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Protection Against Labor Troubles
The Campaign of the Association de l'Industrie Française for Economic Stability and Social Peace During the Great Depression, 1880–96
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
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By introducing an economic cycle of a new sort in Europe the Great Depression of 1873–96 encouraged the alignment of iron and textile industrialists’ interests with those of the great growers and livestock raisers. The French version, perhaps best labelled the alliance of cotton and wheat, is the concern here, for since profits and sales for both agriculture and industry traced parallel curves, for the first time in French history, representatives of these interests could unite and press the new republican leadership for common relief against depression and intensifying foreign competition. They were also impelled to unite in the face of the growing militancy of the new working class emerging in the provinces. Their spokesmen of the Association de l'Industrie Française and the associated Société des Agriculteurs addressed themselves to the new incarnation of the social question by offering protective tariffs – and protected jobs and pay checks – to workers striking more frequently and organizing more solidly than ever before. Their slogan was “the protection of national labor”. Having no reforms to offer, the Opportunist republicans and their ex-monarchist allies offered the emergent industrial working class safe incomes and economic nationalism.
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References
1 Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is the most famous attempt to address why and how this was so.
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12 Strikes after 1899 to 1914 were more frequent and in many ways more militant. But by the turn of the century industrialists had ceased to be as disconcerted by what in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties was a relatively unexpected style of worker economic resistance. Moreover, in the new century industrialists’ organizations were stronger and they themselves had grown more sophisticated about the social question qua wage problem. Most important, economic recovery made them less a hostage to their employees. In the decade and a half after 1899 real wages rose more slowly than productivity. Lewis, Cf., Growth and Fluctuations, p. 107;Google Scholar Caron, F., An Economic History of Modern France (New York, 1979), pp. 144, 154; P. Léeon, “Le Dynamisme industriel”, in: Histoire economique et sociale de Ia France, 111/2, discusses the divisions of opinion in the important literature.Google Scholar
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18 Tilly, and Shorter, , Strikes in France, p. 47;Google Scholar Perrot, , Les Ouvriers en gréve. 1. pp. 89–90.Google Scholar
19 Ibid.
21 Perrot, , Les Ouvriers en grè;ve, I, p. 406;Google Scholar Tilly, and Shorter, , Strikes in France, p. 342, specifically deny the importance usually ascribed to wage disputes in the occurrence of nineteenth-century industrial disputes. They see wage demands as “merely a mobilizing device, not a real issue”. The economics of the question, I think, tends to support my view.Google Scholar
21 See the list of members, their firms and officers of the AIF in L' Industrie Française, 21 03 1878, pp. 89–90Google Scholar (reprinted in Smith, . Tariff Reform, op. cit.. pp. 245ff.), and for the members in 1893 see Le Travail National. 18–23 June 1893.Google Scholar
22 Consider these examples of strikes in firms owned by important members of the AIF. In 1880 the Roubaix weaving firm of Delathe pàre et fils was struck twice. Mr Julien LeBlan, President of the Lille chamber of commerce, a member of the Executive Committee of the AIF, and manufacturer of linen thread in Lille, in 1882 had twice (10- 30 October and 6 November) personally to confront workers on strike over pay cuts he had initiated. Even the reputedly docile workers of the Vosges resisted their employers’ attempts to make them pay for the business crisis. Just before Christmas 1882 in Saint- Dié one hundred and sixty workers employed in the weaving firm of Dietsch fréres, also members of the AIF, walked off to protest alterations in the shop rules. In 1882 important strikes shook Le Creusot, where Henri Schneider, another AIF Executive Committee member, ruled, and AIF-represented shops in the iron-working regions of Saint-Etienne, Grenoble, Vienne; the coal mines of Carmaux were struck as well. That fall labor troubles broke into violence at the Blanzy coal mines in Monceau-les-Mines. Gréves en France, Archives Nationales F 12 5749.
23 Early in 1879 in Lille, AIF member Gustave Dubar, the linen manufacturer, had his foremen and managers gather workers'; signatures on a protectionist petition. Claiming to have assembled thirty thousand names, they presented the document to President Jules Grévy in May. In Amiens the AIF militants also gathered the signatures of their workers and held public meetings as well to promote protectionism. Nicolas Claude, Méline's mentor in the Vosges, organized similar efforts in the textile-mill towns of the Vosges valleys. Meetings between workers and officials, petition campaigns and rallies blossomed all over Normandy. At Rouen yet another large protectionist demonstration collected thousands of workers' names on anti-freetrade petitions, which in due course were presented by AIF stalwarts L.ucien Dautresme and Richard Waddington, at the head of a delegation of foremen, to William Waddington, brother to Richard. and Premier.
