Paedagogica Historica Volume 35, No.

1, 1999

Schools of Revolt: Syndicalist Education and Workers' Culture in Pre-World War I France
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Stephen Leberstein The Center for Worker Education of The City College of New York
The two decades before the first world war were the 'heroic'period for French syndicalism, one that saw it emerge as a major workers' movement pledged to revolution. Syndicalists were highly conscious of their class identity, seeing in class consciousness an essential element of a revolutionary movement. And so they rejected parliamentary politics as a means to the new socialist society that would be organized by a working class they regarded as sufficient in its own right for this task. For syndicalists, then, the spheres of daily life and of political activism tended to coincide, leading the movement to politicize every aspect of French culture. Few aspects of this contested cultural terrain were as important to syndicalists as education. This article explores the wide range of the syndicalist movement's educational project, which encompassed the Bourses du Travail, its most enduring institutional embodiment, as well as student-worker groups, teachers' syndicates, apprenticeship training and model schools. Finally, the article analyzes the question whether this project was an effective means to syndicalist political goals while also considering whether efforts in popular education, teacher unionization and school reform were valuable in their own right.

Discussing the flawed public schools of 1908, the anarchist militant Grandjouan argued that it was better to turn them into "schools of revolt" than try to reform them.1 Like many of his comrades he saw existing society itself as a "school of revolt", and syndicalism as the generator of a self-conscious working class culture that could form the basis of the future socialist society.

Grandjouan, "L'Ecole rnove de demain, l'cole rvolte d'aujourd'hui", L'Ecole rnove, I, 5 (Aug. 15, 1908), pp. 235-238.

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At the turn of the century the labor movement in France, like those elsewhere in Europe and even in the US, was marked by the emergence of syndicalism, a self-consciously revolutionary movement. Syndicalists were strongly influenced by anarchists in the sense that they rejected parliamentary democracy, in their view "politics", in favor of the direct action of the workers themselves. It was a matter of faith among syndicalists that the working class and the owning class had nothing in common, and both the French Confdration Gnrale du Travail and its American counterpart, the Industrial Workers of the World were convinced that the working class was perfectly capable of organizing a modern society. Their emphasis on working class autonomy and self-sufficiency made syndicalists particularly interested in culture, that is in the totality of workers' experience. Like the American "Wobblies", whose ballads and song defined a world apart from bourgeois society, French syndicalists tried to fashion a workers' world in their own image. For them, culture, and education in particular, assumed apolitical burden, often serving as the anti-political means for political responses to the dominant culture. While syndicalists generally claimed they were anti-political, they tended to politicize every aspect of their lives in the effort to define a specifically working class agenda. The educational activities of French syndicates were, in this sense, always elements of political struggle. For the left-wing of the French labor movement in the two decades leading up to the first world war, then, every kind of labor organization would become a "school of revolt", a way to educate workers. In the political ferment of the period, anarchists, syndicalists and revolutionary socialists all agreed on the need to educate workers, on the importance of training them in "la science de son malheur", as the secretary of the Bourses du Travail, or labor exchange, federation, Fernand Pelloutier, put it. Projects to promote that consciousness of their poverty were seen as vitally important by many militants and often served as a means for organizing workers. Young workers, lamented the socialist writer Daniel Halvy in 1901, lived in cultural poverty and intellectual solitude.2 The syndicalist firebrand C.A. Laisant thought that workers, ignorant of their own interests due to this intellectual underdevelopment, were too easily distracted and so kept from challenging power.3 And so the educational work of labor organizations often went beyond the expected short courses and study circles to take on a greater purpose than teaching new skills needed on the job or for union work. Writing in La Vie Ouvrire just before the war, Albert Thierry, the syndicalist educator, looked to the syndicates, or labor unions, to give workers something far more

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2 Daniel Halvy, Essais sur le mouvement ouvrier en France (Paris, Socit nouvelle d'dition et de librarie, 1901), p. 154. 3 C.A. Laisant, L'Education de demain (Aiglemont, Colonie Libertaire d'Aiglemont, s.d.), p. 30.

