Echoing Balzac’s Les Paysans, Émile Zola set the peasants’ greed for the land at the centre of his novel of 1887, La Terre. The Fouan family, former serfs living in the Beauce, had struggled for 400 years to defend and extend their property, ‘with an obstinate passion that father bequeathed to son’. The old patriarch Fouan, rather like King Lear, is about to divide his 50 acres between two sons and two daughters, and there is not enough to go round. One daughter, Lise, has married her thuggish cousin, Buteau, who has been working as a farmhand in the Orgères district, from which during the Revolution a notorious band of brigands terrorized the peaceful farmers of the Beauce. Buteau and Lise confront another daughter, Françoise, in a field. Buteau rapes her, Lise attacks her, and in the ensuing struggle Françoise falls on a scythe and dies. Fouan has observed this scene and is likely to disinherit Lise and Buteau, so Buteau beats him to death in his bed and sets fire to the house, to make it look like an accident. Only the great worker earth, observes the seed-sower Jean, Françoise’s intended, remains impassive in the sight of ‘our engaged-insect quarrels, taking no more notice of us than of ants’.1
Zola was a city-dweller from Avignon who bought a house in the country at Médan on the Seine in 1878. Émile Guillaumin, by contrast, was brought up on his grandparents’ farm of Neverdière in the Bourbonnais, where his father, Gilbert, had married the old couple’s daughter and worked on the farm. In 1892 Gilbert inherited his own father’s farm, Les Vignes, to which he became the sole heir after the death of his brother. Although the father had come into his own, Émile Guillaumin was reluctant to move and the fate of the peasant, displaced repeatedly from one plot to another, sometimes to inherit but more often evicted by some rapacious landowner, was one of the themes of his 1904 novel, The Life of a Simple Man. Schooled until first communion aged twelve and thereafter self-taught, Guillaumin tells the story of Étienne Bertin or ‘Tiennon’, a métayer or sharecropper whose lot was to put capital into a farm alongside the landowner’s contribution and share the produce and profits, although without enjoying security of tenure. Tiennon rented his first farm, Les Craux, when he married, aged twenty-two, and eight years later his second farm, La Creuserie, large enough to require him to employ two farmhands, an agricultural labourer for the summer, and a servant girl. However after twenty-five years he was evicted by a landlord who declared ‘métayers are like servants; with time they become bold and have to be changed.’ At fifty-five he rented a third farm from which he was evicted six years later on the death of the landowner, and at sixty-one he was left with a ‘little plot with three cows, about the same size as that with which I started at Les Craux’. Ever rehearsing the cycle of the seasons, The Life of a Simple Man also teaches that a peasant’s life is also cyclical, with little hope of making progress.2
France was in many ways a peasant democracy, a country of small farms rather than sharply stratified, as in eastern and southern Europe, between large landowners and peasants with little or no land. In 1892, the year Guillaumin’s father inherited his own farm, 75 per cent of French farms were owner-occupied, that is owned by the peasants who worked them, the others being rented as farms or, in certain areas like the Allier, from which Guillaumin came, under métayage. Farms, whether owned or rented, were small, 53 per cent between 1 and 5 hectares, 23 per cent between 5 and 10 hectares in 1892.3 There was a general tendency towards an increase in the number of and area covered by small farms and the erosion of large estates. In the village of Mazières-en-Gâtine (Deux-Sèvres), studied between the wars by Roger Thabault, the proportion of farms under 5 hectares increased from 67.5 per cent in 1860 to 70.5 per cent in 1913, while that of farms between 5 and 10 hectares grew from 13.3 to 16.3 per cent. The largest estate in the village, owned by the Vicomte de Tusseau, was gradually sold off in 1881–6, the biggest portions picked up by a bourgeois landowner of Niort and a Paris lawyer who was a deputy of the Deux-Sèvres. ‘In spite of the growing prosperity of farmers in the commune,’ noted Thabault, ‘none of them was rich enough to become involved in this sale of a property that had belonged to local notables for at least three centuries.’4 In the Beauce, where Zola set his novel, small properties (under 19 hectares) which accounted for 40 per cent of the land in 1820–30 developed to cover 49 per cent of the land in 1914, while in the same period large properties (over 30 hectares) lost 18 per cent of the land. Within that group, large properties owned by nobles shrank from 46 to 36 per cent over the century, the Duc de Luynes being left with 3,540 hectares in the Marchenoir region in 1914 compared to 4,200 held by his ancestors in the 1820s.5 In winegrowing areas, the division of land was even more intense, landholdings being often just plots providing a supplementary income to artisans and industrial workers. In Courson (Aude) in 1911, alongside wine barons employing agricultural labourers, 24 per cent of landholders owned between 1 and 5 hectares, but 24 per cent owned under 1 hectare.6
The world of the peasant was not unchanging, as some fantasies of rural life believed, and at the end of the nineteenth century the challenges facing the countryside were greater than ever. Industry which for so long had provided handwork for seasonally employed peasants was increasingly based in the towns, powered by steam and then electricity. Rural industries collapsed, destroying the balance between agricultural and industrial incomes that had sustained so many rural communities, so that what was now a surplus of rural labour moved to the towns. The rate of migration to the towns rose from 85,000–100,000 per annum in 1881–91 to 100,000–130,000 in 1891–1913. The rural population, defined as living in communities of under 2,000 inhabitants, declined from 69 per cent of the total population in 1872 to 56 per cent in 1911. The proportion of the working population employed in agriculture fell from 53 per cent in 1856 to 49 per cent in 1876 and 41 per cent in 1911.7 Those who left were not so much farmers as rural artisans such as coopers, wheelwrights, basket-makers, clogmakers and saddlers, together with farmhands and agricultural labourers, often the sons and daughters of farmers, who saw more employment possibilities in the towns than in the countryside. Young Bretons used to seek additional income by going to harvest in the Beauce and Normandy. They were charged only on the outward trip by railway companies and were paid 5 francs a day. They took the steamer in the autumn in gangs of twenty to sell onions in the south of England. After 1880 they went to work in the arsenals of Brest, on the transatlantic steamers of Le Havre, and above all in the railway yards and the tanning, gas and chemical factories of the heavily industrial Paris suburbs, such as Saint-Denis, becoming permanent immigrants. Breton girls, former lacemakers or farm servants, also went to Paris to work as maids, hoping to save enough to return home with a dowry to marry a farmer, but often staying for good.8 That said, France remained an agricultural country in a way in which many other European countries had ceased to be by the Great War. The proportion of the working population employed in agriculture in 1909–11 was only 9 per cent in Great Britain, 23 per cent in Belgium and 37 per cent in Germany, with France’s 41 per cent only a little lower than Ireland’s 43 per cent.9
