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The French Working Class and the Blum Government (1936–37)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Arthur Mitzman
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To the French Left in May 1936, the electoral triumph of the Front Populaire – a coalition of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties – signified nothing if not the victory of legal republicanism over the criminal machinations of domestic fascism. Consequently, embarrassment – not to mention confusion – was widespread, when the proletariat chose to greet this victory with a wave of sit-down strikes that was at once massive, spontaneous, joyful, and utterly illegal. It is true that the roots of the strikers' grievances went much further back than the political campaign of recent months. Five years of lowered wages, poorer working conditions, and the indifference of many employers to the lot of their men were behind the workers' monumental audacity. Nevertheless, the coincidence of the strikes with Leon Blum's accession to office was far from accidental.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , December 1964 , pp. 363 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1964

References

page 363 note 1 Speaking of employer attitudes in the years preceding the Blum regime, Ehrmann, Henry, Organized Business in France (Princeton, 1957), p. 12Google Scholar says: “Absorbed by a constant fight for a share in an always limited and now still-narrowing market, beset by credit difficulties, cynical about domestic policies, many employers knew nothing about the living conditions and the mentality of their own workers.” In the same work, on p. 6, Ehrmann refers to the “shocked” and “ashamed” reaction of the employers' representatives at the Matignon Conference in June '36, when CGT leaders presented statistics showing the low wage rates in many industries. See also Prouteau, Henri, Les Occupations des usines en Italie et en France (Paris, 1937), p. 104.Google Scholar

page 363 note 2 Cf. Weil, Simone, La Condition Ouvrière (Paris, 1951), p. 168Google Scholar. The traditional treatment meted to strikers once calm was restored has been described in fictional form in the first part of La Grande Lutte (Paris, 1937)Google Scholar, by Tristan Remy.

page 364 note 1 Cf. Schwarz, Salomon, “Les Occupations d'usines en France de Mai et Juin, 1936”, in: International Review for Social History, Vol. II (1937), p. 51.Google Scholar

page 364 note 2 Werth, Alexander, Destiny of France (London, 1937), p. 304Google Scholar. A fictionalized account of the 1936 strike, Les Belles Journées by Maurice Lime (Paris, 1949), p. 128Google Scholar, also makes this point.

page 365 note 1 Lavergne, Bernard, “L'Expérience Blum”, in: L'Année politique française et étrangère, 06 1937, p. 191.Google Scholar

page 365 note 2 Borkenau, Franz, European Communism (New York, 1953), pp. 158, 198Google Scholar; Delmas, André, A gauche de la barricade (Paris, 1950), pp. 116–130, passim.Google Scholar

page 365 note 3 Borkenau, , p. 198Google Scholar; Delmas, idem.

page 366 note 1 Beloff, Max, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia (London, 1946), Vol. I, 1929–1936, pp. 90–91Google Scholar. Also cf. Ceyrat, Maurice, La trahison permanente, parti communiste et politique russe (Paris, 1947), pp. 40–44Google Scholar, and Borkenau, op. cit., p. 167.

page 366 note 2 Both Borkenau and Ceyrat hold that the achievement of this friction was the major reason for the communists' attempt to push France into the Spanish Civil War.

page 366 note 3 Cf. Werth, Alexander, The Twilight of France (New York, 1942), pp. 77–78.Google Scholar

page 366 note 4 On June 10, 1936, Maurice Thorez somewhat threateningly declared in L'Humanité that it was necessary to know how to end a strike once the essential demands were satisfied. In the July 25, 1936 number of Cahiers du Communisme Jacques Duclos told the proletariat that the workers could make their demands triumph not only without recourse to sit-down strikes, but even without striking, since before stopping work, the workers could use other means of pressure on the employers.

page 366 note 5 The “French Front” line was gradually brought out in L'Humanité between July 24th and August 3rd, 1936.

page 366 note 6 In two huge meetings alone, reported in L'Humanité for August 10 and 31, 1936, 700,000 people were gathered. Social issues were de-emphasized, national ones stressed, at these gatherings. Joan of Arc and the composer of the Marseillaise replaced Marx and Lenin as Communist saints; the supporters of Franco were compared to the aristocratic intriguers against the French Révolution; and Charles V was adduced to show the menace to France of a Spanish-German coalition.

