12. The Problems of Unemployment and Leisure

Publicly and officially, both Popular Fronts fought not only against workers’ resistances but against licentious popular culture as well. Both leftist coalitions used their own resources and those of the state to solve what they considered the problems of unemployment and leisure. Unlike its Spanish counterpart, which was engaged in a civil war, the French Left was joined by some of its right-wing opponents who also wished to civilize, domesticate, and curb the idleness, drinking, gaming, and smoking of the workers. To replace these practices, both the French Left and Right attempted to promote new desires and new consumerist needs, while struggling against workers’ indifference to production.

In the industries examined, the French Left did put one important part of its productivist ideology into practice: employment of the jobless. As in Barcelona, the desire to share worktime was deeply rooted among many Parisian workers, who continued to initiate strikes to defend the jobs of colleagues who had been dismissed. Because of the genuinely popular effort to share employment, the payrolls of the exposition increased from 5,000 workers in December 1936 to 24,800 at the end of April 1937. Renault and the aviation firms in the Paris area added literally thousands of new workers. Despite these additions, the World’s Fair opened considerably behind schedule, productivity at Renault did not improve, and airplane production was sluggish. The Left nevertheless continued to assert that the unemployed wanted only to work. More accurately, the unemployed had less desire to labor in factories than need of jobs, or more precisely, steady incomes. Some industrialists asserted that hiring the jobless did more economic harm than good: in May 1936 the Third Employers’ Conference on Apprenticeship declared that in 1933 sugar producers had hired 4,100 unemployed workers and that their labor was characterized by low productivity, “inaptitude” for work, and high turnover.^[1] In addition, certain of the newly engaged demonstrated little “ardor for their work” and became “elements of discord and agitation in the factories.” At construction sites throughout the Paris region, workers deliberately slowed their pace as the projects approached completion in order to receive an income for a longer period. At one project, CGT delegates opposed the hiring of qualified workers from other construction sites so that their own workers could take turns sharing unemployment benefits.^[2] As in Spain, the Left’s discourse on unemployment masked the reality of a situation in which many workers, both employed and unemployed, often wanted a source of income more than they desired to produce in jobs from which they derived little satisfaction or social prestige.

Throughout the Popular Front, officials in the Ministry of Labor lamented the lack of discipline among the jobless. A naval engineer working in this ministry concluded that employed, skilled workers had a “physical endurance” and an “eagerness to work” that were “generally much greater” than those of the unemployed.^[3] On 1 July 1936 sanctions were established to encourage the unemployed to complete their reeducation.^[4] The authorities wanted to reduce the propensity of the jobless to abandon training centers in spring and summer, a phenomenon that paralleled the increase in strikes by the employed during the same seasons. The labor committee believed that “it seems absolutely necessary to have a wide range of punishments at our disposal” to reduce “indiscipline.”

Even when the unemployed completed their training, they were too few in number and the quality of their work was often deficient. According to the Comité de décentralisation industrielle, the forty-hour week had created the need for fifteen thousand additional mechanics, in part because the skilled were leaving the shop floor for desk jobs or promotions to supervisory positions.^[5] The newly trained lacked dexterity and quickness and were, of course, less familiar with machinery.^[6] Some managers claimed that the unemployed who had been retrained worked not like skilled workers but rather like the unskilled.^[7] The labor ministry admitted that even after three months of instruction, an unemployed worker was unable “to produce the same number of pieces as a skilled worker” and could continue to receive unemployment insurance.^[8] Employers and government officials alike generally considered retraining programs to be failures.

To further complicate matters, a serious struggle between employers and the CGT arose over the reeducation of the unemployed. Industrialists charged that the jobless who were being trained in the centers of the Syndicat des métaux (a CGT union) were unconcerned with productivity. Even though these workers sincerely believed that they were professionals, “they were absolutely incapable of completing their work in a normal length of time.”^[9] Therefore, they could be hired only as semiskilled personnel (ouvriers spécialisés). According to employers, the CGT school was producing fitters (ajusteurs) for aviation plants, “who are only, in truth, semiskilled (manœuvres spécialisés) whose training is relatively limited.” Industrialists criticized the government for promoting the CGT center and charged that the administration “facilitates the infiltration (noyautage) of firms by the Communist Syndicat des métaux.” Also, industrialists feared even lower productivity if the union took complete control of hiring and firing. To combat the union’s influence, employers wanted to promote their own reeducation centers and to expand them beyond the size of the CGT’s program. Employers thought that companies “should become aware of the need to favor workers” who had been retrained in their own centers.

