Nine—
Liberation and Reform, 1944–1946

The Liberation of France brought a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats into power under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle. United in their opposition to Hitler and Vichy and in their determination to make the Fourth Republic more effective than the Third, these several parties shared in a broad national consensus supporting the view that after the humiliation of 1940 France had to modernize its economy and reassert itself as a European power. The Vichy experience, moreover, had given most people a distaste for the authoritarian right and an appetite for notions of popular democracy. Graced by a spontaneous outpouring of patriotic fervor during the Liberation, this new governing coalition had a mandate to initiate reforms. In the two years that followed, French politicians reshaped policy in a number of areas, including industrial relations. Not since 1848 had the left had such a chance to make social policy and refashion the workplace.

Not surprisingly, the aircraft industry became an important arena for experimentation, just as it had been during the Popular Front. State prominence in the managerial hierarchy of the industry gave reformers in Paris access to virtually every factory and laboratory in the airplane business. The influence of the state, combined with the renewed strength of the CGT in the work force, created a receptive environment locally to institute reforms. The aircraft industry had a track record for innovation in labor relations, a legacy of employee representation, collective bargaining, and trade union power that CGT militants had established between 1936 and 1938. Despite some turnover in the work force, many of the people employed in aviation in the early postwar period had been in these same plants a long time—a government report in 1949 declared that the average seniority of workers at SNCAN in Le Havre was fourteen years—long enough to have tasted the triumphs and disappoint-

ments of the late 1930s.^[1] In short, the players were still in place for the aircraft industry to command the center of the industrial-relations stage after the Liberation.

At the same time it was hard to tell what the PCF and the CGT would make of this opportunity to initiate reform. For one thing, the industry was in shambles. Though production had continued during the Occupation, research had stagnated. Just when engineers elsewhere were taking major steps into the jet age, the Occupation authorities kept the French saddled with 1940 vintage aircraft. It remained to be seen how officials would juggle the competing demands for making aviation a showcase of labor reform while trying to salvage a commercial future for the industry. It was also unclear how far left-wing reform could go, given the internal politics of the governing coalition. The PCF, the SFIO, and the MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire, the Christian Democratic Party) were rivals as well as partners. A world of ideological difference separated de Gaulle from his left-wing ministers. And then there was the PCF itself. Only its internal leadership had an informed understanding of party strategy, and even these leaders were not of one mind about how hard to push for reforms, given the overwhelming presence of the American army and Stalin's desire to keep the Grand Alliance intact. It was therefore in an atmosphere of hope and uncertainty that employers, government officials, and workers in aviation embarked on a second great effort at left-wing experimentation, an effort that soon proved to be as far-reaching in its impact as was the first one in 1936.

Liberation

Events during the Liberation itself set the stage for the reforms that followed. During the final days of the Occupation an insurrectionary climate filled the air as workers went on strike, took over factories, or found their workplaces paralyzed by electrical blackouts, sabotage, or bombardment. It became extremely difficult for factory directors to maintain effective control over their personnel, especially in cases where management had collaborated assiduously with the Germans. Liberation committees surfaced everywhere, usually with Communist leadership, and were eager to settle accounts. When Allied troops or the FFI (the internal Resistance now unified into Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur) secured control of Le Havre, Sartrouville, Toulouse, and the other main centers of the industry, Liberation committees frequently purged management and put new men in charge. Reprisals came swiftly. At SNCASE in Marignane the personnel director and his deputy were both assassinated, and in Toulouse a purge committee sacked fifteen department heads and one hundred other employees. At Sartrouville a Resistance

group took over the plant and had the production director arrested. The FFI named a new factory director at SNCAN in Méaulte, as did the purge committee at Caudron in Paris and at SNCAC in Bourges.^[2] For a brief period managerial hierarchies dissolved.

Much the same thing, of course, occurred in many other industries. What made the Liberation distinctive in aviation was the extent to which this initial burst of left-wing assertiveness translated into a movement to create "production committees" throughout the industry—factory councils designed to promote the speedy rejuvenation of production. In Toulouse, where the FFI was particularly strong and aviation was a major industry, production committees quickly gained the national limelight. There, in late August and early September, workers at SNCASE, Bréguet, Latécoère, and Air France proclaimed their right to have a say in managing their plants, even going so far at SNCASE as to demand the right to "oversee the progress of production."^[3] Within a week production committees had sprouted in other industries throughout the region—so much so, in fact, that Pierre Bertaux, de Gaulle's commissaire régional de la République (a kind of superprefect), stepped in to contain the movement by bringing employers and labor militants to the bargaining table. On 12 September both sides agreed to the Accord de Toulouse, which legitimized the committees, defined their powers, and provided a framework for their further proliferation. It gave them "a right to oversight which allows for effective control over all technical, administrative, commercial, and financial activities of their respective workplaces, in order that the latter can be put to the total service . . . of the Nation."^[4] In the name of patriotism the accord gave workers a voice in their factories, paving the way for later national legislation establishing plant committees (comités d'entreprise ) and mixed production committees (comités mixtes à la production ) in other industries throughout France.

Aircraft employees stepped to the forefront of the movement to establish production committees for a number of reasons. First of all, employees in aviation had a history of assuming some responsibility for the organization of work. Aircraft construction still called for highly skilled metalworkers and an unusually large proportion of technicians, draftsmen, and engineers. Communication up and down this skilled occupational hierarchy remained commonplace in prototype shops. Even mass production in 1939–40 did not eliminate these long-standing features in the social organization of aircraft work. It therefore made sense in aviation to argue that a production committee could improve the quality and pace of production, and the idea appealed to employees with a collective self-image as a skilled elite.

