The Reconstruction of Northern France after World War I

Efforts to rebuild the devastated regions of Northern France began long before the war ended. Only months into the conflict, the French state announced that the sinistrés, the affected inhabitants of the regions that saw massive destruction of buildings and agricultural land, would have the right to compensation for damages or loss of home, land, and cattle. In 1916, coordinated campaigns started to rebuild territory reclaimed from retreating German troops. Often carried out by French and British military, these efforts focused mostly on removing shells and wire and on returning farmland to its original use. The rebuilding of homes was no national priority during the war. In the eyes of the local population, the end of the war did little to change this.Footnote ⁷ Although the government established several emergency relief agencies, and although a number of laws were passed to alleviate the distress of the sinistrés, no comprehensive plan was put forward for the rebuilding of the war-devastated regions. Frustrated at the government’s inertia, the local population started to look elsewhere for help – which it found in the ranks of organized labour.Footnote ⁸

The rebuilding of the war-devastated regions became a major concern for France’s socialist trade union movement in the aftermath of the war. In early 1919, just a few months after the armistice, a first encounter between French and German building trade unions took place during the negotiations that eventually led to the Treaty of Versailles. France and Germany had set up special delegations representing both the building employers and the building trade unions in the official reparations talks. During the first meetings of what came to be known as the reconstruction commission, the idea surfaced to deploy German workers for the rebuilding of the war-devastated regions of Northern France. The idea attracted considerable attention among the public. According to the CGT, it even gained support from a high-level delegation of American builders and financiers, who promised to provide funds and building materials at a special meeting during the first International Labour Conference, which convened in Washington DC in October 1919. Equipped with American assurances, the CGT called on the French government to begin preparations for the deployment of German workers. Yet to the great disappointment of the CGT, the French government declined to do so, explaining that a long list of issues had to be discussed and decided before France could receive workers from the very country that was responsible for razing the villages and towns it was now called upon to rebuild.Footnote ⁹

The CGT went out of its way to put pressure on the French government in the hope the latter would reconsider its position. In early 1921, the CGT set up a special committee of enquiry consisting of five senior functionaries to assess the needs of the local population. For several weeks, the committee toured the devastated regions in the North, talking to mayors and sinistrés and documenting their appalling living conditions.Footnote ¹⁰ The committee had two objectives. First, it was supposed to put the spotlight on the government’s failure to rebuild the war-devastated regions. Writing for the CGT mouthpiece, Le Peuple, the commission fiercely criticized Louis Loucheur, France’s Minister for the Liberated Regions and an important voice in the reparation negotiations with the former enemy, for ignoring the needs of the sinistrés, who, CGT officials did not tire of stressing, still lived among ruins and rubble. The committee was especially critical of Loucheur’s refusal to say anything of substance about the workers required to rebuild the war-devastated regions.Footnote ¹¹

The second objective of the committee was to mobilize support for direct Franco-German trade union cooperation, which manifested in the drafting of a proposal for the deployment of German construction workers to Northern France under the auspices of French and German unions. The CGT knew that it had to make the idea of receiving large numbers of German workers palatable to the local population. In an effort to dispel concerns, the French labour confederation regularly held meetings with local sinistrés.Footnote ¹² On the eve of such a meeting, the CGT’s long-time Secretary General, Léon Jouhaux, published an op-ed in Le Peuple highlighting the twofold significance of Franco-German building trade union cooperation. Jouhaux pointed out that in light of the government’s failure to act, the trade union proposal to use German construction labour would, on the one hand, make an important practical contribution to ending the suffering of the local population. On the other hand, Jouhaux argued, the idea deserved support because it showed a path towards international reconciliation, which was the best protection against nationalist hubris and the revival of militarism in the future. In short, he suggested that the reception of German construction workers promised to rebuild not only houses but also trust.Footnote ¹³