Throughout the Popular Front the Left continued to demand the employment of the jobless not only to increase consumption but also to modernize and rationalize the infrastructure of work and leisure in Paris and its suburbs. The unions and the leftist parties lobbied for a vast campaign of public works and urbanization. The PCF called for the construction of day-care centers, stadiums, and bathing and showering facilities.^[10] It argued that projects must be built rapidly to give work to the jobless. Humanité praised the accomplishments of PCF municipalities that provided health facilities and social assistance, and it stressed Communists’ role as “doers” (réalisateurs). Syndicats, the CGT review, demanded similar types of projects, and it lauded the work of the Socialist mayor of Suresnes, Henri Sellier, who organized his municipality “rationally,” improved health and safety conditions, and built schools.^[11] In addition, Syndicats esteemed the work of Tony Garnier, the modern architect who built the city hall or, as it was called, usine municipale for the Socialist government of Boulogne-Billancourt, where Renault and other major metallurgical firms were located. Thus, unlike its Spanish counterpart, the French Left was able to realize certain reforms within the framework of capitalism and without revolution.

Leftist organizations lauded the modern and progressive urbanism that would replace old residential areas where inadequate housing and unhealthy sanitary conditions promoted high rates of tuberculosis. Humanité complained that the destruction of the traditional quartiers came “belatedly,” and the PCF newspaper desired to improve traffic circulation at the expense of the picturesque.^[12] It did not “lose hope that one day skyscrapers which could compete in height with those of New York, would be erected” in Paris. The anti-Communist Syndicats joined a dissident Communist, Boris Souvarine, who wholeheartedly endorsed Le Corbusier’s ville radieuse and wanted to update Parisian roads for automobiles.^[13] The Fédération du bâtiment (CGT) also approved Le Corbusier’s Pavilion of New Times at the World’s Fair of 1937, where the renowned Swiss architect offered “modern civilization the housing that it merits.”^[14] The progressive architect designed a ville radieuse from which workers could “joyously” commute to their factories, a neo-Saint-Simonian city of high rises that was to be inhabited by producers and was characterized by a “stark division between work and play.”^[15] Toudic, secretary of the regional committee of the Syndicat du bâtiment, admired Le Corbusier’s film, Les bâtisseurs, praised concrete structures, and believed that the buildings erected by Communist and Socialist municipalities combined both beauty and utility.^[16]

Members of the Popular Front frequently appealed for the construction of HBM, which often took the form of high-rise apartments for workers in the suburbs. From 1928 to 1933 France built more low-cost housing than ever before, and by 1936 eighteen thousand HBM housed approximately one hundred thousand people in Paris.^[17] Because of the economic crisis and consequent joblessness, the PCF demanded a continued effort to build HBM, which, it claimed, had been particularly beneficial for workers by providing them employment and shelter.^[18] Anti-Communist CGT militants praised Baron Haussmann’s fight against slums during the Second Empire and demanded the building of HBM to provide work for the unemployed.

