Chapter Six

Redefining Workers’ Control: Rationalization, Labor Time, and Union Politics in France, 1900–1928

Gary Cross

I

Since the days of the sans-culottes, the French labor movement has been identified with direct action and the ideals of self-management. The tradition of J. J. Proudhon and the survival of craft industry into the twentieth century helped to create and preserve a pattern of labor militancy peculiar to France; workers’ control not only permeated the thinking of the communards of 1871 but survived the repression of this urban insurrection to revive among the skilled workers who gathered around the labor exchanges (bourses du travail) in the 1890s. Along with the vision of autogestion came the notion of workers’ self-emancipation and autonomy from the state and socialist politicians. The syndicalist formula of direct action and the general strike emerged as a dominant theme in 1888 and after the local unions and trade federations were united in 1902, these ideas dominated union congresses. With a militancy unparalleled in Europe, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) in its famous Charter of Amiens (Charte d’ Amiens) in 1906 called for self-liberation through direct action and preparation for workers’ unmediated control of production.¹

Yet by December 1918, that same CGT had adopted a strikingly different posture. Its Minimum Programme for postwar France advocated social amelioration through legislation and collective bargaining, and union participation in national economic councils. The Programme distainfully labeled the tradition of direct action as “street riots.”² An insurgent movement emerged during the war and blossomed in 1919 and 1920. It revived the syndicalist ideal of direct action and identified the soviets of Bolshevik Russia with the French idea of union control of production. However, control of the CGT eluded the insurgents and with the failure of the strikes of 1920, the left minority abandoned syndicalism for the political unionism of the communist-controlled United General Confederation of Labor (CGTU). What brought this eclipse of syndicalism and workers’ control in France where it had been so deeply rooted before the war?

Many French labor historians have skirted this problem by ending their studies at 1914 or earlier, confining their attention to the “golden years of French syndicalism.”³ Others, such as Peter Stearns, have argued that the French labor movement in the decade before the war was not nearly so militant as the Charter of Amiens suggests.⁴ After the large but unsuccessful strikes of 1906 for the eight-hour day, the CGT stagnated and slowly drifted toward collective bargaining and alliances with the socialist parliamentarians. Others claim that the union leadership’s participation in the Union Sacrée during the war led it to abandon a class and revolutionary perspective for a national corporatist approach—relying on a partnership with the “progressive bourgeoisie” to bring about a modern economy and collective bargaining system.⁵ Still others argue that the weak impulse toward workers’ control after the war is a result of the adaptation of French labor, long wed to ideas appropriate for a declining craft-based industry, to the reality of mechanization and industrial concentration.⁶

All three perspectives declare that a large share of the French labor movement became integrated into the bourgeois state and economy. Whether seen as an inevitable acceptance of “modernization” or as a betrayal of the revolutionary élan, all three arguments interpret this history essentially as a passive response of labor to external economic and political exigencies. Rather, I shall argue that the trend toward reformism in the prewar CGT was an effort to widen and deepen the organizational strength of labor. The shift of the CGT leadership during the war was not an abandonment of ideals of labor self-emancipation but an attempt to ameliorate working conditions and living standards and to prepare workers for assuming control over production. Finally, the apparent adaptation of the CGT to economic rationalization, or Taylorism, was not made in the face of widespread mechanization; rather, it advocated increased productivity in opposition to a French patronat that was reluctant to pay the price of innovation.

The CGT had adopted a strategy appropriate for an economy entering a more mechanized and rationalized phase; nevertheless, it failed to mobilize a social base to correspond with this strategy. The CGT’s membership remained in the craft and government/service sectors long after its strategy had shifted. Furthermore, during the war, the leadership isolated itself from the rank and file by its dogged commitment to the war effort, which alienated a large minority of workers and split the movement in 1920–21. The loss of unions to the communist-led CGTU in 1921 greatly diminished the power of the CGT to press for structural reforms.

However, we must reassess the history of this transformation of the CGT’s ideology by going beyond the dichotomy of reform versus revolution and the presumption of embourgeoisement and passive adaptation. The CGT reformists obviously failed after the war to build an effective movement, but their ideological shift over the issue of workers’ control and economic rationalization nevertheless was an integral part of the struggle for an improved labor standard and a step toward the social control of a modernized economy. In fact, the communist unions, which later proved to be more successful than the CGT in organizing the new industrial sectors, essentially adopted the CGT’s position.

II

Revolutionary syndicalism was the dominant but not unchallenged theme of the CGT from its foundation in 1895 until 1910. Beyond its obvious militancy (a theoretical rejection of collective bargaining, opposition to legislative amelioration, insistence on raising revolutionary as well as wage and hour demands, and advocacy of sabotage), revolutionary syndicalism was, essentially, a movement for a decentralization of power. According to Fernand Pelloutier, Emile Pouget, Victor Griffuelhes, and other syndicalist leaders, local unions were to struggle against the state and the political leadership of the socialists and remain autonomous even from the CGT bureaucracy. Local unions were to organize the direct self-emancipation of rank-and-file workers and thus make possible the transformation of the syndicats into organs of production and distribution. This was a vision of an enterprise-based workers’ control, which assumed the efficacy of localized action and the capacity of rank-and-file workers to manage production on the shop floor. Its craft origins are obvious. That the vision was largely inapplicable to large-scale mechanized industry operating in a national economic context was starkly revealed by the failures of the CGT after 1906.

The massive wave of general strikes in May 1906 for the eight-hour day was a culmination of revolutionary syndicalist tactics. They not only failed to meet their objectives, but offered decisive proof of the weakness of autonomous and spontaneous action. Many unions acknowledged their impotence by concluding a separate peace with their employers (for example, the printers, who settled for a nine-hour day); more broadly, the ill-coordinated movement was isolated and repressed by the government.⁷ The increasingly harsh stance of the state and the growing effectiveness of employer associations after 1906 contributed to the further decline of syndicalism.⁸ Moreover, the narrow base of the CGT in the skilled sector of the French working class limited its appeal and ability to organize workers in the modernizing and unskilled industries. CGT membership stagnated, growing a mere 15 percent from 1906 to 1914, compared with the 70 percent growth between 1900 and 1906. Numbers of strikes and strikers also stagnated. Most important was a trend toward strike failures after 1906 (see Table 6-1).

These defeats both reflected and accentuated the instability of membership. This was especially true in the modernizing sector. Despite the high participation of smelting and metal-working labor in the 1906 strike (31 percent and 8.6 percent respectively, compared with a national rate of 2.1 percent), the CGTmade little permanent headway in organizing these sectors.⁹ Christian Gras shows that while between 1909 and 1913, 174 new local unions were formed in the Metalworkers’ Federation, some 104 disappeared.¹⁰

CGT membership remained heavily concentrated in the artisan, government, and service sectors; trade unions had hardly penetrated beyond mining into the “proletarian” industrial sector (see Table 6-2). This stagnation and narrow base of organized labor in France was hardly lost on CGT leaders. Already in 1906, in recognition of the declining importance of craft industries, the CGT refused membership to additional craft unions and promoted the merger of existing craft federations. The national committee (Comité confédéral national, CCN) in turn attempted to coordinate and prepare strikes. The CGT, under its new leadership of Léon Jouhaux (who replaced the syndicalist champion Victor Griffuelhes in 1909), formed alliances with the socialists in order to broaden its base of support. The syndicalist strategy was no longer effective and the leadership recognized the need to centralize and broaden its appeal.¹¹

The syndicalist goal of skilled workers’ control began to recede at the same time. In part this was a response to new managerial methods and mechanization. The pressure of competition, especially in the new automobile industry, forced managers to attempt to reduce the control of skilled labor over the methods and pace of work. This offensive, usually identified with the doctrines of Frederick W. Taylor, was a direct attack on the traditional concept of workers’ control. Although craft workers opposed these changes, unions quickly recognized that the new methods could not be defeated. The CGT did not simply capitulate to industrial progress; rather the unions made an ideological leap. The CGT recognized that it had to cast its net beyond the declining craft sector and to appeal to the economic needs of the mass of French workers—especially those entering the growth industries—if it were to regain momentum. This required a new definition of workers’ control, one based not on an opposition to but on a participation in an effort to mechanize and to increase the productivity of the French economy.