Even more powerful as a challenge was the development of steamships and the penetration of the railways that created a global market for agricultural produce and threatened the traditionally unspecial-ized and somewhat autarkic French farm. The opening up of the wheat plains of the Ukraine and American Midwest resulted in a glut of grain, and a 20–25 per cent fall in cereal prices in the early 1880s, confronting French farmers with the alternative of specializing in cash crops that were in demand or facing bankruptcy. Cereal farming remained the staple of the central plain of France, but became more efficient, with mechanical innovations such as reapers, reaper-binders and threshing machines replacing agricultural workers who were now scarcer and became 30 per cent more expensive in 1890– 1910, and also with the use of chemical fertilizers, the consumption of which doubled in France between 1890 and 1900 alone.10 The demand for meat and dairy produce from growing towns encouraged a shift from arable to pasture for cattle in Normandy and Brittany, Poitou and the Charentes, with a supporting acreage of fodder crops. Normandy developed a network of dairies to make cheese and a meeting of fifty cheesemakers at Lisieux in 1911 established a cartel to defend their monopoly of true Camembert cheese.11 The Nord and Pas-de-Calais concentrated on sugar beet, known as ‘the vine of the north’, which supplied not only industrial sugar production but also fodder for increased cattle production. Étienne Lantier, hero of Zola’s Germinal, arrives at the mine near Valenciennes where he is seeking work ‘across fields of beet’, which grew denser under the impact of price rises and booming production in 1897–1914.12 Meanwhile in the south of France wine production became less of a facet of polyculture than a regional monoculture, serving the growing wine consumption of the urban French. The problem with specialized cash-crops is that years of boom were too often followed by years of slump, when the crop failed or the bottom fell out of the market. In the Midi, phylloxera – a yellow aphid attacking the vine roots – spread across the vineyards from the 1870s. Thousands of small winegrowers went out of business, their plots acquired by the wine barons who were able to replant at great cost with undamaged vines from California. Failed winegrowers returned to work as agricultural labourers, who in 1892 formed 17 per cent of the agricultural population in the Midi compared to a national average of 9 per cent.13 Catastrophe, however, struck again after 1900 when bumper harvests, combined with the import of wine from Algeria and the switch from wine to beet to distil alcohol, caused wine prices to collapse. The price of table wine in particular fell from 23–24 francs per hectolitre in 1871–5 to 10–11 francs in 1902–6.14
French peasants had a reputation for being solitary and individualistic, dedicated to holding on to their plot and increasing its yield. However, in the face of these challenges peasants were forced to organize themselves. The cost of fertilizer and machines and the need to secure fair prices for cash crops encouraged the formation of cooperatives. Mazières in the Deux-Sèvres, which was linked to the railway system in 1886 and was shifting to dairy cattle, set up a dairy co-operative in 1895 under the initiative of the republican mayor, while the purchase of fertilizer was organized by the agricultural union, run by his conservative political rivals, after 1901.15 Trade unions were permitted under legislation of 1884 and in the countryside agricultural unions tended to be less the instruments of peasants against landowners than the instruments of landowners to control peasants while providing them with benefits such as cooperatives. These tended to be run in the west of France and Massif Central by Catholic conservative landowners, as a legitimate vehicle for their royalist politics, but were challenged by competing unions of republican notables. Hervé Budes de Guébriant, a royalist landowner of Saint-Pol, became president of the Office Central des Oeuvres Mutuelles Agricoles du Finistère in 1911 and with the help of the clergy kept Breton peasants on a tight leash down to the Second World War.16 Trade union legislation was exploited for class purposes on the other hand by landless or near-landless peasants. The woodcutters of the Cher and Nièvre in central France, whose product faced competition from iron for building and coke and coal for smelting and heating, saw the rates paid by wood merchants more than halve in the 1880s, founded woodcutters’ unions after 1890 and organized strike action in 1903.17 Near by, in the Allier, Émile Guillaumin was involved in founding a union of métayers, the Federation of Landworkers, in 1905, to improve their ability to negotiate with landlords.18 In Languedoc-Roussillon unions of the landless workers in the wine industry were founded in the 1890s, linked in 1903 into the Federation of Agricultural Workers of the Midi, 15,000 strong, based at Béziers, and launched a general strike in 1904. This was unsuccessful, because those who suffered from the glut were not just landless labourers but small and larger winegrowers, indeed whole communities. A new phase was opened in 1907 by Marcellin Albert, winegrower and café-owner of Argilliers, and Ernest Ferroul the Radical-Socialist mayor of Narbonne, who was also a Félibre and friend of the ‘red Félibre’ Xavier de Ricard. In May and June 1907, using the rhetoric of the Albigensian revolt against the tyranny of Paris, they organized huge demonstrations, hundreds of thousands strong, from Perpignan, Carcassonne and Narbonne to Béziers, Montpellier and Nîmes, and orchestrated the mass resignation of municipalities – 76 per cent in the Hérault, 53 per cent in the Aude, 44 per cent in the Pyrénées Orientales – leaving such notices as ‘closed because of misery’ or ‘free commune’. In late June Clemenceau, as premier, was forced to send in the army, which killed five demonstrators in Narbonne but, made up of conscripts as it was, mutinied at Béziers. Marcellin Albert, summoned to Paris to negotiate, was discredited by accepting a hundred francs for his fare home, and a law of 29 June 1907 restored some order to the wine industry.19 The ‘revolt of the vignerons’ was community activism rather than class struggle and, despite the drama, was limited to one corner of Mediterranean France.