Syndicalist Education and Workers ' Culture in Pre- World War I France precious than what Lamartine had called "the intellectual alms" of the bourgeoisie.4 For Thierry as for many syndicalists who followed his columns in La Vie Ouvrire, syndicates would cultivate "the treasure" of the working class, that is "the young syndicalist faith: - this profound understanding workers get by means of their labor... [that of a] society capable of justice."5 Thierry's generation of militants, those who came of age in the decades before the war, saw the syndicates as schools for teaching working class consciousness, for shoring up the culture of the working class. As they sought to create a cadre of dedicated militants who would lead the working class to overthrow capitalist society, they saw the educational task of labor organizations as an important organizing device, both in the present and for the long run. In considering the syndicalist educational project in its many forms, it will become clear that it was both much more and much less than what it appeared to be. From the youth groups, the model schools, the work of the Bourses du Travail, and the struggles of the organized public school teachers, we can see that syndicalists were doing far more than demonstrating ideas on adult education or school reform. In their minds, these efforts were important in sustaining a working class culture and also constituted revolutionary work. And in this sense, we need to take the syndicalists at their own word and look at issues of agency and class consciousness in their projects of this period. If class consciousness is what syndicalists thought they were promoting, then we also want to see how their educational projects influenced and shaped their organizing in such ways as to encourage worker solidarity and militancy. Did their emphasis on the separate-ness, or autonomy, of working class culture serve to give syndicalist organizing a democratic, "horizontal" quality as opposed to the "vertical", centralized form of, say, the German labor confederation of the same period? Did their projects promote a greater identity of common interests among rank and file workers, impart a sense of their own interests as a class that could sustain them in times of struggle, as Laisant and others hoped? The syndicalist educational project was shaped by the changing circumstances of working class life in the period before the war. The two decades leading up to the first world war mark a period of great economic change in France. According to Georges Lefranc, this period represents a turning point for French capitalism, as small, self-sufficient enterprises gave way to much larger ones and as the working class became increasingly proletarianized.6 Workers responded to these changes with growing militancy expressed in labor organization, revolutionary rhetoric and strike movements. Of the approximately 15

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Thierry, Rflexions sur l'ducation (Paris, Librairie du Travail, s.d.), pp. 51-52. Ibid.

'Georges Lefranc, Le Mouvement syndical sous la Troisime Rpublique (Paris, Payot, 1967), p. 156.

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million wage workers in the first decade of the 20th century, about half worked in industry. In the same period (1902 to 1910), the number of syndicates doubled, from 1,403 to 3,012, and the number of workers who belonged to syndicates in the Confdration Gnrale du Travail (CGT) grew from 100,000 in 1902 to about 400,000 in 1908 / Another index of worker militancy is the number of strikes and strikers. As compared with the last decade of the 19th century, the period 1900 to 1910 saw the number of strikes and strikers more than double (from 4,210 to 9,042, and from 924,000 to 2,021,200 respectively). Similarly, the number of strike days also shot up from 15,021,840 in the last decade of the 19th century to 37,702,650 in the first decade of the 20th.8 While syndicates did not include a majority of French workers, the CGT still exerted a great influence, especially at times of strikes, according to Lefranc and others; syndicalists were the "minorits agissantes" able to galvanize masses of workers despite their small numbers and the lack of a trade union apparatus.9 The "heroic age" of revolutionary syndicalism in France was more than rhetorical; it was one of growing militancy. It was against this background of mounting class conflict and industrial strife that the syndicalist movement in France took on its revolutionary character. As Gerald Friedman reminds us in a recent article, by 1900 French unions were viewed around the world as radical and "the very name of ... the CGT became synonymous with extremism, militancy, and violent revolution."10 It is in this time that the syndicates also became schools of revolt, so to speak.

The Bourses du Travail If any labor organization of the time embodied the syndicalist educational project, it was the Bourses du Travail, or labor exchanges. The first Bourse was authorized by the Paris Municipal Council in 1886, and was established there in 1888 and in other cities thereafter.11 Bourses were sponsored by unions, or associations, of local syndicates as a means of providing job placement services and mutual aid. For the local governments, the Bourses were intended to help promote social peace by aiding struggling syndicates and by

Ibid., pp. 105-106. 'Pierre Semard, "Origines et formation du mouvement syndical franais," Cahiers du Bokhvisme (Feb. 15, 1936), p. 181.
'Lefranc, Le mouvement syndical, p. 89. 10 Gerald Friedman, "Revolutionary unions and French labor: the rebels behind the cause; or why did revolutionary syndicalism fail?" French Historical Studies, XX, 2 (Spring 1997), p. 157. u Ren Gibre, "Les Bourses du Travail," Force Ouvrire, (Aug. 4, 1955).

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giving workers a chance to improve themselves.12 By the end of the 1890s, 57 Bourses were functioning throughout France, representing the association of 1,065 syndicates, nearly half the total number in the country.13 In this regard, the Bourses had accomplished what in the present-day US is seen as the Herculean task of joining local unions together in common efforts across trade or jurisdictional lines. Another aspect of the Bourses was that they were by definition local; by providing a common center of activities and a physical facility, they represented the working class community in the cities and towns where they existed. These were qualities that made them responsive to the needs and concerns of workers that may have been beyond the ken of union action over wages and the like. These included temporary lodging and assistance for those in search of work, cultural activities for workers, and guided activities and even schooling for children and youth. Both contemporary activists and historians regard the Bourses du Travail, or labor exchanges, as syndicalism's most creative invention. While local authorities saw the Bourses as means for muting class conflict, militant activists, like Fernand Pelloutier, the consumptive who martyred himself for the cause, soon understood their other uses for the labor movement. What, however, was the practical, daily role of the Bourses in the life of local working class communities? One of their primary services was free job placement. Apparently some of the Bourses also raised funds so that they could offer some assistance to the unemployed, which Pelloutier described "as the payment of a debt of solidarity contracted between syndicalist workers, and especially as a means of holding the unemployed back from offers of underpaid work."14 Other mutual aid services included the viaticum, or aid to itinerant workers, a means that the Bourses could use to try to regulate fluctuations in the labor market that would otherwise tend to suppress wages. In each case, these forms of mutual aid were also expressions of class solidarity and allowed the Bourses to propagandize the most exploited workers, those temporarily unemployed and in search of work. For Daniel Halvy, the activities that the Bourses organized gave them a unique sense of place in their working class communities. In his Essais sur le mouvement ouvrier en France (1901), Halvy wrote that it was in their meeting rooms "where that great thing, working class consciousness, is born. It is there that men of the people meet other men of the people, in a room that belongs to them, in an institution that they themselves wanted and ran. Come to talk about wages and work, they speak of everything when united in their meetings: of justice, humanity, and science, and the Bourse becomes more than an 'exchange', but a Home, the fresh nucleus of a class until now reduced to the most

