PART 2
CLASS RELATIONS

5
Elite Response to Social Problems

Changes in the working-class family structure in Saint Chamond reflect some of the fundamental transformations that capitalism and industrialization brought to workers' lives. Proto-industrial artisanal work in the first half of the nineteenth century accommodated family life but nonetheless subjected it to commercial cycles and the growing power of merchants. Among some workers, particularly those in the ribbon industry, family planning became a strategy to control unpredictable material and trade conditions. Full-scale industrialization, by removing work from the home and from the rhythms of family life, forced more workers to limit reproduction. They delayed marriage and childbearing or they slowed the pace of births by avoiding conception or resorting to abortion. In many cases smaller families resulted from ill health and high deathrates.

Couples who produced more than two children often stretched the family economy beyond its capacity, particularly since industrialization changed the system of family wages. In Saint Chamond, the decline of domestic industry, the monopolization of textile production by factory labor, and restrictions on female and child employment from the 1870s on limited wage-earning opportunities. The adult male wage could not yet support a family, especially a large one. Throughout the century, most workers in domestic and factory industries faced frequent unemployment or underemployment. Low standards of living, combined with sometimes dangerous work and industrial and urban pollution, resulted in untimely deaths, injury, and illness.

The challenges workers faced in their family lives not only reflected their material conditions but also helped to define class relations. The plight of the working-class family became a focal point for interaction with the elite. Employers and municipal officials could hardly ignore working-class hardships. Abandoned, ill, and dying infants and children became a source of public concern and

shaped elite attitudes toward workers. Humanitarian, and particularly Christian, sentiments as well as a pragmatic desire to preserve the labor force produced a strong charitable impulse among the employers and notables of Saint Chamond. Attention to children as the most helpless victims naturally extended to women as reproducers, to men as the fathers of families, and, by the second half of the nineteenth century, to single men as future heads of families. Class relations cannot be understood without an examination of elite attitudes, which will be a primary focus of this chapter.

In their stance toward the working class, employers in Saint Chamond were certainly not unique in France, but they were unusual, particularly for the Stéphanois industrial basin after 1850. A profound commitment to Catholicism and to Legitimism—loyalty to the deposed Bourbon monarchy—distinguished them. Even the new industrialists who embraced economic liberalism espoused Old Regime values or at most a very conservative and Catholic republicanism after 1870. These traditional values lay behind extensive material assistance the local elite provided to workers.

Industrialization in the second half of the century brought new challenges to social peace in Saint Chamond, and elite responses to these challenges engaged workers and employers in a complex set of relationships. Not only did the working-class family experience new forms of stress and indeed become structurally weakened, but republicanism and socialism offered workers a new vision of themselves in relation to their employers. The latter answered this challenge by continuing to offer extensive material assistance, but also by combining that assistance with a systematic effort to educate and moralize workers according to their own vision. While traditional values continued to inspire employers' behavior, industrialization forced them to accommodate their strategies to the new organization of work, the challenge of anticlerical, republican government, and their own commitment to economic liberalism. Material assistance became a means to discipline as well as to preserve the labor force, and Social Catholicism became a means to moralize it.

The collective mentality of Saint Chamond's merchant manufacturers and industrial entrepreneurs had historical roots, for the city's most important families had shaped the local economy

and politics over a number of generations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Saint Chamond elite—about 10 percent of the population—was composed primarily of wealthy forging and silk-merchandising families and petty nobles, whose prominence continued through the nineteenth century. They included names such as Dugas, Praire, Thiollière, Neyrand, Chaland, Grangier, and Flachat.

Their attachment to Old Regime values can in part be explained by their experience with the Revolution of 1789. Prior to the Revolution, this town enjoyed status as the capital of French ribbon production. The ennoblement of the Dugas brothers and other ribbon manufacturers for their innovations brought local renown and strengthened the commercial elite's loyalty to the Bourbon monarchy. In addition to abolishing noble privileges, the Revolution brought an end to Saint Chamond's proud commercial status. The price of raw materials became exorbitant and the "revolutionary excesses" of the Terror brought a virtual halt to commerce. Throughout the period of revolution, merchants in Saint Chamond met with economic disaster from numerous sources: the depreciation of assignats , the revolutionary paper money based upon the wealth of the church; the siege of nearby Lyon; the loss of taste for luxury items; and, most important, the wars that paralyzed commerce and cut off markets. During the period of stagnation, foreign ribbon production progressed rapidly, and Berlin in particular became a dangerous rival.^[1] Though competition from Saint Etienne caused the ultimate decline of the Saint Chamond ribbon trade, manufacturers could more easily blame their plight on the Revolution.

The Revolution also caused local political turmoil and destroyed part of Saint chamond's cherished religious heritage. Silk millers and ribbon merchants identified with the counterrevolutionary federalist cause, pitting them against most of the local workers, who sympathized with Jacobinism.^[2] Vandals came from the nearby mountains of the Haute-Loire and destroyed the château, the tombs of its seigneurial lords, and the old church of the original parish, Saint Ennemond. This parish would remain without a priest for nearly sixty years. Most of the Saint Chamond clergy refused to take the oath to the constitution and fled, while anticlerical revolutionaries drove out three of the town's religious orders.

The Revolution attacked and nearly destroyed a heritage dear to Saint Chamond's very identity.^[3]

The prolonged commercial crisis, the struggle between the merchants and Jacobin workers, and the banishment of the religious orders left their mark on the merchant manufacturers and petty nobles of Saint Chamond: they emerged from the period of war and revolution with a distinct commitment to restoring the old order and everything for which it had stood. Most important, their vision of social peace rested upon a permanent association among divine monarchy, the church, and commercial prosperity. They saluted the restored monarchy as a "deliverance" and expressed joy that "France returns to this dynasty under which she saw eight centuries of prosperity flow for her." Part of the municipality's registered proclamation declared, "Inhabitants of Saint Chamond, your industry will once again find the means to become developed, workshops will reopen for you; peace … will renew social [and commercial] relations; young and old, rich and poor, reunite in sentiments of gladness and hope, of love for your legitimate sovereign."^[4] Many other municipal governments in the Loire proclaimed their support for the restored monarch in April 1814, but the vast majority that did so were those of small, rural communes. Already Saint Chamond distinguished itself from the two industrial cities on either side, Rive-de-Gier and Saint Etienne, whose acceptance of the restored monarchy manifested less enthusiasm than quiet cooperation.^[5]

The association among authoritarian government, religion, and economic prosperity articulated in 1814 would be echoed in Saint Chamond throughout the rest of the century. The memories of 1789 and each subsequent upheaval that threatened to repeat its events renewed the elite's attachment to the past, particularly to divine monarchy and the power of the church. The wealthy merchant class continued to associate anticlericalism and revolution with commercial stagnation. Their legitimism and devotion to Catholicism were also an inherent part of a larger worldview that included a belief in a rigidly hierarchical society and a profound sense of noblesse oblige, attitudes which informed their stance toward workers and the laboring poor.

The laboring poor, however, were less easily reconciled to the restored monarchy, and class relations throughout the region became

tense after Napoleon's defeat. Long-term unemployment fostered deep discontent among workers. The prefect noted that troubles brewing in Lyon passed along the route through Givors into the Stéphanois valley, to Rive-de-Gier, Saint Chamond, and Saint Etienne, contaminating each city along the way.^[6] But Saint Chamond remained remarkably peaceful. Indeed, more than one observer attributed the relative social peace that prevailed in Saint Chamond during the Restoration and the July Monarchy to the particular nature of the local elite. In the crisis year of 1818, for example, J. Duplessy suggested that a spirit of altruism in Saint Chamond inspired the reconciliation, noting that inhabitants distinguished themselves by "a harmony, ordinarily very rare among persons for whom the practice of the same profession too often gives birth to distressing rivalries. [In Saint Chamond], as soon as it is a matter of doing good works, everyone is in agreement. The collège rebuilt, the almshouse enlarged, the churches repaired, decorated, and richly maintained attest to the qualities which distinguish [the Saint Chamonais]."^[7] A few years after the 1834 riot in Lyon which spread to the Stéphanois valley, a military observer compared the upper classes in Saint Chamond and Saint Etienne. He complimented the former as "truly aristocratic" while calling Saint Etienne's elite "bourgeois" because it "only cared about money."^[8]

The merchant and noble classes of Saint Chamond were not unique in their ultra politics, their attachment to Catholicism, or their charitable spirit toward workers.^[9] But the persistence of ultramontane sentiments suggests that this elite remained organized and exerted considerable influence for an especially long period of time. And while municipalities elsewhere certainly distributed material assistance, Saint Chamond retained a reputation for being particularly charitable.

The nature of the ribbon industry itself had long made material assistance a necessary element of the local economy. In addition to its dependency upon capricious fashions, nature itself—the health of silkworms and mulberry trees—often determined its fate. While the Revolution diminished commercial fortunes and produced political rifts between merchants and workers, charity continued and helped to ease tensions. The capacity of the hospice to distribute material aid became urgent in the early years of the new century.

In 1803, ribbon production only employed one-tenth of the workers it had in 1790, and daily wages had fallen by one-third. By 1806, according to the prefect of the Loire, mendicity had made "humiliating progress" as "day laborers, charcoal burners, nail makers and ribbon weavers" could no longer make ends meet; their wages continued to fall, and as they aged they lost the ability to work. The prefect duly noted the importance of charity, for male workers often died young, leaving widows and children.^[10] In 1807, a disastrous winter devastated the silkworm's staple diet, mulberry leaves. The resulting dearth of silk reduced the work force in ribbon production by 75 percent.^[11]

After substantial cutbacks due to revolutionary upheaval, private donations beginning in 1804 permitted Saint Chamond to expand the services of its hospice. Relief went first to orphans and the children of indigents, who received food and shelter. With the crisis of 1807, the hospice began distributing bread to the unemployed in the amount of 2,000 francs' worth per year, and their offer of shelter extended from children to the old and incurable. In 1810, war and further tariffs on ribbons reduced exports another 75 percent; by 1811, ribbon weavers in Saint Chamond worked an average of only one week per month. Of the inhabitants throughout the arrondissement, 24,000 had to rely on assistance.^[12]

The economic situation during the Restoration called on charitable institutions to do far more than provide assistance to the unemployed. A sharp increase in the number of abandoned children (enfants trouvés ) offers sad testimony to the inability of the economy to absorb overall population growth, even as many couples began to have fewer children. Those who could no longer care for their children began to abandon them at an alarming rate. Though providing no statistics, the General Council of the Loire reported a constant rise in the number of abandoned children between 1819 and 1821, and the number of children brought to hospice charities grew enormously in the 1830s and 1840s.^[13]

Although it was certainly not the only charitable institution, the hospice best symbolized and most abundantly documented the meaning of charity in Saint Chamond. This institution first became established sometime prior to 1561.^[14] Within its walls, various religious orders cared for the sick, the old, and the incurable, and raised abandoned, orphaned, or indigent children. Three major

sources of funding provided it with comfortable profits: extensive landholdings which were rented and farmed, the investment of profits from those lands in bonds, and private donations. The customs tax (droit d'octroi ) contributed a lesser amount.^[15]

Local notables staffed the administrative commission of five which decided all budgetary questions as well as policy matters relating to admissions, releases, rules within the hospice, and the distribution of outside aid. The commission met weekly or fortnightly to decide which individuals would be admitted or would receive outside aid, as well as to formulate social policies for the entire community.^[16] The provision of aid by local notables and wealthy bourgeois defined the nature of their relations with workers almost as much as wages did. For example, forgemaster and nail merchant Antoine Neyrand and ribbon fabricants F. Grangier and J.-M. Estienne were among those who sat in the offices of the hospice and deliberated the fates of those who needed aid. They also were the employers or former employers of many of these poor. Their alternate roles of benefactor and patron personalized the administration of charity during times of need.^[17]

No explicit effort to moralize the laboring poor and unemployed accompanied the charity they received. The hospice administrative commission overtly concerned itself with molding good workers, but members directed their attentions primarily toward children, both inside and outside the hospice. They gave orphaned or abandoned children a "useful and moral" upbringing. The commission's goal, as stated in 1806, was to "accustom children to a regulated and sober life, such as it must be for workers, but with enough abundance to give them a trade so that they can subsist and be useful to society."^[18]

Boys were taught to make nails, in the hope that as adults they would return to the countryside and combine forging with farming. The hospice taught girls to reel silk, to sew, and to run a household, so they could work as domestics in the city or the countryside. Girls were provided with clothing when they left the hospice, and the Dames de Charité, wives of the elite, continued to supervise them after their departure. The nails and silk that children produced in the hospice brought to it a profit of 474 francs in 1804, which grew steadily to 6,566 francs in 1838.^[19]

The hospice made every effort to reach children beyond its doors

as well. In 1806 they established a primary school for girls and boys from poor families, directed respectively by the Sisters of Saint Charles and the Brothers of the Christian Schools. These two religious orders enjoyed a great resurgence during the Restoration and received considerable support from notables who financed their educational and charitable activities. Instruction focused on instilling religion and work habits from a young age. In their successful religious instruction, Saint Chamond's school became a model for the rest of the Loire department.^[20]

While religious instruction for children and material assistance for the poor expanded in Saint Chamond during the Restoration, the July Revolution of 1830 that overthrew Charles X inspired elite goals of moralizing and preserving the labor force with new impetus. The revolution not only challenged divine monarchy but broke the alliance between throne and altar that had profited religious orders during the Restoration. This illegitimate regime gave the Catholics of Saint Chamond, as it did those throughout France, cause to redouble their attachment to the altar. In response to the relaxation of press censorship that in turn gave rise to an anticlerical campaign, a substantial number of Saint-Chamonais formed a Carlist party in opposition to the new Orleanist regime of Louis Philippe.^[21] They also drew more religious orders to the town and gave them solid financial backing. Private donations helped to establish the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in 1834, which joined the Sisters of Saint Joseph, the Sisters of Saint Charles, the Ursulines, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and the Marists in administering charity.^[22]

Religious instruction became the most important target of reform for the government and, consequently, of resistance among its conservative opposition. The Guizot Law of 1833 on education required the establishment of an elementary school in every commune. It was also intended to raise teaching standards. By providing more incentives for lay teachers, the government hoped to reduce the influence and power of the clergy. But in areas strongly Catholic and Legitimist, the Guizot Law resulted in a mobilization of old and new wealth behind the religious orders that offered instruction.^[23]

In Saint Chamond, the Brothers of the Christian Schools "multiplied themselves" during the 1830s; by 1839 they had established

two new schools and taught 210 students in the parish of Notre Dame and 130 in Saint Pierre. In the entire canton of Saint Chamond this teaching congregation reached no fewer than 600 children.^[24] During the July Monarchy, instruction extended beyond children to adults. Forge masters Antoine Neyrand and Antoine Thiollière established an adult school in 1846. The Brothers of the Christian Schools became known not just for their superior teaching skills but for their attempts to instill virtue in parents by insisting that they have marriage contracts.^[25]

While elite solicitude toward workers served as a defense against the anticlerical July Monarchy, it also reflected a broader awareness of the potential of working-class discontent—another hallmark of the 1830 revolution. Up to this point Saint Chamond had had little direct experience with worker protest, but the elite had good reason for concern. Even in the best of times, ribbon weaving was a precarious trade, and now, increasingly, fabricants and commis de barre cheated the weaver of his just wage.^[26] By the beginning of the July Monarchy, ribbon weavers were experiencing deep frustration and anger. In 1833, weavers in Lyon and Saint Etienne began to demand fixed prices for patterned fabrics and ribbons. Fabricants refused; workers held meetings that "threatened to trouble public order," and authorities intervened. The prefect had been right in 1814: trouble did spread from Lyon westward, and the railroad built in 1827 hastened its progress by facilitating travel and communication. Ribbon weavers in Saint Etienne and Saint Chamond rioted in March 1834, and the national guard had to be called in. In the following month, protest became full-scale insurrection in Lyon and Saint Etienne, with workers calling for a republic. This time, however, the trouble bypassed Saint Chamond.^[27]

