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- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 10 July 2020
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- 03 December 2019, pp 247-266
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Fellow Travellers
- Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939
- Thomas Beaumont
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- Liverpool University Press
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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Fellow Travellers examines the shifting practices and strategies adopted by Communist militants as they sought to build and maintain support on the railways. In a period in which the Communist party struggled to establish a foothold in many French workplaces, activists on the railways bucked the trend and set down deep and lasting roots of support. They maintained this support even through the sectarian period of the Comintern's shift to class against class, deepening their participation within railway industrial relations and gaining the experience of engagement with managers and state officials upon which they would build during the years of the Popular Front. Here France's railway employees joined alongside their fellow workers in shaping a new social contract for workers, extending the principle of democratic representation into the workplace. While the Popular Front experiment proved shortlived, its influence was long lasting. In the post Liberation period, the key tenets of the Popular Front experience re-emerged within the nationalised SNCF, shaping the particular character of railway industrial relations – the peculiar mix of collaboration and hostile confrontation between management and workforce that continues to make the French railways one of the most contested sectors of the modern French economy.
7 - Railway Workers and the Popular Front: From Victory to Defeat, 1934–1939
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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- 10 July 2020
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- 03 December 2019, pp 203-238
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Summary
For a brief period, the events of May–June 1936 transformed the social and political landscape in France. Following almost two decades of employer ascendancy and the relative impotence of the labour movement in France, divided as it was into often warring communist and non-communist factions, a re-united and supremely confident CGT seized back the initiative. A massive surge in rank and file militancy following the election of the first Socialist prime minister in the nation's history led to widespread strikes across French industry and commerce beginning in May 1936 and carrying on through the following months. Alongside the strikes French workers adopted the relatively novel tactic of occupying their workplaces, raising among some the hopes, and fears, of an impending revolution. Beginning among aircraft workers in Le Havre and Toulouse on 11 May the strike wave quickly spread, first through other aircraft factories before broadening out through other industrial sectors. By the end of the month the strikes had reached the Parisian banlieues and had increased dramatically in scale. On 1 June there were ten occupied workplaces in the Paris region. By midday on 2 June this had reached 66, and by that evening 150 workplaces had been occupied. As economic activity began to grind to a halt, the newly elected Popular Front government responded. On 6 June the newly elected Prime Minister Léon Blum announced in parliament that the government would be immediately implementing a programme of social legislation. Employers were thrust onto the back foot. In secret talks the following day with representatives of major industrialists at the prime minister's official residence, the Hôtel Matignon, the Popular Front government exacted significant concessions which fundamentally recast social relations in the workplace. As a result of these concessions, French workers now had the right to join unions, elect shop stewards to represent them in negotiations with management and gained pay increases across the board. This sudden, unsolicited extension of trade union power within the workplace was one of the major achievements of the Popular Front government. It was as, Herrick Chapman notes, a ‘stunning breakthrough for the CGT’. The Matignon Accords were announced on Monday 8 June, yet they failed initially to curtail the strikes. Occupations persisted through June, finally petering out in early July, at which point 12,000 workplaces had been affected by the strikes, with 9,000 occupied.
Frontmatter
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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Index
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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- 03 December 2019, pp 267-271
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3 - Railway Workers and the Communist Choice
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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- 03 December 2019, pp 85-114
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Summary
The collapse of the May strike had a profound and lasting impact upon the cheminot community. Individually, many workers experienced the loss of their job, prospects and security as a traumatic event. There were reports of suicides among the workers in the days and weeks following the termination of the strike. The cheminots’ defeat led to a general sense of disillusionment and many turned away from the union and from political activity. Yet, for large numbers of railway workers, defeat turned to anger. This targeted for the most part the reformist CGT leadership, who, it was alleged, had betrayed the workers throughout 1920. This anger led first to the schism within the railway Federation, as the minoritaires under Gaston Monmousseau and Pierre Semard wrested control of the union away from the supporters of Maurice Bidegaray. This was soon followed by an analogous schism within the wider CGT as the minoritaires split with the reformists and went on to form a new organisation, the CGTU.
