PART TWO
THE ORIGINS OF SUBURBAN COMMUNISM

Chapter 4
Electoral Politics in Bobigny

The first part of this study outlined the development of Bobigny into a working-class commuter suburb in the early twentieth century, focusing on the characteristics that allowed the French Communist party to gain a dominant position in local political life after 1920. To assert that these characteristics made it inevitable that Bobigny would become a Communist fief, however, would be to fall into a rigid historical determinism. Other Paris suburbs, especially in the northeast of the Department of the Seine, experienced urbanization similar to that of Bobigny between the wars and yet offered far less support to the PCF or the Left.^[1] To analyze what favored the PCF's influence in Bobigny is important, but to complete our history of the community we must describe the evolution of political forces and political life.

Electoral politics in Bobigny during the early twentieth century was above all urban: the issues and structures, the advantages and disadvantages of suburbanization underlay all political contests and furnished their dominant electoral themes. The positions people took on such issues usually reflected their social class. In more than one respect, therefore, politics and suburban development in early twentieth-century Bobigny marched in step.

Republicanism in Bobigny: Dominance and Disunity

At the start of the Second Empire in 1852, Bobigny voted solidly, sometimes almost unanimously, for the official conservative candidates.

This situation began to change at the end of the next decade; in 1869, liberal Republican forces were able to gain almost as many votes in Bobigny as the monarchist Party of Order, while a small minority of local electors cast their ballots for representatives of the Radical Left. The growing strength of the Republicans in Bobigny correlated with the influx of the market gardeners; the social divisions between these newcomers and the farmers mirrored and reinforced their strong political differences.^[2]

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Commune of 1871 disrupted the community. Because Bobigny lay directly on the invasion route from Germany to Paris, Bobigny's entire population was transferred to Paris in 1870 and returned only after the defeat of the communards. The experience of the war and the founding of the Third Republic in 1871 eliminated the prewar political extremes from Bobigny. In sharp contrast to the rest of France, Bobigny gave the monarchist Right only token support after 1871, but the Radical and socialist Left was temporarily forced out of political activity by governmental repression after the Commune. Henceforth politics in Bobigny was dominated by the Republicans.^[3]

Although the national traumas of 1870 and 1871 altered the mode of political expression in Bobigny, they did little to change a fundamental conflict between the old rural community headed by the farmers and the newly arrived market gardeners. The farmers, shopkeepers, and other traditional Balbynians now identified with and voted for the conservative republicanism symbolized by Adolphe Thiers and the national government of the Third Republic. Just as they had under the Second Empire, these social groups continued to support those political forces that stood for the defense of property and order.^[4]

The political allegiances of the late nineteenth-century newcomers to Bobigny were less defined: the market gardeners, wage earners, and other "outsiders" supported Boulangists, Radicals, and different socialist factions. This political heterogeneity arose not so much from local causes as from the difficulties that French political forces to the left of center experienced in coalescing and elaborating a direction and sense of purpose. Despite this diversity of political expression, however, the market gardeners usually opposed the conservative Republican farmers.^[5] As the market gardeners became the majority of the population, so the leftist republicanism they championed became the dominant force in local politics. By 1900, three-quarters of Bobigny's city councillors were market gardeners. Though the farmers and other traditional social

groups kept some local influence, by the 1890s they had ceded political dominance to the market gardeners. Since the late nineteenth-century political allegiances in Bobigny so neatly paralleled social divisions, they foreshadowed the early twentieth-century rise of socialism and communism in the community.^[6]

From 1900 until the outbreak of the First World War the domestic politics of the Third Republic was dominated by the Republican Left, a loose coalition of the Democratic Alliance, the Radicals, the Radical Socialists, and the socialist parties of Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde. Stemming from the Dreyfus affair, this coalition was united in its desire to safeguard the republic and foil the political ambitions of the church, the army, and other conservative forces in French society. It produced the strident, and popular, anticlericalism of the government of Emile Combes but was profoundly divided over social questions. The growing socialist strength, and the climate of labor militancy that led to clashes like that at Draveil in 1908, indicated that the hegemony of liberal republicanism would be threatened from the Left as well as the Right.^[7]

Bobigny followed the nation's lead in political affairs. In 1900 forces that identified themselves as Radicals or Radical Socialists, supported by the market gardeners and by some wage earners and other nontraditional groups, controlled political life. Not a unified political party, they had a common viewpoint on many issues of importance to the people of Bobigny. They concurred with the protests of the Republican Left against the privileges of the wealthy and advocated greater concern for the rights of small independent producers. They were strongly patriotic and approved of the national government's secular stance.

In local affairs, Bobigny's city government emphasized a passive, go-slow approach to developing and expanding the community; it was generally cool toward projects to tamper with the quality of life in Bobigny, especially if they involved large municipal expenditures. Except for the tramway line linking Bobigny with Paris, which many Balbynians desired, the city government did little in this period to upgrade municipal services or promote the growth of the town.^[8] The issue of growth weakened the de facto political coalition of market gardeners and wage earners against the traditionalist old guard. Bobigny's working and lower middle classes were still small; their members favored the town's growth and expansion of municipal services. Their political representatives spoke out against what they saw as the government's lack of dynamism. In 1902 a correspondent for the suburban newspaper Paris-Est, which often favored the progressive

Republicans in Bobigny, attacked the municipality in the following terms:

The population of Bobigny is growing and changing every day and the old city councillors are becoming less and less adequate to the task of guiding the city along new paths. In their opinion, everything is as it should be, and nothing should be changed. For them, it is always nostalgia for the good old days, but we doubt that this nostalgia is shared by the majority of the population.^[9]

This belief in change and progress, which for Bobigny in 1900 meant advocating greater suburbanization, soon divided the dominant Radical forces in the community and gave rise to a more progressive strain of radicalism. Although this latter grouping included fewer market gardeners among its supporters than the more traditional Radicals of Bobigny, the difference between the two groups was not a simple function of class divisions or a split between rural and urban factions. A sizable minority of Bobigny's market gardeners supported the progressives. Moreover, although the dispute over modernization was the main issue between the two political groups, it was not the only one. The minority, progressive Radicals of Bobigny viewed their traditional opponents as less firm in their commitment to democracy and the Third Republic.

The city councillors are certainly honest people, but it is not easy to understand their political opinions. They call themselves Republicans, but that is difficult to believe. They are Republicans along the lines of the Boulangists and Nationalists who criticize everything that the government does and who are always ready to accept alliances whose goal is the overthrow of the republic. . . . They are Republicans who regret the passing of the empire, or who would gladly cry "Long live the king!"^[10]

In effect, the progressive Radicals of Bobigny felt that there was little difference between the mainstream radicalism that dominated the city council and the conservative republicanism of the farmers and their community's old guard. Their progressive radicalism eventually failed in Bobigny. But the group represented an interesting aspect of the early phases of Bobigny's integration into the Paris metropolitan area. It attempted to go beyond the class-based politics that characterized the town. While it rejected the attempts by market gardeners to shore up their dominant position in the community, it also opposed the control of city politics by the working class. Some members of the group were willing to go a long way in working with Socialists, especially before

1908, but most rejected a political landscape in which the working-class Left would occupy the primary position. Many members, including their leader, Paul Peysson, belonged to the urban middle or lower middle class. Had progressive Radicals been a larger percentage of the population, they might have been an urban alternative to working-class socialism. Unfortunately for Peysson and his followers, they lacked a solid constituency in the allotments.^[11]

Although the progressive Radicals formulated their political position by the turn of the century, they took longer in putting together a formal organization. Certain adherents formed a committee in 1901, but it quickly fell apart because of differences of opinion among its members. Judged from newspaper reports, these differences concerned both ideology and strategy.

The democratic Republicans are far from being in agreement as to individuals, ideas, or the means of waging the struggle. Some would prefer to fight with their colors openly displayed, whereas others would prefer to play hide-and-go-seek with the city council. . . . As for the leadership . . . the discord is so complete that, during the last elections, it could not even agree upon a titular leader for an electoral list.^[12]

Somewhat shakily, these progressive Radicals did manage to pull themselves together in 1902 to back Adrien Veber's campaign for election to the national legislature from a suburban district that included Bobigny. Veber, who was president of the General Council of the Seine, was well known as a socialist. The willingness of Bobigny's leftist Radicals to support him indicated both the diffuse organization of socialism in France before the formation of the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) and their identification with all progressives in opposition to enemies of the Third Republic. Certainly Veber's campaign, which was backed by an organization named Concentration républicaine, was not that of a fire-breathing Marxist. At an electoral rally in Bobigny held by the Veber committee less than a month before the election, the candidate and his supporters declared themselves Republican Socialists and emphasized their commitment to the defense of the republic.^[13]

Veber won his race and was elected to the legislature in May 1902, but he lost in Bobigny. His Nationalist opponent, Goussot, outpolled him by a score of 185 to 136 on the second round of the election. The vote nonetheless demonstrated that Bobigny's progressive Radicals could marshal support in the community to compete with the tradi-

tional Radical establishment, which had supported Goussot. Because of this, Peysson and his colleagues considered the Veber campaign a victory:

Bobigny has proved herself worthy of the republic on the second round of the vote. In spite of 40 new abstentions, the Republicans won 35 votes over the first round and the reactionaries lost 46. We hope that the municipality will understand the significance of such a result and that it will finally decide to devote itself to progress.^[14]

Understandably, the leftist Radicals did not wait for such a change of heart on the part of the municipality. Within a year they were organizing themselves to compete for political control of Bobigny in the 1904 municipal elections—a difficult task, as the leftist Republicans of the town had been unable to agree. Some, such as the local arrondissement councillor Collardeau, while criticizing the passivity of the city government, associated themselves with it on some issues; others, such as Peysson, condemned the city councillors as monarchists in Republican clothing. A key source of discord between the two factions was that the latter tended to emphasize social issues and to collaborate with the Socialists, from which Collardeau and his colleagues often demurred.^[15]

Despite their lack of unity, the leftist Radicals put together an energetic campaign for the municipal elections. In March 1904 this group finally managed to form its own organization, the Republican Committee for City Interests; its introductory manifesto emphasized the committee's concern for the well-being of Bobigny's market gardeners and demanded to know what the city council had done for them lately. A majority of the committee's members were market gardeners, although employés and small businessmen were also represented.^[16] Peysson, as the committee's candidate for mayor, took the lead in waging this group's electoral campaign. He used his connections with the newspaper Paris-Est to write a stream of articles attacking the city government and commenting on the ideas and progress of the progressive Radicals; he was most responsible for defining the committee's campaign platform. Not surprisingly, the major issue at which Peysson and his colleagues hammered away was the municipal administration's failure to modernize Bobigny. Not only did most progressive Radicals see this as the most important issue, but it was one of the few questions on which they could agree.^[17]

The municipal administration of Mayor Antoine Boyer, who was up for reelection, defended its record energetically. The Union of Patriotic

and Liberal Committees, the organization of the traditional Radicals, emphasized how judiciously and impartially the Boyer administration had run the affairs of the city. It stressed the important contacts Boyer had developed with the prefect of the Seine and other national officials to promote the well-being of Bobigny. Without directly replying to the charges by their opponents that city government had become stagnant and wary of progress, the traditional Radicals accentuated the stable, peaceful character of city government during their term in office.^[18]

The supporters of the Boyer administration also vociferously attacked Peysson and his followers. First, they charged that the leftist Republicans were spendthrifts without a proper sense of the responsibilities involved in running a city government. Second, the traditional Radicals accused the progressive Radicals of lacking patriotism and of opposing the French military, even though Peysson had at one time been an army officer. However, the most frequent reproach that Boyer's supporters aimed at Peysson and his colleagues was that they were either dupes of the socialists or socialists themselves. The traditional Radicals focused upon the support their opponents gave to Veber during the legislative campaign of 1902 as proof of a commitment to "collectivism." In contrast, Boyer and his supporters tried to portray themselves as upholding the rational political center, against both the antirepublicanism of the extreme Right and the socialism of the extreme Left represented by Peysson.^[19]

Peysson and the progressive Radicals waged an energetic campaign but lost the municipal election. Out of a total of 430 votes cast, 239 were for Mayor Boyer to 178 for Peysson. This victory in 1904 represented a last hurrah for Boyer; the days in which his supporters controlled Bobigny's political life were numbered, as the race for the arrondissement council in the canton of Noisy-le-Sec a year later demonstrated. In Bobigny the candidate of the Republican Committee, Renault, came in first with 79 votes, followed by a Socialist with 71, and a Nationalist with 69. This election was important in pinpointing political trends in Bobigny: it showed the strong position of the leftist Radicals, the dramatically increasing strength of the Socialists, and the growing distance between the two groups.^[20]Paris-Est explained the results:

For the first time in Bobigny the Republicans have obtained a majority, and if the Socialists had kept the promise they had made to marshal all Republican votes behind the candidate who won the most votes on the first round, against a Nationalist candidacy, we would have opposed 150 Republican votes to 69 Nationalist ones.

Although the Radicals came in first place, it was the Socialists who registered the greatest success, which they obtained through an energetic campaign.^[21]

The progressive Radicals never won political hegemony in Bobigny, which had seemed in their grasp until 1905. The rise of the Socialists fundamentally changed the rules of the political game. Before 1905, the progressive Radicals had viewed the socialists as another kind of Republicans, as allies and followers in the primary struggle against the traditional Radicals.^[22] But in 1905 the unification of the SFIO, with a more clearly defined Socialist doctrine, and the growing Socialist strength in Bobigny changed their perspective; by 1912 the majority of the community's progressive Radicals considered the Socialists to be the main enemy.^[23]

This political shift gained momentum in 1906 during Veber's campaign for reelection to the legislature. Many leftist Radicals who supported Veber in 1902 refused to do so again after a strike by agricultural workers against market gardeners in Bobigny and other northeastern Paris suburbs. This strike in March and April of 1906 brought home to many market gardeners the dangers of supporting a strongly pro-union party like the SFIO, and Paris-Est was firmly hostile to it. The fact that the SFIO had introduced a bill into the national legislature to enact the eight-hour day for industrial and agricultural workers did not help either. Veber won the election, but in Bobigny his conservative opponent beat him by 239 to 134 votes.^[24]

From 1906 to 1912 local politics in Bobigny was preoccupied by the growth of the progressive Radicals, and their increasing distance from the Socialist Left. In October 1906 a group of dissidents criticized the hostility of Radical Socialist leaders to Veber; by 1908 this group had formed its own political organization, the Republican Association for City Interests (ARIC). ARIC soon moved to the right, however, displaying the same hostility to the Socialists as had the Radical Socialist leadership. In the legislative election of 1910 Veber was opposed for the first time by a Left Republican, who won a majority of the vote in Bobigny. The results of this election, added to ARIC's failure to establish a distinct leftist Radical presence, marked a gradual rapprochement of the Radical factions in Bobigny.^[25]

The municipal elections of 1912 both illustrated and reinforced the results of 1910. For the first time the SFIO ran its own separate list and thus made a bid to govern Bobigny. Most of its members were new to municipal politics in Bobigny, although a few, such as Peysson, had run

as Democratic and Socialist Union candidates in 1908. Some would later prosper in local politics, like Jean-Marie Clamamus, the future mayor, who was running for the first time.^[26]

Yet the most notable aspect of the municipal campaign in 1912 was not the entry of the SFIO but the unification of the Socialists' opponents that the campaign provoked. At the end of 1911 a correspondent for Paris-Est had predicted that there would be four competing slates in the municipal elections, two of Republicans, one of independent Republican Socialists, and one of Socialists. By the following spring the two Republican lists had merged, however, cumbersomely and confusingly, into the Republican Radical Socialist Union. This slate included most of the outgoing city councillors as well as several former ARIC members, mostly market gardeners. Out of the twenty-three candidates on the list, sixteen were market gardeners and two were farmers, the rest being members of the urban middle classes. The slate excluded Bobigny's working class—at this point more than two-fifths of the population. It embodied a political coalition among Bobigny's farmers, market gardeners, and middle classes to ward off the growing political challenge posed by local workers.^[27]

The results of the 1912 municipal election made the need for such a coalition even more apparent. Although its list represented forces that dominated the political life of Bobigny, the Republican Radical Socialist Union obtained only 40 percent of the votes cast. The remaining 60 percent was divided between the SFIO slate and a group calling itself Republican Socialist. Since the Republican Radicals had won a bare plurality, the head of its list, outgoing Mayor Montigny, was reelected. The new city council consisted of fourteen members from the list and seven from that of the SFIO.^[28]

The municipal election in 1912 signaled the end of the era in which the rivalry between farmers and market gardeners dominated politics in Bobigny and expressed itself in electoral battles among Radical factions. As Paris-Est recognized, city government in Bobigny would no longer be the same.

Has something changed in Bobigny? We would respond with the affirmative.

The group controlling the old city council, almost entirely composed of market gardeners and farmers, has lost seven seats. That is to say that the newcomers, who only yesterday represented a negligible fraction of the community, today easily represent as large a proportion as the old population.

In consequence, we estimate that each neighborhood of the city is represented and we note with pleasure that allotment areas like la Folie, the Pont de Bondy, and Six Routes have their own councillor at city hall.^[29]

The elections demonstrated that the progressive Radicals of Bobigny had failed to transcend class politics or create a middle ground between traditional republicanism and socialism. Although the Independent Republican Socialists had done fairly well, they lost importance after 1912. Other representatives of the leftist Radicals either made their peace with the traditional old guard or else, like Peysson, temporarily cast their lot with the SFIO. From 1912 to 1919 the contest between these two groups was to dominate political life in Bobigny.^[30]

The Rise of Socialism in Bobigny

Before 1905 there was little distinction between socialists and leftist Radicals in Bobigny. Even the local organization that supported Adrien Veber's legislative campaign in 1902 was not a strictly socialistic one. As late as 1904 a local commentator suggested that Bobigny's socialists had no realistic prospects for electoral success.

The socialists are agitating confusedly in Bobigny. Up until the present all their efforts have only succeeded in demonstrating their impotence. They challenge the Republicans who are determined not to give up any of their present gains. . . . Even with the protection of M. Veber, there is no chance that the red flag and the "Internationale" will be displayed in our streets. . . . Let us return to our fields, with the firm conviction that the republic will continue to triumph against the revolution in our city.^[31]

Yet the views of this commentator were soon refuted by the surprising strength of Bobigny's Socialists. In 1905 they scored their first electoral gains, when the SFIO candidate came in second in Bobigny in the race for the arrondissement council. Much of their success came from the energy and organization with which they waged their campaign. Another telling factor was the working-class background of Robillard, the Socialist candidate. Because of it, many working-class voters who had voted Nationalist switched their support to the SFIO.^[32]

The SFIO's electoral gains, in the first year of its local founding, came from the growing working class and its newly articulated class consciousness. The workers and their families who moved into the community after 1900 were isolated both physically and socially from the other major population groups. It is not surprising that working-class politics should reflect this isolation, all the more since neither

traditional nor progressive Radicals sought to include working-class representatives in their electoral slates. This situation helps to explain why many Bobigny workers had voted Nationalist at the beginning of the century; they were voting against the Radicals and the market gardeners. In forming a self-proclaimed working-class political organization whose candidates would be workers, the SFIO of Bobigny not only enabled local workers to vote for their own but spurred the growth of class consciousness among them.^[33]

A growing working-class population boosted the Socialists' political strength in other Paris suburbs before 1914. Socialists controlled municipalities in substantial working-class communities like Ivry and Saint-Ouen before 1900. In Montreuil-sous-Bois, whose population was roughly one-third working class in 1912, the SFIO doubled the vote total of the Radicals and nearly won a plurality in that year's municipal elections. In Drancy, the SFIO candidate for the legislature in 1910 won the election with nearly two-fifths of the vote.^[34]

In 1906 the SFIO section of Bobigny devoted most of its efforts to reelecting Veber to the legislature. In contrast to 1902, in this campaign Veber ran as a Socialist in Bobigny and received much less support from leftist Radicals and market gardeners than he had four years previously. Veber won, but his local campaign—a Socialist effort—did not. Other than this campaign and the legislative election of 1910, the SFIO took little part in local electoral politics until Bobigny's municipal election of 1912.^[35]

It is hard to say whether the SFIO's minimal electoral participation in Bobigny from 1906 to 1912 derived from lack of resources or from greater emphasis on other aspects of organizing and community politics. In these years the Socialists did become involved in important community issues. In 1909, for example, they founded a local branch of the SFIO's Commuters' Federation, to press for improvements in Bobigny's tramway service. This effort led to conflicts with the progressive Radicals, who had been agitating over the same issue in their community organization and who regarded the local SFIO group as interlopers. The Socialists began to develop neighborhood groups; in 1912 they held a meeting to explore a possible section of the SFIO's People's University for Bobigny.^[36]

In May 1910, in the aftermath of Veber's successful legislative reelection campaign, the Socialists of Bobigny issued their first position paper since the founding of the local section. In this document they elaborated SFIO's approach to dealing with community problems.