The modern urbanism advocated and adopted by the Left emphasized increased mobility and expanded circulation. In this sense, the Left’s policies followed the tradition of Haussmann, who had also improved mobility and traffic circulation. Communists, Socialists, and cégétistes campaigned for large public works projects to transport people more rapidly around the Paris region. Planners such as Le Corbusier and Lurçat, who were employed by the Left, stressed the advantages of a highly developed system of roads for automobiles. In 1925 Le Corbusier had identified the health of the city with its capacity for movement: “The city that achieves speed achieves success.”^[19] The architect saw himself bringing order and mobility to the city, as Haussmann had. To fight against unemployment, Syndicats advocated “a plan of roads to facilitate the circulation of Parisians in and around their city.”^[20] Union activists criticized the government for building only one highway when five were needed, and they asserted that great expressways with their own police were necessary to solve “the problem of circulation.” La Vie ouvrière believed that improved circulation saved lives and that “the builder of roads” was “the bringer of health.”^[21] According to the militants, the urbanist should illuminate the slums and move traffic through the city. The vision of the pro-Communist activists resembled in some ways that of Louis Renault and other capitalists who also urged “beautiful roads” for automobiles and better circulation in the Paris region.^[22]

In addition to highway construction, the partners of the Popular Front recommended improvements in public transportation. The Communists, in particular, advised that the costs of traveling to and from work be substantially reduced; Humanité attacked the anarchy of suburban transportation.^[23] The PCF insisted on the extension of the métro into the outskirts of Paris and on 22 January 1937 celebrated the inauguration of the métro station of Plaisance. It argued that buses must replace tramways since the latter did not always get workers to their jobs on time.

The Left’s vision of the city contained four distinct, but interconnected, urban spaces: work, housing, transportation, and leisure. Work was, of course, the most important space, by which the others were defined. Housing was to be clean, healthy, and inexpensive. According to Le Corbusier, it should be mass-produced, like any other machine-made object. Housing and work were to be linked by transportation, preferably that of the automobile, supplemented by the métro and buses. Circulation had to be improved so that workers could efficiently commute from housing to work, from apartment to factory. The final space was devoted to leisure. Parks, recreation areas, tourist facilities, swimming pools, sporting fields, and stadiums were all clearly separated from work. Leisure was defined in opposition to work. The urbanism of the Left reproduced spatially the separation between work and play that is characteristic of industrial civilization.

Play meant leisure, the principal growth industry of the Popular Front and one of the fastest growing sectors of the twentieth century. The mass leisure pioneered by the French Popular Front was a clear indication of an economy that was capable of generating and partially satisfying new needs. The terms, leisure (loisir) and spare-time activities (loisirs), are themselves significant because they reflected fundamental changes in social attitudes. In the nineteenth century Paul Lafargue, the French socialist leader and son-in-law of Karl Marx, spoke and wrote of le droit à la paresse; however, in the twentieth century leaders of working-class organizations never mentioned paresse, idleness, or laziness. Blum argued that “leisure is not laziness, it is rest after work.”^[24] The Left urged a shorter working week both to provide more jobs for the unemployed and to promote new spare-time activities that it made an intense effort to organize.

Before and especially during the Popular Front, the Left attempted to dominate loisirs and to reduce management’s role in the organization of spare-time activities. In the nineteenth century, French employers had often provided libraries, leisure facilities, and even theater space for their personnel; stadiums were frequently named after wealthy entrepreneurs. Before World War I, Catholics had sponsored sporting and gymnastic associations.^[25] After the Great War Catholics’ and employers’ control of leisure activity was increasingly challenged by the organized Left. Both sides realized that sports were a relatively easy way to mobilize and influence adolescents. Political parties, unions, and patrons fought to dominate sporting activities to demonstrate their symbolic and real control of youth. The intense battles between the employers and the CGT during the interwar period indicated the development of a growing social need.

With regard to leisure activities, a number of Parisian metallurgical industrialists followed an antirevolutionary strategy, not based on the clergy as was often the case in Barcelona, but on secular social works. By 1936, five thousand French summer camps—many of which were supported by industrialists—received one hundred thousand urban youth from humble backgrounds.^[26] During the Popular Front, Benoît Frachon, a leader of the pro-Communist tendency in the CGT, acknowledged that “there is not one aspect of the everyday life of the workers that has escaped the care of the management.”^[27] In this case, Frachon’s assertion seems plausible, since a study undertaken in 1935 demonstrated that of eighty-five factories surveyed, eighty had sporting facilities.^[28] Nonetheless, according to Frachon, workers often distrusted employers’ initiatives, and he advocated that the union capture control over the organization of leisure activities from industrialists.