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Fernand Pelloutier, Histoire des Bourses du Travail (Paris, Schleicher Frres, 1902), p. 74 ff. "Ibid., p. 79.
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Pelloutier, Histoire des Bourses du Travail, p. 90 ff.

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fragmented and miserable of lives."15 Such other contemporary writers as Lon de Seilhac agreed that the Bourses were important labor organizations, the real centers of syndicalist action.16 By 1892 the Paris municipal government had spent one million francs on a building for the Bourse on the rue du Chteau d'eau, which it turned over to the local Chambres syndicales}7 The Paris Bourse still operates at the same address. In that same year, the Bourses du Travail held their first national meeting simultaneously with the Congress of the socialist-dominated Fdration des Syndicats led by Jules Guesde at Saint Etienne. Just three years later, in 1895, the Bourses had formed a national federation under the direction of a Comit fdral, and Pelloutier became its sole secretary. Under his direction, the Bourses became independent of political parties, breaking with the Guesdist socialist trade union federation, and struggled to maintain their independence of local authorities even while accepting their support, a stance for which he was sometimes criticized.18 Wherever the syndicates in a town had affiliated in a local union, there a Bourse du Travail was likely to be established. By June 1895, when the Bourses du Travail held a national congress at Nmes, Pelloutier reported that 36 of them were represented on the Comit fdral, and that after four years steady growth, they now counted one million members.19 If there were not more Bourses, Pelloutier argued, it was because the local syndicates had not affiliated in over a quarter of the towns where they had organized.20 The Bourses du Travail also offered an instructional service, which usually included a library, an information office, vocational training and general education courses.21 By 1902 every Bourse had managed to put together a library, the collections ranging from 400 to 1,200 volumes except in the case of the Paris Bourse which had a library of 2,700 volumes. Pelloutier spoke, with nearly Victorian reverence, of the libraries holding "those works most likely to refine taste, elevate feelings, and extend the knowledge of the working class..."22 In his mind this meant a wide range of all that French culture had to offer, from

Daniel Halvy, Essais sur le mouvement ouvrier en France (Paris, Socit nouvelle de librairie et d'dition, 1901), pp. 85-86. 16 Lon de Seilhac, Syndicats ouvriers,fdrations, bourses du travail (Paris, Armand Colin, 1902), p. 264. 17 Jean Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (Paris, SUDEL, 1951), p. 278. 18 JacquesJulliard, Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme d'action directe (Paris, Seuil, 1971), pp. 7-8. 19 Fernand Pelloutier, "Rapport sur les travaux du Comit Fdral pendant 189495, prsent au FVe Congrs national tenu Nmes le 9 juin 1895," in: Institut franais d'histoire sociale, Fonds Monatte, 14 AS 223, no. 4, p. 1. 20 Pelloutier, Histoire des Bourses du Travail, p. 79. 21 Gibre, "Les Bourses du Travail". 22 Pelloutier, Histoire des Bourses du Travail, p. 112.

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Syndicalist Education and Workers ' Culture in Pre- World War I France Chateaubriand to Balzac and Zola, as well as volumes on politics and the economy. In the main the Bourses devoted their energies to offering trade courses to workers. During a nine month period, from October 1899 to June 1900, Pelloutier reported that the federated Bourses held a total of 597 educational meetings lasting an average of two hours each, with an average attendance of 426.23 If everything were equal, then each Bourse would have had just over one educational meeting a month in this period, not an impressive number. Of those that did offer an educational program, some showed a broad range of subjects. At Saint Etienne, for example, the Bourse offered courses in eleven fields, ranging from geometry and design for building trades workers to painting and drawing, surveying and leveling. The Toulouse Bourse received a municipal subsidy to set up a model typographical workshop. At the Paris Bourse in the year 1901, for example, syndicalist workers as well as teachers from the Polytechnical Association, a popular education society, offered courses in everything from industrial electricity and commercial accounting to German and English languages.24 Pelloutier worried that workers were not serious enough in their attitude toward education, often dropping in and out of the courses. Others feared that the courses would turn out foremen and subcontractors instead of militants. And in fact the model print shop at Toulouse produced such welltrained apprentices that they began to displace the town's older printers because they were paid less for similar work. When the issue of trade education was discussed at the 1900 congress of the Bourses in Paris, despite the criticism raised, most delegates supported the efforts as good ways of recruiting new workers to the syndicates and of spreading their political ideas. A delegate from Blois, for example, argued that without the syndicalist schools, vocational training would be left to the state and industry, both hostile to syndicalism. It was not just trade skills that the Bourses taught, as another delegate put it, but "another way of cultivating the mind."25 For another delegate from Nmes, vocational training was important because it "inculcate[d] labor dignity and solidarity" while turning out "workers who understand everything about their profession" thereby "raising up the concept of the individual and of the young proletarian army..."26 Pelloutier did not live to lead the army; he died of tuberculosis, a young man in 1901.

