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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
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.
1 Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is the most famous attempt to address why and how this was so.
2 Hoffmann, S., “Paradoxes of the French Political Community”, in: In Search of France, ed. by id, . et al. (New York, 1963).Google Scholar
3 Crozier, M., La Société bloquée (Paris, 1970).Google Scholar
4 Finally, it tends to depict France and the maladies of French society in the late nineteenth–century as unique. It eschews a comparative perspective. Neither depression nor an awakening working class and peasantry were unique to late–nineteenth century France. Nor was neo–lconservative coalition building needed only in France; trasformismo in Italy and Sammlungspolitik in Germany represented parallel efforts to rule new states in new ways. This point deserves greater attention than can be devoted to it here.Google Scholar
5 Rosenberg, H., Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967);Google Scholar Caron, F. and Bouvier, J., “Les Indices majeurs”, in: Histoire économique et sociale de la France (Paris, 1970–1982), IV/1;Google Scholar Bouvier, J., “Mouvement ouvrier et conjonctures économiques”. in: Le Mouvement Social, No 48 (1964);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lévy-Leboyer, M., “L'Héritage de Simiand”, in: Revue Historique, CCXLIII (1970);Google Scholar id., “La Croissance économique en France au XIXe siécle: résultats préliminaires”, in: Annales, Economies Sociétés Civilisations, XXIII (1968);Google Scholar F. Crouzet, “Essai de construction d'un indice annuel de Ia production industrielle francaise au XIXe siécle”, ibid., XXV (1970); Lescure, J., Des Crises générales et périodiques de surproduction, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1923).Google Scholar
6 Lewis, W. A., Growth and Fluctuation, 1870–1913 (London, 1978), pp. 17–68, esp.47–50.Google Scholar
7 Caron and Bouvier, “Les Indices majeurs”, bc. cit.
8 Bouvier, “Mouvementouvrieretconjonctureséconomiques”, loc. cit.; Shorter, E.and Tilly, Ch., Strikes in France 1830–1968 (Cambridge, 1974);Google Scholar Perrot, M., Les Ouvriers en grève, France 1871–1890 (2 vols; Paris, The Hague. 1974);Google Scholar Julliard, J., “Théories syndicaliste révolutionnaire et pratique gréviste”, in: Le Mouvement Social, No 65 (1968);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Néré, J., “La Crise industrielle de 1882 et le mouvement boulangiste” (mimeographed dissertation, Paris, 1959); id., Le Boulangisme et la presse (Paris, 1964).Google Scholar
9 Actually, they had already raised this demand in the last days of the Empire, and frequently their workers – even while striking against them – added their own maledictions against free trade in common manifestations of protest. This part of the story of class collaboration around protectionism is too long and complex to discuss here. See my forthcoming The Alliance of Iron and Wheat: Origins of the New Conservatism of the Third Republic, 1860–1914, ch. 1. See also Fohlen, C., “Crise textile et troubles sociaux: Le Nord ala fin du Second Empire”, in: Revue du Nord, XXXV (1953);Google Scholar id., L'Industrie textile au temps du Second Empire (Paris, 1965); Motte–Bossuet et al., Rapport sur l'émeute du 16 mars 1867 á Roubaix á M. Masson, Préfet du Nord à Lille (n.p., nd.). 4 pp.;Google Scholar L'Huillier, F., La Lutte ouvriàre à la fin du Second Empire [Cahiers des Annales, No 12] (Paris, 1957);Google Scholar Elwitt, S., “Politics and Social Class in the Loire: The Triumph of the Republican Order, 1869–1873”, in: French Historical Studies, VI (1969);Google Scholar Léon, P., “Les Grè;ves de 1867–1870 dans le département de l“Isè;re”, in: Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, I(1954);Google Scholar Baker, R. P., “A Regional Study of Working-Class Organization in France: Socialism in the Nord, 1870–1924” (Stanford University Ph.D., 1967; University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan), p.21.Google Scholar The interesting new work of Reddy, W., The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Cambridge, Paris, 1984),Google Scholar nuances the picture of early class-consciousness in the Nord by focusing on the non-economic issues in the lives of the workers. Emile Aubry stands out as an especially astute Northern labor leader who tried to keep the organized textile workers in Rouen from the protectionist temptation: Aubry, E., “Opinion de Ia Fédération ouvrière de I'arrondissement de Rouen sur Ia protestation des industriels de Ia circonscription contre le traité de commerce”, in: Journal des Economistes, Third Series, XVI (1869).Google Scholar Although Aubry spoke for the feared International in Rouen, and although its representatives were active in the strike movement of Alsace, the evidence is slim for its agitational successes in the late Empire's labor troubles (Fohlen, , L'Industrie textile, p. 436), or indeed in the Paris Commune. But it is also a datum of historical consciousness that government officials and owners charged it with great influence at the time, banning it in France and harrying its members. One contribution of my study, hopefully, shall be to remind us of the importance of initiatives which failed, of actions undertaken from misdirected motives, of misunderstood motives, and of misanalyzed situations. I wish to combat a naïve Hegelian teleology which sometimes influences the work of both Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike.Google Scholar