The discontent among workers in Lyon and the Stéphanois region reflected a growing consciousness among French workers of their rights, sparked by the revolution of 1830. To the bourgeois elite who profited from this revolution, "liberty" meant freedom of expression and freedom to pursue economic gain. For many among the popular masses, this slogan, coupled with the economic hardship they had suffered, came to mean the "right to work."^[28] At the same time, the "dangerous classes" and their social problems became more visible. The government of the bourgeois monarchy, as Armand Audiganne pointed out, began "to preoccupy

itself with an anxious concern over the fate of workers, whether by seeking to create new sources of work, by multiplying schools, by developing the institution of savings accounts, kindergartens, etc."^[29]

This new attention directed toward the laboring classes reflected the influence of liberal economists. Officials attempted to shift emphasis from direct material assistance to self-help. In the 1830s, for example, Jean-Baptiste Say insisted that the unemployed and destitute had no right to charity. Only the "deserving poor"—abandoned and orphaned children, the aged, and the infirm—could rightfully receive assistance. Liberal economists viewed even the right to work, a demand that became increasingly important during the July Monarchy, as a violation of liberty. Only economic expansion, not the government, could supply more work opportunities. The health of any economy, this logic argued, depended upon individualism and self-reliance.^[30]

The establishment of savings institutions thus became a key means to try to foster individual responsibility, independence, and self-sufficiency among workers. The "doctrine of savings" would strengthen the family and make it autonomous. Individual savings would make workers independent of state assistance and, just as important, independent of their own associations. Jacques Donzelot has suggested that those who wanted to instill these habits in the poor deliberately intended to undermine workers' associations. Government officials and liberal economists hoped the habit of saving would "reduce the organic, festive, transfamilial forms of solidarity so as to eliminate the risk of dependence as well as the parallel risk of insurrection."^[31]

The thinking of liberal economists became incorporated into official government policy, but with few positive results. Efforts to address the growing problem of abandoned children and to rationalize charity in the department of the Loire failed during these years. The cyclical crises in the industrializing economy of the Stéphanois region made barring the able-bodied from charity senseless. In 1840, the subprefect of the arrondissement of Saint Etienne lamented to the General Council, "It is indispensable to shelter the proletariat from need in a region where commercial crises occur several times a year."^[32] In Saint Chamond, the spirit of noblesse oblige persisted even as the elite assumed more of an entrepreneurial

character with the development of large-scale metallurgy and mechanized braid-making. Private assistance frequently accompanied that which the hospice and religious orders already provided.^[33]

Local response to the commercial crisis of 1837 provides the best and most thoroughly documented example of attitudes in Saint Chamond toward the laboring poor. The crisis hit ribbon weavers hardest, but workers in other trades eventually suffered as well. Though their use of the term is not recorded, the municipality of Saint Chamond revealed a commitment to the "right to work." It provided subventions to employ 1,000 people—a substantial portion of the city's adult male population—in public works such as road building and street sweeping. Firms tried to continue to employ workers even when they received no orders. Dames de la Ville opened charity workshops and shelters to aid poor families and single women.^[34] A second salle d'asile was created whose double purpose was charity and education.^[35]

The existence of direct charity did not, however, preclude self-help institutions. The hospice administrative commission in 1839 established savings accounts for children living there to "encourage the love of work" and good habits. Every six months they put one-tenth of each child's earnings into an account which the child received upon leaving the hospice. As the century progressed, education began to play a greater role in moralizing children than did work. At the same time, the commission began to give exiting orphans larger sums of money, often the gifts of benefactors.^[36] Adults saved as well. The district council of the arrondissement (conseil d'arrondissement ) established savings institutions in 1837 in Rive-de-Gier, Saint Etienne, and Saint Chamond. By the end of 1839, the bank in Saint Chamond had 148 accounts amounting to a total of 69,350 francs—"remarkable results at the end of three years of existence in a town of 9,000 souls." The number of accounts, of which ribbon weavers held about one-third, multiplied to 780 by 1846.^[37]

Despite these partially successful efforts to inspire self-help, most workers could not save. Economic downturns regularly obliterated the accounts of those who did. The crises of 1807, 1810, 1816, and 1837 hit most ribbon weavers and forced many of them to rely on material assistance. Nail makers and their families suffered chronic poverty; most could not weather a family or economic

crisis alone. Thousands of workers received aid over two generations. In 1844, out of 3,600 inhabitants in one of Saint Chamond's parishes 2,200—more than 60 percent—received material assistance of some kind.^[38]

The economic and political upheavals of 1848 resulted in further community aid. The administrative commission of the hospice decided on 2 May to ask all property owners to make contributions in proportion to their wealth in order to "subsidize the needs of the moment." Victor Dugas urged that the hospice commission allocate 3,000 francs to help the unemployed. The commission would pay them to farm uncultivated domains owned by the hospice. Because the property lay some distance from Saint Chamond, the hospice would provide two servings of soup per day to each worker, in addition to a daily wage. Within a month the project was fully implemented, and on 10 June the commission decided to allocate an additional 5,000 francs to extend it. Such efforts to provide aid during times of crisis certainly did not conform to Louis Blanc's vision of "social workshops," but neither did they fall victim, as did national workshops in Paris, to political conflicts.^[39]

Municipalities and the wealthy merchant classes in Lyon, Rivede-Gier, Saint Etienne, and other industrial cities of the Stéphanois basin also provided material aid to workers and tried to moralize them through religious instruction. But in those cities, class relations assumed a form quite different from that in Saint Chamond. In the former, the riots and insurrections of the early 1830s were followed by intense revolutionary activity in 1848, while Saint Chamond remained relatively untouched by turmoil. Given that the town lay among cities with similar industries and politically conscious workers, its quiescence is difficult to explain.

The nature of the elite and the manner in which charity was distributed to some extent explain the relative social harmony in Saint Chamond. If the merchant elite was more "aristocratic" than the bourgeoisie in neighboring towns, as observers claimed, class relations remained somewhat more "feudalistic." A military observer in 1837 noted that, in contrast to Saint Etienne's workers, "The working-class [of Saint Chamond] has no opinion. It mimics all the fabricants who make it work, is subordinate to them and has respect for them because they make use of loyalty … and they never leave their rank, as in Saint Etienne."^[40]

"Subordinate," "loyalty," and "rank" are all words that apply to the hierarchical, authoritarian society in which Legitimists in Saint Chamond believed. The spirit of Christian charity and noblesse oblige may have softened the edges of exploitation ribbon weavers experienced at the hands of avaricious fabricants on their way up.

And yet this charitable élan seems incongruous, given that these bourgeois were reaping the benefits of industrial capitalism. Fabricants' treatment of ribbon weavers and nail makers could in most cases hardly be described as altruistic; indeed, relations became more antagonistic as aspiring middlemen and merchants extricated more profits from workers. But two factors account for the spirit of charity that prevailed. First, much of it came from old commercial wealth, from individuals whose families had been established in Saint Chamond for several generations. Private donations to the hospice reflect their influence. Between 1812 and 1848, the hospice budget more than tripled, from 18,466 francs to 68,036 francs. The Dugas, Thiollière, Neyrand, Chaland, Grangier, and Flachat families—whose wealth was based on forging and silk merchandising—featured prominently among the donors. These families had made their fortunes prior to the Revolution, and their descendants continued to identify with Old Regime values of noblesse oblige.^[41]

A second factor in this charitable spirit was pure self-interest. Providing direct assistance and employment in public works helped keep the local labor force in Saint Chamond. The ribbon manufacturers had particular cause for concern. During the 1830s their industry began to face insurmountable competition from Saint Etienne. Indeed, the crisis of 1837 marked a point of no return for many. In the hope that this crisis, like others, would pass, they had a keen interest in preventing weavers from moving to Saint Etienne, Lyon, or Paris.^[42]

More concrete factors specific to the local working classes also help to explain the development of political consciousness or the lack thereof. In Lyon, for example, convent workshops that housed indigent and orphaned children provided direct competition to silk workers and engendered considerable hostility. As Jardin and Tudesq describe it: "Better organized and more conscious of their condition, these workers were the first to claim that justice rather than charity was the basis of social relations." These workers thus

provided the first socialist critique against Social Catholicism.^[43] In Saint Etienne, where workers also exhibited class consciousness in 1848, ribbon weavers had formed their own highly successful mutual aid society which made them independent of charity.^[44] Workers in Saint Chamond faced a different situation. Only the hospice put children to work making nails and processing silk, and their production did not threaten workers. Ribbon weavers organized a mutual aid society in 1833 which attracted 140 members. But it was dissolved during the insurrection of 1834.^[45] It never revived, probably because the declining industry could not support it. Given the local economy, workers in Saint Chamond had greater need for material assistance and it was provided more directly than in other cities.

The workers of Saint Chamond posed no threat to order throughout the short-lived Second Republic or during the events that ended it. Even as the city's elite became more industrial, it continued to commit itself to traditional authoritarian government. Legitimists supported Louis Napoleon, who increasingly seemed to stand for order, religion, and commercial prosperity. The coup d'état of 1851 received widespread upper-class support in the city. The police commissioner confidently assured the prefect that the principal property holders marveled at the "change that occurred in the high levels of power." M. Richard, a ribbon manufacturer who had spent 1,300 francs to help get Louis Napoleon elected in 1848, promised a unanimous vote from Saint Chamond in his support during the plebescite of November 1852.^[46] Historian Condamin captured the reaction accurately when he said of the coup d'état that it "imposed silence on the improvised orators of tumultuous meetings and rendered to our city security and peace, for which [its commerce] always had an imperious need." Just as they had in 1814 and 1830, the industrialists of Saint Chamond saw in authoritarian government the promise of commercial prosperity and social peace.^[47]

In the 1850s and 1860s, it would appear, this promise was fulfilled. Saint Chamond and the entire Stéphanois valley experienced intensive industrial growth. The year 1853 in particular marked an important turning point. Petin and Gaudet at this time established forges in Saint Chamond where they began producing naval artillery and armor plating for battleships. This event coincided, not

accidentally, with the outbreak of the Crimean War—a conflict that provided these captains of industry with a new outlet for products and modes of production. The war united upper class and workers in the patriotism it inspired; of more lasting importance, it played a major role in the expansion and success of these forges. In 1854 Benoît Oriol, later joined by Emile Alamagny, contributed further to industrial expansion in the city by establishing the largest braid factory.^[48]

Together, the braid and steel industries transformed Saint Chamond and redefined the parameters and meaning of charity. During the 1850s, the new metalworks and the braid factories continued to attract migrants in ever-growing numbers. By 1856, inhabitants numbered nearly 11,000. These new industries also left their mark on the city's physical appearance. Developers tore down the old, picturesque buildings that lined the squares of Saint Pierre and Notre Dame and ripped up plants and trees to make more room for large factories. In his travels through Saint Chamond in 1862, journalist J. Valserres called the city a miniature of Manchester and Birmingham and noted how smoke from its tall chimneys made the sky forever gloomy.^[49] "In this industrial conglomeration," another observer wrote, "All is somber, all is black, everything carries the imprint of fire and smoke, of dust or continuous jolts [of steam hammers,] … piles of rock, slag, debris of all kinds, houses or factories partly demolished, presenting a lugubrious and sad countenance as if war and fire had just happened in this region."^[50]

Industrialization in Saint Chamond did more than create an eyesore. The problems it caused for the workers placed increased demands on the charitable impulse of its elite. In the first place, not only did industrialization create new strains on family life, but the dangers of the workplace now lay in the domain of the employer rather than in the worker's own home. Second, though the population growth in Saint Chamond did not compare to that of Saint Etienne, the valley location made expansion difficult. Housing became crowded and unsanitary. Poor housing combined with industrial pollution of both air and water made for noxious living conditions that contributed to the deterioration of workers' health. Third, the republican politics that reemerged in the 1860s and became permanently installed in French life during the 1870s undermined the very basis for class relations. Republicanism challenged

both the concept and the reality of a hierarchical society. Even more threatening to the Catholics of Saint Chamond, it began systematically to dismantle the elite's primary tool of working-class moralization: religious instruction. The elite's response to these challenges imaginatively combined their devout Catholicism and monarchism with their own commitment to free enterprise.

Employers and public officials could not ignore problems of housing, pollution, and overt signs of deteriorating public health such as the large number of stillbirths and the high rate of infant mortality that came with industrialization. At the same time, however, belief in the principles of private property and a free market economy predisposed official policies toward problems of public health. For example, owners of dyeworks, some of whom sat on the municipal council, in the name of free enterprise effectively blocked any effort to prevent or even limit the appalling river pollution. They claimed that use of the river waters had become their right and that to force them to move would interfere with their freedom of work and private property. While the municipality recognized the problem this posed for the workers of Saint Chamond, it also acknowledged the dye industry's importance to the city economy, particularly because it served the Lyon silk industry as well as their own braid industry. As long as owners of the dyeworks and braid manufacturers continued to serve on the municipal council, the river would continue to receive pollutants.^[51] Local author M. Fournier lamented that "the frolics of young children were carried on in the midst of limitless refuse [and] carrion, bathing their nude feet in water which drains all the blemishes of a city!" The municipality finally covered the river in the 1890s, and today it still flows below concrete.^[52]

In its stance on the housing problem, the local government of Saint Chamond similarly demonstrated its preference for preserving rights of private property over preserving workers' health. The municipal council established a health commission in 1859 to address problems of unsanitary housing. But in 1864, Mayor Jules Duclos still noted the "large number of lodgings that are far from offering all the guarantees necessary to health."^[53] He formed yet another commission to improve the situation but, like its predecessors, it accomplished nothing and stopped meeting after 1875, under the mayorship of Claude de Boissieu. Evidence that conditions

remained deplorable persists through the 1870s, with no hint of any later improvement.^[54] The commissions remained impotent because any regulation they tried to enforce interfered with the rights of private property.