The new ‘unitaires’, however, were soon themselves divided over the relationship the new confederation should pursue with the Bolsheviks in Moscow, and with the newly created French Communist Party at home. While Moscow's supporters argued for adherence to the new Bolshevik International, anarcho-syndicalists rejected Moscow's overtures and any submission of the union movement to a political party. These debates continue to animate historical discussion. In her seminal thesis published in the 1960s, Annie Kriegel emphasised the significance of this moment as would-be revolutionaries turned away from the traditions of French syndicalism and towards an embrace of Russian-style Bolshevism. This interpretation has since been challenged, most notably in the work of Kathryn Amdur, who emphasised the continuing significance of a distinctive revolutionary syndicalist current within French communism at least down to 1924, as well as the continued legacy of revolutionary syndicalist thinking and practice outside of the communist movement beyond this date. Most recently, Ralph Darlington's wide-ranging comparative study of working-class political activism has rejected the thesis of a clear rupture between revolutionary syndicalism on the one hand, and communism on the other hand. Instead, Darlington has explored how the immediate post-war period and the early 1920s saw a process of rapprochement between the two political cultures, with former syndicalists moving towards the Bolshevik position, and the communist leadership in turn accommodating themselves to key elements within revolutionary syndicalism.
5 - International Connections
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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Cheminot internationalism during the 1920s proved to be highly problematic for those who still looked to the railway workers as a source of political militancy within the French working-class movement. While on the one hand railway workers enjoyed a reputation for their international links and the sense of a global railway community, on the other hand the political and social climate of the 1920s in reality often worked against such international solidarities, placing cheminots at odds with workers internationally, and with the leadership of the PCF. This was most notably the case during the Ruhr occupation during which some 20,000 French and Belgian railway workers operated as strike breakers during the German workers’ campaign of passive resistance. In this, as in the communist campaign against the Rif War, the legacies of the 1920 defeat were still in evidence, casting a shadow across the cheminot community. Nevertheless, in their day-to-day working environment numerous workers demonstrated their commitment to the internationalist cause, and nurtured communist political campaigns, often against the odds.
Cheminot Internationalism
From the earliest days of modern train travel, the railways have always occupied a complex political space; deeply entwined with the nation state they were also from the outset profoundly international endeavours. While the relationship between individual nation states and the railway industry developed in differing fashions through the nineteenth century, from the wholly private financing of British laissez-faire liberalism on one extreme to the fully state-owned Belgian system on the other, the railways quickly became enmeshed with ideas of nationhood and discourses of national prestige. Yet, the railways were also a major global industry. Alongside the global spread of the railways emerged an international labour force of engineering experts, highly skilled locomotive footplatemen and railway navvies, a cosmopolitan, mobile workforce which proved crucial to the industry's development. International connections and cooperation continued to be vital to the industry throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. French railway companies maintained close links with foreign railway operators. This was particularly marked in the borderlands, of course, where trains crossed back and forth between national jurisdictions. In the north of the country, the Compagnie du Nord sustained important connections with the Belgian railway network, for instance.
2 - Railway Workers and the ‘Après Guerre’
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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This chapter examines one of the seminal periods in French interwar social and political history, the series of railway strikes in the winter and spring of 1920, culminating in the month-long railway general strike of May. This is a subject which has drawn the interest of a number of historians, notably the early investigations of Annie Kriegel, who in her analysis of the cheminot strike was able to draw upon source material that has since been destroyed. During the 1980s, the publication of the highly significant respective studies by Georges Ribeill and Adrian Jones shed important new light on the period. This chapter sets the 1920 strikes in the broad context of post-war labour militancy. Growing frustration at the emerging political and social settlement in the period after the armistice led French railway workers into an increasingly militant stance through the course of 1919. Though the reformist ‘majoritaire’ leadership were able to contain this discontent through 1919, by the end of this year they found themselves squeezed between, on the one hand, an increasingly pragmatic revolutionary ‘minoritaire’ current that was gaining ground among the cheminots and, on the other hand, an intransigant railway management keen to reassert their authority on the railways. In the winter and spring of 1920, the reformists would lose their control over the rank and file. The resulting major confrontation between railway workers and the French state would have significant consequences that shaped railway industrial relations for years to follow.
Railway Workers and the ‘Spirit of 1919’
‘Above all’, argues Tyler Stovall, ‘1919 was a year of revolution, both actual and potential.’ Internationally and in France itself, revolutionary change appeared imminent. In March, just a little over a year following the Bolshevik's revolution, the first Congress of the Communist International was held in Moscow. Though largely attended by Russian delegates due to the difficulties European socialists faced in reaching the newly created Soviet state, the official creation of a new International designed to spread Bolshevik-style revolution worldwide captured the imagination of revolutionaries in the west.
The founding of the Comintern in the spring of 1919 coincided with a period of labour unrest and worker protest that in certain European regions and cities irrupted into revolutionary crises for the existing regimes. In Germany workers’ uprisings and strikes were followed by counter-revolution.
