Children of the Revolution Read online

  The size of a farm was central to whether it could maintain a family. As a general rule 10 hectares of farmland were required for a family to be self-sufficient, but 4 hectares might be enough if they were under vines. In 1862 some 85 per cent of farmers had holdings of less than 10 hectares, and a third of smallholders supplemented what little they owned by renting plots from bourgeois or noble landowners. At the bottom of the pile in 1851 were 900,000 day-labourers and two million domestiques or live-in farmhands, some of whom had a future claim on a family farm or inheritance while others made up the rural poor. Louis-François Pinagot, a carter’s son of the Perche (Orne), became a clogmaker working in a hut in the forest for a dealer who paid 1 franc a day in 1855, 2 francs in 1867. He escaped military service, which was decided by drawing lots, and married a hemp spinner who was paid only 25 centimes a day. They remained on the margins of the core community of farmers and though they had eight children only one of his sons, who started as a farmhand, came into property.10

  Small farms could make a living where the soil was rich, but others, in poor soils and upland areas, obliged farming families to supplement their income by industrial work, either at home or by temporary migration out of the region. Cottage industry operated under a system by which entrepreneurs ‘put out’ textile work to peasant families in their villages and hamlets, affording cheap labour without overheads for the entrepreneur and the means to remain on the land by access to a little cash income for the peasants. Generally a gendered division of labour applied, with the men continuing in the fields or with their trade and the women spinning or weaving. In the Pays de Caux, the chalk plateau north of Rouen, Rouen merchants put out cotton for spinning until factory spinning killed it off in the 1830s, then they put out spun yarn for handloom weaving. Three-quarters of the 110,000 weavers in the surrounding Seine-Inférieure in 1848 were women, paid at the miserable rate of between 75 centimes and 1.25 francs per day.11 In the Forez village of Marlhes (Loire), near Saint-Étienne, where 70 per cent of peasants had less than 10 hectares, the local cottage industry was silk ribbon-weaving, and 88 per cent of the weavers were women, 55 per cent of them being single, 38 per cent married and 7 per cent widows in 1851.12 To the south, in the Velay, lacemaking in silk and linen employed 130,000 country women in 1855, a luxury product marketed by the merchants of Le Puy as far as Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain.13 To the south-east, in the Ardèche, the peasant populations grew the ‘golden tree’ or mulberry which fed silkworms, producing either raw silk to be sold to merchants at the markets of Aubenas and Joyeuse or spun in workshops along the Ardèche river, fifty-six of them employing 3,360 workers, almost all women, in 1860.14 Further west, in the Rouergue (Aveyron) even the mines of Decazeville, developed by the Duc de Decazes and his associates, were worked by peasant miners who owned plots of land and came to the mine only when there was nothing to do in the fields.15

  THE FORMATION OF A WORKING CLASS

  Elsewhere, industry did not come to peasant women but rather men from peasant communities had to go in search of work, migrating seasonally or temporarily. Many if not most industrial workers originated in peasant communities, primarily because 52 per cent of the working population in 1856 was agricultural and only 23 per cent was in mining, manufacturing or building, whereas in Great Britain at the same time only 22 per cent of the working population was agricultural, while 48 per cent was industrial.16 From the Rouergue, in the south-west of the Massif Central, sawyers went to work during the winter in the forests of the Pyrenees and Catalonia, travelling in teams from the same villages, returning in the spring in time for the harvest and with cash enough to pay taxes or buy land.17 From the Limousin, on the north-west of the Massif Central, especially the Creuse department, where most peasants had less than a hectare and the soil was too poor even to grow rye, men left in work-teams from the same villages every spring, going to Paris to hire themselves out as masons, returning around St Andrew’s Day, 30 November. Leaving from the age of thirteen or fourteen, 34,000 strong in 1846, they were earners of hard currency for the extended family, returning home every third winter, marrying young because they were earning but then leaving their wives in Limousin when spring came round again.18 Thus Martin Nadaud, schooled as far as his first communion aged thirteen, was equipped with a heavy woollen coat, strong shoes and a top hat, and set out aged fourteen in March 1830 with his father and other comrades from the Bourganeuf area for Paris. Early in 1839, having escaped military service, he married a local girl who provided a dowry of 3,000 francs but he also had to contribute to the 1,200-franc dowry required by his sister, so he went back to Paris after only seventeen days of marriage, returning at the end of 1842 with three bags of a thousand francs each, to repay most of the family debt.19 Seasonal or temporary migration was not confined to men. Girls also left their homes in the country for a period of work in the city, either in domestic service or in the textile mills. This was generally to save enough money for a dowry and a trousseau in order to marry someone with the prospect of inheriting land, for there was no such thing as a free marriage.20