On 21 February 1884 a miners’ strike broke out at Anzin in the Nord. Émile Zola interrupted his work on La Terre to go to the scene, escorted by Alfred Giard, professor at the Science Faculty of Lille and republican deputy for Valenciennes. He met the miners’ leader, Basly, and was permitted to go down a pit 675 metres deep. He returned to Paris to complete research into mining matters and to write Germinal, which was serialized in Gil Blas between November 1884 and February 1885, and published in book form in March 1885. In the novel Étienne Lantier, sacked from the railway workshops in Lille, arrives at Anzin to find the aged miner Bonnemort, who had ‘worked for fifty years at the pit, of which forty-five were underground’. Becoming a leader, and later addressing a meeting of 3,000 striking miners, he exhibits Bonnemort and exclaims, ‘is it not terrible: a people dying at the coal-face from father to son, in order to bribe ministers and allow generations of great lords and capitalists to give parties or grow fat at their fireside!’20
Zola’s image of a race of miners, whose families had been exploited for generations, is powerful but far from the experience of most miners. The annual turnover rate for miners in the Valenciennes area was 8 per cent in 1896, rising to 14 per cent in 1906 and to 34 per cent in 1914. Some who left went to the newer mines of the Pas-de-Calais, where wages were better, while still more abandoned the mine for jobs in the steel industry with local firms such as the Company of Furnaces, Forges and Steelworks of Denain-Anzin.21 Most miners, especially in the mines flanking the Massif Central, were recruits from the countryside, initially with their own plots of land, and leaving the pit each evening and each summer to work in the fields. Mining companies had to work hard to force miners to live near the pits, providing them with back-to-back accommodation as an incentive, and to discipline them to a full working day, winter and summer. The Carmaux mine was beginning to recruit second-generation miners or ‘born proletarians’ by the 1890s, but the turnover rate was still daunting. In order to retain one miner the Carmaux company had to hire between one and two miners in 1890–92, but between four and five miners in 1900–1901 and sixteen or seventeen miners in 1911–12.22
The number of industrial workers in France fell from 3,151,000 in 1876 to 3,056,000 in 1886, because of economic depression in those years, but it grew to 3,303,000 in 1906 and even more rapidly to 4,726,000 in 1911.23 Such growth could not be supplied by the urban working classes themselves because of high death rates but required the influx provided by rural depopulation, as we have seen, by increasing the proportion of women in work from 25 per cent of women in 1866 to 39 per cent in 1911,24 and now by foreign immigration. The nationality law of 1889 was fairly flexible, making French nationality automatic for children of foreigners who were themselves born in France, and optional when the foreign parents had been born abroad, so that by 1911 foreigners accounted for 2.8 per cent of the population, 3.3 per cent including naturalized foreigners. There had long been seasonal migration of Belgians over the border to help with the beet harvest, but 40 per cent of the textile workers in the textile boom town of Roubaix were Belgian in 1904 and the Lille suburb of Wazemmes was known as ‘little Belgium’. The development of large-scale wine production in Languedoc-Roussillon after the phylloxera epidemic sucked in Spanish migrant labour, whose numbers rose from 62,000 in 1872 to 105,000 in 1911. Italians, who had hitherto been familiar in the shops of Marseille, were increasingly visible as warehousemen in the southern ports, and as navvies building railways, tunnels and dams in south-eastern France. In 1894 they provided blackleg labour to break a miners’ strike in Rive-de-Gier, above Saint-Étienne. The previous year, after the assassination of President Carnot by an Italian anarchist, twenty Italian workers were set upon and killed at Aigues-Mortes (Gard). After 1908 Italian labour was recruited by the Comité des Forges to work in the orefields and steelworks of French Lorraine, where they numbered 14,000 by 1913. Finally, Russian and Romanian Jews fleeing pogroms arrived in Paris, concentrating around the Marais and Montmartre, where they were the mainstay of the garment industry as tailors and capmakers, and prominent as cabinet makers.25
The working classes had never formed a bloc, sharply divided as they were by differences between regional economies, local and national origin and gender. A huge skills gap separated the working-class aristocracy of artisans who had undergone an apprenticeship, and organized legally or illegally to ensure a closed shop for the trade and payment at a good price, and the unskilled labourer, competing for work with the rest of the ‘industrial reserve army’ and taken on seasonally or casually at whatever wage was dictated by the economic cycle. These divisions were changing, however, in the later nineteenth century, and a more homogeneous working class was emerging. Production was moving from the countryside to the town, into large factories powered by steam or electricity, where labour discipline was imposed by long days and close surveillance. The canuts or handloom silkweavers of Lyon were displaced by power looms in factories in the city suburbs or along the Isère valley, where hydro-electric power was harnessed. By the eve of the First World War a third of Lyon workers were employed in the engineering industry, including car manufacture, and chemicals, while only a quarter were left in textiles.26 At Saint-Chamond near Saint-Étienne domestic artisanal ribbon-weaving gave way to factory braidmaking. The stocking makers of the Troyes region no longer worked in their homes, scattered over the Champagne countryside, but were concentrated in the hosiery mills of Troyes itself.27 Mechanization was making progress in trades hitherto requiring precise manual skills. Sewing, stitching and lasting machines transformed shoemaking from an artisanal to an industrial process, undertaken in factories such as those of Fougères in Brittany. The introduction of the Siemens oven after 1878 revolutionized glass production and undermined the skilled glass-blowers of Rive-de-Gier, outside Saint-Étienne.28 Meanwhile the file-forgers of nearby Le Chambon-Feugerolles were said to be ‘boiling over’ in 1899. ‘A company has been established at Trablaine for the mechanical manufacture of files and this has resulted in a great anger among the workers. According to them,’ reported a local paper, ‘the number of workers is going to be reduced, they will be deprived of their skill and reduced to misery.’29 Printers who came to Paris for the 1900 Exhibition were, in the words of one worker, Jeanne Bouvier, ‘shattered to see the linotype compositing machine which they thought would reduce their salaries and throw many of them out of work’.30 Machines degraded the expertise of the skilled artisan since they could be operated by semi-skilled workers who were cheaper and now more efficient. Closed shops were broken open and apprenticeship fell into disuse. The profile of the working class now shifted, with a growing body of semi-skilled workers at its heart, displacing the elite of skilled workers and throwing the unskilled into the ‘industrial reserve army’ of the unemployed.