Profit motives also determined industrialists' response to legislation in 1874 and 1892 that sought to protect the health of women and children by restricting their labor. In most cases the directors of large plants did not employ children under the age of twelve. But the conservative municipality participated in the illicit hiring of youths between the ages of twelve and sixteen by providing the requisite livrets and unearned certificates of instruction. Unlike their counterparts in the Nord and the Allier, manufacturers in Saint Chamond saw nothing wrong with employing women—even married women and mothers—in factory labor and night work.^[55] Legislation restricting night work had the ironic effect of encouraging employers to hire a larger number of older and hence married women. Between 1874 and 1893, braid manufacturers used every argument they could imagine to preserve their right to employ women in "traditional" work shifts. They claimed, for example, that night work helped prevent unwed motherhood and permitted married women more opportunity to care for their families during the day.^[56] One could argue that their desire to keep women and youths employed did reflect a genuine sympathy for the working-class family's need for wages. But self-interest lay behind the braid manufacturers' rhetoric. Cutting back shifts to comply with the laws would, they believed, destroy the edge the braid manufacturers of Saint Chamond enjoyed over their domestic and foreign competition.^[57]

The behavior of industrialists in Saint Chamond toward the problems of housing, pollution, and night work underscores their commitment to the free market economy. And yet while this new generation of employers devoted itself to economic liberalism, it also, paradoxically, continued to practice traditional noblesse oblige as well as new forms of paternalism.^[58] To the government survey shortly after the events of the Paris Commune, the local Consultative Chamber of Arts and Manufacturers responded, "the best way of avoiding conflicts is for the employer to have a relationship with his workers, to concern himself with them, their morals, and their material welfare."^[59] Twenty-five years later, Louis Jury,

president of the Saint Chamond Association of Textile Employers, suggested that this policy had become pervasive: "The directors of the shops (and this is characteristic of the employer spirit in Saint Chamond) are generally paternal; most of the employers consider themselves moral substitutes for the father of a family and treat their men and women workers with justice."^[60] Like their forefathers, Saint Chamond industrialists built reputations on their generosity toward workers. Influenced by "tradition … and religious faith," Charles Neyrand demonstrated "sentiments of responsibility and paternity toward his personnel."^[61] He performed a "mass of charitable works" and was known as "father of the poor." Braid manufacturer François Gillet earned a reputation for his "works of charity, assistance, and familial organization." Adrien de Montgolfier, successor to Petin and Gaudet, "interested himself generously in all charitable works which solicited his support" and was known for his "paternal devotion."^[62] Jules Duclos, silk miller and mayor in the early 1870s, opened a restaurant for workers where they could obtain substantial meals at a low price. He also arranged to have his money distributed among the poor after his death. Ladies bountiful—the wives of Oriol, de Boissieu, Jury, Alamagny, and many others—regularly supplied financial assistance to workers' families.^[63]

As in the past, employers offered large donations to the hospice. Oriol, Alamagny, and Brun were among those who donated hundreds of thousands of francs for aid to the old and infirm, the sick, and orphaned children. The annual budget tripled from an average of 66,033 francs between 1844 and 1848 to 194,396 francs between 1884 and 1886. During this same period the population of Saint Chamond grew from 8,000 to 14,000 inhabitants. The amount that the hospice spent annually per inhabitant grew from 8f25 to 13f50. The hospice also provided direct material assistance during the economic crisis of the 1880s, just as it had during the crises in the first half of the century.^[64]

This continuity with the past exhibited in charitable activities stemmed in part from the ruling elite's own heritage. Many of them were descendants of old Saint-Chamonais families—for example, banker and investor Charles de Boissieu, notary Victor Louis Finaz, Ennemond Richard, grandson of the pioneer braid manufacturer, and the Balas, Neyrand, and Thiollièer families.

The very prevalence of traditional attitudes and the belief that they maintained class harmony in Saint Chamond attracted like-minded newcomers: Petin, Gaudet, Montgolfier in the steel industry, Louis Jury, and many others in the braid industry embraced monarchist politics as well as Catholicism. Although some of the newer industrialists—Oriol, Alamagny and forge master Chavanne-Brun—professed cautious republicanism after 1870, they nonetheless joined with the Legitimists in their strong attachment to Catholicism, which helps explain their disposition toward material assistance.

But while the material aid that employers offered through religious orders, private charity, and the hospice might at first appear a simple continuation of the Old Regime spirit of noblesse oblige, in fact the "fatherly" concern for workers necessarily assumed new qualities during the second half of the century. Changes in the work force and the environment brought about two key transformations in the manner that charitable institutions administered material assistance. First, more extensively than in the past, in Saint Chamond the employers assumed family functions in the care of the children, the sick, and the old. Second, the commission no longer provided aid indiscriminately. Despite the prolonged depression of the 1880s and early 1890s, the sort of indiscriminate aid that had been typical during the many crises in the first half of the century was given only once during the second half.

As industrial labor became more dangerous, and living conditions brought further detriment to workers' health, the need for material assistance increased. The fact that work took place on the premises of the employer rather than in the worker's home extended the employer's guardianship over the latter's physical welfare. The noxious industrial environment, the increased threat of work-related accidents, and the employment of mothers outside the home forced elites to assume greater responsibility in the care of workers' health and in the upbringing of their children. Employer-sponsored mutual aid became established from at least the 1870s and provided workers the security of assured medical care.^[65] Workers usually contributed part of their wages to these funds, but employers supplied the major portion and sometimes the total amount. In any case, employers retained the power over its administration. Mutual aid in particular became an instrument they used

to meet the needs of their labor force and still maintain control over the workplace, for it substituted for raising wages or improving conditions. Industrialists also established child-care institutions, administered by religious orders. Employers in Saint Chamond staffed the hospice administrative commission, the bureau de bienfaisance , and the municipal council and used these institutions to govern workers' behavior. Faced with the need to preserve a labor force, charitable institutions, rather than shoring up the working-class family, assumed some of its functions.

Whether or not this policy was a conscious one, it became particularly apparent in employers' stance toward women. Significantly, while other French industrialists were slow to provide mutual aid for female workers, employers in Saint Chamond did so readily. By the 1870s, Oriol and Alamagny, who employed 800 women in their factories, supplied medical insurance free of cost to workers. In cases of accidents, they paid for all medical and pharmaceutical expenses and even paid full wages during absence from work. Sick workers received half their wages. The company also established retirement pensions for women after they reached sixty years of age.^[66] In 1895, industrialists' wives formed La Prévoyance Féminine, in which they became "honorary" members. Regular contributions from Louis Jury and other braid manufacturers sustained it. Annual fairs were held to raise funds for all the mutualist associations.^[67]

Because the braid industry removed women from the home, the need for child care became urgent. So dependent on women's labor were these industrialists that it never occurred to them that women's factory labor should be regulated, much less eliminated. Women had always worked, had always contributed to the family income. Thus instead of encouraging them to stay in the home as paternalists in other parts of France did, they addressed the needs that labor outside the home generated. Petin and Gaudet established a salle d'asile for young children in their factory. In 1864 Ennemond Richard founded a salle d'asile in Saint Chamond's poorest parish, Saint Ennemond. The Sisters of Saint Charles administered both these kindergartens, and in the latter thus supplemented catechism with 2,500 to 3,000 francs yearly in food and clothing. Between 1867 and 1869, the Alamagny family also created a crèche and on the street that bore their name constructed a hospital for children.

Alamagny's widow established yet another kindergarten, attended by 250 children in 1884, as well as one in the adjacent commune of Saint Martin, where braidworks also employed women extensively.^[68]

But it was more than ill health, work-related accidents, or need for child care that made the working-class family more dependent on employer aid than it had been in the past. The inability even to keep children or to care for the old in their families also forced workers to rely on private charity and municipal aid. A few examples will illustrate this point. Three times during the last two decades of the century, Jean-Marie R. sought aid for his family from the Saint Chamond hospice. Born in the countryside near neighboring Rive-de-Gier, Jean-Marie R. had lived in Saint Chamond ten years prior to his marriage in 1864. Over the next nineteen years he held several semiskilled jobs at the Petin forges while his wife, Marie-Anne G., worked as a braid maker and then as a silk reeler. Marie-Anne bore a child every two years until she died, three days after giving birth to her tenth. She left Jean-Marie with an infant who needed to be breast-fed, a two-year-old, a ten-year-old boy, and a seventeen-year-old daughter with the unlucky name of Marie-Antoinette. The rest of their children had died in infancy. Marie-Antoinette assumed her mother's household responsibilities. But soon the family encountered further misfortune. Less than two years after Marie-Anne's death, Marie-Antoinette entered the hospice to give birth to an illegitimate child whom she named after her own mother. Marie-Antoinette died in the hospice five days after the birth; the baby died a day later.^[69]

Infant death had already become a familiar experience for Jean-Marie R. Whatever grief he felt for his first grandchild's misfortune may have been mixed with some sense of relief that he would not have to assume single-handed responsibility for a third child under age five. The loss of his daughter, just two years after his wife had also died from childbirth, posed a more overwhelming challenge.

The subsequent history of this family can be sketchily reconstructed. Jean-Marie could not raise his children alone; in 1892 he placed his last son, then aged ten, in the hospice, where the boy remained for the next seven years. The absence of his other young son from the 1891 census suggests that he, too, may have been placed in the care of a religious order. No one in this family had

good fortune; Jean-Marie's oldest surviving son died in a penitentiary at age twenty-seven.^[70]

The history of this family encapsulates many of the structural changes that occurred in family life over the nineteenth century: increased illegitimacy, maternal mortality, increased infant and child death, and the inability of urban workers' families to survive independently of institutional aid. Hospice records provide an abundance of such examples. Though each case was unique, together they form a pattern. A mother of five brought her nine-year-old boy to the hospice because her husband had died; she could not work since she had to nurse her youngest. A widower who received a daily wage of 3f50 and "aid allocated to him from diverse sources" (such as the bureau de bienfaisance , Saint Vincent de Paul, and private charity) could not support his five offspring and so brought one of them to the charity. Being childless could also act as a liability. Marie Anne L. married late in life and had no children. She became widowed at sixty-five. Like numerous other widows in Saint Chamond, she survived as a braid worker until age seventy-five, when, "without family and without resources," she presented herself to the commission asking to be admitted to the home for the aged.^[71]

François C.'s experience represented that of many Saint-Chamonais, for it derived from a common work-related illness. He worked as a stoker at the Petin forges in the 1860s and then at the Richard and Puthod dyeworks in the 1870s and 1880s. Eventually he became ill from breathing the sulfuric acid gas used for dyes. In June 1885, François presented his case to the administrative commission of the hospice. Unable to support his wife and four children because of "frequent ill health that sent him to the hospital," he asked that his ten-year-old daughter be admitted to the orphanage. The commission admitted her. François C. died five years later, at age fifty, in Saint Etienne.^[72] The administrative commission considered several such cases every week; in each case, illness, death, too many children, or lack of children pressed families into dependence on the charity of religious orders and the municipality.

The need to seek aid from the hospice touched hundreds of working-class families in Saint Chamond through the period of full-scale industrialization. Fertility and mortality rates provide only one clue to the adverse material conditions workers faced in

their daily lives. Behind the statistics lay countless stories of how individual families, in coping with these conditions, had to open the most intimate details of their lives to the will of the ruling elite. Life in the hospice bore similarity to that in a prison. Grilled windows and locked and guarded doors restricted and regulated the visits of friends and relatives. All inmates assumed the status of children and had to submit to strict discipline. They retired in the evenings and rose in the mornings at specified times; food and wine were carefully rationed. The able-bodied were expected to work. The old especially lost their personal freedom, since they often went there to spend the rest of their lives and had to relinquish any savings or pensions they had earned. On numerous occasions old men and women requested release and tried to live on their own, only to return weeks, months, or years later to subject themselves once again to the humiliating scrutiny of the administrative commission and the religious orders.^[73]

Entering the hospice became more complicated in the later decades of the nineteenth century; it was in the admissions to the hospital, the orphanage, and the home for the aged, as well as in releases from these institutions, that employers exerted considerable power over the inhabitants of Saint Chamond. As was the case throughout France, in Saint Chamond there were more candidates for admission to the hospice than there were places for them. The administrative commission had to turn away many of the old, the young, and the sick.^[74] In the second half of the nineteenth century, admission became more discriminating, not only because the numbers needing assistance rose but because the economics of admissions changed. Originally, founders of hospices intended that they provide aid for indigents. Because d'octroi impositions and other local taxes supported hospices, the law of 7 August 1851 stipulated that communes with no hospice could send their indigents to neighboring communes that did have a hospice, provided that the former paid a daily rate fixed by the prefect. This law had the inadvertent effect of encouraging hospices to give priority in their admissions policy to those who could pay or be paid for. Thus they admitted first the sick for whom an employer, a relative, a society of mutual aid, or the municipality of another commune paid the expenses. They then considered those sick who could pay for themselves. This practice spread in the second half of the nineteenth

century, even though it violated the fundamental principle that hospices were meant to aid precisely those who could not pay.^[75]

In cities such as Saint Chamond, the hospice admittance policy increased workers' dependence on the mutual assistance provided by employers. In principle, any resident of the commune of Saint Chamond, Izieux, and Saint-Julien-en-Jarrez could enter the hospice at a cost of 1f50 per day, about one-half to one-third a day's wages for employed workers. The hospice would assume the cost for indigents, and industries with insurance policies would pay for their workers. Though the hospice continued to accept indigents, they admitted them only after a thorough investigation that determined whether a candidate had relatives who could come to his or her aid. Workers supported by mutual aid societies or pensions had priority. Their fate too, however, depended on an investigation and on the employer's judgment.^[76]

Sick workers funded by company insurance could enter the hospital only on their employer's recommendation. In order to make such a recommendation, employers had to become personally familiar with workers' circumstances. Thus, for example, Grangier and Reymond, whose braid factory employed about 100 workers, wrote to the administrative commission of the hospices in June 1876: "One of our workers is from the department of the Vaucluse and consequently has no family here who can take care of her. We ask that you take her in and give her your best care." She spent forty-two days in the hospital. On one occasion the Petin and Gaudet Company refused to pay the expenses of a worker because he had come to the hospital against the wishes of a doctor whom they had consulted. They intended to prevent workers from availing themselves of this benefit too freely.^[77]

Personal knowledge of clients also influenced entry into the orphanage and home for the elderly and incurable. The administrative commission frequently made decisions favoring or opposing admission on the basis of recommendations from prominent members of the community, such as Louis Jury, head of the Association of Textile Employers, or members of the long-established and notable de Boissieu family. One elderly widow entered the hospice on the recommendation of the foreman at the Petin forges where her husband had worked prior to his death many years earlier. Those who donated large sums of money to the hospice also influenced

admissions. They could, and almost always did, specify to what use their gifts would be put. Braid manufacturer Irenée Brun wanted the annual interest from his 3,000-franc donation to be used for the support of three new beds in the home for the aged. He also reserved the right for himself and his family to determine which individuals would be admitted for those places.^[78] The ability—and need—for the administrative commission to exercise increased discrimination in admissions to the hospice increased over the course of the century. Despite the enormous expansion in this institution's budget, demands for care outpaced the growth of resources to meet them.

The release of children from the orphanage also required a scrutiny of family circumstances. The hospice invested time and money in the children they raised, so the commission released them only when they felt confident that circumstances warranted the release. After they received a certificate of instruction, children could leave if they were returning to a family in proper moral and economic circumstances. In 1894, for example, the commission granted a woman's request to have her daughter returned because she had remarried and her new husband had a stable income.^[79]

If parents took their children prior to the time the commission judged suitable, which they frequently tried to do, they were expected to pay 12f50 for each month the child had lived in the hospice. One miner, for example, "stole" his ten-year-old daughter from the hospice on the occasion of a visit with her. The commission decided that this father had to pay for the two-and-one-half years she had lived there, as well as return the dress she was wearing when she left. In another instance, a Mme L. removed her ten-year-old daughter without authorization. When she refused to return her, the administrative commission sought the aid of the police. A couple of months later, Mme L. asked once more for her daughter. The commission finally asked Mme de Boissieu to take moral responsibility for both mother and daughter.^[80]

Having Mme de Boissieu assume "moral responsibility" in this case offers but one example of how the request for assistance provided ample opportunity for the administrative commission and their associates to intrude upon the privacy of family life. Regarding the admission of two children to the hospice in 1898, the commission recorded in its registers:

The father is an inveterate drunk; all the efforts made, notably by [braid manufacturer] M. Jury, to lead him back to better sensibilities have failed. He mistreats his wife and children, and it is a social work to protect them from his influence. … The wife, on the contrary, is valiant and expends a superhuman energy to meet the needs of her large family, but cannot assure them the barest necessities.^[81]

Though most workers did not experience the direct personal intervention of elites such as Louis Jury, assistance from the hospice, the bureau de bienfaisance , and religious orders pervaded their lives. If they did not receive aid, they anticipated that one day they might, or they clung with great pride to their independence from it. Fournier portrays this aspect of their lives in his novels about Saint Chamond's working class. His character Rosine Aubert, a former braid maker, had in her old age only "the interest from a small sum placed in the savings bank, fifteen or twenty sous she earned each day in pulling floss from finished braids, and one hundred francs the curé Verdier paid her at the end of the year for sweeping the church and maintaining the altars." To this she added profits from candles she sold at pilgrimages to Saint Ennemond. "Never had she wanted to register herself at the bureau de bienfaisance and [she] had refused with a smile the aid offered her by Sister Gabrielle of the Order of Saint Vincent."^[82] Another character, Stéphanie Cointe, "would not know the humiliation of having herself admitted 'to the ranks of the old,' to the sinister hospice of the city, built on the filthy Gier, where the indigent of [Saint Chamond] came to end their lives." But père Briquet put himself in quite a different situation. After he had borrowed 2,000 francs to buy a house, his wife chastised him:

So you want to become a property owner! Look what will happen to you! Have you only thought of the taxes that are going to overwhelm you at the end of the year? [You will be] stricken from the bureau de bienfaisance , the free distributions, the Bread of Saint Antoine, the works of Saint-François-Régis! And that's not all! When you become sick and you're taken to the hospital, you'll be put in the ranks of the paying!^[83]

Old Briquet ended by selling the house and returning the 2,000 francs to his friend. Even if this last vignette lacks credibility, it does suggest, as do examples throughout Fournier's books, that

charity pervaded the lives of Saint-Chamonais and that assistance frequently came from the hands of clerics.