Taylor’s ideas for enhancing managerial control over production were hardly new to France,¹² and thus he found there, as early as 1900, a receptive audience.¹³ Taylor’s system of scientific management in France was often broadly identified with mechanization, the continuous production line, and a greater division of labor in general. Yet Taylor’s personal contribution was largely confined to time and motion studies designed to analyze work methods and to enable the employer to set a piece rate that encouraged workers to increase their productivity. He also advocated a complex reorganization and specialization of management in order to maximize employer control of the production process and with it to increase productivity.¹⁴

Despite the active support of Henri Le Chatelier and other academic engineers, French industries were not quick to adopt these methods. The earliest support for Taylorism came from the auto industry, and it was hardly unequivocal. In response to the crisis of overproduction in 1907, Louis Renault hired Georges de Ram to Taylorize a shop of 150 workers.¹⁵ However, not only did supervisors resist the innovations of this outsider, but Renault himself was reluctant to invest his profits in factory reorganization rather than style and model changes.¹⁶

For Renault the key innovation was the time study, a rather crude attempt to speed up individual output. Renault hired “demonstrators”—young, strong, and experienced workers paid a special rate—and timed their output over short intervals. Their output was used to determine the piece rate. The time study from its first experimental appearance in 1907 was criticized by the syndicalist press. By 1912, it had provoked a number of automobile strikes, the most important of which was the strike precipitated by the introduction of the stopwatch to one-quarter of Renault’s shops.¹⁷ A thousand of the 4,000 affected workers walked out on December 12. After an interim settlement failed to quell workers’ dissatisfaction, a second strike broke out on February 12, 1913. This strike soon turned into a lockout when an intransigent Renault refused to negotiate with workers.¹⁸

This strike prompted a national debate in the popular as well as the business and syndicalist press over Taylorism.¹⁹ The Metalworkers’ leader A. Merrheim and anarcho-syndicalist Emile Pouget presented the CGT’s position. They attacked Taylorism as a threat to skilled workers’ control. Pouget claimed that motion studies “stifled the ingenuity of the worker” and placed a premium on brute strength and manual dexterity rather than intelligence. Taylor’s claim to know the “one best way” of work and assumption that “the best mechanic is incapable of working efficiently without the daily aid of his instructor” was an insult to the workers’ dignity.²⁰ Taylorism also threatened the sense of solidarity and cooperation between workers, for Taylor’s piece rate stimulated a selfish “appetite for gain.”²¹ Merrheim declared that Taylorism reduced the worker to “an automaton ruled by the automatic movements of the machine” and weakened the “market value” of professional or skilled workers.²² Merrheim somewhat earlier had lamented that job specialization and new machines had reduced apprenticeship and threatened to replace the autodidact with the “ignorant masses.”²³

This defense of artisan values, along with its undercurrent of disdain for and fear of the unskilled machine operator, could be interpreted as a last ditch stand of the militant craftsman in a losing battle against economic progress. Yet, in spite of these “reactionary” sentiments, the CGT leaders clearly recognized the inevitability of economic rationalization and with it the decline of the skilled mechanic.²⁴ Moreover, many French syndicalists were keenly aware of the backwardness of French industry and began to see innovation as the only means of raising the French workers’ standard of living. As early as 1910, Victor Griffuelhes claimed that French production could compete only if French manufacturers adopted the innovative management of the Americans. It was the patronat, according to Griffuelhes, rather than the workers who resisted innovation.²⁵ Léon Jouhaux in 1912 blamed long working hours and low wages on the industrialists’ failure to modernize. In 1913, he specifically blamed the reluctance of both labor and management in the French fishing industry to “modernize their form of work” for France’s inability to compete with Norwegian and Spanish fisheries.²⁶

Ervin Szabo went so far as to argue in 1913 in Le mouvement socialiste that economic rationalization could improve working conditions because it would replace the “bourgeois lord” with the “producer” as manager who had learned the “scientific knowledge of efficient production.” In France, this Saint-Simonian faith in the productive engineer and condemnation of the “feudal” bourgeois was, of course, a long-established tradition. Furthermore, Szabo envisioned in the prospect of factory-trained workers an elimination of the old chasm that divided the apprenticed craftsman from the common day laborer. This essentially Marxist view of capitalist development held that labor’s power would grow because of its unity and prosperity despite the strength of big capital.²⁷ This was a dialectical as opposed to the syndicalists’ ahistoric view of the future. It depended, however, on whether rationalization was used for or against the worker.

The core of the Metalworkers’ opposition to Taylorism was not based on their fear of economic rationalization but rather on how it affected labor. Pouget, for example, held that Renault’s brand of rationalization was merely a speedup, with no provisions made to protect the health or safety of the worker. The “time-study men,” said Merrheim, were less interested in economizing labor, making it more efficient, than in a crude effort to increase output.²⁸

During the Renault strike, Merrheim himself indicated the new direction the CGT would take:

[A] rational organization of work is absolutely necessary for the progress of industry. . . . As for me I think that the Taylor system adapted to the French mentality will be introduced more and more in industry. . . . [T]he interest of workers is to supervise this process and to favor all those efforts in the degree that they do not harm their moral, economic, or physical interests.²⁹

This was not merely a grudging and defensive acceptance of a fait accompli. After all, only a handful of French factories had adopted Taylorism. Rather it was an outline of a new concept of workers’ control, one that discarded the old defense of the craft tradition and instead advocated labor’s “supervision” of economic innovation as part of the struggle for the benefits of increased productivity.

Any ambiguity about CGT goals was eliminated by the result of the Renault strike. With only fifty CGT members out of the 4,000 employed at the Renault Billancourt plants, the strikers lacked effective organization. After one month of the strike, participation had dropped more than two-thirds to 390. Only a hard core of skilled workers held out defending a craft tradition isolated from the new young proletarianized work force. Moreover, Renault had no difficulty ignoring workers’ demands for “supervising” the time study. He refused to negotiate and accepted the return of workers only on his terms.³⁰ Surely if the old form of artisan control was a dead letter, the new model of workers’ control of a more productive economy was far from realized.

In the aftermath of the failure at Renault, the Metalworkers faced an impasse. As Gras has shown, all but a rightist trade-union minority wanted to expand into the new sector of unskilled production workers. Yet the union was divided over how to undertake this difficult project. While the Federation leadership, especially Merrheim, advocated patient organization of industrial workers around a concrete economic program, a syndicalist wing, mostly from Paris, proposed a wave of strikes to mobilize the unorganized workers. The CGT never abandoned mass organizing. However, its historic weakness in the proletarianized sector and its inability to expand beyond local municipal coalitions and to organize whole industries greatly limited its effectiveness.³¹

It is not surprising, then, that the leadership sought allies among friendly industrial engineers and the progressive bourgeoisie, at least as a tactical measure, in its struggle over productivity. The CGT embraced engineers who, like Jules Amar and J. M. Lahy, sought not only to increase output but also, through studies of the physiology of work, to reduce fatigue and nervous exhaustion. Lahy held that workers must be consulted before innovations are made and thereby be given a measure of control over industrial change.³²

The CGT even found in Taylor himself ammunition for their demand that the French economy must be rationalized to the benefit of workers. While Taylor, in his popular work The Principles of Scientific Management, berated workers for their “soldiering” on the job and declared that management alone has the knowledge to determine the “one best way” of doing a job,³³ he was obliged to soften the antilabor bias of his program in 1912.

