PART TWO—
AN INDUSTRY EMBATTLED, 1936–1938

The electoral results of 3 May 1936 startled even the victors. Not only had the Popular Front coalition of Radicals, Socialists, and Communists swept into power; for the first time Socialists had overtaken Radicals as leaders of the parliamentary left, and the PCF had emerged from electoral obscurity to become a major political party. Contrary to predictions, Léon Blum's Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO)—the Socialist Party, and not the Radical Party—would form the new government, one squarely on the left. For aircraft workers, as for workers everywhere in France, the political climate suddenly brightened with the news that voters had elected the most left-wing government in the history of the Third Republic.

Just what steps the Blum government would take once in power, however, were unclear. Conflict between the three major parties in the Popular Front coalition simmered beneath the surface of electoral unity; the Popular Front program itself embodied unresolved tensions—between pacifism and defense, ambitious reform and tactical moderation—since the coalition hoped to appeal to both working-class and middle-class voters. Although euphoric over the victory, many left-wing supporters harbored fears that the new government would succumb to the compromises that had paralyzed Radical regimes in 1924 and 1932. Right-wing opponents feared the contrary—that Socialists and Communists would press for major structural reforms. To complicate matters, no sooner had elections ended than the contest over capital began: stock prices plummeted, the franc weakened, and influential investors, ignoring Blum's reassurances, began shifting assets into foreign accounts. Nor did the international climate offer solace. Two months earlier Hitler had transformed the military balance of power on the Continent by remilitarizing the Rhineland, a stunning initiative France and Britain had failed

to deter. By mid-May Mussolini had withdrawn Italy from the League of Nations and launched his war in Ethiopia. Meanwhile street violence in Spain brought France's other southern neighbor one step closer to civil war. To compound the sense of suspense, Blum refused to take power promptly, preferring instead to respect the customary month-long delay before assuming command; Albert Sarraut continued to govern as lame-duck premier.

In this atmosphere of hope, fear, and confusion, strikes began to break out—first in the aircraft industry, then in metalworking industries generally, and finally throughout the economy in the greatest wave of popular protest since the revolution of 1848. By the second week of June nearly two million workers had joined in the movement. The strikes, in turn, changed the political landscape. The CGT quickly blossomed into a mass organization as workers, now protected under the provisions of the Matignon Accord of 6 June, could finally join unions without fear of reprisal. By autumn the CGT had grown more than fivefold from the one million members it claimed at reunification in early 1936. Blum's government, moreover, in an effort both to capitalize on the strike wave and to restore public order, pushed through major reforms—paid holidays, collective bargaining, the forty-hour week—within a month of coming to power. No less important, the "social explosion" of June became a symbol: for workers, "June '36" became an emblem for solidarity, direct action, and the courage to stand up to the boss; for employers, it signified chaos, illegality, and left-wing insurgency. For both groups, the strike wave of June would long remain an emotionally charged point of reference.

This unanticipated series of events, from the elections of May through the strikes of June, revolutionized life in the aircraft industry. Aircraft workers suddenly emerged as a vanguard in the labor movement. Even while-collar employees cast their lot with the CGT. Employers, overwhelmed by the movement, had to reconcile themselves to negotiating matters that had previously been theirs to decide. The June strikes, moreover, colored how everyone responded to the next great upheaval in the industry—nationalization. In an effort to reorganize the industry, Blum's government opted to nationalize about 80 percent of the airframe sector. Under any circumstances such a policy would have aroused deep passions, but after June '36 people fought all the harder over what it would mean. From the summer of 1936 to January 1938 the industry remained a major center of controversy over issues as basic as wages and as complex as how to give labor a voice in newly nationalized firms. Even though the outcome of these conflicts still hung in the balance at the end of this period, it is now clear in retrospect that June '36 and nationalization made the aircraft industry a critical arena in the larger battle to redefine industrial relations under the Popular Front.

Three—
June '36

In the early spring of 1936 few observers would have predicted that aircraft workers would soon become the vanguard of a massive strike movement. To be sure, labor militance had revived in aviation since 1934. Plan I had strengthened the bargaining power of labor in many plants; the reunification of the CGT made it easier for militants to agitate in behalf of the new spirit of the Popular Front. Moreover, the brief strikes of 1934 and 1935 marked a sharp break with the quiescence of the past. Like militants in many other industries, aircraft militants had gone a long way to overcome the isolation they had suffered in the early 1930s, and the effort to mobilize support for the Popular Front—the meetings, marches, rallies, and electoral campaign—made them more visible to their fellow workers on the shop floor and in the local community. But these achievements were not unique. Militants in many industries were making headway in 1934 and 1935. What is more, aircraft workers lacked the strong unions and a track record of successful strikes that might logically have cast them for prominence in the sitdown movement of June '36. Their emergence as the catalytic force of labor protest in June '36 begs explanation. The first strikes in May 1936 offer clues, as does a look at the national negotiations that followed. These events point toward a number of factors that help explain why aircraft workers took the initiative in May and why the strike movement marked a turning point in the history of the industry.

The Initial Rebellion

Aircraft workers unwittingly began the great wave not in Paris, where one might have expected it, but in the port city of Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine. Workers in Le Havre had a colorful syndicalist past.^[1] Revolutionary syndicalists there had won a strong following during the First

World War among seamen and dockers and in the metalworking and building trades. In 1922, even after the CGT schism and the strike defeats of 1920 had hobbled the labor movement nationally, a metalworking strike in Le Havre escalated into a week-long general strike that nearly became a municipal insurrection. Le Havre's workers soon fell into the same quagmire of trade union weakness that stymied workers throughout France in the 1920s. Still, when Louis Bréguet established a new factory for building seaplanes in Le Havre alongside the Tancarville canal, he recruited a local work force well aware of its political heritage. Although Bréguet's workers were no more unionized than aircraft workers elsewhere in early 1936, Communists and other militants of the revolutionary left continued to dominate the metalworkers union local as they had in the 1920s. Being a couple hours remove by train from Paris, they continued to enjoy a degree of independence from the Fédération des Travailleurs en Métallurgie (FTM), which, when it came time for taking initiatives, could sometimes be an asset for a trade union militant.

With hindsight we can now trace the immediate origins of the Bréguet strike to May Day, which in 1936 fell between the two rounds of the national elections and hence provided a fortuitous opportunity for left-wing militants to keep up momentum for the second electoral round. Nationally, the May Day mobilization proved particularly effective in metalworking and aviation; in the Paris region alone more than one hundred thousand metalworkers stayed away from work that day, and for the first time in fifteen years the Renault plant had to close for lack of workers.^[2] At Bréguet's Le Havre plant a remarkable 90 percent of the work force failed to show up for work.^[3]

In keeping with past habit, many employers throughout France answered the May Day demonstrations with reprisals at the factory level. Bréguet's factory director in Le Havre was no exception. On Saturday, 9 May, he fired two militants, ostensibly because they no longer were needed on the job; but as everyone knew, it was on account of their politics. Some workers also viewed the firings as a reprisal for another incident: a worker had embarrassed the personnel director (allegedly "a notorious member of the Croix de Feu") by rebuffing his efforts to sell right-wing newspapers to workers.^[4] Whatever the chief motives of management, the firings provoked a revolt. Within hours militants from the local metalworkers union passed out leaflets at the plant inviting workers to an open meeting. That evening about seventy of the plant's five hundred workers gathered together and agreed to demand that the two workers be reinstated and that no others be fired. They also called for a forty-hour week in hopes of averting future layoffs, which, workers feared, could be in the offing.^[5] No one called openly for a strike since police informers were assumed to be (and indeed were) at the meeting.

But buoyed by the May Day turnout and the Popular Front victory, a group of about twenty militants met secretly and decided to call a sit-in strike.^[6]

By Monday morning a strike call had clearly spread through the plant. At nine o'clock all five hundred workers in the prototype and production shops stopped what they were doing, stood at their benches, and refused to work until the boss rehired the two men. The other 256 employees who served as inspectors, supervisors, engineers, technicians, and clerks remained aloof from the protest.^[7] When Lechenet, the plant director, refused to negotiate, workers moved to occupy the plant until he yielded. Several strikers quickly became sentries to watch over equipment and guard against saboteurs. With a little nudging, young apprentices dashed home to alert parents that they might be spending the night in the plant. By evening a supplies committee, with support from families and local merchants, had brought blankets and food for the strikers' night-long vigil. Women strikers, however, went home for the night. Marius Olive, the second in command for the whole Bréguet firm, found workers so well organized that he later argued the strike had been thoroughly planned in advance. Sentries, he later reported, "were relieved every two hours, and veritable patrols, under the orders of a leader, made rounds through the factory."^[8] The discipline of the strikers, their respect for plant property, and the ease with which they found supporters in town made the strike appear all the more sinister to employers.

However intimidating the strikers seemed to outsiders, they must have relied more on improvisation than advance planning. These militants had no experience with factory occupations. Indeed, it must have been rather unclear what it meant to "occupy" the workplace. To be sure, about a half-dozen factory occupations had occurred in France since 1920, and the great wave of Italian occupations in 1920 was well known.^[9] The sit-down strike had become so common in the coal mines of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s that French workers had come to refer to the tactic as a "Polish strike."^[10] No doubt everyone at Bréguet understood the virtues of a sit-down: it precluded a lockout and made it tougher for scabs. Given the obvious danger of further reprisals and a chronic fear of layoffs, a factory occupation made plenty of sense. But it also posed new questions for workers as well as employers. Were strikers violating the property rights of employers? If so, what attitude would government officials take toward the strike? After occupying the factory, should workers try to run the plant on their own, as Fiat employees had done in Turin in 1920?

Although the strikers at Bréguet made no gestures toward taking over the production process itself, it became apparent immediately that the sit-in tactic gave them tremendous leverage in the negotiations that fol-

lowed. Director Lechenet had reacted swiftly, asking local officials to order police to evacuate the plant. Léon Meyer, the mayor of Le Havre, a Radical deputy and a former minister of the merchant marine, had a keener sense of the complexities of the situation. He balked at Lechenet's request. The strike delegates had, after all, said that if police rushed the factory, workers would scurry into the Bréguet 730 prototype that was sitting, fully fueled, in the large assembly hall for stationary tests—a situation that could, one militant recalled, "have serious consequences."^[11] By early evening Meyer finally agreed to a modest show of force, dispatching one hundred local police and sixty gendarmes to surround the plant in hopes that their arrival alone would intimidate workers to leave. But the strikers held their ground. They insisted on talking directly with Marius Olive or even Louis Bréguet himself, and they asked the local subprefect to intervene on their behalf. Strikers had nothing to lose by holding firm as long as public officials restrained police from assaulting the plant. And restrain them they did. François Graux, the local prefect, sent an urgent telegram to the ministers of labor, the interior, and the air to explain that "workers appear firmly resolved to resist, and a serious collision would be feared if official force be used to expel them. The mayor and I think it useful to await results of negotiations between strikers and the administrateur-délégué before taking any action."^[12]

Government officials proved pivotal in resolving the conflict. On the second day of the strike Prefect Graux arrived from Rouen and together with Meyer pushed Olive to yield. As Olive later recounted, the mayor told him that "in general he opposed forcing strikers and police or armed guards into confrontation. It seemed to me, on the contrary, quite easy to evacuate the factory, for I had the clear impression that most of the workers wanted to be free of this occupation and that in any case one could . . . block supplies and defeat the workers without the least risk of confrontation." But Prefect Graux told Olive that no lesser authority than Premier Albert Sarraut wanted the conflict ended and "did not want to see either the police or armed forces intervene." The prefect, moreover, urged Olive to negotiate not only with strikers but also with officials at the union level—a distasteful notion to Olive since he considered union militants to be outsiders to the conflict.^[13] Indeed, a local Communist metalworker who did not work for Bréguet, Louis Eudier, had emerged a major spokesman for the strikers. But Olive had quickly run out of options. Pressured by strikers, on one side, and Prefect Graux, on the other, Olive agreed by early afternoon to submit the dispute to mayoral arbitration.

The mayor, meanwhile, easily won workers' approval of the arbitration agreement he proposed. It stipulated that the two militants be reinstated and that the plant director "organize the work in such a way as to

employ the largest number of workers, it being understood that management would remain the sole master of the organization"—subtle phrasing that affirmed management's authority yet implicitly recognized the possibility that without such assurances the employer might not be seen as the "sole master" of the shop floor.^[14] The mayor then returned to his office, where he told Olive he would not require the firm to pay workers for the two days lost to the strike. With a settlement now clearly in reach, Olive departed for Paris, only to discover on his arrival that the mayor had in fact granted strikers two days' pay. The mayor's arbitration elated the strikers, who had won all their demands short of the forty-hour week, whereas it embittered Olive, who felt abused by workers and government officials alike.

The factory occupation not only enabled the strikers to prevail over Olive; it also elicited a burst of political energy in working-class Le Havre. Nearly a thousand friends, relatives, and fellow workers gathered outside the plant to express support for the protest and slip provisions into the shops. When the workers evacuated the plant and marched for nearly an hour to the city meeting hall, "the procession," as the local Communist newspaper described it, "was acclaimed by the population from the windows and on the sidewalks, the workers saluting them with raised fists as they walked and sang the International."^[15] Two thousand metalworkers and other supporters joined the five hundred strikers at the meeting hall to hear the strike settlement read out loud, including a provision that if a slump in orders forced the factory to lay off workers, "the latter would have priority in the event of rehiring."^[16] It was not a guarantee against layoffs, but it was the next best thing. In any event, local supporters seemed to recognize in the Bréguet victory something larger, a revival perhaps of what the local Communist press called "the spirit of the barricades of 1922."^[17] At the very least, success confirmed workers in their optimism about a future under the Popular Front.

Strike success also brought immediate benefits to the metalworkers local of the CGT. Before the strike few people at Bréguet were prepared to assume the risks of union membership. Even so, when Lechenet fired the two militants, most workers felt that political rights had been violated and that their own security was at stake. Lechenet's provocation, anxiety over layoffs, and enthusiasm for the Popular Front helped militants and workers see eye to eye on the need for a strike. Union militants both inside and outside the company provided leadership, leaflets, and coordination, and nonunionized workers provided the enthusiasm and solidarity that had been missing for over a decade. After years of isolation, ironically, militants now had to move swiftly to keep up with workers. Accordingly, Ambroise Croizat, general secretary of the Fédération des Travailleurs en Métallurgie (FTM) and a newly elected Communist deputy, who had rushed down from Paris to attend the negotiations with the

mayor, congratulated the strikers at the meeting hall and urged them to join the union. Membership in the metalworkers local quickly grew, and the enthusiasm for the CGT spilled over into other local industries. According to one estimate, the CGT in Le Havre could claim only three hundred or four hundred members before the Bréguet strike and eleven thousand after it.^[18]

One day after the strike in Le Havre an uncannily similar strike began in Toulouse. This time protest erupted at the Latécoère plant, where militants from the Dewoitine factory nearby had been struggling since 1934 to build a union. Again the immediate cause of the conflict stemmed from May Day. Since so many workers chose to observe this day of labor solidarity, Latécoère had to shut its doors for the day. Dombray, the personnel director, retaliated against workers by firing three militants for allegedly committing "serious mistakes" on the job.^[19] On the morning of 13 May workers halted work, demanded that the militants be reinstated; then, fearing a lockout during lunch hour, they occupied the plant and sent a delegation to Ellen Prévost, the Socialist mayor of Toulouse. Prévost, like his counterpart in Le Havre, urged the factory director, Marcel Moine, to give ground.

Again as in Le Havre, May Day reprisals and the fear of layoffs had triggered the occupation, though additional grievances soon surfaced. According to one police spy, wage issues were "the real cause of antagonism" in the plant.^[20] Yet that assessment seems too neat. The broadsheets that militants from the metalworkers local posted all over town condemned "the scandal of Latécoère factories" and cited "the inadequacy of the machinery, . . . the way workers were paid, . . . the harassment personnel had to suffer."^[21] Not only wages but also a number of managerial practices gave workers the motivation to strike. If in Le Havre Bréguet workers used the issue of reinstatement to raise larger questions about layoffs, job security, and the organization of the workweek, at Latécoère workers used the firings to press for better wages, more respect on the job, and a fairer system of pay.

The strike ended more quickly than the one at Bréguet since Mayor Prévost intervened even more promptly than had Prefect Graux in Le Havre. By late afternoon Moine agreed to rehire the fired workers and recognize elected delegates as legitimate spokesmen for workers.^[22] Moine hated to make these concessions; he believed that a majority of his workers had "no animosity toward the board of directors, the foremen, or management" of the firm and had participated in the strike quite indifferently.^[23] But in fact he was up against two new developments that gave the strike its real punch—the enthusiasm with which so many nonunionized workers joined the protest, and the decisiveness with which local officials tried to settle the strike by backing the workers' de-

mands. Moine found himself squeezed in the same vise of labor militance and government pressure that had gripped Olive at Bréguet.

Victory swelled the ranks of the metalworkers local in Toulouse as it had in Le Havre. Nine days after the strike a police spy wrote to the prefect that management's effort to establish an antiunion association in the plant, the Amicale pour Combattre l'Action Syndicale, had utterly failed. Nearly all the workers at Latécoère, he reported, now flocked to the CGT local.^[24] With Dewoitine's employees joining the union as well, aircraft workers were swiftly becoming a major constituency in the metalworkers local.

The events in Toulouse and Le Havre caught national business and labor leaders by surprise. Major metal industrialists who had gathered at the offices of the UIMM in Paris were taken aback by the strikers' ingenuity and the influence that government officials had had on the outcome. Feeling the need to do something in response, they agreed to survey how many other firms could fall victim to similar misfortune.^[25] In the meantime CGT officials at the FTM applauded the victories. Yet behind their applause they seemed to harbor misgivings about local initiatives they had not controlled. On the one hand, labor leaders proclaimed these strikes as models that militants elsewhere might follow: "Whether in the north or the south, aircraft workers have just provided all metalworkers with a model of exemplary solidarity."^[26] On the other hand, the bureau said little about the tactical breakthroughs and nothing about the larger issues strikers had raised, issues that conformed closely to those that the FTM had selected in April to form the basis of a new national propaganda campaign.^[27] Local militants seemed prepared to blend themes from the FTM program with initiatives rank-and-file workers appeared ready to take by mid-May. But at the national level union leaders remained reluctant to encourage the new militancy.

National business and labor leaders inclined to view the two strikes as strictly local affairs were quickly disabused of the notion. On 14 May seven hundred workers occupied the Bloch aircraft factory in Courbevoie, an industrial suburb west of Paris. Unlike their comrades at Latécoère and Bréguet, the workers at Bloch struck purely to gain offensive objectives—higher wages, shorter hours, paid vacations, an apprenticeship program within the factory, a company cafeteria—rather than to reverse May Day reprisals.^[28] Above all, these workers wanted Marcel Bloch to stick to his word. A few weeks before, he had already agreed to some of these demands after tough negotiations with Lucien Ledru, a young Communist militant who had emerged as the leading spokesman for Bloch's workers. But Bloch had done nothing to implement the agreement. After the Popular Front victory workers saw their chance to force his hand: they seized the plant. With supplies from fam-

ily and friends, and with donations of hot meals and money from left-wing municipal officials in neighboring suburbs, the strikers were able to spend the night in the factory and continue the sit-down into a second day. Shrewdly, the strikers also sent a delegation to discuss their grievances with L. O. Frossard and Marcel Déat, the labor and air ministers in Sarraut's cabinet; this hearing gave the strike an added measure of legitimacy.^[29] What is more, several engineers and draftsman who had initially been trapped in their offices by the occupation subsequently chose to join the strike—an outcome particularly gratifying to Pierre Servanty, a militant who had been working hard to establish a CGT union in the plant for technicians and engineers.^[30] By the afternoon of 15 May Lucien Ledru was once again negotiating effectively with Bloch, and the strikers soon achieved their principal aims—wage hikes, pay for the strike days, and recognition of the right to paid vacations.^[31]

The victory at Bloch not only marked a shift from defensive to offensive demands; it also made the sit-down tactic visible in the Paris region, where aircraft workers were highly concentrated and where aircraft militants had gone furthest since 1934 to build a cohesive section for aviation within the FTM. Militants at Bloch belonged to a political network that included most of the major aircraft firms and many of the leaders of the Paris metalworkers unions. Even though the PCF remained reluctant to publicize these aircraft victories—L'Humanité began to report the first aircraft sit-downs only on 20 May—the lessons learned at Bloch were not lost on aircraft militants around Paris. On 20 May workers at Lioré et Olivier occupied their plant in Villacoublay, southwest of Paris, and after five days won a wage hike of one and a half francs an hour, the recognition of worker delegates, and the reinstatement of militants fired after May Day.^[32] At nearby Issy-les-Moulineaux Nieuport workers made even greater gains on 21 May: a minimum daily wage, the recognition of worker delegates, the elimination of overtime, and—a major breakthrough—a forty-hour week.^[33] On 22 May the strike movement spread beyond aircraft to the Compagnie Française de Raffinage, a refinery in Gonfreville near Le Havre.^[34] The tally of protest was spectacular: within two weeks workers had won stunning victories in six occupations, five of them in the aircraft industry, where labor had fared poorly in the past.

