The making of the working class

1. The making of the working class Dr Chris Pearson

2. Lecture outline • The age of artisan rebellion (1790s-1870s) • The ‘radical artisan’ thesis and its critics • Workers and the Third Republic (1871-1914) – integration or alienation?

3. “Traditional” Social History • 1960s and 1970s – seeking the origins of the working class and class consciousness • Workers (artisan radicals) portrayed as struggling against market forces and capitalist exploitation • Stresses solidarity and common purpose of workers • Modernist – history as progress

4. The challenge of cultural history • 1980s+ emergence of cultural history within changing economic and social context and postmodernism • Working class not unified, but fraught with shifting, unstable identities and divisions • Class is a discursive construct rather than a socio-economic reality

5. The evolution of Joan W. Scott • The Glassmakers of Carmaux (1974) used strike of 1895 as ‘a lever which would permit me to examine the strikers, to learn more about what motivated them to act when and as they did’ (p.1-2) • Post-structuralist theories of gender then became her main focus as a ‘category of analysis.’ (Gender and the Politics of History [1988])

6. Sans-culottes: revolutionary radicals

7. It’s an artisan’s life… • Journeymen worked in workshops overseen by masters • Members of compagonnage or brotherhood • Compagonnage divided into different affiliations – rivalry that could descend into violence • Divisions between sedentary and nomadic workers

8. The “working class” emerges • 1830+ shift in vocabulary: from ‘the people,’ ‘the mob’, ‘gens de métiers’ to the ‘workers’ and the ‘working class’ (la classe ouvrière) • Balzac: ‘The three former estates have been replaced by what are today called classes. We have the lettered, the industrial, the upper, the middle classes, etc…’

9. New class consciousness • Auguste Colin, Le Cri du Peuple (1831) • L’Atelier (1840+), ‘the organ of the working-class, edited exclusively by workers.’ • Contrast with Britain – larger proletariat in Britain (workers in factories and mines) but more popular militancy in France –led by artisans

10. Votes for démos-soc list, 13 May 1849

11. Martin Nadaud (1815-1895)

12. A docile proletariat? • The French proletariat was 30% of the workforce but comprised only 10% of strikers in 1830s and 1840s • Possible reasons: difficulties in mobilizing female and child labour (women 30% of labour force in mills); poor bargaining position of unskilled workers; control of workers via company paternalism; resort to drink and violence rather than protest. • Government and business punishing protest: e.g. fate of Lodève (Christopher Johnson, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc [1995])

13. The ‘Radical Artisan’ Thesis • Orthodoxy amongst social historians • Rudé’s crowds: skilled workers, not the dangerous classes of elite mythology, made up the crowds of urban protests

14. Pressures on the artisans • Cost cutting and productivity • Less apprenticeship schemes • Cheaper, unskilled workers (often women) • Reliance on fewer, more powerful merchants

15. Artisan tactics in Lyon • Revolt (1831): ‘To live by working or to die fighting.’ • Strike and insurrection (1834) • Co-operatives • Worker’s newspapers – expressed class consciousness

16. Radical songs in Lyon To brave oppression! Run without fear to victory, Fight without eating or drinking That's the worker of Lyon The Croix-Rousseans are not dogs. The merchants are lazy-bones Source: McDougall (1978), p.134

17. Strengths of the artisan movement • Rootedness and resources (C Tilly) • Able to draw on experience and solidarities of compagnonnage system (W Sewell, Work and Revolution in France) • Fit with ‘utopian’ socialism of Proudhon, Blanc and others in 1848 – artisans not concerned with nationalization of industry but with creating workers’ co-operatives, mutual aid societies, workers’ banks (B Moss)

18. Questioning the radical artisan thesis • Revolutionary heritage and culture more important than artisanal culture (T Judt) • Myth of the radical artisan (J Rancière) • Divisions within the workshop (J Scott) • Lingering tensions between masters and journeymen • Paris 1860s and 1870s: community identities more important than workshop (R Gould)

19. Reactionary Radicals? ‘We need to see revolution against capitalism as based not in the new class that capitalism forms, but in the traditional communities and crafts that capitalism threatens. Rootedness in a social order challenged by industrial capitalism can make political and economic opposition radical and provide the social strength for concerted struggle.’ Craig Calhoun, ‘Industrialisation and Social Radicalism: British and French labor movements in the mid-nineteenth century crisis,’ Theory and Society (1983), p. 486

20. Workers and the Third Republic (1870-1914) • From the Paris Commune of 1871 (30,000 deaths) to the Union Sacrée of 1914 • 1870+ steady decline of skilled artisan, even in Lyon • New industries, increased productivity, and new workforces e.g. in Decazeville • More immigrant workers, such as Italians in Lorraine

21. Living standards • Some improvement; shorter working hours, better food, improved health of conscripts - between 1869 and 1900 the percentage of Belleville conscripts unfit for military service fell from 30% to 10% • Higher wages – rises of 25% in Lyon and 33% in Saint Etienne from 1881-1911 • More time for leisure

22. But not all rosy… • Persistent income inequalities: the percentage of the population dying property-less in Belleville rose from 79% in 1860 to 88% in 1900 • Poor prospects for social mobility: in 1900, 63% of army conscripts belonged to the same social class as their fathers • Work-related illnesses • Poor housing

23. Republican reforms • The introduction of schooling for workers’ children (1880s) • The legalisation of trade unions (1884) • Industrial accident compensation (1898) • Obligatory weekly rest day (1906) • Pensions for workers (1910)

24. Jules Ferry (1887): ‘The strike is industrial war, the union is social peace.’

25. Schneider (Le Creusot):‘I accept the intervention of no one outside of the factory in [the] contacts I have with my workers’

26. Poverty as life-style choice: ‘People who think it's a lifestyle choice to just sit on out-of-work benefits - that lifestyle choice is going to come to an end. The money won't be there." George Osborne, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, 9 September 2010

27. The lazy unemployed?"There was a very good programme the other day that talked about Merthyr Tydfil and the fact there were jobs in Cardiff, but many of them had become static and [they] didn't know that if they got on a bus for an hour's journey, they'd be in Cardiff and could look for the jobs there.”Iain Duncan Smith, UK Work and pensions secretary, 21 October 2010

28. Military repression of strikes • Anzin (Nord) in 1884 • Decazeville in 1886 • In the Corrèze (1888) • Fourmies (Nord) in 1891 – nine strikers killed at a demonstration/strike on May Day • Carmaux (Tarn) – miner’s strike in 1892 – 1,500 soldiers sent in

29. Jean Jaurès (1859-1914)

30. The workers fight back? • Despite the legalisation of trade unions in 1884, trade union membership remained low • Only 9% of industrial workforce unionised in 1891 • 1901, 60% of miners unionized, 31% of printers, 21% of metalworkers… • …but only 9% of textile industry

31. European trade union membership • Compared with Britain and Germany, TU membership low • 1913: 10% of French industrial workforce unionized (1,064,000) • Germany: 63% (3,317,000) • UK: 26% (3,023,000) • But despite the unions’ relatively low membership, strikes were commonplace

32. Local, rather than national, activism • Bourses au travail (labour exchanges), established in 1884 by Paris Prefect of Police • Expanded rapidly: 1887-1902 established in 94 towns and cities • By 1907, 157 bourses nationwide • Became sites of worker class solidarity, where TU activists met the unemployed

33. Striker blocking fuel depot, southern France,October 2010