Significantly, the lines between charitable institutions of all kinds in Saint Chamond (the crèches , the salles d'asiles , the bureau de bienfaisance , and the hospice) became blurred: the same group of people—employers, their wives, and clerics—staffed all the administrative bodies and discharged the aid. An employer who one day dismissed a worker from his factory might encounter him at the bureau de bienfaisance or the hospice the following week. From the worker's viewpoint, not only was this charity inseparable from the employer, but it was inseparable from the clerical orders which administered it. In the operation of the hospice itself, moreover, it becomes apparent that the disciplining of the working class, as well as its preservation, had become a goal of its administrators.

Industrial employers' position toward the material distress of the poor reflected their experience in large-scale, capitalist industry, as well as their roots in Saint Chamond's charitable past. Even though they created and perpetuated the conditions that undermined workers' health, they also sought to preserve workers by providing material assistance and medical care. If their behavior appears paradoxical, it reflects the complexity of their own economic position and sentiments. Their entrepreneurial activity and faith in free enterprise prevented them from treating the true causes of distress among workers, while their Old Regime values—Catholicism, authoritarian government, a belief in a hierarchical society—inspired them with genuine concern for workers' material conditions.

But material assistance to working-class families, in whatever form, did not suffice in the face of new challenges to traditional sensibilities—republicanism, anticlericalism, and socialism—each of which encouraged workers to find their own solutions independent of paternalist employers and the church. The new industrialists continued to associate economic prosperity with authoritarian government. They thus sought to prevent liberalism—whose economic forms they embraced—from invading the political arena. They wanted Christianity to become a moral substitute for republicanism. The paradox of their position arose from the difficulties inherent in trying to promote Christian values of deference in a

society whose economic well-being depended upon aggressive individualism. Their mission, moreover, became much more difficult in the context of Third Republic anticlericalism. A speech Petin gave to workers in 1877 well illustrates the stance they assumed

All our large factories, which today make the glory and wealth of our region, have been founded by men who came from our Christian schools. … All the positions of accountants, clerks, and foremen have been taken exclusively by them. Their aptitudes and above all their conduct have made them sought out for the most delicate jobs. Why? because they not only have instruction, but also possess these religious principles which give them consciousness of their duties. … One can say that primary and religious instruction is the application … of the principle of equality in our society, and when I see that our Christian schools, so popular, so veritably democratic, and so useful to the laborious class, are attacked so arduously, I can only conclude one thing: that those who attack them do not like the working class.^[84]

Petin thus portrayed Christianity as a medium for social action and even a means of upward mobility for the worker. Religious instruction was the only way to establish and spread Christianity. In attacking religious instruction, he argued, the Third Republic attacked the true interests of workers. At the same time, in making his appeal Petin went far beyond the language of Catholicism and borrowed the republican language of democracy and equality. Yet he clearly sought to convey that only Christianity, not republicanism, provided the true foundation for human freedom and equality. Thus, more than ever, in the industrial period employers in Saint Chamond reinforced and extended the influence of Catholicism.

A campaign to integrate workers into this Catholic community began to intensify just as industries expanded in the 1850s and migrants flocked into Saint Chamond from the countryside. At this time the quality of schools depended heavily on the sentiments and finances of the municipality. Local government also determined whether lay or religious instructors taught in the schools. Legitimists dominated the Saint Chamond municipal council at this time, and they duly shaped local instruction in their own image.^[85] During these same years, legislation on education further empowered Catholic monarchists. The law of 14 June 1854 established cantonal delegations to supervise both lay and congregationalist schools. Throughout France and in Saint Chamond, these delegations gave reactionary forces influence comparable to that

which they had enjoyed during the Restoration. In the 1850s and 1860s, religious orders increasingly replaced lay teachers. Catholic and monarchist notables and industrialists such as Benoît Oriol, Hippolyte Petin, Victor Finaz, and Charles de Boissieu staffed this delegation and controlled education in the canton of Saint Chamond.^[86]

Though most nonnative workers came from the nearby countryside where Catholicism was widely practiced, the values of an industrial society were foreign to them. Even if they had previously engaged in cottage industry, workers from rural areas were unaccustomed to the supervision and regimentation of twelve-hour shifts. Nor had they learned the work ethic of their employers. Even the French language was often unfamiliar to them. A large portion of migrants to Saint Chamond came from the mountains of the Haute-Loire and the Puy-de-Dôme, where they spoke an Auvergnais patois. Teachers faced great obstacles substituting French for the migrants' native tongue. Local pride and children's embarrassment over speaking a language different from that of their parents discouraged them from learning French. Schools in the Stéphanois basin began making substantial progress in conversion to French by the mid-1850s, and in 1860 they formally forbade patois.^[87] Being forced to abandon their former language and adopt standard French had an important psychological effect on workers as they became integrated into urban life. Giving up the language of their parents and adopting that of the urban middle class completed a cultural break with their pasts of which migration itself had been but the first step. Speaking French may also have encouraged an identification with the bourgeois elite rather than with fellow workers.^[88]

By the mid-1850s, efforts to bring children into the school-houses—and under the influence of religious orders and the industrial elite—proved fruitful. Education became more religious as congregationist teachers increasingly replaced lay teachers. In 1857 only 273 boys in the arrondissement between the ages of seven and thirteen, or 1.9 percent, had received no education.^[89]

With the changing urban environment and work structure in the city, adults became a focus of instruction and moral education. To the free adult schools that forge masters Charles Neyrand and Camille Thiollière had established in 1846 were added in 1856 night

courses for miners. By the 1860s subscriptions from various private donors supported several adult classes, and workers attended them at night free of cost. Between 1864 and 1871, a course taught by Antoine Cara averaged about 150 students per year, and for his excellent teaching he received an imperial medal. Emma Canel ran a course for adult women with an enrollment of 95, but she complained of irregular attendance because so often the women had to work at night. She did note that all the women who took her course knew how to read and write. By 1872, voluntary gifts and subscriptions amounting to 600 francs helped support five instructors who taught 581 adults. Educational trends in Saint Chamond reflected those throughout much of the arrondissement, and particularly Saint Etienne. But Saint Chamond distinguished itself by the substantial private donations that supported religious orders, kindergartens, and, especially important, adult education.^[90]

Instilling workers with religious sentiment became at once more difficult and more urgent as the Third Republic began its anticlerical attacks and as republican and socialist ideologies offered alternatives to employer paternalism and Catholicism. As in the July Monarchy, new challenges to religious influence mobilized Catholics to extend their efforts and finances beyond instruction. Laicization of schools and other legislative efforts to restrict religious orders obliged Catholic employers to assume personal responsibility for strengthening religious sentiment among their workers. Several prominent employers in Saint Chamond joined the Social Catholic movement that enjoyed resurgence after the Paris Commune of 1871. Inspired by distaste for bourgeois individualism and fear of a working-class revolution, Albert de Mun, La Tour du Pin, and their followers wanted to substitute a "Christian social order" for the liberal bourgeois social order. They sought an alliance between the nobility—or what was left of it—and the working class, forming associations for both workers and employers.^[91]

Camille Thiollière and Charles Neyrand apparently established the first cercle in Saint Chamond, in 1872, but its statutes were not registered until 1876, when it had forty-seven members. Its purpose was "essentially moralization, in that it seeks to separate the worker from places where he will spend his family's money, ruin his health by debauchery, [and] have his morals corrupted, and to attract him to and maintain him in an honest and Christian milieu,

where his savings will run no risk, and his health will suffer no damage from excesses, and where his morals will remain pure."^[92] By 1880, the cercle had seventy-eight full members and thirty-four associates, with a ribbon weaver serving as president and Claude de Boissieu as president of the directing committee. Other members of the ruling class, especially Montgolfier, Victor Finaz, and Oriol, participated in the cercles and other more centralized Social Catholic institutions such as the Catholic Committee and the Industrial Commission. Both Thiollière and Neyrand became nationally prominent in the movement.^[93]

The cercles in Saint Chamond functioned in a manner similar to others in France, reflecting a paradoxical attitude toward workers. Leaders encouraged workers to assume responsibilities within the cercles but insisted that they remain subordinate in an authoritarian and rigidly structured hierarchy. Because Social Catholics equated workers with children, the rules instructed the director to behave as a "loving father" and "give them the appearance of having great independence" while reserving for himself the role of "discreet but all-powerful guardian."^[94] The cercle engaged workers in religious and social activities. They also provided a caisse de famille to supply aid to members in times of sickness or unemployment.^[95]

In contrast to the national movement, Social Catholic institutions in Saint Chamond enjoyed comparative success. They received support from employers, persisted beyond the turn of the century, and by 1903 could boast 665 members, the majority of whom were reportedly workers.^[96] This success can be attributed to a predisposition toward Catholicism in this town, but the talents of Camille Thiollière and Charles Neyrand also played a key role in shaping the local movement. These forge masters went beyond Albert de Mun's model of worker cercles and attempted to imitate Léon Harmel, the bon père known for his successful experiments in giving workers some control over his factory in Val-des-Bois (Nord). Neyrand set up a "union" in his factory, administered by a council of six employers and six workers. The union created a cooperative, subsidized by nuns who would care for sick workers in their homes. Neyrand's cercle catholique encouraged workers "to take a preponderant influence in the life of the factory."^[97] While Neyrand and Thiollière did not succeed as well as Harmel, they received credit for averting the "hostile influence of anarchists,

… pulling together the different elements of work in Saint Chamond and contributing to maintaining there an atmosphere of social peace."^[98]

The Association of Catholic Employers was another institution through which employers of all ranks sought to reinforce Catholicism among workers, a purpose they could not state in their statutes, for it violated civil liberties. The exact relationship to Social Catholicism was made deliberately unclear, and the precise date of its formation is unknown. More than likely it first organized in the early 1870s and served as the employer organization which directed the workers' cercles . In 1889, its statutes indicated its professional purpose: to group together Catholic businessmen to defend themselves against enemies of the Church who might sabotage their economic interests.^[99] The true goal of this organization, however, was to reinforce Christian belief among workers. The association's earlier statutes instructed members to develop religious principles and good morals among their workers. Each member had to conduct himself as a "good father of the family with workers" and promise never to assign work on Sundays. Employers had to enforce strict discipline in the workplace, for discipline provided the "basis of … prosperity and [the] source of well-being for the family of the worker." No fewer than one hundred employers belonged to this association. Members ranged from the large braid manufacturers—Chavanne and Brun—to foremen in the forges and small shopkeepers.^[100]

The zeal with which employers in Saint Chamond pursued these duties in some cases violated workers' civil liberties and thus drew the attention of the public prosecutor's office in Lyon. Braid factory owners forced women workers who lived in their dormitories to attend mass twice a week, say prayers in common morning and night, go to confession, and receive communion. Although in principle these workers could choose not to participate in these religious exercises, "they all believed they would be fired if they refused."^[101] Most employers did not house their workers and thus had less opportunity to instill religious habits in them, but other members of the association behaved in a spirit similar to that of the braid manufacturers.

Through the nineteenth century, but particularly during the industrial period, moralizing and preserving the labor force remained

the dual goal of the local notables and employers in Saint Chamond. While their attention to the working classes reflected traditional values of noblesse oblige in a rigidly structured social hierarchy, the ruling elite were forced to adapt their strategies to the changing physical, political, and moral environment. The successive generations of employers demonstrated continuity in their adherence to Catholicism and authoritarian government; the most prominent bourgeois industrialists of Saint Chamond continued to mobilize themselves against anticlerical attacks, and some professed monarchist politics into the twentieth century. But the new elite in braid manufacturing and large-scale metallurgy, unlike their predecessors, found themselves in the position of having to defend a free market economy. Their strategies for dealing with the moral and physical well-being of the working class accordingly changed: they no longer administered charity indiscriminately to those who needed it. Instead, they exercised a paternalism in which they assumed more responsibility for instilling Catholic values in workers and used material aid as a means of disciplining them.

A variety of observers, inhabitants as well as travelers, suggested that efforts to reinforce Catholicism and discipline workers succeeded.^[102] In addition to the testimonies referred to above, parish reports based on the number of parishioners receiving sacraments indicate that the workers of Saint Chamond practiced Catholicism more than those in neighboring towns through the turn of the century. And yet we must wonder if the perceptions of a military officer in 1843 may have held true for the rest of the century. He noted "more appearance than reality in this religious disposition … and the morality is very far from having any relationship to this exterior devotion and ostentation in which priests delight."^[103]

If indeed there was more appearance than genuine piety in workers' religious activities, it no doubt resulted from the fact that the administration of material aid was, in the eyes of the Saint-Chamonais, as much a function of religious orders as was the administration of sacraments. Economic factors in the last two decades of the century exercised a more fundamental influence over their lives than religion did. Whether or not workers became indoctrinated with Catholicism, many of them did become recipients

of charity and other sources of material aid through the hospice, all administered by employers and run by religious orders.

If this care did not help much to stem the rise in deathrates, it did become a factor in defining class relations. But while the relative quiescence among workers may have resulted in part from employer solicitude, it did not mean the elite had succeeded in shaping the working class in its own image. Indeed, beginning in the 1860s, a substantial number of workers in Saint Chamond began to articulate a political, if not moral, posture independent of their employers, which became more distinct by the end of the century.

6
Workers and Politics

Situated in the arrondissement of Saint Etienne, Saint Chamond is surrounded by cities with similar industries and economic conditions and which produced militant labor movements during the nineteenth century: Rive-de-Gier to the east, and Saint Etienne, Le Chambon-Feugerolles, and Firminy to the west. The entire industrial basin, as police agents and prefects were quick to point out, became vulnerable to political and social radicalism from Lyon. Saint Chamond, however, remained relatively tranquil in a region that suffered most of France's political and social storms. When the labor movement brought turmoil to neighboring cities, the ruling elite of Saint Chamond bragged complacently of their well-behaved workers. In one of his local histories, Fournier boasted, "Troublemakers, agitators, preachers of revolt do not hold our … peaceful, calm, and ordered city in much esteem. It is too wise or too intelligent for them. Our workers—sober, economical, thoughtful, attached to their homes—raise their small families there in complete quietude, in an atmosphere of harmony."^[1]

This same author later reminisced, "Without any complaints, anger, fights … the four police agents did not know what to do with their time."^[2] Series M in the departmental archives at first glance supports the complacent self-portrayal that local historians have offered. One must wade through numerous reports of contention in other cities before coming across the often slim accounts of events in Saint Chamond. Officials reported "the greatest tranquility" even during the tumultuous years of the early 1830s, 1848, 1851, and 1870–1871. During the Third Republic, the proclerical, antirepublican right wing in Saint Chamond attracted more attention from the police than did workers.