Contents
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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1 - Railway Workers at War
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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Summary
On the eve of the First World War, the French railway network was dominated by a handful of powerful private rail companies and one state-operated rail network. These regional railway companies, working from their headquarters at the major Parisian termini operated under conventions agreed with the French state in 1883. These companies were the Compagnie du Nord, which, as its name suggests, serviced the north of France; the Compagnie de l’Est; the Paris-Orléans (PO), which operated the railway network to the west and south-west of the country; the Midi; and the Paris-Lyon-Marseille (PLM), which ran services from Paris into the south of France. Added to this list was the state-operated Etat rail network, created in 1909 following the collapse of the Compagnie de l’Ouest. All told, the Grands Réseaux, as the private railway companies were collectively known, employed around 350,000 workers in August 1914.
Pre-war rates of union membership among the railway workers, collectively known as ‘cheminots’, were low and distributed among a number of individual trade unions. The defeat of the major railway strike of October 1910 had caused a significant collapse in union membership on the railways. From roughly 40,000 members in December 1910 this figure had fallen to just 14,000 one year later. The defeat of the strike left the workers deeply divided: between rival networks – workers on the Nord for instance felt that they had been badly betrayed by their fellow workers on the Est – and divided by hierarchies of skill. The largest of the unions representing railway workers on the eve of war were the Syndicat National, a general union which represented all grades of blue-collar workers, and the Fédération des Mécaniciens et Chauffeurs, the union representing the locomotive drivers and firemen. The latter were highly skilled workers who occupied the highest rungs of the blue-collar hierarchy on the railways. Pre-war efforts to unite the disparate trade unions representing railway employees had foundered, overwhelmed by the professional divisions within the industry whose complex hierarchies based upon type of profession and years of service created significant barriers between the various grades of cheminot.
After a brief flirtation with radical syndicalist practice, which culminated in the major national railway strike of 1910, the Syndicat National had moved steadily rightwards under the leadership of Maurice Bidegaray, a locomotive driver on the Etat network.
Conclusion
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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- 03 December 2019, pp 239-246
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This book has shed important new light on the interconnected histories of interwar communism and the French labour movement in three key areas. First, it has explored the growth of communist support among one of the PCF's key working-class constituencies, the railway workers. Fellow Travellers is the first book to provide a detailed examination of how and why communist militants were able to put down such deep and long-lasting roots among this significant group of workers during the interwar years. In particular, by placing the emphasis upon the workplace and industrial politics, this work provides one of the few book-length studies of communist trade unionism in France during the interwar period, and sheds important new light on the communist-led CGTU and its relationship with workers and the Communist Party.
Second, this work has sought to place communist activity firmly within the political and social contexts of the railways and railway industrial relations. By exploring the manner in which communist militants sought to respond to the particular challenges and dilemmas posed by the railway context through the 1920s and 1930s, the work has shed important light upon the shifting strategies and approaches adopted by the communistled railway trade union as its leaders and local activists negotiated a path between their communist political convictions and the everyday realities of the railway workplace. In so doing we have seen how communist militants, through their deepening relations with management and state officials, contributed to the shaping of what was to become a particularly French approach to industrial politics during the interwar years, echoing the findings of Herrick Chapman in his early research on France's aircraft workers.
Third, this work has focussed upon the question of power and the place of workers within the late-Third Republic. From the late 1920s onwards, communist militants on the railways placed the extension of working-class representation and the contestation of managerial authority within the railway industry at the heart of their industrial strategy. Defeated, divided, and excluded from positions of influence within the industry after the 1920 strikes, French railway workers, through the activities of communist militants, were increasingly able to exert themselves upon the calculations of railway company management and French state officials. This developing policy of engagement, which I have labelled ‘hostile participation’, was pursued with increasing pragmatism through the years of ‘class-againstclass’, and reached its apotheosis with the advent of the Popular Front.
4 - Stabilisation
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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The defeat of May 1920 had profound and long-lasting consequences. Though the cheminots continued to adhere to railway trade unions in large numbers, including the communist-led FNCU, the wave of industrial action had well and truly been broken. On the railways there was to be no return to the rank and file militancy of the period 1917–1920. For the remainder of the period, up to and including the Popular Front, railway workers were not to participate in any further significant strike action. Nor did the vast majority of cheminots demonstrate any inclination to participate in political demonstrations organised by the Communist Party. For Communist leaders, this new reality proved highly frustrating. Writing on the tenth anniversary of the May 1920 defeat, the leader of the communist railway Federation, Lucien Midol, complained of the impact of ‘ten years of passivity’ among the railway workers. Others were even more damning.