  Over time agricultural and industrial populations did draw further apart; the peasantry and the working class became more sharply defined. The development of large-scale, powered and mechanized industry undercut cottage industry, so that first rural spinning and then rural weaving disappeared. Rural populations became less mixed and more predominantly agricultural. In the 1860s, for example, ribbon-weaving in the Loire department shifted to water-powered factories in Saint-Étienne which employed unmarried women only, so that the farmers’ wives of upland villages like Marlhes switched to dairy farming, producing milk and cheese for another market.21 Similarly, rural workers who began by migrating temporarily to the town or city might end up staying permanently, either because they were making a good living in the city or because the prospects of coming into an inheritance at home dwindled. There also emerged the first generation of ‘born proletarians’ such as Jean-Baptiste Dumay, born in Le Creusot in 1841 to a foreman who died in a mining accident six months before his birth and a seamstress who came from a family of clogmakers in the Nièvre. He was briefly educated in the company school before starting as an apprentice turner making nuts and bolts in the Le Creusot workshops, aged twelve, in 1854.22

  The formation of a working class also presupposed the development of a working-class solidarity, overcoming differences between different regions or indeed localities. Building workers, especially carpenters, often went as journeymen on a Tour de France lasting several years to learn their trade. It was sustained by a system of compagnonnage or brotherhood which gave material and even familial support to the itinerant workers, with a ‘Mother’ in each town. Although this might have created a sense of solidarity among building workers, in fact it pointed up their differences. Agricol Perdiguier, who went on a Tour de France between 1824 and 1828, was immediately struck by the variety of patois of workers from different towns, starting with those between his native Avignon and those in nearby Marseille and Nîmes, who were not easy to understand. Moreover, compagnonnage, rather like freemasonry, was divided between different affiliations allegedly going back to the masters who built the Temple of Solomon. Perdiguier, for example, was a Companion of Liberty or Gavot. These were the sworn enemies of the Companions of Duty or Dévorants, who might rival each other to do the best work but might also resort to violence when they met. Finally, the network of hospitality for itinerant workers was virtually absent in Paris, whose workers, reflected Perdiguier, ‘although very skilled and clever, learning every day, have little sympathy for each other, and few ties attaching them to others’.23 Martin Nadaud, as a mason, was not a compagnon and did not go on the Tour de France, but was equally divided as an immigrant worker from the more established Paris workers. The masons lived in boarding houses in their favoured neighbourhood near the place de la Grève, looked down on by Parisians as ‘chestnut-eaters’, coming from a poor region where chestnut flour was used to make bread. That said
, they also fought among themselves, masons from the north of the Creuse called Brulas and those from the south of the department called Bigaros, and woe betide the employer who tried to hire a mixture of them.24

  Workers were sharply divided not only by place of origin but by level of skill and therefore earning power. Those trained in a trade or craft were much better off than the unskilled who had received no apprenticeship. In the first there was continuity, interrupted only by economic slump or injury, while the second were often in and out of work on a regular basis. Skilled workers had the possibility of progressing in the trade, becoming a master or even entrepreneur, while unskilled workers changed jobs frequently in the hope of finding a better situation, without really getting anywhere.