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"Ibid., p. 121 24 Loc. cit.

"L'Enseignement professional", in: Mlle Congrs national des Bourses du Travail de France, Paris, 5-8 Sept. 1900 (Paris, Imprimerie typographique Jean Allemane, 1900), pp. 95-112. For more information, see dossier F(7) 12493 in the Archives Nationales. 26 Loc. cit.
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Student Groups Pelloutier's political (or anti-political) formation may have been unusual, emerging from the Chevaliers du Travail Franais and from contacts with a libertarian literary elite.27 But as a young intellectual strongly influenced by anarchist thinking he was typical of a generation of youth, including Paul Delesalle, Amde Dunois, Pierre Monatte, Marc Pierrot and Alfred Rosmer among others, who became revolutionary syndicalists. Many of them began their political development as university students for whom life in the mainstream of French society seemed either unsatisfying or beyond reach. It was from the youth culture of the period that this group emerged, and those militants who were shaped by their youthful experience later insisted on the importance of working with youth and children for the future of the labor movement. An incubator of this "intellectual proletariat" was the Groupe des Etudiants Socialistes Rvolutionnaires Internationalistes(ESRI), active in Paris from 1892 until 1903. In its first manifesto for a national student congress in 1893, the group addressed itself to those students "whose feeling of justice rebels against all orders of exploiters..., students whom life will tomorrow enroll in the intellectual proletariat."28 In language that resonates across the century, the group addressed itself to "all the proletarians - industrial, agricultural and intellectual - of all the civilized countries."29 The group's stress on internationalism was consistent with that of a French left battling the nationalist revanchisme of the state and army, and also reflected a membership that was about half foreign born, predominantly exiles from Russia, Romania and Poland.30 By the turn of the century, according to Pierre Monatte, its last secretary, the ESRI group became a worker-student alliance in which the two parts were brought together by their common anarchist inspiration.31 Nor was this the only such group. The Ligue Dmocratique des coles, for example, announced its Cercle d'tudes politiques et sociales in December 1896.32 Like the ESRI group, the Ligue self-consciously sought to draw together workers and students, in part in reaction against what they regarded as the corrupting influence of socialist party politicians. Earlier in 1896 at the Second Interna-

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Augustin Hamon to Pierre Monatte, Oct. 5,1944, in: Institut franais d'histoire sociale, Fonds Monatte, 14 AS 223. 28 "Congrs national des Etudiants Socialistes de France", in: Archives Pierrot, 14 AS 203, at the Institut franais d'histoire sociale. 29 "Aux Etudiants de Paris", (Paris, Imprimerie Jean Allemane, s.d.), in loc. cit. 30 "Cahiers des ESRI", in loc. cit. (The notebooks contain membership lists of the group in its early period as well as minutes of its meetings.) 31 Jean Maitron, "Le Groupe des Etudiants Socialistes Rvolutionnaires Internationalistes", L Mouvement Social, 46 (Jan.-Mar. 1964), p. 24. 32 Archives Pierrot, 14 AS 203; see also the Ligue's dossier in the Archives de la Prfecture de la Police, Ba/1527.

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Syndicalist Education and Workers' Culture in Pre- World WarlFrance tional's Congress at London, the syndicalists along with youth groups, anarchists and others split apart from the socialist party. We know that the groups did in fact engage in study circles, that they were active engines of propaganda writing and distributing brochures and handbills, and that they maintained libraries. They kept and read works by Louis Blanc, Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue and Karl Marx, as well as contemporary leftwing journals such as Le Drapeau Rouge, L'Art Social, La Question Sociale, and L'Almanach du Parti Ouvrier,,33 Links between students and workers, especially those with a common interest in anarchism, were not unusual in this period. In part we can understand this connection as an expression of the instinctual feeling of the young for justice and irreverence toward authority. But examples of such worker-student alliances marked this period and significantly influenced the development of syndicalism, which understood how important this connection could be. The police certainly believed that such groups were significant. Police surveillance of the "social movement" of that era often targeted such groups, and reports from police informants described study groups and educational meetings as notable forms of working class political activity.34

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Model Schools and Camps Attention to the needs of working class children and youth remained an important concern of the syndicalist movement. It is not so hard to understand why working parents of that time worried about their children in the public schools, much as contemporary working parents do. Throughout the entire period under discussion, the syndicalist press was full of articles and letters on educational issues. While much of this interest can be attributed to the nearly universal worry of working parents about their kids, part of it stemmed from the continuing conflict between church and state in France and elsewhere. Not until 1905 did France "laicize" primary education, abolishing public subsidies for church schools. In the aftermath of the laws on the lay school, the public school teachers, especially in rural areas, worried about the strident clerical reaction that the village cur often directed against them.