10 Labrousse, E., “A livre ouvert sur les élans et les vicissitudes des croissances”, in:Histoire économique et sociale de Ia France, op. cit.. 111/2;Google Scholar Elwitt, S., The Making of the Third Republic: Class and politics in France, 1868–1884 (Baton Rouge, 1975).Google Scholar The first important broker between often artistocratic growers and often republican industrialists was Augustin Pouyer-Quertier. Most recently on Pouyer-Quertier see Chaline, J.-P., Les Bourgeois de Rouen (Paris, 1982). What better protagonist of a new ruling-class unity of interest might serious economic leaders want: a self-made man under the Empire, briefly a supporter of Boulanger, Pouyer-Quertier crafted the tariff agitation for republicans like Ferry and Méline to carry on, but married off one daughter to a Count, the other to a Marquis. Elected as a republican Senator in 1876, nevertheless, he was widely identified as a “legitimist”.Google Scholar
11 On the data see Lewis, , Growth and Fluctuations, op. cit., pp. 94–111,Google Scholar who bases his calculations on E. H. Ph. Brown, with Browne, M. H., A Century of Pay (London, 1968); M. Perrot, “Les Classes populaires urbaines”, in: Histoire économique et sociale de la France, IV/1. The improvement of the lives of European workers in the late nineteenth century was one source of the intellectual crisis of European socialism in that epoch. Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg and V. I. Lenin each in his/her way realized that current Marxist orthodoxy was unsuited to explain this new reality. The theories of imperialism of Luxemburg and Lenin were in large part aimed at accounting for this violation of the immiseration tendency articulated by Marx. Bernstein called for a re-thinking of Marxist theory because he extrapolated what he believed to be a secular trend of improved conditions for workers.Google Scholar
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
13 See Kuisel's, R. excellent summary of the backwardness debate in his Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1981), ch. I;Google Scholar Lambert, J., Quelques families du patronat textile de LiIle-Armentiè;res (1789–1914). Thèse de doctorat (Lille, 1954), p.488;Google Scholar Rust, M. J.,“Business and Politics in the Third Republic: The Comité des Forges and the French Steel Industry, 1896–1914” (Princeton thesis, 1973; University Microfilms, 1974), pp.18–19.Google Scholar
14 Smith, M., Tariff Reform in France, 1860–1900: The Politics of Economic Interests (Ithaca, London, 1980), pp. 132–40.Google Scholar
15 Tilly, and Shorter, , Strikes in France, op. cit., pp. 74–75, 307.Google Scholar The political and economic leaders of other lands also struggled with the social consequences of the world-wide price deflation. Kindleberger, Ch., The Economic Response: Comparative Studies in Trade, Finance, and Growth (Cambridge, Mass., London, 1978), ch. III: “The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe, 1820–1875”. Lands in the midpassage of industrialization, nations moving from largely agrarian social relations towards industrial maturity– and therefore towards the social conflicts of newly industrializing societies– sought in protective tariffs a weapon of counter-cyclical social protectionism. In 1879 the German Empire began a series of tariff increases which culminated in 1902 with the passage of the Bülow tariff. Italy and Austria-Hungary followed suit. Even the United States – at that moment experiencing both unprecedented industrial conflict and Populist disaffection– passed the strongly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890.Google Scholar
16 Prefect of Vosges, communication of 24 March 1879, Archives Nationales F 124655, cited in Perrot, , Les Ouvriers en grève, op. cit., I, pp. 152–53.Google Scholar See the excellent book by Bleaney, M., Underconsumption Theories: A Historical and Critical Analysis (New York, 1976), pp. 9–21, and especially the section on Sismondi, pp. 62–79.Google Scholar
17 Prefect of Nord, Archives Nationales F 124655. The cotton spinners of the Nord held something on the order of a half year's unsold production of finished yarn worth two million francs. Cf. F. Caron, “Dynamismes et freinages de Ia croissance industrielle”, in: Histoire économique et sociale de la France, IV/1.
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.
