Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. x + 284 pp. $54.95 cloth.

Abstract

The metamorphosis of French syndicalism is easy enough to discern. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the Bourses du Travail and the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), workers talked openly about revolution. Employers and the government took them seriously, as they took themselves seriously. After all, French labor had a long and impressive revolutionary pedigree, and throughout the fin de siècle the working class kept adding to its scars as it continued to engage in frequent and violent confrontations with the forces of order. Thus the proletariat primed itself for the decisive showdown: the general strike, the heroic and largely spontaneous episode that would finish off bourgeois society and bring workers to power. This was the revolutionary “myth” that propelled the labor movement forward.