In 1871, a fishmonger from the seaside German town of Stralsund renamed his pickled product “Bismarck herrings” after the autocratic chancellor of the day, Otto von Bismarck. Presciently fitting, the name summed up the pioneering social welfare legislation that Bismarck would push the following decade: like herring, the major staple of the German poor, the chancellor’s programs might have kept starvation at bay, but they fostered mere survival rather than empowerment for the country’s vast working class.

Bismarck’s hand was forced by a rising German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the largest mass socialist party on the continent. Acting less out of benevolence than calculated malevolence, he constructed the world’s first modern welfare state in a bid to steal the thunder from the workers’ movement. The goal was to pair the iron fist of repression (mass bans on the party, violent crackdowns on strikers, severe limits on voting rights) with the allure of ameliorating reform (accident, old age, and health insurance). This was to be the first of many “white revolutions,” a model of top-down Caesaristic paternalism soon copied throughout the world.

But the SPD didn’t bite. Voting time and again against Bismarck’s welfare legislation, the SPD provided an early reminder that socialists must not be tempted to surrender the vision of a free and democratic society — and that bread is no trade for freedom.