1 - Introduction

Summary

In one of his last works before he passed away, renowned French author Émile Zola sketched a utopian cité idéale, or ideal steel manufacturing company town, by 1900. He compared this new fictitious town, La Crêcherie, with the adjacent, more traditional company town, Beaucourt. In contrast to Beaucourt, workers at La Crêcherie had better working conditions, better wages, shorter working hours and could also access a number of additional welfare work benefits, like attractive family houses with gardens, green parks, schools, cooperative shops, pensions, etc. Moreover, to prevent a monotonous work life, workers at La Crêcherie had to rotate tasks several times a day. Generally, workers and their families at la Crêcherie were happier and healthier than the workers at Beaucourt. Zola’s novel was not a complete figment. He based his utopia on Fourier’s ideas concerning the Phalanstère, a collectively organized utopic living and working community. Zola also undertook extensive research in the important French coalmines of Anzin in the North of France, as well as in a large steel complex in the industrial city Saint Etienne. What Zola had in mind at that time was to influence social reformers, progressive employers and politicians in the French Third Republic, and likewise define a new ideal for French labour relations at the turn of the nineteenth century. In fact, Zola’s cité idéale better expressed the progressive mood of the past in France – as well as in many other capitalist countries – because avant-garde company towns had already been built in France and elsewhere from the 1850s.

In the golden age of enlightened capitalism between 1880 and 1930 many, mainly larger, companies in various sectors (e.g. textiles, railroads, coalmining, metallurgy, electro technics, food, chemical industry) in various industrialized countries introduced remarkably comprehensive welfare work programmes. These programmes encompassed all kinds of provisions, such as workingman’s housing, cheap mortgage loans, profit sharing schemes, saving schemes, pension saving schemes, schools, healthcare services, shops, sports facilities, and worker participation. Employers, often supported by social reformers, had various short-term as well as long-term economic and moral aims to introduce welfare work programmes in their companies .