Following their electoral victory, the elements of the Popular Front increased their efforts for workers’ sporting and leisure activities. Blum established a new chair on the history of work and leisure at the Paris law school; he founded a subministry of “sports et loisirs,” despite the incomprehension and opposition of many bourgeois who persisted in calling the new post “le ministère de la paresse” and who had not yet realized the industrial or commercial potential of this growing new sector.^[29] The extreme Right declared that the worker did not possess the “inalienable right to dress badly, to shout the Internationale when a Rolls passed, and to litter everywhere.”^[30] Disregarding the scorn, Blum appointed Léo Lagrange as “undersecretary of state for the organization of spare-time activities and sports,” and the thirty-six-year-old Socialist deputy began to democratize sports by instituting “islands of leisure” throughout the nation.^[31] His new position was under the authority of the Ministry of Public Health, an indication that the Popular Front designed leisure to improve the workers’ health or, in the terminology of the time, “the race.” Paid vacations were also to ameliorate the “physical condition of workers.”^[32]

In fact the Left, like the Right, was determined to civilize the workers and to wage war on licentious popular culture. Lagrange argued that the working class had known how to win more leisure but now must learn how to use it.^[33]Humanité too opposed paresse and insisted upon loisirs intelligents.^[34] As part of this intelligent leisure, union activists wanted workers to reduce their intake of alcoholic beverages. La Vie ouvrière declared that “we are capable of organizing our days of rest,” and it warned workers against “frequenting bars and losing the inclination to work.” The CGT’s newly established Tourist Bureau urged “healthy utilization” of leisure to permit workers to achieve “well-being and culture.”^[35] The head of the CGT’s educational program, which collaborated with the Tourist Bureau, advocated “universities of work”—supported by the government—to train workers how to control the productive forces.^[36] According to Syndicats, the fears of those who had predicted “the perils of idleness” had been alleviated by the “organization of spare-time activities” (organisation des loisirs) that the CGT had undertaken. Non-Communist union militants asserted that a shorter working week would permit male workers to spend more time with their families.

The unions nourished the growth of tourist traffic. Emilie and Georges Lefranc, a married team of trade-union intellectuals and educators, recommended that all workers “try to go away” during their annual paid vacations, and they saw the same need to escape after a normal workday: “Workers who have finished their working day…want a change of place, to forget their job, and to flee from everything that reminds them of it.”^[37] Sunday should become the “day of departure.” The Lefrancs advocated leisure as relief from boring work and an ugly urban environment, which lacked air and light: “Leisure must permit [workers] to regain the balance broken by our civilization.” Leftist theoreticians of leisure attempted to solve the problem of loisirs by defining leisure activities as compensation for the alienating conditions at work and in the city.

The Lefrancs also encouraged sporting activities, physical sports that must eliminate the “cult of the star” and supplement intellectual activity. Socialists believed sports to be the key element of leisure activities: “Physical exercise—controlled and channeled naturally—compensates wonderfully for a sedentary life and overspecialization at the workplace.”^[38] During the Popular Front the tremendous growth of the Fédération sportive et gymnique du travail, a new organization of Socialist and Communist sports enthusiasts, mirrored the expansion of the unions.^[39] In 1935 it had 732 clubs and 42,706 members; by 1938 it possessed 1,687 clubs and 102,694 members. Football was undoubtedly a major activity in many workers’ clubs. Originally used to train a nineteenth-century elite, the sport became increasingly popular among workers in the Paris region between the wars.

As early as the 1920s the Communists were keenly interested in organizing the sporting activities of wage earners; during the Popular Front they demanded a billion francs to promote this form of leisure activity.^[40] The PCF urged the construction of gymnasiums, stadiums, swimming pools, and athletic fields. Sports were a means of rational development, and many Communists argued—as did certain syndicalists and industrialists—that an expansion of sporting activities could produce a physical well-being that would increase workers’ productivity. Communists gave considerable attention to their party’s sporting events, which sometimes received more coverage in their press than did major strikes.