  A comparison of the careers of two workers, Martin Nadaud and Norbert Truquin, will illuminate these differences. Taken by his father, a mason, to Paris in 1830, Nadaud became an apprentice in the trade, earning two francs a day. Two years later he was promoted to limousinier, the category which laid the foundations and built the basic walls for three francs a day, before becoming a mason companion proper, paid over four francs a day. Now he headed his own gang and negotiated directly with entrepreneurs such as Georges Duphot, who had started as a mason from the Creuse and became a big property developer. Nadaud was paid 150 francs per month to build a school in 1844 and 180 francs per month to build the town hall of the 5th arrondissement, place du Panthéon, in 1847.25 One of the crowd who invaded the Hôtel de Ville in February 1848 and heard the Republic proclaimed, he was elected deputy for the Creuse to the Legislative Assembly in 1849.

  Norbert Truquin, whose brutal and drunken father was briefly the manager of an Amiens woollen mill, received no education and was sent to work at the age of seven in 1840 for a wool-carder for 2 francs 40 a day, removing impurities from the wool with his teeth. After his employer died he took to petty theft, ran errands for prostitutes and joined a pedlar selling haberdashery in Champagne, before grape-picking for a franc a day. Back in his home village, his father sent him to work in a brickyard, then in a knacker’s yard. Truquin then went to work in a wool-spinning mill in Amiens, sharing lodgings with mill girls paid 80 centimes to 1 franc 10 a day, but was then laid off and went to Paris where his father was running a wine warehouse, finding work in a woollen-cloth factory. Unemployed during the 1848 Revolution he enrolled in the national workshops and after the June Days tried to make a new start as a settler in Algeria. Unable to make a living there he returned to dig railway tunnels near Lyon before becoming a canut or silkweaver in the Croix-Rousse district of Lyon. Often laid off for lack of work he tried to become independent, marrying another silkweaver with 200 francs in savings, borrowing some more and renting lodgings that could hold two looms. Unpaid debts and recession in 1867 forced him to go back as a wage worker, and having become involved with the Revolution of 1871 in Lyon he decided to emigrate to South America, where he was joined by his wife and son. He worked as a charcoal-burner in Argentina to build up his savings and then they moved to Paraguay where he bought a plot of land.26

  A key factor in the development of a working class was organization, but organization was precisely what government and employers wished to prevent. The Le Chapelier law of 1791 prohibited the association of members of any trade or occupation with a view to collective bargaining, on the grounds that ‘there is nothing but the particular interest of each individual and the general interest.’ In 1801 Bonaparte introduced the livret which every worker was obliged to carry as a record of his employment and to ensure that he repaid all debts to his employer before moving on. Articles 415 and 416 of the Penal Code of 1810 outlawed all ‘coalitions’ with an intent to raise the price of work by means of strike action as a kind of conspiracy or sedition, and imposed a two- to five-year prison term for leaders of any violation. All this was in the name of the free market, but workers who participated in the July Revolution of 1830 did not take long to prise open the contradiction between the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of exploitation and oppression. The Paris printers, the closure of whose presses had triggered the Revolution, launched their own paper, The Artisan: Journal of the Working Class, in September 1830, proclaiming that the working class was ‘the most numerous and most useful of society’, by the sweat of whose brow other classes made fortunes, but was now discovering a strength in ‘association, a means to remedy the misery of the working classes’.27

  As an organization of the working classes compagnonnage was not a good starter at this point. In one sense a charitable organization providing hospitality for young journeymen undertaking the Tour de France, in another it was a monopoly of accredited workers which was dedicated to ensuring that employers paid them a decent wage. A group of compagnons were accused of forming a coalition to push up wages and were sent for trial at Saintes (Charente Maritime) in 1812. Although acquitted, the threat of legal procedures continued to haunt them. More serious, the division of the compagnons into a number of factions ritually pitted against each other made this an unlikely weapon of the working classes.28

