[Capital] can spring into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with a free laborer selling his labor-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history.
—MARX
The growth of industry and commerce, coupled with the expansion of construction in Paris, put strong pressure on labor markets during the Second Empire. Where was the supply to come from? How and under what conditions were workers prepared to surrender rights over their labor power to others? And how did the quantities and qualities of labor power offered in Paris affect the form and geographical distribution of economic activity?
In 1848, Paris had an enormous surplus of labor power. To those thrown out of employment by the collapse of Parisian industry and trade was added a flood of provincial workers seeking the traditional protections of Paris in times of trouble. The numbers enrolled in the National Workshops rose from 14,000 to over 117,000 between March and June 1848.1 The repression of the June Days led many to flee the city, but unemployment remained a key problem in both the city and the nation. The labor surpluses in Paris were partially absorbed during the recovery of 1849–1850, but it took the dramatic upsurge of economic activity after 1852 to turn a labor surplus with falling wages into labor scarcity and rising nominal wage rates—though the increases were largely offset by inflation—until the 1860s.2 The response to this scarcity was a massive immigration wave into the city during the 1850s, followed by increasing absorption of that other segment of the industrial reserve army—women—when nominal wage rates stagnated and real wage rates fell during the 1860s. Thus were the quantitative needs of Parisian industry and commerce broadly satisfied.
Figure 62 The construction trades brought floods of migrant laborers into the city, some of whom came from very specific regions. Here Daumier comments that it is easier to encounter people from Limousin in Paris on the boulevards at six in the evening than it is back in Limoges, the main city of that province.
The qualities of the labor supply are harder to dissect. Paris had already lost most of its real artisans—workers in control of their own labor process and working independently for market exchange. Cottereau puts them at no more than 5 percent of the economically active population in 1847. But there also were few machine operators. The mass of the workforce was divided between craft workers, who were fully initiated (usually by apprenticeship) into all aspects of a trade; skilled workers, whose skills were confined to specialized tasks within the detail division of labor; and unskilled workers, often itinerant day laborers, grading into the indigent and criminal classes variously referred to as “dangerous classes” or “lumpen-proletariat.” Literate and numerate workers also could find employment in the burgeoning white collar occupations spawned by the revolutions in banking and commerce and by the rise of tourism.3
The craft workers had evolved means of informal control over labor markets during the preceding half-century.4 They possessed hidden forms of corporatist organization and were capable of negotiating collectively with owners over rates for the job, conditions of work, and length of employment. Labor markets were often centralized and under collective control, employers hiring from a central assembly point or in a particular locale where workers could exchange information and exert maximum pressure on employers and other workers to respect collective norms. This power did not guarantee steady or secure employment. The ups and downs of trade were felt more as periodic, seasonal, and occasionally prolonged unemployment (the last usually triggering political protest and social unrest) rather than as variations in wage rates. This system of control had the added advantage of easy integration of migrant craft workers into the urban labor market (a relic of the tour de France of the compagnonnage system that had organized migrating movements of provincial labor for at least two centuries).
It is hard to get any exact estimate of the proportion of Parisian workers operating in labor markets of this kind, but it was plainly substantial. And the craft workers, by their example and their political leadership, undeniably set the tone for the Parisian labor market in the 1840s and were at the heart of the workers’ movement of 1848. They were the group with whom the association of capitals had to do battle.
The Second Empire saw a diminishing control over labor markets by craft workers.5 It also saw redefinitions of skills of the sort Marx describes so well in Capital as production moves through the increasing detail and social division of labor to machine and factory production. In some industries, craft skills were eliminated and replaced by specialized skills within a detail division of labor. In others, machine operators replaced craft workers. Some of the specialized skills that arose out of transformations of the labor process were monopolizable, but others were relatively easy to reproduce. Here, too, the tendency was toward deskilling and the use of easily reproducible skills in lower-quality mass-production systems (either factories or integrated workshops). The boundary between skilled and unskilled became more blurred as it became easier, given changes in techniques and organization, to introduce unskilled migrants or women into the workshops. Traditional labor market controls also tended to break down as the Parisian labor market exploded in size and dispersed in space. The centralized hiring points, still a matter of comment in the Enquête of 1847–1848 had all but disappeared by 1870.6 And most commentators agreed that the labor market had become characterized by a much more pervasive competitive individualism in 1870 than had existed in 1848.