If political life in Saint Chamond remained relatively harmonious, another series in the departmental archives—registers of births, marriages, and deaths in Saint Chamond—affords a less

happy picture of this city. Material conditions brought considerable misfortune to the family lives of workers. Mortality and fertility rates suggest that Fournier's "small families" resulted as much from horrible material conditions, poor health, and abortion as from prudence. Without question, high rates of infant and child mortality helped to minimize family size. In addition to a precarious family structure, workers experienced the complete restructuring of industrial organization, the effects of cyclical economic crises and the resulting unemployment or underemployment, the uprootedness of migration, inadequate housing, industrial pollution, and chronic disease. The workers of Saint Chamond—natives and migrants—suffered the same disruptions as workers in other industrializing cities but suffered them in a silence uncharacteristic of the region. These two sides of Saint Chamond—social tranquility and harsh material conditions—are not easily reconciled.

It would be tempting to resolve this anomaly by concluding that material assistance and Catholic moralization reduced class tensions in Saint Chamond. This conclusion, however, would do injustice to the complexity of class relations, particularly from the viewpoint of workers, for we have said little about their responses to elite solicitation. Moreover, it would not explain why paternalism was relatively successful in Saint Chamond when workers elsewhere rejected it. Examining workers' responses to charitable and religious efforts in this city is exceedingly difficult, however, precisely because its "quiet" population left little record of its reactions. But the absence of direct, documented response to employer efforts at exerting hegemony over workers must not simply be taken to mean that these efforts were successful.

A close examination of local politics reveals that workers appeared "tranquil" only in contrast to those in neighboring cities. Though the Saint-Chamonais voted more conservatively than other working-class populations in the Stéphanois region, they nonetheless supported republicanism rather than the monarchism of their employers. The labor movement in Lyon, Rive-de-Gier, and Saint Etienne, moreover, helped inspire and sustain a labor movement in Saint Chamond. Not only did this population call its share of strikes, but it elected socialists to its municipality and hosted a sizable group of anarchists. Strike activity and the development of independent working-class politics provide indirect evidence that

workers did not submit docilely to a reactionary, Catholic world-view; indeed, they assumed a posture quite distinct from that of their employers.

A number of critical factors did, however, limit the extent of the labor movement, the degree of militancy, and ultimately the mass basis of support necessary for socialists to gain the upper hand in local politics. The organization of work itself and the geographical and cultural uprootedness among workers inhibited independent associational life among them. In addition, and perhaps more important, the reactionary politics among the bourgeoisie and their charitable and moralizing activities did influence worker consciousness. Though workers exhibited cultural and political independence from the employer class, paternalism can be credited for preventing them from realizing their full potential for militancy. The anticlericalism of the left in particular divided workers, and the majority remained loyal to local priests for reasons other than religious sentiment. The vulnerability of working-class families and material assistance from religious congregations and employers help to explain the limits to militancy.

Like those in other Stéphanois cities, during the Second Empire workers in Saint Chamond began to develop a political consciousness independent of the elite. The silence of the 1850s stemmed more from repression than detachment, as the prefect signaled in 1858 when he assured the minister of the interior that new repressive measures brought into law that year kept anarchists in the Loire "living in fear."^[3] Just a few years later more liberal constitutional reforms opened the dike for opposition to Napoleon III's regime. Industrialist Agamemnon Imbert, a machine constructor and former worker who employed 300 men, helped to organize Saint Chamond's first republican club and spread propaganda. The legislative elections of 1863 became the first sign, and a dramatic one, that workers in Stéphanois cities had become politically conscious. Despite a booming economy this consciousness translated into a rejection of the Empire. Just under 50 percent of the voters in Saint Chamond joined other Stéphanois in voting for opposition candidates.^[4]

Stéphanois workers soon expressed further dissent after the legalization of strikes in 1864. In the summer of 1865 the prefect anxiously argued that "the nature of the industrial population"

required doubling the strength of the garrison in the arrondissement of Saint Etienne. Strikes broke out the following fall among miners, masons, and velvet makers in Saint Etienne, which then spread to the miners in Saint Chamond.^[5] Dormant tensions revived in 1869, a year of widespread strike activity in much of France. Miners throughout the Loire coal basin went on strike in early June. While prolonged and violent in Saint Etienne, the strike among coal miners in Saint Chamond was short-lived. But it did assume political overtones. Through the night of 14 June, workers at the Saint Chamond pits sang the "Marseillaise," caused "tumultuous scenes," and boisterously proclaimed their support for the republican candidate in their circumscription.^[6]

By 1 July the police commissioner of Saint Chamond reported that miners there had resumed work, and while it appeared that the working classes were less hostile, he expressed concern that the democratic press, by which he meant the Eclaireur of Saint Etienne, had influenced workers in Saint Chamond: they had incontestably become more concerned with politics than previously. But most workers, he reported confidently, would not follow the leaders for very long. They "will conserve the cult of the great Napoleonic principle which responds so well to [their] aspirations and genius."^[7]

Just the following month, however, Saint-Chamonais metal workers went on strike. Repeating the pattern of workers throughout the Lyonnais region, those in the Petin forges demanded a reduction in the workday from eleven to ten hours and a bonus of 50 percent for overtime. The company compromised and granted them a one-half-hour reduction in the workday and a 40 percent bonus for overtime. The workers peacefully accepted these conditions. In the spring of 1870, another wave of strikes hit Saint Etienne and Rive-de-Gier. Workers in Saint Chamond did not strike, but in August several hundred loudly protested their state of unemployment by running through the city's streets and singing the "Marseillaise." To this song they added the line, "and the Republic will reign in France."^[8]

Strike activity during the 1860s in Saint Chamond thus not only stemmed from demands for higher wages and shorter hours but also became a vehicle through which workers began to demand a republic—a political sentiment quite distinct from that of the employer

class. Soon workers in Saint Chamond organized a more direct means of political expression, the Cercle des Travailleurs. Upon its creation in 1870, the club stated its purpose: to "propagate progressive and fraternal ideas" and "to assist in the development of intelligence," through a library, through readings of newspapers and other materials, and through lectures. Their office would also serve as a labor exchange. The police soon pointed out, however, that the club was composed of radical republicans whose true purpose was to combat the influence of the Saint Chamond monarchist club, the Cercle de la Ville, whose origins dated back to 1831.^[9]

The 177 men who joined the Cercle des Travailleurs came from "workers of all categories." But the handful of leaders who merited close police scrutiny had primarily petit-bourgeois and even middle-class origins. These included the president, Deigas, who was a merchant tailor; Deschamps, a pharmacist; Jean Charvet, a laborer and former letter carrier; his brother Claude Charvet, a journeyman shoemaker; Pouget, a junk merchant; Gauthier, a café keeper; Jamet, a gallic acid manufacturer; Bergé, a braid manufacturer; Ollagnier, a wine merchant; and Loubet, Chanson, Payre, and Veyre, "simple workers living with much difficulty from the product of their work."^[10] Some industrial workers no doubt numbered among the rank and file, but it is noteworthy that they provided no impetus or leadership for the club. As in Rive-de-Gier, Lyon, and Saint Etienne, radicalism came, not from industrial workers, but from artisans and small merchants.^[11]

With notable exceptions such as Agamemnon Imbert and Paul Bergé, bourgeois industrialists in Saint Chamond did not share the republican sentiments developing among workers. Indeed, the growing republicanism deepened bourgeois commitment to the regime of Napoleon III. As believers in authoritarian government, these industrialists did not welcome the reforms for a more liberal constitution in 1860. As devout Catholics, they were offended by Napoleon III's support for Italian independence and the partial annexation of the papal states to the kingdom of Italy. Yet they clearly preferred the relatively authoritarian imperial government to any republican alternative.^[12]

In this posture, the industrial bourgeoisie of Saint Chamond diverged from its counterpart in Saint Etienne, who helped mobilize republican opposition to the government. There industrialists opposed

economic measures the government had taken, particularly the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 establishing free trade with England. Republican opposition among the industrialists, moreover, provided leadership and impetus for a working-class republicanism that eventually turned against the middle class.^[13] The industrialists of Saint Chamond, however, supported most of the government's economic policies. The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty had been a boon to braid makers. The metallurgical firms were large enough to escape its negative impacts. The Petin and Gaudet Company indeed owed its growth and prosperity to government orders. They no doubt also felt a personal loyalty to the emperor, for he had awarded them the medal of the Legion of Honor. Profit from economic policies and abhorrence for republicanism thus inspired the Saint-Chamonais Catholic, monarchist elite to continue its support for the Empire during its liberal phase in the 1860s.^[14] In the plebiscite of May 1870, 60 percent of the voters in Saint Chamond endorsed the Empire. This vote, which was essentially a vote in favor of order and in opposition to republicanism, demonstrated that the city's conservative and reactionary elite still held a good deal of influence over voters. In contrast, voters in Saint Etienne and Le Chambon-Feugerolles overwhelmingly rejected the Empire.^[15]

The Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Second Empire, however, jolted the Legitimist elite from its monopoly of power in Saint Chamond and brought republicans into the municipal government. As soon as Napoleon III met with humiliating defeat in September 1870, the Cercle des Travailleurs quickly mobilized itself, presented candidates for the municipal council, and spread electoral propaganda among workers. The members of the new municipal council constituted on 24 September 1870 came from this group, including Deschamps, Deigas, Chanson, Gauthier, Jamet, Loubet, Payre, Pouget, Veyre, and Imbert.^[16] These elections and subsequent prefectoral action deprived Catholic monarchists of control over Saint Chamond and unseated such figures as Emile Alamagny, Irenée Brun, Dugas-Vialis, Victor Louis Finaz, Henri Neyrand, Louis Zavier Pascal, Ennemond Richard, and Henri Thiollière.^[17]

In contrast to workers in Rive-de-Gier, Saint Etienne, and Lyon, radical republicans in Saint Chamond remained relatively moderate. The Paris insurrection that began on 18 March 1871 sparked

militant activity in these other cities, and workers in Saint Etienne and Lyon even established communes. The Saint Chamond municipal council contented itself with making an official commitment to republicanism. On 4 April 1871 it sent an address to the National Assembly expressing fear that this body was preparing "a restoration of the monarchy," which the country did not want. "The Republic is above all discussion, above universal suffrage itself. No one has the right to alienate his liberty, still less that of his descendants."^[18]

But the appointed mayor, Deschamps, soon alienated a substantial number of Saint-Chamonais over issues other than republicanism. Legend has it that upon entering the city hall he put a symbolic end to the Empire by throwing the bust of Napoleon III out the window. More offensive to the Saint-Chamonais was his anticlericalism and that of his colleague, César Pouget, an "enemy of priests and religion." The latter appointed himself cantonal delegate of primary instruction and laicized Saint Chamond's communal schools. To this measure Saint Chamond's Catholics responded with substantial enough donations to reestablish the teaching congregations. In May, the clergy still received nearly three-fourths of the city's 1,047 children.^[19] Even if the majority of Saint-Chamonais parted company from the monarchist elite in their support of republicanism, anticlericalism turned many against the municipality. In the same month, conservative former mayor Jules Duclos was returned to the office by proclamation.^[20] The issue of anticlericalism confused republican sentiment in Saint Chamond, as it would on many future occasions.

Through most of 1873, the members of the Cercle des Travailleurs numbered about 200 and remained well organized. According to the police, they propagated "doctrines of the commune" and "spread revolutionary electoral propaganda" among workers in Saint Chamond and the surrounding region. Apart from promoting anticlericalism, it seems their main preoccupation was to prevent monarchists from regaining power. In any case, this group forced a political realignment in the city. In response to their activity, 148 middle-class conservative republicans established a Cercle de l'Industrie et du Commerce in January 1872. In the previous elections to the General Council, the conservative candidate had backed down in favor of the Legitimist, but the latter lost to the

radical republican. The moderate republicans thus realized that they had to organize their own political group to combat the "radical democracy which grows worse every day in the spirit of the worker population."^[21] In requesting from the prefect the requisite official sanction, both the mayor, Jules Duclos, and the police commissioner stressed that this group included only "men of order and honor." Even though it was illegal for cercles to discuss politics or religion, both the mayor, himself a member of the club, and the commissioner emphasized that the club should be sanctioned despite its political intent, for it would help to establish social peace in Saint Chamond.^[22]

Industrialists, entrepreneurs, businessmen, merchants, and master workers composed the club's membership. Among them numbered several braid manufacturers—including Emile Alamagny as president and Benoît Oriol—numerous dye masters, and forge master Chavanne-Brun. In their paternalism, Catholicism, and fear of democracy, these conservative republicans shared much with the Legitimists. Indeed, radical republican César Pouget said of Alamagny that he would give "100,000 francs to be … received in the great Legitimist families."^[23] They differed principally in their social origins and in their reluctant but pragmatic acceptance of republicanism. It was through pressure from this group that the prefect finally dissolved the Cercle des Travailleurs in August 1873, for violating the law against political activity, the same law the Cercle de l'Industrie itself broke with sanction from the police, prefect, and mayor.^[24]

The dissolution of the radical republican group in Saint Chamond came at a time when monarchists on both the national and local level had begun to regain power and establish the "moral order," the conservative reply to the "sins" of the Paris Commune. This label refers specifically to the period beginning with MacMahon's replacement of Thiers as chief executive in May 1873 and extending to the legislative elections of October 1877. During these years proclerical monarchists dominated the National Assembly. The humiliating defeat to the Prussians made them believe that France had become sinful and frivolous, diseased by the virus of freethinking and irreligion. Concrete manifestations of their sentiments abounded. It was during these years that Albert de Mun

attempted to address the problems of industrialization with the establishment of Social Catholic institutions meant to moralize both workers and employers.^[25] Paris built its Sacré Coeur to atone for its sins; Lyon, Limoges, and many other cities erected comparable structures.

Saint Chamond rebuilt its beloved Notre Dame, and Neyrand and Thiollière founded their cercles catholiques . Social Catholicism established itself in this city with some degree of coercion. One resident wrote that "since the foundation of the cercle catholique our city is turned upside down and we no longer understand what is happening." "The Jesuits" apparently forced people to join, threatening them with a fall from grace if they did not. Marists and Brothers of the Christian Doctrine supported the cercle , but some of the parish priests opposed it and were forced to leave.^[26]

Employers in Saint Chamond established other social, economic, and political institutions which manifested their solidarity. Their spirit of cooperation is best symbolized in the Association of Catholic Employers formed sometime in the 1870s. The twenty-two founding members included Adrien de Montgolfier; braid manufacturers Gabriel, Florian, and Jules Balas, François Gillet, and Léon Chaland; forge masters Camille Thiollière and Charles, Eugène, and André Neyrand; notables Charles de Boissieu and Victor, René, and Louis Finaz; and eight other industrialists and notables. In addition to the founders, the association numbered more than one hundred members, most of whom were small-scale employers and shopkeepers, although other major industrialists in addition to the founders also joined. Among them, for example, were Irenée Brun and his sons, whose factories in and around Saint Chamond employed nearly a thousand workers.^[27]

No institution could better represent the spirit of cooperation between the old elite and the new. The association's ostensible purpose was "to find all the possible means for supporting and fostering small local commerce" and "to cooperate in the professional prosperity of other members … by according them preference [in] purchases and orders." Their pretext for such cooperation lay in their fear that the "enemies of the church" were trying to "destroy the influence of Catholics by impoverishing them and by closing their activity to all the roads that lead to an independent situation."^[28]

As we have already seen, they had as another purpose to wean their workers away from republicanism by reinforcing their Catholicism.