Comrades and small property owners—

You came to Bobigny fleeing the high rents of Paris and seeking to emancipate yourselves from the rapacity of bourgeois who exploit you in all possible ways.

Unfortunately, in our city you have found only high taxes, absurdly poor means of communication, rutted streets, insufficient lighting, mounds of garbage, and no drinking water. . . . On the other hand, you have a city administration that is very costly and incapable of making any social progress.

The schools have neither day-care centers nor lunch rooms, and your children have to wade through the mud in the winter in order to come home for lunch. . . .

In cities dominated by Socialist elements, they make the effort to create means of social education, such as patronages laïques [youth clubs], scientific conferences, and so forth.

For these reasons we invite you to join us and examine with us those municipal issues that are of greatest interest to you.^[37]

From the first words of their manifesto, the Socialists of Bobigny identified their constituency as the working-class residents of the allotments, the mal-lotis, who had come to the community to realize their dreams of owning homes in the country and had instead been confronted with life in suburban slums. The manifesto ignored the farmers, market gardeners, and middle-class residents of Bobigny. Unlike the propaganda of the leftist Radicals, it emphasized that the SFIO was primarily a working-class party.

The other striking characteristic of this document was its strong emphasis on local issues and living conditions in Bobigny, as opposed to national questions and work-related grievances. The Socialists stressed the working class's immediate and omnipresent grievances, which they ascribed to the capitalist system, and gave less priority to the national struggle to implement socialism. The emphasis on living conditions over workplace issues reflected the experience of Bobigny, already largely a working-class commuters' suburb. Stressing the inadequacies of suburban life, the local SFIO mapped out a strategy that it and the Communist party used to great effect for a political base in early twentieth-century Bobigny.^[38]

In 1912 the municipal elections put the SFIO on the political map. In their first attempt at winning control of Bobigny, the local Socialists recorded about one-third of the vote and elected seven of their members to the city council, the first Socialists to sit there. This vantage gave them the opportunity to develop their popular base by demanding improved tramway service and introducing petitions from their districts

for better water and electric service, and other changes. Moreover, the elections marked the first time that Bobigny's Socialists campaigned independently of, and against, the progressive Radicals. In more ways than one, the 1912 elections indicated the maturation of the SFIO section in Bobigny.^[39]

Special municipal elections in August 1914 provided dramatic proof of this growth. In July, after a wave of resignations from the city council, byelections were called to replace five of its members. Four lists contested, one of traditional Radicals, one of leftist Radicals, one of independent Socialists, and one of the SFIO. The split between the Radicals (who had united in 1912), as well as the continued divisions between the SFIO and independent Socialists (some of whom had been on the SFIO list in 1912), seemed to presage a return to the politics that preceded the SFIO's upsurge in 1912.^[40]

Yet the electoral results showed that local politics would not return to the past. Four out of five of the SFIO's candidates were elected to the city council, in the first four places; the party's fifth candidate placed seventh. Except for city councillor Guieu, who defected to the independent Republican Socialists, the elections gave the Socialists control of ten out of twenty-one seats on the city council. Their stunning victory in the elections of 1914 resulted not from better electoral organization or strategy, but above all from the increasing percentage of their working-class constituency. It came at a momentous time: the elections took place on 1 August, the day after the assassination of Jean Jaurès and two days before France plunged into World War I. That night Balbynians sang the "Carmagnole" and the "Internationale" in the streets, as both Bobigny and France as a whole prepared to face a future they could not have predicted.^[41]

The Triumph of Socialism

Municipal elections were suspended in France for the duration of the First World War. Politics seemed to come to a standstill as the country prepared communities for the war and then tackled the problems it caused. The first elections after the end of the war, in 1919, resulted in the complete triumph of the SFIO in Bobigny and ushered in an unbroken sequence of city administrations controlled by the Left. Although such a victory had been foreshadowed by the striking progress the Socialists achieved in Bobigny from 1905 to 1914, it was not automatic. During the war the representation on the city council

they had gained in 1912 and 1914 became more valuable: without elections and with much of the press closed or censored, the activities of their city councillors were almost the only means the Socialists had to demonstrate their capabilities and intentions to the working people of Bobigny. The Bobigny SFIO's city councillors made a major effort to soften the impact of war on the people of the community, and this effort was not forgotten in 1919.^[42]

The two basic wartime problems the city council had to deal with were food and fuel, especially coal. Early in the war the municipality formed an emergency coal stockpile, from which it sold coal to city residents.^[43] Socialist councillors said the city was overcharging people for its coal, especially given the large quantities stored. They also transmitted citizens' complaints over the quality of coal distributed.

M. Vasseur brought to the attention of the tribune of the council the complaints of a large number of people having affirmed the lack of equity in the distribution of coal, and he noted that he had confirmed that some people have received coal that was 95 percent powder, whereas others got large chunks.

M. Beaugé joined his protests to those of his colleague Vasseur and advised that equity in the distribution can only exist when the practice of tipping has been suppressed.^[44]

Food, or preventing shortages of food, also became a major political issue. One of the council's first acts in August 1914 to prepare the community for war was to establish municipal soup kitchens in the schoolhouse, which served meals for twenty centimes, approximately the cost of a pound of bread. As the war dragged on, the SFIO city councillors began protesting that this was not enough, that measures should be taken to reduce the inflation of food costs for the majority of the population who did not use the soup kitchens.^[45]

Socialist members of Bobigny's city council tried to ensure that public transportation ran smoothly and frequently pointed out inadequacies of service, especially in the number of working-class trams. They also lobbied for a city workhouse, which was headed by the SFIO city councillor Pierre Adam. It manufactured pants and, employing mostly women with children, slightly eased wartime unemployment in the community.^[46]

Most of their wartime activities Socialist city councillors devoted to protect the living standards of their working-class constituents. There were exceptions, however, including a motion in 1916 that put socialism on the map in Bobigny. Noting that Bobigny was one of the

few Republican municipalities in the Department of the Seine that had not honored Jean Jaurès, the assassinated Socialist statesman, Jules Vasseur proposed to rename the rue de Romainville, avenue Jean Jaurès. In spite of protests from local shopkeepers, many with shops located in the rue de Romainville, the city council voted to adopt the change—the most visible sign of increased Socialist influence in municipal affairs during World War I.^[47]

Although not caught up in the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm that swept central and eastern Europe in 1919, French politics immediately after the war displayed a decided tendency toward extremes. On the Left, sympathy for the Russian revolution and protests against wartime inflation created massive strikes in 1919 and 1920. In both the labor movement and the SFIO, radicals were clearly on the offensive, forming the French Communist party in 1920 and causing a schism in the Confédération générale du travail in 1921. On the Right, members of the Party of Order joined with many Radicals frightened of bolshevism and resentful of the Treaty of Versailles to form the Bloc national, which scored a landslide victory in the legislative elections of November 1919.^[48]

In the same month, Bobigny held its first full municipal elections in seven years. Aside from the SFIO's impressive rise in the community since 1905, many indications pointed to a Socialist victory. By the end of 1919 both the national SFIO and its union ally, the Confédération générale du travail, were growing rapidly. Although the national SFIO did poorly in the legislative elections, it scored close to 30 percent of the vote in the Paris suburbs of the Department of the Seine; in Bobigny the Socialist candidate won a majority of the vote for the first time in the city's history. Moreover, 1919 was a year of heightened revolutionary expectations all over Europe, registered even in Bobigny.^[49]

In contrast to the elections in 1912 and 1914, in 1919 municipal elections in Bobigny were contested only by two slates, the SFIO and the Republican and Social Union. The Socialist list included most of the party's city councillors, plus politicians, such as Léon Rouberty, who had earlier belonged to independent socialist groupings, and political neophytes, such as Léon Pesch, who would affect Bobigny's political future. Almost all were running as candidates for the first time; of the twenty-three individuals on the SFIO list, four were incumbents and only one, Robert Saunier, had been elected before 1914.^[50]

The candidates on the Republican and Social Union list were equally new to electoral politics in Bobigny; only two were incumbents. The

newness of the candidates on both lists and the fact that there were only two slates indicated the beginning of a new political era in Bobigny. World War I served as a great divide; before 1919 the working-class Left possessed only marginal influence in city politics, whereas after 1919 it achieved permanent control of the municipality. During the war the city's Socialists had strengthened their appeal and increased their natural working-class constituency. The municipal elections were their opportunity to show how well they had used this time.

The municipal elections, the first round of which took place on 30 November 1919, were not even close. Under France's new system of proportioned voting, each ballot could contain as many votes (in this case, 23) as there were positions to be filled. Out of 1,089 ballots cast, the top SFIO candidate won 609 votes, while the one at the bottom of the list won 588. The vote totals of the representatives of the Republican and Social Union list, by contrast, ranged from 432 to 463. These municipal elections, unlike the legislative elections a month earlier, were a general success for the SFIO. In the Department of the Seine the number of city governments controlled by the SFIO bounded from seven to twenty-five, and in the provinces for the first time the party took control of important centers like Toulon and Lille.^[51]

Among the reasons for the local victory of the Socialists in 1919 is one of national dimension. Balbynians shared the desires of their fellow citizens all over France for a better life and for social equality after many years of hardship and sacrifice; the SFIO articulated these desires for its working-class constituency. Certainly the SFIO's vigor at the national level immediately after the war also contributed to the Socialists' victory in Bobigny.^[52]

Yet by far the most substantial reason for their victory in Bobigny was the increase in the community's working-class population, to which the Socialists succeeded in forming strong links. From 1911 to 1921, when the desperate wartime housing shortages occurred in Paris and the allotments expanded phenomenally, the working-class percentage of the population of Bobigny rose from under 44 percent to over 60 percent. By 1921 the employés were another 10 percent of the population, whereas the farmers and market gardeners together made up only slightly over 18 percent. These statistics made victory certain for any party that could win the loyalty of most of the former groups—the Socialists' appeal to Bobigny's mal-lotis won city hall.^[53]

In 1912, moreover, competing for control of the municipality had been two socialist lists, which divided the majority of the vote they

won. The disappearance of the independent Republican Socialists, some joining the SFIO and others leaving local politics, figured in the victory of the SFIO in November 1919. Some leftist Radicals, such as Paul Peysson, who had adopted socialist ideals and causes, were unable to make the transition from a political faction supported by market gardeners and employés to a group based on the working class. In addition, the independent Socialists lacked ideological coherence and national organization; they posed little obstacle to the SFIO's successful struggle for the allegiance of Bobigny's working class.^[54]

The municipal elections of 1919 were a great success for the SFIO in the Paris suburbs and marked the beginning of the Red Belt. The Socialists retained the seven city halls they had previously won, took over eighteen new ones, and established strong minority positions in six more. The combination of intense industrial mobilization in the Paris area and unprecedented housing shortages in Paris during World War I had created the working-class base for the Socialists' success of November 1919.^[55]

Well before the SFIO rose to importance in Bobigny, the community's political life had reflected the social split between farmers and market gardeners. The Socialist electoral victory in 1919 showed that, although the dividing lines had moved, local politics remained largely based on class. This fact was demonstrated in the 1920s and 1930s by the PCF, successor to the SFIO, which regularly received a majority of the vote in this predominantly working-class community.^[56]

The SFIO had power in Bobigny for only one year before the Congress of Tours split the old party in two to form the new French Communist party. But the Socialists nonetheless made it clear that their victory would bring changes to Bobigny, as their enemies noted with sarcasm.

It is generally clear that something has changed in Bobigny. In other times, when the "bourgeoisie" held the pot handle, it was rare to see official papers pasted on the walls. The public's attention was called upon only when it was indispensable to do so, and the city authorities tried to be as brief as administrative form permitted.

Now this is no longer true. The former city councillors worked and did not talk. In their place the electors have preferred orators, citizens capable of speaking for an hour without saying anything.^[57]

During its year in office, the SFIO municipality began work on a number of important city projects. These included paving the avenue Jean Jaurès and the chemin de Groslay, bringing electricity to the

community, and constructing schools for the Pont de Bondy district. One of the first acts of the new administration in 1920 was to vote to install a bust of Jean Jaurès (paid for by individual city councillors, not the municipality) in the council chambers.^[58]

From Socialism to Communism

Although a majority of the SFIO's members voted to affiliate with the Third International and the new PCF in December 1920, only a minority of Socialist officeholders—including municipal officials—approved the decision. In the Paris region, however, of the twenty-five SFIO city administrations in the Department of the Seine, sixteen chose to join the new party; they included Bobigny's Socialists. Their choice in 1920 was not atypical.^[59] More unusual was their ability to keep the municipality in the hands of the PCF over the next few years. For members of the PCF, these were years in which the new party was being recast along more Leninist principles; many who had originally joined out of vague sympathy with the Russian revolution became disillusioned and often left or were expelled from the PCF. For municipal officials, the Communist leadership's insistence on their subordination to the national Party was an onerous consequence of the Congress of Tours. As a result, many city administrations that had declared themselves Communist in December 1920 soon revolted: in October 1922 an influential mayor, Henri Sellier of Suresnes, led eight suburban municipalities in the Department of the Seine to quit the Party. By 1925, on the eve of the first municipal elections contested by the PCF, it retained only three city halls in the Seine: Bobigny, Saint-Denis, and Villetaneuse.^[60]

The experience of Saint-Denis exemplifies the chaotic first years of PCF municipal government. In December 1920, seven Saint-Denis city councillors rejected the choice of the majority and voted to stay with the SFIO. More significant was the refusal of most of the new Communist city councillors to follow the directives of the Saint-Denis PCF section; they held to the traditional autonomy of municipal officials. In July 1921 these councillors elected one of their own as mayor, removing Saint-Denis from PCF control. The PCF regained city hall in May 1922 after byelections, only to lose control of it again in February 1923, after several of its city councillors were expelled from the Party. Not until the regular municipal elections of May 1925 (and just barely then) did the PCF succeed in wresting definitive control of Saint-Denis from a coalition of Socialists and dissident Communists.^[61]

Although in Bobigny the hold of the PCF over the city administration was never seriously contested during this period, discord among city councillors did lead to resignations from the Party and the city council. For example, Pierre Beaugé, one of the four SFIO city councillors elected in 1914, sent two letters to the prefect of the Seine in April and July 1921, alleging that Clamamus was abusing his functions as mayor. Beaugé then stopped coming to city council meetings. Refusing a summons to explain his actions to the council, he resigned his position in October.^[62] In a similar, though less dramatic, case, Jules Vasseur, another SFIO candidate elected in 1914, clashed with the mayor and his fellow city councillors over the relations between the municipality and local Communist organizations. At a March 1923 council meeting Vasseur protested Clamamus's endorsement, in the name of the Bobigny municipality, of a dance held by a Communist sports society, La Prolétarienne. Other councillors attacked Vasseur's position, one stating that it was natural for the mayor to grant municipal approval to a working-class organization.^[63] Vasseur and others like him did not last long in the new Bobigny. The slate that the Bobigny PCF ran in the 1925 municipal elections contained mostly newcomers. Out of twenty-two candidates, only eight had been elected in 1919, and only one (Clamamus himself) in 1914. Thus the PCF that fought the elections in 925 was not the same political party as at the beginning of 1921.^[64]

And yet despite these changes in Bobigny the PCF had managed to hold onto the municipality from December 1920. By the 1930s Bobigny was the only city in the Department of the Seine to have achieved this record without a break. Why was Bobigny unique? Structural explanations do not suffice. It is possible, for example, that the newness of Bobigny's Socialist administration allowed its members to accept the PCF; they had not had time to get used to the traditional autonomy of municipal officials, and the PCF's stricter guidelines might not have seemed burdensome.^[65]

More significant were the attitudes of the suburban mayors toward the new PCF. I have not analyzed the political history of every Parisian suburb in the early 1920s, but of those I have, in each case a Socialist suburban mayor led a majority of his city councillors in opting for either the new PCF or the SFIO. In Puteaux, the first Socialist administration was elected in 1912 and reelected in 1919; the municipality split in 1920, yet Mayor Charles Auray stayed in power as a Socialist, and the return of three city councillors from the PCF to the SFIO in 1924 assured him and his party full control of the city council. More typical were the experiences of Montreuil and Drancy. In both

communities the first Socialist municipality was elected in 1919; following the local mayors, the councils joined the PCF overwhelmingly in 1920 and left the Party at the end of 1922. Moreover both mayors, Poncet of Montreuil and Duchanel of Drancy, dominated local politics until the Popular Front of 1936.^[66]

Bobigny provided another example of this trend. The consistent emphasis that Bobigny's Socialists placed on local rather than national issues certainly kept their organizations intact amid national and international schisms in the workers' movement. Yet their emphasis resulted less from structural factors than from individual personalities, above all that of Mayor Clamamus. As mayor of Bobigny throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Jean-Marie Clamamus was the city's preeminent Communist leader; to many inside and outside the community, he was red Bobigny. In 1920 Clamamus did not personally dominate politics as he would ten years later, but his prestige was sufficient in 1920 to cause his colleagues on the city council to follow his choice between the two leftist parties (unless they dropped out of politics). Unlike many other suburbanites, few who left Bobigny's city council and the PCF in the early 1920s rejoined the local SFIO, which between the wars remained weak, almost inexistent. Clamamus's stress on local concerns, above all the problems of the mal-lotis, meant that Communists who disagreed with national policy would keep their party membership without continuous, total adherence to the exact Party line. The local PCF was able to maintain the consensus reached at the Congress of Tours during the Party's stormy infancy, thanks to the political astuteness of the city's mayor.

