the short term. By mid 1946, however, the scale of the economic problems confronting the occupying powers in Germany had already manifested itself in the reduction of food rations and the consequent falling off in the output of Ruhr coal. The fragile economy was to suffer an even greater setback during the cruel winter of 1946/7. The immediate restoration of economic activity became imperative, not least because the dollar cost of sustaining the British Zone with imported grain weighed heavily on the British exchequer.