The Catholic elite also organized itself politically. In 1873 Victor Louis Finaz formed a Catholic Committee or monarchist-clerical party which included some of the most important industrialists in the Stéphanois, such as Charles Neyrand, Camille Thiollière, Hippolyte Petin, and forge master J. Euverte from Rive-de-Gier.^[29] Adrien de Montgolfier proved to be the most important and most influential figure among them. In 1874, at age forty-three, Montgolfier assumed the directorship of the Petin-Gaudet forges, the Aciéries de la Marine et des Chemins de Fer. Prior to his takeover of the steelworks, he had served as chief engineer of roads and bridges, as cantonal delegate of instruction, and since 1871, as a monarchist deputy to the National Assembly.^[30] It is ironic that for nearly forty years the very defense of the Republic rested in part on a company whose director vehemently opposed republicanism. In his own mind, of course, Montgolfier was helping to defend the nation, not the government which he detested. The military importance of the steelworks combined with Montgolfier's own political shrewdness gave him considerable influence in Paris, which in turn brought him renown and brought economic profit to Saint Chamond.

In the discourse of the Catholic Committee one can detect its fundamental principles: Christian morality and economic liberty. Each had to be defended against the anticlericalism and political liberalism of the fledgling Third Republic. These industrial monarchists feared that universal suffrage would result in legislation that would compromise the freedom of the marketplace. Charles Neyrand's statement during the 1876 legislative elections looked to an authoritarian government to assure the preservation of these two principles:

I will defend religion against the attacks that revolutionary atheism and this so-called liberal hypocrisy are preparing to wage against it. I will defend property against the endeavors of dangerous utopians who, under the pretext of distributing equitably the burdens on each and every one of us, will fatally arrive, by the theory of progressive taxation, at the absolute negation of the right of ownership and, in so doing, will ruin private and public fortune.^[31]

In the years following the formation of the Catholic Committee, many of its members and their sympathizers regained power. Notable Claude de Boissieu became mayor in 1874, and Henri Neyrand, Victor Louis Finaz, Camille Thiollière, and the director of the Company of Mines, de Beauvais, all served on the municipal council.^[32] Shortly after they returned to power, a return sanctioned by the national atmosphere of "moral order," they witnessed a degree of class conflict hitherto unknown in their once peaceful community.

Workers in Saint Chamond had lost their political power base through the dissolution of the Cercles des Travailleurs and the ousting of radical republicans from the municipality. But the republican and communard ideology had changed their view of employers and had made it impossible for politically conscious workers to embrace the same moral vision. For the first time since 1869, strikes broke out in 1875. Dye workers, who had replaced ribbon weavers as the largest male occupational group in textiles, fought for their autonomy and independence. In May 1875, almost all the city's 500 dyers went on strike to reduce the length of the workday. They also agitated for the right to name their own foremen, directly challenging the authority of employers. In the employers' view, each concession would only result in further demands. They were willing to concede the reduction in the workday, but only on the condition of a promise to stay overtime when necessary. The dye workers reluctantly agreed to accept overtime work with bonuses. Although the strike ended peacefully, the police commissioner warned that dye workers expressed "extreme jealousy" for the wealth of others and a "profound hatred of the rich." Significantly, more than half of the dye masters against whom workers struck belonged to the conservative Cercle de l'Industrie et du Commerce.^[33]

Employers could not rest easy with the strikers' success, particularly because it had challenged their authority over workers. In an effort to reinforce deference and discipline, the Richard and Puthod dyeworks posted a warning that any insult, disobedience, or unauthorized absence gave the foreman the right to fire workers. The dyers took this notice as a violation of their liberty and an insult to their dignity. In a clear assertion of their moral independence, 200 walked out. The strike ended quickly with a compromise.

Employers established more equitable guidelines for the dismissal of workers; the latter had to pledge that they would in the future give three days' notice prior to any work stoppage, in order to avoid damaging the silks.^[34]

Insubordination then spread to the metal industry. The following month, June of 1875, 286 of the 1,600 workers in Montgolfier's steelworks, the Aciéries de la Marine, protested the temporary elimination of the night shift because it meant the layoff of nearly 50 percent of the plant's work force. The protesters would accept a reduction of hours so that layoffs could be avoided. They circulated petitions in the workshops of smaller forges throughout the city, hoping to set off a major strike. Unable to believe that his workers could be at once so disloyal and so well organized, Montgolfier assumed that outside agitators had instigated the movement. In the end he succeeded in thwarting the strike, in part because he had more than the police behind him. Since the production of cannons for the military was at stake, concern over this possible strike extended well beyond Saint Chamond. The central government prepared the army to intervene, a measure that ended the movement.^[35]

The strike and strike threats of 1875 were followed by legislative elections in 1876 that eroded Legitimist power in Saint Chamond. The Catholic Committee mobilized all its resources for this election. Montgolfier, who became a senator after the passage of the Wallon Amendment of 1875, used his power and prestige to back monarchist candidates, particularly Charles Neyrand. Neyrand posed a serious threat to the republicans, for as a leading industrialist and member of a long-established family in the region he enjoyed widespread popularity.^[36] The republican newspaper did what it could to undermine him: "You disguise your clerical and Legitimist opinions under an insipid phraseology; your manner of walking like a common man, your patois, the social and democratic pipe that you smoke incessantly in the street, fool no one, for each knows that under this appearance [of simplicity] hides a zealous, intolerant, ruthless reactionary."^[37] Neyrand lost to the radical republican candidate Richarme by a wide margin in the arrondissement of Saint Etienne. Although Saint Chamond gave a higher portion of its votes to Neyrand than did any other canton—even the previously reactionary rural ones—it too favored Richarme with 58 percent of the vote.^[38]

Local conservatives suffered further setbacks after President MacMahon's ill-fated coup of seize mai in 1877. Part of MacMahon's effort to manipulate the legislative elections had consisted of ordering prefects to revoke republican mayors and municipal council members. In this same year, the paternalist and Catholic braid manufacturer Benoît Oriol had been elected mayor. Despite his very conservative republicanism, the prefect dissolved the entire municipal council on 24 August, replacing Oriol with the former mayor, Legitimist Claude de Boissieu. The usual Legitimists returned to the council. But this tampering with the municipal government had unfortunate consequences for conservatives and reactionaries after the ultimate republican victory over MacMahon. Saint Chamond responded to the coup in the same manner as most of France, giving 66 percent of its votes to the republican candidate in the legislative elections of October 1877. The city elected into office a municipal council and a mayor, Marius Chavanne, who proved sympathetic to the labor movement.^[39]

The new municipal government elected early in 1878 overtly encouraged workers to organize and gave particular inspiration to dye workers. The police complained that Marius Chavanne granted "official consecration" to militant speakers by permitting them to use municipal halls for their speeches.^[40] Workers took advantage of this support. In the summer of 1878 dye workers once again went on strike, this time demanding standardized pay and pay raises for both skilled and unskilled workers. In violation of the pledge they had made in 1875, the dyers gave no notice of their work stoppage, and at 2 o'clock in the afternoon quit the dyeworks, leaving silk in acid baths. The prolonged soaking in acid resulted in an alleged 100,000 franc loss for the owners of the dyeworks.^[41]

As 400 workers in Saint Chamond and 300 in the neighboring communes of Izieux, Saint-Martin-en-Coallieux, and Lavalla joined the strike, dyeworks shut down completely; their closure in turn interfered with ribbon, braid, and silk fabric production. Mayor Chavanne had already incurred the anger of police and employers by leaving the city to take a water cure just as the strike broke out. Far more serious were the allegations that his adjunct, Claude Raymond, had been the principal organizer of the strike. A former master dye worker himself, Raymond not only supported the strike but referred to employers (his former competitors) as exploiters

and encouraged workers to leave the silk in the acid baths.^[42] Class consciousness became more pronounced as dye workers appealed for assistance from Lyon. The Trade Union Committee of Dye Workers wrote that they waged their strike "in the name of the social principles and of solidarity. … We can finish this battle victoriously with the cooperation of all the colleagues and citizens guided by fraternal love which must make us succeed in the liberation of the proletariat."^[43]

This strike had a massive and unforgettable impact on Saint Chamond when female braid makers joined the dyers; nearly 5,000 workers in and around the city stopped working. Yet these numbers are deceptive. A coalition between dye workers and braid makers might have been a powerful weapon against the employer class, not only because dyeing was a "collaborator with weaving in the silk industry" but because members of the same family often worked in the two branches of the industry, which might have facilitated organization and strengthened solidarity among workers. Police indeed referred to an "alliance" between those two groups of workers in 1878.^[44] The respective strikes had no direct relationship, however. Dyers neither encouraged nor helped braid makers. Instead, a certain Mlle Finet from Lyon, a "habitual orator on women's rights," gave a speech in Saint Chamond that provoked braid makers to leave their work.^[45] The ability of this feminist, an étrangère no less, to inspire a strike testifies to the double exploitation braid makers felt as workers and as women. But even before the 300 women in the Oriol and Alamagny factory threatened to stop working, Oriol engineered an agreement with the other braid manufacturers to close all the factories if a strike began in one of them. It was the shutdown, not the strike, that put 4,200 women out of work. It also locked a substantial proportion of them out of factory dormitories and virtually threw them into the streets.^[46]

In contrast to the dye workers' month-long effort, the women stayed away from the factories for only one week. Their employers made no concessions. But the dye workers' strike failed completely as well. Rather than giving workers the advantage, the occupational structure in Saint Chamond may have helped to prevent their success. The interdependency of dyeworks and braiding gave employers, rather than workers, the advantage in quelling strikes. To the extent that dye workers themselves depended on women's

industrial employment, they would suffer if their wives and daughters went on strike. The double interdependency of male and female workers on the one hand and the braid industry and dyeworks on the other may have hastened the failure of both strikes in 1878.

Industrialists in Saint Chamond thus succeeded in resisting the strikers' demands despite support from the municipality for the dye workers. Indeed, the radicalism of Marius Chavanne played an important role in forging a common front between dye masters and braid manufacturers. Chavanne nonetheless continued to assist workers in organizing. In 1880, the municipal council gave metal workers the use of the town theater to establish a union; they met two or three times with a delegate from the workers' congress of Lyon. Despite this municipal support, the meetings attracted the interest of only about six metal workers, a clear sign that they did not yet have the basis for a sustained labor movement.^[47]

In 1881, Chavanne, like his predecessor Deschamps ten years earlier, incurred further animosity when he suppressed congregational schools. The monarchists finally succeeded in ousting him from the municipal government in 1882 when the deputy mayor and secretary were discovered to have embezzled money from the city. Adjunct Paul Bergé, a braid manufacturer, radical republican, and former member of the Cercle des Travailleurs, served as mayor for about two years. But in 1884, Benoît Oriol, whose Catholicism carried more weight than his conservative republicanism, returned to office as mayor.^[48]

The labor movement and working-class politics in Saint Chamond suffered serious setbacks in the 1880s. Not only did workers lose municipal support but they suffered a severe economic crisis which undermined their leverage with employers. At the same time, monarchists regained influence, particularly through the divisive issue of clericalism. The economic difficulties primarily hit the metallurgical industry and thus affected a majority of the adult male workers. The crisis stemmed from the implementation of the Thomas-Gilchrist process, first developed in 1878. Until that time only choice minerals could be used for cast iron in steel production. This new process permitted the use of lower-quality minerals. Prices plummeted. This major innovation also came just when the demand for steel rails dropped. Annual steel production in the

Loire suddenly fell by 60,000 tons. Some of the steelworks were forced to close completely; others moved. The number of workers in neighboring Terrenoire dropped from 14,000 to 6,000.^[49]

In part because it had government contracts, but also because of skilled direction, the Saint Chamond steel industry survived this crisis relatively intact. Montgolfier's Aciéries de la Marine, for example, converted to the production of fine steel and developed new specialties.^[50] Nonetheless, the 1880s required considerable adjustment that resulted in high levels of unemployment and worker-employer tension. Two days before Christmas in 1882, management at the Aciéries de la Marine informed workers that 80 to 100 of them would be dismissed at the end of the month. The company claimed the layoffs resulted from a decline in orders. In fact, they had just received a substantial order for cannons from the Mexican government. Their true purpose was to eliminate the night shift because maintenance of certain equipment and the detection of malfunctioning during the night hours had become too difficult.^[51]

Within a few months the company again used the excuse of a slowdown in orders to change from day wages to piecework for turners and molders. The latter found piecework particularly onerous and unjust. The issue was not simply that they would earn less but that they lost control over their work. With piecework, the company paid workers for every 100 kilograms fabricated. But if a cast mold did not succeed, workers would receive nothing for a month's work unless the company guaranteed them a minimum salary. One hundred molders and turners went on strike in June and July 1883, when the company agreed only to guarantee 35 percent of the daily wage instead of the requested 90 percent. Montgolfier expressed astonishment, for he believed that piecework would profit workers. "All they need do is work a little harder," he protested, "and they will be able to earn as much!" The strikers responded that they already produced as much as they possibly could, and piecework would result in reduced wages. The strike spread to the Neyrand and Thiollière factories in L'Horme.^[52]

After two weeks, only four workers returned to Montgolfier's plant, and the company fired the rest of the strikers.^[53] As the workers petitioned unions and individuals in the community for funds, the dispute became more political. In August, a meeting to benefit the strikers drew 225 people. Jean Ablemanc of the National Committee

of Paris "preached socialism" to the group. Five months later, in January 1884, 400 people attended another benefit lecture over which former mayor Marius Chavanne presided. The lecture addressed "the social question."^[54]

Despite this prolonged strike activity and its clear impact on worker consciousness in Saint Chamond, with the help of the economic crisis in the early 1880s and a more conservative atmosphere nationally, reactionary employers regained their political influence. In the elections of October 1885, conservatives throughout France and in the Loire made substantial gains. Three parties presented candidates in the Loire. The Union Républicaine, also called the Alliance Républicaine, consisted of opportunist moderate republicans. Representing the extreme left were the radical-socialists, who included some anarchists and enjoyed substantial support in Saint Etienne. The monarchist party had two elements: families from the old nobility with wealth based in agriculture, considered to be pure monarchists, and newer industrialists, who opposed republicanism but promised to uphold the constitution. The monarchists' final electoral list which, after much deliberation, favored the industrial group included Charles Neyrand, Petin, and Euverte. The prefect predicted that despite the great popularity of these paternalist forge masters, the monarchist list would place third in the arrondissement of Saint Etienne because it lacked support among the workers.^[55]

To the prefect's surprise, the radical-socialists lost miserably in the first ballot, and monarchists came in a close second to the Republican alliance, a mere 1,000 votes behind. Joined by radical-socialists in the second ballot, the moderate Republican alliance won easily. But once again Saint Chamond voted more conservatively than the other Stéphanois cities and gave the republicans but a slim victory. Agamemnon Imbert received just 4 more votes than monarchist Neyrand; only 142 votes separated the republican candidate who came in first from the monarchist who came in last.^[56]

The monarchists owed the support they received to an issue that had come to divide France deeply in the 1880s: attacks against the church. In their campaign of 1885, conservatives focused most on the threat of anticlericalism. Once again, the attitude of the Saint-Chamonais toward congregations served as a bellwether for their politics. Even though they favored the Republic as a form of government,

the majority of residents in Saint Chamond again resisted the anticlericalism of the Third Republic. Their support for clerics became apparent, for example, in 1884, when upon becoming mayor, conservative republican Oriol circulated a petition to reestablish the religious schools and gained the signatures of Saint-Chamonais in every neighborhood, occupation, and social class. The religious schools continued to teach classes with the support of 80 percent of the pupils and their families.^[57]

The monarchists exploited this proclerical sentiment in joining with clergy and waging what the prefect later called a "dirty campaign." In their sermons and instruction—even in the confessional—priests attempted to manipulate votes. The special police commissioner reported to the minister of the interior that priests were telling their parishioners to "pray for this poor France which agonizes … that these sectarians will be ruined. [Pray] for this poor France from which God and his ministers are chased and [pray] in the churches where soon praying will no longer be permitted." The commissioner pointed out that this was being said in every commune. "When the priest does not say it from the pulpit," he continued, "he whispers it in the ear of his penitents."^[58] The curé of Saint Pierre, Father Bouvard, had a reputation for prudence and moderation. But even he exhorted his faithful to pray that the next elections would result in the "greatest good for France."^[59] He had no need to tell his parishioners directly that the greatest good for France would be an end to the anticlerical Third Republic.