In that year, when Taylor faced opposition to his methods from workers in the naval shipyards of Massachusetts, he defended his innovations before a well-known congressional investigation. Scientific management, far from being antilabor, he claimed, was a “mental revolution,” the best means of overcoming class conflict in the factory; it benefited both sides, providing high wages through wage incentive plans for the worker and increased output for the employer. In addition, the consumer got a more plentiful supply of cheaper goods. Even management’s control over work methods had its redeeming aspect: at least, this control was to be based on scientific principles, rather than the arbitrary will of the boss.³⁴

While Taylor’s “mental revolution” essentially offered no more than management’s promise of higher wages in exchange for labor’s ceding control over production, French labor drew quite different conclusions: Taylorism could increase the standard of living of workers and consumers, and could be equitably applied. Most important, the CGT would use these ideas as a stick to beat the noninnovative French patronat who was responsible for France’s poverty and the country’s increasingly noncompetitive position in the world market.

While the CGT’s new approach to productivity and innovation was surely appropriate, its weak base among proletarianized workers resulted in a tactical shift away from mass organizing and an alliance with elites. The war accelerated this movement toward cooperation with engineers and a progressive bourgeoisie, a trend that would split the French labor movement. Yet the war period also led to a clarification of the new ideology, which despite these war-generated distortions in tactics would permanently replace the old syndicalist formula.

III

The war afforded French engineers, the CGT, and business a unique opportunity to rally around the flag of Taylorism as well as the tricolor. Because the profits of the war industries were not limited by the market but only by their capacity to produce, employers were keenly interested in engineers like E. Nussbaumer and Charles de Freminville, who experimented in Taylorizing munitions factories.³⁵ French trade unionists embraced Taylorism as they collaborated in the war mobilization. As a délégué à la nation, Jouhaux joined a number of commissions that provided manpower needs for the war economy.³⁶ Not only did these offices coordinate manpower procurement, but they “encouraged all necessary modifications of work and facilitated the rapid adoption of new work methods.”³⁷

The CGT found at least temporary allies who shared its commitment to the modernization of postwar France. Albert Thomas, a right-wing socialist deputy and proponent of class collaboration, took a position similar to Lahy and other humanistic engineers.³⁸ From May 1915 to September 1917, Thomas achieved a unique and ironical position for a socialist, by becoming Undersecretary of State for Munitions. During his tenure he became an energetic proponent of Taylorism. He not only favored piece rates and bonus systems but also motion studies, division of labor, and vocational screening.³⁹ Also for the sake of social peace and uninterrupted production, he proposed, like humanistic engineers, that psychological and social factors should be taken into consideration. He insisted that piece rates should “reflect average ability in the factory and the average productivity of the machine rather than the fastest worker and machine.”⁴⁰ In April 1917, in his bulletin, Usines de guerre, Thomas summarized his position on Taylorism:

No longer will the worker be content with fixed salaries which he gains for a week of non-strenuous work. No longer will the employer be content with the careless methods of the past. The employer now wants a greater productivity; the worker wants the highest salary; and they give each other perfect satisfaction when they reach their goals by a method of payment for work based on results.⁴¹

This view, although linked to a patriotic concern with munitions production, had a broader meaning. It was almost identical with the “mental revolution” advocated by Taylor in 1912 and was a prescription for reform after the war. Fundamentally, he advocated a trade-off between labor and management.

Thomas’s commitment to postwar economic rationalization was shared by the Societé d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, an agency of heavy industry.⁴² Louis Renault, who had used Taylor’s method in arms production during the war, advocated that France produce the greatest amount in the least time with the least effort, stating that “If we do not maximize production, we will remain a tributary power to other lands.”⁴³ In 1918, André Citroën proposed that a national industries ministry be established to encourage postwar factory specialization and increased efficiency.⁴⁴

Nevertheless, the application of Taylorism in war production was quite limited, largely owing to the prevalence of small workshops.⁴⁵ Moreover, as both Aimée Moutet and Richard Kuisel have shown, cartelization rather than the introduction of new technology was the key to French business strategy. Nor did business social policy recognize the need to share the benefits of growth, much less accept labor input in innovation; rather, they stressed an only slightly modified form of traditional paternalism. Renault, for example, advocated social programs (workers’ gardens and better city services to improve the moral environment of workers). More substantial social reform measures, including a shorter workday and improved wages, were to follow, not parallel, increases in productivity.⁴⁶ The “progressive bourgeoisie” thus shared with Thomas and the CGT little beyond a willingness to modernize, and even this goal was held only by a small group of large employers.

While the CGT had worked with business representatives during the war, it would be incorrect to label it as simply reformist or class collaborationist. The Minimum Programme adopted by the Comité confédéral national (CCN) one week after the Armistice was certainly opposed to prewar anarcho-syndicalism; but it went far beyond business plans for enlightened, paternalistic capitalism. Its opening sentence was, “We must direct ourselves to take control of production.” As a first step, it advocated the preservation of the organizations “installed in the course of the war,” in order to forestall a revival of the “Oligarchy” whose private interests had been “strangling industry and consumers,” and to end “sterile and destructive conservativism.” A program of “incessant progress of production” and developing “all new inventions and discoveries” was to make possible a number of social reforms (improved social insurance, education, and the eight-hour day). These reforms were to prepare the worker for the “ultimate goal of emancipation.” The package of reforms included the nationalization of railroads, mines, shipping, banking, and electricity, to be administered by committees of producers (labor and technicians), consumers, and deputies.⁴⁷ To be sure, the CGT leadership sought to expand its base of support beyond the worker, but it was more interested in reaching out to consumers and the new working class of technicians than to the employer class. Like Thomas, Jouhaux supported the incentive wage, however, not as a trade-off between business and labor but to “link the interests of the producers to those of the consumers.” As Jouhaux declared at the 1918 Congress of the CGT, “We must strive to realize this formula, the maximum production in the minimum of time, for the maximum salary with the general increase of the buying power for all.” Also, after the CGT’s plan for a National Economic Council was rejected by the Clemenceau government, the CGT established between 1919 and 1921 a National Council of Labor with representatives of labor, consumers, and technicians. The goal of postwar CGT policy was not compromise with capitalism but a strategy of economic democracy in and through a modernized and productive society.⁴⁸

This trend is most obvious in the stance of the union most affected by rationalization—the Metalworkers’ Federation. At its congress in July of 1918, A. Merrheim and R. Lenoir approved of “new methods of work and renumeration” and denied “neither the inevitable specialization nor useful intensification of production either in war or peace.” In sharp contrast to its prewar defense of craftsmanship, the Metalworkers declared themselves “no longer isolated from the general spirit of the population” and willing to “contribute toward the achievement of general abundance.”⁴⁹ In September 1918, Lenoir wrote that a rationalized consumer-oriented economy would bridge the gulf that divided France into two societies, one of “subsistence” and the other of “arrogant excess.”⁵⁰

The Metalworkers’ leadership was not oblivious to the psychological costs of rationalization. “The machine,” said Lenoir, “changes the worker from being the practitioner who directs something himself . . . to the servant resigned to the moving machine which commands the rhythm of work.” Yet, if less interesting work is inevitable, it must be rewarded, declared Lenoir, not merely with higher pay but also with labor’s participation in the process of change.⁵¹

Surely the most important prerequisite for the CGT’s acceptance of economic rationalization was the eight-hour day. On April 23, 1919, the French parliament, facing massive May Day strikes and demonstrations, accommodated workers and veterans by passing an eight-hour day law. The act generally reduced the workday from ten to eight hours with significant exceptions for delays, temporary exemptions, and seasonal fluctuations.⁵² In collective bargaining, the Metalworkers’, Clothing, and Construction Federations agreed to increase productivity in order to smooth the transition to a shorter work day.⁵³ Yet despite the CGT’s willingness to increase productivity, employers resisted the reduction of the workday from the start. Jouhaux defended the eight-hour day by challenging business to increase productivity rather than production time, an argument repeatedly made throughout the 1920s.⁵⁴ In this context, the CGT’s acceptance of Taylorism was hardly a capitulation to the needs of capitalist accumulation nor an adaptation to business unionism à la americain. Rather it was an integral part of the political and ideological struggle for a shorter workday, improved wages, and the social control of production.

