The organization and unionization of foreign workers became one of the goals of French trade unions in the interwar period, when France was a key immigration country. Meriggi focuses her analysis on the initiatives towards these goals by the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU), an organization led by a revolutionary majority that split from the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) in 1921 and remained a distinct body until the two reunified in 1936.
Since World War I, an important minority had grown within the CGT, formed by the opponents of the Sacred Union. The growing tension between the different factions culminated in the autumn of 1921 when the minority group decided to organize a founding congress in Saint-Etienne, which was planned for June 1922. During the 1920s, the communists gradually took control of the CGTU and marginalized other minorities, leading to a significant loss of militant members by the mid-1930s.
Far from being a minoritarian experience, the CGTU played a central role in French trade union history, as its communist leadership formed the core of the postwar CGT, the main French organization in the second half of the twentieth century. As the author notes, the CGTU “influenced the life, the choices and, above all, the culture of the CGT after 1944” (p. 19).
To coordinate its work with immigrant workers, the CGTU began organizing a central office for foreign workers in Paris in 1923. The office's core activities were based on four main pillars: creating a “linguistic” branch for each of the main foreign groups, organizing French language courses for foreigners and foreign language courses for French trade unionists, printing magazines in various languages, and creating specific legal aid services. At the same time, the legal status of immigrants was an important aspect of the CGTU's political demands, as it called for all restrictions on the right of foreigners to organize and to strike to be lifted, and for equality in terms of social security, unemployment benefits, and wages.
In the following years, the CGTU set up offices for foreign workers in the main immigrant regions, such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Nancy, and several newspapers were published in Italian, Polish, Spanish, Romanian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and other foreign languages.
By the turn of the 1930s, the CGTU had 40,000 foreign members, almost a tenth of its total membership. The union's attempts to organize foreign workers were motivated by a number of concerns. First, it was part of its strategy to gain greater control over the labour market in order to prevent tensions and conflicts between the national workforce on the one hand and the immigrant one on the other. It was also a practical way to express its internationalist ideals and, finally, of challenging the CGT, which had more nationalist and protectionist political positions.
Meriggi analyses an incredibly wide range of sources, including the CGTU newspaper (La vie ouvrière), the documentation of the French section of the Comintern (digitized on the PANDOR portal), police reports from the Archives Nationales, and the congress proceedings published by the CGTU itself. Her book provides a dynamic and multifaceted picture of the union's strategies for dealing with foreign workers, combining internal debates (at grassroots and leadership levels), international relations, and accounts from the police.
The analysis of the initiatives aimed at migrant workers is particularly interesting, since they took place at a time when foreigners faced serious restrictions on their political and trade union rights and became victims of repression and expulsion when they decided to take an active part in organizing strikes or trade union initiatives.
At an international level, this research helps us to better understand the relationship between the CGTU and the Profintern, especially since the former was led by Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky, who had lived in France before the Bolshevik Revolution and who took an active part in French trade unionism. It was important for the strategy of the Profintern to prevent the formation of migrant trade unions, preferring to organize them within the unions led by the communists, where they could meet in their own Main-d'oeuvre étrangère offices. Similar offices were also organized within the French Communist Party, as part of a broader internationalist strategy aimed at uniting the proletariat under one organization, regardless of the origin of the militants. From a tactical perspective, the author shows that infiltration of foreign workers was also a way of gaining a foothold in the major Taylorist industries that employed a large number of migrant and colonial workers.
One of the main features of Meriggi's book is its in-depth analysis of the organization of strikes at the turn of the 1930s, a period the historiography has tended to frame as a time of crisis and labour unrest. Meriggi highlights the numerous mobilizations that spread in small and medium-sized factories, as well as in the mining and construction sectors. The CGTU was confronted with strikes, often led by unorganized groups of workers, representing new, emerging sectors of the working class, of which foreign workers were an important part.
Another feature is that the author has chosen to quote very long passages verbatim from the sources she has consulted. It follows that the book is also a very important repertoire of historical texts taken from the CGTU newspaper, internal meetings, police sources, and reports sent to/from the Profintern office in Moscow.
As mentioned, Meriggi has organized each chapter around a particular type of source. There are some drawbacks to this source-based structure that I want to address. First and foremost, the reader is forced to switch back and forth from the split to the reunification, finding a repetition of the same processes and events from different points of view. Secondly, the length of each chapter can vary greatly, from twenty pages (Chapter Three) to 194 pages (Chapter Five).
At the same time, a more structured and continuous dialogue with the historiography could have improved this research. For example, the book says very little about the pre- and post-unification experience. Nevertheless, several historians, including Nancy Green, Léon Gani, and Leah Haus,Footnote 1 have already worked on this. Moreover, for the interwar period, there is a wealth of previous research that could help to better place this book in the historiographical debate on French labour history (Claude Didry, Alain Dewerpe, Xavier VignaFootnote 2), the political engagement of migrant workers (Gary Cross, Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Antonio BechelloniFootnote 3), and Italian immigration (Pierre Milza, Manuela Martini, Gérard NoirielFootnote 4).
Some issues are touched on only briefly and would have benefited from more detailed study or analysis in light of the existing literature. First of all, the book is limited to the CGTU initiatives. No attempt is made to examine what was happening in parallel in the CGT. I believe that the competition between the two organizations was one reason both created specific structures and subsidized them over time. Moreover, a closer look at the initiatives of both unions is necessary to understand the organizational models and political cultures that prevailed at the time of unification in 1936, and thus to understand whether the CGTU's experience in the new unified union was hegemonic or not.
Another aspect worthy of more detailed study is the role of second-generation immigrants and naturalized foreigners. As several previous analyses have shown, these two groups were fundamental in organizing foreign workers and circumventing restrictive laws. What was their place in the CGTU?
Moreover, Meriggi's research pays little attention to the relationship between political and economic migration. This clear distinction must certainly be questioned, given its permeability. It would have been interesting to know more about the background of the foreign activists who flocked to the CGTU. What was their relationship to politics in their country of origin? What was their economic background? When did they start unionizing?
These questions are also important for understanding whether migrants’ social networks played a role in bringing some of them closer to French trade unionism, or whether these social networks were instead an obstacle to their unionization. In her introduction, Meriggi suggests that, for some groups, it was more a process of “conflictual integration” (p. 13), i.e. where joining trade unions (sometimes even against the wishes of employers sharing the same origins as those migrants) was a means to becoming part of French society. This aspect certainly deserves further attention in future research.
These caveats aside, this book remains an important tool for understanding the transformations in the trade union and labour world of the interwar period. Placed in the context of Meriggi's previous work, it represents the final piece of a very large mosaic on workers’ internationalism and the development of international trade union culture between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s.