The initiative by the CGT did not fail in its intention to put pressure on the French government. Loucheur declared that the French people would most likely not tolerate the presence of large groups of German workers in Northern France. If, however, the CGT was able to convince him otherwise, he would not obstruct the trade union proposal.Footnote ¹⁴ Against this backdrop, the CGT made an effort to show the Minister, and, indeed, all of France, that the sinistrés welcomed help no matter where it came from, even if it came from Germany. On 31 October 1921, a joint Franco-German trade union delegation visited Chaulnes, a heavily damaged commune in Northern France. The unions hoped to use Chaulnes as a test case to demonstrate that the sinistrés approved of their proposal. According to Le Peuple, the bi-national trade union delegation was cordially met by the local sinistrés and their representatives. Witnessing the extent of the devastation, the German trade union delegate, Sassenbach, delivered what Le Peuple called a sincere and sober speech, which allegedly made a strong impact on the local population. The CGT claimed that an ad hoc enquiry among the sinistrés of Chaulnes showed that they strongly supported the unions’ proposal to let German construction workers help rebuild their homes.Footnote ¹⁵

It is not surprising that these unverified claims by the CGT did little to win over the French government, as the geographer Hugh Clout, one of the few scholars who has studied this episode in detail, pointed out. According to Clout, Loucheur stressed that he would approve of the union’s proposal only if eighty per cent or more of the affected people in Chaulnes expressed support in an official survey. The results of this survey, which was carried out a few weeks later, showed that attitudes differed considerably from one village to the next. Ultimately, however, only forty-nine per cent of the sinistrés who took part in the survey approved of the plan. Following meetings with the sinistrés, the local prefect interpreted the results in such a way that the people of Chaulnes were not categorically opposed to the idea but that they feared that the sheer number of German workers necessary for reconstruction might overwhelm the local population. Against this backdrop, Loucheur had no option but to reject the proposal.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus ended not only the French government’s interest in union-orchestrated plans to use German construction labour for the rebuilding of Northern France, but also most of the scholarship, which has so far focused predominantly on the French experience. As the following pages will show, adding the perspective of the German unions contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of the idea of sending German workers to Northern France, and of the hopes and fears organized labour attached to it.

The Reconstruction of Northern France and the German Unions

The first aspect that the analysis of trade union sources from early Weimar Germany brings to light is that the intra-union debate about the reconstruction of Northern France was much more contentious than CGT officials suggested. When the idea first surfaced at the above-mentioned meetings of the reconstruction commission in early 1919, German trade union delegates warmed to it not so much because they believed in its potential for international reconciliation and working-class solidarity, as Jouhaux had put it, but because they distrusted assurances by the French government that German prisoners of war, who had been used rather generously for emergency works before, would not be used for reconstruction in peacetime. In other words, the prospect of an official agreement on the use of German workers in Northern France was appealing to German trade union functionaries because such an agreement could help prevent the use of forced labour in reconstruction.Footnote ¹⁷ This does not mean, however, that the German building unions were fully supportive of the idea from the start. In the first months after the war, they regularly expressed doubts that, given the low unemployment figures for skilled construction labour at home, German building workers would accept employment in France without knowing what to expect.Footnote ¹⁸

On the French side, too, the path that eventually led to the building trade unions’ endorsement of the idea was thornier than the CGT implied. From the beginning, CGT officials, including Jouhaux, were careful to describe the negotiations with the German building trade unions as amicable and smooth. However, this fails to capture the deep reservations that many French building trade union functionaries initially had about the idea. In the summer of 1919, trade union representatives from near and far convened in Amsterdam for the International Trade Union Congress, which marked the birth of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU).Footnote ¹⁹ During the constituent congress of the IFTU, or Amsterdam International, a group of Dutch, French, and German construction workers gathered for a special meeting to explore the idea of sending German workers to rebuild the war-devastated regions of Northern France. The French building trade union delegate, Chauvin, explained that although he respected the willingness of the German unions to contribute to the reconstruction effort, he did not understand how, given the overwhelming “hatred by the French for everything German […] any German worker would even consider coming to France”.Footnote ²⁰

This was not the only time Chauvin cast doubt on the alleged Franco–German unity that CGT officials sometimes read into bi-national trade union negotiations. When construction trade union delegates met in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1919 to relaunch the Building Workers’ International, which, like the Second International, had effectively collapsed with the outbreak of World War I, they pledged to do everything in their power to foster working-class cooperation and to avoid armed conflict in the future. Yet, the war was not forgotten. As soon as the floor opened, Chauvin asked the long-serving General Secretary of the Building Workers’ International, the prominent German functionary Friedrich “Fritz” Paeplow, whether he had been in favour of the war or opposed to it. Paeplow replied rather angrily that if their roles had been reversed he would not have dared to ask Chauvin such a disrespectful question. All class-conscious workers in Germany, Paeplow continued, had been opposed to the war. What they lacked was not the will but the power to prevent the war – a historic failure the burden of which German workers shared with workers elsewhere, including the French.Footnote ²¹