Anti-Communist CGT militants feared that the PCF and employers would monopolize workers’ leisure. They believed that the “application of the forty-hour week and paid vacations compels us to organize spare-time activities” and advised their fellow activists to anticipate the actions of employers by creating libraries, theaters, outings, and sporting games. Leisure activities that the bosses organized had only one goal—to prevent workers from thinking, a charge that Communists had voiced in the 1920s and 1930s. When the forty-hour week was granted to clerks, Syndicats noted, “Today, joy fills their hearts.…Tomorrow, the problem of the organization of spare-time activities will be posed.”^[41]

Working-class organizations and the Popular Front governments endorsed and planned the flight of workers from their workplaces and urban homes into specialized leisure spaces. In 1936 Lagrange approved 253 projects for the construction of stadiums, in addition to plans for numerous athletic fields.^[42] By the end of 1937, 400 projects were in progress. It must be recalled that many traditional places where workers spent their free time had already been destroyed by 1936. Before the Popular Front and the organization of mass tourism, many Paris workers had spent their days off in the nearby countryside where they fished in the Seine or the Marne or passed their time in rural bistros. By 1936 the waters of the Seine and the Marne were polluted, and many of the suburbs had lost their rustic flavor. At Boulogne-Billancourt, home of Renault, “there are now gray, thick walls where before, during holidays, working-class families frolicked on the grass under the poplars.”^[43] The Socialist government, the CGT, and the PCF began to organize excursions from urban to increasingly distant vacation sites. The government introduced special price reductions for transportation—called popular or Lagrange tickets—to move workers from their homes to leisure areas such as the French Riviera. In 1936, 600,000 used Lagrange tickets, 1,200,000 in 1937, and nearly as many in 1938.^[44] Over 100,000 traveled to the Riviera in the winter, but even more took advantage of the reduced fares to visit their relatives in the countryside.^[45]

Lagrange’s office also planned special trains: Paris–Nice, Paris–Toulouse and cruises to Corsica, Algeria, and even Barcelona.^[46] Likewise, the union initiated tourisme CGT, its official tourist agency, coordinating activities from ski trips to North African cruises. The CGT established a Vacations for All organization, which merged with the Tourist Bureau in December 1937. The agency booked trips at reduced prices, reserved rooms at modest hotels, and established campgrounds. It also created a Vacations-Savings plan, which encouraged workers to put aside a small sum every week and accumulate enough for holidays. According to the union, its savings plan would alter the habits of certain workers: “They will drink perhaps fewer apéritifs and smoke fewer cigarettes, but, anyway, that will not be so bad.”^[47] The CGT’s bureau offered package deals on credit (“buy now, pay later”).^[48] Transforming the mythological conspirators of anti-Communist literature, the Left developed a new identity—that of travel agents. The Communists frequently propagated the slogan, The Riviera for all, and urged the expansion of mass tourism into all provinces. The PCF deputy from Nice instituted a bus service from Paris to the Côte d’Azur.^[49] Other more politically neutral organizations also participated in the leisure boom. Catholic groups set up their own youth hostels to compete with the lay hostels, which, Catholics objected, mixed the sexes and encouraged dangerous opinions. In 1938 new travel agencies—forerunners of today’s low-budget charter companies—began to cater to a more popular clientele to whom it offered moderately priced package deals. Still, only a minority of workers were able to take advantage of the discounts and special opportunities. In 1936 employed Parisian workers spent three times more on laundry than on vacations and trips.^[50]

During the 1930s and especially during the Popular Front, certain leisure activities encouraged the mixing of young people from various backgrounds.^[51] Lagrange actively promoted the youth hostel movement, but it attracted many more teachers than workers. In 1935, 90 youth hostels provided 10,000 overnight stays. In 1936, the numbers rose to 229 hostels and 26,800 nights. Participation in scouting among the more modest sections of the population also grew significantly during the Popular Front. Donning uniforms, waving banners, and marching in processions tended to level social differences—at least momentarily—among scouts. In 1935, 80,000 were involved, by 1939, 108,000. Of the three major scouting groups, Catholic, Protestant, and secular, the last experienced by far the most rapid growth. Perhaps many parents with few means encouraged their children to join so the adults could spend their vacations by themselves. Lagrange and Jean Zay, the education minister in the Blum government, collaborated in bringing sports into public schools and universities.^[52] By the fall of 1937, over 100,000 popular-sporting diplomas, which tested competence in various activities, had been issued.