  More fruitful in the long run as workers’ organizations were the friendly or mutual aid societies that developed after the Restoration. Ostensibly dedicated to the health and welfare of their members, and using such names as the Philanthropic Society of Tailors to avoid legal proceedings for coalition, they were in fact nascent trade unions prepared to take on the might of the employers and the state ranged behind them.29 The first great confrontation of the July Monarchy came in 1831 in Lyon, when the canuts or silkworkers, their rates driven down by international competition, organized into a master-weavers’ Society of Mutual Duty and a journeymen’s Society of Ferrandiers and tried to negotiate a minimum tariff with the silk merchants. Though the prefect chaired a meeting of merchants’ and workers’ representatives in October 1831 to agree a tariff, the merchants refused to recognize it, going over the head of the prefect to prime minister Casimir Périer for support. Proclaiming that ‘the July sun shone for everybody,’ the silkworkers went on strike on 21 November, descending from the Croix-Rousse and other suburbs, clashing with the National Guard (who were essentially the armed bourgeoisie), and briefly seizing control of the Hôtel de Ville. The first round was lost by the workers but mutual-aid societies reformed, including the Society of Mutual Duty of young master-weavers, which organized a successful strike against a pay cut imposed by merchants in February 1834. The government immediately replied with an Associations Law which banned these clandestine unions and sent the strike organizers to trial for illegal coalition. This provoked a demonstration, then an insurrection in Lyon, the silkworkers backed by other trades such as cobblers, tailors and building-workers which had also been trying to form associations. However, the insurrection was put down and the ringleaders sent to Paris, arraigned in the notorious case of the 121, many of them being sentenced to prison and deportation.30

  Although this kind of conflict with the bourgeoisie and behind them the state helped to shape the consciousness of workers as members of a working class, other factors worked against that class consciousness. The rising of 1834 in Paris, parallel to that in Lyon, had been led by republicans who considered the workers to be an integral part of ‘the people’, composed of everyone apart from the elite. The Republic proclaimed in 1848 was not particularly committed to workers: only one member of the provisional government and 34 of the 900 members of the National Assembly were workers.31 The ‘organization of labour’ was the order of the day and trade associations flourished, but the experiment of national workshops for the unemployed ended in disaster, and the June Days of 1848 witnessed a martyrization of the Paris working class. Norbert Truquin, who saw action on the barricades, spoke of ‘a legal massacre of workers’.32 Workers had a more positive attitude towards the Second Empire, generally enjoying rising wages, with particular enthusiasm among the ironworkers of Lorraine and the miners of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The government cultivated the working class in order to wean it away from th
e republican leaderships.33 In particular it modified the harsh sanctions of the Penal Code against coalition in a law of 25 May 1864, sponsored by republican deputy Émile Ollivier. While still outlawing picketing in the name of the right to work the law now authorized trade unions which legitimately tried to improve the lot of their members.34 The government also sponsored an engineering worker, Tolain, to visit the International Exhibition of 1862 in London. He ran as a labour candidate in a Paris by-election of 1863, urging workers not to vote for bourgeois republican politicians. The alliance of Empire and workers was however imperfect. Tolain was inspired by anarchism and led a delegation of French workers to a congress of the International Workers’ Association in Geneva in 1866. Some sectors, such as the Lyon textile workers, were never converted to the Empire, and the final years of the regime saw an upsurge of strike action. Although the steel town of Le Creusot was dominated by Eugène Schneider, Jean-Baptiste Dumay, whose career as an ironworker had been interrupted by military service between 1861 and 1867, returned there as a blast-furnace puddler and early in 1870 was involved in an ironworkers’ strike over the company’s bid to control the benefit fund that was deducted from their wages. The strike spread to the miners employed by the company, and twenty-seven of the ringleaders were sent for trial in April, receiving sentences raging from three months to three years. It seemed that little had changed since 1834, except that the Le Creusot strike became a cause célèbre, and militants of the International Workers Association came to Le Creusot to set up a branch there. Dumay proclaimed: ‘We were proud that our cause provoked universal sympathy and when the time comes we will also practise working-class solidarity. In the meantime we loudly proclaim our membership of the great International Association of Workers, that sublime freemasonry of all the workers of the world.’35