page 367 note 1 On Sept. 3, 1936, Thorez, in a speech before 15,000 Renault workers, commended a proposed protest strike against the blockade (L'Humanité, Sept. 4, 1936)Google Scholar. On Sept. 7, the metal workers of Paris struck for one hour to protest, among other things, Blum's Spanish policy. These were the first protest strikes on Spain to be sanctioned by the Communist leadership.

page 367 note 2 Collinet, Michel, “Masses et militants: la bureaucratie et la crise actuelle du syndicalisme ouvrier français”, in: Revue d'histoire économique et sociale, Vol. 29, 1951, pp. 65–73Google Scholar. Delmas, op. cit., p. 104, offers further reason for Communist control over the union in the ability of the Communists to send their men into the new unions and, because of the workers' lack of sophistication, to get these militants appointed to key positions.

page 367 note 3 Collinet, op. cit., loc. cit.

page 367 note 4 This point is made very clearly in Lime, M., Les belles journées (Paris, 1949), pp. 128ffGoogle Scholar. which is described by the labor historian Dolléans, Eduard as “une image romancée, mais exacte de la réalité” (Histoire du mouvement ouvrier, Paris, 1953, Vol. III, p. 153)Google Scholar. Lime shows how, when the local communist leader fails to back a strike that has begun spontaneously, he is simply ignored until, contravening the orders of his superiors, he agrees to join the strike committee.

page 368 note 1 Delmas, op. cit., p. 93, says that during the June strikes, “in the conversation of one militant to another”, the Communists admitted “that the workers' demands mocked all their slogans, and declared that the wisest thing was to let themselves be carried by the popular current in order to give the impression that they were leading it”.

page 368 note 2 See p. 366, note 4.

page 368 note 3 In Le Populaire for August 9, 1936, see Farinet, Emile's column, “The Spanish War is a Class War”Google Scholar. On August 14, Marceau Pivert condemned the French Front in the Socialist paper, and also stressed the class struggle in the Spanish War. In the August 31st Populaire, Louis L'Hévéder sarcastically rebuffed Thorez' repeated pleas for a government “from Reynaud to Marcel Cachin”. As for the proletariat, Delmas says that “in the workers' meeting the speeches in favor of the French Front only encountered skeptical smiles and jeers”. Op. cit., p. 124.

page 369 note 1 In an article apparently written in mid-September, Thorez, said, “Let us emphasize the fact that strikes are beginning in a district like the Nord, where the Socialists have re mained stronger than we”Google Scholar. This very interesting article, which strongly suggests the mental anguish of the Communist bureaucracy at being torn away from its “moderate” pose by the resurgence of class conflict, appeared as “The People's Front and Tasks Facing the Communist Party of France”, in Communist International, 1936, pp. 145–71.Google Scholar

page 369 note 2 On September 12, 1936, in the name of working-class unity, the Communists renounced the French Front slogan in L'Humanité.

page 369 note 3 Journal Officiel, December 5, 1936, pp. 3377–3378.Google Scholar

page 369 note 4 The congress was given extensive coverage in Le Peuple for February 7, 1937, and La Révolution Prolétarienne, February 10, 1937Google Scholar. In my narrative, I have combined these accounts.

page 370 note 1 According to the Bulletin of the International Federation of Trade Unions for February 17 1937 tne phrases in question were, “the vanguard of Fascism has been revealed and destroyed in Moscow”, and “the workers and peasants of Russia, who form one bloc with their government, have recently given themselves the most democratic constitution in the world, which allows of the Trade Unions fulfilling their most useful task”.

page 370 note 2 Le Peuple, February 7, 1937Google Scholar and La Révolution Prolétarienne, February 10, 1937Google Scholar, article by Simone Weil. The CGT official was André Delmas in his A gauche de la barricade, p. 127. The ostensible reason given by the CP, according to Le Peuple and Weil, was the preservation of unanimity. But surely the Communist leadership must have been aware of the presence of non- and anti-communist syndicalists among the 800 delegates, who were not going to vote for the report as presented. At any rate, the fact that the Communists only withdrew the passages after a fairly influential bloc of old syndicalists came out against them, shows rather clearly that more than a fear for mere unanimity impelled the leadership.

