Children of the Revolution Read online

  Much more successful were the local federations of unions. These came under the umbrella of the Bourses du Travail, which were to begin with simply labour exchanges to deal with the pressing problem of unemployment in the 1880s. They were funded by republican municipalities, generally as a reward for the electoral support of workers in delivering republican victory in municipal elections. However, they provided much needed venues for local trade unions accustomed to meet in the back rooms of cafés, and trade unionists used the contact with unemployed workers to encourage them to join the union if it found them a job. Bourses du Travail were set up at Marseille in 1885, Paris in 1886 and Lyon in 1891, and a Saint-Étienne conference of 1892 set up a federation of Bourses du Travail. Local solidarity proved much more effective in promoting the cause of labour, as in 1893 when powerful support for the striking metalworkers of Rive-de-Gier came from the glassworkers of the town.42 As in agriculture, local loyalties were generally more powerful than class solidarity.

  A WIDENING PETITE BOURGEOISIE

  The processes of industrial concentration and mechanization did not mean the disappearance of the artisan or petit patron, employing a small number of workers, from the French economy. The number of firms in fact peaked in 1906 and while some industrial sectors, such as mining, metallurgy and textiles, were given over to large enterprises, in others the small firm continued to exist. A survey of 1907, for example, showed that the average number of workers employed was 2.4 in the joinery trade and shoe industry, 2.1 in the female garment trade and 1.4 in the case of tailors, 1.1 for bakers and 0.8 for charcutiers.43 Competition from large-scale industry drove many small firms out of business, but it also created a demand for specialist suppliers. Thus in Paris there were thriving small workshops which provided spare parts for larger engineering firms, and ‘articles de Paris’ such as artificial flowers, imitation jewellery, vanity bags and umbrellas were made in workshops that had moved from the centre of Paris to the suburbs, while demand for fashion goods from department stores provided work for subcontractors who had orders made up in sweatshops or at home by women now using sewing machines.44

  Just as large factories competed with small workshops, so department stores competed with small shops. In Zola’s Au bonheur des dames an orphaned Denise comes from Normandy to work in her uncle’s crumbling draper’s shop, Au Viel Elbeuf. There is no place for her there so she goes to work as a sales assistant in a department store painted by Zola as a brightly lit cathedral of commerce, whose only aim is to seduce the fashionable ladies of Paris. Mocked as a country girl by more urbane staff, worked off her feet from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., she nevertheless ends up marrying Octave Mouret, the owner of the store.45 This happy end is perhaps the only fanciful element in Zola’s book, which might have been modelled on the career of Jules Jaluzot, the son of a notary of the Nièvre who dropped out of Saint-Cyr, became head of the silk department at Bon Marché, married a rich heiress and set up Printemps in 1865. After a fire he rebuilt it in the style of a cathedral, complete with nave, in 1881–5, lit by electricity, and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1889.46 Of course the department stores squeezed out the small shops of central Paris which had sold the same products, provoking more militant shopkeepers to form a Ligue Syndicale du Travail, de l’Industrie et du Commerce in 1888, attacking the German-Jewish bankers they saw funding the big stores.47 However, many shops moved to the suburbs where they catered for the working-class and white-collar clienteles who lived there. While the number of small grocers in the central 1st arrondissement fell from 131 to 60 between 1860 and 1914, in the popular Belleville 20th arrondissement they multiplied from 196 to 456.48 Auvergnats continued to exploit their niche in wine stores, cafés, hotels, ironmongery and coal provision. Only about 30 per cent enjoyed business success, but those who did returned to the Auvergne in the summer on ‘Bonnet trains’, named after Louis Bonnet, owner of the Auvergnat de Paris, who negotiated special rates with the railway company. There they showed off their gold watches, cigars and silk dresses, dominated conversation in the café and teased the countryfolk who stayed in the villages for their backwardness.49 Lastly, although the countryside lost rural artisans, it gained shops which moved in to meet the rising living standards of the farming clientele. Mazières-en-Gâtine for example had one grocer in 1850 but three in 1880, selling coffee, sugar, soap, candles and matches, needles and thread, and one café in 1850 but six in 1880. A wine merchant and beer shop arrived in 1896, the butcher and charcutier were joined by a fishmonger in 1911, and a second baker set up in 1906 as peasants stopped making their own bread.50