Exploiting working-class material insecurity, reactionary industrialists added to this spiritual blackmail a more worldly one. Neyrand in particular was accused of bribing workers to vote for the reactionary party and to convince their friends to do so as well. Reactionaries paid their workers to distribute ballots with the conservative list in cafés and to convince their friends that if Neyrand, Euverte, and Petin did not win, the factories would close.^[60] Their argument had particular potency for workers during this period of crisis and adjustment in the steel industry. Unemployment remained high, and much of the steel work depended upon government contracts.

During the 1885 electoral campaign, the conservative municipality provided aid for unemployed workers. The hospice, run by the same people who dominated the municipal council, spent

18,000 francs to help those out of work.^[61] Monarchists and moderate republicans sat on the administrative commission and decided to support unemployed workers. They joined hands in acknowledging that charity was better than socialism. This aid began seven months prior to the legislative elections.

Though the majority of Saint-Chamonais voted republican in the legislative elections of 1887 and 1888, material assistance from the municipality apparently influenced voters to continue supporting conservatives and monarchists, for they persisted in electing them to the municipal council. Paternalist, reactionary industrialists Eugène Neyrand, Louis Jury, and Jean Pascal received the most votes and shared power on the council only with weak republicans such as Vial and Fabreguettes. The one known radical republican whose name appeared on the list of council members in 1888, Rochefort, garnered the fewest votes.^[62] The composition of the municipal government between 1878 and 1882 had clearly been important to workers' efforts at gaining independence from their employers. Thanks in part to the unfortunate corruption of Chavanne and his cohorts, that influence became extinct in the early 1880s—just when steel workers most needed support.

However workers in Saint Chamond felt about charitable assistance, its availability eroded the basis for independent associational activity. Socialists in Saint Etienne, for example, had, with good reason, come to be suspicious of public aid as they witnessed ribbon weavers "suffer in silence and count on public aid to help them." Ribbon weavers in that city remained moderate in their republicanism and avoided radical politics.^[63] Why should workers form a union and pay the monthly dues of one franc—which might or might not give them assistance in times of sickness or need—when employers, the municipality, Saint Vincent de Paul, and the Sisters of Saint Charles already provided that protection?

Only in the 1890s did trade unions form in Saint Chamond and begin to offer some of the same protection employers, the municipality, and the church had long been providing for workers. Beginning with miners in November 1889, by the end of 1893 dye workers, elastic weavers, masons, and metal workers had all formed unions. By January 1894, a total of 505 men had unionized and had collected funds amounting to 3,139 francs.^[64] This number comprised 7.8 percent of the employed population and roughly 12.6

percent of the employed men.^[65] Though still a small fraction of the workers in Saint Chamond, this percentage constitutes a rate far higher than the French average for mining, metallurgy, textiles, and construction for the years 1884–1897.^[66]

Workers who unionized not only exerted independence from their employers but became radical in their politics. All the unions that formed in Saint Chamond at this time allocated funds for general expenses to maintain the organization itself as well as to aid sick or needy members, providing a chance for workers to become independent of employer-sponsored mutual aid funds. Just as significant, they allocated a portion of their funds for support of strikes outside their own occupations. Though it numbered only eighty members, the molders' and modelers' union collected the largest amount, 1,140 francs, some of which they sent to metal workers in Rive-de-Gier and to glassmakers in Saint Etienne.^[67] The existence of this syndicat caused further hand-wringing on the part of the Saint Chamond police commissioner, who noted that most of the unionized molders and modelers from the Aciéries de la Marine professed "revolutionary socialist opinions," while others identified themselves as anarchists.^[68]

The revolutionary socialism of the molders and modelers and their example of having obtained a ten-hour day inspired the formation of a union among other metal workers in Saint Chamond. The Saint Etienne Bourse du Travail quickly provided assistance. The union of metal workers in turn professed "very advanced socialist opinions in the meetings of their corporation" and regularly engaged in political activity, especially during municipal or legislative elections. They too supported strikes outside Saint Chamond.^[69]

Other unions in Saint Chamond also provided generous support to striking workers elsewhere. Masons and miners sent funds to metal workers in Rive-de-Gier, stonecutters in Dijon, glove makers in Nantes, and miners in Saint Florine (Haute-Loire). These unions, the police commissioner noted, also exhibited "overt participation in politics."^[70]

Despite their identification with workers outside their own trades and outside their city, the Saint-Chamonais commitment to the labor movement had limits. Two key meetings took place in January 1893, with molders providing the nucleus. Simmonet, a representative

from the Fédération des Chambres Syndicales Métallurgiques de France in Paris, came to urge the Saint Chamond metal workers' unions to federate; representatives from Saint Etienne and Rive-de-Gier came as well, to plead for support for striking metal workers in the latter city. The molders of Saint Chamond considered a sympathy strike but decided against it. They did, however, donate 171f70 to support the Rive-de-Gier strikers. The following week 120 metal workers attended a meeting with union representatives from Saint Etienne. Once again, they gave money at the door to support their colleagues in Rive-de-Gier but exhibited reluctance to federate, apparently because they perceived the leaders as ambitious politicians and distrusted them.^[71]

But these workers showed more commitment in their own political activity. Metal workers, all employees of the Aciéries de la Marine, headed the socialist committee in Saint Chamond, which met regularly at the Rouchouse café. They in turn established Cercles d'Etudes Sociales to educate workers even though, according to the police, none of the founders themselves had any education. A group of anarchists also became visible during the 1890s. About 200 of them existed in the arrondissement of Saint Etienne, half of them in the city itself. The police considered only about 40 to be "dangerous" and worth spying on.^[72] Saint Chamond's police commissioner felt differently about the anarchists in his own jurisdiction. They met regularly at two cafés, and even though they caused almost no overt trouble they inspired the commissioner to make repeated requests for more police agents. The six agents in Saint Chamond had to oversee a population of 23,000 in the entire canton, which included, the commissioner claimed, around 80 anarchists. The commissioner's anxiety portrays a situation opposite to the one described by local author Fournier, who boasted, "Without any complaints, anger, fights … the four police agents did not know what to do with their time."^[73]

This apparently sudden radicalization among many Saint-Chamonais coincided with the growth of socialist and anarchist movements throughout France in the 1890s. Militancy in this city indeed pales in comparison with that in some other industrial cities such as Limoges and Saint Etienne.^[74] But a number of events occurred during these years that suggested, either through direct resistance or by symbolic gestures, that a critical mass among Saint

Chamond's working class rejected the moral and material hegemony the monarchist and republican bourgeois elite tried to exercise over it. Small gestures, insignificant by themselves, occurred with increasing frequency. Although most political groups in Saint Chamond mourned the assassination of President Sadi Carnot, certain elements, anarchists being among the prime suspects, tried to make a hero of his murderer, Sante Caserio. In July 1894, the month following Carnot's death, during a Bastille Day celebration a small group sang a song claiming Caserio would be avenged; during the most important celebration in Saint Chamond the following September, a woman wanted to display a wax figure of the assassin.^[75]

Irreverence extended even into the hospice in the late 1880s and through the 1890s. Nuns reported that insubordination began to increase after—and apparently in reaction to—conservative success in the municipal elections of 1888. Both the young in the orphanage and the old in the home for the aged exhibited disobedience and impiety on numerous occasions. The men became drunk more frequently and their Thursday outings had to be suppressed for eight months. Children became so disrespectful and undisciplined that the nuns had to be replaced with male lay teachers. The administrative commission had to take several measures to increase internal security. In order to make supervision more effective, they decided to keep all but one of the doors locked at all times and to place a guard at the unlocked one.^[76]

In the 1890s women, more than any other group, exhibited "complaints, anger, fights." They were the only workers to go on strike. Their strikes have interest not only for the momentary assertiveness they reveal but because they demonstrate clearly the limits of male support among workers as well as among the paternalist employers. At issue was a cutback in working hours and thus a decline in wages. In August and September 1890, the Balas, Brun-Jury, and Castel-Patisseur braid firms reduced the workday by 25 percent, from 11.5 hours to 8.5 hours. They reduced wages by 10 percent. The workers preferred the longer days at their previous wages. Close to 400 women in these three firms went on strike, but after a few days they returned under the employers' conditions.^[77] A year later the Brun-Jury firm reduced wages a further 20 percent, and the Levy company followed suit. One of the workers wrote to

the prefect, "It's shameful on the part of [employers] who earn millions because of female workers. They recently bought more properties in the Midi as large as the city of Saint Chamond. What are they lacking? They want workers to be their slaves."^[78] Braid makers struck in both firms, but once again they returned without concessions and accepted the 20 percent reduction in their wages.^[79]

In 1893, 300 workers from these same firms went on strike when employers reduced the workday further by one half-hour and lowered daily wages from 1f80 to 1f70. The law of 2 November 1892 pressed employers to take this action. It required a break of one hour instead of one half-hour. Until then, the women worked at two 8 ½-hour shifts, one from 4 A.M. to 1 P.M. and the other from 1 P.M. to 10 P.M. Manufacturers could not accommodate the added half-hour break because the law also prohibited women from working after 10 P.M. or before 4 A.M. The strikers submitted a petition to the police commissioner requesting that the law be interpreted more liberally in their case, and that they continue their previous work schedule with one half-hour break. The petition stressed that the old schedule permitted them to combine wage-earning with housekeeping and mothering.^[80]

As these women confronted the employers, they also became their pawns. Manufacturers had a keen interest in preserving the two 8 ½-hour shifts; returning to a single 11-hour-day shift would have been their only alternative, and with that they would have lost four hours of production. The police stressed that in their own opposition to the law of 2 November 1892, manufacturers had deliberately pushed workers to strike. Levy had reportedly prompted his headmistress to organize the strike in his factory. The police affirmed that employers had themselves prepared the workers' petition. Indeed, with refined language, this petition deferentially and compassionately referred to the impossible situation in which foreign competition had placed the women's bosses. But its intent did represent workers' interest, and 200 braid makers converged on the police station to sign it. In the end, the braid manufacturers agreed to comply with the law, and the striking workers had no choice but to return to the factories at 10 centimes less per day.^[81] Although they were ever willing to send funds to workers outside Saint Chamond, established unions there gave no assistance to the locally striking braid makers.

A further incident involving braid makers illustrates the limits of any moral hegemony the industrial and Catholic elite had tried to extend over workers. In October 1895, in the Levy braid factory, three female workers raped a fifteen-year-old girl with a loom spindle while fifty others looked on with amusement. Her youth, physical attractiveness, naiveté, and virginity had reportedly inspired jealousy and malice on the part of others.^[82] This incident caused turmoil far beyond the factory and produced descriptions of common morality in Saint Chamond found nowhere else. The radical press in Saint Etienne, L'Eclaireur , exploited the incident as an occasion to expose industrialists' mismanagement of the workplace and to decry the miserable situation in which factory work had placed women. The press also revealed in no uncertain terms their own views toward these workers. L'Eclaireur referred to the women as "female animals" and as "unfortunates who seek pleasurable satisfactions among themselves because men are a minority in Saint Chamond." The article continued:

It is well known that in Saint Chamond the braid factories are not convents, and the workers are not even half-virgin. … In their excess of nymphomania, the workers go to the point of using their spindles and other implements. … The worst practices are common among these poor, veritably possessed girls. … This is a dreadful sickness which can easily be remedied by facilitating early marriage.^[83]

The account implied that this incident, far from being isolated, resulted from sexual excess among the women. The incident itself and its depiction in the newspapers suggest that the Association of Catholic Employers had failed in their efforts to moralize workers. As a Jewish employer, Levy did not participate in Social Catholicism, but the newspaper attack generalized the "woman problem" to all of Saint Chamond's young female workers. The braid manufacturers united against the slander in L'Eclaireur and eventually avenged themselves. The newspaper described the incident in such explicit detail that the braid manufacturers successfully sued the editors for publishing pornography. The latter had to pay a fine of 50 francs. The three attackers received five-month prison sentences which were later reduced to three months.^[84]

The formation of workers' unions, the growing visibility of socialists and anarchists, the braid makers' strikes, and other gestures of insubordination occurred during years of economic crisis

that reached a peak in 1894. Foreign competition forced cutbacks in braid production, which, along with a crisis in the Saint Etienne ribbon industry, caused slowdowns in the dyeworks. By February 1894, dyers worked only five days per week.^[85] All the industries, but especially metalwoks and braid factories, had to lay off an increasing number of workers through the year. Between May and July, the Aciéries de la Marine had to lay off 262 men. During these months the number of people who registered themselves at the bureau de bienfaisance increased daily.^[86]

This time the economic crisis did not strengthen the old authority of the Catholic party as it had done in the 1880s. Monarchists ceased to dominate the municipal council, and instead bourgeois moderate republicans assumed control. In 1893, for the first time, the council included at least one worker: Lerme, an officer in the metallurgists' union.^[87]

Ultimately, however, the economic crisis prevented the fledgling labor movement in Saint Chamond from gaining further strength. Dyers self-consciously curbed their union activities and their political rhetoric for "fear of reprisals."^[88] The republican municipal council, moreover, turned out to be no friend of workers. Moderate or opportunist republicans in Saint Chamond reacted to working-class militancy as they did throughout France: they became more conservative and used their power on the municipal council to thwart the labor movement. In October 1895, the municipality unanimously rejected a request from the unions in Saint Chamond for an annual subvention of 2,500 francs to support a Bourse du Travail. Four days later the unions requested a room in the municipality for socialist lectures and for their Bourse du Travail. "Tired of being accosted in the town hall every day by the politicians of socialism," opportunist Mayor Vial suggested they request a subvention to rent a room somewhere else in the city. It took almost a month for the municipal council to vote on the request, and it was unanimously rejected. In the meantime, the Cercle d'Etudes Sociales voted to censure Vial for the successive refusals and to have the censure published in the socialist newspaper Peuple de la Loire .^[89] These workers must have wished that Saint Chamond had had a socialist municipality, like those in Carmaux and Limoges, that would lend its support to workers.

Catholic monarchists experienced their own metamorphosis in

reaction to the new worker militancy. But theirs was also a response to other key events: the death in 1883 of the Comte de Chambord, pretender to the throne; the moderate path that republicanism had assumed; and the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum novarum in 1891 and Au milieu des sollicitudes in 1892. The latter encyclical called for acceptance of, or ralliement to , the Republic. Most monarchist Catholics in Saint Chamond henceforward tacitly accepted republicanism. In 1893, M. Heville, accountant for the Société Industrielle, addressed 100 members of the Catholic Committee: "True Catholics do not concern themselves with the form of government: they like a republic as much as a monarchy, but on condition that the government respects the liberty of conscience."^[90]

The other encyclical, Rerum novarum , asked that Catholics pay more active attention to the problems of the industrial working class. It generally divided conservative Catholics into two groups: "noninterventionists," who adhered to a belief in economic liberalism and charity, and "interventionists," who believed that social justice had to precede charity and that the state could be used as an "arm of progress."^[91] As industrialists, conservative Catholics in Saint Chamond fell into the former category. In keeping with their city's charitable and religious past, they viewed the spirit of Christianity and Christian charity as the only means to ameliorate the workers' lot. This position was hardly new to them. Only Catholics could resolve the "social question," Heville contended, for they alone could feel true compassion for the workers' condition.^[92] Their concern for working-class material conditions was genuine, and in addressing material needs they also attempted to address workers in a language with which they could identify. Just as they had borrowed the words of liberty and equality in the 1870s, in the 1890s they appropriated the very language of socialism to lure workers from its godless and dangerous solutions to their problems.

