Socialists, Small Vineyard Owners, and the Agrarian Question

Not only did socialists in the Aude increasingly divest themselves of rhetorical references to revolution, but they focused their attention mainly on urban and rural artisans and small vineyard

owners, not the impoverished vineyard working class. In the Narbonnais, socialists energetically supported the interests of small vignerons devastated by the ravages of the phylloxera and the general depression of the 1880s and 1890s; one looks in vain in the pages of La République sociale or in socialist campaign speeches for references to the plight of agricultural workers, who suffered most from the phylloxera crisis. In the campaign for the 1893 elections Ferroul took the POF program to the countryside, promising nationalization of the Canal du Midi, railroads, and mines and establishment of agricultural credit, but he said virtually nothing about agricultural workers, whose situation had scarcely improved despite the modest recovery of the wine market in 1893.^[24] For the small vineyard owners who supported Ferroul, however, socialism meant opposition to the anarchy of the free market and a demand for state regulation, not a mise en question of the capitalist system. This was the real meaning of the social republic in the Aude, and it differed little from the message of southern left radicalism.

Why did socialists, who claimed to represent the working class, support small vintners' demands for tax and tariff reform but fail to address the concerns of vineyard workers? It is unlikely that socialists were unaware of the plight of rural workers or blind to rural poverty. Ferroul's strategy of support for small vineyard owners may have been designed to assure him financial backing (from departmental officials); it was also undoubtedly related to the fact that many rural artisans and vineyard workers were also small property owners. In short, socialists may not have seen landless rural workers as a separate constituency at this stage.

In fact, the socialists were probably well aware of the complexities of class identity in the Aude. The vineyard working class was exceptionally heterogeneous at the end of the nineteenth century. Vinedressers and small proprietors shared similar conditions, and both faced proletarianization, if not destitution. Impoverished worker-owners and artisans sympathized with their nonlandowning confreres; these groups mingled and mixed in the local political clubs that flourished in the 1880s and 1890s, and formed a common political culture.

The socialists' decision to tone down their revolutionary rhet-

oric and back small winegrowers, then, was consistent with the general POF strategy of appealing to peasant farmers. France was still very much a nation of small-holding peasants. They had to be brought into the socialist fold.

At their 1880 congress in Le Havre, the Guesdists had adopted a radical agrarian program calling for the immediate collectivization of land, mines, and farm equipment. At their 1892 congress in Marseille, however, they cast aside their revolutionary rhetoric in favor of a more moderate platform calling for a minimum wage for agricultural workers; the creation of agricultural arbitration councils; the distribution of land to propertyless families; the establishment of a retirement fund from a tax on large estates; a reduction of sharecroppers' and tenants' rents; payment to sharecroppers and tenants of an indemnity from the surplus value they created on the property they farmed; the purchase of land and agricultural machinery by municipalities, which would then rent them to small farmers; the establishment of consumers' cooperatives; the suppression of sales tax on properties worth less than 5,000 francs; and the revision of land survey records (cadastre ).^[25] Nowhere did they mention class struggle in the countryside or the collectivization of peasant property.^[26]

The relative lack of attention to the needs of landless laborers by a party that claimed to represent the working class was note-worthy. And in 1894 Guesde and Lafargue went still further, calling peasant property the "tool of the peasant, as the plane is of the cabinetmaker and the scalpel is of the surgeon. The peasant, the cabinetmaker, and the surgeon, who exploit no one with the tools of their trade, do not have to fear that they will be taken away by a socialist revolution."^[27] In fact, some socialists believed that impoverished small property owners could be likened to workers. In the ensuing debate on this issue, for instance, Jean Jaurès (who helped draft the considérants to the 1894 revised program) drew an analogy between the small peasant proprietor and the worker: "Between large holdings and small, there is not only a quantitative difference, but . . . a qualitative one; the former is an expression of capital, the latter of labor."^[28]

Ferroul and his supporters, however, did not translate these national debates and prises de position into a clear or consistent

strategy. Their rhetorical attacks on private property and agricultural capitalism in La République sociale were not matched by concrete efforts to recruit agricultural workers.^[29] Still worse, in some areas of France Guesdists failed to back rural workers' struggles, such as those of the lumbermen of the Allier, Nièvre, and the Cher who tried to form unions in the early 1890s—a serious omission for a major socialist political party claiming to represent the working class. Nonetheless, small vineyard owners and artisans continued to support socialists in the winegrowing Aude, even after Ferroul temporarily lost the municipality of Narbonne in 1897.^[30]