25 Le Travail National, 6 07 1884, p.2.Google Scholar
26 Stearns's, Cf. P. still valuable study of the extent of harmony and paternalism in French industry in the earlier part of the century, Paths to Authority: The Middle Class and the Industrial Labor Force in France, 1820–48 (Urbana. 1978).Google Scholar
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
31 Dolléans, E., Histoire du mouvement ouvrier (3 vols; Paris 1936–1953), II, pp. 25–26.Google Scholar
32 The réponse of the Bordeaux merchants denied that workers were suffering any important new difficulties. They were about as well-off, asserted the Bordeaux return, as they had been twenty or twenty-five years before. Bad harvests, which could have sent bread prices up, had been compensated for by the temporary admission of foreign-grown wheat. Moreover, the optimistic statement concluded with a dig at the cotton manufacturers, increases in the scale of production in recent years had reduced clothing prices, which had held down increases in the cost of living. Enquête parlementaire sur la crise économique et sur la situation industrielle, commerciale et agricole en France, 1884, Réponse Bordeaux, Archives Nationales C 3329.Google Scholar
33 Réponse Chalon-sur-Saäne, Autun, Louhans, ibid.
34 Réponse Lille, pp. 6–10. Ibid.
35 Procè;s-verbaux, séance du 1 April 1884, pp. 141−50; séance du 8 mai, p. 343, Ibid.
36 Tilly, and Shorter, , Strikes in France, Appendix B, pp. 260ff.;Google Scholar Perrot, , Les Ouvriers en grè;ve, I, pp. 96–97.Google Scholar
37 Perrot, , Les Ouvriers en grève, I, pp. 96, 118. For 1889–90 Paris was the site of only 7% and 3% of the strikes. In 1889 59% of the strikers were textile workers largely from the North; in 1890 35% of the strikes and 53% of the strikers were involved in textile production.Google Scholar
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.
39 Anderson, R. D., France, 1870–1914. Politics and Society (London, Henley, Boston, 1977), pp. 14–15.Google Scholar
40 Le Travail National, 1 12 1889, p. 564.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
41 Ibid., 21 and 28 December 1890, pp. 633–56.
42 Ligou, D., Histoire du socialisme en France (1871–1961) (Paris, 1962). p. 114.Google Scholar
43 Journal Officiel, Chambre des Députés, 12 05 1891, p. 867.Google Scholar
44 Veber, A., “Réaction et protection”, in: Revue Socialiste, XIV (1891), esp. p. 145.Google Scholar
45 Smith, , Tariff Reform, pp. 203.ff, gives the details of the delicate bargaining.Google Scholar
46 Le Travail National, 17 01 1892, p. 29. A text of the new tariff is reprinted on p. 34. Although there had to be bargaining among the various interests seeking advantages.my reading of the sources does not confirm Smith's emphasis on the exclusive role of the tariffs in the creation of ruling-class collaboration. Class alliances are not worked out over the duties on low-numbered cotton threads. Classes fear not things, but other classes. Smith's treatment leaves out the larger socio-political issues — and the working class.Google Scholar
47 For the story of Fourmies and the socialist breakthrough in its wake, see Willard, C., La Fusillade de Fourmies (Paris, 1957), pp. 77–78 and passim;Google Scholar Baker, , “A Regional Study of Working-Class Organization in France”, op. cit., pp. 64ff.;Google Scholar Ligou, , Histoire du socialisme en France, op. cit., pp. 11ff.;Google Scholar Hilsheimer, J., “Interessengruppen und Zollpolitik in Frankreich: Die Auseinandersetzungen urn die Aufstellung des Zolltarifs von 1892” (Inauguraldissertation, Heidelberg, 1973), pp. 426–27; and more for the feel of the moment than for information on the election see Laura Lafargue to Friedrich Engels, 22 11 1891,Google Scholar in Engels, P. F., and Lafargue, L., Correspondance, ed. by Bottigelli, E. (Paris, 1956–1959), III, pp. 132–33 and passim.Google Scholar
48 Le Travail National, 21 02 1892.Google Scholar
49 Lafargue, P., Le Communisme et l'évolution économique (Lille, 1892), pp. 22–23.Google Scholar
50 In March the Saint-Quentin lacemakers walked out; in April and May the dyers, cotton spinners and garment workers of Amiens; in May, too, the dyers of Roubaix; and August the wool spinners of Vienne. Although all over France there were strikes of skilled construction workers — carpenters, joiners and cabinet makers—, more significant were the walkouts of the mécanjcjens-constructeurs of Nantes, métallurgistes of the Rivede-Gier, and the thousands of miners of Béthune. Ligou, Histoire du socialisme en France, p. 117.Google Scholar
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
52 Landes, D., “Religion and Enterprise: The Case of the French Textile Industry”, in: Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century France, ed. by Carter, E. C., II, et al. (Baltimore, London, 1976).Google Scholar
53 See newly the study on the causes for the lack of social reform in the early decades of the Third Republic by Stone, J. F., The Search for Social Peace: Reform Legislation in France, 1890–1914 (Albany, N.Y., 1985).Google Scholar
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