"Pierrot's memoirs, which appeared originally in Plus Loin, 95 (Mar. 1933), as quoted in Maitron, "Le Groupe des Etudiants Socialistes Rvolutionnaires Internationalistes", Le Mouvement Social, 46 (Jan.-Mar. 1964), p. 24, and Catalogue in Archives Pierrot, 14 AS 203. 34 See the dossier F (7) 12504 in the Archives Nationales for descriptions of the "social movement" in the early 1890s. In the Archives de la Prfecture de la Police for Paris are numerous reports on study circles and the like, especially in dossier Ba/1498, "Activits Anarchistes, 1899-1901."

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One response to the perceived failure of state schools for working class children was the creation of model schools, often anarchist-inspired. The anarchist weekly Les Temps Nouveaux set out a project for a model school in 1897 as a needed alternative to public schools, described with poorly concealed hyperbole as "the perfect training for servitude."35 Critics were especially incensed that coeducation was actually prohibited by school law. Impatient to show what could be done, some of the critics organized a summer camp for August 1898 near Paris, with 19 kids. The unfortunate experiment foundered when one of the organizers lost his patience and slapped a camper.36 By 1901, Francsico Ferrer organized La Escuela Moderna in Barcelona, a model school that attracted widespread attention and support and which inspired similar projects all over Europe, and even in New York. The most important French model school was La Ruche which Sbastien Faure directed at Rambouillet near Paris from 1904 until 1917. Over a ten year period from 1904 to 1914, about 4,000 children applied to La Ruche, mostly the children of single parents, abused women and those determined to keep their kids out of charitable religious institutions when they were hard up.37 Faure's colony, like Madeleine Vernet's Avenir Social at Neuilly-Plaisance near Paris and others answered the desperate needs of working or unemployed parents.38 However informally, Vernet, Faure and the others were personally linked, and their colonies connected institutionally, to the broader syndicalist movement, often through workers' cooperatives and local syndicates. But their colonies remained Utopian nonetheless. What is more significant for our discussion are the projects that the syndicates themselves organized. There had been talk in syndicalist circles of sponsoring schools as at the 1900 congress of the federated Bourses du Travail, resurfacing at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress at Amsterdam. "Workers being more apt than anyone to determine the character of the education to give their children, [the report to the congress proposed that] the care of education revert essentially to the syndicates and labor unions [or federations]."39 But it was soon apparent how impractical these proposals were. Writing in La Guerre Sociale in 1908, Gustave Herv said that "one or two schools like Faure's La Ruche or Madeleine Vernet's Avenir Social are interesting as models; but to imagine now, within the capitalist order of society, that the

"L'Ukime dressage pour l'asservissement", Degalvs & Janvion, "L'Ecole libertaire", Les Temps Nouveaux, III, 5 (May 15-21,1897), pp. 1-2. 36 See Les Temps nouveaux, IV, 12 (July 16-22,1898) and 26 (October 22-28,1898). "Eugnie Casteu, "L'Enfance malheureuse", Bulletin de la Ruche, 8 (June 25, 1914), pp. 12-15.
"Madeleine Vernet, Cinq annes d'exprience ducative, l'Avenir Social, 1906-1911 (Epne, Editions de l'Avenir social, 1911). 39 Lon Clment, "L'Education intgrale de l'enfance", in: Congrs Anarchiste, Compte-rendu analytique (Paris, La Publication sociale, 1908), p. 105.

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Syndicalist Education and Workers'Culture in Pre-World WarlFrance cooperatives and syndicates would ever have enough funds to set up 'free schools' in the face of the lay school, you would really have to delude yourself about the 'financial capacity' of the working class of our day."40 Although Herv deflated the grand idea of independent labor schools, Georges Yvetot, secretary-general of the Fdration des Bourses du Travail, remained sympathetic, in part in the hope that syndicalist schools could hire militant school teachers who had lost their jobs and so demonstrate class solidarity. So at its own congress in 1908, the Fdration des Bourses appointed a commission to study the possibilities. Reporting back at the next congress of the Fdration des Bourses in 1910, the commission recognized that creating independent syndicalist schools was not possible. But it did recommend that the Bourses "set up in their quarters children's nurseries, [to operate] after primary schools close and on vacation days, and to turn them into Pupils' Groups which will permit the education of proletarian youth toward an anti-militarist and syndicalist goal..."41 Yvetot promoted the project, supporting the use of the Bourses during day-time hours for children's activities. His greatest enthusiasm was for what could be done with kids when their parents were on strike, "when [the kids] would live a few days of this fever of labor's battle."42 Yvetot saw this as a way to organize workers by actively involving working parents in organizing the after-school projects. While not much evidence exists on how Yvetot's ideas were carried out, it is clear that Pupils' Groups had begun to function in working class communities. In 1913 the idea emerged of federating all the children's groups that had become a part of the labor movement. Lon Clment and Maurice Bouchor argued in La Vie Ouvrire that workers' cooperatives, syndicates and socialists together should coordinate and support the Pupils' Groups.43 Such an arrangement had apparently already been worked out in Bouchor's own neighborhood, the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, and the proposal garnered warm response from readers of La Vie Ouvrire.** Within a year we read about a Coordinating Committee for the Pupils of Cooperatives of the Parisian Region, affiliating the

