Children of the Revolution Read online

  Even more powerful as a challenge was the development of steamships and the penetration of the railways that created a global market for agricultural produce and threatened the traditionally unspecial-ized and somewhat autarkic French farm. The opening up of the wheat plains of the Ukraine and American Midwest resulted in a glut of grain, and a 20–25 per cent fall in cereal prices in the early 1880s, confronting French farmers with the alternative of specializing in cash crops that were in demand or facing bankruptcy. Cereal farming remained the staple of the central plain of France, but became more efficient, with mechanical innovations such as reapers, reaper-binders and threshing machines replacing agricultural workers who were now scarcer and became 30 per cent more expensive in 1890– 1910, and also with the use of chemical fertilizers, the consumption of which doubled in France between 1890 and 1900 alone.10 The demand for meat and dairy produce from growing towns encouraged a shift from arable to pasture for cattle in Normandy and Brittany, Poitou and the Charentes, with a supporting acreage of fodder crops. Normandy developed a network of dairies to make cheese and a meeting of fifty cheesemakers at Lisieux in 1911 established a cartel to defend their monopoly of true Camembert cheese.11 The Nord and Pas-de-Calais concentrated on sugar beet, known as ‘the vine of the north’, which supplied not only industrial sugar production but also fodder for increased cattle production. Étienne Lantier, hero of Zola’s Germinal, arrives at the mine near Valenciennes where he is seeking work ‘across fields of beet’, which grew denser under the impact of price rises and booming production in 1897–1914.12 Meanwhile in the south of France wine production became less of a facet of polyculture than a regional monoculture, serving the growing wine consumption of the urban French. The problem with specialized cash-crops is that years of boom were too often followed by years of slump, when the crop failed or the bottom fell out of the market. In the Midi, phylloxera – a yellow aphid attacking the vine roots – spread across the vineyards from the 1870s. Thousands of small winegrowers went out of business, their plots acquired by the wine barons who were able to replant at great cost with undamaged vines from California. Failed winegrowers returned to work as agricultural labourers, who in 1892 formed 17 per cent of the agricultural population in the Midi compared to a national average of 9 per cent.13 Catastrophe, however, struck again after 1900 when bumper harvests, combined with the import of wine from Algeria and the switch from wine to beet to distil alcohol, caused wine prices to collapse. The price of table wine in particular fell from 23–24 francs per hectolitre in 1871–5 to 10–11 francs in 1902–6.14

  French peasants had a reputation for being solitary and individualistic, dedicated to holding on to their plot and increasing its yield. However, in the face of these challenges peasants were forced to organize themselves. The cost of fertilizer and machines and the need to secure fair prices for cash crops encouraged the formation of cooperatives. Mazières in the Deux-Sèvres, which was linked to the railway system in 1886 and was shifting to dairy cattle, set up a dairy co-operative in 1895 under the initiative of the republican mayor, while the purchase of fertilizer was organized by the agricultural union, run by his conservative political rivals, after 1901.15 Trade unions were permitted under legislation of 1884 and in the countryside agricultural unions tended to be less the instruments of peasants against landowners than the instruments of landowners to control peasants while providing them with benefits such as cooperatives. These tended to be run in the west of France and Massif Central by Catholic conservative landowners, as a legitimate vehicle for their royalist politics, but were challenged by competing unions of republican notables. Hervé Budes de Guébriant, a royalist landowner of Saint-Pol, became president of the Office Central des Oeuvres Mutuelles Agricoles du Finistère in 1911 and with the help of the clergy kept Breton peasants on a tight leash down to the Second World War.16 Trade union legislation was exploited for class purposes on the other hand by landless or near-landless peasants. The woodcutters of the Cher and Nièvre in central France, whose product faced competition from iron for building and coke and coal for smelting and heating, saw the rates paid by wood merchants more than halve in the 1880s, founded woodcutters’ unions after 1890 and organized strike action in 1903.17 Near by, in the Allier, Émile Guillaumin was involved in founding a union of métayers, the Federation of Landworkers, in 1905, to improve their ability to negotiate with landlords.18 In Languedoc-Roussillon unions of the landless workers in the wine industry were founded in the 1890s, linked in 1903 into the Federation of Agricultural Workers of the Midi, 15,000 strong, based at Béziers, and launched a general strike in 1904. This was unsuccessful, because those who suffered from the glut were not just landless labourers but small and larger winegrowers, indeed whole communities. A new phase was opened in 1907 by Marcellin Albert, winegrower and café-owner of Argilliers, and Ernest Ferroul the Radical-Socialist mayor of Narbonne, who was also a Félibre and friend of the ‘red Félibre’ Xavier de Ricard. In May and June 1907, using the rhetoric of the Albigensian revolt against the tyranny of Paris, they organized huge demonstrations, hundreds of thousands strong, from Perpignan, Carcassonne and Narbonne to Béziers, Montpellier and Nîmes, and orchestrated the mass resignation of municipalities – 76 per cent in the Hérault, 53 per cent in the Aude, 44 per cent in the Pyrénées Orientales – leaving such notices as ‘closed because of misery’ or ‘free commune’. In late June Clemenceau, as premier, was forced to send in the army, which killed five demonstrators in Narbonne but, made up of conscripts as it was, mutinied at Béziers. Marcellin Albert, summoned to Paris to negotiate, was discredited by accepting a hundred francs for his fare home, and a law of 29 June 1907 restored some order to the wine industry.19 The ‘revolt of the vignerons’ was community activism rather than class struggle and, despite the drama, was limited to one corner of Mediterranean France.