The discourse of the Catholic elite appeared regularly in the newspaper La Croix de Saint-Chamond , a weekly edition of the national La Croix . Begun in Saint Chamond in 1897 with considerable financial and editorial support from Charles Neyrand, the newspaper became a major organ through which the elite tried to reach workers. It self-consciously addressed them in both its contents and its price. Its circulation grew from 1,200 to 2,800 by 1902, reaching close to half of the adult population.^[93]

In addition to reporting on events and issues of concern to workers, essays appeared regularly to explain why Catholicism provided the only alternative to socialism. While allowing for the "necessary stimulus of private ownership, indispensable to the march of scientific, material, intellectual, and moral progress," Catholicism, if practiced scrupulously, would inevitably result in "the social ideal of 'every man assured bread to the end of his life.' How could a practicing Catholic excuse himself from coming to the aid of his less fortunate brothers, he to whom Jesus Christ made it a strict duty to love his neighbor as himself?"^[94] At least one article or editorial commentary in each weekly issue devoted itself to the social goals of Catholicism and to the weaknesses of socialism. One issue, for example, contained a "letter from a worker" describing how he had come to understand the iniquity of socialism. Another article portrayed a priest explaining to a worker laboring over his garden that under socialism, he would have to turn the products of his garden over to his neighbors who were too lazy to cultivate their own food. Upon this revelation, the worker ceased believing in socialist ideals and came to understand the moral: "Each time a socialist becomes a property owner, he no longer wants to share."^[95]

It is noteworthy that the Saint Chamond elite began its concerted newspaper campaign in the 1890s, when further economic crises had made socialism and anarchism so appealing to a substantial number of workers in the Stéphanois region. The Christian rhetoric accompanied further attempts to meet workers' economic needs. Louis Jury and the wives of several braid manufacturers established the Prévoyance Feminine, a mutual aid society for women workers, in 1895; in 1896, the Catholic Committee established another mutual aid society for workers, La Caisse de Famille de Notre Dame du Travail. In 1899, Montgolfier decided to have the Aciéries de la Marine, which employed 95 percent of the Saint Chamond metal workers, assume total financial responsibility for mutual aid, further undermining workers' motivation to provide independent protection for themselves. The decision "produced an excellent effect among the personnel of these establishments," who were "already animated by a better spirit than in certain other working-class towns."^[96]

Although reactionary Catholics in Saint Chamond responded to the papal encyclicals with greater solicitude toward workers and

reluctant toleration of republicanism, they did not become completely reconciled to the government of the Third Republic, particularly because it did not, in their view, permit freedom of conscience. From 1899 the attention of the Catholic party necessarily became riveted to the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet's renewed efforts to limit the power of the church.^[97] The anticlerical assault targeted the private schools of teaching congregations, an issue dear to the hearts of the Saint Chamond right wing. It was also around this cause that the right wing had always succeeded in mobilizing popular support. After the laicization of 1881, teaching congregations continued to conduct religious classes in the communal schools.^[98] However, the law of 30 October 1886 had prohibited congregations from teaching in these schools. The congregations, with the financial support of private donations, then proceeded to establish congregational schools (écoles libres ). The Catholic party collected subscriptions to open two new private schools in the parishes of Saint Pierre and Notre Dame in 1897 and 1899, respectively. Montgolfier in particular played an instrumental role in the construction of these schools.^[99]

The reactionary Catholic party also exercised their influence over instruction through the cantonal delegation, which they continued to dominate. In 1901, republicans complained that "no friend of lay education, [no] firm republicans, [no] declared enemies of the right-wing alliance" ever appeared on this list. The delegation contained only "the remains of the Oriol committee." It was thanks to their efforts that congregational schools had enjoyed considerable development.^[100]

The Waldeck-Rousseau government sought to reduce the powers of the teaching congregations further with the Associations Law of 1901. By requiring that congregations seek authorization from municipalities, the law empowered local governments to prevent them from teaching even in their own schools.^[101] Like many local governments throughout France, that of Saint Chamond had become distinctly left-wing in the municipal elections of 1900, seating five socialists. They would surely try to remove the congregations from the local private schools. But before the Associations Law passed, the Catholic Committee waged a citywide campaign to garner support for the religious congregations.^[102]

A key issue highlighted in La Croix articles and in speeches, meetings, and demonstrations was not simply the clergy's importance to instruction but, notably, the material aid they distributed. In April 1901, the Catholic Committee sponsored a lecture on "The Liberty of Association." More than one thousand voters attended the lecture, and according to La Croix the majority of them were workers. In this meeting Charles Neyrand held forth: "The religious render services freely to this immense country. If England is burdened with 250 million in poor taxes, and if France, Paris excepted, spends only 14 million on public assistance, it is because congregations supply the French state with this service. What is going to happen to the sick, the old, the orphans welcomed by these congregations?"^[103]

La Croix calculated that if the Sisters of Saint Charles did not administer the kindergarten in the parish of Saint Ennemond, the cost of its administration would rise from 3,420 francs per year to 5,920 francs. Moreover, the Dames Patronesses, who annually raised 2,300 francs for this kindergarten, would not do so if it were a lay school. Thus the kindergarten would require 4,800 francs more if the Sisters of Saint Charles could not administer it. This article pointed out that 165 children attended the kindergarten and all but 10 of them received aid in the form of food and/or clothing.^[104]

These words might appear hollow if workers did not in fact face a material plight that forced many families to rely on assistance. The election results for the General Council of the arrondissement two months later measure the impact of such arguments and indicate the degree to which this campaign stirred proclerical feeling. Anticlerical republican candidate Janon received the fewest votes, the socialist candidate came in second, and the clerical party's candidate won—a sharp reversal of the municipal elections of 1900.^[105] Saint Chamond again distinguished itself by its conservative reaction in the April-May legislative elections of 1902. Socialist Aristide Briand ran and was elected in the circumscription to which Saint Chamond belonged. But he lost by 300 votes to the clerical candidate in the city of Saint Chamond itself.^[106] Despite the militancy of the 1890s and the temporary success of the socialists, the church-state issue forced a critical portion of voters to abandon the left.

Nationally, the elections of 1902 gave the left a big victory and forced the resignation of Waldeck-Rousseau. His replacement, Emile Combes, brought further intensity to the struggle to defend teaching congregations in Saint Chamond. More anticlerical than his predecessor, Combes tried to make the Associations Law ruthless. A decree in July 1902 ordered the closure of all congregations that had not requested authorization from their municipality. The following month the Catholic Committee of Saint Chamond in just four days collected 14,000 signatures in support of the city's congregations. The meeting they held to discuss the issue attracted 4,000 to 7,000 people, an enormous number out of a population of 14,000.^[107]

Anticlericalism played a strong role in preventing the Saint-Chamonais from expressing a stronger socialist commitment. The battles between the socialists and the republicans strengthened the power of the Catholic right wing. Despite the support many workers gave to the left during the 1890s, a critical mass remained loyal to religious congregations. Workers who felt little sympathy for anticlericalism fell under right-wing influence, especially since the Catholic party argued that material assistance would end with the repression of the congregations. The anticlerical legislation after the turn of the century thus provoked a political shift in Saint Chamond that favored the reactionary elements.

As widespread support for the religious congregations breathed new life into the local right wing, the influence of unions and socialist clubs in Saint Chamond waned. A frustrated organizer complained in March 1901 that unions in Saint Chamond were "mere embryos."^[108] Union membership among metallurgists swelled to 400 when an economic crisis two months later resulted in layoffs. But just one year after the crisis, a union meeting drew only sixty people.^[109] Several strikes broke out between 1906 and 1914, especially among masons, joiners, and plasterers. Strikes also broke out in some of the newer factories—manufacturers of chains and bicycle accessories and agricultural tools. Most of these strikes were settled in favor of the workers. Those among construction workers, which occurred most frequently and spread beyond Saint Chamond to Rive-de-Gier, succeeded because workers were so unified and employers lacked any common front.^[110] But workers in the large industrial establishments such as the steelworks remained inactive.

Though workers at the Aciéries did not strike, their behavior during these years is telling. They continued to donate substantial sums of money to other strikers, especially masons. On two occasions—1906 and 1911—masons working within the Aciéries supported their striking colleagues outside the steelworks but did not join them. Once the strikes were settled in the workers' favor, masons in the steelworks requested a pay raise. These requests came independently of the metal workers' union. To reward nonunionized workers for their good behavior, the directors not only granted their request but extended a pay raise to other workers.^[111] Unionism and the left-wing politics associated with it thus lost impetus among the bulk of the industrial workers in Saint Chamond during the years prior to World War I.

From the 1860s on, strike activity, the formation of the Cercle des Travailleurs, the socialist Cercle d'Etudes Sociales, unions, and anarchist and socialist groups all indicate that workers in Saint Chamond were hardly docile recipients of material aid, Catholic instruction, and the sacraments. Indeed, workers in the newest industrial groups, metallurgy and braids, were often the most militant and highly organized. And yet, socialists did not succeed in winning consistent support, and the majority of workers remained loyal to their employers. Though militancy in Saint Chamond came primarily from skilled workers in the steel plant, most metal workers remained aloof. In his statistical analysis of the relative power of strike activity in Saint Chamond between 1880 and 1914, Michael Hanagan demonstrates that these workers had the least tendency to express grievances. Construction workers lost 22,434 workdays; textile workers, 9,669 workdays; and metal workers, only 1,986 workdays through their respective strike activities. This measure of strike intensity appears the more remarkable because construction workers comprised only about 3 percent of the male labor force in Saint Chamond, while metal workers accounted for nearly half of it.

Contrasting Saint Chamond with Rive-de-Gier and Le Chambon-Feugerolles, Hanagan stressed the important role that artisans played in the industrial labor movements of the latter two cities. The weak presence of artisans in Saint Chamond inhibited the development of an independent working-class culture. Loss of control over work and over apprenticeship, relatively lower wages resulting from less skilled work, and the difficulty of forming on-the-job

friendships explain the relatively low rate of strike activity among metal workers. The nature of the work itself and financial difficulties in sustaining union funds created overwhelming obstacles for workers in the mechanized textile and steel industries.^[112] In comparison, construction workers retained more control over their work and did succeed in creating a solidarity through their jobs. They replicated this solidarity in the community by concentrating slightly more in certain neighborhoods.

But construction workers exhibited other characteristics as well. Among those married in the 1860s, more had been born in Saint Chamond than had metal workers. Among the witnesses to births, marriages, and deaths in their families, construction workers included a larger portion of neighbors than did either textile or metal workers, which suggests that they had developed more extensive community bonds. They also tended to show more job stability than metal workers: 26.3 percent changed occupation, while 34.4 percent of the metal workers left metallurgy.^[113] Metal workers also suffered more than others from the uprootedness of migration and the decline of occupational inheritance. The consequent disappearance of patriarchal authority from the family may have made workers more vulnerable to the patriarchal and paternalistic authority within large industry.

Yet if we use these criteria to try to understand strike patterns, dye workers present an anomaly. Their work remained fairly skilled and they exhibited geographical stability, strong family ties, and a relatively high rate of occupational inheritance. Despite severe crisis years after 1878, they did not strike until after 1900. Ironically, female braid makers, who had far more obstacles to organized activity, accounted for the workdays in textiles lost to strike activity. Clearly, occupations themselves—and the family and social relations generated from them—informed worker consciousness. But occupation alone does a poor job of explaining working-class political radicalism and labor militancy, or the lack thereof.

Nor did occupation especially determine workers' material reality. The analysis of family formation in Saint Chamond demonstrates that families became smaller among all workers, and infant and child mortality did not discriminate by occupation. Similarly, the effects of ill health, disease, physical debilitation, and the sudden deaths of wage earners crossed occupations, as did the need among families to rely on private, municipal, and clerical aid.

Material reality and the acceptance of material assistance influenced worker consciousness as much as the social relations of production. It was not just the lack of cultural and economic resources but the offer of aid from employers, the church, and municipal officials that made it difficult for workers to establish their own independent mutual aid associations. This assistance militated against workers viewing employers or priests as class enemies. It also presented a further barrier to their independence in that aid was administered on the basis of personal familiarity with workers, and a degree of moral blackmail often accompanied it.

A further look at workers in one of Saint Chamond's neighborhoods, the parish of Saint Ennemond, gives us yet another portrayal of consciousness, one that falls between militancy and docility. While it had the same proportion of metal workers as other neighborhoods, Saint Ennemond housed a larger proportion of braid makers and workers in older trades: nail makers, miners, and stonecutters. Most remarkable was its residential stability in contrast to the rest of Saint Chamond: more than twice as many of its residents, including workers in the new industrial trades of steel and braid production, were natives or had lived in the city for at least twenty years prior to marriage in the 1860s. Also noteworthy about the inhabitants of this parish was the reputation they had earned for their irreverence and impiety.^[114]

Author Fournier made workers in this neighborhood the subject of his factually based novels. Central to his portrayal was their sociability and associational life, and a culture quite separate from the middle class. They drank copious amounts of wine in cafés, organized activities through their boules clubs, and engaged extensively in telling stories about themselves and previous generations of Saint-Chamonais. They expressed class-consciousness in their contempt for the bourgeois municipal council and their support for the "social and democratic Republic" and for the candidacy of Aristide Briand. The inhabitants of this neighborhood also, insofar as it was possible, rejected charity. So great was their aversion to material assistance that some of Fournier's characters literally preferred dying in the streets to entering the hospice. An informal mutual assistance through neighborly generosity permitted the inhabitants of this parish to avoid, or at least postpone, accepting aid from the dreaded hospice.^[115]

Fournier thus portrayed these workers as fiercely independent,

proud, defensive of their dignity, and conscious of themselves as a class. But this mentality never translated into confrontation or even effective political resistance. While they shunned religion, they expressed affection for the parish priest because he had genuine concern for the poor. They never uttered a negative word about the director of the forges, foremen, or engineers. Employers' treatment of workers had indeed won some degree of loyalty on their part. And if we are to believe Fournier, their love for drink diverted them from serious political activity.^[116]

Fournier wanted his fiction to recapture the authentic working-class past in Saint Chamond. Although we cannot assume that it represents reality, archival evidence supports the general thrust of his portrayal. The majority of workers in Saint Chamond did not become militant and did remain outwardly loyal to their Catholic, conservative employers. They also remained loyal to the lower clergy, even when they did not practice Catholicism. What Fournier witnessed and put into print for posterity was the independent culture of these workers—artifacts of which never became documented in archives. His portrayal provides insight into a worker independence from bourgeois hegemony—an independence that did not become translated into any enduring or systematic political opposition or militant confrontation. By his own account, paternalism from both the clergy and employers in part explains their stance. To this explanation can be added a lack of education and a sociability that actually became escapist.

Despite an independent culture among workers, factors enumerated above such as migration, the decline of occupational inheritance, barriers to the formation of independent mutual aid, the reality of material need on the part of families, and loyalty to employers and the clergy together help explain why socialists could not consolidate power once they became elected to the municipality. Hence they could not, in turn, take control over the institutions that administered so much aid—the hospice, the bureau de bienfaisance , schools, and congregations. As the history of other cities has demonstrated, such municipal control had key importance for the effectiveness of working-class institutions such as the Bourse du Travail and the labor movement in general.^[117]