It also appealed to people's patriotism, which was particularly ripe for the tapping during the Liberation. As a point of national pride, employ-

ees wanted to supply French-built airplanes to a French air force that was otherwise depending mainly on American and British equipment. Communist militants were particularly eager to replenish the air force for the continuing war against Germany, and the production committee offered them a device for enhancing that effort and absorbing employees' enthusiasm for the Liberation into a structure militants could control. Militants, moreover, were well positioned to promote these committees, in part because the CGT had largely succeeded in organizing workers and technicians between 1936 and 1938, in part because many of these same men, like the technician Lucien Llabre in Toulouse, came to the forefront again in August 1944.^[5] The skilled nature of aircraft construction, its importance to the renewed war effort, and a continuity of leadership and organization in the CGT made the industry fertile ground for production committees.

In addition, there were precedents. Pierre Cot, Blum's air minister in 1936, had required nationalized companies to establish advisory committees in their factories. Likewise Fernand Grenier, a Communist and de Gaulle's air minister in the provisional government in Algiers, established production committees in 1944 in all Algerian airplane repair shops, an experiment modeled on the joint production committees that Grenier had seen in wartime Britain. The committee movement therefore drew on sources both "below," in the shop floor experience of airplane construction, and "above," in wartime plans of the CGT, the Communist Party, and the new Air Ministry.

Just how radical a challenge the production committee posed to traditional managerial authority was at first unclear. One observer hailed the Accord de Toulouse as a "night of 4 August 1789," a stunning abdication of employer privilege.^[6] In the heady days of the Liberation the sudden emergence of Liberation committees and purge committees and the resurgence of the CGT gave the movement for production committees an aura of what would now be labeled "autogestion," or employee self-management. Some workers and local militants may have had hopes that factory committees would somehow replace the boss. And in fact in some plants the Liberation committees seemed to have much more authority than company management.^[7] Certainly some employers feared the worst; the director of Latécoère in Toulouse wrote at the time, "This committee is changing little by little into a soviet!"^[8]

But what mattered most was how Communist militants viewed these committees, for in August 1944 they were in a strong position to dictate to workers and managers alike how radical an instument these committees would be. The PCF, in fact, had no intention of jeopardizing national unity and the party's newfound prestige by promoting radical notions of worker-run enterprise. Committees were to counsel, but not

replace, factory management. Having mobilized the committee movement, Communist militants worked at the same time to keep it within bounds, to make the committees serve the practical aims of strengthening the CGT, stimulating production, and rejuvenating French firms for the stiff international competition they would face after the war. The oath committee members took on assuming their duties made these purposes clear:

We swear on our honor to cooperate faithfully with one another in order to ensure the maximum production while safeguarding the interests of workers and the national collectivity. . . .

[We swear] never to allow our committees to be used as stepping stones for personal gain beyond trade union and patriotic control, or for ambitions to acquire managerial posts in the airplane companies.

[We swear] to put all our technical and professional knowledge to the exclusive service of production and the management of the enterprise placed under our safety in order that French aircraft production will regain the rank it should never have lost.^[9]

Patriotism, productivism, and loyalty to the union: these were the values that Communist leaders in Toulouse wanted committee members to promote in their factories. To be sure, workers and militants expected the committees to have real power. Militants at SNCASE, for example, were determined to go beyond the experience of the Popular Front when factory advisory committees played what they felt had been a superficial role in their plant.^[10] But strictly speaking, the Accord de Toulouse did nothing to usurp the formal right of management to direct the firm.

If the committee movement posed only a mild threat to management, it posed no threat at all to the state. On the contrary, the Accord de Toulouse demonstrated that rank-and-file aircraft workers, as well as the CGT and PCF militants among them, were willing to cooperate with the embryonic regime taking shape around de Gaulle. At no point in the chaotic days of the Liberation did aircraft workers question the legitimacy of the new government. Nor did anyone challenge Pierre Bertaux's authority to oversee the talks that produced the Accord de Toulouse. In fact, the authority of the production committees ultimately depended on support from the state. As the accord stated, "The refusal by the director to apply measures recommended [by the committee] must be for specific reasons and can be the occasion for the committee to turn to a qualified representative of the Government." During the Popular Front aircraft workers had relied heavily on prefects, labor inspectors, and ministerial officials for support in strikes, grievance hearings, arbitration, and collective bargaining. From 1936 until Munich Communist militants learned to work through, rather than against, the state. When the PCF and the CGT returned to a Popular Front strategy in 1944, and when a new government of the Liberation seemed to hold such promise for the

left, aircraft workers showed a willingness once again to view government officials as potential allies for labor reform. In 1944, as in 1936, contrôle ouvrière seemed to go hand in hand with expanding the supervisory authority of the state.

Within a month of the Liberation the world of French aircraft manufacturing had become thoroughly absorbed into a new era of national mobilization. Purge committees had gone a long way to clean house, not always justly, in factories, offices, and laboratories. Newly promoted managers scrambled with the help of their employers to get production going again, not always successfully on account of bomb damage, blackouts, shortages, and bottlenecks in supplies. But a kind of left-wing patriotic revivalism did a lot to compensate psychologically for the economic chaos that still paralyzed much of the industry.