German union functionaries were markedly upset about Chauvin’s comments. Hermann Silberschmidt, a prominent building trade union official who had attended the IFTU congress as a delegate for the German Building Workers’ Association (DBV), the country’s largest union of amalgamated building trades, travelled directly from Amsterdam to Versailles, where he represented the DBV on the reconstruction committee. Having confronted the committee with Chauvin’s dismissive remarks about the idea of sending German workers to Northern France, Silberschmidt was reassured by Loucheur, then still acting in his capacity as Minister for Industrial Recovery, that the German trade union representatives must have misunderstood Chauvin. Loucheur promised that he would have a word with the French trade union leader. The Minister declared that he continued to be open to the idea of receiving German workers, which could provide crucial relief especially to the most badly damaged towns – a position he held at least until the disappointing Chaulnes referendum mentioned above. In stark contrast to later claims by the CGT, Loucheur here defended the idea of sending German workers to Northern France against the critique of a leading French trade union official, not the other way around.Footnote ²²

Chauvin, for his part, knew very well that the sheer scale of destruction made it necessary that foreign workers be brought in, especially at a time of acute labour shortages in France. He argued, however, that it would be much better to increase the number of Spanish and Italian building workers, who already had a fairly strong presence in the country, than to include German workers in the reconstruction effort, even if the rejection of German labour would slow down the pace of reconstruction.Footnote ²³ It is important to note though that despite his name, which he shared with the fictive Napoleonic character that coined the term, Chauvin’s remarks were not an expression of chauvinism. Although animosities towards the neighbour in the East did play a role, Chauvin, like many in his union, was primarily concerned about the impact that an influx of skilled German workers would have on the domestic labour market, especially since there was no agreement in place regulating the conditions under which German workers would be employed.

Committed to remedying this, German unions intensified efforts to work out the basic conditions that had to be met before French and German labour could accept the deployment of German workers to Northern France. A first step towards achieving this goal was made in early January 1920, when a number of unions representing German construction workers, miners, painters, metal workers, and several other trades adopted a proposal for the deployment of German workers to Northern France.Footnote ²⁴ In the weeks that followed, the DBV held several meetings with its French counterpart and with the Building Workers’ International to discuss the details of the German proposal.Footnote ²⁵ Finally, on 17 February 1920, a gathering of French and German trade union officials adopted the proposal, which thus became official trade union policy on both sides of the Rhine.Footnote ²⁶ The proposal quickly won over those French unionists who at first had been hostile to the idea of receiving German workers. As Chauvin himself observed, opposition in his union quickly vanished in the weeks following the adoption of the joint proposal, which provides further evidence that the initial opposition by French construction unionists was not an expression of ingrained anti-Germanness but a trade union’s rather conventional opposition to unregulated labour migration.Footnote ²⁷

The unions’ joint proposal for the deployment of German workers to Northern France constitutes a remarkable yet largely forgotten document of labour history. The proposal featured a long list of rather unsurprising trade union demands, for instance that German workers must not earn less or more than their French colleagues or work more than eight hours a day. As the DBV paper, Der Grundstein, had long argued, it was common sense that the deployment of German workers would be acceptable to French workers only if the former did not underbid the latter.Footnote ²⁸ Yet, the proposal also contained a number of exceptional provisions on trade union representation across borders. It laid down, for instance, that German building trade unions must not sign any framework contract with the German state that the French building trade unions had not read and approved. Equally important was the provision that German workers would enjoy unrestricted freedom of movement and freedom of coalition; freedom to read their own press; freedom to hold meetings; and freedom to bring along their own functionaries, who would collaborate with French union officials to make sure that rules and regulations were being observed. Most strikingly perhaps was the provision that German workers were to have the right to join a French union if they wished to do so.Footnote ²⁹

Merely a year after the end of the war, the organized construction workers of these two alleged arch-enemies adopted a joint proposal for transnational trade union representation, which included the right of German functionaries to represent German workers in French industrial conflict, and the admission, even if temporary, of German workers to French unions. This was highly unusual at a time when transnational labour representation was still limited to cooperation with chapters in foreign countries that were important destinations for labour migration, such as the Italian-speaking union Locales in the US.Footnote ³⁰ One of the most interesting terms of the proposal, however, had little to do with hours, pay, conditions, and trade union representation abroad. It centred on the role that the German state would play in the proposed scheme.