IV

This trend toward democratic control over innovation was blown off course after the war. The CGT’s weak base in growth industries and its failure to develop a strategy to win it left the leadership seeking allies among the French elite, a shift that contributed to the split of the rank and file and the failure of the new orientation. This trend became obvious when, in August 1914, instead of attempting to organize a general strike against the war, the CGT joined the Union Sacrée.

The power of federation officials increased as they worked with government and employers in the war economy. Despite the rank-and-file dissatisfaction with the Union Sacrée during the spring strikes of 1917 against the war, the leadership supported Thomas’s program of shop stewards, compulsory arbitration, and no-strike pledges. Even though the Union Sacrée dissolved in September 1917 with the socialists (including Thomas) leaving the government, the CGT leadership remained unwilling and probably unable to take charge of the growing restiveness among the workers. The result was local strikes (e.g., the Metalworkers in the spring of 1918) and the election of antiwar radicals (e.g., Gaston Monmousseau as secretary of the Railway Workers’ Federation in April 1920). By early 1918, the leadership (majoritaires) faced within the federation a growing antiwar movement led by Pierre Monatte, Raymond Pericat, and Gaston Monmousseau (minoritaires), who hoped to emulate Lenin’s smashing of the Russian state and to establish soviets of workers out of the French unions.⁵⁵ Merrheim denounced the minoritaire’s call for a “catastrophic” political revolution. Whereas Bolshevism was “incomplete,” merely a destruction of the bourgeois state, Merrheim proposed an economic revolution that promised true “emancipation” through “general abundance.”⁵⁶ In the midst of this Bolshevik challenge, the CCN confidently declared that the new work methods would force management into employing “our technical and administrative staff” who “will be ready to organize a new society” based on the “law of progress.”⁵⁷ Such statements indicate an elitist approach to the struggle for control over innovation and implied cooperation with the “progressive bourgeoisie.” This is confirmed by the CGT leadership’s participation in the Association for the Struggle Against Unemployment and their support for the weekly Information ouvrière et sociale, both of which were forums shared by industrial and technical elites as well as labor. I have already argued that there was no real possibility for class collaboration; nor did the CGT leadership intend to abandon class struggle or workers’ control but only to redefine them. Yet the CGT minoritaires could easily have read this intent in their leadership’s words and deeds.⁵⁸

One disastrous but symptomatic result of this mistrust was a strike of Metalworkers in June and July 1919. Organized by a “Committee of Action” from the Parisian Metalworkers’ union, it was directed against the settlement that Merrheim and Lenoir had made with the employees in April 1919. By this agreement, which established the eight-hour day, the wages of hourly workers were increased to account for the shortening of the work day, but the piece rate workers won no such increase. Instead the union leaders simply agreed that they would encourage an increase in productivity. This arrangement meant a real wage cut during a period of inflation and postwar decline in jobs. The strike against this policy quickly took on a revolutionary political character. Leadership devolved to the local level and without the support of the Federation organization it soon disintegrated in complete failure.⁵⁹

The well-known strikes of May 1920 followed a similar pattern. After the failure of management to implement a settlement to a successful strike of railway workers in February 1920, the Railway Federation, under the newly elected leadership of the pro-Soviet Gaston Monmousseau, narrowly approved of a general rails strike in late April, which the minoritaires hoped to build into a revolutionary movement. This poorly organized plan for a walkout (perhaps one-half of the railworkers participated) forced a reluctant CGT leadership into joining it with a general sympathy strike for May. It was staggered into three “waves” of strikes in the first three weeks of May. With lackluster coordination from the top, absentions were widespread, especially in the north and east. The results were worse than a disappointment: by May 20, the CGT voted for a return to work as the ex-socialist president Alexandre Millerand won a temporary court-ordered dissolution of the CGT and 20,000 railway workers were fired. It showed the final collapse of the syndicalist strategy of the revolutionary general strike.⁶⁰

During the next eighteen months the CGT lost half of its membership and split into two bitter factions. A militant wing supported the International Red Trade Unions (created by the Communist International) and formed comités syndicalistes revolutionnaires or Revolutionary Syndicalist Committees (CSR). At the CGT Congress of July 1921, the revolutionary faction was a large minority (losing 1,325 to 1,572 on a vote for the CGT’s leadership). When the CCN subsequently demanded that the unions dismantle factions (the CSR), the result was the succession of the revolutionaries and the creation of the CGTU in December 1921, which joined the Communist International’s trade union arm.⁶¹

Without mass support, the CGT’s dreams of “economic revolution” soon faded. In the midst of the May 1920 strikes, Robert Pinot, president of the Iron and Steel Committee (Comité des forges) declared that the CGT could not be trusted to control the working masses, thus signaling a stiffer resistance of French employers. In January 1921, the Union of Metal and Mining Industries broke off negotiations with the Metalworkers’ Federation over introducing shop stewards.⁶² Except for the eight-hour day, none of the objectives of the Minimum Programme of 1918 was won.

The issues that split the CGT were essentially political—the position of the leadership on the Soviet Union and its collaborationist role during the war. Significantly, the question of workers’ control and Taylorism played no important part. Indeed, the CGTU quickly was purged of adherents to anarcho-syndicalism and with it the old tradition of skilled workers’ control. Yet the impotence of labor, partially resulting from the split, blocked any effective policy on economic innovation.

V

The French labor movement was in an anomalous situation in the 1920s. The unions had adopted an ideology that was appropriate for an industrialized economy, but they were constrained by two barriers: (1) the French patronat had only an ambiguous commitment to innovation—hardly fulfilling the historic progressive role of the bourgeoisie, and (2) organized labor lacked a large base in growth industry. Neither confederation was able to broaden its base beyond the craft and service sectors (see Table 6-3). This produced a movement that exhorted business to innovate and idealized foreign models of economic rationalization (the United States and the Soviet Union). At the same time, the labor movement in the 1920s demanded a share of the benefits of increased productivity—the eight-hour day and increased wages—but because of their weak bargaining position, the demand for labor’s control over the introduction of new methods receded into the background. Despite the great differences between the CGT and CGTU, both converged on these points, leaving a rear guard of syndicalists to defend the old model of skilled workers’ control.