Interwar Electoral Politics

Compared to that of the French Communist party and of many Communist municipalities, Bobigny's history of electoral politics between the wars was uneventful; nothing challenged the dominant position of the local PCF. Of the three municipal elections during the 1920s and 1930s, the PCF handily won those of 1925 and 1935; in 1929 it was unopposed. The legislative elections presented a similar picture. Clamamus was elected to the national legislature for the first time in 1924 from a district including Bobigny and most of the northeastern suburbs of the Department of the Seine. He was reelected in 1928 and 1932; he stepped down in 1936, having been elected to the Senate, whereupon he was replaced in the legislature by Gaston

Monmousseau, also representing the PCF. Only in 1928 did Clamamus face significant opposition.^[67]

The power and stability of Bobigny's PCF were unusual in the Paris Red Belt in two respects. First, Communists in other suburbs generally faced more formidable opposition, especially from the Right. In Ivry, for example, the PCF outdistanced the rightist slate by only three percentage points in the second round of the 1925 municipal elections, and by one percentage point in the second round of the 1928 legislative elections; not until 1936 did it win a majority of the vote on the first round.^[68] Second, many PCF suburban municipalities—including Clichy, Saint-Denis, Villetaneuse, Malakoff, and Pierrefitte—were taken over by Communist dissidents at one point or another between the wars. The solidity of the PCF's base in Bobigny was in fact more typical of the Red Belt after 1945 than in the 1920s and 1930s.^[69] Their electoral power was indomitable, based on local issues and networks, not on national politics. Even when the PCF was in poor straits elsewhere in France during the late 1920s and the early 1930s, in Bobigny it continued to receive solid majorities over all opponents (Table 19). The fact that many Balbynians identified themselves as Communists (not necessarily militant or activist), added to the achievements of the PCF municipality and the personal popularity of Mayor Clamamus, explained the interwar political situation in Bobigny better than specific political issues or campaigns.

The PCF drew a large share of the vote in the electoral district (most of the northeastern suburbs of the Department of the Seine) and all over Bobigny; it was strongest in the Pont de Bondy. In the 1928 legislative elections, it won 72 percent of the vote in this neighborhood and received 65 percent in central Bobigny. Conversely, the Right received 21 percent of the vote in the center, but only 10 percent in the Pont de Bondy. Although the central voting district contained many allotments, it also held Bobigny's few shopkeepers and market gardeners, two population groups hostile to the PCF.^[70]

Even though the working class's general identification with the interests of the PCIF largely determined the outcome of local elections, there were aspects of the local Communists' electoral strategy that improved its prospects. One of these concerned the class background of the candidates whom the Communists backed. In all three municipal elections of the interwar period, a majority of the PCF candidates for the Bobigny city council were of working-class background, and many of the remainder were employés. The PCF was not unique in this strategy, nor was it imposed by the national PCF during its bolchévisation campaign. (In 1919, 70 percent of the SFIO's candidates in Bobigny were also from working-class backgrounds.) By the 1930s it was evident that an electoral list without working-class candidates had no chance in Bobigny, so that even the Right proposed a predominantly working-class list for the 1935 municipal elections. Nonetheless, the PCF was more consistent in giving the workers of Bobigny a chance to "vote for their own." Similarly, including employés on the Communist electoral slates reflected both the local party's ties to Bobigny and its conscious attempts to maintain its support there. It was this attention to the sensitivities of its constituents that sustained the crucial sense of identification between the Communists and the people in Bobigny.^[71]

Campaign literature featured prominently in the PCF's electoral strategy. In addition to the usual propaganda, I uncovered two lengthy manifestos for the municipal elections of 1929 and 1935, both of which praised the achievements of the Communist municipality. In language almost identical to that in the 1929 manifesto, the 1935 document argued that the high quality of the PCF's municipal administration justified a vote for its candidates.

When in 1925, once again asking for your votes, we examined the achievements made since 1919 by your working-class elected officials, we did not fall to indicate to you the great difficulties we would encounter in trying to carry out the program that we presented to you.

Today, in spite of the difficulties that have occurred, resulting from the general financial situation created by the Bloc national and the Cartel des gauches, we are proud to affirm that this program has in large part been achieved.

None can even dream of denying the excellence of the city administration of Bobigny.

On every side, in the legislature, in the central government (despite the latter's constant struggle against communism), people acknowledge the impeccable financial management, the imaginative initiatives, and the audacious achievements of the Communist municipal elected officials of Bobigny.^[72]

Both manifestos had subsections dealing with the municipality's achievements in financial management, welfare, public instruction and hygiene, public works, and so forth. Neither manifesto, nor any other campaign literature put out by the Bobigny PCF, centered on the workplace or the significant ideological change in the national PCF from the "class against class" period to that of the Popular Front. From time to time the PCF would indicate these shifts: for example, in 1935 it put out a small brochure detailing the effect of the depression on small shopkeepers and its proposals to help them. It did not show such concern for shopkeepers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.^[73]

Concentrating for the most part on local issues, Communist electoral propaganda avoided doctrinal differences in municipal elections. Even in legislative elections, the local PCF emphasized loyalty to a political party that had done so much for the workers of Bobigny. In any electoral campaign the competing parties will naturally emphasize their most impressive achievements; for the Communists of Bobigny those were the achievements of the municipality. For the PCF militants and the average voters of Bobigny alike, communism was above all a local affair; their common viewpoint was reflected in the consistent electoral success of the PCF in Bobigny.

In conclusion, the electoral history of Bobigny in the early twentieth century supports our contention that residential issues, not workplace concerns, dominated the community's political life. At the beginning of the century the major political debates centered on the way Bobigny should develop. Right from the start, Bobigny's Socialists stressed their determination to amend the poor living conditions of the city's workers. The communists inherited this approach to local politics and carried it to fruition in the 1920s and 1930s.

From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, political allegiance in Bobigny paralleled social class. Before 1900 the open-field farmers supported the Party of Order, whereas the market gardeners voted for the Radicals. The arrival of a suburban population reinforced this general pattern, as the workers and employés solidly backed their own political party, the Socialists and then the Communists. For workers and employés social class related more to similarities in urban structure than to differences in workplace. Farmers, market gardeners, workers, and employés represented different degrees of urban development; conflicts among the latter three groups, for example, arose not at the point of production but rather from the contrasting needs and desires of rural and suburban populations. Political class conflict in Bobigny thus assumed a distinctly urban flavor.

Its urban background explains why Bobigny's history of elections was so undramatic: to a large extent political conflict reflected its gradual suburbanization. One reason why Communist politics in Bobigny did not reflect the weakness or volatility of the French labor movement in the interwar years was its link to urban change; as the pace of suburbanization stabilized after the mid-1920s, so did local communism. The correspondence between the arrival of a new urban and working-class population in Bobigny and the shifts in its political life is so strong that these changes could almost be seen as an autonomous process.

Yet that was not the case. The crucial factor in the success of the Socialists and then the Communists in Bobigny was that they won the allegiance of the city's working class. The isolation of that class from community life tended to promote class solidarity, but such feeling did not automatically translate into votes for the Left. The Left worked to win this allegiance; it did so by using its control of the municipality to improve local living conditions and by developing an extensive network of community associations that shaped residential life in Bobigny. It was into these areas, rather than electoral politics strictly defined, that the PCF put the bulk of its efforts in Bobigny. Electoral politics was responsible for the slogan "red Bobigny"; it was municipal policies and community activism that made that slogan a reality.

Chapter 5
The Communist Municipality of Bobigny

The Communist party's long-term control of Bobigny's municipal government made the community unique in the Paris area. In analyzing such a political formation, we should consider whether its existence as a Communist entity made any difference to the town's inhabitants. It existed within a capitalist system; if Stalin could not create socialism in one country, Mayor Clamamus had no hope of doing so in one city. Yet the people of Bobigny consistently elected a Communist city government; in seeking to discover why, we must consider its actions and achievements.

One fact that emerges from our previous discussion is the municipality's overriding concern with urban issues. Just as the problems of suburbanization dominated political debate in Bobigny, so the need to resolve those problems governed activities of the Communists. By no means did they see themselves simply as a party of municipal reform; they linked their ideological agenda to the most pressing daily concerns of their working-class constituents. In Bobigny such concerns were urban issues, a fact the PCF city government astutely grasped and acted on.

Municipality, State, and Party

Before looking at the accomplishments of the Communist municipality of Bobigny in the interwar period, we must bring into context two constraints on its activities. The French national government

strictly limited the powers of municipal governments; the French Communist party, like the French state, was a centralized national organization and left as little as possible to local initiative. They did not act in concert, but both forces influenced the policies of Bobigny.

The law of 5 April 1884 created the regulations that governed French municipalities, continuing the highly centralized government established by Napoleon. The responsibility of overseeing the work of city officials fell to the prefect of each department. Appointed directly by the president of the republic, the prefect was a department's administrative head and worked under the minister of the interior. The prefect's broad range of powers over municipal government was perhaps most significant in city finances; all city budgets had to be approved by the prefect. Moreover, if the city government failed to include enough funding for necessary services like police or education, the prefect had the power to add these to the budget and force the municipality to levy additional taxes to cover their cost. This policy allowed him a part in determining what programs a municipality could undertake.^[1]

Finances were by no means a prefect's only avenue of influence over city governments. The prefecture administered programs for education and relief of poverty with little input from local municipalities. Although city governments paid for police services, police commissioners were usually appointed by the prefect or the president of the republic. The prefect had the general right to annul any city council decision that he judged to be beyond the parameters of municipal concerns. Finally, the prefect had extensive disciplinary powers over municipal governments. In the case of illegal actions by city officials, he could temporarily suspend them from their functions or expel them from their positions.^[2]

Although not applicable to the city of Paris itself, the law of 1884 did cover its suburbs and the rest of the Department of the Seine. In the Seine, however, in contrast to other departments, suburban municipalities had not one but two prefects to deal with; they were also subject to the decisions of a prefect of police. This official had jurisdiction over all matters of public order and safety in the suburbs, such as surveillance of public places, control of vagrants, and maintenance of prisons. The function was justified by a greater need for security in the capital, and by the natural turbulence of large cities.^[3]

These strict prefectural controls meant that major aspects of life in Bobigny lay beyond the influence of its Communist municipality. The

city council could not change the curriculum in local schools to reflect Marxist ideology, for example. The relative powerlessness of French municipal government explains the PCF's pessimistic view of its possibilities: the PCF rejected the concept of "municipal socialism" within a capitalist state and constantly emphasized national political issues over local concerns.^[4]

The Communists were not the first leftist political party to grapple with socialism's implications for municipal government. In 1881 the "Possibilist" party of Paul Brousse published a program advocating municipal autonomy from the central government, municipal ownership of public utilities like gas and water, and local control of unemployment relief and other services. Other socialists, notably Jules Guesde, attacked this program as simply reformist. In rejecting municipal socialism, therefore, the PCF adopted much of the prewar critique by the Guesdists.^[5] This attitude toward city government was not restricted to Communists in France; for the Comintern, municipal issues definitely had secondary significance. The Second World Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow from 19 July to 7 August 1920, indicated its view of the relation between communism and municipal government by devoting a single paragraph to the subject:

13. Communists, if they obtain a majority in municipalities, should: a) form a revolutionary opposition to the central power of the bourgeoisie; b) try by all possible means to serve the interests of the poorest part of the population (economic measures, creation of or attempts to create an armed workers' militia, etc. . . .); c) use every opportunity to reveal the obstacles raised by the bourgeois State against all radical reforms; d) develop on this basis energetic revolutionary propaganda, without fearing conflicts with the bourgeois State; e) replace, in certain conditions, municipal governments with soviets of workers' deputies. All the action of Communists in the municipalities should be integrated into the general task of the disintegration of the capitalist system.^[6]

Aside from specific instructions, such as replacing municipal governments by soviets, which reflected the revolutionary hopes of the era, this Comintern document clearly expressed the view that all specific actions by Communist municipalities should work to overthrow capitalism. It referred to concrete reforms that Communists in control of city governments could make to improve the material conditions of the working class only obliquely, in one phrase, "economic measures." It devoted greater attention, in subsections (c) and (d), to using the

municipality to embarrass and hinder the central government. Even in its single paragraph on local issues, the Comintern emphasized the primacy of national politics; this remained a central theme of the PCF's programs for municipal government.^[7]

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s certain broad themes characterized the Party's policies on city government. First and foremost—in line with the Comintern document—all municipal activity must be subordinated to the main task of challenging the capitalist system on a national level; municipal socialism was simply reformist or unrealistic. The municipality could serve the interests of the working class only by helping to prepare the socialist revolution; without this clear perspective any reforms it achieved could harm those long-term interests by delaying the development of revolutionary class consciousness. PCF propaganda constantly pointed out the limits that the French state imposed on municipal activities, as in an article on the Communist city government of Clichy. After listing all the material improvements implemented, the author noted,

Certainly, the workers are still exploited by capital just as much in Clichy as elsewhere. And that which a municipality can do in the bourgeois state, under the yoke of bourgeois power, is nothing in comparison with what should be done—with what cannot be done until the proletariat holds state power in its hands . Certainly, what a municipality can do is nothing in comparison to what the soviet will do tomorrow.

The example of Clichy shows nonetheless that Communist workers are capable of managing the interests of the workers much better than the bourgeois who administer city halls for the profit of their class.^[8]

Aside from general revolutionary theory and strategy, a more immediate reason for the national leadership to downgrade municipal issues was its determination to ensure that local Communist politicians remained firmly under the control of the Party. Where the PCF controlled a city government, a Communist mayor could build up a personal base of support and thus challenge the Party's leadership.^[9] Traditionally, political parties in France were loosely structured organizations, with little effective control over the activities of their elected officials. This was particularly true at the municipal level, where a politician's activities often had more to do with his position in local society than with his party affiliation. In trying to create a new kind of political party in France, party leaders rejected the traditional autonomy of French politicians; they feared moreover that municipal officials immersed in local affairs would lose sight of the broad lines of PCF policy and gradually lapse into reformism. Therefore the goal was to

keep Communist mayors and city councillors on a short leash; but this was easier said than done.

Circular on the Control of Municipal Activity

In spite of precise directives repeated a hundred times, there are still some municipalities that try to evade, the control of the Party, or district organizations that neglect their duty to control the municipalities.

We remind you that this control is an absolute obligation and also that the actions of municipal councillors cannot be overseen from a distance, but only by working closely with them. If this is not done, the municipal councillors can hide behind the excuse of artificial technical difficulties, or else comrades may ignore real technical difficulties and commit mistakes.^[10]

In general the organizational methods devised by the PCF to manage municipal politics seem to have functioned sporadically, if at all.^[11] They were part of the larger organizational structure decreed by the policy of bolchévisation, which tried to increase the role of working-class militants and the control of PCF leaders over all aspects of Party life.^[12] Yet in spite of the plethora of dummy committees, commissions, and sections, the PCF asserted effective control over its city governments. It did so by ensuring the uniformity of all municipal electoral campaigns;^[13] most important, it expelled Communist municipal politicians who failed to adhere to the Party line. In 1929 there was a wave of expulsions of local officials who had refused to accept the PCF's new, ultraleftist "class against class" position.^[14] The PCF's ability to regain control of Saint-Denis after expelling Jacques Doriot clearly showed its success in changing the traditional relation between French political parties and their elected representatives, and in dominating municipal policy.^[15]

Involvement in city politics benefited the Party, especially when the PCF gained control of a municipality. First of all, the Communist municipality was useful in providing an electoral base for Party leaders, such as Maurice Thorez, mayor of Ivry (or Doriot, mayor of Saint-Denis). The PCF also used city payrolls to provide sinecures for important Party activists; for example, a police report of March 1933 noted that the Communist militant Suzanne Girault had been appointed a mayoral assistant in Vitry.^[16] The leaders of the young Communist party considered control of a city government gave its organizers on-the-spot training in administrative skills. By training and closely supervising the work of Communist municipal officials, the Party could exercise greater control over them and create the administrators for the workers' state of the future.^[17]

From time to time the PCF called on city governments to challenge the national government, to defy "bourgeois legality." By going beyond the juridical bounds set for municipal government, PCF local officials would show workers how those legal limits worked against their class interests. Workers would then, the Party hoped, draw the lesson that only by destroying the bourgeois state that set and enforced those limits could they improve their condition.

We must always keep in mind that this program and the revolutionary municipal action that it entails will inevitably break the limits of bourgeois legality and that it will come up against the repressive measures of the bourgeois state and its apparatus (prefecture, police). Thus every time that the authorities place obstacles before our [workers'] class policy, and harass or imprison our elected officials, we should seize the occasion to denounce to the masses more vigorously than ever before the constraint, the repression, and the dictatorship of the bourgeois state, to undertake a vast campaign of agitation and mobilization of the masses for the defense of their Communist municipality and their Communist party.^[18]

The Party expected Communist mayors, for example, to close their city halls in observance of its general strikes, to show that they were not simple politicians like any others but were above all servants of the revolutionary interests of the working class. In January 1930 the Party censured the PCF mayors of Clichy and Chambon for "capitulating before the bourgeoisie" when they agreed not to hold Communist meetings at their city halls if the local prefects agreed not to send police into their communities during the PCF's general strike on 1 August 1929.^[19]

Perhaps most useful in winning over the vast numbers of workers unaware of revolutionary class consciousness, Communist municipalities could enact reforms to improve the material standards of the working class. They could demonstrate at once their administrative competence and their working-class credentials. The Paris suburbs, which had more people living under PCF governments than any other part of France, were key to this strategy. The Communist municipalities of the Department of the Seine thus became the PCF's laboratory for testing its municipal policies.^[20]

Communist city governments in the Paris suburbs did devote a lot of attention to improving local living conditions. Bobigny and Vitry took the lead in dealing with the problems of their defective allotments, of vital concern to suburbanites. Saint-Denis, the largest suburb controlled by the PCF, was especially active in building new urban facilities and

upgrading old ones. During the 1920s and early 1930s the city built an entire new school complex, repaired or enlarged many other school buildings, built a swimming pool, a day-care center, a city library, and set up a summer camp for the city's children. And such activities built the long-term bases of PCF electoral strength in the Paris suburbs.^[21]

A related aspect of the PCF's municipal policy was the concept of Communist city governments as "bastions of socialism." PCF municipalities were expected to use their governmental powers to aid unions and other working-class organizations.

We must create, or at least try to create, a proletarian municipal policy, whose principal tasks were determined by the last presidium of the Communist International: . . . support the economic struggles of the workers by the vote of subsidies to strikers, by the organization of soup kitchens for the strikers and their families, by the organization of colonies for their children.^[22]

One instance was the massive sitdown strikes of June 1936, the largest of the interwar period, when Communist municipalities organized soup kitchens for the striking workers. During the depression PCF city governments were instructed to help committees of local unemployed workers, by letting them hold meetings in municipal buildings, for example.^[23]

For us, the PCF's interwar municipal policies are more than a record of events, however significant: they give us the key to a fundamental characteristic of the Party, its centralized structure. To a greater extent than in socialist groups before 1914, decisions within the PCF were made by the leadership and imposed on Party members. The leadership took this structure from Moscow, believing that such centralization made the Party more effective in fighting capitalism. But the structure also mirrored that of the highly centralized French state. Especially for municipal policy, the structure of the PCF was both a result of Soviet directives and a distorted reflection of French government. "Fighting fire with fire" in working for the revolutionary overthrow of the French government, the PCF reproduced the French hierarchical structure within itself.^[24]

Ideological Actions of Bobigny's Communist Municipality

As a Communist stronghold during the 1920s and 1930s, Bobigny offers an excellent example of how the national Party's instructions concerning municipal governments worked at the local level. Much of

the Communists' success came from the city administration's ability to resolve the concrete problems resulting from Bobigny's chaotic and overrapid urbanization; still, Bobigny's Communists were not just "sewer socialists." The city council did take many overtly political positions and in general attempted to use the Bobigny municipality to serve the broader revolutionary goals of French communism.