  ORGANIZING THE WORKERS

  On 21 February 1884 a miners’ strike broke out at Anzin in the Nord. Émile Zola interrupted his work on La Terre to go to the scene, escorted by Alfred Giard, professor at the Science Faculty of Lille and republican deputy for Valenciennes. He met the miners’ leader, Basly, and was permitted to go down a pit 675 metres deep. He returned to Paris to complete research into mining matters and to write Germinal, which was serialized in Gil Blas between November 1884 and February 1885, and published in book form in March 1885. In the novel Étienne Lantier, sacked from the railway workshops in Lille, arrives at Anzin to find the aged miner Bonnemort, who had ‘worked for fifty years at the pit, of which forty-five were underground’. Becoming a leader, and later addressing a meeting of 3,000 striking miners, he exhibits Bonnemort and exclaims, ‘is it not terrible: a people dying at the coal-face from father to son, in order to bribe ministers and allow generations of great lords and capitalists to give parties or grow fat at their fireside!’20

  Zola’s image of a race of miners, whose families had been exploited for generations, is powerful but far from the experience of most miners. The annual turnover rate for miners in the Valenciennes area was 8 per cent in 1896, rising to 14 per cent in 1906 and to 34 per cent in 1914. Some who left went to the newer mines of the Pas-de-Calais, where wages were better, while still more abandoned the mine for jobs in the steel industry with local firms such as the Company of Furnaces, Forges and Steelworks of Denain-Anzin.21 Most miners, especially in the mines flanking the Massif Central, were recruits from the countryside, initially with their own plots of land, and leaving the pit each evening and each summer to work in the fields. Mining companies had to work hard to force miners to live near the pits, providing them with back-to-back accommodation as an incentive, and to discipline them to a full working day, winter and summer. The Carmaux mine was beginning to recruit second-generation miners or ‘born proletarians’ by the 1890s, but the turnover rate was still daunting. In order to retain one miner the Carmaux company had to hire between one and two miners in 1890–92, but between four and five miners in 1900–1901 and sixteen or seventeen miners in 1
911–12.22