The CGT pursued its strategy of the Minimum Programme in the highly adverse circumstances of the 1920s—defending the eight-hour day and advocating a vague program of social control of a more productive economy. Capital resisted the demand for the eight-hour day arguing, for example, in a government commission of March 1919 that it would threaten postwar recovery and that a shortened workday was possible only after economic modernization.⁶³ Employers accepted the eight-hour day only in the face of the strike threat of May 1919. Thus, when the labor movement disintegrated in 1921, the employer press led by the Comité des forges and the Groupe des intérêts économiques called for a rollback to a longer workday. The short day, they claimed, led to inflation, made France uncompetitive, and prevented the country from modernizing for lack of capital. The eight-hour law, claimed the conservative deputy Paul Messier in 1920, was passed only to give the workers “a little rest” after the war, but was unthinkable as a permanent policy.⁶⁴

In response to a coordinated effort of conservative deputies to suspend the law, the CGT organized a petition drive in the summer of 1922 that brought nearly two million signatures in favor of the eight-hour day. The refusal of leaders of the governing Bloc nationale to support the industrialists (fearing social disorder if the law were abandoned) temporarily quelled this attack on the eight-hour day.⁶⁵

The issue of the eight-hour day, which smoldered throughout the early 1920s, was enflamed in late 1925. The International Labor Office, (ILO), an outgrowth of the League of Nations directed by Albert Thomas, campaigned throughout that year to induce the industrial nations to ratify the Washington Convention of 1920, which sanctioned the eight-hour day. This effort met a setback when, in the spring of 1926, Fascist Italy reinstated the nine-hour day. The business press in other European countries clamored to follow suit, presumably to prevent Italy from winning a competitive advantage.⁶⁶

Against this attack on labor’s one lasting victory after World War I, the CGT and its allies in the ILO defended the eight-hour day as the norm for modern industrial society. It promised, according to Thomas, to restore family life, led to a decline in alcoholism and promised a development of general and professional education.⁶⁷ A “change of machine and methods of work rather than an increase in work time” said Francis Millon of the CGT, was the solution to labor productivity.⁶⁸ Union leaders, close to the rank and file, criticized how economic rationalization was applied, complaining that it led to fatigue and the discharge of older and less robust workers, and softened the labor movement by reducing the scarcity of skill. Nevertheless, the central leadership felt compelled to ignore the long-term issue of democratic control over innovation and repeated its advocacy of increased productivity as an alternative to the conservative pressure for a longer workday.⁶⁹

Despite its inability to control the rationalization process, the CGT also continued to support Taylorism as the only way of increasing French standards of living. Toward this goal, the CGT even adapted the ideas of American welfare capitalists, especially Henry Ford, who was presented in Europe as a champion of increased productivity, high wages, and a mass consumer economy.⁷⁰ This image of American Taylorism was a kind of wish fulfillment for the CGT leadership, the hope of “general abundance” that Lenoir in 1919 had identified as the “economic revolution.”

An instructive if extreme example of this seemingly unnatural embrace of American capitalism by French labor can be seen in the case of Hyacinthe Dubreuil. A machinist for over twenty years, by 1920 Dubreuil rose through the ranks of the Metalworkers’ Federation to become secretary of the CGT in the Seine. Noted for his strong anticommunism, he drew the attention of Albert Thomas. In February 1927, through the good offices of Thomas and the Industrial Relations Council (an affiliate of the Rockefeller Foundation), Dubreuil began a fifteen-month tour of model factories in the United States. As a former machinist, Dubreuil was a credible advocate of Taylorism to a working-class audience. Thus upon his return to France, Dubreuil wrote a series of books praising the new methods of production in the U.S.⁷¹

Dubreuil found in the scientifically run American factory the rule of technique and objective procedure rather than the arbitrary privilege of status or wealth. Because of this “scientific” procedure, cooperation replaced the old pattern of “discord and of class war.” Both the “aristocratic pride” of the French factory owner and the “excessive individualism” of the French worker were superseded by a “democratic” supervisor and a worker whose “remarkable trait” was a “natural placidity” in receiving orders and accepting change. Most important, Dubreuil saw the American factory as a solution to mass want through mass production. For Dubreuil all of this was a sign that the U.S. was moving “toward some form of socialism.”⁷² Obviously Dubreuil was holding up an idealized image of how industrial society ought to be—a Saint-Simonian meritocracy and consumer economy. But the core of his praise for America was a trenchant critique of French capital in the 1920s.

Despite considerable growth, French business remained backward in the 1920s. Jean Carré has calculated an annual increase of man-hour productivity in France of 5.5 percent between 1921 and 1929 (the same as between 1946 and 1953 and considerably higher than the average of 2 percent between 1896 and 1913). Yet this growth was concentrated only in a few industries (electricity, chemicals, and mechanical goods).⁷³ Moreover, even the comparatively innovative sector of automobiles lagged far behind that of the United States. Citroën calculated that French autos were produced in 300 man-days, compared with the 70 man-days of the American car.⁷⁴ Further, in a government survey of the impact of the eight-hour day on productivity, conducted between 1921 and 1927, only one of sixty-six factories reporting had adopted the key component of Taylorism, time and motion studies. Although twenty-eight introduced new or more machines, most relied on rather crude means of increasing productivity, including fifteen who increased machine speeds, fourteen who increased discipline, and twenty-seven who simply introduced piece work (some firms reporting several innovations).⁷⁵ Given this evidence, plus the persistent cry from business for a longer workday, it is not surprising that Dubreuil had an audience among workers.

Despite the deep ideological divisions within the French labor movement, the CGT’s rivals in the CGTU and Communist Party held a position on economic rationalization only cosmetically different from that of the CGT. They strongly criticized the CGT, claiming that it had accepted capitalism as long as it was productive and renounced the class struggle. Yet the communists and the CGTU did not criticize scientific management itself nor did they generally defend the traditional values of skill and the profession autonomy of labor. Probably more than the CGT, the CGTU found itself in an anomalous situation: it shared with the CGT a belief in the progressive function of technological innovation (derived from Marxism). However, in order to avoid class collaboration and, more important, to win new union members, the CGTU also attacked the “consequences” of capitalist innovation. The CGTU reluctantly defended both those opponents of Taylorism, who wanted innovations but demanded that they be democratically controlled, as well as those who defended traditional skills against economic change. By failing to distinguish between these two critiques, the CGTU, like the reformists, obscured the new model of workers’ control in which labor “supervised” innovation.

The communists held that technological innovation was not only inevitable but an aid in organizing because it created a more “homogenous worker” replacing the parochial skilled workers with a “base for a large and general class movement.”⁷⁶ The CGTU’s position was also colored by Lenin’s advocacy of Taylorism in April 1918 as a solution to Soviet Russia’s massive economic problems. Indeed, scientific management institutes, which Lenin had established in 1920–21, were expanded in 1928 on the eve of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan.⁷⁷

Central to the CGTU’s doctrine was its distinction between capitalist and socialist rationalization, which emerged in 1926 in response to the CGT’s campaign for scientific management.⁷⁸ In contrast to capitalist rationalization, socialist rationalization did not waste energy in class exploitation but rather realized the dream of the eight-hour day, whereas under capitalism it was only advocated.⁷⁹ While the CGT used an idealized image of Fordism to criticize the failure of French business to modernize, the CGTU posed an equally unrealistic picture of Soviet economy for essentially the same purpose.

Unlike the CGT, which increasingly abandoned the struggles on the shop floor for interest group politics, the CGTU was committed to organizing new workers, especially those in the larger and more concentrated industries. The Communist International in February 1928 advocated organizing “the new ranks of workers, especially the semi-skilled machine operators.” Attempts of the CGTU to penetrate innovative industries such as the automobile industry obliged them to attack the new work methods.⁸⁰ During the boom years of 1929 and 1930 communist labor organizers filed dozens of reports in L’humanité condemning the new factories. For example, the Michelin rubber workers were pictured as a “vast army of 18,000 people making the same mechanical movements under the watchful eyes of the company’s band of young and loyal ‘stooges.’” Complaints of the breakup of small cohesive work groups with the introduction of piece work, the stopwatch, and the greater division of labor were very similar to the opposition of Taylorism in the auto plants before the war.⁸¹ Moreover, the CGTU also defended the skills of artisans such as Breton fishermen, Parisian metal workers, and construction workers whose immediate economic interests were threatened by innovation.⁸²

Like the CGT, the communist unions demanded that the benefits of increased productivity be shared by those workers forced to submit to more intense production. The CGTU’s program stressed the need for vacations and the 44-hour week for the “recuperation of energy” dispensed by workers in rationalized plants and higher wages for the “general improvement” of the standard of living.⁸³

However, by 1929, under pressure from the rank and file, whom they hoped to organize, the CGTU was forced to go a step further, demanding workers’ control over innovation on the shop floor.⁸⁴ It advocated the suppression of time study and “dangerous machines” (as determined by workers’ delegates), and demanded rest breaks for conveyor workers and even a reduction of the speed of the belts by “collective action” where needed.⁸⁵ This policy was clearly a concession to organizers just as was the defense of the craft skills of metal workers and fishermen the year before. It was not an integral part of CGTU strategy; the communists defended, although reluctantly and inconsistently, both the progressive and conservative demands of workers against the consequences of Taylorism. They failed to distinguish between workers’ control of innovation and craft defense of traditional skills and thus did not develop a goal of democratic economic innovation.