Already during the negotiations that led to the adoption of the proposal, trade union delegates had demanded that any future contract be centrally allocated by the German state, which would act as general contractor for all building works in Northern France.Footnote ³¹ Upon returning from an extended tour of the war-devastated regions of Northern France, Silberschmidt maintained that this was a decisive precondition for trade union support in France and Germany alike – not only because, as general contractor, the German state would be able to enforce compliance with laws and agreements but also because this would prevent Northern France becoming a playground for independent contractors eager to turn public funds into private profits.Footnote ³² Silberschmidt’s comment points to a virtually overlooked reason behind the strong support by organized German construction workers for the idea of sending their members to help rebuild Northern France.

The Rebuilding of Northern France as a Laboratory for the Socialization of Industry

As mentioned in the introduction above, the few scholars who have studied Weimar Germany’s debate about “reparation through rebuilding” have suggested that public support for the idea stemmed predominantly from three sources, namely the widely shared commitment to reduce the overall reparation burden; to contribute to postwar reconciliation; and to relieve pressure on the domestic labour market. By briefly discussing the role that these three aspects played in the rationale behind organized labour’s support for the idea of sending German construction workers to Northern France, the following pages draw attention to what previous research has overlooked.

There can be no doubt, first, that German trade unionists embraced the idea as an opportunity “to promote international cooperation and peace among nations”, as Der Grundstein put it.Footnote ³³ In fact, leading Social Democrats regularly invoked the ideal of international reconciliation in an effort to prevent workers from making unrealistic demands in the ongoing reconstruction negotiations. In characteristic manner, the prominent Social Democrat Max Cohen lectured German workers that the overarching goal of reconciliation required a certain willingness on their part to make sacrifices, which would be rewarded in the long run. “The reconstruction of France”, Cohen argued, “is in the common interest not only of Germany and France but of Europe as a whole. German workers must make this notion their guiding principle. If they do this, reconstruction will surely lead to the rapprochement of the French and German people”.Footnote ³⁴

Second, organized building labour supported the idea of reparation though construction work because German union officials hoped that the rebuilding of Northern France would create employment opportunities abroad when domestic demand for skilled building labour, which was high in the immediate aftermath of the war, would start to decrease in the not-so-distant future. Some union functionaries even conceived of the proposal as a remedy for the anticipated negative effect on employment of labour-saving innovations, which larger building companies started to experiment with in the early 1920s.Footnote ³⁵ Union leaders knew that measures such as serial construction and the use of prefabricated parts were likely to cause a fall in demand for skilled construction workers. Creating employment opportunities abroad could thus help to relieve the German labour market, at least temporarily, of some surplus labour in order to cushion the process of technological and organizational rationalization that was beginning to transform Weimar Germany’s construction industry.Footnote ³⁶ This logic resonated also with government officials, who hoped that, under carefully regulated terms, reparations could actually fuel rather than curb economic recovery.Footnote ³⁷

Third, German construction unions embraced the idea of sending some of their members to Northern France because they believed this would help diversify reparation claims and restore national sovereignty. As Karla has suggested, German building unions saw the deployment of construction workers as a way to actively participate in decision-making rather than passively implement decisions made by others. “Far from being an independent attempt on the part of the German trade unionists”, Karla continues, “their effort, in vain, to participate in reconstructing villages in the Northern French Somme stood for a general policy supported by German governmental authorities, relevant companies and large parts of the population”.Footnote ³⁸ Karla is right to highlight the yearning for a bigger seat at the table as one of the reasons for the trade unions’ push for reconstruction. Union officials did not tire of stressing that the deployment of construction workers for the rebuilding of towns and villages of Northern France would help diversify the means by which “Germany will pay”, as the popular French slogan had it. Any reparation delivered in the form of labour power, union officials reasoned, would decrease the total amount the country had to pay, and it would restore a feeling of self-efficacy among ordinary Germans.Footnote ³⁹