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40

Herv, La Guerre Sociale (June 24-30 June 1908), quoted in Max Ferr, Histoire

du mouvement syndicaliste rvolutionnaire chez les instituteurs (Paris, SUDEL, 1955), p. 150. ""Rapport prsent par Togny et Raud la Ve Confrence des Bourses (1910, Rennes), Sur les Ecoles Syndicales", reprinted as Annexe 3, in: Ludovic Zoretti, Education nationale et mouvement ouvrier en France (Paris, Librairie Populaire, 1923), pp. 70-72. "Georges Yvetot, "L'Ecole syndicale", Part H, L'Ecole mancipe, 1,18 (Jan. 28, 1911), pp. 2-3. 43 Reprinted in pamphlet form as Les groupes de Pupilles, l'ducation de l'enfance dans les milieux ouvriers (Paris, Editions de la Vie Ouvrire, 1913), p. 9. 44 E. Reynier, "Les Groupes de Pupilles - travers les livres", La Vie ouvrire, V, 92 (July 20, 1913), pp. 112-113.

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activities of 26 separate groups under the control of labor organizations.45 The groups were not meant only to extend the school day, explained a member of the Coordinating Committee, but rather "to give our children a social education which is given them nowhere else." Aside from anything else the children - these "pioneers of tomorrow" in the enthusiast's words - would learn, they would also see demonstrated the collective role of people in creating a working class institution.

Youth Groups Downloaded by [Fordham University] at 08:40 17 August 2011 The most interesting aspect of the syndicalist project, though, were the Jeunesses Syndicalistes that emerged alongside the children's groups. Embracing adolescent apprentices and workers, the first such youth groups appeared for a very brief time around 1904-05, just as the student-worker study circles began to fade away. But it seemed that they too faded away, mainly due to the indifference or active hostility of older militants.46 By 1911 La Vie Ouvrire regarded the ascendant syndicalist youth groups as crucial to the future of syndicalism for "Each has suffered from the gross loss of young strength the syndicalist movement has undergone." To understand better how the syndicates could attract and hold onto youth, the journal developed a questionnaire to survey all the youth groups it could identify. The survey asked the following questions: 1. How long have you been in operation? how many members? are you making progress; statutes, etc. are you installed at the local labor exchange? 2. What tasks have you assumed? education among the young and old? extended propaganda, results desired and obtained; role of sports and other distractions in the group? 3. Do the syndicates help you? in what form; or is there mistrust; what complaints are made against you; is there antagonism between younger and older; if so, to what do you attribute it; how might it be eliminated?47 The results were encouraging. Within a few months, the journal's inquiry found the Jeunesses Syndicalistes to be generally flourishing. To Pierre Monatte the resurgent youth groups held out the promise of a vital labor movement because they were free of what he saw as "the detestable method" of the German Social Democrats, a practice which "dug a pit of distrust and hate

45 Alice Jouenne, "L'Education dans les Coopratives; nos Groupes de Pupilles", L'Ecole mancipe, IV, 30 (April 18, 1914), p. 351. '"'"Les Jeunesses Syndicalistes", La Vie ouvrire,!!, Ab (August 5, 1911), pp. 146147. 47 Ibid.

Syndicalist Education and Workers ' Culture in Pre- World War I France between the organizational leaders and the masses" by creating a professional caste of labor officials.48 In the first summary of reports to the Vie Ouvrire questionnaire, 22 different groups sent in answers to the survey. Most of those that responded were well established or growing, although it is hard to estimate the exact numbers of young workers involved due to their loose organization. Although the Jeunesses Syndicalistes probably included fewer than 1,000 steady members throughout the country at the end of 1911, these groups, like the syndicalist movement itself, certainly exerted an influence on their comrades out of all proportion to their numbers, especially during anti-militarist campaigns and in times of crisis. Some trends are apparent from the responses. In Paris, the youth groups formed within certain trades, whereas in the suburbs and provincial towns the small number of workers in any given trade meant that groups formed instead within the local labor exchange or cooperative, drawing their members from among all the syndicalist workers in the area. A majority of the groups admitted and encouraged non-organized workers to join their activities as a way to recruit new members to the labor movement. For this organizing tactic to work, the groups had to do more than study together; they had to embrace the kind of things youth in general would be interested in, like physical education and sports.49 Many of the Jeunesses Syndicalistes groups thought of themselves as representing "advanced" ideas, an attitude that often brought them into conflict with their elders. Were these generational conflicts, or a clash between political tendencies? Closer consideration of a few examples may help us to understand the role of the youth groups in the larger context of the syndicalist movement. The first youth group to form that was identified in the survey, in July 1909, was the Jeunesse de la Voiture in the automobile industry.50 These youths tried to strike a balance by sponsoring cultural activities in addition to family outings and what they called "rational" or non-competitive sports. They also participated as a group in street demonstrations, and although they wanted to include "revolutionary" in the group name, they held back in order to attract more recruits. Even though their number remained small, the auto-workers practiced solidarity by going out of their way to help organize other youth groups. So the Jeunesse Syndicaliste des Ferblantiers, the tin-workers, reported that they got the idea to organize from their comrades among the auto-workers.51 So too did the Jeunesse Syndicaliste d'Asnires help their comrades at Saint Ouen in setting up a group, and together they organized the Coordinating Committee of Revolu-