The French communists in the 1920s faced an untenable problem: they wished to affirm the necessity of the rationalization of work and yet avoid supporting those capitalists who controlled it. They rejoiced in the emergence of the mass production worker, and yet they defended the immediate interests of the French laborer in a painful transition to a modern economy. They encouraged shopfloor agitation against the new work methods. Yet the main thrust of their policy was hardly distinguishable from the “reformist” CGT—higher wages and shorter hours in compensation for Taylorism and mechanization.

The only proponent of the anarcho-syndicalist tradition of workers’ control was the small and ephemeral Ligue syndicaliste (Syndicalist League). Organized by a small group of largely ex-communist radicals, under the guidance of Pierre Monatte and Maurice Chambelland, the Ligue syndicaliste attempted within both federations to organize a revolutionary trade unionism independent of the communist party and thus to recreate the CGT of the Charter of Amiens.⁸⁶ Against the reformists’ acceptance of Taylorism, which they held to be only a speedup, the league advocated that workers “go slowly.” They also rejected the communist distinction between capitalist and socialist rationalization: “let the workers in no case abandon absolute control over working conditions in either a bourgeois or workers’ state,” Max Emile declared in 1927.⁸⁷

How did the Ligue syndicaliste advocate exercise of workers’ control? Principally by regulating the speed of work. The productivity movement was management’s “revenge” on labor for winning the eight-hour day, an attempt to force workers to do ten hours worth of labor in eight hours. If workers accepted this, one member wrote, they would have “gained nothing” from the shortened workday. He proposed that workers impose a general slowdown, a boycott of the most Taylorized plants, and generally “fix the work rate for all.”⁸⁸

For the Ligue syndicaliste work was not a means toward general prosperity but an embodiment of personal value and autonomy, which scientific management threatened. However, in contrast to the anti-Taylorism of the prewar period, these independent radicals did not defend traditional skills. Their concern was merely with the quantity of work, an obvious reflection of the rise of a totally quantifiable pattern of repetitive labor.

As a viable strategy of French labor, anarcho-syndicalism was dead by 1906. With the Renault strike of 1913, if not sooner, the goal of skilled workers’ control had also been abandoned. To the extent that the syndicalist tradition survived World War I, it surely failed in May 1920, while the ideal of artisan management of production persisted in the 1920s only in the episodic and pale form of the Ligue syndicaliste.

Shortly before the war the mainstream of French labor moved away from a decentralized and craft-based syndicalism and toward an organized movement committed to mobilizing the industrial work force. Recognizing the need for a more productive economy, the French labor movement abandoned the defense of craft skills and sought means of making economic innovation serve the long-term interests of labor. Lacking an ability to organize the new unskilled industrial workers until 1936, and facing a patronat that failed to innovate, the French labor movement confronted an ironic situation: it advocated an ideology appropriate for a labor movement that it could not organize and for an economy that did not yet exist. Despite the obvious differences between Dubreuil and the communists, not only did both extremes favor innovation but they saw in it the future of French labor. The central problem—one that the division of the left and the poor organization of labor made impossible to solve—was how workers were to use innovation to improve their material conditions and ultimately to control the production process.

Notes

1. For studies of prewar French syndicalism, see Val Lorwin, The French Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), Edouard Dolleans and Gerard Dehove, Histoire du travail en France, vol. I (Paris, 1953), Georges Lefranc, Histoire du mouvement syndical français (Paris, 1937), and Robert Goetz-Girey, La pensée syndicale française (Paris, 1948). More recent works include Peter Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor: A Cause without Rebels (New Brunswick, 1971), Harvey Mitchell and Peter Stearns, Workers and Protest: The European Labor Movement, the Working Classes and the Origins of Social Democracy (Ithaca, 1971), F. F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France (New York, 1971), and Jacques Julliard, Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme d’action direct (Paris, 1971).

2. The Minimum Programme is published in Léon Jouhaux, Le syndicalisme et la CGT (Paris, 1920), 205–213.

3. A recent example of this approach is Bernard Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1830–1914 (Berkeley, 1976).

4. Stearns says that the theory of syndicalism embodied in the Charter of Amiens was a product of the French intelligentsia and not the workers who were indifferent to theory. The syndicalist “image lives in the minds of those historians who wish that workers had been what they were not.” Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 102.

5. See Martin Fine, “Toward Corporatism: The Movement for Capital-Labor Collaboration in France, 1914–1936,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1971, especially 4–129, and “Albert Thomas: A Reformers’Vision of Modernization, 1914–1932,” Journal of Contemporary History 3 (July 1977), 545–564. See also Alfred Rosmer, Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la guerre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1936 and The Hague, 1959), John Godfrey, “Bureaucracy, Industry, and Politics in France during the First World War,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Oxford University, 1974, and Michael Delucia, “The Remaking of French Syndicalism, 1911–1918: The Growth of the Reformist Philosophy,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University, 1971.

6. See Alain Touraine, Workers’ Attitudes Toward Technical Change (Paris, 1965); Michel Collinet, Esprit du syndicalisme (Paris, 1950); and Georges Friedman, Industrial Society (Glencoe, Ill., 1956). See also Charles Tilly and Edward Shorter, Strikes in France (New York, 1974), 180–184 and Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris, 1963).

7. See Georges Lefranc, Le mouvement syndical sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1967), 125–146.

8. Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 79–85. See also Jacques Julliard, Clemenceau, briseur de greves: L’affaire de Draveil-Villeneuve-Saint-Georges (1908) (Paris, 1965).

9. Tilly and Shorter, 119.

10. Christian Gras, “La Fédération des Métaux en 1913–1914 et l’evolution du syndicalisme revolutionnaire française,” Le mouvement social 77 (October–December 1971), 87–88.

11. For background on the prewar shift in organizational strategy of the CGT, see Bernard Georges and Denise Tintant, Léon Jouhaux, cinquante ans de syndicalisme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1962), 65–101. See also Christian Gras, “Merrheim et le capitalisme,” Le mouvement social 63 (April–June 1968), 143–163, Michelle Perrot, “Grèves, grèvistes, et conjoncture: Vieux problème, travaux neufs,” Le mouvement social 63 (April–June 1968), 109–124, Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 85–93 and Lorwin, 145–179.

12. See Bernard Mottez, Systèmes de salaire et politiques patronales, (Paris, 1966) for an account of experiments in bonus and piece rate systems in late nineteenth-century France that were very similar to those of Taylor. See also Michelle Perrot, “The Three Ages of Industrial Discipline in Nineteenth-Century France,” in John Merriman, ed., Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1979), 149–68.

13. J. M. Laux, “Travail et travailleurs dans l’industrie automobile jusqu’en 1914,” Le mouvement social 81 (October–December 1972), 14–23.

14. The literature on F. W. Taylor is immense. A concise analysis of Taylorism in the European context is Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970). An excellent bibliography is in Aimée Moutet, “Les origines du système de Taylor en Fance, le point de vue patronal (1907–1914),” Le mouvement social 93 (October–December 1975), 17. See also Maurice Levy-Leboyer, Le patronat de la second industrialisation (Paris, 1979).

