The reaction of the French working class to the Forst World War

... uld be transmitted to the provinces via men sent from the socialist strongholds of Paris and the occupied north-east. The mobilisés were also often only in a certain location temporarily, and so less susceptible to the allure of cradle-to-grave paternalism which was being practised by both the employers and the government. However, they found it hard to 'infect' the local population with their ideas, and were often resented as privileged shirkers whose problems should not be voiced at a time when so many were dying at the front. The main effect of the mobilisation of labour, therefore, was effectively to deprive the unions of many of their members, even if they were not actually sent to the front.

`The final 'new' group of workers were immigrants. The use of immigrant labour was almost entirely unhelpful for the radical cause, being far more likely to cause racial tensions within the working class than to become involved in conflicts with employers. To some extent, the workers were deflected from the real source of their problems, seeking instead to blame the new outsiders: in a letter to Merrheim, a worker in Nice wrote, "In Nice, French railwaymen are relieved by Italians and 50 Americans, and the French are sent away: the old classes to the interior and the young to the war zone. That is the help of our allies thanks to the stupidity of our leaders. The allies to the factory and the French to the front." No doubt the same attitude was felt when women replaced men in the factories, and while such fears were possibly not entirely without foundation, they created a working class fighting within itself rather than one with a single recognised class enemy.

`Broadly, the changes which French society underwent in the early years of the war set up a situation which helped limit the chances of radical outbursts. Unsettled, divided, and with its leadership bound by the dual constraints of a commitment to working within the system and numerical decimation due to mobilisation, the working class had much running against it should it ever wish to express its frustrations. This was especially so given that the government had the excuse of wartime to clamp down on trouble-makers, as happened particularly under the stricter regime of Clemenceau after the strikes in the later stages of the war. The employers too could use the war to enhance their power, through non-participation in war production should their workers prove too troublesome, thus pressurising the government into taking action on their behalf. However, the slow revival of the labour movement from 1916 and the strikes of 1917 and 1918 show that the situation for the militants was perhaps not entirely beyond hope, and that such constraints did not have an unbreakable hold over French workers.

`What was the significance of the strikes? Were they a result of a rise of radical feeling which overcame the constraints on labour? A breakdown of the façade of the Union Sacrée? A collapse of popular patriotism? There were many possible causes, but the way in which the strikes were resolved perhaps gives the biggest clue as to the sig ...