page 371 note 1 Cf. Borkenau, Franz, The Spanish Cockpit (London, 1937), pp. 64 ff.Google Scholar

page 371 note 2 Delmas, op. cit., p. 105.

page 371 note 3 Idem.

page 371 note 4 Le Populaire, July 30, 1936Google Scholar.

page 371 note 5 Le Populaire, July 29, 1936Google Scholar.

page 372 note 1 Eduard Dolléans, op. cit., p. 162.

page 372 note 2 There is much opinion that asserts, to the contrary, that, non-intervention was proposed entirely on the initiative of France. However, the account of Pertinax in the Gravediggers of France, p. 433, quoted approvingly in Bowers, Claude' My Mission to Spain (New York, 1954), p. 281Google Scholar, is very explicit and, unless fabricated out of whole cloth, leaves no room for doubt that, though the announcement came from France, England was primarily responsible. Werth, Destiny of France, p. 379Google Scholar also supports this account.

page 372 note 3 Le Populaire, August 22, 1936Google Scholar.

page 372 note 4 The French refusal to allow Spanish munitions to cross back into Spain is recounted in Claude Bowers, op. cit., pp. 280–283.

page 372 note 5 According to Sturmthal, Blum's contact with the working class was “far more intimate than Ramsay MacDonald or any German Social Democratic minister had ever thought necessary”. And Delmas supports this in relating how, at the Matignon Conference, Blum urged Communist union officials: “Don't call me Mr. President; I have done nothing to merit this. Call me Blum, as always”. Sturmthal, Adolf, Tragedy of European Labour (London, 1944), p. 234Google Scholar; André Delmas, op. cit., p. 94.

page 372 note 6 Sturmthal, idem.

page 373 note 1 Quoted in ibid., p. 234. With the exception noted below, all the other details of the Luna-Park speech are from this source.

page 373 note 2 Delmas, op. cit., p. 117.

page 373 note 3 Cf. Werth, Alexander, Destiny of France, pp. 72–92, 250Google Scholar; and Borkenau, Franz, European Communism, p. 116.Google Scholar

page 374 note 1 Ehrmann, Henry W., French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation (New York, 1948), p. 41.Google Scholar

page 374 note 2 Le Populaire, July 21, 1936Google Scholar.

page 374 note 3 Cf. Colton, Joel, Compulsory Arbitration in France, 1936–1939, p. 28Google Scholar; Collinet, Michel, L'Esprit du Syndicalisme, p. 127Google Scholar; and Wilde, John C. De, “The New Deal in France”, in: Foreign Policy Reports, 09 1, 1937, esp. p. 140.Google Scholar

page 374 note 4 Le Temps, August 19, 1937Google Scholar.

page 374 note 5 Dolléans, Eduard, Histoire du Mouvement Ouvrier, Vol. III, p. 144.Google Scholar

page 374 note 6 Delmas, op. cit., p. 47.

page 375 note 1 At the time C. J. Gignoux, the new head of the employer group, though he stated his belief that the 40 hour week was a “serious error”, denied that he desired the revocation of the social reforms granted in June 1936. Cf. his Patrons, soyez patrons (Paris, 1937), pp. 7, 33Google Scholar. But in a work written under the German occupation, Gignoux showed a bitter hostility to certain of the reforms, especially to the 40 hour week, which he now less temperately described as an “insanity”. Cf. Gignoux, G. J., L'Economie française entre les deux guerres, 1919–1939 (Paris, 1942), pp. 307 ffGoogle Scholar. Ehrmann says that “the CGPF flatly turned down requests by the government to facilitate the working of the new legislation through a new and more elaborate understanding with labor”. Ehrmann, H. W., Organized Business in France (Princeton, 1957) p. 37.Google Scholar

page 375 note 2 Ehrmann, Henry W., in Organized Business in France, discusses the relation of the textile employers to the new CGPF on p. 15Google Scholar. An article in the left Radical La Lumière for Sept. 19, 1936, titled “Le Conflit du textile du Nord: Premier vague d'une grande offensive des féodaux de I'industrie”, referred to “the desire for combat of the great conservative families: Michelin and Clermont-Ferrand; the cotton manufacturers of the Vosges; the textile masters of Lille … They want to break the union power and dissolve the Popular Front.”

page 375 note 3 TIME SERIES ON WAGES AND PRICES

Average male hourly wage for 43 “professions” (all cities outside Paris): October, 1935–3.80 frs.; October, 1936 – 4.42 frs. (percentage increase: 16.3%).