Negotiating a Contract

During the last week of May factory occupations multiplied at an astonishing rate. The movement spread first within aircraft firms—to Farman, in Billancourt, and Dewoitine, in Toulouse—and to companies, such as Hotchkiss and Sautter-Harlé, that relied heavily on military contracts. On 28 May Renault followed suit; skilled workers in its aircraft

and armament shops played important roles in bringing France's largest factory into the strike movement. The next day workers at Gnôme-et-Rhône and at Salmson, both aircraft engine firms, launched strikes, as did workers at Citroën, Fiat, Caudron, and several other firms. By the end of the week two hundred thousand metalworkers had brought their plants to a halt, demanding that employers raise wages, cut hours, establish shop steward systems, and recognize the rights of workers to join unions. The furious movement of telegrams, delegations, union militants, police units, and working-class food and blanket platoons that had characterized the Le Havre strike two weeks before now occurred in dozens of plants.

As the strike wave grew, labor and employer organizations struggled to bring the situation under control. Labor and business leaders alike described the movement as a contagion, a metaphor betraying some discomfort, even in trade union officials, over so massive a grass-roots movement.^[35] For national leaders of the CGT, the enthusiasm nonunion workers brought to their strikes, though welcome, created two kinds of problems. In plants where local trade union militants had helped initiate strikes, as appears to have been the case in most of the sit-downs in aviation, there was no guarantee that union militants would (or could) heed CGT directives to limit the strikes.^[36] However, in work sites where strikes had caught local militants completely by surprise, it was all the latter could do to grab a share of strike leadership.

As a result, national leaders of the FTM had to maneuver between countervailing pressures. They could scarcely oppose a strike wave that offered them an opportunity to enlarge union locals and promote the demands the FTM had outlined only six weeks before. Communist officials in particular hoped to narrow the gap between the party and the working class and, if possible, monopolize the channels of communication between workers and the state.^[37] The strike wave, moreover, created an opportunity to pressure the new Popular Front government to legislate its program of social reforms in rapid order once Léon Blum took power. But at the same time FTM officials felt the need to contain the strike movement lest it outflank the national leadership and turn against them, as had happened in the Paris metalworkers' strikes of June 1919.^[38] National trade union leaders, both Communist and otherwise, feared strikes they could not control, especially at a time when the unity of the Popular Front—and its middle-class support—meant so much to the left. To escape this dilemma, the FTM pursued a two-pronged strategy: it called for national negotiations with employers to establish a collective contract, a tactic that would both build on the momentum of the movement and channel it into an activity the Federation could control; and it urged employers, and implicitly the workers themselves, to see the

strikes as a movement for modest economic demands.^[39] When on 28 May the Sarraut government moved to intervene in the crisis, the FTM's strategy seemed to pay off: Air Minister Déat brought together representatives from the FTM and the aircraft employers' Chambre Syndicale, and Labor Minister Frossard did the same with leaders of the UIMM.^[40] Negotiations appeared imminent.

Besieged by their workers within plants and pressured by the Air Ministry to negotiate, industrialists in aviation were finally forced to respond collectively to the movement. On 28 May Henry de l'Escaille, president of the Chambre Syndicale, addressed his colleagues. Having met with Sarraut and Frossard, he felt employers in the aircraft industry ought to "collaborate from now on in the drafting" of a collective agreement.^[41] A notion as revolutionary for the industry as a collective contract no doubt divided the Chambre Syndicale. To some members, like de l'Escaille, such a step may have seemed unavoidable under the circumstances. Even Fernand Lioré, rarely a progressive voice on labor matters, suggested that an effort under way to establish a collective agreement at the Arsenal d'Aéronautique, a state-run facility in Orléans, might provide a framework for broad negotiations. The Chambre Syndicale, however, found its way to a more conservative strategy—to oppose a separate contract in aircraft and argue instead for a single metalworking contract negotiated by the UIMM.^[42] With this goal in mind, aircraft officials urged Alfred Lambert-Ribot, head of the Comite des Forges, to push the government into suspending talks scheduled for separate aircraft negotiations and hence divert the battle in aircraft into a conflict over contracts in metalworking as a whole. Aircraft employers, in short, sought refuge within the well-armed fortress of the UIMM.

Events in the first week of June only deepened the conflict. On 3 June talks between the FTM and the UIMM collapsed after employers insisted that workers evacuate plants before negotiations could resume. Meanwhile a second wave of sit-down strikes spread throughout France. By the end of the week more than a million employees—not just in industry but also in commerce, insurance, and banking—had joined the movement. In aircraft, too, strikes broke out in a number of Parisian and provincial plants that had escaped the first wave of May. Aircraft technicians and office employees, moreover, began to ally more openly with workers. At Morane-Saulnier in Puteaux and Villacoublay, at Hanriot in Bourges, and at the Bréguet plant in Villacoublay technicians took active roles in their strikes; at Bourges in particular they promoted grievances of their own.^[43] The movement spread out into the countryside and up into the white-collar strata of the industry, and much the same happened in other industries.

It was in an atmosphere of widespread panic that Léon Blum took decisive action upon assuming the premiership. Addressing parliament on 6 June, he announced a legislative program to establish the forty-hour week, collective bargaining, and two-week paid vacations for all workers in France.^[44] The following day, at the secret request of employers now frightened by events, Blum negotiated the Matignon Accord, which granted workers across-the-board pay increases, the right to join unions, and the right to elect shop stewards in plants with more than ten workers. In a France that lagged far behind many other countries in labor legislation, Matignon was a stunning breakthrough for the CGT. Blum's efforts, however, failed to dampen popular protest, as the strike movement spread even further on 8 and 9 June. Since the Matignon Accord lacked the status of law, and since many employers, including Lambert-Ribot, president of the Comité des Forges, expressed misgivings publicly about a deal struck under duress, workers felt they had to continue their strikes until their own employers met their demands. As much as national officials in the CGT wanted to bring the strikes to a close, they still had too little influence with strikers to do so. Even in metalworking, where union officials and the PCF had some success in cooperating closely with rank-and-file strikers, relations remained tense between local strike committees and FTM leaders.^[45]

Aircraft workers, moreover, had reason to believe they could gain more than had been won at Matignon. The accord, after all, had endorsed the principle of collective contracts, leaving the door open for workers and employers in individual branches and locales to negotiate. With virtually the whole of Parisian aircraft construction shut down by the movement, and many provincial factories as well, the pressure on employers was greater than ever to return to negotiations with aircraft militants. On 8 June aircraft manufacturers found themselves cornered into just the kind of separate negotiations they had tried to avoid the week before.

Aircraft workers had a further incentive to hold out for a collective contract, for by finally coming to power, Léon Blum had strengthened their hands in two ways. First, the Popular Front victory had made the nationalization of the industry an imminent possibility. Blum dispelled any doubts of this on 5 June when he announced to the Chamber of Deputies that he would present legislation to nationalize the arms industry.^[46] Just what shape such a reform would take and how it would affect a sector as complex as the aircraft industry remained unclear. Even so, the government lent legitimacy to notions of state-controlled industry, however vaguely defined, and thus gave workers and government officials alike a potential weapon to wield against management. Some mili-

tants even began linking notions of nationalization to visions of workers' control. When, for example, seven hundred strike committee delegates from Paris metalworking industries met on 10 June, they rejected FTM plans to accept a compromise contract. Instead, they voted to issue employers an ultimatum: either agree to the contract with minimum wage guarantees, or the strikers would call for "the nationalization of the factories on strike and of those working for the state, operated by technical personnel and workers under the supervision of the ministries involved."^[47] Simply by coming to power with a commitment to implement the program of the Popular Front, Blum tacitly allowed the specter of expropriation to take a seat at the negotiating table.

Second, Blum's electoral victory brought Pierre Cot back as air minister, and Cot had few qualms about intervening in workers' behalf. His brief tenure at the boulevard Victor in 1933 had demonstrated his independence from the builders. He still had the air of the brash Young Turk. Moreover, the events of February 1934 had inspired him to become a major architect of the Popular Front strategy; though still a Radical, Cot felt even more resolutely on the left than before and was committed wholeheartedly to revitalizing the industry and improving its labor relations. Aircraft workers, then, had the advantage of an air minister sympathetic to collective bargaining in the industry.

With strikers showing more determination than ever, and with Pierre Cot bent on forging a contract, aircraft employers finally succumbed to an agreement on the night of 10 June. Minutes of this pivotal meeting, held at the Air Ministry itself, have not survived in the archives; but an embittered Marius Olive, administrateur-délégué at Bréguet, apparently handed over a copy of these minutes years later to judicial officials at the Procès de Riom, and he interpreted them for the court:

You will see [in the minutes that] from the beginning of the negotiations M. Cot, the air minister, had in the presence of the workers withdrawn from employers any possibility of discussion by threatening them with requisitioning their factories. . . . The workers used this threat several times and reminded the minister of it, especially at the moment when the issue of wages in the industry was raised. On the night of 10–11 June Cot pressured the Chambre Syndicale directly to yield to workers' demands.^[48]

However biased Olive's version of the meetings may have been, it reveals how employers felt cornered into making concessions. Cot no doubt played a key role in getting a settlement.

The contract that workers won through these negotiations marked a sharp break from the autocratic framework that had governed labor relations in the industry. The agreement was far from simple; its thirty-two articles and detailed wage schedules testified to the determination, shared by both workers and employers, to minimize the need for fur-

ther debate. This level of specificity implicitly revealed how much distrust had surfaced in the strike and how rapidly both sides had come to depend on state-supervised negotiations to flesh out details. Unlike in Britain, where trade unionists had kept government officials out of the collective bargaining process and continued to do so, in France CGT militants were willing to use the influence of sympathetic state officials to full advantage.^[49] The June talks with Cot, moreover, appeared to validate the approach.

This first collective contract in aircraft, which applied only to workers in the Paris region, granted workers precisely the changes in wages and working conditions they had most hoped to win by their strikes.^[50] They could now join unions without fear of reprisal; militants who had once been fired for their political activities could now, according to the contract, reclaim their old jobs. Employers, moreover, were now obliged to give workers at least two weeks of paid vacation and pay overtime rates ranging from 33 to 50 percent above normal hourly wages. The contract also required employers to establish a delegate system. In this respect the contract fell short of the radical reforms many militants sought in a new system of workers' representation; the plan mandated by the contract called for too few delegates—one for a firm of fifty workers, two for two hundred fifty workers, three for a thousand workers, and so on—to allow workers to convert the delegate system into the more substantial shop steward networks that many workers wanted. Nor could militants be sure that the new delegate system would work to their advantage since it gave employers as well as workers a new channel of communication within the plant; it provided no guarantees that delegates would be faithful to the union. Still, the new delegate system at least legitimized the notion of shop floor representation and gave delegates a chance to voice grievances on a regular basis. The contract, then, offered employees genuine reforms in an industry where paternalism and repression had long prevailed.

It was the wage schedules, however, that made the news of the contract reverberate throughout France. Of all the issues under discussion, wage questions had caused negotiators the greatest anguish, for with wage hikes the shift in political power in the industry took its most tangible form. When averaged by skill category, the new wages stood well above those that Parisian metalworkers had earned during the first quarter of 1936—22.7 percent higher for skilled workers, 26.7 percent higher for semiskilled workers, and 25.9 percent for unskilled laborers.^[51] The new wages guaranteed by the contract were higher still in the engine-building sector, where most skilled workers now would earn 8.40 francs, semiskilled workers 7.50, and unskilled laborers from 6.00 to 6.90 francs. Pieceworkers, too, won guaranteed minimum wages and the

right to draw salaries during lulls in production. The contract even prohibited employers from reclassifying workers into lower ranks to cut costs. In short, it made aircraft the most highly paid sector in metalworking and diminished the capacity of employers to use wages to discipline workers on the shop floor.

The new wages also reduced the differences between pay scales for various kinds of workers in the industry. Under the new contract semiskilled men earned 82 percent of what skilled men received, compared to the 75.5 percent semiskilled men earned at Farman in 1927. Semiskilled women earned 80 percent of the wages of semiskilled men, a slight improvement over the 77.5 percent that semiskilled women earned at Farman in 1927. An unskilled laborer still earned only 68 percent of a skilled worker's wage. To be sure, wage differentials remained. The contract maintained nineteen separate wage distinctions—testimony to the desire of skilled workers to maintain traditional skill differentiations in the industry. Thus the wage structure reflected both the continuing predominance of skilled workers, whose interests were fully protected, and the spirit of the Popular Front, which sought to give special relief to lower-paid workers.

By winning such a favorable contract, aircraft workers inspired other strikers in metalworking industries. In this respect they repaid the debt they owed the strike movement as a whole for strengthening their own bargaining position. The big industrialists in the UIMM now found it more difficult to avoid making some concessions along the lines their colleagues in aviation had had to offer. The aircraft contract also gave rank-and-file metalworkers an incentive to keep the pressure on their own representatives in the CGT. As Maurice Roy, a national secretary for the FTM, later admitted, "On 11 June a great divergence emerged [in the wage talks] as a collective contract for workers in aviation had just been signed with serious advantages on minimum-wage rates."^[52] The aircraft contract, in short, brought the crisis in Parisian metalworking to a head by 11 June. Rumors surfaced that some metalworkers wanted to pour out of the factories and into the streets of central Paris. Faced with the renewed danger of losing control over events, Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the PCF, appealed unambiguously for a truce. "We still do not have everyone in the countryside behind us," Thorez said. "We even risk alienating some of our bourgeois and peasant supporters. So it is necessary to know how to end a strike when the goals have been obtained. It is necessary to compromise even if all the demands have not been met, as long as we have won the most essential demands."^[53] With the Popular Front parties all exerting their full political weight for a compromise, the FTM and the UIMM settled on a metalworking contract on 12 June, one that forced concessions from employers but fell

short of the wage rates aircraft workers had won. As in aviation, the metalworking contract was a milestone. Still, some militants felt the PCF had given ground too soon, such as J. M. Bertin, a Communist dissident at the far left of the PCF, who thought that metalworking employers could have been squeezed for more. "This is shown especially," Bertin wrote, "by the better agreement won earlier on wages and hiring by the aircraft workers, who make up the avant-garde."^[54]

When Parisian aircraft workers evacuated their factories after 10 June, they emerged as an elite within the trade union world of French metalworking. Suddenly these workers enjoyed not just the material protections of the new contract but also the prestige of securing the best pay scales in France. As a result, aircraft locals became vibrant, burgeoning unions. The strength of labor solidarity, of course, would continue to vary a good deal from plant to plant, particularly in provincial cities where the struggle to win contracts parallel to the Parisian agreement continued through June, with mixed results.^[55] Still, for most workers, the balance sheet of the strike movement was clear: the aircraft industry was no longer a backwater for the labor movement, a bastion of employer traditionalism. By June it had become center stage for labor reform under the Popular Front.

The Sources of Militance

The question remains why workers in one industry consistently served as a vanguard in the strike movement, from the first factory occupation at Le Havre through the negotiation of collective contracts. A look at what happened in the strikes and what workers wanted points to four features of the aircraft industry that were crucial in encouraging worker militance. The first was the peculiar character of the labor market on the eve of the strike. The growth of government orders since 1934 had increased the demand for labor, if not dramatically, at least more than in most other industrial sectors. This increase, in turn, had strengthened labor's power to bargain. At the same time, however, deflationary policy in late 1935 and early 1936, coupled with uncertainty about what would follow Plan I, jeopardized the expansion of the industry. These developments, in fact, renewed the prospect, and in a few plants even the reality, of layoffs.^[56] This unusual sequence of changes—a two-year trend toward tightening the labor market followed by several months of anxiety over layoffs—ripened the industry for protests over issues of job security. When employers fired militants for observing May Day in 1936, aircraft workers were particularly sensitive to the implications. The volatility of employment made these workers keen to reduce the power employers had traditionally enjoyed to reassign, reclassify, and eliminate employees

as they pleased. A number of the demands aircraft workers made in their strikes—reinstatement, union rights, a shorter workweek, union control over hiring and firing, paid vacations to replace the annual unpaid factory closing common in the industry—all betray a yearning for job security.

The second feature of the industry that helps account for strike militance was the moderate strength of the unions. Stronger unions might have stifled local initiatives since the national leaders of the PCF and the newly reunified CGT feared strikes they could not control. Weaker unions would have made it more difficult to launch the movement since strikers depended on local militants for leadership and logistical support. Many aircraft plants had the right combination—on the one hand, workers who in the political euphoria of May 1936 were eager to win greater security for themselves, and on the other, experienced militants who were established enough to lead strikes, orchestrate sit-downs, and marshal support from sympathetic municipal officials but were not yet powerful enough to enforce the discipline of the national federation. The crucial tactical decisions—daring to occupy plants in May and holding out for a separate contract for aviation in June—might well have been compromised had the FTM had greater control over the rank and file.

The strike wave in aircraft was neither a purely spontaneous rank-and-file movement nor a scheme masterminded from above. Rather, the strikes involved a continuous interplay between strikers at the local level and national leaders in Paris, who responded to local initiatives improvisationally, without a clear sense of strategy.^[57] From the first strikes at Bréguet and Latécoère through those at Bloch, Farman, Renault, and other aircraft and metalworking plants in Paris during the last week in May, local Communists and revolutionary syndicalists agitated for strikes in much the same manner as they had as CGTU members or as isolated revolutionaries during the politically lean years before 1936. But if local militants were essential to the success of the first strikes, they were not the plotters of a large-scale movement. As one police official wrote at the time, although local Communist militants "found themselves among the most active organizers" of individual strikes, "one must recognize that the Communists in the unions were the first to be surprised by the movement ."^[58] Once the strike wave became nationwide, local militants had to maneuver amid sometimes-contradictory tasks of encouraging rank-and-file militancy and keeping the movement under control in the interest of FTM strategy. Local militants, in short, played crucial roles in giving strikes their initial coherence and direction, even as these same militants proved essential in channeling the movement into a contest over a collective contract, organizing plant evacuations after 10 June,

and in at least one case (at Latécoère in Toulouse) discouraging a strike in early June that militants deemed ill advised.^[59] Most militants handled this balancing act effectively, as the success of the movement in aviation demonstrates. Moreover, had local militants been more out of step with the rank and file, or had they alienated their fellow workers in the course of these events, the latter would probably not have stampeded into the CGT as they did in the weeks that followed. The most palpable tensions within labor during the strike movement were not between local Communist militants and the rank and file but rather between strikers at the local level and national leaders of the FTM and the PCF who were eager to get a settlement.^[60]

A third feature of the industry that helped shape the strike movement was the composition of the work force. Many of the skilled metalworkers who predominated in both serial production and prototype building identified with the culte du métallo , the sense of craft prowess that came with years of experience in the metalworking fraternity. Moreover, the self-esteem some workers felt from being associated with aviation, and which employers encouraged, could also enhance a feeling of shop floor camaraderie, especially in the politicized atmosphere of the Popular Front era. This ethos of solidarity made skilled workers in aviation particularly attentive to questions of shop floor autonomy and managerial control. Thus, the intensity of the strike movement in the industry stemmed in part from the willingness of skilled metalworkers to raise grievances about the quality of life on the shop floor.

Strike demands conveyed these concerns. From the first strikes of May to the full-scale shutdown of Parisian aircraft plants by the end of the month, aircraft workers called attention not so much to questions of pay, though these, too, were important to them and figured prominently in negotiating the regional contract; rather, questions of workers' rights and managerial authority lay at the heart of most strike demands. Take the grievances, for example, that workers at Dewoitine presented to the firm on 27 May. These strikers called for the recognition of their union, the establishment of shop floor delegates elected by workers and sponsored by the union, the right of two union representatives not employed at the plant to participate in discussions between management and the delegates, and the creation of a committee to oversee hiring examinations. In addition, workers demanded specific changes in shop operations—improvements in machinery, the elimination of piece rates for certain kinds of machine work, and time "to clean and grease machinery every Saturday morning."^[61] These workers rose in revolt not against the rationalization of the work process, which plagued workers in munitions and automaking, but against rigid rules and irrational encumbrances that irked them on the job. Similarly, at the Hanriot plant in

Bourges workers called for the elimination of the noontime supervisory check and demanded that more time clocks be installed instead.^[62] These workers, who preferred an impersonal time clock to a foreman's harassment, were rebelling against arbitrary authority, not time discipline per se. The collective contract Parisian aircraft workers won on 10 June, with its nineteen wage categories and its detailed regulations for giving shop delegates a say in their factories, conveyed a similar concern for replacing the authoritarianism of the patron with something akin to a social contract. What troubled skilled workers was the failure of management to run plants effectively, modernize equipment, treat employees justly, and include them in making decisions in the plant. In aviation, at least, the strike wave was a rebellion against employer autocracy, a struggle to make the aircraft factory a more secure and sensible place to work.