One service expected from Communist municipalities was to put the resources of the city government at the disposal of the national Party and of Communist causes. Among the numerous allegations that the city government of Bobigny subsidized the work of the PCF—both the local section and the national organization—were those made by the right-wing Journal de Saint-Denis, a newspaper which covered the northern Paris suburbs. Yet the Journal de Saint-Denis was not the only observer to note these practices at Bobigny's city hall. In 1928 a police report stated that the municipality had purchased a Citroën, which was used exclusively to transport PCF candidates to electoral rallies. Given the widespread use of Communist municipalities for similar purposes, this was almost certainly no isolated incident.^[25]

At times PCF city governments aided the clandestine activities of international Communist officials. For example, Mayor Clamamus was able to give Jules Humbert-Droz, a Swiss Communist working for the Third International, falsified papers with the identity of a painter residing in Bobigny.^[26] As Clamamus later confirmed, this was not the only time he used his official position to perform services for Moscow: "I hid in Bobigny . . . the first agents from Russia, Diegott for example, who came at the same time as Richard Schuller, to prepare for the arrival of Clara Zetkin. They were friends. . . . Others came afterwards. I never asked them their names."^[27]

The Bobigny municipality tried to help the work of local Communist organizations, often allowing them to use city buildings for meetings and rallies. The Edouard Vaillant marketplace and the maison du peuple on several occasions served local Communists for informational meetings, showing films, and similar activities. The city sometimes cosponsored demonstrations with the PCF section. One very solemn instance occurred in 1938 when the city government, with every Communist and sympathetic organization in Bobigny, held a public funeral service to honor two young citizens of the community who had died while serving with the International brigades in Spain.^[28]

In addition, Bobigny's Communist municipality displayed solidarity with PCF national actions. To honor the general strike against fascism

called by both the PCF and the Socialist party on 12 February 1934, the city government permitted the picketing and closing of the local schools. On 12 October 1925, the Party sponsored a one-day general strike to protest the French government's repression of Moroccan independence fighters in the Rif. Mayor Clamamus closed Bobigny's city hall and gave all city workers the day off while he went on working in his office. Disregarding Clamamus's protests that he was not responsible for a municipal walkout, the prefect of the Seine charged that "in officially announcing the halting of public services, M. Clamamus has gravely failed in his duties" and suspended him from his functions for one month.^[29]

The PCF condemned this decision as a politically motivated attack against communism in general. During a session of the Chamber of Deputies dealing with the suspension of PCF mayors after the 12 October general strike, Clamamus spoke.

The measures taken against certain Communist mayors are arbitrary . . . these mayors can be reproached with nothing more than having participated in an antiwar demonstration . To suspend a mayor because, independent of his will, city services did not function, is arbitrary. . . . Your decisions are class decisions. The workers of the suburbs will not accept them. No matter what you decide, the people of the suburbs will oppose your arbitrary exercise of power.^[30]

In fact, what lay behind this participation by Communist municipalities in general strikes was not the belief that such aid would bring about their success. In part it was a desire to show that Communist city officials were not like other politicians, that they did not always accept the rules of the game. More important, as Clamamus's statement demonstrates, Communists hoped that such actions would discredit the government in the eyes of the working class and win over the workers to the PCF. In this instance, therefore, the contribution asked of a Communist municipality like Bobigny was not so much material as symbolic and didactic.

By far the most significant project to further the national PCF was the establishment of the Bobigny Lenin School in November 1924; the police raided the school at the end of the year, more than anything else confirming Bobigny's reputation as a solidly Communist suburb. The Bobigny Lenin School was the first national school the PCF set up to train the leadership of the future. In the early 1920s in several local schools the PCF had attempted to train its working-class members in Marxist theory and the history of workers' movements. Bolchévisation

began in 1924 and required among other things that most PCF candidates for public office come from working-class backgrounds; a national PCF training facility was needed for these new working-class politicians, many of whom, far from having a sophisticated knowledge of Marxist dialectics, could barely read or write.^[31]

Most of the roughly sixty students at the school were young men from working-class backgrounds, many with responsible positions in their own unions or Party organizations. While at Bobigny, students were required to participate in local Communist cells for part of every day.^[32] The majority stayed there only briefly; some students did complete their studies and go on to important positions in the PCF. The most illustrious Lenin School alumnus, Jacques Duclos, described it in his memoirs.

The school had been installed in Bobigny in a barracks put at the disposition of the Party by the Communist municipality. This barracks was located very close to the present maison du peuple, not far from city hall. At the time Bobigny was a small suburban community where everything that touched upon daily life was immediately noticed. . . . We came every morning in a bus and ate our meals in a small restaurant near the school, which in that part of Bobigny created an unaccustomed excitement.^[33]

Party leaders did not intend to make a top secret establishment of the Lenin School; still they preferred to locate it in friendly territory. Yet by the mid-1920s this was getting rather difficult to find in the Paris area. Clamamus had already shown his reliability by sheltering Communist agents. Naturally the PCF leadership decided to locate the Lenin School in Bobigny. "'We are supposed to create a Marxist-Leninist school,' explained [Louis] Sellier. 'Orders from Moscow. You are the only mayor worthy of confidence that we have left. That's why we thought of Bobigny.'"^[34]

It was not long before the Bobigny Lenin School, attacked by the rightist Action française as "a nest of Red Guards," attracted the attention of the national government. As part of a series of attacks against PCF targets in the Department of the Seine, the Paris police raided the Lenin School on 6 December 1924. Over 150 police agents surrounded the school's barracks, ordered all students and teachers outside, confiscated their books and notes, and searched the building. Several foreign students, Belgians and Italians, were arrested and soon deported.^[35] To the PCF, the raid exemplified the general right-wing offensive by the newly elected government of the Bloc des gauches; the PCF accused Prime Minister Edouard Herriot of having been pushed into the police action by pressure from Charles Maurras, leader of the

Action française. The raid also brought home the disadvantages of not having municipal control over the police.^[36]

In 1925 the Lenin School moved to Clichy, which had just elected a Communist municipal government; but for many years people linked the Lenin School with Bobigny. In agreeing to shelter the school, Bobigny's municipal government proved that it was interested not just in building more sidewalks but in expressing one of the PCF's most important principles of city government.

Direct aid to the PCF was not the only way Bobigny's city government sought to demonstrate its ideological character. It took many positions and actions that, without necessarily strengthening the Party's organization, expressed the municipality's adherence to PCF doctrine. One example was the "political" motions passed by the city council, decisions that dealt not with business as usual but expressed a clear ideological viewpoint. Because these actions involved only the municipal government, they clearly show its support for Communist party doctrine.

The council's political resolutions often took the form of subsidy grants.^[37] In September 1921 the councillors voted a subsidy of 500 francs to aid the victims of famine in the Soviet Union. In 1936 the council allocated 350 francs to a committee commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, author of the "Marseillaise"; it granted an equal amount the following year to a group planning to build a monument to Paul Lafargue, an eminent prewar French socialist and son-in-law of Karl Marx.^[38] None of these subsidy grants or the brief motions passed to approve them expressed an exclusively PCF point of view; after all, neither Rouget de Lisle nor Lafargue was a Communist, and the PCF was not the only group in France to aid people starving during the Soviet Union's civil war. Yet the acts did identify the Bobigny municipality as an integral part of the French Left.^[39]

At times the city council expressed its political point of view by denying requests for subsidies. When asked by the city council of Saint-Mandé, a wealthy Parisian suburb, to donate money to create an endowment for the children of' French war hero General Mangin, the city councillors of Bobigny responded forthrightly:

Considering that a working-class city council should not spend the pennies of its taxpayers on subscriptions for the children of generals.

That generals who died in their beds while millions of workers and peasants fell on the field of battle have no right to solidarity from their victims.

That the pensions given to generals' families are quite generous when compared to the dole received by the widows of simple soldiers and the miserable allocations accorded to mutilated veterans.

Refuses, for these different reasons, to take part in the envisaged subscription.

Affirms its intention to reserve its solidarity for the workers who were victims of the Great War, and also for the young French workers and peasants who are dying today in Morocco and Syria for the greater profit of the financiers.^[40]

The Bobigny municipality used this subsidy request to condemn the First World War as a class conflict and also—anticipating by five days the PCF's general strike against the French campaign in Morocco's Rif mountains—to attack all French military engagements in Morocco and Syria on similar grounds. On another occasion, in a resolution allocating 4,000 francs to victims of flooding in southwestern France the council condemned "capitalist cupidity" as responsible for the tragedy and for good measure lambasted the government's handling of the reconstruction of regions devastated by World War I. It directed moreover that the subsidy be given to the Comintern's International Workers' Aid, an "organization of proletarian solidarity, alone qualified to ensure the distribution of these funds to the workers and peasants of the region, who alone interest us."^[41]

In contrast to the motions cited earlier, these last two express a more strictly Communist viewpoint. The overriding theme of both is class conflict and solidarity; the monies of a working-class municipality should be used only to benefit other members of that class. Given this viewpoint, it is not surprising that several of these subsidies went to striking workers. For example, in 1931 the Bobigny city council voted to give 1,000 francs to the town of Halluin for the welfare bureau, which was out of money because of the demands on it for striking textile workers; their vote stipulated that the funds be given to strikers no matter what their political opinions were. In June 1926 the council voted to send 250 francs to the British miners' union, which had stayed out despite the collapse of the general strike a month earlier.^[42]

Although the spirit guiding these subsidies to strikers was that of abstract class solidarity, when possible the municipality directly connected such grants to the immediate interests of the workers of Bobigny; thus Clamamus justified his request for aid to the clerks involved in the strike of 1925 against Paris banks: "The Mayor explains to the council the situation of the bank clerks as a result of the strike that they were forced to declare to obtain a wage increase, and

the situation of clerks living in Bobigny thus deprived of resources. . . . The council . . . in solidarity, votes an indemnity of 500 francs to the bank clerks' strike committee."^[43]

Before ending this discussion of the political resolutions voted by the Bobigny city council, I must make two points. First, the number of such forthrightly ideological resolutions was very small. In searching through the city council's records from 1920 to 1939, I found that fewer than twenty resolutions met this criterion (the council met twice a month and discussed up to fifteen items of agenda, many routine). The motions remain significant for us: they show what positions the council took and what issues it chose when it expressed its politics in such a direct manner. Yet they also demonstrate that the municipality considered such overt ideological statements to have minor importance.^[44]

Second, much of the money voted by the Bobigny city council subsidized either Communist organizations or causes the PCF favored. Like the money voted for the victims of flooding in southwestern France, the funds for starving Russians in 1921 were handed out by a PCF official, M. Stratta (presumably Emile Stratta, the secretary of the Bobigny PCF section). The PCF put a great deal of effort into supporting the strike against Paris banks; and red Halluin, like red Bobigny, had a Communist municipality.^[45] As for the struggle of the British miners, after the moderate leadership of the Trades Union Congress abandoned the general strike, it became a favorite cause of the Comintern. We must recall that for French Communists in the 1920s, the most meaningful aid to the working class was aid to the PCF, because only the PCF was fighting to liberate the proletariat. Still, we might add that the Bobigny municipality's political subsidies were made less in a spirit of disinterested class solidarity and more in the desire to assist various Communist endeavors. In granting political subsidies, the city government united its goals of nourishing other branches of the Communist movement and of proclaiming its ideological convictions.

The municipality did not limit itself to subsidizing strikers in other areas; at times it aided striking workers in Bobigny itself. As with the political resolutions, examples of such aid are few, primarily because Bobigny was a residential suburb; having few factories, it had few strikes. The aid for local strikers took two forms: demonstrations at the picket site, and soup kitchens for the striking workers. An example of the former occurred in 1932; during a brief strike by ditch diggers at the Versille workshop in Bobigny, Mayor Clamamus led a delegation of unemployed workers to join the strikers picketing at the work site.^[46]

The city government had meals served to the families of strikers; it sometimes arranged arbitration between striking workers and management and let unions use the city facilities to hold meetings.^[47]

The Budgets of the PCF Municipality

By a variety of political activities, the city government of Bobigny sought to broaden the sense of identity between it and its constituents into a more expansive feeling of solidarity between the French Communist party and the national and international working class. Its symbolic resolutions in favor of strikes, however, did not account for the average worker's consistent vote for the PCF municipality. It won workers' loyalty by the concrete improvements it was able to make in their living conditions.^[48] The major achievement of the city's PCF government was that it provided Bobigny with an urban structure commensurate with the size of its population.

One way to form a picture of the municipality's achievements is to look at the city's budgets. A full-scale analysis of budgets from the Communist takeover in 1920 to 1939 does not fall within the scope of this study, which offers a brief description of their basic structure and evolution during the 1920s and 1930s.^[49] The most elementary fact to note about the budgets is their spectacular growth. From 1921 to 1936 the total expenses of Bobigny increased from 579,304 francs to 12,710,937 francs—nearly twenty-two times; they grew at an average annual rate of over 140 percent. Of course, the city's population also grew substantially, but its increase of roughly 284 percent from 1921 to 1936 hardly explains the budget's expansion. The municipality was spending a lot more money per capita in 1936 than in 1921: this fact alone indicates the development of city services and of the public sector by the PCF city government.^[50]

The taxes that provided the ordinary receipts for French city governments fall into three categories: the octroi, the centimes additionnels, and other taxes, in descending order of importance. The octroi was a sales tax on all goods brought into the community; it was often the largest source of revenue in many suburban municipalities. The centimes additionnels were a surcharge based on direct national taxes; if a municipality levied a total of twenty centimes additionnels, its taxpayers paid an amount equal to 20 percent of their national taxes to the city (in addition to the national taxes). The state restricted the number of centimes additionnels a municipality could impose to eighty

during the interwar period, but this limit went largely unenforced. Finally, municipalities could and did impose a number of less important taxes, including those on dogs, on commercial performances (spectacles ), and on funerals. We can include in this category revenues from renting city property or spaces in city markets, sales of hunting licenses, and similar charges, though they are not strictly taxes.^[51]

Within this city tax structure, the most unusual characteristic of Bobigny's local taxes was the absence of the octroi. For years the French Left had harshly criticized it as outmoded (it was created in the Napoleonic period), cumbersome, and—above all—highly regressive. Both the Socialist and Communist parties called for its abolition.^[52] Yet even a wealthy municipality was loathe to abolish a major source of revenue, and PCF city governments were anything but wealthy. Therefore most Communist municipalities continued to collect the octroi. Because Bobigny was small it never had an octroi before the PCF came to power. In 1921 the town's population reached six thousand, the number needed to establish an. octroi; Bobigny's Communists could more easily refuse to begin levying one than other similar municipalities could abandon a tax inherited from previous administrations to search elsewhere for funds. Nonetheless, refusal to levy the octroi was seen as a major step toward greater fiscal egalitarianism, one to which the Communists pointed with pride in their electoral propaganda.^[53]

The money it failed to take in with an octroi Bobigny made up in ordinary receipts, principally by collecting a large number of centimes additionnels. The number of these imposed "because of insufficient revenues" rose from 640 in 1921 to 811 in 1936, by which time they accounted for well over half of all ordinary receipts. As an income tax, the centimes additionnels were more progressive than the octroi, since parts of them would not affect taxpayers of moderate income.^[54] Thus Bobigny's general tax structure partially justified the PCF's claim that its city governments redistributed the tax burden away from the working class.^[55]

Even more than its receipts, the expenditures of a Communist municipality were to demonstrate its sensitivity to and identification with the interests of the working class and poor. In its program for the 1929 municipal elections, the Communist party of Bobigny emphasized the municipality's efforts in public assistance, unemployment relief, and education. In actual fact the Bobigny city government used a small share of its budget for public assistance; 11 percent of the ordinary expenditures of the 1921 budget was the highest amount I discovered

for the 1920s and the 1930s. By contrast, public instruction was a major budgetary item, from a low point of 20 percent of total ordinary expenses in 1921 to nearly 40 percent of city expenditures in 1931. In a sense, Bobigny's PCF municipality made a decision to use the present to feed the future.^[56]

The PCF valued unemployment relief as an important service that Communist municipalities provided their constituents. By 1936 Bobigny was spending more than six million francs (or 45.4 percent of total expenditures) on unemployment relief a year; most of this sum came, however, from subsidies by the department and the state rather than city revenues. The subsidies covered obligatory expenses for unemployment relief; anything extra was paid by the municipality. And like other Communist municipalities, Bobigny did make extra efforts to deal with the crisis.^[57] In January 1936 the PCF newspaper, La Voix de l'Est, reported that Bobigny had given out five hundred tons of coal to the local unemployed since the start of the winter.^[58]

All in all, the Communist city government of Bobigny gave its constituents well-developed social services, in spite of its rather meager public assistance. The PCF neither initiated nor restructured such day-to-day services, however; its major innovation in Bobigny was to develop an urban structure for the community. Its extraordinary expenditures are that section of the city budget that most accurately shows the extent of this effort. Aside from unemployment relief funds, this section consisted of debt service payments on loans contracted by the municipality to pay for projects in city improvement. For example, the extraordinary expenditures of the 1931 Bobigny city budget include these payments:

In 1931 such payments totaled almost 1.5 million francs, or 61.3 percent of the amount for that year's ordinary expenditures.^[59]

In the four annual budgets I studied from 1921 to 1936, debt service payments had the largest share of expenditures in 1931, which is not surprising, since the Sarraut Law of 1928 added impetus to the cleanup

of the allotments. Moreover, in 1931 the Great Depression was beginning to weigh on city resources. Yet in all four budgets, extraordinary expenditures were a significant component. Their symbolic importance was greater: it was to carry out the projects that these expenditures stood for that the people had elected a Communist city government. What did the people of Bobigny get for their money?

Dealing with the Allotments

The crisis in the allotments confronted Bobigny with its greatest problems at the beginning of Communist municipal control in 1921. The frustrated mal-lotis were largely responsible for the victory of the old SFIO in the 1919 municipal elections. To retain the allegiance of local voters, the young PCF would have to improve the living conditions for this critical constituency. Before 1928 the national legislation on the allotments was the overriding obstacle to their improvement. The law passed by the legislature in 1919 gave municipal authorities no powers to enforce the law's standards on allotment developers; the 1924 law did not apply to those allotments finished before its passage. Since municipal authorities could not force developers to provide their allotments with certain basic amenities, before 1928 the Communists of Bobigny devised two strategies to cope with the problem. They applied existing legislation as strictly as possible and worked with allotment residents and developers to undertake the necessary improvements; after 1924 this local strategy intensified. The second strategy, which Mayor Clamamus carried out at the national level as parliamentary deputy, publicized the problems with allotment developers and worked for more equitable legislation that would make the developers pay.^[60]

Though the 1919 law was unenforceable, the Bobigny city council did demand that developers follow its provisions and submit all plans for allotments to city hall for approval. Speaking before the council in 1921, Mayor Clamamus explained the city's requirements, since most roads opened by developers would become city streets.