Yet, this does not mean that German construction unions pushed for the rebuilding of Northern France hand in hand with private builders, as Karla implies. Whatever hopes German employers attached to reparation through construction, hopes that are beyond the scope of this article, the building trade unions cannot be subsumed easily under a quasi-corporatist effort to improve Weimar Germany’s standing in international politics. To suggest this means to overlook the fact that the building unions developed the idea of sending some of their members abroad in direct opposition to private builders. In November 1919, Otto Geßler, the head of the newly established Ministry for Reconstruction, had requested Germany’s building trade unions and building employers to use the recently established reconstruction commission, on which they both sat, as a forum to develop a joint proposal that would outline the steps required to dispatch building materials and building workers to Northern France. On the first occasion to explore common ground, the unions and the employers clashed so fiercely that the reconstruction commission virtually collapsed. According to Der Grundstein, the talks failed because private builders, insisting on the principle of free competition, refused to accept the Reich as general contractor for all works in Northern France. This, in turn, was not negotiable for the building unions because, as we heard, they were convinced that only the German state could guarantee effective control and the enforcement of agreements. After all, the unions asked rhetorically, how would a French labour inspector or trade union functionary ensure that agreements were upheld on a construction site under private German management, staffed with foreign workers who were employed under conditions not approved by French unions?Footnote ⁴⁰

Unable to find compromise, the private builders and the building unions formulated separate responses to Geßler’s request, which they forwarded to the government as their official proposals for the rebuilding of Northern France.Footnote ⁴¹ The union proposal, which laid the foundation for the above-mentioned Franco-German trade union agreement, was preceded by a short preamble. In it, the German building unions demanded that all reconstruction in Northern France must be carried out either through direct labour schemes, which referred to a practice where the authorities took care of all planning, material, and transport while trade unions took care of supplying labour power, or with the help of construction producer cooperatives and other not-for-profit building enterprises. The goal of the preamble was to highlight the importance of labour’s main demand, namely that no organization involved in the reconstruction of Northern France must be allowed to make profits from a publicly financed programme.

The unions had long warned that private builders saw the reconstruction of Northern France primarily as a lucrative business opportunity, and they regularly warned workers not to be lured to France by job advertisements that appeared in the German press.Footnote ⁴² In fact, labour opposition to profit-making was strong on both sides of the border. On 5 November 1920, representatives of the Building Workers’ International, the ADGB, and the CGT, including Jouhaux, met with a number of national building trade unions to discuss the lack of progress in the reconstruction of Northern France. According to Der Zimmerer, the paper of Weimar Germany’s organized carpenters, all delegates agreed that private builders were to blame because they intentionally obstructed the approval of not-for-profit reconstruction by the French government. Against this backdrop, the French and the German trade union representatives reiterated their position that the reconstruction of Northern France must serve the entire public, including the inhabitants of the regions as well as the workers involved in the scheme, and that “capitalist profit-making must be made impossible”.Footnote ⁴³ By highlighting the importance of not-for-profit construction, organized labour drew a close connection between the rebuilding of Northern France on the one side and the struggle for the socialization of the building industry on the other.Footnote ⁴⁴ In order to better understand the rationale behind this argument, we need to take a closer look at the history of the concept of socialization and the mass mobilization it triggered.

The end of the war marked a watershed moment for European labour. Across the continent, organized workers insisted that their wartime sacrifices must be rewarded by better protection and wider participation in democratic decision-making, in politics as well as in the economy. The latter, they reasoned, must no longer fill the pockets of a few but serve the interests of all. This could only be achieved if industry were brought under democratic control. Against this backdrop, socialization movements emerged from Scotland to Austria and from Hungary to France, which aimed at making the public not only the owner of all means of production but also the ultimate sovereign over economic decision-making.Footnote ⁴⁵ Few countries witnessed a more powerful push for the socialization of the economy than the young Weimar Republic. In the early postwar years, a number of socialization commissions were established and tasked with exploring how different industrial sectors, including mining, the railways, and construction, could be socialized. Although support for the socialization of the economy was generally strong not only among minority socialists and the emergent communist movement but also among majority Social Democrats, the leaders of the SPD often warned that the socialization of industries not yet “ripe” for socialization would seriously undermine economic recovery.Footnote ⁴⁶

