The First Mass Movement of Working People

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Chartism took its name from a document, the People's Charter, and its demands were procedural rather than revolutionary: universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, and pay for members of Parliament, among other reforms meant to let working people actually compete for political power rather than simply petition those who already held it. Between 1838 and 1848 it became, by the standard historical description, possibly the first mass working-class labour movement anywhere in the world, drawing support on a scale no earlier organized effort by British workers had reached. It did not win its charter; most of its specific demands would not become law for decades. But it proved something the movements that followed it could build on, that working people organized in large enough numbers around a shared political program, rather than only around a single trade or a single strike, and that lesson carried forward into the London-based International Workingmen's Association, founded in 1864 as the first serious attempt at coordinating labour organizing across national borders. Chartism lost its fight and won the template.