All owners of land converted into allotments that would require the opening of roads destined to be included in the city street network will be required to furnish for their allotment plan a dossier detailing the length and width of the streets, as well as a proposal for paving streets and building sidewalks, to be submitted to the city council for approval.^[61]

In this early period the Bobigny city council occasionally committed its own funds to cleaning up the allotments. For example, in November 1924 the council voted to pay part of the expenses of a sewer leading

from the chemin de Groslay to the avenue Edouard Vaillant. Since the sewer would serve the Pont de la Madeleine allotment, its developer was asked to pay the remainder of the cost. In the long-term struggle to improve conditions in the allotments, the municipality tried to get allotment residents to form associations syndicales, or property owners' associations, to equip their allotment roads.^[62]

In theory, the law of 1924 gave the city government of Bobigny greater powers over the allotments and their developers. It was not retroactive, and the municipality could still do little for most of the mal-lotis . The 1924 law did at least give the city power to approve or reject new allotments. Within the first year after the law's passage the city council ruled on the applications of eighteen new allotments, reaching the crest of this wave at its session of 1 August 1925, during which it considered the applications of nine allotment developers.^[63] Of the eighteen applications reviewed, fourteen were approved, on the basis of investigations by the departmental Hygiene Commission. The main criteria for evaluating allotment applications were their drainage facilities and water service. Thus, in rejecting the application of the Clos Billard allotment, the Bobigny city council stated:

The Council . . .

Considering that this terrain is far from all paved streets and sidewalks; that the only access is provided by a small, impractical road; that water service can be assured only by wells or pumps; the lot buyers would be forced to use cesspools to dispose of waste waters, which would risk contaminating the ground water and thus lead to epidemics. . . .

Gives an unfavorable decision.^[64]

Since there are no dossiers in the Bobigny municipal archives on associations syndicales for allotments begun after 1924, we can assume that the city council made sure that the allotments it approved were all adequately equipped.

The municipality acted to ease the sufferings of its citizens in defective allotments, where flooding occurred frequently during the winter. It was not the allotment developers but the city that dealt with these floods. In the spring of 1926, for example, severe flooding in the Anjou neighborhood of Bobigny prompted the municipality to rent three automatic water pumps, which it ran almost continuously for several weeks to clean up the mess. On another occasion, the city council voted 250 francs in emergency aid to the residents of Les Vignes to help them pave the allotment's roads and construct an adequate drainage system.^[65]

The case of the widow Renaud showed the gravity with which the Bobigny municipality weighed its approval or rejection of new allotments. Mme Renaud was a developer who opened up an allotment, sold individual lots, and began to build houses on a few of them, all without getting the city's approval. The allotment failed to meet the standards mandated by the law of 1924; the Bobigny municipality responded by bringing a civil suit against Renaud under the provisions of the 1924 law.^[66] Apart from the suit's value in deterring similar actions by other developers, it showed that the local authorities would not tolerate the problems they would face in a defective allotment.^[67]

Yet for most of Bobigny's mal-lotis, city suits and water pumps changed nothing; they provided no general method to organize and fund work to bring allotments up to standard. Given the paltry resources of most allotment residents (and of most municipalities with allotments), this work could be done only by the national government. Such was the opinion of the Bobigny city council; in February 1924 it made a formal protest against the developers' activities, appealing to the public authorities for aid in resolving the problem.^[68] Except for this appeal and other protests, Mayor Clamamus took primary responsibility for bringing the problems of Bobigny's mal-lotis into the national political arena. By the end of the 1920s Clamamus was recognized as the French Communist party's leading specialist on the allotments. His parliamentary district was Noisy-le-Sec, which had the greatest concentration of allotments in the entire Paris region; as its deputy, Clamamus gave the issue a great deal of attention. Yet Bobigny was his political base, and the place he knew best; he came into closest contact with the problems there and, as mayor, had to answer the mal-lotis' questions on when they could expect assistance. Because of Clamamus's dual role, the mal-lotis occupied a strategic place in the PCF's position on the allotments.^[69]

The Communist party's position on the allotments was simple and straightforward: contracts or no contracts, the developers bore sole responsibility for the poor living conditions that existed on the allotments; they should therefore be required to pay for all necessary improvements.^[70] A poster the PCF put up in the early 1920s to warn workers against the allotments' developers made this point quite clearly:

By lying promises, the sellers of lots and houses prey upon your savings; and once you have signed the contracts that they offer you, it is too late to react.

The "allotment developers" promise you pretty streets and avenues, but they rarely keep these promises. . . .

We demand that these mercenaries be forced to clean up the allotments and to make the streets and avenues passable (the present price of land would still bring tidy profits).^[71]

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and especially in the 1920s, Clamamus wrote articles for L'Humanité and the local PCF press on the crisis of the mal-lotis, the burden allotments placed on municipalities, the role of the national government, and other aspects of the phenomenon. In many of these articles he drew from his experiences as mayor. For example, in a March 1926 article in the local PCF newspaper, L'Aube sociale, "How to Regulate the Allotments," Clamamus attacked the national government for failing to provide enough financial aid to communities like Bobigny.

If concerning the allotments certain municipalities, especially Communist municipalities, have made fruitful initiatives to reduce to a minimum the evil done by allotment developers speculating on the needs of the workers . . . the administration, respectful of form and legality, makes it its business to defeat their efforts, as in the case of Bobigny. . . .

Five years ago, the city submitted a project for a collector sewer, asking the department to pay for it.

The administration has opposed this project, pretending that it is of purely local interest and that therefore the city should pay for it, whereas the major part of the floodwaters in the allotments come from neighboring communities.^[72]

As a deputy to the National Assembly, Clamamus could go beyond merely criticizing the government's lack of effective action to propose alternative ways of dealing with the problem. On 3 March 1926 he proposed a law to regulate the allotments, one of several the assembly considered between 1924 and 1928. Clamamus proposed that the national government distribute a total of 50 million francs to municipalities in the departments of the Seine, Seine-et-Oise, and Seineet-Marne for allotments completed before the law of July 1924. City governments would not be required to contribute anything to these funds, which would provide the allotments with sewers, water mains, and other equipment.^[73]

Clamamus estimated the national government's 50 million francs to be about one-third of the money required for the allotments. The developers were to pay the remaining two-thirds. The project thus dealt more severely with this group than other proposed laws did. Unlike them, it also gave a precise definition of an allotment developer. It included a provision for mandatory associations syndicales for resi-

dents of allotments (with most costs to be paid by the developers) and regulated the resale of lots to inhibit speculation.^[74]

The Sarraut Law of 1928 declared once and for all how the government would deal with allotments. Clamamus led the French Communist party's opposition to that law, charging that it let the developers off scot-free. The law stipulated that the government and the associations syndicales of the allotments' residents each pay roughly half the cost of providing defective allotments with the necessary services. The Party attacked the rules on establishing the associations syndicales as being so complicated that many residents would not bother to set them up; they would consequently receive no government subsidies to clean up their allotments and their problems would continue. In an article in L'Humanité, Clamamus denounced the new law in fiery terms:

Electoral bluff, we said; scandalous and hypocritical demagogy, we denounced.

Means of coercion and repression against communism, such is the essence and the specific meaning of this so-called Sarraut Law, which in its present form and spirit cannot give satisfaction to the mal-lotis . . . .

The mal-lotis have not yet seen the end of their pain and their misery .^[75]

The phrase "means of coercion and repression against communism" was partly an allusion to the harshly anti-Communist policies of the law's sponsor, Minister of the Interior Albert Sarraut. It was Sarraut who announced in 1928, "Communism, there is the enemy!" Clamamus feared, however, that the law might convince the mal-lotis that their problems were solved, weakening the PCF's strong position among them and its prospects in the 1928 legislative and 1929 municipal elections.^[76] More important, the PCF feared that allotment residents, disenchanted by the Sarraut Law's slow and unsatisfactory action, would turn their frustrations against their local officials—especially in a Communist municipality like Bobigny where the allotments were a burning issue.^[77] Either way, the government would be able to use the Sarraut Law to drive a wedge between the PCF and one of its most important constituencies.

As it turned out, however, the issue did not bear out this fear. Roughly two months after the Sarraut Law's passage, the Bobigny city council met to plan out how it would correct the problems of the city's defective allotments. It drew up a list of the twelve allotments that the Sarraut Law would benefit. After 1928 the municipality would continue to rule on applications to open allotments (it reviewed twenty

applications from 1928 to 1939) and would occasionally undertake more or less emergency work on defective allotments.^[78]

Even though city governments had no direct role in implementing the Sarraut Law, there were many indirect ways in which they could facilitate the process, as Bobigny's municipality demonstrated. First, it helped organize all the associations syndicales, which involved a specific procedure mandated by the law of 1912 on associations.^[79] Residents of allotments had to put together a dossier containing specified information, such as a report on hygiene conditions in the allotment, a copy of the allotment's contract (cahier des charges ), and a summary account of the constitutive meeting of the association. Moreover, the structure of the association followed a certain form, and officers were to be elected.^[80] Given this state of affairs, the PCF's protest against the Sarraut Law's overcomplicated provisions made a good deal of sense. Far from understanding how to follow all the steps the law mandated, most mal-lotis probably had only the haziest idea of how it was to function. All they knew was that the law was supposed to solve their housing problems.^[81]

In Bobigny, the pattern for setting up these associations syndicales ran somewhat as follows: a group of allotment residents would write to Mayor Clamamus for help in cleaning up their allotment. Clamamus or another member of the city council would write back, explaining how the Sarraut Law worked and proposing that they set up an association syndicale. If the residents seemed willing, the municipality would set a date and time for a general constitutive meeting and inform all prospective members. A municipal councillor would preside at the meeting and explain to those assembled what had to be done to qualify for the association's government subsidy.^[82] Once an association had been constituted, the mayor and the municipality continued to help; Clamamus would work with the association's officers to put together a formal dossier and send the loan application to the prefect. The prefect dealt not with the associations but through the intermediary of the mayor, as association officers did with the prefect; in effect, Clamamus coordinated the whole process. On occasion the mayor intervened more directly into the associations' affairs: I have come across one case where he pushed a rather negligent association officer into organizing the allotment's cleanup.^[83]

Typically, everyone turned to Clamamus for help with problems on the allotments: to obtain their governmental subsidies and clean up their allotments; to deal with residents who did not wish to join their

associations, with developers, and with construction firms. In arranging to fix Bobigny's defective allotments, when any parties involved in the project had problems or questions they usually wrote to him, not to each other. Finally, the Bobigny city council would sometimes lend money to associations so that they could begin repairing especially serious problems before the departmental subsidy came in. Thus in October 1933 the council decided to loan the association of La Bergère 38,046 francs to pay for laying water mains under the rue des Coquetiers.^[84]

Relations between the municipality and the associations syndicales were not trouble-free. Residents often complained to the mayor that the work of cleaning up their allotments was delayed in starting or was taking a long time to complete. Usually the tone of these complaints was not hostile; rather than accusing Clamamus of being derelict in his duties, they were merely asking him to help them:

I have the honor to inform you that the inhabitants of the rues Perron, Perrusset, and Herzog request that you convoke them in a general meeting, to inform them as to the current situation re the equipping of their streets.

In effect, Your Honor, we are very surprised that since February, when our association was formed, and given the good will shown by all in making their payments, work has not yet been started.^[85]

The mal-lotis sometimes turned their frustrations against the mayor and his administration, however. The long, drawn-out process of upgrading Bobigny's defective allotments did not always enhance the municipality's image in the eyes of its constituents, as the following letter from a local Communist to Deputy Mayor Léon Pesch indicates.

I am receiving demands from residents of the allotment of La Renaissance who are faced with flooding and ask what is happening with the project for their street. They object to the slowness of the formalities to be dealt with; they were supposed to be convoked into an association at least six months ago and yet they have heard nothing. Because of this bad weather they are knee-deep in mud and they blame us, figuring that it is our fault.^[86]

Despite their complaints, the constituents kept their good opinion of Bobigny's Communist municipality and especially of Clamamus personally. Their occasional disenchantment with the municipality's role in cleaning up the allotments resulted from their high expectations when the process began. Disputes that did arise were more like a family quarrel than a sharp break. In any case, no evidence indicates that the Sarraut Law cost the Clamamus administration much support among the mal-lotis; there was no significant fall in the PCF's percentage of the

vote in the 1929 municipal elections. It seems therefore that the Sarraut Law posed no real threat to the Communists' popular base in Bobigny. Legally, the Bobigny city government had no direct responsibility for helping to clean up the defective allotments. Yet it did so, and its participation was crucial.^[87]

Lighting the Lamps of Bobigny

To French Communists in the early twentieth century, adequate utilities were not just a convenience but symbolized progress and modernity as well. After all, Victor Hugo had said that democracy equaled universal suffrage plus electricity; amplifying the French novelist's definition, Lenin had recently proclaimed that socialism plus electricity produced communism. Bobigny's Communist municipality viewed the development of utilities as a strategic element in improving local working-class living standards and pointed with pride to its achievements.

The municipality's projects to provide water, gas, and electrical service were an important part of cleaning up the defective allotments, giving the mal-lotis such services—especially drinking water. Bobigny's utilities were poorly developed when the Communist administration began in 1921, and it had to provide them for most of the community.

Of the three utilities, water service took the greatest time and energy to develop. Before the 1920s the community possessed few water mains; most residents got their drinking water from local fountains and in some areas lacked even those facilities.^[88] The Communist municipality's effort to provide drinkable tap water began in 1924. In December the city council approved a plan to equip eight streets in central Bobigny with water mains. The next major extension of water service occurred in 1926, when the municipality began laying water mains under eleven streets. Unlike the 1924 project, it equipped peripheral areas; one street was the avenue Edouard Vaillant, the main thoroughfare of the Pont de Bondy and thus vital to the PCF's constituency in Bobigny. Not all the streets to receive water in 1926 were in such friendly areas; the rue de Blanc-mesnil had one of Bobigny's largest concentrations of market gardeners.^[89]

The municipality worked hard to equip the city's streets with water mains from 1928 to 1935. In 1928 eleven more streets were so provisioned, including the streets of the allotment of rues Perron and Perrusset, and several others. By 1929 the local PCF could claim that on

most of the city's main arteries, mains supplied residents with drinking water. In consequence, the city council decided to start removing water fountains from central Bobigny in November 1929, claiming that fountains were no longer needed since the area was now amply supplied with water pipes.^[90] Most of the streets in Bobigny that did not get full water service until the early 1930s were small and located far from the center of town. Moreover, a large number were private allotment roads, technically outside the jurisdiction of the authorities. In dealing with such streets the city council usually worked through the associations syndicales; for example, the municipality supplied the rue Butté with water by lending the money for the operation, 35,880 francs, to the Chemin de Fer allotment's association.^[91]

By 1935, at a meeting of a community organization in the large Nouveau Village allotment, Léon Pesch could claim that all of its streets had been provisioned with drinking water. Nouveau Village had been a prominent example of the new working-class Bobigny and of the crisis in allotments; the fact that it was now completely provided with water service constituted an important symbolic victory for the municipality. From 1929 to 1934 nineteen kilometers of Bobigny's streets had been equipped with water mains, at a total cost of just over 1.5 million francs. Providing drinking water for the people of Bobigny was to figure prominently in local Communist propaganda as a concrete achievement of the municipality.^[92]

Providing gas and electrical service for home use and public lighting required less effort and expense than did the construction of a system of water mains and took less time. Bobigny had installed gas lighting for the streets in the center of town in 1896. In its first year in office, the Communist municipality extended gas lighting to the avenue Jean Jaurès, running from the industrial area along the canal de l'Ourcq through the city center to the Six Routes intersection, and to the avenue Edouard Vaillant. By the end of 1923 other major thoroughfares in the city, such as the rue de Paris, the route de Saint-Denis, and the route des Petits Ponts, also had public gas lighting.^[93]

In July 1922 the Bobigny city council and the Suburban Gas Company had meanwhile negotiated a contract to provide all of the city's households with gas service; the work of laying the gas mains was well under way by 1924 in the outer areas of the city. The work went rapidly because many of the streets concerned in the peripheral areas and allotments were already torn up for laying streets and sidewalks or water mains. Between 1924 and 1928 almost all of Bobigny's streets

were provided with gas mains for household gas service. In 1924 more than sixty streets, in all parts of the city, were equipped with gas mains. Ten more streets were equipped in 1925, and for the next few years about four streets (mostly minor ones by this point) acquired gas mains every year. By May 1929 the Communists claimed, "At present, all streets, without exception, are provided with gas mains."^[94]

The process of providing the city with electrical power took somewhat longer and began much later. The Communist municipality had to start from scratch; the city had no electricity before the 1920s. Following a complicated series of negotiations between the city government of Bobigny and two different power companies, the Suburban Gas Company and the North-East Parisian Power Company, the municipality finally decided to proceed with the electrification project in 1925.^[95] As the Journal de Saint-Denis was not slow to point out, this decision came on the eve of the 1925 municipal elections, the first time Bobigny's Communist city government would have to face the voters.^[96]

As with the development of gas service, electrification entailed providing for both household and public lighting. In this case, however, the former came first; the replacement of street gas lamps by electric lighting began only at the end of the 1920s. The contract with North-East Parisian stipulated that electricity for household use would be introduced into Bobigny in three stages: first the city center would be furnished with power, then eastern Bobigny, and finally western Bobigny. The first stage was largely complete by the middle of 1928; eastern Bobigny acquired electric power by the following year—just in time for the municipal elections.^[97] The western area of the city, around the rue d'Anjou and the chemin de la Madeleine, took a little longer because its terrain was not flat as in the rest of the city; it was finished by the mid-1930s.

Before completing this process, the municipality began equipping the main streets of the city with electric lighting. In 1928 the city council investigated the possibility of providing electric lights for the route des Petits Ponts, but only two years later did the avenue Edouard Vaillant become the first street to be electrified. By 1935 so were the route des Petits Ponts, the avenue Jean Jaurès, the place Carnot, and several other main streets. The PCF's claim that year that all of Bobigny's main thoroughfares had been electrified was a bit exaggerated—the rue de la République did not get electric lights until 1938, for example. Nonetheless, when World War II began this project had been completed.^[98]

Although the municipality could claim success in developing utilities service, how much most Balbynians benefited from the service is less clear. Without precise statistics for Bobigny we can only form an idea based on patterns of their use prevalent in France. Water service was certainly the most widely used, offering Balbynians rudimentary indoor plumbing facilities like a cold water tap and a Turkish toilet. Electricity and gas service, on the other hand, were considered luxuries and were probably not utilized for more than simple household lighting in interwar Bobigny.^[99] Therefore, aside from water service, the development of utilities in Bobigny assumed a significance that was as much symbolic as real. The municipality's programs did bring its constituents concrete benefits, and they demonstrated that Communist Bobigny was a forward-looking community vitally interested in enabling ordinary people to enjoy the benefits of technological progress.

A New Urban Structure

The Bobigny municipality's efforts to improve local living conditions went beyond its reaction to the population explosion—repairing the defective allotments and developing adequate utilities. Much of the city council's work involved the expansion of traditional city institutions and above all signaled the PCF's success in leaving its imprint on the city.

Bobigny's population in the first decades of the twentieth century outgrew the local market system. In 1921, Bobigny had only one covered marketplace, located in the place de l'Eglise at the city's center. It was owned by the city government and managed by private firms; the annual rent on the market concession was 500 francs. This was a paltry sum, according to the new Communist administration, which felt that the city could do better on its own. In January 1922 the municipality therefore cancelled the lease and began managing the marketplace directly, making it the only large example of municipal socialism in Bobigny.^[100]

Whether privately or publicly operated, however, the market quickly showed itself inadequate to the needs of the new Bobigny. Later in 1922 Clamamus broached to the council the idea of building a second city market, noting that many peddlers had begun to work in the Six Routes area and that he had received a number of requests for a new market from the area's residents. He argued that the success of this market

would be helped by its location, since Six Routes was the terminus of a major tramway line.^[101] Building a market in the Six Routes area was more catching up with the present than building for the future. In fact, the city council's decision in 1922 did not create a market at this location—one had come into existence spontaneously—but rather equipped and formalized it. Yet the council's passive role showed its sensitivity to the needs of the local population; rather than impose a rigid structure on the city's development, the Bobigny municipality showed itself willing in this instance to be a participant in that process.

