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Theme about the storm at Børsen in 1918

by Albert Scherfig

Radicalization of the workers

During the First World War, a split emerged in the Danish labor movement. The so-called syndicalists broke with the Social Democratic negotiation policy and agitated for revolution instead. Under the slogan “direct action”, they supported tenants who were evicted from their homes, sabotaged the recruitment of workers for warring nations, and organized an attack on the Stock Exchange in Copenhagen in February 1918.

“The Stock Exchange was at that time the gathering point for the entire clique that profited from the war: stockbrokers, shipowners, shareholders, money changers, etc. and we therefore decided that one day after a meeting we would storm the Exchange, chase all the stockbrokers out and hang a sign on the door saying: ‘The gambling den is closed by the unemployed’ “

Andreas Fritzner’s memoirs recorded October 22, 1963, Labor Movement Library & Archives.

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Denmark during the First World War

Everyday life for Danish workers during the First World War (1914-1918) was characterised by high unemployment, food rationing, and severe fuel and housing shortages. Up until the outbreak of war, the Social Democrats had gained greater influence in Danish politics. For example, Social Democrat leader Thorvald Stauning had won the party’s first ministerial post in 1916 in a government led by the Radical Left.

But large groups of workers gradually began to organize outside the party. They did not believe that the existing trade union movement’s line of negotiation and the Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary work could solve the problems of unemployment and lack of basic necessities of life. Instead, the syndicalists wanted to base the fight for socialism on union organization in individual companies and so-called direct action, which could take the form of strikes, sabotage and boycotts.

These workers, who called themselves syndicalists, were revolutionaries. In light of the Russian Revolution (1917), it had become clear that Social Democracy was not a revolutionary party, and for the first time in its history, its position as the unifying force of the working class was seriously challenged.

The syndicalists storm the stock exchange

One of the most significant events in the history of Danish syndicalism was what became known as the Storming of the Stock Exchange on February 11, 1918, when militant syndicalists attacked one of the central symbols of working class frustration during World War I – the Copenhagen Stock Exchange.

The attack resonated with the times. Not least because it happened at a time when the whole of Europe was on the brink of revolutionary upheaval. The newspaper København, which was notoriously at odds with the syndicalists, read:

“It is only a few days since the Bolsheviks, in their appeal to the German workers, conjured up the red spectre of Communism, which would flood all Europe, and warned that the midnight hour was near. And yesterday, for the first time, this spectre stared our own peaceful city straight in the eye. Even the most blind opened their eyes and saw its hateful and twisted features. Even the deafest heard the echoes of the shouts and gunshots when, in the afternoon, syndicalists and mobs together stormed the Stock Exchange.”

A break in the history of the labor movement

The fear of revolution was not without reason. Later that year, two syndicalists traveled to Germany, where the revolution had broken out, in an attempt to get the revolutionary soldiers to help with a similar upheaval in Denmark. There was never a revolution in Denmark, but the storming of the Stock Exchange in February 1918 can be seen as a central break in the history of the labor movement between two movements, one revolutionary and one social democratic.