The working classes challenged these developments by strike action. Strikes were launched first by the skilled workers trying to protect their skills monopoly and conditions during the boom that coincided with the republicans’ arrival in power in 1878–9 and held out hope of a ‘social republic’. They were followed by the ‘big battalions’ of miners and textile workers, initially trying to take advantage of the rising market to push up wages and reduce hours, then, as depression bit in 1883–6, defending against wage-cuts and lay-offs. The Anzin miners’ strike of 1884 witnessed by Zola was mirrored by other miners’ strikes at Carmaux in 1883 and Decazeville in 1886, when an engineer was thrown out of a window and killed.31 Forty thousand textile workers went on strike in Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing and Armentières (Nord) in April 1880. ‘Striking France’, asserts Michelle Perrot, ‘was above all textile France, capital Roubaix.’32 On 9 March 1883 thousands of unemployed workers, under the leadership of building workers, marched and demonstrated in Paris, the first of many such events in the 1880s.33
The thinking in governing circles was that ordinary workers were interested only in jobs and pay, and that strike action was fomented by agitators, often from outside the working-class community, drunk on half-baked socialist ideas. In Germinal Étienne Lantier is portrayed in this way, while Maheu, a solid miner with a large family to feed, is to begin with not interested in militant action. The republican government took the view that if workers were allowed freely to form trade unions, to negotiate legitimately to defend their economic interests, they would no longer be vulnerable to the political blandishments of socialist agitators. This was the purpose of the law of 21 March 1884, sponsored by the government of Jules Ferry, who declared in 1887, ‘the strike is industrial war, the union is social peace.’34
In the event workers were fairly slow to form trade unions, with only 9 per cent of the industrial workforce unionized in 1891.35 The skilled trades, which had a long tradition of compagnonnage or illegal workers’ associations, were the quickest to respond. In 1901 some 60 per cent of miners were unionized, as were 31 per cent of printers and 21 per cent of metalworkers, but only 9 per cent of textile workers were unionized, explained in part because women formed a large proportion of the workforce, while unskilled workers such as the Bretons of the chemical and tanning factories of Saint-Denis or Italian workers in the Lorraine ironfields were largely unorganized.36 Employers were reluctant to recognize trade unions and in company towns where the employer was the main service provider they were able to resist dealing with them. At Saint-Chamond near Saint-Étienne, with one big employer, the Company of Naval Steelworks, and jobs secured by orders for warships, the local steel-workers helped to elect Aristide Briand their deputy in 1902 and supported him even when he broke the railway strike of 1910.37 In 1913 only 1,064,000 or 10 per cent of the industrial workforce was unionized in France, as against 3,023,000 or 26 per cent in Great Britain and 3,317,000 or 63 per cent in Germany.38 Perhaps Waldeck-Rousseau and Ferry were correct, and it was the lack of unionization in France that explained the upsurge in strike action after 1906.
Trade unions needed to federate in order to prevent divide-and-rule tactics by employers and the government. Two options were available: either to form national federations of workers in the same trade, or to found local federations, based on the same town, of workers in different trades. It was a characteristic of the French labour movement that national federations were less successful than local federations, that France lacked the powerful national federations of miners, railwaymen or engineers found in Great Britain and Germany. The French labour movement remained essentially regional.
National federations, it is true, were set up in the skilled trades, by hatters in 1880, printers in 1881, building workers in 1882. Railway workers set up a national federation in 1890 but the skilled engineers and firemen had their own union and were reluctant to co-operate with it, severely undermining the railwaymen’s strike of 1898.39 A national textile union was founded in Lyon, although 30 per cent of the members of the founding congress came from Lyon.40 Most eloquent, however, was the story of the national miners’ union. A national union was founded at Saint-Étienne in 1883 by Michel Rondet, a miner from La Ricamerie, but his reformism brought him into conflict with the revolutionary Marxist miners of the Loire basin, led by Gilbert Cotte. Matters came to a head in 1888 when the Loire miners went on strike, opposed by Rondet who was the same year elected to the Saint-Étienne municipal council. Rondet was expelled from the Loire miners’ union but remained general secretary of the national miners’ union. He made common cause with the miners of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, controlled by Émile Basly. Basly was less a militant than a power-broker, who saw the best strategy for his miners not as strike action but as building a local power-base and cultivating relations with those who mattered in Paris. On the strength of the Anzin strike he was elected deputy for Paris in 1885–9, then fell back on the Pas-de-Calais, elected deputy for Lens in 1891 and mayor of Lens from 1900 to his death in 1928. Rondet and Basly refused to affiliate the miners’ union to the Confédération Générale du Travail, which was dominated by anarcho-syndicalists, from 1895 until 1908. Indeed, when the national miners’ union called a general strike in October 1902 Basly broke the united front and kept his Pas-de-Calais miners out of it.41
Much more successful were the local federations of unions. These came under the umbrella of the Bourses du Travail, which were to begin with simply labour exchanges to deal with the pressing problem of unemployment in the 1880s. They were funded by republican municipalities, generally as a reward for the electoral support of workers in delivering republican victory in municipal elections. However, they provided much needed venues for local trade unions accustomed to meet in the back rooms of cafés, and trade unionists used the contact with unemployed workers to encourage them to join the union if it found them a job. Bourses du Travail were set up at Marseille in 1885, Paris in 1886 and Lyon in 1891, and a Saint-Étienne conference of 1892 set up a federation of Bourses du Travail. Local solidarity proved much more effective in promoting the cause of labour, as in 1893 when powerful support for the striking metalworkers of Rive-de-Gier came from the glassworkers of the town.42 As in agriculture, local loyalties were generally more powerful than class solidarity.