Construction of the market proceeded quickly. It opened for business the day after Christmas. The new market prospered and in ten years had to be moved to a new site (in the same area), having outgrown the old one. In the meantime, however, the municipality began considering building a third city market for Bobigny. From 1921 to 1926 the local population had bounded from less than seven thousand to over eleven thousand; by 1926 the new Six Routes market was too small for the marketing needs of the people of Bobigny. Late in 1926 the city council therefore decided to consider building a third marketplace in Bobigny, on the avenue Edouard Vaillant. The Pont de Bondy area was a logical site. Much of the recent population increase had occurred there, farthest from the markets in the center and in Six Routes. The proposal to build a market for the Pont de Bondy also expressed the council's desire to provide urban services for that area of town which embodied working-class Bobigny and the core of popular support for the Communists.^[102]

The lag time between the city council's first proposal and this project's completion was considerably greater than that for the Six Routes market. The final decision to build the fixed marketplace on the avenue Edouard Vaillant was made in November 1935, and the construction of the market took almost two years. As with the Six Routes project, a spontaneous market had grown up on the site when construction began, so again the municipality's action modified and gave official sanction to what already existed.^[103]

By the end of the 1930s the Bobigny municipality could point with pride to its system of markets, which more than tripled the space available in covered marketplaces, accessible to people in all parts of the city. We must, however, grant pride of place to the city government's expansion of the educational system. This was its most impressive accomplishment. Since Communist propaganda for its municipalities laid heavy emphasis on raising the next generation, we can

understand why a large portion of the PCF city budgets for Bobigny should be devoted to public instruction.^[104]

It was less ideology than the explosive growth of Bobigny's school-age population that motivated the investment in the city's educational system. From 1911 to 1921 this age group expanded from 780 to 1,400, almost doubling in size; by 1931 it had increased to 2,630. The city government had given a certain amount of attention to its inadequate school facilities before and during the First World War; but by 1920, when the Communists took power in Bobigny, it had accomplished little.^[105]

At the end of 1920, responding to widespread discontent among Pont de Bondy residents over the lack of local schools, the municipality set up temporary facilities in an old army barracks left over from the war.^[106] At roughly the same time the city government began negotiating with the national government and financial institutions for funds to build a group of schools in the neighborhood and for land. In April 1926 the city council approved the project, which was to consist of a boys' school, a girls' school, and a nursery school. For years the city had been looking, without success, for funds to finance its school construction project; in 1926 it also decided to build smaller schools to make their construction feasible. Meanwhile the schools in the center of Bobigny grew more and more crowded; the boys' and girls' schools increased their total enrollment from eight to ten classes in the early 1920s.^[107]

The primary hold-up in the construction of the Pont de Bondy schools was negotiations between the Bobigny municipality and the prefecture of the Seine over the granting of a state subsidy. In a later interview on the subject, Clamamus bitterly commented on the complicated procedure:

[The process of building new schools] starts by the deliberation of the city council, which decides the purchase of land for the envisaged school group. Then it establishes plans and constitutes a dossier. Five to six months are needed.

The dossier thus constituted is sent to the prefecture. Upon its arrival it receives a number; when its number comes up, the commission examines it and—if it is accepted—sends it back to the city. At least a year is necessary for this.

But the tribulations of our dossier are not yet finished; it is then sent to the Subsidies Commission of the Ministry [of the Interior] . . . then a year later, its turn has arrived, the commission shakes off the dust that has accumulated on our dossier and examines it.^[108]

Construction did not begin on the Pont de Bondy group of schools until 1927; the boys' and girls' schools opened only in 1929. By then they had to accommodate 500 students, or 25 to 50 percent more than they had been built for.

With the Pont de Bondy boys' and girls' schools completed, the municipality shifted its attention to nursery school facilities. In 1931 the municipality opened two nursery school classes in the Pont de Bondy girls' school.^[109] The following year the city council finally decided to go ahead with plans to build a separate nursery school in the area, to consist of seven classrooms plus sleeping rooms, gardens, kitchens, and a playground; construction began in 1937. On 19 May 1939, before a crowd of three thousand spectators, the opening ceremonies for the new Pont de Bondy nursery school at last took place. The Pont de Bondy finally had its schools.^[110]

The city government did not rest on its laurels. In 1937 it voted to proceed toward the development of a similar school group in the rue d'Anjou, about halfway between the Pont de Bondy and the city center. In February 1939 the municipality also decided to build a school group for the neighborhood of La Courneuve, in the northwestern part of the city. Neither project had been started by the end of the decade and thus cannot qualify as an achievement of Bobigny's Communist city government in the interwar period. But they confirm the great importance of education to that government.^[111]

Perhaps the most colorful program in the educational system was its summer camps. The idea was first proposed early in 1919 by the Socialist city councillor Laporte, but nothing came of the matter at that point. Once the Communists had taken over the city administration they acted quickly on this issue, opening the city's first summer camp in 1921 in the community of La Machine in the Department of the Nièvre.^[112] La Machine's camp received one hundred children during its first year of operation and increased this number to almost three hundred by the mid-1930s. Because of the program's popularity, in 1933 the city council decided to begin operating a second summer camp and bought a piece of property on the Ile d'Oléron, a popular resort area on the southern Atlantic coast. The Ile d'Oléron's camp opened during the summer of 1934. Children from six to thirteen years old were sent to La Machine, while adolescents went to the Ile d'Oléron.^[113]

Both summer camps lasted forty-two days, and their fees were low. In 1930, for example, a summer at La Machine for a young Balbynian cost 150 francs, plus 4 francs a day for food; as late as 1936 this

remained the basic fee. The Ile d'Oléron's camp was more expensive; in 1936 the fee was 295 francs per camper; unlike La Machine, the Ile d'Oléron was a true residential camp and thus cost the municipality more to maintain. Campers' fees could be paid in installments over a period of several months; moreover, children of unemployed Bobigny residents were admitted free. (For working-class parents, with average salaries of 5 to 7 francs per hour, it would take one to two hours of labor to send a child to camp for a day—roughly the cost of a dozen eggs.)^[114]

The main purpose of the camps was to expose working-class children of Bobigny to the fresh air of the countryside, and to give them a respite from the miserable existence of the poor in the suburban slums surrounding Paris (a somewhat ironic comment on life in Bobigny, since their families had moved there to escape city slums). Camp activities consequently emphasized outdoor pursuits like soccer, basketball, fishing, and hiking. As an article on La Machine in the local PCF press noted, however, good health was not simply an end in itself:

Our working-class city councillors have well understood the truth of the old Roman adage, which indicates that it is necessary to have "a sound mind in a healthy body." The one complements the other, and the working-class child, taught from early age the harsh necessities of the class struggle, whose consequences he experiences daily in his family, draws from the fresh air of the countryside the physical strength that will make of him a conscious worker, capable of defending himself in all situations, and that will make of him a fighter for the revolutionary combat.^[115]

There can be no doubt that Communist politics was an integral part of young Balbynians' camping experience, particularly in the Ile d'Oléron, because the children spent more of their time together and under the supervision of the municipality's counselors than at La Machine. The Ile d'Oléron's camp proclaimed its politics with two prominent hammers and sickles over the entryway. The Bobigny Communists gave a great deal of publicity to campers' letters to their parents—often publishing the letters in La Voix de l'Est —which usually contrasted idyllic life in the countryside with the dreary surroundings of workers exploited under capitalism. A correspondent for the newspaper of Jacques Doriot's French People's party gave his right-wing view of the Ile d'Oléron's camp in 1937:

In full view of the little cabin where I live, floats the oriflamme of the Bobigny summer camp. The venerable senator—whom everyone here simply calls Father Clama—personally directs, like a good father, this little beehive

of young drones. Guided by this illustrious luminary of Moscow, the children march along the beach singing the "Internationale" and the more attractive "Young Guard." . . . The militants who accompany and direct them submit them every day to unceasing propaganda that, if not counteracted, must certainly lead to the germination of the evil Bolshevik grain in this virgin soil.^[116]

Clamamus's presence at the camp indicates how important Bobigny's Communists considered the program. They valued it with reason, for it very effectively transmitted their ideas to the future generation of working-class Balbynians.

In addition to its major endeavor, Bobigny's Communist municipality undertook many smaller projects to improve the quality of life. In 1936 it built a new maison du peuple for the use of the city's trade unions and community organizations. For hygiene and health care, it built Bobigny's first public baths in the early 1920s, built another in the Pont de Bondy, and at the end of 1937 voted to modernize and expand the municipal health clinic in the center of town. In the 1920s and 1930s the city government installed new fire hydrants in various areas such as the Pont de Bondy, which before the mid-1920s had no fire hydrants at all; it got about half of these. The municipality also installed mailboxes in all peripheral areas, especially the Pont de Bondy, and encouraged the opening of tobacconists' shops in those neighborhoods as well.^[117]

The Municipality Versus the Prefecture

The PCF considered Communist-controlled municipalities useful not just for helping the local working class but also for protesting. In Bobigny protests did not limit themselves to ideological questions but took up more concrete matters, usually involving the prefecture. The single most important source of contention was the public transportation system, which the national government had taken over in 1910. The functioning of working-class trams provoked numerous protests; in the early 1920s the city government made several complaints about the shortage of working-class cars and their poor scheduling during commuter rush hours.^[118]

The extent of service was the subject of most correspondence between the Bobigny municipality and the tramway company (STCRP), and the source of constant requests that more bus and tramlines be created or rerouted to serve Bobigny. In October 1922, for example, the city council passed a resolution requesting the extension of tramline no. 51 (Pantin–Paris) to Six Routes in Bobigny, and attacking the

temporary suspension of service between Bobigny city hall and Six Routes on tramline no. 99 (Bobigny—Paris). In 1925 it requested (and was denied) a stop in Bobigny on the Paris–Strasbourg railway line, so that local workers could use the train for commuting. In 1930 it asked that the public authorities create a bus line linking the northeastern and eastern suburbs, so travelers would not have to waste time going through central Paris to get from one place to another within the same area. Such persistence sometimes got results: in 1936 Clamamus persuaded the STCRP to add two extra working-class cars on the no. 51 tramline.^[119]

Unemployment relief also created tensions between the municipality and the state. In line with general PCF policy, the Bobigny city government attacked the limits that the national government placed on unemployment relief, as the city council did in 1927 in a resolution proposed by Ivry's council:

Considering that the decision of the public authorities suppressing public relief for all those unemployed longer than 150 days . . . has hurt a great number of workers, especially those who have suffered the most . . . because for 150 days they have had no income other than that provided by unemployment relief; that elimination of such aid could lead these workers . . . to commit reprehensible acts; that the latest prefectural circular makes people dropped from unemployment relief the financial responsibility of the municipalities . . .

Requests that those on unemployment relief for 150 days be granted an extension of their benefits.^[120]

On another occasion, the city council asked the prefect of the Seine to grant it an extra 25,000 francs for unemployment relief. In both cases, the municipality was concerned with the plight of the unemployed and also with its own fiscal solvency.^[121]

Finally, Bobigny's PCF city government did what it could to protect the environment by protesting dangerous or noxious industrial operations on or near its territory. Since such installations usually required the approval of the prefect of police of the Seine, protests on this issue were addressed to him. In 1929, for example, the city council sent a resolution to the prefect of police attacking a gut factory (boyauderie ) just over the city line in Drancy, which was causing problems of air pollution for the adjacent Bobigny neighborhood.^[122] And in a virtuoso move, Clamamus managed to attack both noxious pollution and militarism by a protest against a military fortification in nearby Aubervilliers:

The mayor called the attention of the council to the danger of fires at the Aubervilliers fort adjoining the city of Bobigny.

He noted that the accumulation of a large quantity of explosives and asphyxiating gases in this fort is a permanent danger for the neighboring Bobigny population, and asked the council to register an energetic protest against such a situation caused by this militaristic administration's lack of foresight.^[123]

In linking local issues with a more general PCF position, the protest against the Aubervilliers fort was exceptional; for the most part, the Communist municipality stuck to specific issues. In this sphere, as in so many others in red Bobigny, practical concerns and ideological positions were usually kept separate.

The practical problems of residential life concerned the people of Bobigny, and consequently the Communist municipality worked most at making Bobigny a better place to live. Arranging for matching funds to repair defective allotments, sponsoring summer camps, and trying to get better tram service, Bobigny's red city hall focused its attention on community-based politics. Clamamus and members of the city council did support strikes and back local unions, but as far as municipal action in Bobigny was concerned, sidewalks counted far more than strikes.

Among the activities and accomplishments of Bobigny's Communist municipal administration in the interwar period, one characteristic that stands out is its adhesion to national PCF prescriptions on city government. The Bobigny municipality often helped the work of the national leadership and was in general not afraid to proclaim its political coloration. This is not to suggest that the city councillors did nothing but wave red flags all day; local officials seemed at times ambivalent about linking their roles as Communist militants and city politicians, and the atmosphere around city hall seems to have been decidedly businesslike. Political activities were a small but important proportion of the total accomplishments of the municipality and served to underline the difference between a Communist city government and its bourgeois homologues. Given the record of Bobigny's municipality on this score, it is not surprising that Clamamus was so respected by the PCF hierarchy. Much of this respect stemmed from the municipality's ability to solve concrete problems for the community's residents, and the dividends of political loyalty from these accomplishments. Impressive though the accomplishments were, they were not unique; the Communist municipalities of the Paris suburbs in general worked to

deal with the overrapid urbanization and improve the living conditions of their working-class constituents.^[124]

A number of non-Communist municipalities in the Paris suburbs also improved local living standards. Antony was one, on the southern edge of the Department of the Seine; like Bobigny, Antony was severely affected by the allotments crisis. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Radical administration of Mayor Auguste Mounié made strenuous efforts to repair the defective allotments and provide utilities service for them; moreover, the municipality put up posters warning prospective buyers about the allotments. Mayor Mounié was known as "le père des mal-lotis" throughout the Paris area because of his actions on this issue.^[125]

The most active city administration in the Paris suburbs was that of Henri Sellier, Socialist mayor of Suresnes from 1919 to 1945. An internationally recognized urban planner, Sellier put his skills to work in reshaping Suresnes. Under his leadership the city council had built a cité-jardin of 2,500 housing units, an innovative school (including both indoor and outdoor swimming pools), a city dispensary, a cultural center, and an office of hygiene. In 1937 Sellier drew up a plan of urban development (plan d'aménagement ) that made Suresnes a model for many other French cities.^[126]

Earlier socialist municipalities had done much to improve urban facilities and living conditions. In his study of Limoges during the nineteenth century, John Merriman has described how the socialist government elected in 1895 undertook extensive renovations of the working-class neighborhoods of the city, building sewers, paving streets, and expanding medical service for the poor. Nor did the Limousin socialists neglect politics: they observed May Day at city hall, renamed local streets after famous progressives, and, most important, worked hard to support local strikes.^[127]

Clearly, then, Communist municipalities did not hold a monopoly on urban development in the interwar Paris suburbs. What a particular city administration accomplished depended more at times on the individuals in charge, the problems to be faced, and the resources available to deal with such problems, than on the political coloration of the administration. And yet Mounié and Sellier were more exceptions in the Radical and Socialist parties than was Clamamus in the Communist party. One benefit of the tight control the PCF exercised on its municipal officials was their greater consistency in attacking urban problems compared to suburban mayors from other political parties.^[128]

The achievements of Bobigny's municipality during the interwar period were nonetheless impressive. By 1939 the Communist administration had closed the gap between the needs of the city's population and the size of its urban facilities that existed when it took office in 1920; its efforts for the Pont de Bondy were particularly noteworthy. These achievements proved that French Communists could attend to urban issues despite an ideology that downplayed these in favor of issues of the workplace. They also showed that these urban issues had overwhelming importance.

To assume that local residents cared nothing about Communist ideology and only wanted their allotments cleaned up would be going too far. Although the municipality usually separated its ideological from its "bread and butter" activities, in both spheres it identified itself with the interests of the working class. Thus, its changes in the material quality of life in Bobigny had a primary place in building a Communist political consensus.

Chapter 6
Culture, Politics, and Community in Communist Bobigny

In The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams defines popular (or "social") culture as "a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour."^[1] This description of the daily lives of ordinary people is a central task of the social historian, to show the patterns underlying peoples' lives and how they perceive them.

This chapter describes working-class popular culture in Bobigny during the early twentieth century and focuses on the role of the French Communist party in daily life. As yet there are few historical studies of popular culture in twentieth-century France, especially its interwar period, a topic to which I hope to contribute. My primary concern is not popular culture itself but how it interacted with Communist politics and ideology at the local level, how working-class consciousness in Bobigny related to the local PCF. Two questions occur here: to what extent did the popular culture of Bobigny affect the PCF's electoral strength in the community? Was the PCF able to create and popularize a specifically Communist culture in Bobigny?

I contend that there was a culture of communism in Bobigny that helped to form the PCF's political strength and was reinforced by it. I do not mean that daily life in the community perfectly corresponded to Communist ideology; the average Balbynian was no real-life version of the brave proletarian hero or heroine found in much of the period's

left-wing fiction. Rather, Communist culture in Bobigny was a broad, deeply felt working-class consciousness that arose out of popular culture but was influenced by the practices of the local PCF.

The core of this culture was a strong spirit of working-class solidarity. Encouraged and channeled by Bobigny's Communists, this spirit was the product of an increasing split between production and consumption and of a growing social segregation. Both trends helped form class consciousness in Bobigny. Its distinctive spirit constituted the raw material of the culture of communism, which local activists molded into a definite political formation. Through political symbolism that was often astute, Bobigny's Communists were able to make their ideology a part of daily life. Perhaps more important, they linked the social and urban marginality of the suburban working class to the political marginality of the PCF. This affinity in turn allowed many Balbynians to identify with the French Communist party.