Events in Toulouse on 20 September convey something of the afterglow of Liberation that continued into the fall of 1944. That day aircraft workers in Toulouse left their shops early to take part in festivities the Departmental Committee of the Liberation had planned to commemorate "the first victory of the popular army: Valmy, 20 September 1792." As the committee had arranged, employees all over town stopped work at five o'clock to lend their numbers to the crowd and "give the festival its full luster." Local troops from the FFI marched to the Place du Capitole in the center of town, where orators "exalted the victories of the Republic." Later, celebrants gathered at the Gaumont Theater for a concert by Musique de l'Air and a showing of Jean Renoir's film La Marseillaise . The following day Le Patriote du Sud-Ouest, a major Resistance paper for the region, featured its daily historical calendar, identifying what had transpired that day during pivotal years in the French past—1792, 1914, 1918, and so on.^[11] The lesson was clear: the Liberation and the continuing Allied drive were part of a long-standing Jacobin struggle—against Prussians on the eastern frontier and antirepublicans down the street. Alongside the calendar the paper ran a prominent story on the furious pace of work in the aircraft plants, where in the wake of the Liberation workers were working twelve-hour days; as one young worker at SNCASE told the reporter, "Now we can come here; it's not for the Fritz."^[12] In such an atmosphere of enthusiasm for the Liberation aircraft production slowly began to revive, and with it the contest for control in the industry.

The Air Ministry of Charles Tillon

When out of political necessity Charles de Gaulle appointed leading Communists to the provisional government, the post of air minister went to Charles Tillon, a member of the Politburo and the celebrated helmsman of Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, the principal fighting arm of

the Communist Resistance. Most aircraft workers must have been delighted with the choice. A colorful figure, Tillon was part of the troika, along with Jacques Duclos and Benoît Frachon, that ran the PCF in Maurice Thorez's absence during the Occupation. Although a top man in the party, Tillon was also something of an outsider, a maverick with an independent political base in the FTP who had never quite won the confidence of Thorez and Duclos with their close Moscow connections. De Gaulle named Tillon in part to neutralize the FTP and in part to take advantage of his standing with workers in a pivotal industry.^[13] A Breton, a veteran of the Black Sea Mutiny of 1919, an experienced labor organizer, an impassioned supporter of the Spanish loyalists, and an early Resistance fighter, Tillon was more a political combatant than a politician. "A man of action," he later said of himself, "I read Marx with a little spoon."^[14] True to form, he threw himself headlong into the task of reviving French aviation.

As a Communist, Tillon viewed efforts to boost production, stimulate research, and extend the influence of the CGT as equally important aspects of a renaissance in the industry. In Tillon's mind technical progress and social reform were "inseparable."^[15] This outlook suited party strategy. On the one hand, the PCF struck a conciliatory course with its Socialist and Christian Democratic partners in government. It was patriotism and the nationalistic spirit of the Resistance that held this coalition together, and Tillon's call for a "national renaissance" in aviation, his view of the air force as an instrument "for the independence of France," spoke poignantly to these sentiments.^[16] On the other hand, the party sought structural reforms—nationalizations, social security, and labor representation in industrial councils—to keep open the road to socialism and bolster popular support for the party.^[17] Tillon's commitment to left-wing innovations in the aircraft industry became readily apparent and eventually made air policy the subject of some of the country's bitterest controversy just after the war.

First as air minister in 1944 and 1945, then as armament minister in 1946, Tillon chose to stimulate production and research simultaneously—an ambitious program that, though criticized by some politicians and engineers as unrealistic, had support from de Gaulle and the state engineering staff of the Air Ministry.^[18] De Gaulle, eager to step out of the shadow of the Anglo-Americans, endorsed a nationalist strategy for reviving defense. The career professionals in the Air Ministry, including Joseph Roos, who returned to the boulevard Victor for a short stint in 1944 and 1945, defended the orthodox view that the industry should maintain excess capacity as an asset to national security. It was this unusual alliance of Communists, engineering bureaucrats, and de Gaulle that gave Tillon the political momentum to try out his program.

Until the collapse of Germany in May 1945, military mobilization made it relatively easy to finance the effort. Thereafter, however, Tillon had to fight hard to keep the industry financed at full strength in the face of pressures for demobilization. Peace, after all, had almost obliterated the industry in 1919; Tillon wanted to avoid this fate, indeed avoid demobilization altogether, in hopes of restoring the industry to international prominence and preserving it as a bastion of the Communist Party. Until mid-1946 he managed to keep the work force at around ninety thousand employees—a remarkable feat—by fighting reductions in the air force, ordering large production runs of outmoded French and German airplanes, and supporting "reconversion," that is, schemes to use airplane factories for building refrigerators, motorcycles, tractors, army field kitchens, beds, barges, baby carriages, and a host of other products to "conserve precious industrial potential essential to our national defense," as Tillon put it.^[19] To stimulate research, Tillon's staff issued a huge number of prototype contracts. Between 1945 and 1949 the Air Ministry financed 127 prototype flights, a scale of experimentation reminiscent of Albert Caquot's prototype policy of the early 1930s.^[20] Tillon's goals were nothing if not ambitious: to prevent the shrinkage of the industry during a period of military demobilization; to restore France as a competitor in aeronautical technology after it had fallen five years behind Britain and the United States; and to make the industry a showcase of labor reform—all in an era of austerity.