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48

"Les Jeunesses Syndicalistes", La Vie Ouvrire, H, 48 (Sept. 20, 1911), pp. 331-

334. 1911).

49

See results of the inquiry, La Vie Ouvrire, II, 45, 48, 49, 50 and 53 (Aug.-Dec.

L. Calinaud, "Jeunesse de la Voiture", La Vie Ouvrire, U, 48 (Sept. 20,1911), pp. 331-334. ''"Jeunesse syndicale des Ferblantiers", La Vie Ouvrire, H, 48, p. 336.

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tionary Syndicalist Youth Groups of the Suburbs. The youth saw the need to combine their efforts the better to oppose the government's militarism, as they saw it, since young workers would be "the principal victims of such ignoble carryings-on."52 Sometimes youthful enthusiasm (some saw it as violence, sectarianism or impatience) put the youth in conflict with their elders as when the activities of the youth of the Le Mans group threatened the local Bourse du Travail with the loss of its municipal funding. In such cases the youth might have found themselves on the street instead of inside the labor exchange.53 Still, the Fdration des Bourses du Travail had endorsed the creation of youth groups at its 1910 congress in Toulouse and so was consistent in calling on all local syndicates to join the effort. The organization of youth groups was not limited to the Parisian region. A congress of allied youth groups in the West met in February 1912 and agreed to coordinate its activities to make its members more effective in their antimilitarist campaigns. Now agreed on their tasks, reported a spokesman, the youth groups of the West "will be able to give this region, undergoing rapid industrialization, and to all its bodies a generation of militants."54

Teacher Unionism Among the most militant syndicalist workers were public school teachers, who began to organize trade associations, or Amicales, around 1900. With wages hovering near the subsistence level and jobs scarce, the teachers' main concern was survival. They were among the first ranks of "intellectual proletarians", as one study put it: "Primary school teaching is only an immense proletariat. Of the 150,000 men and women who comprise it, at least 100,000 are in a penury very close to poverty".55 The first teachers' syndicates began to organize around 1904 in the department of the Var, as it became apparent that the Amicales were not effective in addressing the teachers' problems. Allied with the CGT, the teachers' syndicates saw themselves as a vanguard in their first manifesto.56 But it was not only to better their material circumstances that the
52 "Le Comit d'Entente des J.S. du dpartement de la Seine", La Vie Ouvrire, II, 53 (Dec. 5,1911), pp. 700-703. ""Jeunesse syndicalisteduMans",Z.a Vie Ouvrire, II, 50 (Oct. 20,1911), pp. 489491. 54 Laurent Hansmoenel, "Le Congrs des Jeunesses Syndicalistes de l'Ouest", La Vie Ouvrire, IV, 59-60 (Mar. 5-20, 1912), pp. 381-387. 55 Henry Brenger, e.a., Les Proltaires intellectuels en France (Paris, Editions de la revue, 1897), 5<b "Manifeste des Instituteurs (1905)", quoted in Ferr, Max, Histoire du mouve-

ment syndicaliste rvolutionnaire chez les instituteurs: des origines 1922 (Paris, SUDEL, 1955), pp. 77-79.