Yet the workers continued to exercise extraordinary power and influence. They remained, according to Denis Poulot’s (1980) vivid descriptions of life and customs in the Parisian workshops of 1870, self-confident to the point of arrogance, opinionated, boisterous, and incurably independent to the point of indiscipline (see table 9). They resisted the authority of the capitalists with an ironic intensity that characterized what Poulot, from the perspective of an employer, disparagingly called, “sublimism.” They suffered from the incurable belief that Varlin, one of their members, put this way: “Most workers have nothing to learn from owners who are not skilled in their profession and who are only exploiters.”7 They continued to exercise collective pressure on labor markets, largely by staying put in their traditional quarters (even in the face of urban renewal and rising rents). Industries that needed their skills had to go to them (which accounts in part for the persistence of industry close to the center and toward the northeast). Indeed, part of the whole pattern of locational shift and innovation in Parisian industry during the Second Empire must be interpreted as a response to the power of such workers, who could be bypassed only through deskilling and industrial reorganization. And, of course, this group provided much of the political leadership for the workers’ movement. It was from the worker quarters that much of the explosive political force of the Commune emanated.
The continued presence of such power and influence is all the more remarkable given the intense repression of the workers’ movement after 1852. Denied all rights of association, combination, unionization, public assembly, and going on strike, they were also faced with a battery of laws covering such matters as the livret (a kind of work record book, which each worker was supposed to have), jurisdictional disputes (in the event of any conflict of opinion between employer and worker, said the law, that of the employer must prevail), and worker participation in the conseils de prud’hommes (trade councils), which always kept them in a minority. They were also faced with a surveillance system that was all too ready to cry conspiracy at the least hint of informal or open discussion. Workers, however, had long been conditioned to this kind of repression and knew only too well how to organize covertly within it. Their resort to irony and disrespectful banter, their sophisticated coding of all manner of signs of resistance, became indispensable weapons in class war. This was the essence of what “sublimism” was all about, and it plainly infuriated employers like Poulot, who saw its eradication as indispensable to industrial progress. But in Paris the workers had another power. Their skills and abilities were indispensable for much of Parisian industry. For this reason legislation on the livret remained largely a dead letter among the craft workers.8
It was, in the end, transitions in the labor process that did more to undermine their power than any amount of political repression. As the conditions of abstract labor shifted, the concrete labor that the craft workers had to offer became less significant. But workers still had abundant opportunities to parlay their power into new configurations. To the degree that the boundary between master and worker was often highly porous, upward mobility (by marriage or straight succession) was possible, though less so than in earlier times. The hierarchical organization of their own labor system also gave them opportunities to insert themselves as supervisors, foremen, and subcontractors within the detail and social division of labor. And their skill, education, and adaptability allowed them to colonize new trades as these opened up and to monopolize new skills. In so doing, they lost their status as craft workers and became the core of an “aristocracy of labor” that was to be the basis of trade union socialism after 1871. The evidence that this transition was already underway is best represented in the evolution of the French branch of the International after 1864, as it moved from expressing the mutualist ideology emanating from the craft tradition to the revolutionary trade union consciousness of an industrial proletariat.
The pattern of skills and trades underwent a substantial structural revolution between 1848 and 1870. New trades came into being (electrician, for example), while others died out (Haussmann’s public works all but eliminated the trade of water carrier, for example). Machine skills came to both factory and workshop—the sewing machine revolutionized the clothing trades, with particularly bad effects, as we have seen—and replaced older crafts. Shop assistants, bank clerks, managers, hotel employees, and bureaucrats also became much more conspicuous in the 1860s as specialized white-collar occupations arose in banking, commerce, tourism, and government. Here lay the seeds for an upwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie that was soon to match the declining shopkeepers in wealth and power. And it was into this flux that provincial immigrants and women were inserted and craft workers were transformed to create radically new structures within the labor market.