24 An alarmed contributor to the resolutely free-trade Economiste Francais voiced the fears of many of the well-off when he wrote of the protectionist rallies that the agitation was going well beyond the usual speech-making and passing around of petitions: “they were trying to unite with the workers [by telling them that they [were] going to starve, and that it [was] the fault of the treaties of commerce.” Dufrenoy, “La Derniére manifestation protectionniste”, in: L'Economiste Français, 10 May 1879. The references and data of the last two paragraphs I owe to Michael Smith's excellent account of pro- tariff agitation. Tariff Reform, p. 163. In the sense of strengthening or weakening pressure-group politics his judgment, “for all the drama and notoriety of such rallies, they played a relatively minor role in the protectionist campaign”, is surely accurate. But this tells us little about their role in the larger struggle for social appeasement and class collaboration rather than conflict.
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27 Journal Officiel, Chambre des Députés, Débats, 3 02 1880, pp. 1202–03.Google Scholar
28 Smith, , Tariff Reform, pp. 180ff.Google Scholar
29 Ibid., pp. 151ff.
30 Although there was a clear upsurge of strike activity in the years 1880–82,Google Scholar Tilly, and Shorter, , Strikes in France, pp. 110–12, do not include that peak in their survey of strike waves. They discuss the wave of 1869–70, which they characterize as “still part of the artisanal pattern”, and then go on to the industrial conflicts of 1893 (“near the front end the long transition from artisanal to mechanized production”). They are right about the industrial transformation going on in that era, but they tend to discount the connection of business-cycle fluctuations with strike activity. They discount, as well, workers' assertions that wages were the overwhelming issue in the majority of strikes — as well as work rules, which often translate into wage issues (pp. 335ff.). Most curiously, the activities of employers do not count for much in their account of industrial conflict. On the economic climate at the turn of the decade see Caron, “Dynamismes et freinages”, loc. cit.Google Scholar
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33 Réponse Chalon-sur-Saäne, Autun, Louhans, ibid.
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35 Procè;s-verbaux, séance du 1 April 1884, pp. 141−50; séance du 8 mai, p. 343, Ibid.
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38 The chamber of commerce of Roubaix, the textile center, criticized the damaging consequences of the treaties and went on then to inculpate for their commercial difficulties “the low price of labor in Germany”. The chamber of neighboring Tourcoing urged that, because competition of neighboring nations threatened, it was “high time to safeguard our national industries and the pay of our workers by means of compensatory duties”. The cotton manufacturers of the Vosges, especially of the town of Epinal, offered as general causes for the difficulties of their industry “foreign competition, the rise in labor costs, finally, and especially, overproduction”. The chamber of commerce of Albi blamed primarily “the strikes of the coal basins, which have increased the price of coal and, as a result, of other products employing coal in their manufacture”. The chamber of Valenciennes advocated non-renewal of the treaties and raised duties on coal and coke. The iron manufacturers of the Jura complained of the German competition, the American, Italian, Spanish and Russian iron tariffs, and especially of the decline in orders with the completion of French rearmament and the slowing of railroad construction. Although the majority of the responses, some one hundred and fifty, did not focus on the question of labor — like those of the chambers of the Jura and of Valenciennes — those that did were sent from regions of strike-ridden industries; their members were militant supporters of Méline's AIF and of new tariffs. The responses may be found in Réponse au questionnaire du Conseil supérieur du commerce et de l'industrie sur le renouvellement des traités de commerce, 1890–91, Archives Nationales F 12 6418 and 6916.
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51 His election posed a serious threat to the class allies who had united industrial wealth and agricultural wealth around means of protecting the social order. To win election from the district Jaurès had had to defeat both the Marquis de Solages, the incumbent, a director of the Mines de Carmaux and a rallié, and his father-in-law and the local political boss, Baron René Reille, also a rallié, chairman of the Mines and, until his death in 1898, head of the Comité des Forges. Both men were active members of the AIF. Reille served on the governing council until his death; he had precipitated a bitter eighty-day strike in August 1892 when he fired Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, an official of the miners' union, on the occasion of Calvignac's election as Mayor of Carmaux. It was in the wake of the successful struggle to have him re-instated to his job in the mines, followed by the resignation from his deputy's seat of the humiliated Solages, that Jaurés, running as a socialist, won election to the Chamber, Le Travail National, 18–25 06 1893.Google Scholar
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