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teachers' syndicates wanted to join the CGT. By joining in the labor movement, the syndicalist teachers believed that they would "gain an understanding of the intellectual and moral needs of the people. Through their contact and collaboration [with other syndicates], we will establish our programs and our methods."57 These teachers identified their interests with those of the communities they served. Such attitudes brought the syndicalist school teachers into conflict with the government. Under Clemenceau, the government in 1907 banned the teachers' syndicates from joining in the Bourses du Travail on the grounds that such membership would conflict with their official public role. In response the national federation of teachers' syndicates formed a defense committee, which issued an "Open Letter to M. Clemenceau." The letter accused the government of being the "Defender of Capital and of privileges", and also accused it of blocking the teachers' membership in the Bourses du Travail "because in them workers discuss the conditions of social organization. But it is their right, and ours too!"58 This declaration of defiance came just after the CGT adopted its famous Charter of Amiens in 1906, and shortly after a wave of strikes in 1907. It is most interesting for what it says of the teachers' determination to substitute for the official curriculum "...a practical, concrete teaching that corresponds to the real needs of the different populations, to the real needs of the producers... It is for all these reasons that we reject your contract [forbidding them a place in the labor exchanges]. For this is our labor, the thing which, 'after love, least suffers authority'."59 With that the syndicalist teachers vowed to fight "the insatiable moloch." In response, the government fired some of the signers. Not all syndicalists welcomed the school teachers, some, like M.T. Laurin, believing that they would dilute the militant fervor of the labor movement.60 Anatole France, on the other hand, saw their actions as an example of labor solidarity in which "functionaries and state employees, along with those who hold the pen and those who wield the pick, rush ... into freedom road ... in their mutual association ... with proletarians..."61 Eventually Victor Griffuelhes wrote in L'Humanit welcoming the teachers as comrades in the battle against "the forces of oppression and exploitation."62 In the years that followed, syndicalist teachers came to talk more and more about the need for "Adaptation

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Ibid. "Lettre ouverte M. Clemenceau, Prsident du Conseil des Ministres", signed by the Comit central pour la dfense du droit syndical des salaris de l'Etat, etc., reproduced in L'Enseignement public 0une-July 1956), in Fonds Vidalenc in the Institut franais d'histoire sociale, 14 AS 225(1), no. 3(1). 69 Ibid. 60 M.T. Laurin, m Le Mouvement socialiste (April 1905).
58

57

Anatole France, introduction to Les Instituteurs syndiqus et la classe ouvrire, documents et opinions (Poligny (Jura), F.N.S.I., 1907), p. 1. a L'Humanit (April 7,1907), quoted in Instituteurs et classe ouvrire, pp. 74-76.

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of teaching to the needs of the working class."63 And over the years, they worked actively to define how they might adapt public schools to those needs. In an example of labor solidarity in August 1912, the congress of the Federation nationale des syndicats d'instituteurs at Chambery voted to support a CGT anti-militarist project, the Sou du Soldat, designed to strengthen the bond between young conscripts and their syndicate. That resolution gave the government the excuse it needed to dissolve the teachers' syndicates.64 At the beginning of the 1913-14 school year, the editors of the Ecole mancipe, the journal of the teachers' syndicate, expressed the opinion that crises in the labor movement, the attempted dissolution of their syndicates, and the countless reprisals against militant teachers, had only served to strengthen teachers' syndicalism. They took courage from the fact that, "in moments of crisis for syndicalism, it was the Ecole mancipe that helped to raise courage, and militants turned toward it; it was and still is the principal source of all action, the center of resistance and the soul of ilie syndicalist movement in education."65 But when war began many of teachers marched off with their working class comrades, and the principled few called out as voices in the dark. Should we view the rank and file organizing and solidarity of the prewar syndicalist movement as a failure? Or should we consider it as the necessary but insufficient condition for mobilizing a force capable of changing the course of French society? As a recent dissertation has suggested, the anti-militarism that was such an important part of the syndicalist movement "served the left as a universal language through which to express class conflict ... and it appealed generally to a certain moral order that the working-class leaders felt had been violated by the army. ...it [also] established a means for ordinary people to challenge the state on such issues as military injustice in the barracks...and the three-year conscription law of 1913-14."66 The tragic fact, however, is that the syndicalist project, for all its revolutionary promise, was unable even to delay, much less avert the war that broke out in August 1914. As measured against the rhetoric of its militants, the project was also much less than it seemed. While the continual agitation and organizing of syndicalist workers may have been a necessary condition for transforming ari unjust society, it was an insufficient one. Did the emphasis on working class autonomy, on culture as opposed to economic action and politics, represent a retreat from a more direct challenge to established power?

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"Louis Bout, e.a., Le Syndicalisme dans l'enseignement: Histoire de la Fdration de l'enseignement et du syndicalisme universitaire (Avignon, Editions de l'Ecole mancipe, 1924), pp. 3-4. M See L'Ecole mancipe, II, 47 (Aug. 31, 1912), for an account of the affair. 65 L. Leger, "Aux instituteurs, aux institutrices," L'Ecole mancipe, IV, 1, (Sept. 27, 1913), pp. 1-2. w Paul Brian Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Anti-Militarism in France, 1870-1914 (Yale University Ph.D. dissertation, 1995).

Syndicalist Education and Workers' Culture in Pre-World War I France The syndicalist education project could not succeed in holding the forces of war at bay in 1914, and so it failed almost at the peak of its power to create the new world it had promised. But it demonstrated strategies that could, and did, work to build class conscious, community-oriented, rank and file organizations that could effectively mobilize workers to fight both for their own interests and for a larger agenda. In both its failures and it promise, the syndicalist project can teach today's labor movement something valuable. Its most enduring lesson is that workers' daily lives can be "schools of revolt", that a visionary class consciousness brings with it the will to build a more just society. It should also caution us that the retreat into an insular culture will not lead to any victories. Downloaded by [Fordham University] at 08:40 17 August 2011

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