  The number of industrial workers in France fell from 3,151,000 in 1876 to 3,056,000 in 1886, because of economic depression in those years, but it grew to 3,303,000 in 1906 and even more rapidly to 4,726,000 in 1911.23 Such growth could not be supplied by the urban working classes themselves because of high death rates but required the influx provided by rural depopulation, as we have seen, by increasing the proportion of women in work from 25 per cent of women in 1866 to 39 per cent in 1911,24 and now by foreign immigration. The nationality law of 1889 was fairly flexible, making French nationality automatic for children of foreigners who were themselves born in France, and optional when the foreign parents had been born abroad, so that by 1911 foreigners accounted for 2.8 per cent of the population, 3.3 per cent including naturalized foreigners. There had long been seasonal migration of Belgians over the border to help with the beet harvest, but 40 per cent of the textile workers in the textile boom town of Roubaix were Belgian in 1904 and the Lille suburb of Wazemmes was known as ‘little Belgium’. The development of large-scale wine production in Languedoc-Roussillon after the phylloxera epidemic sucked in Spanish migrant labour, whose numbers rose from 62,000 in 1872 to 105,000 in 1911. Italians, who had hitherto been familiar in the shops of Marseille, were increasingly visible as warehousemen in the southern ports, and as navvies building railways, tunnels and dams in south-eastern France. In 1894 they provided blackleg labour to break a miners’ strike in Rive-de-Gier, above Saint-Étienne. The previous year, after the assassination of President Carnot by an Italian anarchist, twenty Italian workers were set upon and killed at Aigues-Mortes (Gard). After 1908 Italian labour was recruited by the Comité des Forges to work in the orefields and steelworks of French Lorraine, where they numbered 14,000 by 1913. Finally, Russian and Romanian Jews fleeing pogroms arrived in Paris, concentrating around the Marais and Montmartre, where they were the mainstay of the garment industry as tailors and capmakers, and prominent as cabinet makers.25

  The working classes had never formed a bloc, sharply divided as they were by differences between regional economies, local and national origin and gender. A huge skills gap separated the working-class aristocracy of artisans who had undergone an apprenticeship, and organized legally or illegally to ensure a closed shop for the trade and payment at a good price, and the unskilled labourer, competing for work with the rest of the ‘industrial reserve army’ and taken on seasonally or casually at whatever wage was dictated by the economic cycle. These divisions were changing, however, in the later nineteenth century, and a more homogeneous working class was emerging. Production was moving from the countryside to the town, into large factories powered by steam or electricity, where labour discipline was imposed by long days and close surveillance. The canuts or handloom silkweavers of Lyon were displaced by power looms in factories in the city suburbs or along the Isère valley, where hydro-electric power was harnessed. By the eve of the First World War a third of Lyon workers were employed in the engineering industry, including car manufacture, and chemicals, while only a quarter were left in textiles.26 At Saint-Chamond near Saint-Étienne domestic artisanal ribbon-weaving gave way to factory braidmaking. The stocking makers of the Troyes region no longer worked in their homes, scattered over the Champagne countryside, but were concentrated in the hosiery mills of Troyes itself.27 Mechanization was making progress in trades hitherto requiring precise manual skills. Sewing, stitching and lasting machines transformed shoemaking from an artisanal to an industrial process, undertaken in factories such as those of Fougères in Brittany. The introduction of the Siemens oven after 1878 revolutionized glass production and undermined the skilled glass-blowers of Rive-de-Gier, outside Saint-Étienne.28 Meanwhile the file-forgers of nearby Le Chambon-Feugerolles were said to be ‘boiling over’ in 1899. ‘A company has been established at Trablaine for the mechanical manufacture of files and this has resulted in a great anger among the workers. According to them,’ reported a local paper, ‘the number of workers is going to be reduced, they will be deprived of their skill and reduced to misery.’29 Printers who came to Paris for the 1900 Exhibition were, in the words of one worker, Jeanne Bouvier, ‘shattered to see the linotype compositing machine which they thought would reduce their salaries and throw many of them out of work’.30 Machines degraded the expertise of the skilled artisan since they could be operated by semi-skilled workers who were cheaper and now more efficient. Closed shops were broken open and apprenticeship fell into disuse. The profile of the working class now shifted, with a growing body of semi-skilled workers at its heart, displacing the elite of skilled workers and throwing the unskilled into the ‘industrial reserve army’ of the unemployed.