Average female hourly wage for 7 “professions” (all cities outside Paris): October, 1935–2.26 frs.; October, 1936 – 2.62 frs. (percentage increase: 15.9%).

page 376 note 1 On Sept. 23, 1936, Le Temps reported that 100 textile employers meeting in Tourcoing refused to negotiate with the unions under the menace of force: presumably meaning sit-down strikes. On the same day, the Cotton Syndicate of the East reportedly refused to discuss with the union as long as union pickets forbade entry into the textile plants, which had already been evacuated. On the 28th of October, 1936, Le Temps reported that coal dealers in Roubaix-Tourcoing would not talk with strikers until they evacuated the yards and withdrew their pickets.

page 376 note 2 Le Temps, August 24, 1936Google Scholar. All dates given in this and the next four paragraphs are the date on which the strike report appeared in Le Temps.

page 377 note 1 Le Temps, Sept. 26, 1936Google Scholar. For an extended argument on the same theme, see “Une manœuvre contre la CGT” by Bothereau, Robert, in the October 30, 1936 VendrediGoogle Scholar.

page 378 note 1 The reasons for the CGT's reversal of policy are detailed in Colton, op. cit., pp. 36–38.

page 378 note 2 Neutralization was later proposed to the Chambre by Chautemps in January 1938, but it was not passed. Colton, op. cit., p. 61.

page 378 note 3 See pp. 381–382.

page 378 note 4 Idem.

page 378 note 5 La Voix du Peuple, October 1936Google Scholar.

page 379 note 1 See pp. 381–385.

page 379 note 2 See tables in Colton, op. cit., pp. 13–14.

page 379 note 3 Kalecki, M., “The Lesson of the Blum Experiment”, in: Economic Journal, 03, 1938, p. 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kalecki believes the official figures of 13% for Paris and 16% for the rest of France were too low, since they failed “to account sufficiently for the big augmentation of wages in many enterprises where trade union rates were not observed during the depression”.

page 379 note 4 See table in Coulton, op. cit., p. 31.

page 379 note 5 Ibid., p. 33. Also cf. Michel Collinet, op. cit., p. 126.

page 380 note 1 Collinet, op. cit., p. 123. Colton, op. cit., p. 81 gives the membership as 550,000 in 1937.

page 380 note 2 Collinet says that 90% of the 200,000 voted the Communist theses. Ibid., p. 123.

page 380 note 3 These attempts were discussed in the Rapport annuel de L'union des industries metallurgiques et minières, presented at the General Assembly on February 18, 1937. A 3,000 word excerpt was printed in La Voix du Peuple, March 1937, pp. 176–179.Google Scholar

page 380 note 4 On June 10, 1936, Simone Weil had described the working conditions in a metallurgy factory, where she was then taking part in a strike, under the headings of hunger, poverty, fatigue, fear, and coercion. “La Vie et la grève des ouvrières métalles”, reprinted in La Condition Ouvrière (Paris, 1951), pp. 162–174Google Scholar. Originally appeared in La Révolution Prolétarienne, June 10, 1936Google Scholar, under the name S. Gaulois.

page 380 note 5 I am indebted to Joel Colton, op. cit., pp. 81–86, for all my information on arbitration in the metal industry.

page 381 note 1 Ibid., p. 81. For other wage adjustments under arbitration in 1937, see ibid., p. 84. The effects of inflation on the income of less aggressive workers is seen in Collinet's statement that between 1936 (one presumes the beginning of the year) and 1938, the real wages of civil servants decline by 18%. Collinet, op. cit., p. 126.

page 381 note 2 Ibid., p. 86.

page 382 note 1 The Economist of February 20, 1937, commenting on Blum's appeal to the civil servants “for a breathing space, for a respite in expenditure”, argues that “a breathing space for wages would be an absurdity if not accompanied by a pause in the rise of prices”.

page 383 note 1 A summary of the CGT's criticism of arbitration as it functioned from its inception to its replacement by a more precise law in May 1938, is given in the Compte rendu sténographique des débats of the CGT Congrès conféd`;ral de Nantes – 1938, pp. 62–63. Immediately following is an analysis of the first two hundred arbitration decisions, as reported in the Journal officiel for September 3, 1937, and February 3, 1938.