SPD functionaries argued that, following years of neglect and disinvestment, German industries had to be made productive again and catch up internationally before they could be socialized without risking economic collapse. This required further economic concentration as well as massive investment in plant and distribution channels. Drawing on the concept of “organized capitalism” that their main theoretician, Rudolf Hilferding, had proposed, leading Social Democrats believed that only those sectors were “ripe” for socialization that were dominated by a small number of large trusts, which had proven their ability to reliably supply the public and neighbouring sectors with quality products at competitive prices. Since this applied to very few industries in early Weimar, leading Social Democrats were opposed to the immediate socialization of industry from the top down. Largely following this logic, the country’s socialization commissions abstained from implementing concrete changes, offering instead a wealth of theoretical insight and practical advice for an unspecified time in the future.Footnote ⁴⁷

The commissions’ failure to act increasingly frustrated organized workers, many of whom put great hope in socialization. Discontent ran especially high among members of the building unions. Around mid-1919, unemployed construction workers started to take matters into their own hands. Across the country, producer cooperatives popped up that offered building labour and repair works on a not-for-profit basis. It was no coincidence that these producer cooperatives mushroomed in the building sector. In comparison to heavy industry, the establishment of construction companies required relatively little capital, especially where they carried out contracts on behalf of local authorities that provided material, transport, sometimes even plant. Observers at the time often referred to these building producer cooperatives as a movement for “socialization from below” because, in contrast to the top-down approach of the socialization commissions, they aimed not at passing national legislation or implementing nationwide policy but at socializing the industry from the bottom up, one cooperative at a time.

In an effort to regain control over the uncoordinated proliferation of building producer cooperatives, in 1920 a group of trade union leaders and prominent social-democratic building professionals initiated a network of so-called social building companies, or Bauhütten, which successfully united the quickly growing movement under a new joint roof. Established as limited liability companies, Bauhütten were jointly owned by municipalities, housing cooperatives, not-for-profit settlement associations, and, first and foremost, Weimar Germany’s vast trade union movement. The Bauhütten’s peculiar corporate structure, which gave joint control to not-for-profit stakeholders on the one side and representatives of local employees on the other, aimed to achieve the two main objectives of Weimar Germany’s socialization movement, namely to socialize ownership and to democratize decision-making. Over the course of the 1920s, the Bauhütten movement grew to become one of the country’s leading not-for-profit builders, producing more than 100,000 apartments for low-income tenants.Footnote ⁴⁸ As the following shows, the reconstruction of Northern France provided the nascent Bauhütten movement with a welcome opportunity to transnationalize the struggle for the democratic socialization of construction from below.

Although the French government, as we heard above, lost interest in trade union devised plans for the rebuilding of Northern France following the Chaulnes debacle, organized labour did not. A few weeks after the referendum in Chaulnes, from 20 to 22 December 1921, delegates of the recently established Action Committee for the Devastated Regions (Comité d’Action pour les Régions Dévastées), which represented the sinistrés of twelve affected departments, met with French and German trade unions in the city of Frankfurt to explore new options.Footnote ⁴⁹ The French delegation took the opportunity to emphasize once again that the outcome of the referendum did not mean that the local population was generally opposed to the idea of receiving German workers. Rather, the delegation argued, the failed referendum was the result of a successful campaign by a powerful coalition of business interests, which managed to scare the local populations by invoking fears about what Clout has called the alleged “invasion of the German system of labour organization”, and about what critics at the time dismissed as the “bocho-communiste” approach to the reconstruction of Northern France.Footnote ⁵⁰

Interestingly, neither Clout nor any of the scholars who followed up on his research further explored the characteristics that made this “system of labour organization”, in the eyes of critics, “bocho-communiste”. The above-mentioned meeting in Frankfurt between the action committee and the French and German unions provides an important clue. Doubling down on the principle of not-for-profit rebuilding, the conference declared that all reconstruction in Northern France should be carried out by the German Bauhütte, which, delegates suggested, offered an excellent model for large-scale reconstruction that catered to the needs of the people rather than the needs of capital. The conference set up a working group that included not only representatives of the action committee and the German and French unions but also Martin Wagner, the prominent urban planner and chief executive of the recently established umbrella organization of the Bauhütten movement, the Verband sozialer Baubetriebe (Federation of Social Building Companies, VsB). The working group was tasked with finalizing the details of a new trade union proposal that centred on the Bauhütte as the linchpin for all future not-for-profit reconstruction in Northern France.Footnote ⁵¹