To pursue these goals, Tillon took advantage of the power nationalization gave his ministry. Since the nationalizations of 1936 were still widely regarded as beneficial to the industry, and since the nationalization of key industries figured prominently in the economic program of the Conseil National de la Résistance, Tillon encountered little opposition. Three new institutions emerged: the Office National d'Etude et de Recherche Aéronautique (ONERO) to coordinate research and development; a fully nationalized Air France, bringing together under state control two private airlines and the mixed company that Cot had created in 1933; and, most far-reaching of all, the Société Nationale d'Etude et de Construction de Moteurs d'Aviation (SNECMA). This new, nationalized engine-building firm derived mainly from Gnôme-et-Rhône and the airplane engine division of Renault, both of which were expropriated at the Liberation for collaborating with the enemy. The bulk of the engine sector now came under government control, fulfilling a long-standing demand on the left to break the grip of the powerful engine manufacturers on the industry. This time there was to be no lengthy inventory for indemnification, as had occurred in 1936 and 1937; the government simply expropriated the Gnôme-et-Rhône stock by an ordinance of 29 May 1945, paid off the small stockholders at a cost of about five hundred

million francs, and confiscated the rest of the five-billion-franc firm. The legislation made the rationale for bold action explicit: "During the Occupation the directors lost all awareness of national duty and centered their efforts on satisfying the needs of the enemy. . . . Patriotic conscience demands a complete reorganization of this company . . . to enable the French engine-building industry to recover the technical capacity that will place our national aviation in the first rank. The State alone currently possesses the authority sufficient to assume this task."^[21] Such rhetoric conveyed the faith, widespread in 1945, in the regenerative capacity of the government.

In addition to nationalizing research facilities and the all-important engine sector, Tillon enhanced the prominence of the national companies in the airframe sector. Most new orders for prototypes and serial production went to nationalized firms. A few private firms disappeared. The SNCAN absorbed Caudron, SNCASO took over the Farman plant that had prospered during the Occupation, and SNCASE claimed a portion of Latécoère's research facilities in Toulouse. By the spring of 1946 seven out of eight employees in the industry held posts in the nationalized sector.^[22]

Just as important as the boost Tillon gave to nationalized firms was the purge he carried out among their top management. In January 1945 he asked the directors of all four national companies to resign; he replaced them with men holding stronger Resistance credentials. To run SNECMA he turned to Marcel Weill, a polytechnicien and a Communist. These new directors shared not only Tillon's desire to keep the industry large but also his openness to labor reform. "If SNCAN has to be in the avant garde of technical progress," one new director told his board, "it also must be the forerunner of social progress."^[23] Moreover, Tillon shifted the political balance of the boards dramatically in his favor. He made board memberships overlapping so that each director sat on the boards of the other firms. In addition, the ministries of Finance, Air, and National Economy were each entitled to one representative. The latter two ministries being headed by Communists further enhanced Tillon's control, as did an even more stunning display of Communist power in aviation, the right for the CGT to name three representatives to each board, one each from the ranks of white-collar employees, workers, and foremen. Under these circumstances Tillon's influence over managerial policy in the nationalized sector went a good deal beyond what Pierre Cot had acquired during the Popular Front.

Tillon also cultivated a personal tie to the work force. He visited every major factory in the industry, some of them several times.^[24] A lively orator, Tillon used these visits to promote the PCF's "battle for production" by extolling the virtues of hard work, teamwork, and national eco-

nomic independence. Often at these ceremonial occasions he awarded a deserving worker or engineer the new médaille de l'aéronautique , a bronze medallion that on one side had silhouettes of a metalworker, an engineer, a pilot, and a mechanic and on the other the words "science–technique–work–daring" encircling a propeller. Although Tillon himself had no background in aviation, he was quick to adapt the rhetoric of the Communist Resistance—the repeated references to réorganisation, reconstruction, renaissance , and the fraternité de combat —to the special esprit de corps that had long been a part of French aviation. When he called for restoring "the prestige of French wings," everyone in the industry knew what he was talking about. And he made no secret of his political sympathies, "to be faithful to the working class, as a son to maternal love." He told a large crowd of employees at the Amiot factory near Paris, "It's a fact that there's never been in this country a working class and technical personnel as disposed to labor fervently, with a love of their work and their machines. As for me, I say to you that you have never had a better defender of your demands." How workers responded to Tillon's appeal is hard to know, although he made enough of an impression to inspire a number of apprentices to send him hand-hewn airplane models as examples of their work. There is little doubt, however, that Tillon's personality cult, his effort to establish "an unbroken link" between "the workers of aviation" and "your minister," gave him a political base in the industry from which to battle with politicians, bureaucrats, and employers at odds with his aviation policy.^[25]

Tillon's leadership at the ministry also enabled Communist militants to strengthen the CGT at the factory level. The Air Ministry made it clear, for example, that anyone fired from a nationalized company in the general strike of 30 November 1938 had a right to his job.^[26] More important, since the CGT and PCF were well represented on company boards, CGT militants won control of hiring and apprenticeship training. CGT membership soared. One account estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the personnel at SNECMA were CGT members.^[27] In a labor relations system where unions could not rely on closed-shop arrangements or payroll deductions for dues, informal control over hiring was crucial; CGT militants used it accordingly. With Tillon presiding at the boulevard Victor, CGT militants jealously cultivated their access to the Air Ministry, and Tillon respected their efforts. For example, in early 1945 local militants at SNCASE were given a say in the selection of new plant directors in Toulouse and Marseille.^[28] Influence of this sort enhanced the prestige of the CGT and served to confirm workers in their faith in the ministry.