All sources agree that wage rates rose by some 20 percent or more during the Second Empire and that the increases were widely spread across different occupations (table 7), including those dominated by women. The wage rates, which remained fairly standardized, though less so at the end of the Empire than at its beginning, are much easier to tabulate than are worker incomes, because of unstable employment and the notorious dead season. Duveau draws upon numerous contemporary monographs to get rough estimates of the dead season and annual worker incomes. The latter varied from Fr 700 to Fr 1,500 for men and Fr 345 to Fr 685 for women, depending upon occupation. To the degree that these figures refer to conditions at roughly the midpoint of the Empire, they presumably underestimate annual incomes toward the end of the period.9
Table 1 Annual Incomes and Daily Wage Rates by Occupation, Paris, 1847–1871
| Rates | Duvean’s Estimates, 1860 | Average | Daily | |||
| Occupation | Annual Wage | Daily Rate | Dead Season (Months) | 1847 | 1860 | 1871 |
| Men | ||||||
| Mechanic | 1,500 | 5.00–6.50 | 3 | 4.50 | 4.50 | 5.00 |
| Carpenter | 1,350 | 5.50–6.00 | 4 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 6.00 |
| Mason | 1,150 | 4.50–5.50 | 4 | 4.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 |
| Hatter | 1,150 | 4.00–5.00 | 3 | 4.00 | 5.00 | 6.50 |
| Jeweler | 4.00 | 5.00 | 6.00 | |||
| Bronze worker | 4.50 | 5.00 | 7.00 | |||
| Locksmith | 1,050 | 4.00–5.00 | 4 | 4.00 | 4.50 | 4.50 |
| Printer | 4.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | |||
| Tailor | 3.50 | 4.50 | 5.00 | |||
| Joiner | 1,000 | 4.00–5.00 | 4 | 3.50 | 4.00 | 5.00 |
| Painter | 980 | 4.50–5.00 | 5 | 3.50 | 4.50 | 6.00 |
| Cobbler | 950 | 3.00–3.50 | 2 ½ | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.50 |
| Bakery worker | 900 | 4.00–5.00 | irregular | 4.25 | 5.00 | 6.60 |
| Team worker | 850 | 2.00–2.50 | ||||
| Cabinet maker | 700 | 3.00–4.00 | 4 | 3.50 | 4.50 | 5.00 |
| Day laborer | 2.50 | 3.00 | 3.25 | |||
| Construction worker | 2.75 | 3.00 | 4.00 | |||
| Women | ||||||
| Laundress | 685 | 2.00–2.25 | ||||
| Fashion | 640 | 2.25–3.50 | ||||
| Flower maker | 420 | 1.50–2.25 | 3–6 | |||
| Mechanic | 387 | 1.50–2.25 | ||||
| Custom tailor | 340 | 1.00–2.25 | ||||
Sources: Duveau (1946), 320–328 (cols. 1–3); and Rougerie (1968a), tables 4 and 6 (cols. 4–6). Simon (1861), 286–287, gives dead season estimates for women’s employment.
The movement of real wages is very different. The rise in the cost of living almost offset the rise in nominal wages. If the cost of workers’ necessities is used as a standard then the rise in nominal wage rates would be more than offset. The latter calculation is particularly tricky because the Second Empire also saw revolutions in consumption habits that affected workers as well as the bourgeoisie.10 However this may be, all sources agree that prices rose during the Second Empire, fundamentally affecting the workers’ standard of living. Thomas11 gives the following estimates of annual living costs (in francs) for a family of four:
| Years | Housing | Food/Heating, etc. | Total |
| 1852–1853 | 121 | 931 | 1,051 |
| 1854–1862 | 170 | 1,052 | 1,222 |
| 1864–1873 | 220 | 1,075 | 1,295 |
These costs, spearheaded by rent increases that were a never-ending source of complaint, increased by 20 percent. When we compare these costs with Duveau’s estimates of annual incomes (see table 7), we see that only mechanics and carpenters averaged enough to support a family of four. All other groups needed a supplementary source of income, that of the woman, if basic family needs were to be met. This condition was universal enough to command widespread comment and concern before the Workers’ Commission of 1867. The budgets there drawn up (excluding the more fanciful ones) indicated annual needs of between Fr 1,670 and Fr 2,000 for a family of four, although a carpenter in that year with 337 days’ work (a most unusual occurrence) could get only Fr 1,470. The single male, who could meet his basic needs for Fr 700 or so, was, under such circumstances, ill-advised to form a family unless with a woman who worked. Women, however, simply could not survive alone on the wages they received. This disparity was to have enormous social effects upon working-class life.
There were, however, some shifts in timing and pattern within this overall picture of movement in the nominal and real wages. Duveau, for example, detects an increasing polarization within the working class between a small but growing group of privileged workers whose incomes more than kept pace with the cost of living (and who might even aspire to property ownership) and the increasing mass of workers in the “unhappy” category who simply could not make ends meet no matter how hard they tried. Such a trend is hard to confirm. But contemporary accounts certainly give the impression that at least some workers were sufficiently well off either to accumulate some small savings or to choose freely not to work on Mondays and to spend lavishly at the cabarets.12
How hard it was to make ends meet depended, however, on the economy. Conditions appear to have been very difficult before 1857. Bad harvests and the inflationary effects of deficit financing and inflows of gold from California and Australia combined to generate strong price rises in the face of stagnating wages. Conditions improved rapidly thereafter as labor shortages forced wages up and improved transport brought prices down. The rough equilibrium between wage movements and cost of living shifts that appears to have prevailed in the early 1860s came unstuck after 1866 when financial difficulties (the collapse of the Crédit Mobilier) and the cessation of the public works combined with fiercer external competition to make life extremely hard for much of the Paris working class. This general picture (confirmed by Rougerie 1968a; Duveau 1946; and Thomas n.d.) undoubtedly contained innumerable nuances depending upon occupation, sex, and location. Some of the forces shaping these nuances deserve deeper scrutiny.