  Denise’s career in Au bonheur des dames was in many ways typical of those who moved not upwards, out of the petite bourgeoisie, but sideways, from the ‘old lower-middle class’ of shop or workshop, which required some capital but little formal education, to the ‘new middle class’ of white-collar workers, which required no capital but some education and a polite and subservient manner. In 1911 the twelve largest Parisian department stores had 11,000 employees. They were recruited not from the countryside, which supplied domestic servants, but from Paris and provincial towns, and were not working class but came from a retailing or white-collar background.51 The development of global markets, expanding comm unica t ions and urbanization created new opportunities for clerical workers in banks, in railway and insurance companies, and in utility companies supplying water, gas and electricity. The state was extending its responsibilities into education and social services, not least with the expulsion of religious congregations from schools, while developing postal, telegraph and telephone services and, at the local level, as we have seen, taking over some provision of utilities. The white-collar population of Paris grew from 126,000 or 16 per cent of the working population in 1866 to 353,000 or 21 per cent in 1911, the proportion of women increasing from 15 per cent to 31.52 They behaved differently from the working class: not necessarily earning more money but having more education, as the elementary education system added extra classes up to the age of sixteen, to provide the necessary numeracy and good handwriting.53 The director of the École Turgot in Paris was proud to announce in 1875, ‘the principal goal of the great majority of both pupils and parents is office employment.’54 Office workers tended to marry later and have fewer children, regarding children as a hindrance to social mobility. They were savers rather than spenders, paying into sickness and pension schemes provided by the firm or mutual aid societies.

  That said, white-collar workers, like manual workers, were subjected to long hours and bullying by superiors, and in 1889 they set up a Federal Union of Employees. In the public sector post-office workers formed two unions in 1900, and claimed that two-thirds of workers were members by 1903. The state, however, forbade public servants from forming trade unions, and sacked several hundred post-office workers after a strike in 1906, which provoked another strike in 1909.55 Some instituteurs or primary school teachers felt similarly about their situation. ‘We educate the children of the people by day,’ proclaimed the manifesto of syndicalist teachers in 1905, ‘what could be more natural than thinking of meeting men of the people in the evening?’56 Instituteurs waged war with the government in 1907 about the right to form trade unions, but had little thought of going on strike. Of those training to be instituteurs at the École Normale of Douai in the Nord in 1893–1914 only 15 per cent were sons of industrial workers; 35 per cent were sons of peasants, artisans or shopkeepers, while 21 per cent were sons of other white-collar workers, 19 per cent sons of instituteurs, and 9 per cent from property-owning, professional or business backgrounds.57 Most regarded themselves as secular priests with a mission to modernize France and root the Republic in the towns and villages, not to undermine it.58

  COMPETITION FOR THE PROFESSIONS

  In Les Déracinés of 1897, Maurice Barrès explored how seven young students from Nancy who went to Paris to make brilliant careers came up against intense competition for success.

  As I write these lines there are 730 gra
duates in arts and sciences who are looking for jobs in education; they regard their qualification as a guarantee from the State. While waiting, over 450 have become school supervisors in order to live. And how many jobs are there? Six per year. This situation discourages neither the young people, nor the secondary education system. There are 350 scholars taking degrees and the agrégation. That is to say that the State makes 350 new commitments when it has only six places already fought over by 730 individuals who will become 1,080 and increase to infinity… if they do not become angry with the government they will attack society. In 1882–1883 a particular class is taking shape under our eyes: a student proletariat.59

  Of the students, four had the advantage of family resources. Henri de Saint-Phlin, of noble stock, studied for an arts degree. François Sturel, also from a landed background, and Georges Suret-Lefort, whose father was a businessman, began law degrees. Maurice Roemer-spacher, a doctor’s son, attended the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Three were not so well provided for. Antoine Mouchefrin, a scholar at the Lycée and a photographer’s son, started medical studies but ran out of money and dropped out. Honoré Racadot, the son of a peasant who did well out of selling livestock to the Germans during the 1870 war, became a notary’s clerk in the hope of later buying a notarial office, for which no legal qualification was required. Alfred Renaudin, who had lost his father, a tax inspector, hoped to make a living as a great journalist, but was reduced to being a humble reporter.