Tillon also supported the CGT's effort to broaden its base in the white-collar ranks of the industry. The PCF's emergence in 1944 as the preeminent party in the Resistance gave the CGT a new opportunity to

appeal to draftsmen, engineers, and clerical personnel who otherwise would have kept their distance from a blue-collar union with Stalinist stripes. The CGT had made modest inroads into the middle-class strata of the industry during the Popular Front, although rivalry between competing factions in the CGT had hurt the effort, and Daladier's repression cut it short. Mindful of these earlier failures, the Aviation Section of the National Union of Metalworking Cadres and Engineers hoped in 1945 to unify white-collar trade unionists within a single branch of the FTM and, in doing so, build stronger ties between engineers, clerical personnel, technicians, and workers. In many ways conditions had never been better for integrating white-collar employees into the union: these people, too, had suffered during the Occupation, their salaries had stagnated, and they were not faring well in the face of postwar inflation. The CGT geared its pitch accordingly, reminding engineers and technicians that "their salaries must be as severely compromised as the wages of workers" and that "if an enterprise is closed, they will be laid off as well."^[29] Tillon did his part to reinforce the message that all employees shared a common fate and a common mission in the aircraft industry. In his speeches he always addressed himself to "engineers, technicians, and workers," and in the two major congresses that his ministry sponsored on the future of French aviation he stressed the cross-class solidarity, the "fruitful and fraternal collaboration" of all personnel, that industrial revival required.^[30] Communist influence at the summit of the nationalized sector and in the blue-collar ranks on the shop floor made the militants that much more eager to penetrate the middle reaches of the occupational hierarchy.

Ministerial support also helped CGT militants use production and plant committees to expand the influence of the trade union in workers' lives. As early as October 1944 Tillon called for establishing production committees throughout the industry, patterned after the committees in Toulouse, to give workers a voice in improving production.^[31] Tillon's new directors in the nationalized sector welcomed the production committee as well as the plant committee.^[32] The latter gave personnel representatives (and in reality the CGT) control over social services in the factory. Plant committee services were financed by sizable company contributions, which in the nationalized companies were equivalent to 5 percent of the payroll, substantially more than the 1 or 2 percent that metal-working companies usually provided.^[33] As a result, by 1947 these committees had come to sponsor an impressive range of activities. They organized mutual aid, retirement plans, worker gardens, and emergency support for families in need. They administered medical services within factories and converted rural estates into sanatoriums, rest retreats, and vacation colonies. They supervised consumer cooperatives, day nurser-

ies, lending libraries, study circles, occupational and apprenticeship training, and a wide array of recreational programs—choral societies, art clubs, sports teams, and flying clubs. The Christmas trees and children's parties that had previously given employers a chance to appear benevolent in the autocratic factory now became part of the institutional life of the CGT. So too did factory cafeterias, a complex undertaking that demonstrated, as SNECMA militants were quick to point out, "that workers can run their social services themselves."^[34] Militants viewed the plant committee as a way to destroy the tradition of employer paternalism that prevailed before 1936 and was revived through the social committees of the Vichy era.^[35] The PCF and the CGT hoped to institutionalize a counterpaternalism that strengthened employees' loyalty to the union.

These advances—the high level of employment in the industry, informal influence over appointments, seats on company boards, control over hiring, the vitality of the plant committees, and the proliferation of social activities—all depended in some measure on political support from the Air and Labor ministries. To be sure, a number of these reforms had their basis in formal government statutes, thanks of course to a left-wing majority in parliament. But workers often had to rely on labor inspectors or ministry officials to ensure that employers actually granted the victories to which workers were entitled. For example, at the Société Morane-Saulnier, a private airframe firm, it took the persistent intervention of the Labor Ministry to get the company director to cooperate with his plant committee.^[36] Government pressure undoubtedly also played a role in making the 5 percent subsidy for the plant committee a standard practice in the industry. In short, ministerial support weighed heavily—and visibly—in the new balance of power in aviation that gave workers more of a say in their companies than ever before. Under these circumstances it was reasonable for CGT militants, as well as most rank-and-file workers in the industry, to assume that ministerial power and strong influence in parliament were indispensable to a strategy of left-wing reform.

The Limitations of Communist Reform

The Communist experiment in the aircraft industry had its limits—some self-imposed, others stemming from pressures outside the world of the aircraft factory and the Air Ministry. Despite Charles Tillon's revolutionary background, he pursued a pragmatic policy, particularly toward nationalization. In tinkering with the structure of the nationalized sector, he chose to maintain the national companies in their original form as semiautonomous firms rather than convert them into arsenals subject to

complete ministerial control. He also rejected the notion of merging the national companies into a single enterprise, preferring to keep some rivalry between them as a stimulus to creativity, efficiency, and company loyalty.^[37] He called, too, for "close collaboration" with private employers, warning the directors of nationalized firms that he expected them to stand up to the test of competing with the private sector.^[38] Although in 1944 he had criticized Blum's nationalizations of 1936 for keeping the leading private manufacturers at the helm of the national companies, Tillon did more to maintain the mixed public-private structure of the industry than to change it. Just as the PCF's strategy of united frontism in the post-Liberation period necessitated compromise in a wide range of national debates on public policy, so too it encouraged Tillon to build on, rather than supersede, the initial reforms of the Popular Front.