page 383 note 2 The Economist, February 20, 1937Google Scholar.

page 383 note 3 At the same time that Blum was soliciting support for the “pause”, Jouhaux was urging nationalization of banks and industry. Cf. The Economist, February 27, 1937Google Scholar.

page 383 note 4 The Economist, March 13, 1937Google Scholar.

page 384 note 1 Le Temps, March 25, 1937Google Scholar. Except where indicated, other information in this and the following paragraph is from the same source.

page 384 note 2 The figures are from the account in the Socialist Prolétaire de Clichy, reprinted in La Révolution Prolétarienne, April 10, 1937Google Scholar.

page 384 note 3 The London Times, on March 19, 1937Google Scholar, summed the reason up for this by pointing out that: “In France, every policeman openly carries a loaded automatic pistol, and the gardes Mobiles are equipped with steel helmets, pistols and carbines. When the police, with no weapons but firearms, are hard pressed by the crowd, it is likely that the firearms will go off sooner or later, and when demonstrators know that the police will be armed, they are apt to arm themselves also.”

page 384 note 4 Le Temps, March 18, 1937Google Scholar.

page 385 note 1 Idem.

page 385 note 2 The hospitals only received about 80 workers, but in the press, it was generally thought that untold numbers of workers had not reported to the hospitals for fear of punishment. At any rate, the number of wounded police is a good indication that the number of wounded workers was several times eighty.

page 385 note 3 London Times, March 18, 1937Google Scholar.

page 385 note 4 For Alexander Werth's description of left-extremism and an excerpt from the speech of a Révolutionary syndicalist at the 1938 Congress of the CGT, see Appendix.

page 385 note 5 André Delmas, op. cit., p. 127; Lazareff, Pierre, in a chapter on Clichy in Deadline, and Franz Borkenau, European Communism, p. 208.Google Scholar

page 385 note 6 Le Temps, March 25, 1937Google Scholar.

page 386 note 1 London Times, March 18, 1937Google Scholar.

page 386 note 2 La Révolution Prolétarienne, April 10, 1937Google Scholar.

page 386 note 8 Idem. André Delmas, relating the very confused situation on March 18, implies that the Communists wanted to use the strike as a means of stirring trouble for the Blum regime. But the actual facts he gives correspond to the account in La Révolution Prolétarienne, whose conclusion that the Communist-led Union of Unions and Metal Workers Union were forced by rank-and-file agitation and by pressure from the Metro Union to call the strike makes more sense than Delmas' notion of a plot.

page 387 note 1 Michel Collinet astutely argues that the arbitration system was responsible for this gap, first by removing the union leadership from its role as organizer of a real class struggle and transforming it into a simple intermediary between the workers' demands and the government arbitrator; secondly, by putting the leadership in the position of accomplice to the erosion of real wages under arbitration. Esprit du syndicalisme, pp. 126–127Google Scholar.

page 387 note 2 Le Temps, March 19, 1937Google Scholar.

page 387 note 3 Ibid., March 21, 1937, and London Times, March 25, 1937Google Scholar. The incidents continued for several days after the strike.

page 387 note 4 Le Temps, March 20, 1937Google Scholar.

page 387 note 5 Ibid., March 18, 1937.

page 387 note 6 Revue des deux mondes, April 1, 1937, p. 714Google Scholar.

page 387 note 7 Le Temps, March 20, 1937Google Scholar.

page 388 note 1 Probably the best account of this process is in Ehrmann, op. cit., pp. 77–125. Also, see Collinet, , Esprit du syndicalisme, pp. 126–127.Google Scholar

page 388 note 2 Ehrmann, op. cit., pp. 115–120.

page 388 note 3 Collinet, op. cit., p. 127.

page 388 note 4 Collinet, op. cit., p. 125. Ehrmann, using an estimate supplied by union officials in the summer of 1939, says there were probably still two million CGT members at the outbreak of war. But Collinet was an active trade unionist at the time, and the discrepancy between his and the semi-official figures can probably be attributed to the desire of the officials only to reveal losses which absolutely could not be hidden or denied.