Not that these issues alone fueled the movement. The festive spirit that emerged during the Bréguet strike appeared in most of the sit-downs. To break the monotony of the daily routine, to mobilize family and friends in supply operations, and to become part of a historic upheaval with unknown consequences created an air of excitement that in itself helped to sustain the movement. Aircraft workers, moreover, like their counterparts in other industries, discovered what Simone Weil called joy—"the joy of entering the factory with the friendly permission of a worker guarding the door, . . . of seeing so many smiles, so many words of fraternal welcome, . . . of running freely through workshops where one had been riveted to a machine, of forming groups, chatting, snacking, . . . of listening not to the pitiless roar of machines, a striking symbol of the harsh necessities to which one yielded, but to music, singing, and laughter."^[63] Workers experienced the pleasures and frustrations of reconstituting a community in the workplace for purposes of their own—talking politics, plotting strategy, swapping stories, staging plays and mock trials, playing soccer, dancing, singing, drinking, flirting, fighting, and otherwise passing the time.^[64] Some of this enthusiasm fed on the nervous energy that came from fear: Might the gendarmes attack the plant after all? Might some of the foremen who were members of the Croix de Feu try to sabotage the strike? Might the strikers succumb to disorderly conduct and ruin their own strike?^[65] Uncertainty added to the intensity of the experience, as did the sense of adventure. Henri Jourdain recalled, decades later, the thrill of "traversing Paris in cars that were requisitioned by the strike committee at Renault and decorated with red flags, honking, barely stopping for traffic lights, while the cops cleared our path to get us to the regional headquarters of the métallos union."^[66] Workers, of course, relished a respite from the discipline of foremen, clocks, and machines. Not for nothing did the demand for paid holidays, first fought for and won in the Bloch strike at Courbevoie,

emerge as a popular objective that caught even the CGT by surprise.^[67] Yet in analyzing the strikes in aircraft, it would be an error to see the playful side of the movement as its essence or argue that workers sought more to escape than to transform the factory.^[68] Though escape may have been a crucial motive in industrial branches where rationalization was more fully advanced, in the aircraft industry workers' interest in wage hikes and vacations complemented—and did not substitute for—a yearning for greater power in the workplace.^[69]

A fourth factor helping account for aircraft worker militancy was the proximity of the industry to the state. Aircraft workers took the initiative in part because they were better prepared than other workers to understand just what the electoral victory of the Popular Front could mean for them. Since the early days of aviation the state had been the leading customer for the business. In aviation, as in shipbuilding, mining, and railroads, it was no secret that government officials could influence the way employers dealt with their workers. Moreover, with Plan I everyone in aviation had become acutely aware of the leverage that the Air, Labor and Finance ministries could exert in the industry. The air minister himself had been decisive in settling a major strike in 1935 at Duralumin, the major supplier of special metals to the aircraft companies.^[70] When Dewoitine threatened to lay off one hundred workers in late 1935 in Toulouse, labor militants and local business leaders raised a ruckus with deputies and senators to push the Air Ministry to redistribute its orders.^[71] No doubt about it: aircraft construction was a political affair, and when the Popular Front coalition came to power with a platform that called in vague terms for the nationalization of war industries, everyone knew that the balance of power in aviation might change dramatically. As Simone Weil wrote at the time in analyzing the strike wave:

Trade union unity was not a decisive factor. Of course, it was a great asset, but it weighed more heavily in other branches than Parisian metalworking, where a year ago there were only a few thousand in the unions. The decisive factor, we have to say, was the Popular Front government. Yes, one could finally—finally!—go on strike without [fearing] the police and gendarmes. But that held true for all branches. What really counted was that the metalworking factories nearly all worked for the State and depended on it to balance the books. Every worker knew it. Every worker, in watching the Socialist Party come to power, had the feeling that in confronting the boss, he was no longer so weak. The reaction was immediate.^[72]

In this respect the strike movement in aviation was, above all, a response to political events. Left-wing rule suddenly enabled workers in an industry like aviation to challenge the autocratic authority of their employers with a sense of optimism. Although other factors—the peculiar nature of the labor market, the moderate strength of the unions, and the skilled

character of the work force—made aviation ripe for a strike movement, it was the dependence of the aircraft companies on the state that made workers responsive to the new political climate. In no other industry was the clash so clear between employers, who were used to exercising unfettered authority in their factories, and workers, who were suddenly empowered by the victory of the Popular Front.

The Consequences of June '36

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the events of May and June 1936 for the subsequent development of labor relations in the industry. For one thing, the outcome of the aircraft strikes made workers and employers even more aware than before of how influential the government had become in their industry. The first strikes in May certainly confirmed that state officials could be pivotal. When local officials lent support to strikers in Le Havre, Toulouse, and Courbevoie, and when national officials gave workers a sympathetic hearing, workers readily grasped the implications. The role of the Air Ministry in negotiating a settlement, first under Déat and then more dramatically under Cot, lent credence to the view that state intervention would enhance workers' power in the industry. It was this notion that encouraged militants to raise the issue of nationalization when contract talks threatened to stall. To be sure, government efforts to placate strikers may have frustrated the few genuine revolutionaries who hoped the June strikes might precipitate a larger crisis. Most workers, however, proved willing to settle for the lesser revolution that the collective contract entailed; and few radicals of the far left, not even the Pivertists in the left wing of the Socialist Party or Pierre Monatte's group of revolutionary syndicalists, belittled the achievement. These gains served to enhance the belief that state officials, sufficiently prodded from below, could change life in the industry for the better—an attitude not unique to the aircraft industry. Simone Weil found workers in metalworking as a whole around Paris optimistic about state intervention. "One hears it said [among metalworkers]," she reported in June, "that if certain bosses close their factories, the State will reopen them. They do not wonder for an instant if they will be able to make [the factories] function well. For every Frenchman the State is an inexhaustible source of wealth."^[73]

At the same time government support for workers' demands terrified employers, who since 1934 had become increasingly inept in cooperating to solve basic structural problems in the industry. Some employers in aircraft, though not all, condemned the refusal of the state to evacuate plants forcibly and hence uphold the rights of property.^[74] No one in management, however, viewed lightly the pressure state officials applied

to accede to workers' demands. Employers and their most sympathetic supporters in the state engineering corps blamed Pierre Cot in particular for the two results that management believed to be catastrophic for the industry—a pay scale boosting aircraft wages above metalworking norms, and a decline of managerial authority on the shop floor. Marius Olive, administrateur-délégué at Bréguet, asserted that in business circles "the wages for a cleaning woman in aviation"—4.80 francs an hour, not a great deal of money but well above average for custodial work at the time—"had become a kind of slogan in industrial circles," a shorthand for criticizing overscale wages throughout the aircraft sector.^[75] At Riom Pierre Franck, a state engineer, would later charge that "the attitude of the [air] minister . . . strongly encouraged the worker representatives to be masters of the factory. They continually harassed management with demands of all kinds."^[76] Similarly, Jean Volpert, another state engineer, would argue that when Cot "openly reprimanded the employers of the occupied plants in aircraft in front of the labor representatives," he inspired "anarchy" in the factories.^[77]

Such charges were hyperbolic; yet there was no denying that the Chambre Syndicale took a beating in June when faced with the combined force of factory occupations and government pressure. Negotiations for a regional contract in Paris revealed how much autonomy employers had lost since the early 1930s. In the face of a strike movement of such magnitude and an Air Ministry determined to settle the conflict, the builders could not repel the drive for a separate contract in the aircraft industry. Munitions manufacturers, tank builders, and other defense contractors fared better in the crisis since they at least fell within the less costly contract for metalworking as a whole. Aircraft employers, in contrast, by signing a separate contract, now found themselves saddled with higher wages, more isolated from their colleagues in metalworking and the UIMM, and more vulnerable to state pressures than before.

If the strike movement crystallized the way workers and employers viewed the state's role in the industry under the Popular Front, it also had a second consequence no less significant: it strengthened the Communist wing of the CGT in aircraft factories throughout France. Communist militants such as Lucien Llabres in Toulouse and Lucien Ledru in Courbevoie were quick to assert their leadership in the aircraft strikes, and they were rewarded for their efforts in the weeks that followed as their fellow workers rushed into metalworking locals. The significant progress that unitaire militants had made in aircraft plants in both Paris and the provinces between 1934 and the spring of 1936 now enabled Communist militants to reap the unexpected harvest of the massive growth of the CGT. By having outcompeted their ex-confédéré rivals in aviation for local influence during the crucial years of 1934 and 1935,

ex-unitaire (and usually Communist) militants emerged as beneficiaries of union growth at the local level. By late June most aircraft workers, like metalworkers everywhere in France, had joined the CGT; by September membership in the metalworking federation, the FTM, would mushroom to six hundred thousand, quite a spurt from forty thousand the previous March.^[78] Furthermore, whereas the stampede into unions also occurred in most other industries, the triumph of the regional contract in Parisian aviation made CGT locals all the more attractive to aircraft workers since the CGT would now oversee the application of the contract in the factories.

Communist militants outmaneuvered their ex-confédéré rivals not only because they asserted themselves effectively during the strike movement or because they had already profited from the PCF's shift to a united-front strategy in 1934. They also cashed in on the PCF's rising fortunes at the national level. The Popular Front elections of May 1936 established the PCF as the dominant political force in the red belt of Paris, which, despite the efforts of the Air Ministry to decentralize the industry, was still the heartland of airplane and engine construction. The working-class suburbs of Paris now sent Communist Party militants to seats in parliament as well as to municipal councils and mayorships, which in turn enabled the party to offer their working-class constituencies the services of an up-and-coming political machine. Aircraft workers in the Paris region now encountered Communist Party posters, leaflets, newspapers, and militants in their neighborhoods as well as at the factory gate.

Of course, party militants in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and other provincial cities with aircraft factories did not reap the direct benefits of the red belt revolution, but they did profit from the rising prestige of the PCF. Perhaps more important, they prospered from the earlier failure of the Socialist Party, even in a strong SFIO town like Toulouse, to build a solid organizational base in the metalworking industry. Of the twenty-five Communist factory cells that flourished in Toulouse after June '36, seventeen were in aviation (and five in railroads).^[79] Of the major provincial aircraft-building centers, only Saint-Nazaire and Nantes had metalworkers locals with a decidedly Socialist orientation. But even there Communist militants made inroads in the wake of June '36; at Loire-Nieuport more than fifty workers joined the party.^[80] Furthermore, by November 1936 Communist militants had established a tight grip on the national leadership of the FTM.^[81] Their power, in turn, gave factory militants in the PCF greater clout locally. To be sure, the rivalry between Communists and non-Communists on the shop floors of aviation would continue after 1936, as we shall see. Few workers, moreover, actually joined the PCF, certainly no more than 10 or 15 percent during the summer of

1936.^[82] Yet if most workers kept some distance from the party, they nonetheless helped make their industry a CGT stronghold, thereby narrowing the gap between aircraft workers and the PCF. In all the major centers of aircraft manufacturing except Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, Communist militants emerged from June '36 with enough strength to remain the leading spokesmen in the blue-collar ranks of the industry for the rest of the 1930s.^[83]

The strikes also enabled employees to narrow a gap of a different kind—the gap between blue-collar and white-collar workers. The participation of technicians and office personnel in the strikes, not just in aviation but in many industries, was one of the most startling aspects of the "social explosion" since these employees lacked a trade union tradition and were usually loath to jeopardize their chances for advancement by organizing collectively to bargain with their employers.^[84] Though a few technicians, like Lucien Llabre in Toulouse, had long identified with workers and even served in union locals, most white-collar employees had clung to the professional status their employers wanted them to claim. Yet however distanced these employees may have felt from industrial workers, in aircraft manufacturing they could not remain immune to some of the same frustrations and hopes that had led the latter to strike. They, too, were subject to layoffs amid the ups and downs of the aircraft business; they, too, suffered the indignities of life in an autocratic factory. The same esprit de corps that made skilled workers in aircraft manufacturing especially prone to defend their autonomy on the job could, under the right circumstances, inspire engineers and draftsmen to assert themselves collectively in the interests of professional pride. In aviation, moreover, technicians, especially draftsmen, were sufficiently numerous to make the logic of collective action compelling. It probably helped, as well, for technicians to rub shoulders with skilled metalworkers in prototype shops and test laboratories, in the process establishing personal channels of communication across the occupational divide. In addition, the ideological climate of 1936 was conducive to cooperation. The Popular Front, after all, embraced the notion of an alliance between the working and middle classes and called attention to the burdens middle-class citizens had had to bear under the deflationary policies of the center-right. The political and economic program of the left, not least its antifascism, found supporters in precisely the social groups to which technicians and office personnel belonged. Under these conditions it is not surprising that when factory occupations forced technicians and office personnel to take a stand, a number of them opted to join the strikers.

Once again the aircraft industry was in the avant-garde, for if technicians and cadres joined the strike movement in many other industries, it

was in aviation that separate unions for technicians and administrative personnel first emerged. The Matignon Accord provided impetus. By endorsing the principle of collective bargaining as a universal right, Matignon gave white-collar workers an incentive to create bargaining organizations of their own. In the midst of the strike movement aircraft technicians founded the Union Syndicale des Techniciens de l'Aviation (USTA), which quickly acquired three thousand members. Though the organization was not in a position yet to win a collective contract, it set a precedent for technicians in other industries, and by the fall of 1936 a new Fédération des Techniciens had emerged within the CGT. The USTA, too, made impressive strides. By August it issued the first monthly number of its newspaper for aircraft technicians in the CGT, Les Ailes syndicalistes, which proclaimed precisely what employers most feared about trade unionism spreading into the white-collar work force—that "technicians and workers, by forming an indivisible bloc, constitute an unequaled instrument for struggling against employer egoism and for the legitimate demand of employees."^[85] Under the leadership of Raymond Thomas, the USTA not only provided thousands of technicians a way to affiliate with the CGT; it also served as a distinctively radical, anticapitalist voice in the white-collar ranks of the industry.

At the same time, however, a second white-collar organization emerged in aviation with a different bent. Naturally enough, employers throughout French industry had been shocked by the willingness of foremen, technicians, engineers, and administrative personnel to join the strike movement. In response a number of industrialists, first in aviation and then in most other major branches of industry, set out to co-opt their employees into alternative organizations independent of the CGT. This proved to be a shrewd tactic since many white-collar employees, although eager to engage in collective bargaining, were reluctant to join a CGT union clearly associated with working-class radicalism. Accordingly, on 22 June a group of administrative personnel, with active support from employers, founded the Syndicat des Cadres de l'Industrie Aéronautique (SCIA), and by the following December this new union had signed a collective contract with employers. From the beginning, then, white-collar unionism in aviation took two forms—the "yellow" unionism of the SCIA and the more radical unionism of the USTA within the CGT—a division that would continue to hamper the CGT's effort to build an alliance between technicians and blue-collar workers. Even so, June '36 was a turning point in the effort to bridge this occupational chasm in the industry.^[86]

The strike movement had its greatest impact on the industry by inspiring workers to change the way they viewed themselves. As Pierre Monatte remarked, the French working class "regained confidence in itself"

during June.^[87] Particularly in aviation workers built on the modest gains they had made since early 1934 to become an autonomous force in their own right with which employers and state officials would have to contend. However instrumental CGT militants proved to be in coordinating the strikes, rank-and-file workers were pivotal in making the strike movement a success. It was they who pushed their representatives to refuse compromises in negotiations; it was they who broke the grip of fear and paternalism employers had used to keep wages low and shop floors calm. Besides tangible gains, such as wage hikes, paid vacations, and the forty-hour week, employees won something deeper—the confidence to challenge the boss. What made June '36 a profound moment for workers was that by securing their rights to have trade unions, collective bargaining, and shop floor representation, employees broke through the ramparts of the autocratic factory. As Léon Blum said later, "The divine right of employers is dead."^[88] By asserting themselves, aircraft employees suddenly introduced a new element of uncertainty into their industry—the possibility that workers, technicians, or office personnel might demand a say in decisions that would have to be made to wrest the industry from a structural crisis now years in the making.

Still, it remained to be seen whether aircraft workers would find ways to institutionalize the capacity for collective action that had sprung up so rapidly in the hothouse atmosphere of a national strike movement. It was one thing to triumph during the largest strike wave of the Third Republic; it was another to make an enduring commitment to the CGT once employers recovered their wind. Likewise, if aircraft workers by the thousands, and metalworkers by the tens of thousands, participated eagerly in the rituals of the strike movement—rallies, meetings, sentry duty, supply platoons, and the impressive marches that followed plant evacuations at the end of the strike—what would they do when the humdrum returned or when it came time to stick together against heavier odds? At the end of June, of course, no one could know. The fate of the Blum government was still a mystery. It was also unclear how far aircraft workers and trade union militants would go to try to change the structure of authority in the workplace. By revolutionary standards the achievements of June '36 were tame. The Communist Party, moreover, offered no real analysis of how the moderate objectives of the Popular Front might eventually connect to a revolutionary strategy.^[89] Ironically, by winning moderate, practical concessions, the strikers of June '36 did more to undermine employer authority than had fifteen years of revolutionary agitation by unitaire militants. By achieving the old reformist goals of trade unions rights, shop floor representation, and collective bargaining with the blessing of a Popular Front government, workers put basic issues of industrial authority in the forefront of public debate.

"What frightened the intelligent and far-seeing representatives of the middle classes most," Blum said, "was the very moderation of this movement. . . . The workers installed themselves beside their machines, . . . making the necessary arrangements for the care of the plant. They were there as guardians, that is to say, as caretakers, and also in a certain sense as co-owners."^[90] In the summer of 1936 no one knew for sure where this search for new forms of shared authority in the workplace would lead, especially with people clamoring for the nationalization of war industries. June '36 was not just the culmination of events since 1934; it was also the beginning of a new period of political education for everyone in the industry.

Four—
Nationalization

Scarcely had work resumed after June '36 when workers, employers, and government officials found themselves drawn into a different kind of struggle, the battle over nationalization. Unlike the strike wave, this conflict was anticipated in advance; no one doubted that the Popular Front government would abide by its promise to "nationalize the war industries and eliminate private commerce in arms." This plank in the electoral program of the left had won widespread support, not least from the powerful veterans associations that viewed private arms manufacturers as "merchants of death" and enemies of peace.^[1] The bitterness that arms profiteering had aroused during the First World War had scarcely abated by the mid-1930s. Even center-right politicians endorsed nationalization as long as it was confined to the arms industry. State arsenals, after all, had become commonplace in France by the seventeenth century; a state monopoly over the arms trade appeared to few politicians as a menace to private enterprise. Given this broad acceptance of the notion, and given the importance of nationalization in the thinking since 1918 of many Socialists and CGT moderates like Léon Jouhaux, some kind of program for nationalizing military production seemed a certainty once Léon Blum came to power.

What this plank in the program of the Popular Front meant for the aircraft industry, however, no one knew for sure in the immediate wake of the electoral victory of the left. To be sure, Blum had proposed nationalizing the aircraft industry as early as 1933, and there is some evidence that in 1934–35 officials in the Air Ministry gave consideration to the idea of replacing owners with state-appointed administrators. But concrete proposals did not circulate publicly in aircraft circles before June 1936.^[2] Throughout the electoral campaign spokesmen for the left had remained vague about their plans for aviation, partly because the

aircraft industry, by supplying both a commercial and military market, could not be considered an ordinary war industry, and partly because the Popular Front parties remained at odds over the whole question of nationalization. Radicals, viewing it narrowly as a defense policy, wished to restrict it to the arms sector. Many Socialists, however, hoped to nationalize several additional sectors, including railroads, insurance, mining, electricity, and portions of the banking system. They viewed nationalization as a way to socialize investment, restructure industry, weaken the business lobby, and reform the workplace. Ironically, Communist leaders sided with the Radicals on this question. Although by the late 1930s Communist militants would come to value nationalization as a means to increase their political leverage in the French economy, in 1936 most party officials were still skeptical of a policy that smacked of reformism. They also feared alienating the middle class from the Popular Front with far-reaching nationalizations.^[3] In the common electoral program Communist and Radical prudence prevailed: only defense industries emerged as targets for nationalization. Still, the status of the aircraft industry in the plans of the Popular Front remained sufficiently ambiguous to keep aircraft employers and workers confused about what to expect from the new Air Ministry.

Everyone understood, however, that something had to be done about the structural problems that had plagued the industry since the early 1930s. Private employers had failed to streamline the industry and modernize production or even to keep up with the modest ambitions of Plan I. The system of groupements had become thoroughly discredited as a form of industrial concentration. Little had been done to alter the habits of overpricing and uncompetitive contracting that government inspectors had exposed years before. With German rearmament well under way, Blum's government faced the urgent task of reinvigorating an industry that had previously defied the efforts of reformers. Nationalization appeared to men like Léon Blum and Pierre Cot as a suitable vehicle for reshaping the industry.