The processes of industrial concentration and mechanization did not mean the disappearance of the artisan or petit patron, employing a small number of workers, from the French economy. The number of firms in fact peaked in 1906 and while some industrial sectors, such as mining, metallurgy and textiles, were given over to large enterprises, in others the small firm continued to exist. A survey of 1907, for example, showed that the average number of workers employed was 2.4 in the joinery trade and shoe industry, 2.1 in the female garment trade and 1.4 in the case of tailors, 1.1 for bakers and 0.8 for charcutiers.43 Competition from large-scale industry drove many small firms out of business, but it also created a demand for specialist suppliers. Thus in Paris there were thriving small workshops which provided spare parts for larger engineering firms, and ‘articles de Paris’ such as artificial flowers, imitation jewellery, vanity bags and umbrellas were made in workshops that had moved from the centre of Paris to the suburbs, while demand for fashion goods from department stores provided work for subcontractors who had orders made up in sweatshops or at home by women now using sewing machines.44
Just as large factories competed with small workshops, so department stores competed with small shops. In Zola’s Au bonheur des dames an orphaned Denise comes from Normandy to work in her uncle’s crumbling draper’s shop, Au Viel Elbeuf. There is no place for her there so she goes to work as a sales assistant in a department store painted by Zola as a brightly lit cathedral of commerce, whose only aim is to seduce the fashionable ladies of Paris. Mocked as a country girl by more urbane staff, worked off her feet from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., she nevertheless ends up marrying Octave Mouret, the owner of the store.45 This happy end is perhaps the only fanciful element in Zola’s book, which might have been modelled on the career of Jules Jaluzot, the son of a notary of the Nièvre who dropped out of Saint-Cyr, became head of the silk department at Bon Marché, married a rich heiress and set up Printemps in 1865. After a fire he rebuilt it in the style of a cathedral, complete with nave, in 1881–5, lit by electricity, and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1889.46 Of course the department stores squeezed out the small shops of central Paris which had sold the same products, provoking more militant shopkeepers to form a Ligue Syndicale du Travail, de l’Industrie et du Commerce in 1888, attacking the German-Jewish bankers they saw funding the big stores.47 However, many shops moved to the suburbs where they catered for the working-class and white-collar clienteles who lived there. While the number of small grocers in the central 1st arrondissement fell from 131 to 60 between 1860 and 1914, in the popular Belleville 20th arrondissement they multiplied from 196 to 456.48 Auvergnats continued to exploit their niche in wine stores, cafés, hotels, ironmongery and coal provision. Only about 30 per cent enjoyed business success, but those who did returned to the Auvergne in the summer on ‘Bonnet trains’, named after Louis Bonnet, owner of the Auvergnat de Paris, who negotiated special rates with the railway company. There they showed off their gold watches, cigars and silk dresses, dominated conversation in the café and teased the countryfolk who stayed in the villages for their backwardness.49 Lastly, although the countryside lost rural artisans, it gained shops which moved in to meet the rising living standards of the farming clientele. Mazières-en-Gâtine for example had one grocer in 1850 but three in 1880, selling coffee, sugar, soap, candles and matches, needles and thread, and one café in 1850 but six in 1880. A wine merchant and beer shop arrived in 1896, the butcher and charcutier were joined by a fishmonger in 1911, and a second baker set up in 1906 as peasants stopped making their own bread.50
Denise’s career in Au bonheur des dames was in many ways typical of those who moved not upwards, out of the petite bourgeoisie, but sideways, from the ‘old lower-middle class’ of shop or workshop, which required some capital but little formal education, to the ‘new middle class’ of white-collar workers, which required no capital but some education and a polite and subservient manner. In 1911 the twelve largest Parisian department stores had 11,000 employees. They were recruited not from the countryside, which supplied domestic servants, but from Paris and provincial towns, and were not working class but came from a retailing or white-collar background.51 The development of global markets, expanding comm unica t ions and urbanization created new opportunities for clerical workers in banks, in railway and insurance companies, and in utility companies supplying water, gas and electricity. The state was extending its responsibilities into education and social services, not least with the expulsion of religious congregations from schools, while developing postal, telegraph and telephone services and, at the local level, as we have seen, taking over some provision of utilities. The white-collar population of Paris grew from 126,000 or 16 per cent of the working population in 1866 to 353,000 or 21 per cent in 1911, the proportion of women increasing from 15 per cent to 31.52 They behaved differently from the working class: not necessarily earning more money but having more education, as the elementary education system added extra classes up to the age of sixteen, to provide the necessary numeracy and good handwriting.53 The director of the École Turgot in Paris was proud to announce in 1875, ‘the principal goal of the great majority of both pupils and parents is office employment.’54 Office workers tended to marry later and have fewer children, regarding children as a hindrance to social mobility. They were savers rather than spenders, paying into sickness and pension schemes provided by the firm or mutual aid societies.
That said, white-collar workers, like manual workers, were subjected to long hours and bullying by superiors, and in 1889 they set up a Federal Union of Employees. In the public sector post-office workers formed two unions in 1900, and claimed that two-thirds of workers were members by 1903. The state, however, forbade public servants from forming trade unions, and sacked several hundred post-office workers after a strike in 1906, which provoked another strike in 1909.55 Some instituteurs or primary school teachers felt similarly about their situation. ‘We educate the children of the people by day,’ proclaimed the manifesto of syndicalist teachers in 1905, ‘what could be more natural than thinking of meeting men of the people in the evening?’56 Instituteurs waged war with the government in 1907 about the right to form trade unions, but had little thought of going on strike. Of those training to be instituteurs at the École Normale of Douai in the Nord in 1893–1914 only 15 per cent were sons of industrial workers; 35 per cent were sons of peasants, artisans or shopkeepers, while 21 per cent were sons of other white-collar workers, 19 per cent sons of instituteurs, and 9 per cent from property-owning, professional or business backgrounds.57 Most regarded themselves as secular priests with a mission to modernize France and root the Republic in the towns and villages, not to undermine it.58
In Les Déracinés of 1897, Maurice Barrès explored how seven young students from Nancy who went to Paris to make brilliant careers came up against intense competition for success.
As I write these lines there are 730 graduates in arts and sciences who are looking for jobs in education; they regard their qualification as a guarantee from the State. While waiting, over 450 have become school supervisors in order to live. And how many jobs are there? Six per year. This situation discourages neither the young people, nor the secondary education system. There are 350 scholars taking degrees and the agrégation. That is to say that the State makes 350 new commitments when it has only six places already fought over by 730 individuals who will become 1,080 and increase to infinity… if they do not become angry with the government they will attack society. In 1882–1883 a particular class is taking shape under our eyes: a student proletariat.59
Of the students, four had the advantage of family resources. Henri de Saint-Phlin, of noble stock, studied for an arts degree. François Sturel, also from a landed background, and Georges Suret-Lefort, whose father was a businessman, began law degrees. Maurice Roemer-spacher, a doctor’s son, attended the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Three were not so well provided for. Antoine Mouchefrin, a scholar at the Lycée and a photographer’s son, started medical studies but ran out of money and dropped out. Honoré Racadot, the son of a peasant who did well out of selling livestock to the Germans during the 1870 war, became a notary’s clerk in the hope of later buying a notarial office, for which no legal qualification was required. Alfred Renaudin, who had lost his father, a tax inspector, hoped to make a living as a great journalist, but was reduced to being a humble reporter.