In Paris, as elsewhere, the struggle for command over the laborer’s time was royally fought. Legislation of March 1848 to restrict the Parisian workday to ten hours had been rolled back to twelve by September, and then so riddled with exceptions that on this score the worker had almost no protection. Duveau puts the average workday at eleven hours for much of the Second Empire but notes tremendous variation between craft workers (who still often took “Saint Monday” off) and those who worked fourteen-hour days in some of the small sweatshops.13 But the biggest problem of all was insecurity of employment, for which Second Empire Paris was notorious. The dead season in some sectors was so long that even craft workers producing high-quality products for high wages during one part of the year were forced to supplement their incomes by participating in mass production at low wages for the rest of the year. It is very hard, therefore, to translate standard rates for a job into any sense of worker incomes. Furthermore, there existed a fluid conduit for the translation of craft workers for one part of the year into mere skilled laborers for the other part. Though the problem of the dead season tended to diminish in aggregate, there were many contemporary observers who saw its increase in certain trades as a major problem in the closing years of the Second Empire.14 The instability of employment in certain crafts may well have made regular factory employment more attractive, even at lower wages and with diminished control over the labor process. Certainly one of the attractions of Paris to prospective employers was the availability of qualified labor power at low cost during the dead season.
The Parisian labor market also became more fragmented geographically. The growth and dispersal of population, housing, and employment was accompanied by an increasing separation of work and home. Lazare, a contemporary observer of some note, makes much of the increasing journey to work (mostly on foot and over long distances) as a growing burden on workers, particularly recent immigrants forced to settle on the periphery. A worker named Tartaret complained in testimony to the Workers’ Commission of 1867 that many workers now had to walk three hours a day to get to work and back.15 Cheaper transport systems oriented to workers’ needs or a shorter working day to compensate for increased travel time emerged as issues. The craft workers who clung to central locations had few complaints on this score, however, and focused their wrath on high rents instead. The increasing dispersal and fragmentation of the labor market had a variety of effects. Another contemporary, Cochin, worried that the emergence of new employment centers, each with its own tradition, style, and ties, would turn Paris into a city of inhabitants, not citizens. Certainly wage differentials between one part of the city and another (between center and suburb, particularly) became more marked. But geographical fragmentation also increased the sense of separation of workers and owners who often used to live under the same roof, accelerated the breakup of the apprenticeship system, and made the informal systems of labor market control harder to maintain. Though some, like the carpenters, kept their corporatist traditions intact until after the Commune, other trades witnessed a severe erosion of their collective power because of geographical spread and fragmentation.
The Parisian labor market had never been totally centralized, of course, and French workers had a well-earned reputation for individualism, as Poulot’s Le Sublime so well illustrates. But something more was needed than corporatist tradition to cope with the new geographical patterns and the rising individualism. The shift within the Paris branch of the International from mutualism toward revolutionary trade unionism can be read as exactly such an adaptation.
The rapid increase in population from just under 1.3 million in 1851 to nearly 2 million on the eve of the siege of Paris in 1870 (see table 1) was largely fueled by a massive immigration wave of between 400,000 and 450,000 people.16 Much of the labor reserve in Paris came from the provinces. Its movement was in part to be attributed to depressed rural conditions in the 1850s—provoked in part by changing space relations, which destroyed some rural industries, broke down local self-sufficiency, and generated a slow modernization process in French agriculture.17 When this was put up against the tremendous boom in employment opportunities created by the public works in Paris and the revival of Parisian industry, it is not hard to understand the fundamental impulse behind the immigration. The Parisian labor market had for many years spread its tentacles out into the provinces, mainly to the north but in some special cases, such as the celebrated migrations of stonemasons from the Creuse and Limousin, deep into rural France. But the coming of the railroads shifted the field of recruitment outward to give it even greater geographical coherence and range. Furthermore, the diversity and size of the Parisian labor market made it an attractive destination, no matter what the differences in wage rate. When rural conditions improved in the 1860s and Parisian wages stagnated, immigration continued, though at a slower rate than the vast flood of the 1850s.