But if the industry's malaise, a history of state-run arms production, popular contempt for arms profiteering, and the electoral triumph of May made it relatively easy to nationalize major sectors of aviation, it was unclear to people in the summer of 1936 just how a nationalized aircraft industry would be structured, financed, supervised, and run. Nor could people predict what it would mean for labor relations, especially after June. By exposing the weakness of the employers' Chambre Syndicale, strengthening the unions, and dramatizing the pivotal role the Air Ministry had assumed in the industry, the June crisis increased the sense of uncertainty about how much power workers and militants might wield in a nationalized firm. After June it seemed inevitable that workers would

feel more confidence in asserting themselves, especially if nationalization created new opportunities to reform the workplace. State ownership, moreover, would give Cot and his new team in the Air Ministry more leverage with employers than government officials had enjoyed before. Thus, nationalization not only provided a way to reorganize the industry; it also opened up new possibilities for redistributing power and authority in a major industrial sector. The protracted process of carrying out the nationalizations, which continued through the fall of 1937, therefore perpetuated the struggle for power in the workplace that June '36 had begun.

Nationalizing the Aircraft Industry

Pierre Cot returned to the Air Ministry eager to give concrete form to the democratic, antifascist convictions of the Popular Front. He had hoped, apparently, for a different post in the government, probably in foreign affairs; but Edouard Daladier, Blum's minister of national defense, convinced him to apply his experience as air minister in 1933 and as president of the Chamber of Deputies Air Commission to the task of rejuvenating the air force. Cot gathered around him an aggressive team—General Philippe Féquant as his air force chief of staff; Colonel Henri Jauneaud as his military chef de cabinet, and Jean Moulin, the future resistance hero, as his civilian chef de cabinet —all men equipped to challenge convention.

Within weeks of moving into what journalist Alexander Werth described as the "dazzlingly modern" Air Ministry on the boulevard Victor, Cot's staff had launched a four-part reform program.^[4] First, to democratize aviation, they promoted an ambitious program of "popular aviation." In partnership with Léo Lagrange, the under secretary of state for sports and leisure, Cot created "popular aviation sections," where young people of modest means could learn to fly. Each local section had a directing council, which included a representative of the Air Ministry, a flying instructor, and a delegate of the CGT. Cot hoped this program would not only give a boost to the manufacturers of light aircraft but also diminish the influence of private aéro-clubs and the Fédération Aéronautique by creating a cadre of working-class pilots with sympathies for the Popular Front.^[5] Second, Cot sought to reorganize the air force. By restructuring the high command, he replaced senior officials with younger officers eager to implement his program. To overcome the limitations of Plan I, he developed Plan II to boost the air fleet to twenty-four hundred planes by June 1940. Cot's new production plans called for speedier, modernized fighters and more bombers to give the air force a larger strategic role.^[6] Third, Cot sought to strengthen military ties to Britain

and the Soviet Union. Since France had little chance of matching German aircraft rearmament in the short run, security depended, in Cot's view, on inter-Allied aerial cooperation.^[7] Finally, to overcome the crisis in aircraft production, Cot moved quickly after mid-June to nationalize major portions of the industry. Here lay the key to the entire program: if the industry failed to produce competitive aircraft in huge numbers, none of the other reforms could succeed.

Nationalization appealed to Cot as the most practical device for reorganizing the industry, though it was not the only one imaginable. The British, after all, had expanded their industry in part by enlisting automobile firms and other big companies in airplane production—the "shadow factory" scheme that some men in French aviation circles greatly admired. But given the difficulty Cot and other state officials had had in cajoling the airplane manufacturers to modernize on their own, it was hard to imagine enticing the even more independent automakers of France to play a major role in the volatile business of airplane production. Cot's immediate problem, moreover, was not the size but the inefficient structure of the aircraft industry. Another alternative to nationalization might have been an aggressive use of the decree law of 30 October 1935, which empowered the government to use its control over defense contracts to force firms to merge.^[8] But such a strategy, Cot felt, too closely resembled what air ministers had attempted with little success since 1928. Besides, the ministry budgets of the mid-1930s provided little leverage to reshape firms with incentives. "How could we reform the industry," Cot later wrote, "when we had so few credits? [Therefore] I took advantage of the law nationalizing the war industries."^[9] He argued that by expropriating a controlling interest in a large number of companies, the state could achieve directly what had eluded employers and Air Ministry officials for so long—the consolidation of firms into a few large enterprises, the location and expansion of factories in the provinces, the modernization of plant and equipment, and the creation of a sustained process of industrial mobilization. State officials could ensure that earnings would be invested rationally and that firms would collaborate in the national interest—sharing research, cooperating to meet orders, and even subdividing manufacturing tasks to hasten production.^[10] Cot hoped, too, that nationalization would diminish industry dependence on private bankers, who, as he told the Chamber of Deputies, were more interested in "the profit margin on the contract" than in "the development of special equipment that can allow us to increase production."^[11] Nationalization, in short, appealed to left-wing reformers like Cot and Blum because it finally gave state officials the power to do what businessmen, too wedded to short-term profits, had avoided—modernize the industry.

The June strikes had strengthened an additional motive for nationalization—the desire to reduce conflict in an industry where workers and technicians were becoming a cohesive, militant force. When Daladier advocated the nationalization bill before the Chamber of Deputies in August 1936, he pointed out that the strike wave of June had swelled not in state-run arsenals and repair shops but in private firms working for national defense—a phenomenon he contended "reinforced my convictions in favor of nationalization."^[12] Daladier and Cot thought that by regularizing production orders and standardizing managerial practices, state officials in a nationalized industry would establish what Stéphane Thouvenot, a young engineer in the Air Ministry, called "social and economic stability in the enterprise."^[13] Cot's first acts in office—mediating the June strikes, nullifying sanctions that had been imposed on Air Ministry employees who had taken part in past political demonstrations, and instituting the forty-hour week in the aircraft industry three months before it was required by law—revealed that he intended to be aggressive in replacing traditional labor practices with a more enlightened approach.^[14] He hoped, moreover, that by reorganizing the industry and enforcing a forty-hour week, he could eliminate the threat of layoffs that still hung like a cloud over the industry.^[15] For reformers like Cot, who wanted to blend a Jacobin vision of social reform with a technocratic drive for efficiency, nationalization offered an opportunity too promising to allow compromise with milder forms of intervention.

Once word surfaced that major portions of the aircraft industry were to be included in the bill proposed by the Blum government to nationalize arms production, a few supporters of the industry in parliament and the press combatted the plan. Georges Houard, the editor of Les Ailes, said nationalization would destroy the industry's competitive character, its creative spirit, and its access to foreign markets. "From the moment the law on nationalization is voted," he wrote, "French aviation will cease to be free. Aviation will be muzzled under the odious, ridiculous, and false pretext that the airplane is a weapon of war."^[16] Most opponents of nationalization, like Houard, defended a system of private firms that by maintaining a proper balance between commercial and military sales, exports and state orders, research and mass production, would best serve the national interest.^[17] The state, these critics said, already had enough influence in the industry to enforce reforms or reduce profits without "suffocating aviation with a sterilizing nationalization."^[18]

Although the protest was shrill, it failed to find much of an echo in the meeting rooms of the employers' Chambre Syndicale. As Cot told a parliamentary committee, "I don't believe I will encounter much resistance from industrialists. Most of them will accept it because they know they can't avoid it and they have a stake in being nationalized with a smile and

a future rather than with no smile and no future."^[19] Employers in fact were too weak and divided a group to oppose the policy. Their earlier failure to reform the industry and their demoralization over signing the collective contract in June had isolated them from business and parliamentary allies who under other circumstances might have rallied to their defense.^[20] Although Henry de l'Escaille, president of the Chambre Syndicale, had long hoped the aircraft industry would evolve like shipbuilding, where state engineers supervised closely but firms remained private, it was too late to rally people to this view. The Chambre Syndicale convened twice in July to discuss nationalization but failed to produce a consensus for either resisting or complying with Cot's plans.^[21] Practically speaking, the Chambre Syndicale left it to employers to negotiate with the Air Ministry on their own. Since many of the employers stood to gain from nationalization by receiving indemnities for their property, or in a few cases appointments to top posts in nationalized firms, there was little support for an open campaign against the policy.

Daladier's nationalization bill passed through parliament by a substantial majority. Since employers themselves failed to spearhead the opposition, and since most deputies of the center-left and center-right felt assured that the bill was a defense measure and not a wedge for further nationalizations, only the far right opposed the policy. The Senate, however, added two key constraints: the defense ministries had to complete the nationalizations by 31 March 1937, and they had to keep the total expenditures below a fixed ceiling. Cot had six months to take over firms and just 270 million francs, not the 400 million he had wanted, to buy out the owners.

Once authorized to expropriate firms, each of the three defense ministries marched in a different direction. The Naval Ministry chose to nationalize only two minor firms and left the shipbuilding industry intact. The War Ministry expropriated nine munitions firms, added them to the ranks of the existing state arsenals, and operated them as state-run firms. Cot's staff pursued yet a third strategy, reorganizing about 80 percent of the airframe sector into five "mixed companies," each with a regional identity—the Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautiques du Nord, or SNCAN; de l'Ouest, SNCAO; du Sud-ouest, SNCASO; du Sud-est, SNCASE; and du Centre, SNCAC. Each of these "national companies" absorbed most of the plants in its region but maintained at least one plant in Paris or its western suburbs. These firms were to be "mixed" in the sense that the government was to own two-thirds of the stock, with the other third staying in the hands of private investors.

This structure, modeled after Air France, appealed to Cot for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was cheaper: the Air Ministry could use its 270 million francs to purchase a greater number of firms than it could

have acquired had Cot chosen to turn nationalized firms into full-fledged government arsenals, as the War Ministry had chosen to do in the munitions sector. For another, mixed ownership provided a financial incentive for some of the leading airplane builders to remain invested in the industry. Cot and his staff were determined to keep Henry Potez, Marcel Bloch, and some of the other more dynamic young builders involved as leading figures in new nationalized companies. Engineering talent and industrial know-how were too scarce in France to lose these men and the design teams they had established. The Air Ministry did not have an engineering staff equipped to take over the industry directly. Partial ownership of nationalized firms provided one way to keep some of the manufacturers involved.

Furthermore, despite accusations by critics such as Houard, Cot was sensitive to the dangers of étatisation, of miring the industry in the pettiness and rigidity of a state bureaucracy. The mixed company, he said, would "give free play to new approaches and to the creative spirit . . . and at the same time safeguard the freedom of initiative, the stimulus to competition."^[22] By allowing these companies to continue to function under the law of 1867 on corporations, "their work," as Cot put it, "will have greater administrative subtlety and financial flexibility, and they will suffer less from red tape than they would if they were simply government offices. The workers will have their collective contracts as elsewhere, and the higher employees will be under individual contract."^[23] Under this scheme the state's stock ownership would give the Air and Finance ministries control over the boards of directors and the power to hire and fire top management, while within the companies managers and engineers would have the flexibility of private firms. Cot hoped the mixed company could offer the best of both world—the strategic coordination of a state-managed sector and the competitive drive of private enterprise.

The arrangement in fact worked perfectly as a way to keep several major industrialists at the head of the nationalized companies. Cot's chief negotiator with the owners, Fernand Hederer, first met regularly with Henry Potez, hoping that if the industry's most successful manufacturer could strike a deal with the Air Ministry, the rest would follow. Potez proved to be both receptive and shrewd, for by insisting on being paid immediately for his holdings, he alone among the builders managed to secure his indemnity before the currency devaluation of September 1936.^[24] Both he and Marcel Bloch were quick to recognize that nationalization was a windfall for them since as leading designers of military aircraft, they knew the Air Ministry was eager to bargain generously for their participation. In the Chambre Syndicale they urged their colleagues to cooperate with the policy of nationalization, and by December

1936 Cot had appointed Potez and Bloch as chief administrators of SNCAN and SNCAO respectively.^[25] To complete the appointment process, he also named Louis Aréne, the former director of Lioré et Oliver, to head SNCASE; Outhenin-Chalandre, the former director of Hanriot, to run SNCAC; and Marius Olive, the number-two man at Bréguet, to lead SNCAO. Henry de l'Escaille, the head of the Chambre Syndicale, was appointed president of the entire group of five firms. In the meantime several of the older pioneers in the industry, including Louis Bréguet, Robert Morane, and Raymond Saulnier, were passed over for directorships in the national companies. By consolidating the industry and bringing men like Potez and Bloch into the nationalized sector, Cot attempted, as he put it later, to "cut off the dead branches" of the industry.^[26] The generational distinction between the pioneers and the younger engineers that had for many years created subtle tensions in the Chambre Syndicale now found explicit expression in the contrast between the nationalized and private sectors.

Although nationalization certainly diminished the autonomy of the builders, it was a lucrative bargain for the men chosen to run the new national companies. Besides generous indemnities, they were assured an annual salary of three hundred thousand francs, and their firms were allowed to earn a 10 percent profit over production costs.^[27] Any additional profits would be plowed back into plant and equipment, a national fund to finance plant decentralization, and social programs for employees.^[28] Although directors would not enjoy immense personal profits, at least from mass-production contracts, they were paid handsomely and were spared the burden of risk since the state assumed more responsibility than before for covering payrolls, meeting cash demands, and raising capital for investment.^[29]

The best part of the bargain, however, concerned research. Cot had told parliament that he intended "to preserve complete freedom for research and initiative," which meant finding ways to keep the builders invested in prototype research. As one government official put it, "To nationalize buildings and machines was ultimately just a question of money; to nationalize brains posed a more delicate problem."^[30] By November 1936 negotiations between Air Ministry officials and company heads had produced three options.^[31] Employers could elect to have their research facilities incorporated into the national companies and receive indemnities accordingly. Several firms chose this option. Alternatively, employers could retain their facilities in private companies and sell prototypes to the state and other customers according to rules established in 1934. In practice such firms assumed the risks of developing a prototype, but if they sold it to the government, they could earn about 15 percent of the market value of every plane mass-produced from the model. The

directors of Morane-Saulnier, Amiot, Latécoère, Gourdou, Levasseur, and Caudron agreed to this option. A third arrangement emerged from negotiations with Potez and Bloch, whom as leading designers Cot was keen to please.

Under the terms of the Potez-Bloch Agreement their research facilities would remain private but would be leased to their national companies as long as they ran the latter; the state would have exclusive rights to the prototypes Bloch and Potez built but would pay them a fixed percentage for all the planes built from their prototypes, as well as a percentage of the market value of the planes that bore their trademark and were built by any of the national companies and state arsenals.^[32] Cot later placed a ceiling on this last figure of one million francs a year. Even so, Potez and Bloch stood to make a fortune. Indemnities for their landing fields, offices, and factories (estimated at 27.3 million francs for Bloch and 65 million for Potez); annual salaries for running SNCASO and SNCAN, the most favored of the five national companies; licensing fees for prototypes built before nationalization; a percentage of the sales value of all Bloch and Potez planes built by nationalized or state-run firms; not to mention the indirect benefits of state-financed capital for research—at this cost to the state it was little wonder that Bloch and Potez became enthusiastic supporters of nationalization.

The Potez-Bloch Agreement seemed so good, in fact, that it aroused criticism in parliament. Some members of the Senate Air Commission felt the Air Ministry had ceded too much to Bloch and Potez in return for too little control. Rumors circulated that Bloch and Potez not only enjoyed unhealthy influence in parliament but had even infiltrated the Air Ministry with agents of their own.^[33] Cot, however, defended the agreement as a way to keep the two builders invested in the industry. The Air Ministry had in fact offered the same arrangement to other builders, who refused it since no doubt as smaller operators they could make more money under the system adopted in 1934. The Potez-Bloch Agreement survived the controversy, at least through 1937, and Cot's Air Ministry proceeded to implement a nationalization plan that balanced centralized state coordination with profitable incentives for new research.

Alongside research, one other aspect of the industry posed a complicated challenge for Cot's program—motors. Although the airframe sector had been the principal target of reform, Cot was not satisfied to let the engine sector proceed on its own. To be sure, the five main firms building engines—Gnôme-et-Rhône, Hispano-Suiza, Renault, Salmson, and Lorraine—had avoided the structural fragmentation that plagued the airframe sector. They performed much more successfully in the world market, reporting six times the value of material sold during the first half of 1937 than did airframe manufacturers.^[34] But engine build-

ers showed signs of falling behind their foreign competitors and had lost favor in the Air Ministry for resisting plant decentralization. Though parliament had in effect precluded massive state takeovers in the engine sector by restricting Cot's indemnity budget—the stock of Gnôme-et-Rhnône alone was worth 231 million francs, or the lion's share of the nationalization budget—the Air Ministry still searched for ways to improve the performance of these firms.^[35]

In the spring of 1937 Cot took three steps toward that end. First, he used what money the Air Ministry had to acquire minority stock ownership in Gnôme-et-Rhône and Hispano-Suiza—by no means enough to wield decisive power on their boards, but enough to secure a board position each for the Air and Finance ministries. These state-appointed board members would at least have access to deliberations and make the operations of these firms more transparent to the state.^[36] Second, Cot tried, though largely in vain, to stimulate Hispano-Suiza to compete more directly with Gnôme-et-Rhône in the development of new air-cooled motors, for Gnôme-et-Rhône had come to enjoy a near monopoly over engine production for air force.^[37] Third, Cot decided in April 1937 to nationalize Lorraine, converting it into the Société Nationale de Construction des Moteurs (SNCM). Once again Potez and Bloch benefited directly, since they each owned a healthy share of Lorraine. As a strategy to improve the motor sector as a whole, the creation of SNCM was a dubious wager; Lorraine represented only 10 percent of the market in engines and had little to offer but a coterie of skilled workers and an aging engineering staff.^[38] Cot thought, however, that if he was in no position to nationalize the big firms—Gnôme-et-Rhône and Hispano-Suiza—he could at least try to make the industry more competitive with Lorraine.^[39] In fact, Cot's program did little to alter the structure of the engine sector or the autonomy of its major firms.

Thus, nationalization in 1936–37 had real limitations. It was restricted to 80 percent of the airframe sector, and it kept most prototype research in the private sector. Several major industrialists remained in charge at the national companies. The Air Ministry, by failing to nationalize much of the engine sector, remained as dependent as ever on men like Paul-Louis Weiller at Gnôme-et-Rhône who were openly hostile to more state intervention. Even so, nationalization had an enormous impact on the industry. After years of drift and fragmentation companies at last consolidated into a structure that, if it did not produce miracles overnight, at least paved the way for Air Ministry officials to distribute orders and invest in plant, equipment, and training with less regard for the commercial viability of small, inefficient firms. As we shall see, the full benefits of this structure only became apparent when the government finally committed itself financially to rearmament in 1938–39.

The impact of nationalization on the internal politics of the industry became apparent immediately. If the owners did well by indemnities, and if some of them retained positions of preeminence by running national companies, nationalization nonetheless shifted power away from employers into the corridors of the Air and Finance ministries. Both ministries now had representatives on the boards of the national companies, and their authority, combined with the votes of a CGT representative and the power of the Air Ministry to appoint the chief administrator of these firms, gave the government substantial control over them. What is more, Cot's reform program established three new agencies at the national level—the Office Français d'Exportation de Matériel Aéronautique (OFEMA), to promote and approve exports, a service that the Chambre Syndicale had officially provided; the Centre de Recherche, to serve as a clearinghouse for testing and research for the nationalized sector along the lines of the celebrated American National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; and the Coordinating Committee, bringing together key officials from the Air and Finance ministries, the national companies, and the CGT to standardize managerial practices and propose methods of distributing orders, material and manpower in the nationalized sector.^[40] A new division of labor was emerging, at least in the airframe sector, in which state officials took more direct responsibility than before for personnel policy, the organization of production, investment strategy, and the hiring and firing of top management.^[41] Although employers still enjoyed a degree of autonomy in the nationalized sector, there was no denying that the political realities of nationalization, especially under the auspices of a Popular Front government, had diminished the authority of the builders. This shift gave workers a chance to fight for more of a voice in the industry.

Workers' Aspirations

Workers did not sit by idly while Pierre Cot and the moguls of aviation negotiated indemnities, directorships, and the Potez-Bloch Agreement. On the contrary, aircraft militants met several times with Cot and his staff in hopes of having a say over policy. The CGT, after all, had lobbied for nationalization in June 1936 and thought state expropriation by a left-wing government would give militants new power in the industry. By November, however, optimism had given way to frustration. Not only did militants feel isolated from the decisions being made at the Air Ministry; the complicated business of drawing up inventories and creating the new national companies disrupted production, making workers fearful of possible layoffs. To make matters worse, by the fall of 1936 a 10 percent rise in the cost of living had largely devoured the wage gains of

June. Workers in the Paris region also worried about what would happen if Cot really shifted production (and jobs) to the provinces. The CGT militant Robert Doury wrote in the labor press that although workers had welcomed nationalization with "deep satisfaction, great anxiety [now] reigns in [their] minds" since the unions were "insufficiently informed to give useful details" on reforms. "Several delegations often came to nothing," he said, "and the anticipated decentralization, by forcing layoffs, deepens the anxiety still more."^[42] On 8 October 1936 a delegation of workers and technicians met with Cot to express their anger that men such as Olive, Potez, and Bloch had been chosen as factory directors. "The interview ended," a technician later wrote, "after a few appeasing words from the minister and the granting of one labor representative on the boards of directors [of the national companies]."^[43] Trade union patience with the pace of reform and with the exclusion of labor from the politics of nationalization was wearing thin.