Popular Culture in Bobigny: Balkanization and Isolation

In describing popular culture in twentieth-century Bobigny, we must first look at a central institution of modern France, the nuclear family. It prevailed in Bobigny households and was a crucial component of local working-class culture. In addition, the family in Bobigny was characterized by what historian James McMillan has called the "doctrine of separate spheres." Men and women had distinct roles in the family and in local life as a whole.^[2] As in the rest of France, however, they shared a preference for marriage over the single life.^[3] Nearly 70 percent of all adults in the community aged twenty and over were married—72 percent of all men and 66 percent of all women. A majority of the unmarried adults were over fifty years of age; many were widowers and, especially, widows living alone or with married children. There was no important sector of unmarried young and middle-aged adults, no "singles" culture.^[4] Few Balbynians chose to live together without marriage; in 1927, 90 percent of all couples living together were married. Like unmarried individuals, unmarried cohabitating couples were generally over fifty, much older than the average married couple.^[5]

Bobigny's character as a commuter suburb contributed to the strength of marriage and the nuclear family there. Many people moved to suburbs like Bobigny for a better, less-crowded environment for their children or those they planned to have. The advertising posters put up

by allotment developers in the Paris area often emphasized how family life would benefit from individual home ownership; one such poster featured two smiling crows happily installed in a tree over a caption calling on prospective lot buyers to come furnish their nests.^[6] In the early 1920s Auguste Lallet decided to move out of Belleville to buy a lot in Bobigny; his foreman at work had just done so and advised Lallet to move his young family there.^[7] Bobigny's abbé Ferret described a typical working-class family deciding whether to buy a lot in the community:

The father and mother, followed by their children, after many trips to Bobigny, finally decide where they will set up their new home. . . . They think it over for a long time. . . . "What do you think, dear, should we buy? You know, it's for you and the children that I want to do this; all I'll get out of it is fatigue from the long journey that I will have to make to and from work every morning and night."^[8]

Since the people of Bobigny, especially the working class and lower middle class in allotments, chose to settle there because they cherished domesticity, their attitudes toward family life were not necessarily typical French ones. They represented the direction in which France was headed, however. Bobigny was an extreme example of the geographical and cultural separation between the workplace and the home that had been increasing in France since the late nineteenth century. In the allotments, one consequence of this growing separation was a greater emphasis on family life.^[9]

Another, more direct, consequence of the separation between work and home was that between men's and women's work. Fewer married women were employed outside the home, and their husbands faced a long journey to and from work. In spite of the contemporary myth of the new working woman after World War I, the percentage of married women working in nonagricultural jobs declined slightly from 1906 to 1936. Following patterns similar to those throughout France, in 1921 71 percent of all married working-class women in Bobigny were housewives. As adolescents and young adults, working-class women often had jobs. Once they married, however, they usually shifted from the paid to the non-paid sector, from workplace to household.^[10]

While most working-class wives worked at home, most husbands commuted to work. As the Parisian father noted above, this could be a lengthy journey. Commuting usually took at least thirty minutes each way and often much more. French workers had won the eight-hour day in 1919, but in the interwar period the majority of factories in the Paris area did not apply this standard. As a result, male workers in Bobigny

were often absent from home for twelve hours or more, Monday through Saturday.^[11]

The lives of adult women and men thus differed sharply, that of men dominated by their jobs, generally in Paris or another suburb, and by the long commute there and back. For them, changes in the workplace—such as increasing mechanization and greater control by employers over production—shaped daily life.^[12] For housewives in modern France, there has unfortunately been little scholarly investigation. Joan Scott and Louise Tilly have noted that as married women worked less outside the home, their housekeeping duties became more demanding and required more time. Bobigny's households in the 1920s and 1930s still had few modern conveniences, largely because of the community's poor facilities. The absence of water mains meant that housewives had to go to water pumps in the street; the few stores made shopping for food and other necessities a time-consuming task; and the generally unsanitary conditions in the town made keeping a clean household a continual chore. Working-class housewives in Bobigny faced these tasks alone since their husbands were absent much of the time.^[13]

Yet this division of domestic labor did not diminish the significance of family relations in couples' lives. Marriage remained popular, and if the miserable living conditions during the interwar period made life harder for housewives, they also meant that husbands took a larger role in the household. Many men living in allotments built their own houses, for example; repairing the defective allotments often led them to invest time in community affairs. The difficulties that working-class Balbynians faced in creating a home, and the fact that they did, show that both men and women had a strong commitment to the household.^[14]

The demands of working-class life in Bobigny left little time for leisure activities.^[15] Yet people did manage to make time for recreation. Popular entertainment in early twentieth-century Bobigny was halfway between the traditional festivities uniting workplace and community and the post-1945 commercialized mass recreation. The absence of commercial leisure facilities in Bobigny has already been noted. Although movies were increasingly popular, Bobigny's workers had few opportunities to avail themselves of this entertainment, since the city had only two theaters, opened in the late 1920s.^[16] Music was a more popular (and available) recreational activity. There were orchestras and other types of musical groups in Bobigny throughout the early twentieth century, usually sponsored by the municipality. Music classes,

especially violin lessons, were also popular. In 1939 a resident of the Pont de Bondy noted the existence of three separate music societies in his neighborhood.^[17]

In the early nineteenth-century suburban areas outside Paris, many cafés and dance halls furnished cheap entertainment to Parisians. By the twentieth century the suburbs no longer had this function; few city dwellers thought of going there to have a good time. Yet Bobigny did have a few guinguettes, or taverns featuring musical entertainment. Many Balbynians were hostile to such places and sometimes tried to close them down.

For a while now, residents of the Pont de Bondy, and particularly of the rue de Drancy, have been complaining that their neighborhood has been greatly disturbed since the opening of the Zappoli dance hall in Drancy on the border of Bobigny. Because local hoodlums of both sexes congregate there, not a week passes without brawls, quarrels, and exchanges of gunfire between rivals and antagonists, horrifying the peaceful families of this isolated neighborhood.^[18]

This was not the attitude of all Balbynians; but dance and music halls were not a central part of popular entertainment in Bobigny. Unlike Saint-Denis, the community seems to have been too family-oriented to have provided much business for them.^[19]

Sports in Bobigny at the time also spanned traditional and mass popular culture. Richard Holt has noted that in interwar France, team sports were often polarized by the conflicts between capital and labor. This was the case in Bobigny: during the 1930s the Communists sponsored a local branch of the Union sportive ouvrière, and at least one factory, the Gérard hatmaking plant, maintained its own sporting club. These groups, and team sports in general, however, do not seem to have attracted much interest in the community.^[20] Traditional individual sports retained the loyalty of many Balbynians; the most popular were fishing and pétanque . Fishing did serve to supplement poorer Balbynians' food supply, but it was also a means of relaxation and sociability; at least two fishing societies in the city sponsored contests with prizes along the canal de l'Ourcq. Pétanque, a form of boules, was very popular with male Balbynians, as were card games like belote .^[21]

During the interwar period many workers in Paris spent their Sundays or weekends with friends in the suburbs, the closest they could get to the countryside. Many Balbynians had moved to Bobigny precisely to take advantage of pastoral pursuits and occupied much of

their leisure time in the small gardens adjoining their homes in the allotments. Promenades were also popular, especially along the canal de l'Ourcq, not quite the industrial sewer it is today. On the whole, working-class leisure time in early twentieth-century Bobigny was peaceful, family-oriented, and largely noncommercial.^[22]

Cafés had an important place in popular culture in Bobigny. Here men usually met to play cards and to organize games of pétanque . More than the rest of the commercial sector, the growth of Bobigny's cafés matched that of the population; by 1939 the town had 81 cafés, or one for every 215 residents. They were simple places where local residents could sit, talk, and drink. By contrast to cafés in urban communities before World War I, Bobigny's cafés did not function as hiring halls for workers. Still, they were the most popular public space in a community where much of life centered on the household.^[23]

In many ways, working-class popular culture in Bobigny was respectable and prosaic, contrary to contemporary bourgeois expectations for a community that regularly voted Communist. One aspect of local life that significantly deviated from this bourgeois pattern was religious practice. Like other Paris suburbs at this time, Bobigny was well on the way to secularization. When the abbé Canet arrived in 1923 to take over from the retiring priest, Jules Ferret, the church could claim only 150 practicing Catholics out of a population of roughly 7,000.^[24] Even for working-class areas around Paris this figure was extraordinary; it explains the interest of Catholic evangelists in spreading the gospel in Bobigny. In France even nonpracticing Catholics will often have their children baptized. Yet this ceremony was performed for only two-thirds of all children born in Bobigny in 1931. The church was even less successful with marriages: in 1921 fewer than half of the city's newlyweds had religious weddings.^[25] For most of this period, Bobigny had only one church; like everything else in the community, religious life was affected by the gap between the growth of the population and urban facilities. Yet this factor had minor importance. Bobigny mirrored the alienation from the church characteristic of urban workers in twentieth-century France.^[26]

Isolated from religion, workers in Bobigny also experienced a sharp division between production and consumption, between work and home. The symbol and immediate cause of this split was the tramway, which at the same time unified the Paris area and reinforced subdivisions within it. The division of male and female life into separate spheres was an important consequence of the geographical separation

of work and home, this balkanization of daily life. Off the job, few Balbynians had much contact with Paris or the leisure opportunities it offered. Working-class culture was thus not mass culture in early twentieth-century Bobigny because workers had little contact with cinemas, department stores, or other such institutions.^[27]

More important was their social isolation within Bobigny. The allotments were populated mostly by workers and members of the lower middle class; the community as a whole had few bourgeois residents. Furthermore, the social segregation of the Paris area was replicated within the community; except for the employés, other groups such as shopkeepers and market gardeners lived in the center of town, away from the working-class allotments. Workers had little daily contact with members of other social groups. More than their cultural isolation from catholicism, their social isolation affected people's views of life in general. Like the workers of late nineteenth-century Britain studied by Gareth Stedman Jones, those of early twentieth-century Bobigny lived in a world apart.^[28]

The Culture of Communism in Bobigny

In analyzing the political culture developed by the French Communists in Bobigny, we would be wrong to refer simply to the ideas propagated by the national leaders. Although local Communists did follow the general PCF policy, they also simplified and adapted it to correspond to the experiences of the local population. They were certainly not successful in making this connection all the time, but in some ways local Communist political culture had affinities with the attitudes described above.^[29] It centered on a few themes. The most basic was class conflict, the oppression of the working people of Bobigny by the French bourgeoisie. In a resolution voted by the city council on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1884 municipal law, this point of view was clearly expressed:

[The city council] decides . . . to pursue ceaselessly, at the head of the laboring population of Bobigny that elected it, the task of education and combat to substitute for false bourgeois democracy the true democracy of the people against its profiteers.

[We oppose] to the general interests of capital the interests of the workers against those of their exploiters.^[30]

The theme was especially popular during election campaigns, when Clamamus and other Party politicians portrayed the electoral battles

between the Communist party and its opponents as symbols of the class struggle.^[31]

Implicit in the concept of class conflict was that of class solidarity; in order to fight capitalism the working class would have to unite. In Bobigny class solidarity had two dimensions, according to the PCF: support for the struggles of workers in other parts of France and abroad, above all in the Soviet Union; unity of the working people of Bobigny. The former dimension prompted the various symbolic city council resolutions discussed in the fifth chapter, and was also expressed by constant propaganda praising the achievements of the Bolsheviks and calling for the defense of the Russian revolution.^[32]

Bobigny's Communists tended to express the theme of class solidarity in terms of concrete mutual aid rather than of political principles. Their activities in helping the elderly, the unemployed, and other needy Balbynians they characterized not as charity but as working-class unity. During the June 1936 sitdown strikes the local PCF made sure to call attention to the municipality's efforts for the strikers.

During all of these [strike] movements, the municipality and working-class organizations, as well as the entire population, gave important assistance to the workers and their families.

Kitchens in the factories and in the center and Pont de Bondy schools furnished copious meals. Benevolent comrades ran the kitchens. In the midst of it all, the wife of comrade Clamamus worked from morning until night.^[33]

A third element in the political culture of Communists was the view of their community as the possession and citadel of the working class—symbolized, of course, by the town's PCF municipality, whose achievements were portrayed as examples of what the working class was capable of doing to lift itself up by its own efforts. The frequent use of this theme by Bobigny's Communists was an attempt to fuse class consciousness with local pride and enlist both in support of the local PCF.^[34] They found many vehicles: city council resolutions, newspaper articles, demonstrations by local PCF organizations, and symbolic activities. These last were especially important; they had a more direct and general impact than speeches or written propaganda and showed local communism at its most creative. Prominent examples of such activities included renaming city streets after heroes of the Communist movement and the French Left as well as public demonstrations.

Demonstrations certainly did not occur every day; they seem to have been no more frequent in Bobigny than in other Paris suburbs, regardless of their political coloration. Political demonstrations were

usually held on national holidays or to celebrate major local events, such as the completion of important municipal projects. Armistice Day commemorations gave Bobigny's Communists an opportunity to combine the traditional observance of this date with protests by local politicians against war and militarism.

In Bobigny, the local Communist section organized . . . a meeting attended by 150 people. At the end of the meeting . . . about sixty of them, led by Clamamus, marched, singing the "Internationale" and crying "Down with war," to the place de la Mairie, where a Communist orator harangued them.^[35]

Bobigny's Communists strongly protested against war, expressed in a context of class conflict, not simple pacifism. War was characterized as victimizing poor workers from all countries to benefit capitalists and generals.^[36] Class struggle was usually a central theme of these demonstrations. By contrast, festivities held to celebrate local events tended to stress the importance of working-class solidarity and civic pride in a workers' community. Such celebrations were held to open a new city facility—the new school group in the Pont de Bondy or the maison du peuple .^[37]

Communist demonstrations in Bobigny were often very colorful affairs. They usually started off with parades; participants marched under the banners of the various PCF organizations to which they belonged. After arriving at their destination, the matchers listened to speeches by various Communist dignitaries, local, regional, or national. Mayor Clamamus was the most frequent orator. Then came cultural activities: singing groups, dancers, and skits, usually political. Accounts of such demonstrations suggest that pageantry and performance took up much more time than speechmaking. All were political, but Bobigny's Communists evidently felt that their ideological medicine would go down easier if administered in solution.^[38]

Probably the most spectacular public events staged by the PCF in Bobigny were the famous (or notorious) "red baptisms," rituals that were only the most dramatic symbol of a bitter conflict between the Communists and the Catholic church in the 1920s and early 1930s. At its root lay the church's rather belated recognition of its weakness in Bobigny and other working-class Parisian suburbs. Under the impetus of aggressive evangelists like Pierre Lhande, in the 1920s the church began a major effort to reconvert the suburban workers to Christianity. Bobigny was chosen as a key target for this campaign because of its reputation as a red citadel, and because secularization was so far

advanced there. As Denis Brogan has phrased it, "In the red zone around Paris he [the French priest] had to start almost at the beginning. . . . The old rural Bobigny had gone, and the new Bobigny had to be treated like a mission field."^[39]

Given the abysmal character of the relations between the church and the PCF until the Popular Front of 1936, it is not surprising that Bobigny's Communists, including members of the city government, fought tooth and nail against the attempt to reconvert their community. The red baptisms were one of their most imaginative means of doing so. In recounting Catholic efforts to develop a strong congregation in Nouveau Village, the city's biggest allotment, two associates of Father Lhande vividly described one of these ceremonies. The baptism, which had been widely publicized, began with a parade of the local Red Pioneers led by members of the city council along the rue de Rome. As the parade passed the church the demonstrators shouted slogans like "Priests to the lamppost" and "Death to the Christians," and sang blasphemous songs. One priest reported,

Here is an example of one of these songs, sung to the tune of "Midnight, Christians":

"Religion, daughter of Ignorance,
In centuries past, to ensure its dominance,
Martyred the masters of Science,
All thinkers, artisans of Progress.
Priest assassin, you who have soiled History
With so much blood, in the name of the Creator,
Yes, we know that, under your black robe,
Still hides the evil inquisitor."

The red baptism ceremony began at 4:30 in a municipal field. An individual disguised as a priest mimicked religious ceremonies . . . the children's parents were given a baptismal certificate, in correct form, carrying the signatures of the father, the mother, the godfather, and godmother, with the seal of city hall and the signature of Monsieur . . . Clamamus!^[40]

In April 1936 the "main tendue" speech of Maurice Thorez signaled a new PCF policy of detente toward the Catholic church that brought the end of the red baptisms in Bobigny. In general, Bobigny's Communists faithfully followed the new policy on religion. In addition to terminating the red baptisms, the PCF stopped all attacks on the church in the local press. In February 1936 the municipality appointed abbé Canet vice-president of a committee to aid the unemployed, presided over by Clamamus.^[41]

Like the Lenin School, the red baptisms were a popular symbol of Communist Bobigny in the interwar years, both for those who lived there and for outside observers. Their significance for Communist political culture in Bobigny goes beyond this, however. The re-Christianization campaign waged by the church in the Paris suburbs failed miserably, in part because outsiders were bringing different cultural practices to the area. The red baptisms, by contrast, involved residents defending working-class popular culture and revealed an affinity between it and Communist ideology. They demonstrated that the cultural identification of the workers with the PCF extended to the sphere of religion.^[42]

Bobigny's Communists also renamed local streets in a less spectacular but more permanent attempt to make their political culture a part of daily life in the town. By 1939 it had changed the names of twelve local thoroughfares, most to those of figures of the French Left: prewar French socialists and working-class activists such as Edouard Vaillant, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Louise Michel. The PCF regarded itself as the rightful successor of militants like Jaurès and Michel; the naming of streets after them can be interpreted as an attempt to reappropriate this heritage. Like the city council resolutions to honor Lafargue and Rouget de Lisle, the intention was to anchor the Bobigny PCF firmly in the traditions of the French Left.

The city government did not however neglect those who had achieved distinction within the ranks of the PCF, like Henri Barbusse and Paul Vaillant-Couturier. The municipality also commemorated working-class martyrs in renaming streets. André Sabatier, killed in Suresnes while participating in the PCF's general strike of 12 October 1925, was one; Sacco and Vanzetti, two American anarchists executed for murder in 1927, also had a street named after them.^[43] In addition to the illustrious dead, other politically significant designations were applied to streets; to celebrate the world's first socialist state, streets were named after Moscow, Leningrad, and Odessa. The world Communist movement was commemorated by the rue de l'Internationale.^[44]

The municipality changed street names to ensure that Communist ideals would play a major role in Bobigny's collective memory. Renaming streets was one of the most purely symbolic activities undertaken by the Communists and yet one with practical impact. The names of Bobigny's streets were the most obvious and immediate manifestation of the city's Communist political culture. Its essential goal was to create a sense of identity between the local PCF and the

workers of Bobigny. Its two most important themes, class conflict and class solidarity, demonstrated this identity. Certainly not all of the Party's local propaganda addressed these themes directly, but they formed the basic underpinnings of its weltanschauung. Communist dominance of local political life showed the PCF's ability to create this consensus. Its use of the idea of working-class solidarity, not class struggle, had the greatest appeal for the workers of Bobigny and thus formed the most effective ideological link between them and the French Communist party.

Neighborhood and Community Life

The geographical and social isolation of their lives made class conflict an abstract concept for many workers. Whatever their experiences on the job, at home in Bobigny there was no bourgeois presence to lend the idea of class struggle a concrete reality. By contrast, their isolation made working-class solidarity more tangible. They experienced this solidarity not so much in political terms as in feelings of closeness to their neighbors and ease in their quartier . This important sentiment of local community made the Communist stress on class solidarity readily comprehensible.

In short, communism in Bobigny owed its strength partly to a strong sense of community, especially at the neighborhood level. However, community in Bobigny did not come into being automatically but formed gradually during the early twentieth century as the city grew. Local politics was instrumental in developing neighborhood life, and the PCF's role in shaping local institutions and activities was significant. Since Bobigny was undergoing rapid and far-reaching change in the early twentieth century, its community formation was not traditional but intimately connected with larger patterns of urban growth and political change affecting the Paris area as a whole.^[45]

The same process that turned Bobigny into a commuters' suburb of Paris discouraged the formation of neighborhood sentiment (Map 5). There were many newcomers in the town; in 1921 only 13 percent of Bobigny's residents had been born there. Bobigny had no major ethnic groups, people who had come from the same region and could therefore reconstitute old community ties. Such ethnic concentrations have often been crucial in giving neighborhoods in modern urban areas a special character and sense of cohesiveness.^[46] Bobigny's character as a commuter suburb constituted a stubborn obstacle to community conscious-

Map 5.
Bobigny neighborhoods in 1920.

ness. The absence of much of the population during the day made Bobigny a fragmentary, bedroom community; as studies of similar commuter villages have shown, neighborhood loyalty and identification are often quite weak in such places.^[47] The physical character of the town reinforced its fragmentary identity. Aside from a canal along its southern boundary, there were no landmarks to distinguish Bobigny from other similar suburbs surrounding it. A town that is merely one part of a larger suburban sprawl is less likely to inspire local pride than one that is distinct and self-contained.