  After 1889 competition became even more intense when the new military service law, introducing a universal three-year period, exempted from the army those with arts or science degrees, doctorates in law or medicine, or diplomas from a grande école. Henri Bérenger, in his 1901 study of Intellectual Proletarians in France, complained that ‘a host of young men who previously would have gone into commerce or industry, have thrown themselves into university to escape military service.’60 The university population rose from 11,200 in 1876 to 42,000 in 1914, fuelling a great debate at the turn of the century about the déclassement of young people from the lower classes seeking to escape menial occupations, the ballooning of higher education which turned out larger numbers of young people with useless degrees, the intense competition for places in the professions and government service that would leave many of them dissatisfied, and the political danger posed by half-educated intellectuals.61

  The obvious path for young people of academic ability who lacked family resources was the teaching profession. Bouteiller, the grey eminence of Les Déracinés who taught the young men at the Lycée de Nancy before being appointed to Paris, was described as ‘the son of a Lille worker who was picked out at the age of eight for his precocious and studious intelligence, and won scholarships all the way up to the École Normale [Supérieure] from which he graduated at the top of the list’.62 Teachers in secondary schools were more and more qualified during the Third Republic, the elite securing an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure and obtaining the best posts in the lycées or competing for university positions, the mass of teachers in lycées and municipal colleges (which did not have a sixth form) now having a degree from an arts or science faculty. Such was the demand for posts, however, that many were reduced to serving time as répétiteurs, commonly known as pions or pawns, who were not allowed to teach but supervised homework, playgrounds and dormitories. In 1876 only 7 per cent of pions had degrees; in 1898 it was 35 per cent, in which year only 3.4 per cent of them secured a permanent teaching post in a college.63 Secondary school teachers had cultural but not social capital: among those teaching in 1900–1914, around 9 per cent were sons of industrial workers, 39 per cent sons of peasants, shopkeepers and artisans, 19 per cent sons of instituteurs and secondary school teachers, 13 per cent sons of other white-collar workers, and only 11 per cent sons of professional and businessmen, a profile that differed little from that of the École Normale d’Instituteurs of Douai.64 Even among academics, the social origin of professors in French universities was sharply inferior to those teaching in German universities in 1870–1930, with 35 per cent of French arts professors from teaching backgrounds and 35 per cent of science professors originating in the petite bourgeoisie or working class.65 In some cases teachers might succeed by acquiring connections and marrying into wealth. Édouard Herriot, the son of a soldier who was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, began his career training candidates for the École Normale at the Lycée Ampère of Lyon. However, during the Dreyfus Affair, through his involvement in the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, he acquired the patronage of the mayor of Lyon, Victor Augagneur, married the daughter of a doctor (who was president of the conseil général of the Rhône) and granddaughter of a senator of the Rhône, and was thus launched on a political career that took him to be mayor of Lyon from 1905 to 1940, senator in 1912, minister in 1916, deputy in 1919 and prime minister in 1924–6 and 1932.66 More of a struggle was experienced by Jean Guéhenno, the son of a shoeworker of Fougères in Brittany, who was obliged to leave the local municipal college when his father became ill, and work as an office-boy in a shoe factory. He swotted for the baccalauréat on his own, in order to ‘become a Monsieur’, and then won a scholarship to the Lycée of Rennes to compete for the École Normale Supérieure. He saw himself as a ‘strange candidate, who knows neither Latin nor Greek’, and he failed the examination first time, after which his father died. He succeeded the second time in 1911, this time from the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, but felt ‘ridiculous’ compared to the sons of ‘kings and leaders’ there and was embarrassed to return to Fougères, wanting his determinedly working-class mother to wear a hat. Among recruits to the École Normale Supérieure between 1868 and 1941 in arts subjects, only 3.4 per cent came from the working class and 8.6 per cent from artisans, peasants and shopkeepers, as against 34 per cent from business, professional and higher official families, but those with a teaching background from higher to primary levels and therefore with cultural rather than social capital were overrepresented, accounting for 32 per cent of the entry.67 Nevertheless, Guéhenno had a successful teaching career, preparing students of the top Paris lycées for admission to the École Normale, becoming a writer and left-wing intellectual, and succeeding to Herriot’s chair at the Académie Française in 1962.68