This chapter examines the new realities in cheminot trade union activity in the period after the general strike in May 1920 down to the mid-to-late 1920s. In particular, it sets the cheminots’ trade union activity firmly within the contexts of industrial relations in the railway sector. With the power of the labour movement seemingly broken, railway managers successfully saw off the threat of nationalisation and set about undoing the wartime gains that workers had made. Alongside this, a new generation of railway managers sought to develop a harmonious vision of railway work, based upon principles of shared professional competence and collective endeavour in the national interest as a means of depoliticising the railway workplace. In the face of these developments, and in the context of an ongoing struggle with the CGT for the overall support of the cheminots, the FNCU struggled to maintain a militant voice among France's railway workers.
Cheminot Unionism after 1921
A marked feature of cheminot trade unionism throughout the 1920s is the relative stability in levels of cheminot trade union membership, which remained high by French standards throughout the decade. Across France, and despite the defeats of May 1920, railway workers continued to hold union membership cards and pay their union dues.
Introduction
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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Railway workers (in French ‘cheminots’) were the earliest, and among the most enduring, bastions of communist support in twentieth-century France. From the earliest days of its existence, railway workers provided the French Communist Party (PCF) with some of its most high-profile national leaders, together with a legion of highly active party militants spread widely through urban and rural France. Dispersed cheminot cells maintained a communist presence in some of the deepest regions of rural France, while massive concentrations of railwaymen and women in urban centres such as Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and Saint-Pierre-des-Corps (Tours) nurtured a rich and powerful working-class communist culture. Most significantly, railway workers voted en masse for communist ‘shop stewards’ in the workplace and joined the communist-led trade union Federation in large numbers, consistently making it the largest of the trade union organisations on the railways between the two world wars. The relationship between railway workers and the Communist Party was at the heart of the growth of a distinctly ‘French’ communist political culture, yet it is a history which in large part has yet to be told. Fellow Travellers contributes to remedying this lacuna in the history of the communist movement in France.
The relationship forged between communist militants and railway workers in the period between the two world wars would have long-lasting consequences for industrial relations and left-wing politics in France. The choices made by communist militants among the cheminots in these years were profoundly influenced by two key factors. First, a working environment that was shaped by the professional ethos of railway labour and, second, by the long-lasting legacies of the devastating 1920 strike defeat, which effectively curtailed the railway workers’ willingness to openly confront management and the state for much of the rest of the period covered by this book. In such circumstances, communist activists looked to the everyday politics of the workplace as the key focus of their activities. In so doing, communist activists on the railways set down deep and lasting roots of support. They maintained this support even through the sectarian period of the Comintern's shift to ‘class-againstclass’, deepening their participation within railway industrial relations and engaging with managers and state officials. They would build upon this crucial experience during the years of the Popular Front (1934–1938).
Acknowledgements
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Fellow Travellers
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6 - ‘Hostile Participants’: Communists and Railway Industrial
- Thomas Beaumont, Liverpool John Moores University
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Summary
Between 1928 and 1934 communist strategy on the railways underwent a series of major upheavals. Chief among these was a startling about-face on the issue of participation in railway industrial relations. Previously, the communist-led FNCU, following the revolutionary logic of communists as an oppositional force on the railways, had refused to endorse any activity reminiscent of wartime collaboration and the ‘reformism’ pursued by their rivals in the CGT union federation. From 1928, however, this approach changed as the communist-led union began a process of engagement with consultative managerial committees and, after 1931, played a leading role in railway safety delegations. Undertaken during the period in international communist history known as ‘class-against-class’, this strategy served to cement the communists’ position among the railway workforce as communist activists undertook an ever-greater engagement with the everyday realities, and concerns, of the cheminot workforce. In a period of deepening financial crisis on the railways, a product of the effects of the depression in France, such a strategy met with the support of significant numbers of railway workers who looked to the communist union to defend their working conditions against managerial attempts to enforce cost cutting measures. As such, rather than serving to weaken communist trade union organisation, the period known as ‘class-against-class’ in fact saw a significant extension of communist support on the railways. What is more, the practices learnt and experience gained from this ‘hostile participation’ in railway industrial relations would stand the FNCU in good stead when, in June 1936, the Popular Front government brought a greater degree of democracy into French industrial relations and instituted elected worker representation in workplaces across the French economy. Drawing upon the lessons of this earlier period, railway union militants would be ready to exert their authority in the new industrial relations landscape of the Popular Front.
Workers and the Depression
The French economy seemed at first to be insulated from the impact of the economic crisis that was sweeping through the industrial nations. While American and German economic performance declined precipitously from June 1929, it was another 12 months before the depression began to be felt in France. Even then the impact of the global economic crisis was shallow compared to the damage wrought in other western nations. While industrial output in Britain, America and Germany declined by more than 25% in 1931, France registered only a corresponding 10% drop in output.