15. Georges de Ram, “Quelques notes sur un essai d’application du système Taylor dans un grand atelier de mechanique française,” Revue de métallurgie, September 1909, 929–33. See also Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault (Paris, 1972), 71–72 and E. Riché, La situation des ouvriers dans l’industrie automobile (Paris, 1909), 54–91. See also J. P. Bardou, J. J. Chanaron, P. Fridenson, and James Laux, La revolution automobile (Paris, 1977).

16. Moutet, “Origins du système,” 35–37.

17. Sources on the Renault strikes of 1913 include Direction du Travail, “Statistique de grève pendant l’année 1913 (Paris, 1914), 234–235. Contemporary trade union accounts are in La bataille syndicaliste, February 11, 1913, and March 23, 1913, and Alphonse Merrheim, “La méthode Taylor,” La vie ouvrière 5 (1913), 210–211, 226, and 301–306.

18. Analysis of the strike is found in Michel Collinet, Esprit du syndicalisme, 41–47, Fridenson, Histoire des usines, 73–78, Laux, “Travail,” 25–26, Moutet, “Origines du système,” 40–41, and G. Hatry, “La grève de chronomètrage,” De Renault frères á Renault Régie nationale, December 1971, 73–81.

19. For the debate on Taylorism in the French press see L’auto, February 12, 1913, and Le matin, March 4, 1913. See also Moutet, “Patronat français,” 43.

20. Emile Pouget, L’organisation du surmenage (Paris, 1914), 53–54.

21. A. Merrheim, “Le système Taylor,” La vie ouvrière, March 5, 1913, 309.

22. Ibid., February 20, 1913, 214 and 224.

23. Merrheim at the 1908 Congress of the CGT lamented that new machines allowed metal workers to be trained in one week. See Georges and Tintant, 1: 145. Pierre Coupat of the Fédération de mécaniciens de la Seine in 1906 had also denounced the increasing specialization of work and the decline of long apprenticeships. See P. Coupat, “L’enseignement professional,” Revue syndicaliste, December 1906, 224.

24. Adophe Loyau, “Les conditions du travail dans la mecanique,” Revue syndicaliste, August 1907, 84.

25. Victor Griffuelhes, “L’inferiorité de capitalisme française,” Le mouvement socialiste, December 1910, 329–333.

26. Léon Jouhaux, La bataille syndicaliste, July 3, 1911. See also Georges and Tintant, 72–77.

27. Ervin Szabó, “Principes d’organisation scientifique des usines,” Le mouvement socialiste, January–February 1913, 128–132.

28. Pouget, 4, and Merrheim, “Le système Taylor,” La vie ouvrière, April 5, 1914, 306.

29. Quoted in André Viellerville, Le système Taylor (Paris, 1914), 139–140.

30. Collinet, 44–45.

31. C. Gras, “La Fédération des Metaux,” 98–101.

32. J. M. Lahy, “Le système Taylor et l’organisation des usines,” La revue socialiste, August 1913, 126–138 and “L’étude scientifique des mouvements et le chronometrage,” La revue socialiste, December 1913, 501–520. See also J. M. Lahy, Le système Taylor (Paris, 1916).

33. Frederick Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1967), 19–24.

34. Ibid., “Testimony before the Special House Committee” in Scientific Management (New York, 1947), 24–30. See also Milton Nadworny, Scientific Management and the Unions (Cambridge, Mass., 1955).

35. B. Thumen, “Organisons la production,” Cahiers du redressement française 2 (Paris, 1927). See also Bertrand Thompson, Le système Taylor (Paris, 1916) and L’organisation des usines (Paris, 1926), especially the foreword. The engineering journal, Le génie civil, became a vehicle of Taylorism in France during the war; see, for example, the issues of November 4, 1916, p. 315 and November 10, 1917, p. 307.

36. The labor commission of the Seine, for example, set up seven committees that were directed to solve problems related to job placement, foreign labor, unemployment, and apprenticeships. See Roger Picard, Le mouvement syndical durant la guerre (Paris, 1928), 59.

37. “Rapport sur l’action générale de la CGT depuis Août 1914,” La voix du peuple, December, 1916, 7. Léon Jouhaux, Les travailleurs devant la paix (Paris, 1918). See also Georges and Tinant, 153–185, and Picard, 58–72, for CGT cooperation in the war effort.

38. For background on Thomas, see Fine, “Albert Thomas,” 545–564; Patrick Fridenson and M. Reberiou, “Albert Thomas, pivot du reformisme,” Le mouvement social 87 (April–June, 1974), 85–98; Thomas Schaper, Albert Thomas, trente ans de reformisme social (Assen, 1959); Guy de Lusignan, “Albert Thomas et la justice sociale,” L’actualité de l’histoire 24 (July–August, 1958), 2–28.

39. William Oualid, Salaires et tarifs (Paris, 1929), 90 and 97. For two studies on Thomas’ role in the war industries see Alain Hennebicque, “Albert Thomas et le régime des usines de guerre, 1915–1917,” 111–144 and Gerd Hardach, “La mobilisation industrielle en 1914–1918: production, planification, et ideologie,” 81–109, both in Patrick Fridenson, ed., 1914–1918: l’autre front, Cahiers du mouvement social 2 (1977).

40. Oualid, 97.

41. Bulletin des usines de guerres, April 4, 1917, 273.

42. Le génie civil, February 8, 1919, 177–181; February 15, 1919, 137; and October 18, 1919, 379–380.

43. Louis Renault, Bulletin des usines Renault (August 1, 1918), quoted in Fridenson, Histoire des usines, p. 57.

44. Andre Citroën, “L’avenir de la construction automobile,” La revue politique et parlementaire, May 10, 1929, 241.

45. Henri Le Chatelier, for example, claimed in 1919 that “there is no industrialist in France . . . rigorously applying the Taylor system.” Information ouvrière et sociale, September 14, 1919. See Aimée Moutet, “Patrons de progrès ou patrons de combat? La politique de rationalisation de l’industrie française au lendemain de la Premiere Guerre mondiale” in Leon Marard and Patrick Zylberman, eds., Soldat du travail, special issue of Recherches (Paris, 1978), 454–455.

46. Ibid., 476–486.

47. Le Comité Confédéral National, “Le programme minimum de la CGT,” (December 15, 1918), in La Confédération générale du travail et le mouvement syndical (Paris, 1925), 165–171.

48. CGT, Congrès national corporatif, compte rendu (Paris, July 1918), 234, 184–192, and see Information ouvrière et sociale, January 11, 1920, for adescription of the National Labor Council. A good recent analysis is in Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France (New York, 1981), 59–69.

49. Information ouvrière et sociale, July 28, 1918.

50. Ibid., November 7, 1918.

51. Ibid.

52. Legal background on the application of the eight-hour day and an interesting survey of business and labor opinion about the economic and social effects of the shortened workday can be found in Jean Beaudemoulin, Enquête sur les loisirs de l’ouvrier français, Thèse par le Doctorat, Université de Paris (Paris, 1924).

53. The agreement was published in the Bulletin du Ministère du Travail 31 (April–June 1924), 98. For an analysis of this accord see Bertrand Abherve, “Les origines de la grève des métallurgistes parisiens, Juin 1919,” Le mouvement social 93 (October–December, 1975), 75–85.

54. See the report of the CCN meeting of January 14, 1920 in Voix du peuple, February, 1920, 89.

55. The best source on the split of the French labor movement during the war is Anne Kriegel, Aux origines du communisme francais 1914–1920, vol. I (Paris, 1964), 193–351. See also Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making (Stanford, 1966), Max Gallo, “Quelques aspects de la mentalité et du comportement ouvriers dans les usines de guerres, 1914–18,” Le mouvement social 56 (July–September 1966), 3–33, and for a view from the extreme left, see the collected papers of Pierre Monatte in Colette Chambelland and Jean Maitron, Syndicalisme révolutionnaire et communisme (Paris, 1968).