By December police informants found impatience growing at the factory level as well. In construction shops at Orly discontent over Cot's policy had become so acute that the CGT leadership "made contact with factory delegates . . . in order to appease the agitation that is threatening." Workers there were astonished that "Wibault, Olive, Potez, de l'Escaille, Outhenin-Chalandre, and Bloch, 'genuine reactionaries, friends of Tardieu, Daudet, Dentin, Laval, etc., . . .' were asked to direct an experiment that ought to have excluded them, while the CGT was still waiting to be asked for advice, even on technical matters."^[44] Two other matters troubled these workers: the ministry's "decentralization of the aircraft industry according to the bosses' point of view, which has the effect of exposing militants to employer repression," and the possibility that the hard-won forty-hour week might be sabotaged in the process. Workers at Orly were by no means alone: reports of agitation came in from Marseille, Bourges, and La Courneuve, where workers (and sometimes technicians) expressed anger over falling real wages, yellow unions, and Cot's effort to entice leading employers into the new firms.^[45]

Employee discontent made it clear to Cot and the CGT leadership, if it had not been clear before, that they had to settle on some form of worker representation in the management structure of the nationalized sector. If men such as Potez and Bloch were still going to run factories, nationalization would mean something positive to workers only if they had influence on company boards and at the Air Ministry. This interest in worker representation was hardly novel. It drew on a long-standing demand for contrôle ouvrier —the workers' right to oversee, review, or scrutinize management—that resonated deeply within several competing traditions in the French labor movement. Trade union moderates, such as Léon Jouhaux, Léon Chevalme, or aircraft workers in local So-

cialist groups viewed contrôle ouvrier pragmatically as participation in committees that gave employees a voice at all levels of the industrial hierarchy. This perspective derived in part from experience during the First World War, when Albert Thomas, the Socialist armaments minister, introduced a shop steward system and a network of labor-management committees into munitions plants, an approach the CGT expanded on in its Minimum Program of 1918. Contrôle ouvrier also harked back to the revolutionary syndicalist origins of the French labor movement in the late nineteenth century, with its artisanal vision of worker-run enterprises as the key not only to democratizing an industrial society but to modernizing its economy as well. Although revolutionary syndicalism had by the 1930s become but a tiny faction in the labor movement, and contrôle ouvrier had come to mean scrutiny rather than outright control, syndicalist militants such as Pierre Monatte and Maurice Chambelland, writing in La Révolution prolétarienne, still struck an important chord in the minds of working-class radicals when they urged workers to use the shop steward system introduced by the collective agreements of June 1936 to acquire greater control over production and greater autonomy from both management and the unions.^[46] Even Communist militants, who since the early 1920s had viewed contrôle ouvrier suspiciously as a syndicalist diversion from party-led class struggle, could ill afford to ignore the popularity of that notion in the ranks of skilled metalworkers. Now that a left-wing government had restored a shop steward system and had supported in principle more extensive forms of representation in the nationalized sector, CGT militants and rank-and-file workers alike wanted to explore how much genuine power worker delegates could acquire over wages, hours, holidays, and work organization—the issues that mattered most to workers.

The most radical statement of what contrôle ouvrier could mean in the aircraft industry came, interestingly enough, from the new union of aircraft technicians. The Fédération des Techniciens and its aviation section, USTA, were part of the CGT, but as a dynamic new union made up of technicians and white-collar employees, it was more independent and potentially more radical ideologically than the older Fédération des Métaux. Some of its leaders were left-wing revolutionaries outside the Communist Party. In 1937 the union published a pamphlet that viewed "worker and technician control" as the centerpiece of reform in the nationalized sector: "It is not enough for the State simply to purchase factories. . . . The Federation demands above all: worker control over management by all the personnel of the nationalized factories, through the mediation of delegates elected and recallable by the personnel."^[47] Without workers' control, the union contended, "nationalizations will amount to no more than government financial control covering one great bluff

of expertise." The union even had doubts about Cot's efforts to consolidate an industry into regional companies, rationalize production, and give employees a chance to share profits:

Some people in the government and the CGT think ententes may be a progressive stage toward further socialization of production. We think not. There is a danger of co-optation. Ententes will evolve toward greater conservatism . . . [and] divide workers into one group of more-satisfied members and another group of outcasts. The threat of a schism in the proletariat, with the "embourgeoisement" of one faction, constitutes an undeniable social danger.

To counteract these dangers, the union called for an expansion of the role of delegates, union control over rationalization, and a national labor agreement to address the problems created by decentralization and unstable employment. If workers and technicians had been inclined to give Cot the benefit of the doubt in the summer of 1936, the tone of this pamphlet and the anger that militants expressed over negotiations in the fall of 1936 suggest that labor leaders had ceased to take his commitment to labor reform for granted.

As soon as Cot had completed his negotiations with employers in early 1937, he tried to placate labor. On 15 February he met with Léon Jouhaux and Benoît Frachon, respectively the top moderate and top Communist in the CGT, along with Robert Doury of the Fédération des Métaux, to agree on four levels of representation in the national companies. First, the CGT would appoint two representatives to the Coordination Committee of the SNCAs—one in behalf of workers, the other in behalf of technicians and cadres. Second, the CGT would appoint one representative to the board of each of the national companies. The union members who filled these posts were not necessarily to be aircraft militants since they would be appointed to represent the broad interests of the state rather than the partisan concerns of employees. Third, each national company would have a factory advisory committee composed of the chefs de service, appointed by management, plus two worker representatives and one representative for white-collar employees chosen by shop stewards. "This committee," Cot wrote, "will examine matters of work organization, output, and the coordination of efforts for the proper functioning of the factory." Its role was to be "strictly advisory," leaving management in command.^[48] Finally, shop stewards elected directly by employees would continue to perform the duties prescribed in the collective contract of June 1936—representing individual workers, investigating grievances, and addressing problems in hygiene, safety, work discipline, and wages.

If Cot and the CGT leadership struck a quick bargain to implement

this four-tiered structure of representation, it by no means followed that they shared the same vision of labor participation in the management of nationalized firms. The CGT saw participation in avowedly partisan terms as a way to promote the interests of labor over capital. Cot, however, took a more moderate stance, no doubt reflecting his desire to make concessions to labor without alienating the employers he had worked hard to conciliate. In a speech to the personnel at SNCAO in Bouguenais on 20 July 1937 he justified labor participation in pragmatic, almost managerial, terms: "Authority is not dictatorship. In a sensible country such as ours, it must be earned, not imposed. It is good that the world of labor knows that nothing will be decided by the board of directors without those in whom they have placed their confidence having a say, having their voices heard, and participating in the decision." Cot went on to argue that "CGT members of the board of directors will not come to support worker demands; that is the role of shop stewards. The role of board members is . . . to direct the firm in the name of the state, which had mandated them to defend the general interest." Just as progressive managers might direct the firm in a fashion that transcends the narrow interests of investors, so too, cot suggested, labor representatives on the board should look beyond the immediate needs of fellow workers: "I expect much more from this collaboration than a readiness to resolve future conflicts between employers and employees. I believe it can help train new leaders our society needs. The great lesson of history is that an elite that cannot continually renew and rejuvenate itself falls sick and dies." In short, Cot viewed labor participation not as worker's control but as a way to mollify potential conflict and imbue workers with a sense of responsibility to "the state" and "the general interest."^[49]

If a reformer as sympathetic to labor as Pierre Cot was still ambivalent about contrôle ouvrier, the experiment in labor representation in the nationalized sector was bound to frustrate workers who saw it as a potential source of power in the workplace. The Coordinating Committee for the national companies quickly triggered just this kind of discontent. According to one report, the two employee representatives on the committee found "it was impossible for them to play an effective role."^[50] The committee, after all, was made up mainly of state and management officials. Chronic tensions within the committee, moreover, inspired Cot to circumvent it altogether. Gilles Warnier de Wailly, the Finance Ministry's man on the committee, later reported that after one particularly rancorous session over a hiring issue, Cot began replacing committee meetings with official meetings in his own offices, "from which the CGT representatives were excluded."^[51] The experiment with labor participation suffered accordingly.

Likewise, CGT representatives on the boards of the national companies had little impact on management. One labor leader joined each

board in the spring of 1937, when the stock capitalization for the firms expanded and the boards were enlarged. Their presence meant a great deal symbolically for a labor movement long denied legitimacy in France, to say nothing of access to the corporate board room. Subsequent board discussions on labor issues no doubt differed from those that had taken place in the private aircraft companies before 1936, and administrators obviously felt the political weight of labor as never before. The labor representative was, after all, one of among only five or six directors of the firm.^[52] But there is no evidence, either from the testimony of officials or from discussions in the labor press, that labor representation brought much of a change in the way these boards worked or in the choices they made. The role of labor was still too modest to be decisive. The question of how militants should use their board positions never surfaced in the metalworking press.^[53]

Board participation aroused little controversy; not so the factory advisory committees. On 14 October 1937 the Air Ministry called for each national company to hold committee elections. When some employers balked at this request, ministry officials urged Henry de l'Escaille, the president of the SNCAs, to expedite the elections. André Labarthe, Cot's chief of staff, told de l'Escaille that the committees "will be . . . a very effective aid for management," which, as Cot pointed out, had improved production in the tobacco and railroad industries and in government ministries.^[54] The relevant parliamentary commissions, moreover, had endorsed them, and the Air Ministry planned "to bring the newly elected delegates to Paris to give them details on the missions we will ask them to accomplish." De l'Escaille finally cooperated by sending instructions to the companies, but then the real trouble began. Outhenin-Chalandre, the head of the SNCAC, refused to post the election announcement for his workers since he viewed the factory advisory committees as a soviet and Cot's man, Labarthe, as a radical renegade. To fight what he felt was a subversion of managerial authority, Outhenin-Chalandre went straight to Premier Camille Chautemps, demanding that the election be barred. Chautemps concurred. Thereafter Cot felt compelled to make the creation of factory advisory committees more a matter of managerial initiative than of ministerial policy.^[55]

Though formal mechanisms for worker participation—the Coordinating Committee for the SNCAs, board memberships, and the factory advisory committees—failed in practice to give labor much of a meaningful voice in the industry, nationalization did produce informal channels through which workers could exercise power. Because managers in the nationalized sector were ultimately accountable to the Air Ministry, and because the Air Ministry had both an economic and a political interest in maintaining working-class loyalty, company officials could not afford to ignore, much less harass, CGT militants in their factories. As a result,

local militants continued to exercise, and even enhance, the influence they had won since May 1936. The shop steward system enabled CGT members to solidify their position within plants by strengthening communication between employees and the union local. In factories where it was not just the workers who joined the union but also technicians, clerical staff, and even foremen, contrôle ouvrier became something of a reality. Managers found that they had to consult shop floor delegates on a regular basis. By April 1937 CGT influence over hiring in a number of plants became strong enough to inspire officials at the metalworking employers organization for the Paris region, the Groupe des Industries Métallurgiques et Mécaniques (GIMM), to warn their brethren in the aircraft industry against losing authority over personnel decisions.^[56]

What gave militants even greater influence than they otherwise could have claimed was the open door they enjoyed at the Air Ministry. Cot may have retreated from his commitment to the Coordinating Committee and the factory advisory committees, but he nonetheless remained willing to meet with militants. Since the Air Ministry took an interest in keeping conflicts from getting out of hand and labor militants hoped to win ministry support for local demands, these conversations became a common occurrence and often angered employers.^[57]

Among the things that pleased workers and disturbed employers was Cot's willingness to get involved in factory disputes. At the SNCAO plant in Bouguenais, for example, union members notified management and the Air Ministry that they wanted action on a number of issues ranging from wage rates and medical problems to the rehiring of a militant, "Comrade Salaud." Two days later the Air Ministry gave a detailed response, supporting some demands, rejecting others. As for Salaud, "the Minister has decided that [he] will be rehired at the factory with a new one-month trial contract. After that, the Minister will be informed again on the matter and will decide the case of M. Salaud definitively."^[58] A ministry willing to embroil itself in managerial details and give a sympathetic hearing to labor encouraged workers to value the informal access of the union to the ministries.

The importance of the political link between local labor organizations and the Air Ministry became all the more clear at Bouguenais four months later when Cot visited the factory to make a speech. He took time that day to meet separately with shop floor delegates, and when he returned to Paris, he ordered de l'Escaille to replace the plant director, M. de Broe, with his assistant, M. Cheveaux. No records remain to reveal just what was said in Cot's meeting with workers nor what grounds Cot may have had for dismissing de Broe. But employers in the industry viewed the incident as evidence of the power labor militants had acquired. Marius Olive, the head of SNCAO, interpreted the affair in political terms:

The official reason [for the dismissal] given at the time was that the existence of a director and assistant director was useless and that one would be sufficient. In reality, the dismissal of M. de Broe, who was very competent, was decided by the Minister because, although [de Broe] was not involved in politics, he was not, it seemed, favorable to the Popular Front. The workers demanded his dismissal and found advocates in the entourage of the Minister, namely, M. Hederer, M. Moulin, the chief of the civilian cabinet, and M. Labarthe. . . . M. Cheveaux has a Popular Front reputation and is very closely tied to Popular Front parliamentarians from the Loire-Inférieure.^[59]

However accurate Olive's reading of the events may have been, he certainly testified to the politicization of perceptions in a period when workers began to have influence, albeit modest, over decisions in the industry.

Thus, despite the limitations of the experiment in formal representation, the informal influence workers acquired in the nationalized sector gave workers a tangible stake in the policy. Leverage through the ministry brought militants prestige on the factory floor. One Air Ministry inspector reported with alarm in early 1938 that CGT shop stewards had virtually supplanted the foremen at SNCASO as authority figures on the shop floor—a degree of authority that "exceeds many of the prerogatives that [shop stewards] can claim in the collective contract [of June 1936]."^[60] Even the board seats and committees, which produced little real power for workers, still represented an important milestone for labor since these posts gave the CGT greater legitimacy. Moreover, the procedures for appointing representatives implicitly recognized the CGT as the sole spokesman for labor. Factory advisory committees and Air Ministry support for shop stewards implicitly endorsed the notion that union locals were worthy partners in running the industry.

In fact CGT leaders felt considerable pressure to avoid appearing too comfortable sitting at the green felt tables of the industry. Henri Jourdain, the aircraft workers' chief spokesman within the CGT, was careful to avoid shaking hands with employers at committee meetings for fear a newspaper photographer might catch him in a symbolic act of "class collaboration." He steadfastly refused Potez's offers to use a company airplane to visit aircraft factories in the provinces or to use fancy company cars when he got there.^[61] Just as nationalization was a policy ambiguously suspended between preserving and challenging traditional managerial authority, so too did militants find themselves awkwardly poised between repudiating and assimilating into a management culture.

The dangers of co-optation, however, paled in comparison to the benefits the CGT accumulated in the process. For nearly two decades since 1918 the French labor movement had scarcely been able to challenge the monopoly of power employers had enjoyed in the workplace. By the

early 1930s virtually nothing had survived from the legacy of labor participation on industrial boards during the First World War apart from the CGT's involvement since 1924 on the advisory panel, the Conseil National Economique. But with June '36, Blum's labor legislation, and the experiment in nationalizing the aircraft industry, a transformation had occurred in industrial relations. By the end of 1937, despite labor's skirmishes with Cot, nationalization had given the CGT a visible presence in the management structure of the industry. Most important, this victory lent the union prestige on the shop floor.

Conflict and Solidarity in the Work Force

Nationalization enhanced the capacity of workers to act collectively by giving them an opportunity to assert themselves in ministries, on company boards, and in the plant level politics of the industry—an opportunity that encouraged them to remain mobilized politically long after the intoxication of June '36 had worn off. To be sure, a certain degree of political demobilization after the strike wave was inevitable, as daily routines restored a sense of inertia to working-class life. What is more, when the Blum government floundered over fiscal policy and eventually fell in June 1937, it became harder for workers to assume the risks of collective action optimistically. Even so, aircraft workers remained highly politicized through 1938, in part because as defense workers, their work was closely tied to military and foreign policy, and in part because nationalization kept them actively involved in controversy over how to run the new national companies. Under these circumstances aircraft employees maintained a greater degree of solidarity—across regions, occupations, and political affiliations—than would otherwise have been the case.

To appreciate the positive effects that nationalization and an identification with the cause of the Popular Front had on employee solidarity, consider first the sources of fragmentation within the work force in aviation that kept employees at odds with one another in 1936 and 1937. Not least was Cot's effort to shift production to the provinces. No aspect of industrial reform met with greater success from the point of view of the Air Ministry than the policy of decentralization away from Paris. By 1938 the provincial portion of the airframe sector had grown to 60 percent, up from 40 percent in 1935.^[62] Although the engine companies still clung stubbornly to the Paris region, most of the expansion in the airframe sector between 1935 and 1940 took place in the center, west, and southwest of the country. Of course, nationalization enabled the Air Ministry to decentralize firms directly, and with financial support from the Caisse de Compensation pour la Décentralisation national companies and a few private firms either expanded their operations in Bourges, Toulouse,

Marseille, Bordeaux, Saint-Nazaire, and Nantes or built new plants in such southwestern towns as Figeac, Bidos, and Tarbes.^[63] The most spectacular expansion into the provinces would not come until the late 1930s, but the process advanced well enough in 1937 to make it a major concern for the unions.

Labor leaders in Paris viewed decentralization as an attack on working-class militancy. They accused employers and state officials of trying not simply to reduce the industry's vulnerability to German bombardment but also to break the power of Parisian unions and take advantage of cheaper wages in the provinces.^[64] Although aircraft militants had criticized the policy along these lines since the early 1930s, it was only with Cot and nationalization, ironically, that decentralization emerged as a serious threat to Parisian employees. The prospect of a transfer to the provinces felt like an assault on an employee's most basic attachments. "What do we think our comrades are to do," one militant wrote, "who have bled themselves for all their working lives to buy a patch of land so they can have a modest house built there for their old age, often making long commitments to lenders as rapacious as they are inhumane? Are white- or even gray-haired workers obligated to transplant themselves into a region where they will have to change . . . their costumes, mores, and ways of living and eating?"^[65]

The conversion of the Hanriot plant at Bourges into a national company demonstrated how disruptive the process of decentralization could be for workers. When Air Ministry officials created SNCAC by consolidating Hanriot and Farman in the fall of 1936, they decided to close the Farman plant in Billancourt and send several hundred employees to Bourges in what was the largest set of transfers in the industry. The state financed the move, giving workers up to a year's extra pay to help cover expenses and entice them to give up the metropolis. Management took ample advantage of the situation, inviting only the most skilled and cooperative employees to Bourges. Many refused to go; according to one account, about half the engineers invited to Bourges actually moved there, and only about 20 percent of the workers.^[66] Young employees were less likely than their older, married counterparts to leave Paris. As tough as it was to pass up an enviable job, many workers and technicians preferred that decision to the personal upheaval a new life in Bourges might entail.

Assimilation into the local metalworking culture was no simple task. As Maurice Le Mistre, a former supervisor at the Bourges plant, recalled, "Parisian workers had a different mentality. They enjoyed restaurants and the cinema and were used to paying Paris prices. Provincial workers had gardens and went fishing. Parisians worked faster; provincials worked well, but more slowly." With this difference in mind, some

foremen mixed Parisian and local workers together in work teams so that the latter would learn to pick up the pace—a clever effort to get local workers to adopt Parisian work rhythms at provincial wages. If in the long run mixed work teams hastened the assimilation of newcomers into the shop culture at Bourges, its immediate effect was to undermine camaraderie in the shops. Nor was it easy to overcome differences between Parisians and provincials outside the plant. Le Mistre's wife, for example, found Bourges dreary and hostile, especially since local residents often blamed these newcomers for the rise in local prices. "She was born in Paris," Le Mistre said, as if that spoke worlds. "It took a long time to make friends. We were lucky to have a car to make weekend drives back to Paris."^[67] In short, it took time for Parisians and provincials to establish the bonds of familiarity that solidarity required.