Given these factors, it would seem that residents of Bobigny in the early twentieth century were doomed to live in self-contained households without ever getting to know their neighbors. Yet certain structural characteristics of the town's development promoted neighborhood sociability and therefore counteracted the factors described above. Most important was the sociological homogeneity of the local population. Close to three-fourths of Bobigny's residents were individ-

uals, working class or lower middle class, with roughly similar incomes and life-styles. As several studies have shown, neighborhoods with a homogeneous population are more likely to have strong community life than are more diverse areas.^[48]

The structure of transportation facilities in Bobigny provided an important spur to neighborhood sociability. One cause of Bobigny's suburbanization was the working-class tram system, with low fees on certain tramcars during commuting hours. This meant that Bobigny residents taking the tram in off-hours to visit friends or relatives elsewhere in the Paris area paid full fare for inconvenient tram travel at night; it limited the mobility of Bobigny's workers and made spending their social time within walking distance of their homes more likely.^[49]

The large number of cafés in Bobigny also helped promote workers' sociability. The contribution of cafés to local leisure and urban life has already been noted. Their distribution was unlike that of most businesses in Bobigny, which were clustered around the old town center. The cafés were to be found in all areas, both downtown and in the peripheral neighborhoods. Therefore, they provided an institutional framework to develop local sociability. But they not only fostered neighborhood sentiment; they showed it already existed. Another measure of the strength or weakness of neighborly feeling is the records of local marriages. By calculating what percentage of brides, grooms, and marriage witnesses lived in the same neighborhoods, we can discover to what extent people in Bobigny formed close relationships based on where they lived.^[50]

An analysis of Bobigny's marriage records during the 1920s and 1930s shows that general neighborhood sentiment was a significant component of local sociability but by no means the dominant one. Of newlyweds in Bobigny, 35 percent were couples who lived in the same neighborhoods, whereas 56 percent included a spouse from outside Bobigny. Gaston Laroche and Sylvie Marchal, unskilled laborers, were living a few blocks from each other, on the avenue Jean Jaurès and the allée de la Madeleine, respectively, before they married.^[51] The pattern is similar for witnesses; 40 percent lived in the bride's or the groom's neighborhood, and 56 percent lived outside Bobigny. In both cases the highest levels of neighborhood sociability occurred at the beginning of the period we study; in 1923, 39 percent of new spouses and 49 percent of witnesses came from the same neighborhoods. In general, however, the data do not reveal any clear trends during the interwar period.^[52]

If neighborhood relations did not dominate local sociability, occupational or workplace sociability was even less important. Of all newlyweds in Bobigny during this period, only 14 percent married spouses employed in the same occupation. Again, the statistics for witnesses are similar; only 16 percent of witnesses belonged to the same occupation as either the bride or the groom. The marriage records are an imperfect guide to workplace sociability, since they do not indicate the actual firms in which people were employed; many workplaces employed people from different occupations. Still, they indicate that workplace relations were not a major factor in local social life. Given the separation between workplace and residence so characteristic of life in Bobigny, this is not surprising.^[53]

If neither residential nor occupational closeness determined the social lives of Bobigny residents during the 1920s and 1930s, what were their primary social networks? The data available do not give us a definitive or statistical answer, yet they show that family relationships, and networks formed in the places of origin of new Bobigny residents, were consequential. Family ties usually constitute a primary form of sociability for the urban working class in France and other industrial societies. Although the Bobigny marriage records did not always indicate whether witnesses were related to the newlywed pair, a large number of them seem to have been. In 1911 two-thirds of the marriage witnesses (91 out of 141) were relatives, especially brothers, brothers-in-law, and uncles; one-third of these relatives lived in the same neighborhood as either bride or groom. Of the four witnesses present at the wedding of Etienne Faurisson and Marie Chardon in 1911, three were brothers and the fourth was a sister-in-law; one brother lived in the same Bobigny neighborhood as the newlywed pair, and the other witnesses lived elsewhere in the Paris area.^[54] As for networks from the "old country," there were many examples of brides and grooms who came from the same region in the provinces, or whose parents lived in the same area.^[55]

The crucial lesson to be drawn from this analysis of Bobigny's marriage records is that the majority of people's close relationships did not result from where they lived, but that neighborhood life was still an important factor in their networks of sociability. It probably had an even greater role in casual friendships. One overriding reason for the strength of neighborhood sociability in Bobigny was the condition of the neighborhoods. The need to get streets paved, streetlights put up,

and water service established brought neighbors together. Consequently, people developed the habit of looking out for those who lived around them.

Among these . . . mal-lotis who all have the same problems, there exists a certain solidarity that most often reveals itself by collections taken up haphazardly, according to whether the immediate neighbors organize it. One will give fifty centimes, another five francs—there is no guarantee of equality of sacrifice. Then this collection is given, almost like charity, to a comrade afflicted by adversity. . . . We have been able to affirm that occasionally two, even three collections were taken up in our allotment during the same week.^[56]

Taken from a local Communist newspaper, this description of mutual aid shows not only its importance to the workers of Bobigny but also how the PCF attempted to organize such practices and give them an ideological cast.^[57]

Local solidarity arose both from neighbors' need to deal with inadequate living conditions and from their voluntary organization. Urban sociologists have proposed a theory, the "phase hypothesis of community development," which has relevance to Bobigny. This hypothesis contends that heightened community and neighborhood sociability are characteristic of new housing estates during the first phase of their existence, as people get to know one another and have to deal with common problems involved in settling into a new place. Once this initial phase is completed, however, community sociability tends to decline. In Bobigny this phase of intense neighborliness was prolonged because of the crisis of the allotments and the underdevelopment of the urban facilities in general.^[58]

One form of local activity that helped generate local sociability was the petition drive. Although Balbynians expected the city government to improve living conditions in their areas, they did not simply wait for this to happen but put pressure on the municipality to follow through on its promises. Petitions were a favorite means of doing so. At most of its meetings during the 1920s and 1930s the Bobigny city council had to deal with petitions from its constituents requesting various improvements in city services and facilities. These petitions came from all over Bobigny, especially from the allotment neighborhoods, and usually involved residents of a few adjacent streets. Working on petitions made people aware of their neighbors and of the problems they shared with them.^[59]

Community activism in Bobigny went beyond petitions, however; it also had an important organizational side. One organization that played a significant role in local life was the local interest committee (LIC), or amicale . During the interwar period there were five of these groups in Bobigny; the oldest, that of the Pont de Bondy, was founded in 1913. The LICs were active in organizing petition drives and other campaigns to upgrade the quality of life in their neighborhoods. The following report from a Nouveau Village LIC meeting gives a good overview of the work done by the LICs. These activities may seem mundane, given the reputation of red Bobigny, but they mattered to the residents of the city's working-class neighborhoods.

Our comrade Pesch presented a summary of the activity of the group since our last assembly. All questions of interest to the population of our quartier were dealt with: street repairs, public lighting, paving streets and sidewalks, sewer cleaning, and so on. All these have been or are about to be dealt with by our municipality. Then, our children's festival was decided upon. . . .^[60]

Elected leaders did the bulk of the work of the LICs, and most members looked on. The committees nonetheless provided a forum to discuss local concerns and come up with ways to deal with them. As such, they helped bring neighbors together to develop a concrete sense of community.

Also working on common neighborhood matters were the allotment-based associations syndicales, or lot owners' associations. There were sixteen of them, and they were founded in the 1920s as part of the national effort to make the defective allotments more habitable. Unlike the local interest committees, the associations were less voluntaristic; any allotment dweller who wanted paved streets or other improvements had to join the local association. The two types of organizations were concerned with similar problems and often worked closely together.^[61] Their presence and a more general community consciousness helped the PCF succeed in Bobigny. No political force could have assembled the kind of strength the Communists had in interwar Bobigny without at least some presence in the neighborhoods, and the PCF made itself a part of grassroots politics.

For one thing, Communists led many if not most of the local interest committees and associations syndicales. At least three of the five LICs were headed by PCF city councillors, and much of the leadership of the associations was also Communist. Furthermore, the city council and

especially Mayor Clamamus worked to establish virtually all the associations syndicales. The two community organizations were not simply PCF fronts; sometimes even their Communist leaders came into conflict with the municipality, as is shown by the following letter from Adrien Dumontier, PCF city councillor and secretary of Les Vignes' LIC, to Mayor Clamamus:

Comrade,

In accord with the general discontent of the residents of the Les Vignes allotment concerning the repair of the roads of this allotment, I remind you that Chemin, a secretary at city hall, has held up these works for at least eighteen months, if not two years. . . . I have no intention of covering up with my silence the incompetence of certain city hall employees. I will come by city hall on Sunday . . . to ask you about the specific reasons for this delay. . . .

The bureau of the local interest committee will be informed of this situation; the small property owners of the allotment will be convoked for a special meeting.^[62]

Other conflicts did occur, but none serious enough to break the close relations between the LICS, the associations, and the PCF. These community organizations established a strong Communist presence at the neighborhood level; they would probably have existed even had the PCF played little or no role in Bobigny's political life, yet the Party gave them vigor and manpower.

In their functioning and their ties with Bobigny's city council, these neighborhood organizations suggest parallels with American urban political machines. The LICs represented an unofficial yet effective way for ordinary Balbynians to attract the municipality's attention to local problems. These parallels go only so far, however: Bobigny's PCF politicians had no patronage jobs like shoveling snow to offer constituents in exchange for votes, and in general French municipalities had much less power than their American counterparts.^[63]

The setup of Bobigny's community organizations demonstrated an important, if unspoken, aspect of Communist political culture in Bobigny: the split between a few active leaders and a largely passive following. Much of this stemmed from the difficulties of getting people to devote time to such work. However, the Communists were not especially interested in developing a more democratic and participatory style of local politics. The hierarchical nature of the LICs and associations mirrored that of Bobigny's Communist political culture, in which a few Party activists and politicians made most important decisions; for

the great majority of citizens political decision making began and ended at the ballot box. There were many more PCF voters than there were Party members; in 1925, for example, while the Communists won over a thousand votes in the municipal elections, there were only sixty-two militants in the local section.^[64]

In any case, neighborhood sociability and identity were important to the workers of Bobigny, and the Communists were adept both in maintaining these sentiments and in channeling them toward their own goals. The question remains: to what extent did community solidarity equal class solidarity in interwar Bobigny? The two concepts were not equivalent; a woman who brought over food or cleaned house for her neighbor whose husband was sick hardly interpreted her actions in terms of abstract class solidarity. Yet the isolation of Bobigny workers in their own communities was significant. To a large extent workers lived next to, socialized with, and married other workers. Thus in emphasizing the importance of class loyalty, the Communists of Bobigny were simply trying to give explicit expression to values already implicit in local working-class popular culture.^[65]

Communist Cultural Activities in Bobigny

In their efforts to build a mass base for themselves in the community, Bobigny's Communists devoted much energy to organizing cultural events. Such functions had greater potential to reach out to citizens who were apathetic toward or at best only somewhat interested in politics; the average individual, even in interwar Bobigny, would probably rather attend a block party or a film than a factual political lecture or demonstration. Even committed Party militants must have fun sometimes.

Another reason for the PCF's emphasis on this activity was the notable lack of cultural resources in Bobigny. Although unfortunate for the residents, the situation was in some ways advantageous for the PCF; if it could establish a strong cultural sphere in the community, it would not have to worry about competition from non-Communist sources. Both the PCF and the Communist municipality did have a large part in cultural activities in Bobigny between the wars, and we must note this impact in assessing the Party's strength.

The simplest and most common cultural activities organized by Bobigny's Communists were neighborhood festivals; nearly every local group sponsored them at one time or another. Although the munici-

pality did not officially organize festivals, Clamamus and other members of the city council often attended, and the city government frequently gave subsidies to neighborhood groups to defray the festivals' costs.^[66] Usually these festivals had a political theme. For example, in 1935 the Maurice Bureau quarter held a children's festival to honor its namesake, one of the Communist martyrs killed during the riots of 9 February 1934. On Bastille Day in 1930 the municipality sponsored "red balls" throughout the city. Yet these festivals were genuine parties, with music, dancing, games, and sometimes performers; unlike demonstrations, they rarely featured marches or political speeches.^[67]

In contrast, those entertainments sponsored by the PCF itself, not by its "front" groups or affiliated organizations, generally gave politics pride of place. A 1926 fundraiser for the PCF's twenty-first regional district (rayon ) began with a concert. During the intermission a representative from the PCF's Paris regional federation spoke, praising the Communists of Bobigny and accusing the Socialists of betraying the working class. The concert was followed by a one-act play, "The Idea," depicting the betrayal of strikers by a fellow worker.^[68] Such arid ideological performances were at least as much propaganda as entertainment. They were to be found in Bobigny throughout the interwar period, but it is difficult to believe that they attracted more than the Party faithful.

In the field of music we find a similar distinction between political groups and groups that were also political. Before the PCF won control of the city government in 1920 the city had a municipal music society. The Communists continued this tradition, founding the Harmonie de Bobigny, which played at local functions like the inauguration of new city buildings, graduation ceremonies, and so forth. The Harmonie had more political uses, however; from time to time it also played at PCF rallies and demonstrations in the Paris area. In addition to this official organization, Bobigny's Communists were active in several nonmunicipal music groups in the city, such as the Aube artistique balbynienne.^[69] In contrast to the Harmonie de Bobigny was the local music and drama group known as the Blue Blouses of Bobigny. This PCF organization, associated with the Young Communists, was modeled after similar, cabaret-style performing groups organized by German Communists in the 1920s. It specialized in singing Communist songs at political events. A correspondent for the Journal de Saint-Denis described his impressions of the group's performance at an electoral rally for Clamamus:

Clamamus then offered a presentation of "speaking choruses" by the Blue Blouses of Bobigny. It is truly inadmissible to hear children from twelve to fifteen years of age pronounce words of hatred, chanting slogans like "The Red Front is on the march," "Dynamite is what we are acting," and "The republic deserves to be swept away with a broom." Then the same young boys and girls, carrying wooden rifles and gunbelts, sang a march, that of the future Red Army: "Forward," they sang, "toward the civil war."^[70]

Other Communist cultural activities in Bobigny included sports and, at least during the Popular Front, film. The Workers' Sports Union of Bobigny organized instruction, teams, and competitions in various sports; in 1930, for example, it was given three hundred francs by the municipality to organize bicycle and foot races for the city's annual festival. The films shown by PCF and neighborhood organizations were generally either from the Soviet Union or dealt with the Spanish civil war. There was a short-lived Soviet film society in Bobigny during the 1930s; the Friends of the Soviet Union and other local groups also sponsored showings from time to time. Films sometimes figured as part of the entertainment at festivals; for example, as part of the city's celebration of the sesquicentennial of the French Revolution in 1939, the municipality sponsored a viewing of Jean Renoir's film La Marseillaise .^[71]

Finally, the PCF contributed to local entertainment by maintaining several Communist cafés in Bobigny. The most famous and important of these was the maison Pesch, owned by Deputy Mayor Léon Pesch, in the Pont de Bondy. The Pont de Bondy local interest committee usually met here, as well as several other local PCF organizations. These cafés were important centers of Communist political culture in Bobigny, serving as neighborhood meeting halls, distribution points for the Party press, and places for activists to socialize. For example, one got a glass of red wine by ordering a Clamamus.^[72]

We can divide the cultural activities of the Bobigny PCF into two main categories: the more overtly political ones that most often provided entertainment at Party rallies, and those in which political themes were present but not dominant. Although the former occurred more frequently in the city, the latter, especially the neighborhood festivals, probably did more to involve average Balbynians in Communist culture. Except for these festivals, it is doubtful that Communist cultural activities had an impact on the leisure of the people of Bobigny. For one thing, such activities were not frequent, rarely occurring more

than once a month even during the Popular Front. When people did take part, they often remembered the entertainment but not the politics.^[73] The PCF was often the only source of such cultural activities in Bobigny, but the overtly political types of cultural expression offered by the Communists seem not to have become an integral part of local popular culture.^[74]

The culture of communism in interwar Bobigny was built on a distinctive working-class consciousness produced both by suburban development and Communist activism. At the base of structural conditions shaping this consciousness lay the division between home and work, which increased the segregation of classes in the Paris area. The split between job and home gave rise to overrapid development of the allotments in Bobigny; as residential issues became more distinct, they assumed an importance of their own. Working-class consciousness in Bobigny was to a large extent mal-loti consciousness; workers in allotments put a lot of effort into making their homes and communities decent places to live and considered the struggle to accomplish this goal vital to their lives.

The workers' social segregation also played a key role. One central characteristic of working-class life in Bobigny was isolation from other social groups, and from bourgeois society as a whole. The radical base of Bobigny's electoral support for the PCF was both a product and a symbol of the physical, sociological, and cultural separation of the community's workers from the dominant culture of early twentieth-century France. This social isolation also strongly colored community activities. For various reasons, especially the substandard local living conditions, neighborhood life was very important in Bobigny. Because of the town's segregated population, local solidarity was in effect identical to working-class solidarity, since a worker's neighbors were almost always other workers or employés.

The result in Bobigny was a working-class consciousness that emphasized class solidarity and unity over the class struggle. With no local bourgeoisie to struggle against, class struggle was an abstract concept; one could easily see the need for workers to help each other. The Communists emphasized both. Whereas Balbynian workers were certainly not hostile to struggle, class solidarity more closely fit their own experiences. The most concrete manifestation of this spirit was community activism. The well-developed network of community institutions in Bobigny demonstrated the importance of community issues

in the city's political life. No correspondingly large and active group of institutions was set up to deal with workplace problems. Bobigny did have local unions, but they were small and had less place in local life than did, say, the local interest committees.^[75] The PCF's influence in them helped solidify its electoral hold over the community. But this influence worked two ways: the concerns of Bobigny's community groups also tended to reinforce the PCF's interest in community issues. The PCF's major role in daily life in Bobigny served to integrate it into local popular beliefs and practices. Though this political culture did have political utility, on the whole the culture of communism was more a product of the PCF's political strength than a reason for it. More than anything else, it used symbolic acts like renaming streets and various cultural activities, specifically Communist symbols, to distinguish life in Bobigny from that in other, non-Communist Paris suburbs.

There was an interesting tension in Bobigny's Communist culture between the desire to challenge capitalist society and the wish to present an alternative to it. The PCF itself strongly favored the former option, which goes far to explain its essentially nondemocratic political practices. Yet in developing this culture the Party was implicitly advocating an alternative to bourgeois culture and to bourgeois society as a whole. This vision of an alternative, more than the emphasis on class conflict, was key in continuing Communist power in Bobigny after 1945 down to the present day. Otherwise, French Communism's unrevolutionary partial integration into mainstream French politics would have reduced its appeal to Balbynians. It is still said today that in the suburbs of Paris one is born, not made, a Communist. The example of the culture of communism developed in Bobigny between the world wars shows how this could be so.