The integration of immigrants into the Parisian labor market was a complex affair.18 To begin with, there was little relation between the skills the immigrants possessed and the jobs they took up in Paris. Many were unskilled, at least in the jobs that Paris offered, and had to find their own paths to job opportunities. The continuing shortages of skilled labor provided an incentive toward technical and organizational change in Parisian industry, even in the face of the vast immigration wave. And the immigrants proved, for the most part, adept at adopting the new skills that opened up. There were, to be sure, certain exceptions. The traditional seasonal migrations of skilled construction workers became a more and more permanent affair, with the stonemasons’ lodging houses still operating as employment exchanges and reception points for new immigrants. Privileged paths of integration also existed for those of particular regional origins (from Auvergne, or even Germans in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine). In some cases, Parisian industries experiencing shortages of skilled labor recruited directly—woodworkers and metalworkers from Alsace, for example. But with the exception of the construction trades, much in demand because of the public works and therefore in the forefront of the immigration wave, it seems that the immigrants did not possess the qualities needed to sustain traditional forms of labor but were quick to form the new qualities required for new labor processes.
This mass influx of largely unskilled but adaptable immigrants created all kinds of opportunities for Parisian industry. There were many dirty jobs to be had—the white lead works were a notorious enough death trap that the workers were shunned on the street—and the growth of mass production opened up many semiskilled jobs for which the new immigrants could be relatively easily trained. And to the degree that most of these immigrants found housing on the periphery, they increased the attraction of suburban locations for certain newer industries. The mass of the unskilled immigrants therefore underwent a socialization process into the ways of industrial capitalism very different from that achieved through the transformation of craft workers. Thus there arose a formidable social division within the Parisian labor market, one that was to have pronounced political effects signaled by the low participation of suburban industrial workers in the events of the Commune.
The employment of women—that other great reservoir of surplus labor—underwent some most peculiar gyrations after 1848. Women accounted for 41.2 percent of the workforce (not including domestics) in 1847–1848, declined to 31 percent in 1860, and went back up to 41.3 percent by 1872.19 The declining participation in the 1850s is partly a statistical aberration, since the industrial mix in the suburbs annexed in 1860 was more oriented to male employment. But there was still a very real relative decline, explained by the heavy predominance of males in the immigration wave that hit Paris in the 1850s and the deindustrialization and depopulation of the city center that had been the main bastion of women’s jobs. Rising male salaries may also have diminished the incentive for married women to engage in what was in any case poorly paid work—women’s rates were less than half those of men for comparable work. And the young single women who did immigrate probably entered as domestic servants brought in from the country estates of the nobility, meaning that most of them ended up on the western, nonindustrial side of the city. The east-west division of working-class Paris therefore took the demographic form of a predominantly male east and a predominantly female west.
The general reversal of women’s participation after 1860 had equally cogent explanations. The increasing competitive pressure on Parisian industry, particularly with respect to labor costs, made the employment of lower-paid women not only attractive but imperative in certain sectors. And in the face of declining immigration, that vast captive labor reserve of women that had been dispersed to the periphery during the 1850s must have been eyed hungrily by many an employer. Women’s wage rates, already low, were a third less in the suburbs than in the center. Not only did their employment exert a downward pressure on wage rates, but they could be used directly to confront the power of craft workers in certain trades. The use of women to break one of the first major (illegal) strikes in the printing workshops in 1862 made a deep impression upon employers and workers alike.20 And although men, partly as a consequence, typically inveighed against the employment of women, they were increasingly forced to recognize in the 1860s that the male wage was insufficient to support a family. To the degree that the immigrants of the 1850s formed families in the 1860s, the employment of women became more and more of a sheer economic necessity.
Within these general trends, of course, there were innumerable nuances, depending upon technological and organizational changes and product innovations that opened up some occupations (particularly machine tending of the sort that Zola describes) and eliminated others. Considerable debate also arose over the education and position of women and the organization of their labor.21 On the one hand, the Parisian convents became centers of tightly organized, low-paid, and highly competitive women’s labor—a fact that created considerable resentment in male workers and fueled the anticlerical sentiment that was to flourish under the Commune. In the late 1860s small groups of socialist feminists tried to revive the experiments of 1848 with women’s cooperatives for production and consumption, before becoming a major organizing force during the Commune.22 This brings us, however, to broader questions on the position of women that deserve consideration in their own right.