After 1889 competition became even more intense when the new military service law, introducing a universal three-year period, exempted from the army those with arts or science degrees, doctorates in law or medicine, or diplomas from a grande école. Henri Bérenger, in his 1901 study of Intellectual Proletarians in France, complained that ‘a host of young men who previously would have gone into commerce or industry, have thrown themselves into university to escape military service.’60 The university population rose from 11,200 in 1876 to 42,000 in 1914, fuelling a great debate at the turn of the century about the déclassement of young people from the lower classes seeking to escape menial occupations, the ballooning of higher education which turned out larger numbers of young people with useless degrees, the intense competition for places in the professions and government service that would leave many of them dissatisfied, and the political danger posed by half-educated intellectuals.61
The obvious path for young people of academic ability who lacked family resources was the teaching profession. Bouteiller, the grey eminence of Les Déracinés who taught the young men at the Lycée de Nancy before being appointed to Paris, was described as ‘the son of a Lille worker who was picked out at the age of eight for his precocious and studious intelligence, and won scholarships all the way up to the École Normale [Supérieure] from which he graduated at the top of the list’.62 Teachers in secondary schools were more and more qualified during the Third Republic, the elite securing an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure and obtaining the best posts in the lycées or competing for university positions, the mass of teachers in lycées and municipal colleges (which did not have a sixth form) now having a degree from an arts or science faculty. Such was the demand for posts, however, that many were reduced to serving time as répétiteurs, commonly known as pions or pawns, who were not allowed to teach but supervised homework, playgrounds and dormitories. In 1876 only 7 per cent of pions had degrees; in 1898 it was 35 per cent, in which year only 3.4 per cent of them secured a permanent teaching post in a college.63 Secondary school teachers had cultural but not social capital: among those teaching in 1900–1914, around 9 per cent were sons of industrial workers, 39 per cent sons of peasants, shopkeepers and artisans, 19 per cent sons of instituteurs and secondary school teachers, 13 per cent sons of other white-collar workers, and only 11 per cent sons of professional and businessmen, a profile that differed little from that of the École Normale d’Instituteurs of Douai.64 Even among academics, the social origin of professors in French universities was sharply inferior to those teaching in German universities in 1870–1930, with 35 per cent of French arts professors from teaching backgrounds and 35 per cent of science professors originating in the petite bourgeoisie or working class.65 In some cases teachers might succeed by acquiring connections and marrying into wealth. Édouard Herriot, the son of a soldier who was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, began his career training candidates for the École Normale at the Lycée Ampère of Lyon. However, during the Dreyfus Affair, through his involvement in the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, he acquired the patronage of the mayor of Lyon, Victor Augagneur, married the daughter of a doctor (who was president of the conseil général of the Rhône) and granddaughter of a senator of the Rhône, and was thus launched on a political career that took him to be mayor of Lyon from 1905 to 1940, senator in 1912, minister in 1916, deputy in 1919 and prime minister in 1924–6 and 1932.66 More of a struggle was experienced by Jean Guéhenno, the son of a shoeworker of Fougères in Brittany, who was obliged to leave the local municipal college when his father became ill, and work as an office-boy in a shoe factory. He swotted for the baccalauréat on his own, in order to ‘become a Monsieur’, and then won a scholarship to the Lycée of Rennes to compete for the École Normale Supérieure. He saw himself as a ‘strange candidate, who knows neither Latin nor Greek’, and he failed the examination first time, after which his father died. He succeeded the second time in 1911, this time from the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, but felt ‘ridiculous’ compared to the sons of ‘kings and leaders’ there and was embarrassed to return to Fougères, wanting his determinedly working-class mother to wear a hat. Among recruits to the École Normale Supérieure between 1868 and 1941 in arts subjects, only 3.4 per cent came from the working class and 8.6 per cent from artisans, peasants and shopkeepers, as against 34 per cent from business, professional and higher official families, but those with a teaching background from higher to primary levels and therefore with cultural rather than social capital were overrepresented, accounting for 32 per cent of the entry.67 Nevertheless, Guéhenno had a successful teaching career, preparing students of the top Paris lycées for admission to the École Normale, becoming a writer and left-wing intellectual, and succeeding to Herriot’s chair at the Académie Française in 1962.68
Medicine was another profession in which competition was severe. There were 2,629 medical students in France in 1876, and 8,533 in 1914, over half of them in Paris and 10 per cent of them women.69 Until 1892 qualified doctors did not even have a monopoly of medical practice, but had to compete with so-called health officers such as Charles Bovary in Flaubert’s novel, who were supposed to increase medical provision in the countryside but did not even have a secondary education. The latter were effectively killed off by the military service law of 1889 which required them, unlike medical students, to do three years in the army, and by the monopoly legislation of 1892.70 That said, in 1901 Henri Bérenger calculated that of 2,500 doctors in Paris, 1,200 earned less than 8,000 francs, and made ends meet as ‘beaters’ finding clients for more successful doctors and surgeons, by running VD clinics or doing back-street abortions.71 As with teachers, a good marriage and connections were essential. Georges Clemenceau, a doctor’s son from the Vendée who qualified in 1865, married a wealthy American, Mary Plummer, whom he met on a trip to the United States. More crucial for him, however, was the support of the leading republican Étienne Arago, who when he was mayor of Paris in September 1870 appointed Clemenceau mayor of Montmartre, and allowed him to begin his political career.72 The increasing status of doctors under the Third Republic was reflected in their greater political profile: doctors accounted for 9 per cent of deputies in 1885 and 12 per cent in 1893, while they provided 8 per cent of senators in 1885 and 14 per cent of senators in 1900.73 Election to the Chamber or Senate was an accolade for a country doctor who had done well through contacts he had made for himself. About half the 10,000 doctors in the provinces earned little, according to Bérenger, but they had more opportunity to cut a figure and marry well in local society. Émile Combes, for example, a weaver’s son from Rocquemaure in the Tarn, was seminary-educated and taught in the 1850s at the petit séminaire of Castres, the famous Assumptionist College of Père d’Alzon in Nîmes and the diocesan college of Pons (Charente), before marrying the daughter of a draper, whose uncle was a banker. The dowry and loans enabled him to requalify as a doctor in 1868 and he set up comfortably as a GP in Pons, using his network of clients to launch a political career and being elected a senator in 1885.74