In order to understand why the Bauhütten occupied such a central place in the planning for the reconstruction of Northern France, we need to rectify a common misconception about the Bauhütten that continues to feature prominently in the literature. Despite the name, which they took from the famous guild-like organization that built the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the Bauhütten of the 1920s did not aim to reconcile industrial production with “medieval building traditions”, as the scholarship has often suggested.Footnote ⁵² Modern Bauhütten never tried to control the price by restricting output or access to the trade. On the contrary, they sought to lower prices by increasing productivity and by making construction work more efficient. Seniority and origin played no role in the production or reproduction of their internal hierarchies either. Nor did the Bauhütten of Weimar Germany ever strive to create a craft-based spirit of communion that was to permeate all social relations, including family life. Embracing science and technology as a motor for innovation and rational planning, the Bauhütten of the 1920s were a modern industrial creature through and through.Footnote ⁵³

It is certainly true that, as Karla has pointed out, the Bauhütten got involved in the rebuilding of Northern France because organized labour saw this as a chance for reconciliation and employment. However, at least as important a factor was the belief that the reconstruction of Northern France presented a unique opportunity to promote the Bauhütte as a model for the democratic socialization of the economy in postwar Europe. German trade unionists, in other words, were convinced that the involvement of the Bauhütte, which aimed to transform construction from a profit-seeking industry into a public service under democratic control, provided a shining example of how to socialize the economy from the bottom up. And this indeed resonated with organized labour abroad. Throughout 1922, French delegations visited construction sites of local Bauhütten across Weimar Germany in an effort to learn more about the advances that the movement had made in the bottom-up socialization of construction. Impressed with what they saw, French unionists announced their intention to launch similar socialized building companies at home, which, they hoped, could be used for the cost-efficient, not-for-profit reconstruction of the devastated regions of Northern France.Footnote ⁵⁴

In March 1922, a French labour delegation comprising Jouhaux and a number of building trade unionists embarked on an extended tour of Bauhütten construction sites in Berlin, Cologne, Dortmund, Hamburg, and Leipzig. During their stop in Berlin, the General Secretary of the CGT sat down with an editor of the SPD paper, Vorwärts, to share his experiences. Jouhaux explained that their visit had three objectives. First, the French delegation wanted to find out if the German Bauhütten were capable of carrying out comprehensive construction works in Northern France. After what they saw, the delegates had no doubt that they were. Second, the delegates wanted to learn more about how the Bauhütte worked and what impact it had on construction costs. Jouhaux argued that the study of the German Bauhütte convinced the French delegation that a similar network of not-for-profit building companies would make an important contribution to reducing building costs and, in so doing, alleviate the housing crisis in France. Finally, Jouhaux argued, the French delegation wanted to get a better understanding of the social and political impact of the German Bauhütten. Markedly inspired, the French unionists stressed that the German Bauhütten were a striking attempt at bringing a key industry under democratic control. “We as French trade union men”, Jouhaux concluded, “are convinced that this is a course of action that we urgently need to follow in France”.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the autumn of 1922, frequent visits and talks between the German Bauhütten movement, French labour, and the Action Committee for the Devastated Regions finally led to the first tangible results. On 22 September, the VsB met with delegates of the French action committee in Cologne, where the two sides agreed on the details of a framework contract for the provision of building materials and building labour by the German Bauhütten.Footnote ⁵⁶ One month later, on 24 October 1922, the two sides met in Berlin to sign the first framework contract for Bauhütten works in the war-devastated regions of Northern France.Footnote ⁵⁷ German trade unionists often interpreted this contract as a direct response, as a “counter-contract” even, to a recent agreement between the French state and German private industry.Footnote ⁵⁸ For years, German trade unionists argued, France’s nationalist government had sabotaged efforts by the labour movement to help rebuild Northern France. According to German labour, the government’s opposition was fuelled not by anti-German sentiment but by a strong commitment to turn the reconstruction of Northern France into a haven for organized business rather than not-for-profit builders. This was the real reason why the French Senator Guy de Lubersac, who also served as President of the General Federation of the Reconstruction Cooperatives in the war-damaged regions (Confédération générale des coopératives de reconstruction), had recently agreed to a highly controversial contract with the German industrialist Stinnes for the delivery of large quantities of building materials and building labour to Northern France. The signing of this contract, which came to be known as the Stinnes-Lubersac agreement, as well as similar contracts with Siemens and other large German firms in subsequent weeks, triggered angry responses by German construction unionists, who stressed that these contracts were intended to further fill the pockets of wealthy industrialists at the expense of the German public, which had to pay the bill.Footnote ⁵⁹