Decentralization damaged labor unity in another way: it made national unions more vulnerable to geographical tensions, especially tensions between Paris and the provinces. The policy of expanding the aircraft industry in the provinces divided militants since provincial employees stood to gain from the growth that their Parisian counterparts abhorred. It was difficult for national labor federations to attack the policy openly without compromising militants in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and other cities—militants who at some level resented the Parisian orientation of the national union. Indeed, the Fédération des Métaux (FTM) was very much a product of Paris. It was dominated by Communist militants who depended heavily for their political strength on the city's working-class neighborhoods and its red-belt suburbs. When union delegates from forty-six aircraft factories met in March 1937 to create the National Aircraft Section, they established an executive committee markedly Parisian in composition.^[68] Yet given the commitment of the government to decentralization, the future of the union clearly lay in the provinces. Until provincial militants had more of a voice in the national FTM, and until the Parisian leadership of the union became more sensitive to the unique features of trade union life in particular regions, it would remain difficult to build solidarity across regions. To be sure, the most active militants kept abreast of events throughout the country, as did two leaders at SNCAO in Nantes, for example, who, police said, followed avidly the struggle to create a sixth national company (SNCAM) in Toulouse.^[69] But the regional pride Toulousian workers took in SNCAM, the strong links aircraft workers in Nantes and Saint-Nazaire had with their comrades in shipbuilding, the problems militants faced in forming new unions in isolated towns such as Tarbes and Châteauroux, and the subtle antagonism Parisian newcomers felt in Bourges all pulled militants in different directions and made the challenge of national coordination that much greater.

Just as decentralization presented militants with new opportunities and new problems, so too did the emergence of technicians unions. Before 1936 technicians had been at the mercy of their employers and had shown little sign of following the CGT. But after the sit-down strikes of June '36 technician unions, especially in Parisian aircraft plants, became sizable, stable, and surprisingly radical. The union statutes called for "tightening the lines of solidarity and uniting all employees into a single bloc to struggle against employers' exploitation and liberate work through the socialization of the means of production to the exclusive benefit of the producers of national wealth."^[70] Like metalworking militants, aircraft technicians demanded not only wage hikes but also contrôle ouvrier and a say in hiring.^[71] Indeed, it was technician militants who criticized most harshly the limits of Cot's reforms.^[72] Although not every member of the technicians union may have been committed to a radical vision of workers' control or a socialized economy, many of the designers, draftsmen, and supervisors who came to union meetings by the hundreds were willing to identify with the workers' movement.

Leaders of the technicians union (USTA) viewed links to workers unions as crucial to the success of the union. Raymond Thomas, general secretary of the USTA, urged members "to teach [their fellow technicians and office employees] that the achievements [of June '36] were won with patience, discipline, and solidarity; to show them that they too are capable of it and that from a unity with workers they can do better; to teach them to get to know each other first and then their laboring companions."^[73] National leaders of USTA instructed militants to link up with workers through sports committees and special administrative committees composed of a technician, an office employee, a foreman, and two workers designated by the workers union. In fact, local militants made real efforts to build a trade union culture that cut across the class divisions between blue-collar and white-collar workers. Union leaders at the Bloch plant in Courbevoie hosted a "festival for the trade union unity of workers, technicians, and office employees" out at the lake in Vigneux, where bicycle races, a fishing contest, games for the children, and a picnic gave people a chance to get better acquainted.^[74] Bridging these occupational gaps was easier said than done, of course. Yet in an industry where technicians made up a substantial portion of the work force and, at least in prototype shops, interacted directly with workers, the mere creation of a viable union committed to radical principles and eager to ally with workers was a giant step in promoting employee solidarity.

Despite this achievement, collaboration between technicians and workers was by no means assured. For one thing, the technicians union was still too young and vulnerable an institution to function as an equal partner with metalworkers unions. Some employers, moreover, battled

fiercely against the technicians union by promoting the rival Syndicat des Cadres de l'Industrie Aéronautique, a white-collar organization that opposed the CGT and came close to serving as a company union.^[75] Although this organization had limited appeal, drawing support mainly from office employees, it competed vigorously with the CGT for the loyalty of aircraft technicians. In a few plants, such as Renault-Caudron, Lorraine, and SNCASE at Argenteuil, Syndicats Professionnels also had a small presence.^[76] These right-wing, protofascist organizations made little progress in the aircraft industry. But like the Syndicat des Cadres, they made life more difficult for CGT militants trying to recruit engineers and low-level administrative personnel into the Fédération des Techniciens.

Moreover, the technicians union had its share of political problems at the national level. A battle raged within the CGT over whether technician unions should be organized into a separate Fédération des Techniciens or affiliated with the workers unions of their industries, which in the case of aviation meant the FTM. At issue was a principle—whether white-collar unions should be autonomous or integrated into worker unions—as well as politics. A number of the leaders of the inchoate Fédération des Techniciens were non-Communist left-wing radicals who opposed the PCF orientation of the big industrial unions. By April 1937 USTA opted to affiliate officially with the FTM, and in fact many technicians were probably more comfortable with the conventional trade union politics of the FTM than with the left-wing fringe image of the other federation. Competition, however, continued to fester between the two federations: the Fédération des Techniciens chose not to abandon its organizing efforts in the industry and even went so far as to attempt its own contract talks with the Air Ministry after USTA had affiliated with the FTM.^[77] Squabbles of this sort made it that much more difficult for blue-collar and white-collar employees to overcome obstacles to collaboration that class and occupational differences had engendered.

In addition to tensions between Paris and the provinces and between technicians and workers, a third kind of conflict remained an impediment to employee solidarity: the rivalry between Socialists and Communists. Just as factionalism weakened the cohesiveness of the Popular Front nationally, so too the competing political loyalties of local militants often surfaced as a source of disharmony in local unions. For the most part, aircraft unions conformed to the general pattern of metalworking, where in their rivalry with ex-confédéré moderates ex-unitaire militants, who were usually Communists or fellow travelers, managed by the fall of 1936 to take control of the FTM.^[78] Figures for the Gnôme-et-Rhône factory on the avenue Kellermann in Paris typified the trend: at the beginning of 1936 there were 170 unitaires and eighty confédérés; in

November 650 workers voted for ex-unitaire delegates to the federation congress, whereas only 130 voted for ex-confédérés delegates.^[79] In the aircraft industry, as in other metalworking branches, ex-unitaire militants, with their prior foothold in the industry, their centralized organizational structure, and their willingness to link factory issues to national politics, proved better equipped than their rivals to recruit the workers who rushed into unions in the summer of 1936.^[80] Close links between ex-unitaire leaders at the national level and the PCF, combined with the efforts of local militants to strengthen factory cells, gave trade unionism in the aircraft industry a Communist orientation. And this pattern endured: at the last CGT congress before the war, held in Nantes in November 1938, all the delegates from the aircraft industry, apart from those sent by the aircraft technicians union of the Paris region, voted on the ex-unitaire side of the issues that most divided the congress.^[81]

But PCF influence had its limits. From the few glimpses of party cells that police reports provide, it is apparent that only a minority of union members joined the party. Some of the most active union militants preferred to stay clear of the party and devote themselves strictly to the CGT, albeit with loyalty to the ex-unitaire leadership of the union. Likewise, local Communist militants sometimes had to play down their party connections—as in Bourges, for example, where an aircraft militant opened a meeting by saying, "First of all, we have to point out that this meeting is strictly a union affair and that our comrade Gatignon in no way speaks here in the name of the Communist Party—which had nothing to do with this—but rather [he speaks] in the same capacity as anyone who participates in the discussion, as a worker at the airport."^[82] In this respect PCF influence in the political culture of the shop floor came less through the direct channel of the factory cell than through party influence within the FTM hierarchy.

It was in this context of overwhelming ex-unitaire dominance and indirect Communist control, not just in aviation but in many branches of French industry, that the Socialist Party (SFIO) launched an effort to organize support at the workplace. In September 1936 party leaders created Amicales Socialistes d'Entreprise to compete with Communist cells in several major factories, offices, and department stores in the Paris region—including the plants of Blériot and Gnôme-et-Rhône. By 1937 they had set up amicales in nineteen industrial and commercial branches of the economy all over France. This initiative marked a fundamental departure for the SFIO, which since 1905 had stuck firmly to the principle of separating party organization from the workplace apparatus of the CGT. The decline of the Communist Party from 1921 to 1934 had long convinced Socialists that the PCF erred in contradicting the Amiens principle by building factory cells alongside union locals. From the early

1930s to 1936 Socialists looked to planning, rationalization, and state intervention—not to political mobilization in the workplace—as the most promising vehicles for change. But the success of ex-unitaire militants during the summer of 1936 forced them to reconsider the workplace as a pivotal arena of combat.^[83] After sixteen years of criticizing Communists for blending party politics and trade unionism, Socialists set out on the paradoxical course of creating amicales in the image of the very Communist cells they had long condemned.

The aircraft industry looked like promising ground for cultivating Amicales Socialistes, especially in Paris and Toulouse. These two cities provided the two conditions that appeared necessary for these organizations to take root—a well-developed Communist presence against which Socialists could organize disillusioned or anti-Communist workers, and a large local Socialist Party to provide support.^[84] Police informants estimated that on 29 July 1937, 130 technicians and workers attended an aircraft amicale meeting in Billancourt, as did another fifty at Courbevoie the same evening.^[85] Though such figures paled in comparison with those of Communist supporters, they indicated that the Amicales Socialistes had a noticeable following.

In Toulouse, where the SFIO was particularly strong, Socialist workers in aviation fared even better, building up an "action committee," a Socialist education group, and a Socialist sports club for aircraft workers. By November police were reporting that as many as 450 to 600 workers had affiliated with these Socialist groups in Toulouse.^[86] In a city with close to two thousand aircraft workers these were impressive numbers indeed. By November, as well, Socialists could claim not only a sizable turnout at their meetings and a readership of 350 for Syndicats, René Belin's new Socialist-oriented labor newspaper; they also had won almost half the posts in the metalworkers local, where they attacked one of the leading Communists in the Toulouse aircraft industry for allegedly embezzling funds. Nor did their organizing drive stop there. The Socialist group at the largest aircraft company in the city authorized young members "to form a group of Young Socialists at the factory to respond to the already-existing group of Young Communists."^[87] No one seemed to blanch at this effort to mimic Communist strategies that only a year and a half earlier the SFIO had condemned.

The headway Socialists made in Toulouse suggests that in late 1937 Communist control of the union was by no means a foregone conclusion. Socialist militants perceived that their Communist rivals were vulnerable to criticism, and they spared no chance to exploit it. Their accusations against leading local militants allowed Socialists to imply that Communists had become too entrenched to serve workers effectively. Significantly, local Socialists also portrayed themselves as more seriously com-

mitted to the policy of nationalization. In November 1937 René Desbais, secretary of the Toulouse section of the SFIO, published a lengthy statement in Le Midi socialiste on the state of affairs in aviation, in which he reminded his readers that in 1936 it was the Socialists who had wanted to strengthen the nationalization measures in the Popular Front program. "Other organizations," by which Desbais meant the Radical and Communist parties, "did not believe they ought to vote for these measures, however common, of the Socialist Party and the CGT, and hence they have helped to prevent the first government of the Popular Front from having the means of muzzling the banks and taking the financiers of this country by the throat."^[88] Socialists also reminded workers of a more troubling failing of the Communist party—the Moscow connection. In December 1937 Socialists handed out tracts on the famous Zinoviev telegram, the directive from the Third International ordering Communists in 1920 to split from their Socialist colleagues.^[89] This reminder of the schism of 1920, published and distributed by the central committee of the Socialist Party, called attention to the foreign character of the PCF. So did Achiari, a local Socialist, who lectured a group of Socialist aircraft workers in late November on the unity of 1905, the rupture of 1920, and the alleged effort of the PCF to impose the slogans of the Communist International on the union under orders from Moscow. "The Socialist Party," Achiari concluded, "had not decided to let the moscoutaires lull it to sleep."^[90]

Talk of this sort had a certain appeal, but not enough to give Socialist militants the upper hand locally. After all, Socialists had vulnerabilities of their own. The more they tried to win supporters by attacking the Communists, the more exposed they became to the charge that they were dividing labor. More troubling still, the effort to create parallel organizations in the factories to compete with Communists—the groups, clubs, and youth associations—not only contradicted official claims that the SFIO still fervently believed in separating trade union activity from politics; it also implicitly endorsed the long-standing Communist practice of blending union and party through a network of factory cells. Socialists found themselves in an ideological bind; they could not compete effectively against Communists without violating their own principles. This difficulty made it all the more tempting to stress the one issue that distinguished Communists from Socialists most readily—subservience to the Third International.

Socialists faced a political bind as well. They enjoyed greater access to government officials than did Communists, especially to Pierre Cot and to Blum's finance minister, Vincent Auriol, who figured prominently in the aircraft industry in Toulouse. René Desbais was quick to tell workers in November 1937 that it was a Socialist, not a Communist, delegation

that met with Cot over local concerns.^[91] But along with the asset of accessibility came the liability of accountability. During the pivotal moments of nationalization, from the fall of 1936 through the spring that followed, Socialist militants had felt compelled to counsel calm, a stance that won them few followers. Ironically, by the time Socialist groups had taken root in late 1937, Cot and Auriol had lost the political leverage in Paris that might have made Socialist ties more attractive. Auriol had lost the Finance Ministry when Blum fell in June 1937, and although he stayed in the Chautemps government as minister of justice, he no longer held the purse strings of nationalization. Cot had also become too isolated under the Chautemps regime to serve as powerful ally for local militants. To make matters worse, the national network of the Amicales Socialistes came increasingly under the control of Paul Faure and Francis Desphelippon, Socialists who, unlike Blum and Cot, remained rigidly pacifist on foreign policy.^[92] Just as Communist militants were to suffer the burdens of their international affiliations, especially in 1939 and 1940, so Socialists in aircraft found the Amicale Socialiste movement evolving out of step with their interests.

The conflict between Socialists and Communists in Toulouse demonstrates how susceptible workers were to political and ideological infighting in 1937. Yet despite these conflicts, employees remained much more unified and capable of acting collectively than they had at any time before June 1936. Solidarity had by no means dissolved, and aircraft workers and technicians remained in the CGT vanguard until the end of 1938. No open breaks had surfaced between workers in different regions, different branches of the industry, different levels of the occupational hierarchy, or even between Socialist and Communist militants. Tensions and rivalries troubled the unions, but for the moment, at least, they were adequately contained. When workers confronted employers or the Air Ministry with demands over wages and working conditions or questions about implementing the nationalization policy, they were still able in 1937 and 1938 to transcend the geographical, occupational, and ideological tensions that divided them.

Six factors help account for the survival of employee solidarity and the high level of collective mobilization workers in aviation demonstrated until the end of 1938. The first was job stability and continuity in the composition of the work force. Heavy turnover and frequent layoffs had made it difficult for workers to act collectively in the early 1930s. Since 1935, when about ten thousand additional workers were hired to produce the planes of Plan I, the work force had stabilized. Shortly thereafter nationalization, relatively high wages, and the Air Ministry's aversion to layoffs kept workers rooted in the industry. Conditions within plants remained stable, as well, since little was done in 1936 and 1937 to mod-

ernize factories and expand production. Nationalization changed the structure of ownership and shifted personnel at the highest levels, but it left the social organization of the shop floor intact. The proximity of prototype shops to mass-production facilities, the use of traditional assembly procedures, the juxtaposition of several kinds of work areas within large hangars and sheds—these characteristics of the airplane plant continued to bring various kinds of workers and technicians into close contact with one another. In this environment the social bonds among workers, technicians, and even some supervisors remained strong, especially under the relatively stable conditions of the Popular Front. Since a local union depended on the long-term commitment of militants bound together by their life within plants, low turnover and a continuity in the work process reinforced union ties all the more.

A second source of solidarity was the common stake that aircraft employees had in building on their great achievement in June 1936—the collective contract for the Parisian aircraft industry. Like workers elsewhere in France, aircraft employees shared a common interest in holding on to the forty-hour week, wage hikes, trade union rights, and paid vacations. But by winning such a favorable contract for workers in aviation, at least in the Paris region, the aircraft strikers of that June also established a solid foundation for subsequent collective bargaining. At the very least the contract would have to be renewed since the Chambre Syndicale and the FTM had agreed at the time to abide by the contract for a year and then open negotiations for its renewal. This prospect for making collective bargaining an enduring institution gave workers a continuing stake in the CGT as their "most representative union." Even more, the precedent of the 1936 contract inspired workers to strive for a national contract, one that applied to aircraft factories in Paris and the provinces alike. This idea appealed to workers everywhere in the industry since everyone on the employee side of the bargaining table wanted to narrow the gap between Parisian and provincial wages. Inflation, moreover, increased the stakes. Although aircraft workers were still some of the best-paid employees in France, they too had watched the gains of 1936 disappear, and their very success in collective bargaining made them all the more determined to use their collective strength and their leverage with the government to win a national wage scale indexed to the rise in prices. Thus, wage issues remained a unifying concern for employees that cut across differences in political partisanship, occupation, and geography.

A third factor reinforcing solidarity in the industry was the organizational strength of the CGT. To be sure, the confederation was still embarrassingly underfinanced and understaffed in comparison to its counterparts in Britain, to say nothing of what German metalworkers had

created during the Weimar Republic. Still, the blossoming of the CGT in aviation, and in metalworking generally, must have felt miraculous to those militants who had struggled in such isolation in the early 1930s. Most workers in aviation joined CGT locals and carried union cards, which often became the sine qua non for getting a job.^[93] For the first time, the FTM acquired the financial means to offer members choral societies, sports clubs, trips to the Loire, exhibitions of artwork by métallos, a rest retreat, and even a colonie de vacances in the Seine-et-Marne—services that foreshadowed the full-blown CGT paternalism of the 1950s.^[94] Aircraft militants, moreover, emerged as important figures in the FTM. Robert Doury, Henri Jourdain, and Georges Charrière appeared regularly in the pages of L'Union des métaux both as spokesmen for aircraft workers and as national leaders of the metalworkers federation. The visibility of the FTM in the industry, and likewise the increasing importance of aviation as a sector in the FTM, made it easier for workers to feel some loyalty to the union.

No less important in maintaining solidarity in the work force was a fourth factor—the special appeal Popular Front ideology had for people working in a defense industry. Aviation in fact was ideally suited to the main planks of the PCF's Popular Front ideology—antifascism, national defense, workers' rights, and productivism, that is, the affirmation of work discipline, efficiency, and technological progress. What could be more left-wing and patriotic, more Front populaire, than building airplanes for the struggle against fascism in plants where skilled workers strove for efficiency and contrôle ouvrier?

To see how Popular Front ideology had filtered down into the daily lives of at least some CGT members, consider the flying club of the métallos de l'aviation toulousaine, a group of CGT metalworkers at SNCAM in Toulouse who had taken advantage of Cot's program in "popular aviation." In 1938 these metalworker-pilots sent a letter, along with a small model airplane, to a group of aircraft workers in Versailles who were hoping to create their own flying club. The letter, which evokes the spirit of the Popular Front, deserves citing in full:

Dear Comrades:

We have received your letter of 22 June in which you affirm your satisfaction in our sponsorship. This satisfaction is shared by all the comrades of our trade union, and it will always be affirmed in the syndicalist and revolutionary spirit that inspires us all.

We would like the airplane model, representing one of the beautiful types of planes our firm builds, to serve as an example for you of the competitive spirit the labor movement promotes here. If from the point of view of manufacturing and the organization of work we have obtained absolute control, we hope that in another domain you yourselves will be

able to control these flying machines that we only want to construct for peace. With pilots like you coming from the masses, . . . no doubt the crimes perpetrated in Spain and China by international fascism will never blemish our history. On the contrary, you will all rise up for the total liberation of peoples and fight with all your might against fascism.

It is with great pleasure that we accept your invitation to visit during our next trip to Paris. Wishing with all our hearts that our example will be followed and generalized, with our best wishes for your club, which has become a piece of our own, receive from all your sponsors our fraternal syndicalist handshakes.^[95]

For these CGT members, learning to fly was a political act, especially because until "popular aviation" came along, local aéro-clubs had commonly been elite, right-wing, preserves. The flying club of the métallos de l'aviation toulousaine was no doubt great fun for its members, a brotherhood of adventure for the off-hours which must have given aircraft workers in particular a special sense of mastery. Still, it was in political terms that the authors of this letter described the achievements of building and flying airplanes. For them, aviation was a vehicle for expressing "the syndicalist and revolutionary spirit," an instrument for "the total liberation of peoples."

But what about most rank-and-file aircraft workers, the 75 to 85 percent of the work force who, though CGT members after June 1936, nonetheless refrained from joining the Communist Party? How far did they go in 1937 and 1938 toward embracing a politicized vision of the Popular Front? It is difficult to recapture the opinions the working-class "silent majority" must have had about the PCF, the SFIO, and the politics of the Popular Front. But some evidence suggests that most rank-and-file aircraft workers, even if they stayed out of the party, felt a basic affinity for the values Communist militants promoted during the Popular Front.