The effort to give workers a voice in their factories through plant and production committees had limitations as well. In aviation, as in other industries, the CGT and the PCF had little intention of using these committees to create a genuine regime of democratic decision making on the shop floor. On the contrary, Communist militants took care to keep the functions of the committees narrowly circumscribed so that the crucial issues of wages, hours, and working conditions would remain the primary concern of the trade union itself.^[39] The production committee served not as a foothold for workers' control but as a weapon in the "battle for production." The productivism of the CGT during the Popular Front appeared mild in comparison to the enthusiasm with which these committees embraced the virtues of industrial discipline—hard work, efficiency, technical ingenuity, and an identification with the industry and its products. Production committees offered prizes to workers with the best suggestions for cutting production time, lowering costs, or improving quality. At SNECMA the committee routinely endorsed piecework incentive schemes, time-study methods, streamlined assembly, "psychotechnique" (the use of industrial psychology in personnel management), and even output bonuses for waitresses in the factory cafeteria—methods that at least some Communist militants in the 1920s would have condemned as "capitalist rationalization."^[40] Although production committees gave personnel representatives a voice in their factories, the PCF and the CGT never promoted them as rivals to company managers. As Tillon's chief of staff, René Jugeau, explained it, committees were to supplement, not supplant, supervisory control, especially because workers were not in a position "to see all the contingencies of production."^[41] The production committees may have resonated with the esprit de l'aéronautique of skilled workers, but their limited authority and their productivism also reinforced the managerial hierarchy.

Plant committees likewise fell short of being a revolutionary innovation. By 1946 the CGT sought to draw clearer distinctions between the

production committee and the plant committee by restricting the latter to matters of social welfare, largely to the exclusion of economic matters and work organization. In fact, many CGT militants were ambivalent about the plant committee, fearing that employers or non-Communist militants would exploit the institution for their own purposes. Some militants saw a disquieting resemblance between the postwar plant committees and the social committees that the Vichy government had promoted to co-opt workers into social-welfare activites at the factory level.^[42] Other militants, such as Henri Jourdain, who was responsible in 1945 for coordinating CGT activities in aviation, viewed plant committees more positively. "With plant committees," Jourdain said, "worker democracy can develop." At the CGT Congress of 1946 he told those militants who dismissed the plant committee as a trap for class collaboration, "If you were to say this to Peugeot workers at Sochaux or to workers at Gnômeet-Rhône, remembering that their plant committees now run social services with a budget of thirty to forty million francs a year, they would certainly not follow you."^[43] But if the plant and production committees were clearly "double-edged swords," as Jourdain put it, that could both empower and co-opt workers, there was no denying that by 1946 these institutions no longer embodied the open-ended and quasi-revolutionary spirit of 1944. Although aircraft militants went further toward making something of these committees than did militants in most other industries, their efforts did little to alter the structure of authority in the enterprise.^[44]

On a more pragmatic level, the reconversion program that was designed to absorb excess capacity in the industry proved to be a disappointment. The promise of reconversion had been questionable from the beginning, even in the eyes of many workers whose jobs were at stake. Jourdain later recalled "an interminable meeting at the Mureaux factory" where he did his best "to convince workers that though one must fight to give France the aviation it so badly needs, we must diversify production in our factories."^[45] By 1946 workers had become ardent supporters of the idea of reconversion as a way to maintain the industry. But it was a difficult policy to put into effect. Aircraft factories, in fact, were not always well-equipped to manufacture consumer goods in rapid order at competitive prices. "Everyone knows," reported one sympathetic labor newspaper, "that the stew pans made by SNCAC cost 1500 francs, while the commercial price ought not to surpass 400 francs."^[46] Reconversion was quickly improvised and poorly organized. Although many projects did get under way and kept thousands of people employed, workers could easily see it was a precarious strategy for preserving the industry.

The greatest limitations to reform, however, came from forces beyond the control of the PCF and Tillon's Air Ministry, forces that began to impinge heavily on aircraft workers in 1946. First of all, the job stabil-

ity that Tillon's program had initially provided began to erode. Socialist and MRP leaders in parliament chose to cut military spending sharply, and much to Tillon's dismay, the PCF felt obliged to accept the policy. Once Germany had been defeated, most people in France supported a policy that put domestic reconstruction ahead of military modernization. In early 1946 the twenty billion francs Tillon had expected to have for the industry was cut to a devastating 12.4 billion. Although he declared he would not become the "minister of disarmament," he could no longer shield the industry from peacetime budgetary priorities.^[47] In April SNCASE cut its work force in the Paris region by eight hundred employees. In May Tillon tried to reassure an audience of twenty thousand employees assembled at the Vélodrome d'Hiver: "Well! Despite this reduction . . . I am today in a position to tell you that the layoffs will be limited to a few hundred and that among these several hundred not all will be permanent."^[48] Yet despite Tillon's promises, it was obvious that the specter of cutbacks, which had haunted the industry in the 1920s and early 1930s, had returned.

The government's wage policy also became a burden for workers by 1946. Inflation persisted, and to make matters worse, aircraft workers were forced to accept the wage rates decreed for metalworking as a whole rather than a separate, more favorable wage schedule like the one they had won in 1938. To an extent Tillon and the CGT may have been able to compensate for this setback by overclassifying some employees to help them maintain their wages. But overall, wage schedules slipped out of the front ranks of industry. In contrast to the late 1930s, when skilled aircraft workers were the best paid employees in metalworking, after the Liberation they fell behind their counterparts in the automobile industry in the wages they could command.^[49] This decline in relative wage position reflected in part the simple realities of demobilization—aircraft workers were no longer in great demand—and in part the inability of aircraft manufacturers, closely watched by the ministries, to pay the black-market rates that often prevailed elsewhere. Given the threat of layoffs in aviation and the postponement of collective bargaining that workers everywhere had to tolerate in the first years after the war, it was difficult for them to fight for wage hikes. Frustration of course took its toll. One Air Ministry official wrote in 1947, "The personnel is becoming skeptical; specialists and engineers of all classes are leaving the companies; the apprenticeship training programs are no longer finding the necessary recruits."^[50] Tensions also damaged the CGT: militants found themselves caught between the support of the PCF for wage constraints and the impatience of the rank and file with the policy. At Colombes layoffs and changes in the piece rate system created so much animosity that Tillon himself had to scurry out to the plant and negotiate with

workers. In Toulouse tensions took the form of friction between aircraft militants at SNCASE, struggling to hold on to an increasingly demoralized constituency, and other metalworking militants in the union local who adhered more faithfully to the guidance of the FTM. By early 1947 the same frustrations over wage policy that were undermining the CGT in many industries were troubling aircraft locals as well.^[51]