Against this backdrop, the trade union world celebrated the first contract between the VsB and the French action committee as an important step forward. For the first time, a large network of socialized building companies owned and governed democratically by the German trade union movement had received a substantial contract for supplying the devastated communities of Northern France with building materials and construction workers. German labour functionaries saw their hopes confirmed that the reconstruction of Northern France would promote the Bauhütte as a corporate role model for the socialization of the economy when the French action committee agreed to establish a not-for-profit company as counterpart on the French side, which, mirroring the corporate shape of the Bauhütten, would act as official building contractor on behalf of the sinistrés. The framework contract, which outlined the general conditions for individual contracts that local German Bauhütten would sign with the representatives of a given village in Northern France, forbade any form of profit-making. All funds had to be used for wages, material, and plant. Any money remaining after the successful completion of an individual contract would be split evenly between the French action committee and the German Bauhütte, which, as a socialized not-for-profit company, was prohibited by its own articles of association from paying out dividends. Instead, the Bauhütte had to forward any surplus to the German state as an additional contribution to the overall reparations bill.Footnote ⁶⁰ In so doing, the VsB hoped to achieve two goals at the same time, namely to reduce the financial burden of reparation and to promote the Bauhütten as a model for the socialization of industry from the bottom up.Footnote ⁶¹ In Wagner’s eyes, the framework contract thus promised to transform the very essence of reconstruction in Northern France. What had started as an effort to ease the reparations burden had turned into a transnational endeavour for not-for-profit construction. The involvement of the VsB was intended to change the mere “Wiederaufbau” (rebuilding) of Northern France into “Sozialer Wiederaufbau” (social rebuilding), which underlined the great potential that trade union functionaries saw in the transnationalization of the bottom-up socialization of industry.Footnote ⁶²

The first international Bauhütten contract received a lot of attention not only from union functionaries but also from ordinary workers. In the weeks that followed the signing of the contract, so many German workers and technicians applied for jobs to participate in the proposed scheme that the VsB found it necessary to run announcements in the trade union press informing interested applicants that the details of the contract were still being worked out, and that the VsB would publish an official call for applications in due time.Footnote ⁶³ As we know, this never came to pass. Only weeks after the Bauhütten had signed the first framework contract for Northern France, Belgian and French troops occupied the Ruhr, which not only stifled the implementation of this contract but virtually ended all trade union talks about the provision of German building labour for the reconstruction of the devastated regions of Northern France.Footnote ⁶⁴

Somewhat ironically, the occupation of the Ruhr, while effectively ending trade union talks, was the starting shot for the actual deployment of German workers, albeit not under the auspices of organized labour. In the summer of 1923, the German embassy in Paris published a report its staff had compiled based on testimonies by more than thirty German workers, who, against all warnings by the unions, had accepted employment by private companies in Northern France. According to these workers, they had been recruited by a German and a French agent who had toured the villages of Southern Hessia, falsely claiming to represent their respective national governments. The workers claimed they had to sign contracts that were written in French, which they did not understand. Once they had arrived in Northern France, they quickly realized that not only did they receive wages that were significantly lower than their French colleagues (lower even than the wages of other nationals working in France), but that they were also prohibited from leaving the district where they were employed. Lacking effective trade union representation, these workers were virtually without protection from exploitation and maltreatment.Footnote ⁶⁵ In short, they faced the exact scenario that French and German unions for years had struggled to avoid, largely in vain.