  Medicine was another profession in which competition was severe. There were 2,629 medical students in France in 1876, and 8,533 in 1914, over half of them in Paris and 10 per cent of them women.69 Until 1892 qualified doctors did not even have a monopoly of medical practice, but had to compete with so-called health officers such as Charles Bovary in Flaubert’s novel, who were supposed to increase medical provision in the countryside but did not even have a secondary education. The latter were effectively killed off by the military service law of 1889 which required them, unlike medical students, to do three years in the army, and by the monopoly legislation of 1892.70 That said, in 1901 Henri Bérenger calculated that of 2,500 doctors in Paris, 1,200 earned less than 8,000 francs, and made ends meet as ‘beaters’ finding clients for more successful doctors and surgeons, by running VD clinics or doing back-street abortions.71 As with teachers, a good marriage and connections were essential. Georges Clemenceau, a doctor’s son from the Vendée who qualified in 1865, married a wealthy American, Mary Plummer, whom he met on a trip to the United States. More crucial for him, however, was the support of the leading republican Étienne Arago, who when he was mayor of Paris in September 1870 appointed Clemenceau mayor of Montmartre, and allowed him to begin his political career.72 The increasing status of doctors under the Third Republic was reflected in their greater political profile: doctors accounted for 9 per cent of deputies in 1885 and 12 per cent in 1893, while they provided 8 per cent of senators in 1885 and 14 per cent of senators in 1900.73 Election to the Chamber or Senate was an accolade for a country doctor who had done well through contacts he had made for himself. About half the 10,000 doctors in the provinces earned little, according to Bérenger, but they had more opportun
ity to cut a figure and marry well in local society. Émile Combes, for example, a weaver’s son from Rocquemaure in the Tarn, was seminary-educated and taught in the 1850s at the petit séminaire of Castres, the famous Assumptionist College of Père d’Alzon in Nîmes and the diocesan college of Pons (Charente), before marrying the daughter of a draper, whose uncle was a banker. The dowry and loans enabled him to requalify as a doctor in 1868 and he set up comfortably as a GP in Pons, using his network of clients to launch a political career and being elected a senator in 1885.74

  The law was an equally competitive profession, but one where the rewards were potentially greater, since it was the royal road to government office. The 5,239 law students in 1876 became 16,465 in 1914, with 46 per cent of them in Paris but only 149 or 0.05 per cent of them women.75 Bérenger was equally scathing about the rat race of the legal profession, arguing that of 3,000 barristers in Paris few earned anything before their early thirties and only 200 earned over 10,000 francs. To succeed they needed family resources and, as usual, connections. The law was an obligatory training for government bureaucracy, and 94 per cent of prefects in 1876–1918 were legally trained.76 The appointment of prefects was generally influenced by the deputies from the area they would serve, so political patronage was important. The Cambon brothers, Paul and Jules, lost their father, who owned a tanning factory at Avallon, when they were young, but their uncle was bishop of Langres and as law students in Paris they were close to Jules Ferry. Paul Cambon escaped with Jules Ferry, then prefect of the Seine, when the Commune broke out, and at thirty, in 1873, was appointed the youngest prefect of France, at Troyes. There he met and married a general’s daughter, and became prefect at Lille in 1878, a post to which his brother succeeded in 1882. Paul was promoted minister-resident of the new Tunisian Protectorate, while Jules became governor-general of Algeria in 1891. From colonial administration the Cambon brothers moved into diplomacy, Paul ambassador at Madrid and Constantinople before going to London in 1898, Jules ambassador in Washington and Madrid before going to Berlin in 1907.77