The law was an equally competitive profession, but one where the rewards were potentially greater, since it was the royal road to government office. The 5,239 law students in 1876 became 16,465 in 1914, with 46 per cent of them in Paris but only 149 or 0.05 per cent of them women.75 Bérenger was equally scathing about the rat race of the legal profession, arguing that of 3,000 barristers in Paris few earned anything before their early thirties and only 200 earned over 10,000 francs. To succeed they needed family resources and, as usual, connections. The law was an obligatory training for government bureaucracy, and 94 per cent of prefects in 1876–1918 were legally trained.76 The appointment of prefects was generally influenced by the deputies from the area they would serve, so political patronage was important. The Cambon brothers, Paul and Jules, lost their father, who owned a tanning factory at Avallon, when they were young, but their uncle was bishop of Langres and as law students in Paris they were close to Jules Ferry. Paul Cambon escaped with Jules Ferry, then prefect of the Seine, when the Commune broke out, and at thirty, in 1873, was appointed the youngest prefect of France, at Troyes. There he met and married a general’s daughter, and became prefect at Lille in 1878, a post to which his brother succeeded in 1882. Paul was promoted minister-resident of the new Tunisian Protectorate, while Jules became governor-general of Algeria in 1891. From colonial administration the Cambon brothers moved into diplomacy, Paul ambassador at Madrid and Constantinople before going to London in 1898, Jules ambassador in Washington and Madrid before going to Berlin in 1907.77
While lawyers from humbler backgrounds might finish up as professors in law faculties, the plum posts in the grands corps such as the Cour de Cassation, Cour des Comptes or the Inspection des Finances, an elite body of public service accountants who went on to run the Ministry of Finances or the private offices of ministers, were colonized by lawyers whose families enjoyed hereditary wealth as well as political influence. In 1900 the Cour des Comptes recruited 27 per cent of its members from landowning, banking or business circles, and 31 per cent from administrative dynasties and political families, whereas 40 per cent of professors in law faculties came from the petite bourgeoisie.78 The father of Joseph Caillaux, for example, had been minister in the Moral Order regime and was brought up in Versailles with a son of a Moral Order foreign minister, the second Duc de Decazes. Educated at the Jesuit college on the rue des Postes in Paris and at the Law Faculty, he became an inspect-eur des finances in 1888, deputy of the Sarthe as a republican in 1898 and minister of finance in 1899. Caillaux’s wealthy background gave him leverage into the republican mandarinate, and his jettisoning of royalist for republican ideas enabled him to become a minister.
There was a danger, under the Third Republic, that the republican official and political elite would remain divided from the royalist or Bonapartist social elite, dangerously compromising stability. In fact, while politically sensitive posts such as prefectures were reserved for genuine republicans, other posts, notably in the diplomatic corps and the army, could still be accessed by those uneasy in the Republic, and over a long career they were inclined to rally to it. Pierre de Margerie, educated by the Jesuits at Lille and at Lille’s new Catholic University, where his father was dean, was reluctant to take an oath to the Republic before sitting the examination for the Quai d’Orsay, until his father explained to him that it meant only that he would not conspire against the regime. In 1891–8 he was secretary to Paul Cambon when the latter was ambassador at Constantinople, and he became convinced that the Republic could satisfactorily defend French interests. He helped to further a career that took him to Madrid, Bangkok and Peking by marrying the daughter of the assistant mayor of Marseille, Amédée Rostand, and becoming the brother-in-law of the writer Edmond Rostand.79 The army, which was held to be a bastion of royalist and Bonapartist power, became less of an aristocratic caste: 38 per cent of divisional generals were noble in 1876, but only 19 per cent in 1901.80 At the time of the Dreyfus Affair there was still a fear that Catholic and conservative officers, recruited from the Jesuit college in the rue des Postes, were capable of conspiring against the Republic, but after the Affair care was taken to promote republican generals such as Joffre. Just as important for the coherence of the ruling class was the possibility of marriage between the republican official and political class on the one hand and the older families who controlled the economic and social capital of the country on the other. In 1859 for example, Cécile Anspach, daughter of a high official in the Cour de Cassation, married Gustave de Rothschild of the great banking family. A generation later, in 1895, the aspiring politician of modest means Louis Barthou married Alice Mayer, whose father was a successful businessman with large investments in railways, utilities and Paris property as well as being on the conseil général of Seine-et-Oise, setting him on course to become prime minister.81
‘It is difficult to dispel the excessive love the French have of fonctionnarisme,’ commented Bérenger in 1901. ‘We lack industrialists, agriculturalists and colonists while administrative offices are battled over furiously.’82 In fact, other pathways were opening to ambitious young people in the world of industry, commerce and banking. The first industrial revolution, based on textiles, coal, iron and railways, which was losing momentum in the 1870s, was supplemented at the end of the nineteenth century by a ‘second industrial revolution’ based on steel, engineering, chemicals and electricity. The family firm, which had dominated for so long in the nineteenth century, was overtaken by the joint-stock company, in which the ownership of shareholders was separated from the running of the business by trained and salaried managers. The growing dependence of industry on advanced science and technology increased the demand for ingénieurs, graduates from the archipelago of grandes écoles which paralleled the traditional university faculties, heralded in 1880 as the ‘kings of the epoch’.83