56. A. Merrheim, Information ouvrière et sociale May 4, 1919. Jouhaux stated this distinction between political and economic revolution even more explicitly, claiming the idea “that one ought to produce intensely only in victorious revolution and when capitalist society has been abolished as false and useless.” Voix du peuple, November 1919, 343. In place of revolutionary abstentionism, Jouhaux advocated an economic revolution which in a “slow process of evolution . . . little by little penetrates the system, which saps the regime and which in the very midst of the established order creates a new organism.” Le bataille syndicaliste, July 23, 1919.

57. Information ouvrière et sociale, November 7, 1918.

58. See Fine, “Toward Corporatism,” 35–45 and 70–79.

59. Abherve, 75–81. See also Nicholas Papayanis, “Masses révolutionaires et directions réformistes: les tensions au cour des grèves de métallurgistes francais in 1919,” Le mouvement social 93 (October–December, 1975) 52–73.

60. Kriegel, Aux origines du communisme, vol. 1, 359–547.

61. The brief account of the split of the CGT is found in Lorwin, 47–67, Georges Lefranc, Le mouvement syndical sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1967) and Anne Kriegel, La croissance de la CGT, 1918–1921 (Paris, 1966).

62. Fine, “Toward Corporatism,” 76 and 115.

63. Moutet, “Patrons de progrès,” 476.

64. See l’intransigeant, December 28, 1920. Archive nationales de la FranceF²² 405 and 422 contain press clippings documenting this offensive against the eight-hour day. Business requests especially from the leather and shoe industries for special exemptions from the law are in F²² 411. Examples of this literature are the booklet by Andre François Poncet and Emile Mitreaux (from the Comité des Forges), La France et les huit heures (Paris, 1921) and articles in La journée industrielle, January 25, February 2 and 24, April 12, 20, and 24, June 2, 1922, Le temps, November 17, 1921, and L’oeuvre, April 17, 1922. Evidence of a continued attack on the eight-hour day in 1924 and 1925 are also in these cartons.

65. Conservative deputies including Daval-Arnould, chairman of the Commission du Travail, proposed a bill to allow the suspension of the eight hour day by ministerial decree in January 1922. La journée industrielle, January 25, 1922. Against this threat, the CGT mobilized its forces during the spring. Its daily, Le peuple, devoted twenty-six major articles to the subject between May 6 and October 30. The eight-hour day was repeatedly defended as a workers’ right and with the claim that if employers would only modernize, the shorter workday should not hurt productivity. On October 9, 1922, large demonstrations for the eight-hour day were held in Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. In fact, in November talks were held between the CGT and CGTU for a common program of defense. La journée industrielle, November 24, 1922. By November, not only had the Minister of Labor, Albert Peyronnet, come to the defense of the eight-hour day but he was also joined by the centrist parti republicain democratique and the Radical Party, thus signaling the defeat of the business-inspired offensive. Le peuple, October 30 and November 6, 1922.

66. A. Thomas feared that the Italian action would spark a “race for the longest working day” among the industrial powers. See Albert Thomas, “The Eight Hour Day,” International Labour Review, 6 (August 15, 1926) 154. See also Fine, “Toward Corporatism,” 141.

67. Le peuple, November 25, 1926.

68. Ibid., August 15, 1926. Between November 12, 1926, and March 15, 1927, the CGT published twenty-six lengthy reports on the benefits of the eight-hour day in Le peuple. They were also published in E. Morel, La production et les huit heures (Paris, 1927).

69. Examples of these critiques of the CGT position are found in Le peuple, January 11, 1927, May 12, 1928, November 20, 1928, and January 14, 1929.

70. Bertram Austin and W. F. Lloyd, The Secret of High Wages (London, 1926). For enthusiastic reviews of this book see Le peuple, March 30, 1926, and L’information ouvrière et sociale, April 15, 1926.

71. See L’information ouvrière et sociale, May 28, 1925 and July 10, 1930, as well as H. Dubreuil, Standards (translated as Robots or Men) (New York, 1927), 78. Additional background on Dubreuil can be found in Martin Fine, “Hyacinthe Dubreuil: le témoignage d’un ouvrier sur le syndicalisme, les relations industrielles et l’evolution technologique de 1921 à 1940,” Le mouvement social 106 (1979), 45–63, and G Truillier, Pour la connaissance de Hyacinthe Dubreuil: ouvrier, syndicaliste, sociologue (Paris, 1971).

72. Dubreuil, Nouveaux standards (Paris, 1931), 48, 200, and 213. See also Dubreuil, Standards, 48 and 192.

73. Jean-Jacque Carré, et al., La croissance français (Paris, 1972), 109–111 and 138.

74. Andre Citroën, “L’avenir de la construction automobile,” La revue politique et parlementaire, May 10, 1929, 224.

75. This study was a collection of reports published in the Bulletin du Ministère du Travail under the title “L’adaptation des conditions de production et de travail à la loi du 23 April 1919 sur la journée de huit heures,” which appeared in the issues from April to December 1924, January to March 1925, and July to September 1927.

76. A. Losovsky, “La trustation, la rationalisation, et nos taches,” L’international syndicate rouge (November 1926), 947–54. See also Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919–43, Documents, (London, 1960), 44, for a similar statement by the Executive Committee of Comintern in a session held November 22 to December 6, 1926.

77. V. I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” (first published in Pravda [April 28, 1918]), in Selected Works II (Moscow, 1967), 663–664. See also Jermey Azrael, Managerial Power and Soviet Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); James Bunyan, The Origins of Forced Labor in The Soviet State, 1917–1921 (Baltimore, 1967); J. G. Crowther, Industry and Education in Soviet Russia (London, 1932), Jean Querzola, “Le chef d’orchestra à la main de fer. Leninisme et taylorisme,” in Soldat du travail, 57–94, Kandall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, 1978), and Rainer Taub “Lenin and Taylor, The Fate of Scientific Management in the (Early) Soviet Union,” Telos 37 (Fall 1978).

78. F. Fontenay, “A propos Fordisme,” Les cahiers du bolshevisme, October 9, 1926, 1862. See also, “Qu’est à qui la rationalisation?” Les cahiers du bolshevisme, January 15, 1927, 49.

79. See La vie ouvrière, July 19, 1929, 2, and September 3, 1929, 1.

80. Degras, vol. 2, 433. According to the CGTU’s Report d’activité prepared for the 1929 Congress, not only the metalworkers’ but the miners’, textile, construction, and wood workers’ unions made studies of rationalization for use by their locals to organize the semiskilled machine operator. See La vie ouvrière, June 28, 1929, 3.

81. L’humanité, January 4, 1928; see also July 4, 1928, July 8, 1928, July 11, 1928, July 26, 1928 and August 7, 1928.

82. Ibid., December 5, 1928 and March 15, 1929.

83. CGTU, Congrès national ordinaire, compte rendu (September 19–24, 1927) 508 and CGTU, Congrès national ordinaire, compte rendu (September 15–17, 1929), 527–529.

84. See L’humanité, April 15, 1929, and La vie ouvrière, May 1, 1929, for evidence of a greater shopfloor militance within the struggling Metalworkers’ Federation.

85. CGTU, Congrès (1929), 529.

86. See John Gerber, “Dissident Communist Groups and Publications in France during the Interwar Period,” Third Republic/Troisième République 9 (Spring 1980), 1–62.

87. La révolution proletarienne, September 1926, 22 and March 15, 1929, 84–85.

88. Ibid., November 1928, 275–281.