For one thing, non-Communist minority factions in the aircraft industry—Trotskyists, Pivertists, revolutionary anarchists, Catholics, Socialists, and anti-Communist reformists associated with the newspaper Syndicats —all tried to win support from aircraft workers by attacking PCF methods rather than the PCF vision of the Popular Front. None of these minority factions criticized the productivism and antifascism that served as a foundation to Popular Front ideology. Instead, they lashed out against the high-handed tactics Communist militants used to "colonize" the FTM. Socialist militants in Bordeaux, for example, campaigned against the "Stalinist hiring practices" they felt Communist militants had managed to establish by requiring PCF membership cards for new jobs.^[96] Many workers must have resented coercive organizing methods. But had a significant number of workers felt openly hostile to the basic

values of the Popular Front, it seems plausible that one minority faction or another would have tried to capitalize on such disaffection, and none did so.

More direct evidence for rank-and-file support for Popular Front ideology can be found in the support aircraft workers lent to the cause of republican Spain. When Spain was plunged into civil war in July 1936, "guns and planes for Spain" became ubiquitous as a slogan at left-wing rallies and in the leaflets and newspapers that workers encountered every day on the trip to work. In the aircraft industry Communist militants found their fellow workers receptive to ideas for aiding the loyalists. At the Bloch plant in Courbevoie workers and technicians demanded that "management allow them to work for free on Saturdays, a rest day under the new forty-hour week, to build planes cheaply for the Spanish government."^[97] Jourdain has recalled that during the first weeks of the Spanish conflict, when Blum and Cot tried to slip the loyalists as many fresh planes as they could, aircraft workers contributed two or three unpaid Saturdays to the task of preparing planes for delivery.^[98] In September, after Blum opted for nonintervention, aircraft workers joined other metalworkers in the Paris region in demonstrations and brief work stoppages to protest his policy. Because the PCF continued to rally unequivocally to the cause of republican Spain while the SFIO became badly divided over Blum's policy, the issue served to strengthen the position of Communist militants in aviation as elsewhere in French industry.^[99] Thus, the Spanish civil war and the continuing controversy over nonintervention reinforced in workers' minds again and again through 1937 how closely tied their work had become to basic choices in foreign policy. No riveter at work on the fuselage of a Bloch 210, however disaffected he might be from party politics, could remain oblivious to the political significance of his work.

A sixth factor, one closely connected to Popular Front ideology, also helped maintain solidarity in the work force—the nationalizations. We have already seen how nationalization gave workers a greater voice in the national companies, both formally and through informal channels to the ministries. Even though workers had complained bitterly over Cot's decision to appoint leading employers to the top posts in the national companies, they still had a common stake in the success of nationalization, a policy associated in everyone's mind with patriotism, the Popular Front, and the parties of the left. For workers, the national companies also embodied the promise of greater respect, better treatment, and more power for employees at the workplace.

Conflicts in Toulouse in 1937 illustrate how invested workers became in nationalization. The two aircraft companies in Toulouse, Dewoitine and Latécoère, posed special problems for Cot because Emile De-

woitine's company, though still operating, had slid into bankruptcy, and Pierre Latécoère refused to let his be nationalized.^[100] For a while it appeared Dewoitine would be absorbed into SNCASE, and Latécoère would stay private. But on 25 September 1936 members of the aviation section of the local metalworkers union decided to urge Cot to nationalize both companies and consolidate them into a separate firm, a "sixth group" in the SNCAs. Albert Nicolas, a leading aircraft militant in Toulouse, wrote Cot that "if these two factories are given the means, and if technical expertise were to take the place of financial expertise, we workers know that the experiment would be successful."^[101] Cot could not afford to ignore the idea. For one thing, the union local, like most aircraft locals, had burgeoned since June and represented a substantial majority of workers in the two plants.^[102] For another, the notion of a separate national company in Toulouse had support in high places. Emile Dewoitine himself backed the movement. A separate national company in Toulouse would presumably assure him the government financing that might not come under the aegis of SNCASE. Since labor militants viewed Dewoitine as a man with whom they could bargain, not the reactionary that Pierre Latécoère was reputed to be, the union and Dewoitine joined forces to advocate a separate nationalized firm. To this alliance came a third source of strength—Vincent Auriol, who as a deputy from Toulouse, a leading Socialist, and the finance minister in Blum's government was well positioned to promote the idea.^[103]

In the months that followed, rank-and-file workers rallied to the cause. Several hundred workers gathered on two occasions to greet union delegates returning from Paris after lobbying in the ministries. In February 1937, when Cot was expected to decide the matter, workers at Latécoère peppered their shops with miniature flags proclaiming "Vive le sixième groupe!" In April, when Cot agreed to a sixth company—but one that included only Dewoitine—the workers at Latécoère rebelled, occupying their plant and demanding its nationalization. It took Cot six weeks to reach a settlement. The strikers finally agreed to let the Latécoère company stay private in exchange for the right to transfer to the new nationalized firm; 549 of Latécoère's 807 employees chose to do so.^[104] Nationalization was no empty slogan for these workers. Rather, it offered them the prospect of more sympathetic management and something else—a sense that the new firm would be, as Nicolas put it, "the common property of all," not the boss's.^[105] In a letter to Auriol Nicolas pledged that "all the workers, office workers, and technicians in Toulouse aviation are ready to demonstrate that nationalization, under the oversight of the Air Ministry, can put our country at the head of progress in international aviation. . . . The working class can show that it can build and erect [airplanes] without the help of swindlers, if it is

given the chance."^[106] They dubbed the sixth national company the Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautiques du Midi (SNCAM), the "du Midi" reflecting a sense of regional pride in the French southwest.

Aircraft workers in SNCAM retained a feeling for the political importance of their firm after it was nationalized. The struggle to create SNCAM had greatly strengthened the CGT; by the fall of 1937 even a majority of foremen at SNCAM had joined the union, and local militants had come to enjoy considerable influence over personnel matters and the day-to-day functioning of the shops. As a result, when in October 1937 Cot broached the idea of absorbing SNCAM into SNCASE as a way of relieving budgetary pressures on the Air Ministry, workers rallied against the plan. By that time employees had even more to protect than before. "Whatever managerial group is imposed on us," local militants told Cot, "we never intend to abandon the gains we currently possess in accord with the present management, namely, the absolute right to oversee hiring and firing and the exams used for hiring; a workers' disciplinary committee to review all sanctions and dismissals; workers' control of the advisory committee to management; the right to oversee work rhythms; continuous contact between the chief of personnel and worker delegates; the maintenance of current wage levels; respect for tacit agreements over retirement; etc."^[107] SNCAM's strength, the militants implied, lay in the commitments its workers felt to a firm willing to give them a share of authority. Decisions that threatened this esprit, they warned, would have "disastrous consequences."

Cot backed off from the merger, not just on account of the union reaction but also because local elites lobbied in behalf of SNCAM. La Dépêche du Midi, the leading daily in Toulouse, ran a story on the tremendous morale at the plant, where workers had sacrificed the long Armistice Day weekend to finish a delivery for Air France.^[108] When Cot came to town to investigate the situation, the local Chamber of Commerce agreed both to provide SNCAM two million francs outright and to support the firm in raising more capital locally. Faced with this unusual convergence of labor militance and local business boosterism, Cot retreated. SNCAM had won what proved to be a few more years of survival as a separate company in the nationalized sector.

If nationalization enabled aircraft workers in Toulouse to express a sense of regional identity through the creation of SNCAM, the policy also served to tie workers together across regions through their common employment in a national company. In this respect nationalization served to link workers in the provinces more directly to Paris, which became even more important than it had been before as the locus of committees, state officials, and company executives who ran the nationalized sector. In short, workers in the national companies became work-

ers in a more national enterprise, in contrast to workers in private firms, where employees retained a stronger sense of the personalization of authority in the hands of the employer.

A wage dispute at SNCAC in Bourges illustrates how nationalization encouraged provincial workers to direct their attention to the power brokers at the national level. In late 1937 the two CGT locals for aircraft technicians and workers filed grievances at the local conciliation board, established as part of the conciliation and arbitration machinery the Blum government had created in the fall of 1936. These aircraft employees in Bourges wanted wage hikes to match the gains that SNCAC workers at Billancourt had won through a series of four arbitration decisions in Parisian metalworking in 1937.^[109] Since these increases applied only to the Paris region, Outhenin-Chalandre, director of SNCAC, saw no reason to raise wages in Bourges. The conciliation board, however, found enough merit in the grievances to recommend the case for arbitration. As procedures stipulated, union militants then drew up a list of acceptable arbiters for the prefect, which in this case included several men prominent in the French aircraft scene, among them two parliamentary deputies, two executives at Air France, an inspector involved in Cot's program of popular aviation, and a left-wing staff associate of Cot's in the Air Ministry. Outhenin-Chalandre objected to all these men, for in his view they had "no relationship with the department of the Cher. It seems to us that the local interest of the conflict would not be respected."^[110] The stakes here were obvious: management wanted arbiters who would keep aircraft wages in line with the local labor market; militants wanted men who were politically connected to the Air Ministry and who presumably had an interest in aircraft manufacturing as a national enterprise. Even though Cot, as it turned out, proved unwilling to champion efforts to close the wage gap between Paris and the provinces, the arbitration process nonetheless served as a form of political education—teaching workers to take advantage of the arbitration machinery, solicit the advice of national CGT leaders, rub shoulders with leading officials in Paris, and recognize the national context of their local concerns.^[111]

Thus, nationalization reinforced the sense of national solidarity that had emerged among employees in the industry during the strike wave of June 1936. It by no means eliminated the sources of fragmentation in the work force. There was plenty for militants to complain about in the way Cot had organized the national companies. Some of his administrative appointments seemed scandalous to them; and the company boards, with just token labor delegates, were a far cry from the tripartite boards that CGT moderates had been advocating for public enterprises since 1919, boards that would give employees, consumers, and the state equal representation.^[112] Even so, through 1937 militants and workers showed no

signs of disparaging nationalization. The national companies still looked like promising arenas for expanding CGT leverage in the workplace.

Employer Disunity

Whereas nationalization helped employees maintain a sense of solidarity despite their internal conflicts, for employers Cot's policy had the opposite effect. The partial nationalization of an industrial branch would have shaken any employers organization, or chambre syndicale. In an aircraft industry already subject to tensions between a younger, more dynamic generation of employers and the founding fathers of the industry, as well as to potential conflicts between airframe, motor, and equipment manufacturers, Pierre Cot's nationalization program proved catastrophic to employer unity. To be sure, the gentlemanly club of the Chambre Syndicale des Industries Aéronautiques continued to function, and Henry de l'Escaille did his best to hold the organization together, all the while serving as president of the national companies. In principle the Chambre Syndicale still had an important role to play for its members: as the only organization representing every sector in the industry, the Chambre Syndicale remained an instrument of collective defense against the designs of nettlesome ministers and the demands of a resurgent labor movement. Moreover, because the Collective Bargaining Act of 24 June 1936 now required employers to negotiate collectively with "the most representative union," namely the CGT, employers became more dependent than ever on the Chambre Syndicale as their own representative body. But just at the time when industrialists in many other sectors tried to rally against the achievements of labor of June '36, businessmen in the airplane industry found themselves drifting toward ruptures—between nationalized and private firms and between airframes and the other two branches of the industry.

What most troubled a number of employers was the fear that nationalized firms would compromise the autonomy of the Chambre Syndicale and, by extension, what remained of the private sector. At a Chambre Syndicale meeting in early 1937 Morelle, a spokesman for accessory manufacturers, explained that he and his colleagues "dreaded seeing their discussions . . . becoming known to their most important client," that is, the state.^[113] Directors of nationalized firms, he implied, would develop split loyalties to the Chambre Syndicale and the Air Ministry. When Louis Bréguet wondered aloud "whether the general purpose of the Chambre Syndicale, such as it is defined in the statutes, would have to be modified," Morelle offered a concrete suggestion: "Reinforce the authority of the Chambre Syndicale by making provisions to sanction a breach in solidarity." These anxieties over solidarity prompted employ-

ers in the national companies to respond. De l'Escaille reminded Morelle that "tightening the bond of solidarity must be done by some means other than sanctions since the chambres syndicales are regulated by the law of 1927, which guarantees the complete independence of their members." Potez, too, tried to calm his colleagues, declaring that "the creation of the National Companies changed nothing."^[114] As events were to prove, however, many members were not so easily reassured.

If suspicions about the loyalties of national company executives weakened the sense of solidarity in the Chambre Syndicale, labor questions undermined it further. But the divisive effect of collective bargaining became apparent only gradually, for in the spring of 1937 the Chambre Syndicale won a victory by signing a contract with the "friendly" Syndicat des Cadres. This effort to lure away office workers and managerial personnel from the influence of the technicians unions of the CGT—which apparently astonished officials at the Air Ministry—gave employers some hope of using the new bargaining environment to their own advantage.^[115] By July 1937 employers began to report that upper-level administrative employees in Saint-Nazaire and Argenteuil had broken even further from their fellow workers by demanding that they be represented on factory boards by their own delegates.^[116] Employers responded uniformly to these opportunities to recapture the loyalty of high-level white-collar employees, whose affinity for the labor movement had, after all, been dubious in the first place. But it was much more difficult to maintain a united front against workers, technicians, and their CGT militants. This challenge widened splits in the Chambre Syndicale.

Two issues loomed especially large at the Chambre Syndicale in its deliberations over labor—wage schedules, and the roles that personnel representatives should play in hiring and in apprenticeship training. Although no employer was eager to make concessions, some, namely the directors of the national companies, were better equipped to compromise with labor than were others. With an Air Ministry behind them willing to accommodate wage hikes and at least some forms of labor participation, Bloch, Potez, de l'Escaille, and other employers in the nationalized sector could better afford reforms. Nationalization had changed things, not least the capacity of the major firms in the airframe sector to adapt to the labor innovations Blum had supported in 1936, however much Bloch and Potez may have privately disapproved. This was precisely the division of interest that employers in the engine and accessory sector had feared.

Searching for some way to transcend these conflicts, employers agreed in September 1937 to modify the Chambre Syndicale. They transformed it into the Union Syndicale des Industries Aéronautiques, a

looser structure giving each sector greater freedom to discuss issues on its own.^[117] They also created a new subcommittee for the national companies, in effect separating the public and private firms in the older airframe committee. The Union Syndicale would now bring together representatives from five semiautonomous committees: the two for airframes, plus one each for engines, accessories, and civil aviation. But since the Union Syndicale would continue to serve as the principal vehicle for negotiating with trade unions and the ministries, it was unclear what problems had really been solved.

September brought a second change as well: the Union Syndicale decided to withdraw from the major employer associations in metalworking, the UIMM and the GIMM. Union Syndicale minutes fail to disclose why employers chose this path, but two motives seem clear. First, nationalization had compromised the relationship between the Chambre Syndicale and the umbrella organizations to which it had belonged. When de l'Escaille represented the Chambre Syndicale at the UIMM and the GIMM, did he not also, as president of the national companies, compromise the autonomy of these organizations from the state? Though the metalworking organizations by no means sought to purge aircraft from its ranks—and indeed the UIMM had issued a call for employer organizations to consolidate in the face of the challenge from labor and the left—the decision to withdraw spared everyone the ordeal of resolving a difficult problem.^[118]

More significant still, the decision to quit the UIMM and the GIMM gave the Union Syndicale greater flexibility to strike its own bargains with labor and the state. Since June 1936, when aircraft employers had signed a collective contract distinct from, and more generous than, the metalworking contract, the Chambre Syndicale represented a progressive fringe within the metalworking sector. In fact, when negotiations reopened in the late spring of 1937 to revise aircraft contracts, national business leaders felt compelled to warn the Chambre Syndicale against making far-reaching concessions to labor. Villey, an official from the Confédération Générale des Patrons Français, addressed the Chambre Syndicale at its April meeting in 1937 and cautioned employers explicitly against expanding workers' influence over hiring and apprenticeship training.^[119] Throughout 1937, moreover, the UIMM upheld the view that new contracts ought to be regional, not national, in scope—an effort to keep contracts as limited as possible and prevent agreements struck by the powerful unions in Paris from setting standards for the rest of the country.^[120] This principle ran counter to what the aircraft builders had decided to do, namely, accept national contracts provided that wage schedules be regional and the accessory sector be excluded altogether.^[121] Whereas the leaders of the UIMM hoped to go as far as possible to

restore employer authority and minimize the effects of collective bargaining, many aircraft manufacturers had come to accept the prospect of national contracts. They turned their attention to making the best bargains they could within that framework. Withdrawal from the UIMM and the GIMM freed the airplane manufacturers both from the constraints these organizations might impose and from the fear that aircraft contracts would set precedents that metalworking employers would feel forced to follow. Flexibility, of course, carried a price—isolation.

These two organizational changes, the creation of the Union Syndicale and the withdrawal from the UIMM and the GIMM, failed to reverse the erosion of solidarity within the ranks of employers. On 2 November 1937 antagonism that had been building up between engine manufacturers and the Union Syndicale took an extraordinary form: Paul-Louis Weiller, president of Gnôme-et-Rhône, issued a private memorandum calling for the major nonnationalized engine firms to break away from the Union Syndicale. Weiller reproached the Chambre Syndicale for "defending the interests of its members poorly, for having let the Technical Service [of the Air Ministry] elaborate new test standards for motors of 150 hours, and for not having protested against the development of a collective contract like that of SNCM [the nationalized engine-building firm]." Weiller went on to criticize Claude Bonnier, the man Cot had named as president of SNCM: "This company president is fully implementing Pierre Cot's program. A labor delegation is [even] sitting on the board of directors."^[122] In fact, Bonnier publicly endorsed worker representation on the SNCM board as a way of "finding good and just solutions" to industrial problems and accused opponents of workers representation of being self-serving executives who cared more about protecting their privileges than defending the fundamental principle of managerial authority.^[123] With this kind of antipathy between Bonnier and Weiller, and more generally between Weiller and his colleagues in the nationalized sector, an open schism in the Chambre Syndicale became hard to avoid. Weiller put it bluntly: the organization, he said, was "no longer qualified to support nonnationalized firms."

Under Weiller's plan the four private engine firms—Gnôme-et-Rhône, Hispano-Suiza, Salmson, and Renault—would create their own Chambre Syndicale and affiliate with the GIMM. This arrangement would enable engine builders to abstain from any contract the Union Syndicale might sign with the CGT, while enhancing their chances of adopting the lower wage scales of Parisian metalworking employers in the GIMM. Weiller reasoned that workers in the engine sector, unlike their counterparts in airframe manufacturing, were nearly identical to workers in automobile engine shops, and "though they might be slightly more skilled, they should settle for automobile wages."^[124] Weiller had

little difficulty attracting the three other firms to his project; already Renault's aviation division had on its own initiative resigned from the aircraft Chambre Syndicale in December 1936 over a dispute about worker representation.^[125] By January 1938 the new group had selected a site on the Champs Elysées for its headquarters and by the end of the month had sent de l'Escaille a formal letter of resignation.

However sympathetic many employers may have felt toward Weiller's motives, schism came as a demoralizing blow to the Union Syndicale. Even in the antiseptic language of the minutes of the Union Syndicale meeting of February 1938 the bitterness of controversy came through:

The Conseil d'Administration accepts [the resignations] but in the cases of Gnôme-et-Rhône and Hispano-Suiza [Salmson did not formally resign until the April meeting] considers their resignations doubly inopportune since they ignore the need to maintain employer solidarity and misunderstand the efforts President de l'Escaille has made to meet the difficult task that has devolved to him since May 1936 and that has become particularly thankless under these circumstances. . . . The recent modifications made in the structure of the [Chambre Syndicale] have given it all the flexibility it needs.^[126]

Schism weakened the Union Syndicale in more ways than one. Not only did it bring into the open its divisions; by bolting, the engine manufacturers left the Union Syndicale all the more dependent on the strength of the national companies and hence all the more linked to the state. If nationalization served to reinforce worker solidarity, it also served to weaken the employers' capacity for collective action.

Industrial Performance

Aircraft production in 1937 was neither strong enough to silence the critics of nationalization nor weak enough to discredit Pierre Cot's policy. Production figures were unimpressive: the industry delivered 418 planes to the air force, down from 569 in 1936. This decline did not reflect as badly on the industry as it seems, as 226 of the planes were bombers—a breakthrough for the air force.^[127] By the second half of 1937, moreover, national companies began to construct Morane 406s and Potez 630s, high-speed aircraft designed in 1935 to meet the challenge of the latest German models.^[128] To some extent the poor performance of the industry in 1937 reflected the thorough disruption that nationalization had involved—taking inventories, reorganizing plants, and reassigning personnel. By the second half of the year work had resumed in most plants in the nationalized sector; Cot pointed out that it took Renault-Caudron, a private firm, 40 percent more time and 20 percent more money to build a Bloch 210 bomber than it did the national company, SNCAC.^[129]

Still, although nationalization had streamlined the airframe industry in a way that would eventually make it possible to modernize and expand production, output declined 11 percent in 1937, according to one study, and the industry was still caught in a thicket of organizational and financial problems.^[130] These shortcomings, moreover, loomed all the larger in people's minds because by the end of 1937 the Germans were building airplanes at six times the pace of the French.^[131]

As the insufficiency of production became more apparent in the last quarter of 1937, accusations surfaced along predictable lines. Business publicists and conservative politicians blamed labor for the lag, citing low productivity, the "crisis of authority," the deleterious effects of collective bargaining and the forty-hour week, and nationalization itself as the source of the troubles in the industry. Georges Houard, editor of Les Ailes , remained as acerbic as ever in his criticism of Cot's nationalization program, which he viewed as "the eviction of the pioneers."^[132] Labor leaders, in turn, repeated charges that employers still exerted too strong an influence over the nationalized sector and that the Air Ministry had been "much too prudent."^[133] More should have been done, militants felt, to impede industrialists, financiers, and military officials bent on "sabotaging" nationalization.