The most prestigious of these schools, the École Polytechnique, for a long time regarded itself as too exclusive to provide graduates for industry. Its alumni moved into the army, into high civil service posts such as the Inspection des Finances, and via supplementary training in the École des Mines and École des Ponts et Chaussées, into services developing the country’s infrastructure. Only from the 1890s did substantial numbers of graduates from the Polytechnique go into industry, to work on such ambitious projects as the development of electrical grids to light Paris and to power the metro.84 Less prestigious but more effective as far as industry was concerned was the École Centrale de Commerce et de l’Industrie. Gustave Eiffel, the son of a military administrator, whose mother made the family fortune by supplying coal to iron-furnaces in the Haute-Marne, went to Centrale only because he failed the examination for Polytechnique. He worked for the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest and then set up his own engineering firm at Levallois-Perret outside Paris in 1866, building bridges and viaducts for railways, providing the steel frame for the Statue of Liberty, and for the Paris Exhibition of 1889 building the tower that bore his name.85 At the turn of the century the French tyre and car industry was essentially developed by graduates of Centrale. Armand Peugeot, trained at Centrale, switched the family business in Montbéliard from making springs for the watchmaking industry to making bicycles in 1886 and cars in 1896.86 André Michelin, another Centralien, and his brother Édouard, who had a law degree, took over a failing family firm in Clermont-Ferrand and hit success with the manufacture of the detachable pneumatic tyre in 1891, with which they won the Paris–Brest cycle race that year, and were employing 5,000 workers by 1914.87 Ironically, one of the greatest car manufacturers, Louis Renault, failed the examination to Centrale. He refused to follow his father, a Paris draper and button-seller, developing models in the garden of the family’s out-of-town property at Boulogne-Billancourt. In 1898 he and his two brothers each put 30,000 francs capital into a car factory, expanding the old-fashioned way by ploughing back profits, winning contracts to provide taxis for the Paris and London markets in 1909, and became the biggest French car manufacturer, employing 4,440 workers in 1914.88
Family firms still existed but the largest of them drew heavily on outside finance and their heads were very much part of the French economic and social elite. Henri Schneider of Le Creusot moved into arms manufacture in 1875 and aspired to become the French Krupp. His business interlocked closely with that of de Wendel, sharing the same bankers, Demachy-Sellière, and dominating the Comité des Forges steel cartel. When much of the de Wendel empire found itself annexed by Germany, Schneider helped to develop a French site for the de Wendel business at Jouef in French Lorraine. Socially, Schneider behaved less like a steel magnate and more like a grand seigneur. He acquired a château in the Sologne, which was prized hunting country, and, using the shooting to develop contacts with aristocratic neighbours and business partners, married his son Eugène II and four daughters into aristocratic families.89
Finance was traditionally closer to the aristocracy than was heavy industry. It was less tarnished by grime, and gained cachet from lending money to governments and the social elite. After the economic recession of 1882 which brought down a number of banks, Henri Germain, founder of the Crédit Lyonnais, decided to cease investment in industry, concentrating on the property market, insurance, public utilities and lending to home and foreign governments.90 This aristocratic sheen did not mean that it was impossible for ordinary people to make a successful career in banking. Émile Mercet, whose parents were both in domestic service and who had no formal qualification, became an employee at the Crédit Lyonnais, charged with founding its Constantinople branch in 1876, heading its St Petersburg branch from 1879 to 1881, and finishing as president of the Comptoir d’Escompte in 1904.91 In other ways, though, banking circles were growing closer to the nobility. The family strategy of the Rothschilds, for most of the nineteenth century, had been characterized by endogamy, with cousins marrying cousins. At the end of the century, however, their practice was to marry out. In 1878 Marguerite de Rothschild, for example, became the second wife of the Duc de Gramont, Napoleon III’s ill-fated foreign minister of 1870, and hosted immense society balls at their house in the rue de Chaillot.92
By the same token, the French aristocracy became less choosy about new wealth, and keen to make alliances with the super-rich from finance and industry. This tendency was encouraged by the fall in land values and land rents that followed the agricultural depression of the late 1870s and 1880s. Landed families now invested more of their resources in banks, railways, insurance companies and even industry, and to protect their investments accepted places on the boards of directors of large companies and trusts. The president of the Suez Canal Company was the Prince d’Arenberg, and in 1914 five of the seven directors of the Comité des Forges were noble. At the same time the reconciliation of many noble families with the Republic through the Ralliement meant that the divisive influence of the French Revolution, which had turned the nobility of the Faubourg Saint-Germain into a caste, became attenuated. Aristocratic families married their daughters into money as never before, promoting a plutocratic super-elite that was both noble and grand bourgeois, part landed and part monied. The Catholic and royalist aristocrat Albert de Mun married each of his daughters into a wine family and at the turn of the century American heiresses were all the rage. In 1893 Winaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune, married Prince Edmond de Polignac, son of the last minister of Charles X, while in 1895 Anna Gould married Boni de Castellane only to divorce him in 1906 and marry his cousin, the Prince de Talleyrand-Périgord. And while under the Third Republic the nobility forfeited political influence, having no more than 5 per cent of ministerial appointments in 1879–1914, their profile in the Chamber of Deputies falling from 23 per cent to 9, they remained the rulers of society. Aristocratic hostesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain held the best salons to which every aspiring politician or artist sought admission. One of the most brilliant was hosted by the Comtesse Élisabeth de Greffulhe, known to Proust as the cousin of his friend Robert de Montesquiou, the model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in la recherche du temps perdu.93
French economy and society demonstrated a number of weaknesses before 1914. Agriculture faced the challenges of glut and depression, and saw its strongest sons and daughters leave for a better life in the cities. Industrial development was held up by the prevalence of the family firm, but in large-scale industry class conflict was rife. Those who secured secondary education competed for jobs in the professions and public sector, fuelling fears of déclassement and fonctionnarisme. On the positive side, however, were many factors which contributed to a high degree of social cohesion in pre-war France. The proportion of those working in agriculture remained high in comparative European terms and private property was widely disseminated in the form of farms, shops and workshops. There was a high degree of mobility both geographical and social together with a widening of the petite bourgeoisie which defused class conflict, and in any case workers tended to be organized on local rather than occupational lines. State-building and the development of education offered wide possibilities for employment in the public sector, but the growth of managerial capitalism created opportunities in the private sector also. Finally, the French elite was increasingly interconnected, both in terms of land, finance and industry, and between the republican political and official elite and the non-republican social elite. The apaisement that was apparent in politics in the Belle Époque was thus also reflected in the social order.