  The working classes challenged these developments by strike action. Strikes were launched first by the skilled workers trying to protect their skills monopoly and conditions during the boom that coincided with the republicans’ arrival in power in 1878–9 and held out hope of a ‘social republic’. They were followed by the ‘big battalions’ of miners and textile workers, initially trying to take advantage of the rising market to push up wages and reduce hours, then, as depression bit in 1883–6, defending against wage-cuts and lay-offs. The Anzin miners’ strike of 1884 witnessed by Zola was mirrored by other miners’ strikes at Carmaux in 1883 and Decazeville in 1886, when an engineer was thrown out of a window and killed.31 Forty thousand textile workers went on strike in Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing and Armentières (Nord) in April 1880. ‘Striking France’, asserts Michelle Perrot, ‘was above all textile France, capital Roubaix.’32 On 9 March 1883 thousands of unemployed workers, under the leadership of building workers, marched and demonstrated in Paris, the first of many such events in the 1880s.33

  The thinking in governing circles was that ordinary workers were interested only in jobs and pay, and that strike action was fomented by agitators, often from outside the working-class community, drunk on half-baked socialist ideas. In Germinal Étienne Lantier is portrayed in this way, while Maheu, a solid miner with a large family to feed, is to begin with not interested in militant action. The republican government took the view that if workers were allowed freely to form trade unions, to negotiate legitimately to defend their economic interests, they would no longer be vulnerable to the political blandishments of socialist agitators. This was the purpose of the law of 21 March 1884, sponsored by the government of Jules Ferry, who declared in 1887, ‘the strike is industrial war, the union is social peace.’34

  In the event workers were fairly slow to form trade unions, with only 9 per cent of the industrial workforce unionized in 1891.35 The skilled trades, which had a long tradition of compagnonnage or illegal workers’ associations, were the quickest to respond. In 1901 some 60 per cent of miners were unionized, as were 31 per cent of printers and 21 per cent of metalworkers, but only 9 per cent of textile workers were unionized, explained in part because women formed a large proportion of the workforce, while unskilled workers such as the Bretons of the chemical and tanning factories of Saint-Denis or Italian workers in the Lorraine ironfields were largely unorganized.36 Employers were reluctant to recognize trade unions and in company towns where the employer was the main service provider they were able to resist dealing with them. At Saint-Chamond near Saint-Étienne, with one big employer, the Company of Naval Steelworks, and jobs secured by orders for warships, the local steel-workers helped to elect Aristide Briand their deputy in 1902 and supported him even when he broke the railway strike of 1910.37 In 1913 only 1,064,000 or 10 per cent of the industrial workforce was unionized in France, as against 3,023,000 or 26 per cent in Great Britain and 3,317,000 or 63 per cent in Germany.38 Perhaps Waldeck-Rousseau and Ferry were correct, and it was the lack of unionization in France that explained the upsurge in strike action after 1906.

  Trade unions needed to federate in order to prevent divide-and-rule tactics by employers and the government. Two options were available: either to form national federations of workers in the same trade, or to found local federations, based on th
e same town, of workers in different trades. It was a characteristic of the French labour movement that national federations were less successful than local federations, that France lacked the powerful national federations of miners, railwaymen or engineers found in Great Britain and Germany. The French labour movement remained essentially regional.

  National federations, it is true, were set up in the skilled trades, by hatters in 1880, printers in 1881, building workers in 1882. Railway workers set up a national federation in 1890 but the skilled engineers and firemen had their own union and were reluctant to co-operate with it, severely undermining the railwaymen’s strike of 1898.39 A national textile union was founded in Lyon, although 30 per cent of the members of the founding congress came from Lyon.40 Most eloquent, however, was the story of the national miners’ union. A national union was founded at Saint-Étienne in 1883 by Michel Rondet, a miner from La Ricamerie, but his reformism brought him into conflict with the revolutionary Marxist miners of the Loire basin, led by Gilbert Cotte. Matters came to a head in 1888 when the Loire miners went on strike, opposed by Rondet who was the same year elected to the Saint-Étienne municipal council. Rondet was expelled from the Loire miners’ union but remained general secretary of the national miners’ union. He made common cause with the miners of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, controlled by Émile Basly. Basly was less a militant than a power-broker, who saw the best strategy for his miners not as strike action but as building a local power-base and cultivating relations with those who mattered in Paris. On the strength of the Anzin strike he was elected deputy for Paris in 1885–9, then fell back on the Pas-de-Calais, elected deputy for Lens in 1891 and mayor of Lens from 1900 to his death in 1928. Rondet and Basly refused to affiliate the miners’ union to the Confédération Générale du Travail, which was dominated by anarcho-syndicalists, from 1895 until 1908. Indeed, when the national miners’ union called a general strike in October 1902 Basly broke the united front and kept his Pas-de-Calais miners out of it.41