In the highly charged political atmosphere of the Popular Front period it was easy for conservative critics to find a receptive audience for their claims that collective contracts, high wages, a forty-hour week, and strong shop stewards lowered output. But it was difficult to substantiate these claims. Some officials argued that the industry was stymied by a chronic shortage of labor made acute by the forty-hour week, and Marcel Bloch complained about it at SNCASO; yet there was also evidence that in some plants skilled manpower went underutilized for lack of financing or orders, as Paul-Louis Weiller, the head of Gnôme-et-Rhône and no friend of labor, told stockholders in early 1938.^[134] The forty-hour week may have hampered a few employers. But until mass production finally got under way in late 1938, it does not appear to have been an important obstacle to production except in prototype departments, where the efforts of technicians and designer-draftsmen were much in demand from 1937 on.^[135]

The impact of Blum's labor laws on worker productivity in the aircraft industry was even harder to discern. For one thing, in an industry like aviation, where workers produced airplanes in relatively small batches and where some models called for more labor-intensive methods than others, it was difficult to calculate the effects of wages and working conditions over long periods of time. Moreover, in 1937 Cot's Air Ministry deliberately put extra workers to work on bombers as a way to avert layoffs, even though building these bigger planes required fewer work-

ers per ton than did fighters. When Joseph Roos, a young engineer in the Air Ministry with no notable sympathy for labor, made a systematic study of productivity in 1937, his findings were inconclusive. He argued that in the one factory that produced roughly the same kind of airplane in 1935 as in 1937, hourly output per worker had dropped 5 percent in the intervening two years. Roos admitted that "such a study is touchy in the airframe industry, where workers have to change jobs fairly often and where work rhythms vary significantly with the rank of the plane in the series being produced. The elimination of a bonus or its diminished significance owing to a rise in minimum wages can harm output slightly." Roos concluded, however, that "the troubles with output are not fundamentally important."^[136] Air Ministry investigations in early 1938 found no evidence that workers' hourly output had declined.^[137] Even as hostile an observer as Paul Boutiron, an engineer who in his Riom testimony castigated Cot and the unions, praised workers for their efforts: "To be fair, the work was well done, and generally highly finished, except for that done by inexperienced novices. Professional conscience did not die."^[138] The understanding of labor output, in short, remained impressionistic and was certainly insufficient to discredit Blum's labor reforms.

In fact, nationalization seems to have enhanced worker morale. Cot implied as much when he later pointed out that during his stint as Air Minister aircraft workers struck only in private firms—at Latécoère and Renault-Caudron in 1937. Another private company, Bréguet, was saddled with labor difficulties from June to October 1937, especially at its plant near Paris in Vélizy.^[139] Certainly the pressures were greater on managers in the nationalized sector to standardize employment practices and consult with shop floor representatives when problems arose. Administrators at SNCASO made a conscious effort to minimize layoffs, and in an industry where job security had figured so prominently in the strike demands of June 1936, the stability of employment levels in the nationalized sector could only improve morale.^[140] It was common lore in the 1930s that jobs in the public sector were easier to keep if you were lucky enough to get one.^[141] The national companies, moreover, probably did not try to force employees to work on Saturdays in May 1937 to make up for religious holidays the way Paul-Louis Weiller did at Gnôme-et-Rhône.^[142] By the same token the stakes workers had in the success of the national companies, the relatively open channels CGT militants had to Cot's Air Ministry, and the commitment Cot's staff had to iron out problems with local militants all helped ease the friction between workers and management in the nationalized sector. As Cot wrote years later, "The fact remains—to the credit of nationalization and of the Popular Front—that from June 1936 to January 1938 the aeronautic industry was the branch of the French economy in which labor and social problems were

settled with greatest facility; nationalization improved the social climate of production even more than it improved the equipment of factories."^[143] Robert Jacomet, a high government official in the Daladier government in 1938, agreed. He told a Senate committee in June 1938 that workers in nationalized plants and state arsenals appeared to have more enthusiasm for their work than their counterparts in the private sector.^[144] One retired worker at the state-controlled aircraft arsenal at Châtillon has attributed high morale precisely to the fact that "everyone wanted to participate, to show that we could do things better than in the private sector. . . . Because—it isn't an exaggeration to say it—we had the impression of working for ourselves. I'm not just making a poetic spiel. Without being prodded by management or the foreman—we weren't being wound up like clocks—everyone was imbued with the idea that we were going to prove something."^[145] Of course, not everyone was. Some workers no doubt felt as alienated from the workplace in national companies as they had been when their factories were private. But on the whole, nationalization under the Popular Front and the support the CGT gave to the policy did more to improve than impede cooperation on the shop floor.

The crucial obstacles to production in 1937 lay not in the workweek or worker morale but in three long-standing problems that nationalization had failed to solve—the needs to coordinate the production of supplies and accessories, modernize production, and, above all, finance production on a far grander scale. Cot's reforms had done much to streamline the airframe sector by eliminating an inefficient structure that had long supported uncompetitive firms. For the first time a serious policy of decentralization had taken hold. For the first time, too, the Air Ministry had established an effective system for pegging prices at levels closer to the costs of production. But shortages remained. Airframe and engine builders still encountered delays in receiving construction materials, aircraft accessories, and propellers. Delayed machinery deliveries plagued them as well. Although the national companies increased the value of their manufacturing equipment (from 60 percent at SNCAN to 300 percent at SNCAM), the level of investment in plant and equipment remained much too modest to match the pace of German production. As General Hederer testified in December 1937, nationalization had not altered construction times appreciably in the course of the year.^[146]

Budgetary austerity lay at the heart of these problems. Just as financial policy proved to be the bane of the Blum government during the first half of 1937, so financial constraints blunted nationalization as an instrument of industrial reform. The air force was still too weak a component of national defense, and rearmament too controversial a priority, to give the aircraft industry the money it needed to build more than six hundred

warplanes a year. Despite the growing recognition that war was likely and that air power could be decisive, the Air Ministry still found itself stymied by an army high command committed to a tactical, not a strategic, air force and a Senate unwilling to finance production on a larger scale. In 1937, when a third of the British defense budget went to the Royal Air Force, the French air force garnered only a sixth of France's.^[147]

To make matters worse, Cot's relations with the Finance Ministry soured after June 1937, when the Blum government fell and Georges Bonnet replaced Vincent Auriol at the rue de Rivoli. The finance minister had enormous discretionary control over the budget, and as a conservative member of the Radical Party, Bonnet sought to strengthen the franc by limiting expenditures rather than to finance production. Without Auriol at the Finance Ministry, Cot no longer had a colleague there in sympathy with his reforms, and without Blum as premier, Cot had no ally at the top to forge a coherent rearmament policy. Bonnet not only failed to support Air Ministry plans for the 1938 budget; he also held up funds that had been appropriated for aircraft construction in 1937. At the same time, because financial problems were severe in the industry, the Finance Ministry took more and more control over decisions that would otherwise have been the the domain of the Air Ministry. Likewise, Finance Ministry representatives became increasingly powerful figures on the boards of the national companies.^[148] Financial constraints, then, not only stymied the Air Ministry but diminished its power as well. Years later, when critics at the Riom trial blamed Cot for the modest budgets of 1937 and 1938, he answered, "If my efforts [to obtain larger appropriations for aviation] were often fruitless, it was because they clashed, especially after Chautemps had replaced Blum as premier, with the holy alliance of military conservatism of which Pétain was the symbol, and financial orthodoxy, whose guardian was Bonnet."^[149]

Budgetary constraints also kept the national companies in a state of chronic financial crisis. Employers complained that they had to spend their time searching almost incessantly for liquid funds, and they still found themselves hard pressed to meet payrolls, to say nothing of improving plant and equipment.^[150] Furthermore, when the time came to increase the stock capitalization of these firms, it fell to the state to raise funds; private industrialists who sat on the boards and had initially accounted for nearly a third of the capital by and large abstained from further investment.^[151] As a result, the national companies, and by extension the Air Ministry as well, had to turn once again to the banks. Although private businessmen by no means reclaimed the degree of control over the industry they had enjoyed before 1936, a poorly financed nationalized sector failed in 1937 to acquire the autonomy reformers had

originally envisioned. Nationalization succeeded as a way to reorganize a fragmented industry but failed to put the industry on a solid financial footing.

By December 1937 Cot was too isolated in the Chautemps government to carry forward a program of industrial expansion and modernization. Ironically, he found himself at the nadir of his influence just as the pieces of such a program were beginning to fall into place. Several important prototypes, such as the Morane 450, the Dewoitine 520, and the Lioré 45, were nearly done. To redress the critical need for a high performance engine, Cot had purchased an important manufacturing license from the American firm, Pratt and Whitney, much to the dismay of some conservative critics, who saw this move as a threat to French firms.^[152] What is more, Premier Chautemps was finally becoming alarmed at the need for aerial rearmament; he returned in early December from a trip to Britain troubled by his government's failure to rebuild the air force as rapidly as the British were now proceeding to do. Chautemp's concern at least gave Cot the opportunity to draw up a new plan to boost production to an annual rate of thirty-four hundred warplanes by 1940 at a cost of eleven billion francs over three years.^[153] But Cot himself had run out of political capital. Although his plan would serve as a blueprint for his successor at the Air Ministry, Guy La Chambre, Cot had too little influence to win quick support for a vast new extension of credits.

Nor did military officials in the air force strengthen his hand. Cot's efforts to promote young officers to top posts and reorganize the structure of command had made him enemies in the air force. Deficiencies in aircraft production, moreover, had caused the air force to languish without adequate equipment, thereby damaging morale. Although for a time Cot had won a more prominent role for bombing squadrons in military planning, in the fall of 1937 he was forced to retreat when the army high command reasserted its preference for a more limited air force role.^[154] By the end of 1937 Cot's relationship to the air force, and the continuing subordination of the air force itself in military planning, had isolated the Air Ministry all the more. It was in this context that General Vuillemin, a leading staff official and commander of the First Air Corps, sent Cot a shocking memorandum on 15 January 1938 in which he said that in the event of a war with Germany "French aviation would be crushed in a few days."^[155] Just when the condition of the air force was finally emerging as a major concern at the highest levels of government, a cabinet crisis forced Chautemps to reshuffle his government, and Cot lost his post at the Air Ministry.

Cot's departure marked the end of the Popular Front era in the aircraft industry. Not that the Popular Front as a national coalition of Radicals, Socialists and Communists had completely disintegrated; its final

collapse would come in the fall of 1938 with the Munich Agreement and the general strike of 30 November. But in aviation Cot's ministry had been pivotal to reform, and its collapse signaled the beginning of a new phase in the industry. To be sure, Cot had failed to achieve a number of objectives he had targeted in the heady summer of 1936—support for Spanish loyalists, cooperation with the Soviet Union, the promotion of collective security, and the modernization of the aircraft industry. But by pushing employers to sign a collective contract in June 1936, nationalizing firms, giving labor militants greater access to the Air Ministry, and supporting (albeit equivocally) the participation of the CGT in the management structure of the nationalized sector, Cot's ministry had transformed social relations in the industry. With employers divided over how to respond to nationalization, and with employees galvanized, despite internal tensions within the work force, into a cohesive trade union movement, the balance of power in the aircraft industry had shifted decisively since 1935.

In short, nationalization had political consequences in addition to the economic consequences it was designed to produce. It undermined the capacity of employers to respond collectively to the expansion of the state's role in the industry, although it by no means prevented some industrialists, especially Marcel Bloch and Henry Potez, from wielding enormous power and profiting accordingly. No less important, nationalization encouraged workers, technicians, and their trade union leaders to become more integrated into the bureaucratic politics of the industry. In this respect nationalization had both a radicalizing and a moderating effect—radicalizing insofar as it gave workers an arena to advocate contrôle ouvrier and a real shift in power on the shop floor; moderating insofar as the practice of organizing delegations, serving on boards and committees, and lobbying in the ministries taught militants to cultivate the art of bureaucratic advocacy within what was still fundamentally a capitalist industrial hierarchy. Above all, nationalization politicized the industry by giving workers and employers alike more of a stake in their relationship to the government and in the partisanship of the Air, Finance, and Labor ministries.

These political effects did not derive simply from the fact that the role of the state expanded in the industry; they sprang as well from the expectations people brought to the process of nationalization. In this respect the aircraft industry differed from the railroads. When the Chautemps government negotiated with the railroad companies in the summer of 1937 to create the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF), militants did not see it as a chance to transform the structure of authority in the railroads. Nor did employers divide between proponents and opponents of state control. Rather, an intense set of negotiations

produced an arrangement giving the state 51 percent of ownership of the railroads and ultimate control over management without provoking the former stockholders and directors into revolt. Although the CGT won four seats on the thirty-three-seat board of SNCF, CGT militants had no illusions that they were on the threshold of social reform. L'Humanité viewed the change cynically as state acquisition "without nationalization."^[156] Railway workers did not experience nationalization as a major breakthrough.^[157] In terms of labor relations it in fact was not: railway workers still lived in the shadow of two traumatic strike defeats, one in 1910, the other in 1920, when militants had promoted the slogan "Railroads to the railroad workers."^[158] Indeed, railroad workers had abstained from the strike wave of June '36.^[159] Moreover, it was hardly inspiring for workers to witness such moderates in the Radical Party as Camille Chautemps, Georges Bonnet, and Henri Queuille negotiating with the companies after the Blum government had fallen in June 1937—negotiations that culminated a long, incremental process of bringing the railroads under state control that had begun in the late nineteenth century.

What made nationalization so much more important an event in aviation than in the railroads were the conditions in which it was done—on the heels of June '36, at the height of Popular Front power—and the expectations people had for a policy that appeared to represent, at least potentially, a major shift in management structure. Furthermore, employers came into the negotiations over nationalization already more divided among themselves, and with different interests at stake, than did their counterparts in the railways. Conversely, as part of a highly mobilized wing of the CGT in a dynamic, growing industrial sector, aircraft workers and technicians found themselves in a stronger position to influence policy than were their counterparts in a languishing, older industrial sector such as the railroads. Above all, Young Turk Radicals like Cot and left-wing staff associates like Jean Moulin and André Labarthe in the Air Ministry raised workers' hopes and provoked employers' fears during the period of the Blum government much more readily than did the more conservative men around Bonnet and Queuille in the summer of 1937.

By the same token, if nationalization gave aircraft workers greater leverage than before, it also made them more dependent on officials like Cot, Moulin, Labarthe, Lebas, and Auriol—men whose claim to power gradually eroded as Chautemps's succession of cabinets shifted more and more toward the right wing of the Radical Party. Cot's relationship to workers was complex: he was viewed as both a friend to labor and a cagey politician all too cozy with Bloch and Potez. A year and a half of compromises and accommodations had done little to make Cot, or any-

one else in Blum's original Popular Front government, a worker's hero. When Cot lost his ministry in January 1938, aircraft workers were no more prone to take to the streets than workers in general had been when Blum's cabinet fell the previous June. Even so, once Cot had gone, employees faced a new set of uncertainties about what a more conservative government might do in an industry where state officials had acquired a great deal of influence over day-to-day conditions in the plants. There seemed little danger of returning to the autocratic style of industrial management that had prevailed before June 1936. But in early 1938, with CGT militants anxious to make good the promise of "a genuine nationalization as conceived in the original program of the Popular Front," with employers yearning to regain at least some of their lost authority, and with the pressure to boost production growing daily in the face of the German threat, the prospects for a new set of conflicts appeared likely after Cot's ministerial fall.^[160]

Fig. 1.
Apprentices in training at an Amiot factory near Paris, c. 1939–45. Aircraft companies 
depended on a higher proportion of skilled workers than did most metalworking firms. 
Many skilled aircraft workers made their start as apprentices in the industry. Others came with 
experience from shipbuilding and automobile construction. Even after airplane construction was 
modernized in 1938–39, skilled workers remained in high demand. Photo courtesy of SHAA.

Fig. 2.
Air Minister Pierre Cot (left) and state engineer Albert Caquot (third from left) 
on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1937. Cot put great stock in Franco-Soviet 
cooperation as a defense against Germany. Photo courtesy of SHAA.

Fig. 3.
"There is a way to increase production other than the sixty-hour week." 
After the defeat of the general strike of 30 November 1938 the Daladier government 
eliminated the forty-hour week and expanded work hours in defense-related industries. 
The CGT argued in vain to rely on other methods than long hours to boost production. 
This cartoon from the April 1939 issue of the FTM's  L'Union des Métaux  called for 
reorganizing production into three eight-hour shifts, investing in better machinery, retraining 
the unemployed, and expanding apprenticeships.

Fig. 4.
Assembly hall for building the Bréguet 691 bomber at the Bréguet factory in Vélizy-Villacoublay 
in 1939. Since the First World War airplane construction had taken place in immense assembly sheds 
as small work teams put together fuselages and attached wings, fins, cockpits, and accessories to 
the emerging aircraft. Yet only in 1938 and 1939 did workers and engineers address the challenge of
 building large all-metal airplanes in great numbers. The extensive use of jigs for positioning pieces, tools, 
and large structures made the job easier. Photo courtesy of SHAA.

Fig. 5.
Women at work building the Amiot 143 at the Amiot factory in 1939–40. 
By simplifying airplane design and reorganizing production methods in 1938 and 1939, 
airplane manufacturers found new ways to use semiskilled workers, trained in a matter 
of weeks for specialized jobs. Whereas women had comprised a miniscule proportion of 
the blue-collar work force in the industry before the war, after September 1939 companies 
recruited a great many women to do semiskilled work. They were usually the first to lose 
jobs after the defeat of June 1940. Many women later found work in airplane construction 
when the industry revived under German auspices during the Occupation. Photo courtesy of SHAA.

Fig. 6.
Production line for the Dewoitine 520 at the SNCAM factory in Toulouse in 1940. 
As impressive as French production turned out to be in 1939–40, the industry never 
overcame the handicap of a late start. This picture, taken in Toulouse three days after 
the armistice, shows the highly regarded Dewoitine 520 finally coming off the production 
line too late for use in the Battle of France. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

Fig. 7.
Employee dining hall at the Amiot factory, c. 1940. Employers and labor militants had 
competing ambitions for factory dining halls. Employers saw them as places to reinforce 
their paternalistic authority, militants as places to cultivate support for the CGT. Even 
during the Occupation, mealtime in the cafeteria gave militants a chance to promote job 
actions and protests. After the Liberation, plant committees dominated by the CGT won 
the right to oversee the social-welfare activities of the factory, including the cafeteria. 
Photo courtesy of SHAA.

Fig. 8.
SNCASE employees who were members of the Patriotic Militia, a paramilitary organization 
designed by the Communist Party to harass the Occupation authorities, gather in the streets of 
Toulouse to celebrate the Liberation in 1944. The Resistance enabled Communist militants to 
reestablish themselves as leaders of the labor movement in aviation, as in most industries, after 
the setback of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. Photo courtesy of the photographer, Jean Dieuzaide.

Fig. 9.
Air Minister Charles Tillon visiting the SNCASO plant at Châteauroux in 1945. 
As a veteran labor militant and the chief of the military arm of the Communist Resistance, 
Tillon tried to make the industry both an arena of labor reform and a model sector for 
the party's postwar "battle for production." Photo courtesy of SHAA.

Fig. 10.
"The SNECMA Strike, 1947," by Willy Ronis. Ronis captured this view of a 
SNECMA factory during the strike wave of late 1947. The CGT's defeat in the
strike wave made it nearly impossible for aircraft workers to prevent the 
massive layoffs and plant closings that followed from government decisions 
to restructure the industry. By 1950 thousands of jobs had disappeared, manufacturers 
and politicians had established a stable working relationship between the public 
and private sectors of the industry, and Communist militants, though still the leading 
spokesmen for workers in most airplane factories, had lost much of the political 
ground they had won after the Liberation. Photo courtesy of Willy Ronis.

Map 1.
Principal Locations of the Aircraft Factories in France in 1940

Map 2.
Principal Locations of Aircraft Factories in the Paris Region in 1940