What must have made job insecurity and wage constraint seem particularly unjust was that workers in aviation had by and large worked hard to revive the industry. Airframe production climbed steadily in 1945 from 80 tons in January to 210 tons the following October.^[52] The SNCAN established an impressive record of steady deliveries, producing more than nine hundred aircraft by the spring of 1947.^[53] The secret to this success was overtime. Tillon prevailed on workers to work well beyond forty hours a week, and for the most part workers complied. One company director reported that "the company personnel are currently making a magnificent effort to increase production; at certain posts the workweek has even reached sixty hours."^[54] At the SNCASO plant in Courbevoie, which according to one CFTC journalist was characterized by "a spirit of camaraderie and enthusiasm for work," workers put off their August vacations in 1945 to complete a long-awaited breakthrough for the company—its first order of a new airplane, the SO 30 R.^[55] Of course, labor productivity varied from shop to shop and from month to month. In some factories productivity lagged for lack of supplies, machinery, electricity, or proper organization. Overstaffing, overclassifying employees, and absenteeism were problems as well.^[56] Moreover, it is hard to say what workers really thought of the "battle for production." The productivist campaign of the PCF put CGT militants in the awkward position of enforcing work discipline, which according to one militant's later account triggered controversy in the party cells around SNECMA.^[57] Tillon clearly understood the danger. He went out of his way to say that in promoting production he had no plans to impose the hated Rowan wage incentive scheme or "other time-saving systems."^[58] Still, there is little evidence that many workers rebelled openly against PCF productivism, nor is there any sign that the left-wing socialists and revolutionary syndicalists who mocked it as "an attempt to transplant Stakhanovism into France" won much of a following. In SNCASE and SNCASO alone the CGT's call for suggestions about production generated more than 250 responses by mid-1947. At SNCASE managers calculated that committee suggestions reduced production time by nearly eighteen thousand hours. As two former workers at an aircraft factory in Châtillon recalled, "Ah yes! The eagerness for working! The guys were quite swollen with pride" (M. Badie); "Everyone believed in it [work] in those days. There was a different ambiance than now. We really believed in it" (M.

Dugon).^[59] Despite the frustration over wages, it is safe to assume that most workers viewed Tillon's efforts to spur production and minimize layoffs as in their interest. The aircraft industry, which depended heavily on skilled workers who identified with their work and feared layoffs, did not have the same degree of resistance to work discipline as semiskilled workers mounted in the automobile industry in 1946 and 1947.^[60] Nor were workers in aviation subjected to as much rationalization of the labor process.

But if most workers responded positively to the challenge of reviving production, they were not in a position to solve the underlying problems plaguing the aircraft industry. Production rates rose, but by 1947 the industry was still building obsolete airplanes. prototypes proliferated, but most of the new models failed. The technological deficiencies that had stymied aircraft builders since 1940 still remained. Only a long-term program of research and production offered a way out of the malaise; only a long-term program, with or without reconversion, could give workers the job stability they deserved.

Tillon's Air Ministry could not surmount the political barriers to creating such a program, for behind the immediate crisis of budgetary austerity loomed several political problems that Tillon, his staff, and the CGT were powerless to overcome. The first was the difficulty of winning popular support for a defense budget now that the immediate threat of foreign invasion had been removed. Second, the international environment remained forbidding because British and American aircraft producers were eager to press their advantage as the leaders in civilian and military aviation. Air France and the French air force could not help but covet the equipment the Americans in particular could offer. As much as everyone liked the idea of industrial independence for France, many officials in the air force, parliament, and the private sector believed it would be wiser to rely on foreign producers, reduce the size of the industry, and restrict the latter to a few important niches in aviation in which French firms could eventually compete. The temptation to buy American would have been greater than it was had the French government not been short of dollars and saddled with debt, problems offset to some extent by the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of May 1946, which forgave France its war debt to the United States and provided loans in exchange for an open door for American goods.^[61] Although Tillon did what he could to keep to a minimum French reliance on British and American airplanes, even he could not eliminate it altogether. If these purchases remained modest up to 1947, the continuing dominance of British and American competitors in aviation made it politically difficult to plot—and finance—an ambitious long-term strategy for industrial recovery.

Another obstacle to planning for the aircraft industry was all too familiar to industry employees and the permanent staff of the Air Minis-

try—tension between the Air and Finance ministries. Just as in 1937, when Pierre Cot had run up against the intransigence of the more conservative Georges Bonnet at the rue de Rivoli, so in 1945 and 1946 Tillon encountered the resistance of René Pleven. A businessman who had joined de Gaulle's entourage in London early in the war, Pleven was an economic liberal disinclined to applaud the statist interventionism of Communist and Socialist ministers in the first years of the Fourth Republic. As finance minister, he had great influence over how money was raised and spent in the industry, and his man on the board of the national companies, M. Richard, kept a close watch on company decisions, occasionally voicing dissent. As early as June 1945 the directors of the national companies complained of interference from Finance Ministry officials. By 1946 Tillon had put aside the decorum of tripartite politics to lash out publicly against Pleven's policies—his willingness to starve firms of the capital they needed for reconversion and his reluctance to pay workers in the nationalized sector what their counterparts in private firms earned.^[62] Though Pleven had not prevented Tillon from carrying out his initial program in 1945, his stature in the government grew steadily thereafter, making it impossible for the Air Ministry to dodge the blow of budgetary austerity once it came.

A fourth obstacle to effective planning for the industry had a Popular Front precedent as well—the fragility of the political coalition in power. The inherent instability of tripartite politics—the difficulty of holding together Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats once the aura of Liberation unity disappeared—had from the beginning made Tillon's vision for the industry a precarious hostage to political fortune. Policy differences and the gradual emergence of tensions between East and West had corrosive effects. By late 1946 conflicts within the government over wage and price controls, colonial policy, and Soviet-American antagonisms had widened the rift between Communists and their Socialist and Christian Democratic partners. When Léon Blum formed a new cabinet in December 1946, Tillon lost control of the Armament Ministry. One month later, Paul Ramadier, a Socialist, established yet another government, naming Tillon as minister of reconstruction but turning to a Radical, André Maroselli, to take over the Air Ministry. Though the tripartite coalition would remain in power until May, this shift in cabinet posts would soon prove fateful for the aircraft industry. It would not take long for employees to discover that Tillon's removal marked the beginning of a shift in national policy toward aviation even more fundamental than La Chambre's replacement of Cot had proved to be nearly ten years before.

Tillon's tenure at the Air and Armament ministries did resemble Cot's in several ways. Like Cot, Tillon had taken advantage of labor militance and a resurgence of left-wing parliamentary power to nationalize impor-

tant firms and expand the power of the government in the industry. And like Cot, Tillon tried to buttress his position in government by opening the doors of his ministry to CGT militants; he cultivated political support within the work force, thereby enhancing the position of the CGT. Both men used the instrument of nationalization to restructure firms and strengthen the power of the Air Ministry, and they both watched the momentum of reform bog down at the Finance Ministry. Dismissal came to both ministers months after they had reached an impasse on the path of reform.

Beyond these similarities, however, circumstances differed in 1947 to make the political consequences of Tillon's dismissal potentially much greater than they had been when Cot lost his post in 1938. Cot left the boulevard Victor at a time when everyone agreed that the industry should expand; Tillon left amid deep disagreements over whether to diminish the industry and how far to move into the American orbit. For the PCF as well as for employees generally, the stakes in keeping the industry large were particularly high. At the same time the balance of power between labor, employers, and state officials had changed dramatically in the course of a decade. The CGT, for all its troubles in 1946, had more clout than before, especially its Communist faction. Plant and production committees, high rates of union membership, overwhelming PCF influence in the FTM, Tillon's left-leaning management team in the nationalized sector, and the PCF's sizable delegation of deputies in parliament all contributed to CGT political strength in aircraft manufacturing. By the same token, private employers were much weaker as a political force than they had been in 1938. The creation of SNECMA had nationalized the most important independent base of operations for private capital in the late 1930s, Gnôme-et-Rhône and Renault. To be sure, a few powerful private builders were still around. Louis Bréguet and Marcel Bloch (who after returning from Buchenwald in 1945 changed his last name to Dassault) quietly picked up the pieces of their wartime and prewar operations respectively. Félix Amiot fought a lengthy battle to keep his company from falling permanently into government hands. But none of these men was in a position to rally colleagues behind a counteroffensive against reform as Paul-Louis Weiller had done in 1938. The Union Syndicale, as a business association bringing together employers in both the public and private sectors of the industry, had even less autonomy from the state in 1947 than in 1939 and less power to shape employer strategy. In short, labor had strengthened and private employers weakened as organized groups in the industry.

The political balance had shifted in another way: Tillon's reassertion of ministerial authority in the industry, his nationalizations, and appointments in the nationalized sector had tied aircraft manufacturing even

more tightly to national politics than it had already been in 1938. State officials, be they ministers, parliamentarians, or staff men in the ministries, held most of the cards in the aircraft deck after the Liberation—a situation that accrued to the benefit of the Communists in the short run but exposed them to setbacks as party fortunes faded later on. What the PCF had won through the ministries in 1944 could be lost by the same means when leaders with other loyalities and convictions came to power. These risks were obvious, as any militant who had experienced the reversals of 1938 knew all too well. But few militants, least of all Communist militants, saw much reason in 1944 and 1945 to question the dual strategy of mobilizing workers on the shop floor and winning influence in the ministries that had brought real dividends in 1936 and again after the Liberation. Tillon's position in the government had been crucial in making the aircraft industry an important arena for labor reform, even if his power proved insufficient to provide the budgetary support and longterm planning the industry needed.

By trying to stave off the peacetime contraction of the aircraft industry, Tillon overplayed his hand. In late 1946 the national companies were languishing without proper operating funds and long-term orders. Had Tillon remained in charge of industry policy beyond 1946, the fundamental shortcoming of his strategy—maintaining the fiction of a nationalist, productivist policy for the industry without the money or the plans to pursue it—might have severely undercut his standing with workers and hence the prestige of the CGT. By losing his post, however, Tillon spared the PCF the embarrassment of presiding over further austerity. As it turned out, his departure set the stage for a brutal series of battles in parliament and in the streets over how to reshape the industry.