The Popular Front offered young people the chance to learn to fly a plane. The Minister of Aviation, Pierre Cot, who had the cooperation of Lagrange, promoted Popular Aviation and air clubs that aimed to teach flying to youngsters from various social backgrounds. In September 1937 four thousand young delegates representing ten thousand club members attended the first fête of popular aviation at Vincennes. The clubs trained four thousand new pilots from all over the nation.^[53] The PCF took a prominent role in publicizing and recruiting for Popular Aviation and enthusiastically declared that “a healthy and strong youth” was being created. Yet important government officials had a different idea. They complained of the low intellectual level and poor physical condition of the new recruits, boys and, after 1936, girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. According to their report, many of these youngsters naively assumed that their training in Aviation populaire would enable them to pursue careers as military pilots. But only 50 percent passed a simple written examination, and their responses shocked the examiners: the Marseillaise was the wife of the president of the republic, the Baltic a river, the Versailles treaty an eighteenth-century document, and Lyon north of Paris. Physical tests were no more positive.

Furthermore, aviation clubs were rife with generational and class conflicts. The new sections of Popular Aviation merged with the established Aéro-clubs, which had an older and wealthier membership. The elite in the Aéro-clubs had invested considerable resources in the organizations and did not welcome the poorer, less educated newcomers.^[54] Every section experienced tensions; when peace reigned it was usually because the new members followed the “better trained” leaders of the old Aéro-clubs. In 1938 government officials concluded that Aviation populaire had not been worth the financial effort—each pilot produced had cost 750,000 francs. Growing international tension increased the need for trained aircraft personnel and led to the replacement of Popular Aviation by Premilitary Aviation. The Popular Front’s desire to strengthen French youth and democratize flight quickly turned in a more militaristic direction, but it nevertheless prefigured the rise of a mass airline industry in the 1960s.

In addition to flying, other new rights appeared during the Popular Front as the CGT claimed “le droit à la neige” or the right to bring the city to the mountains: “Winter sports have become a necessity.…After vacations at the ocean, why not ski vacations?”^[55] During the Christmas season of 1936, fifty thousand persons (approximately one-fourth of all French skiers) left Paris for the snow; Lagrange himself, equipped with skis, inaugurated a youth hostel in the mountains. Special weekend tickets gave workers a chance to ski in Auvergne. The government attempted to lower the prices for ski rentals and hotels, to open the sport to less privileged individuals. Rumors concerning these new rights spread among some metallurgical workers who believed (it appears wrongly) that they could take an extra day of paid vacation for every month they worked.^[56] According to a union leader, SIMCA workers sincerely thought that they were allowed to extend their vacations from 23 to 30 August. When they took the extra week, management fired them.

The mass tourism and leisure generalized by the Popular Front inaugurated the era of the weekend and the vacation. On 17 August 1936 Humanité presented both a photograph of Paris deserted, showing the place de la Concorde with neither automobiles nor pedestrians, and an article entitled, “Murderous Day,” which confirmed that on the highways six people had been killed and thirty injured in traffic accidents.^[57] Overcrowding became an issue during the summer months as urban dwellers rushed to escape from their homes and workplaces. Workers’ publications demanded that new roads be constructed to ease the difficulties of tourist travel and complained that traffic jams had discouraged many from traveling on Sunday, the chosen day of departure; union militants complained that the “rush of bathers,” which “jammed the majority of beaches,” created an “intolerable crush.” Overcrowding and inflated prices discouraged workers from visiting cities such as Nice in August. Employers too desired paid vacations without traffic jams.^[58] A law passed in November 1938 attempted to correct the “disorder” of vacation scheduling that risked harming national production. The legislation stipulated, apparently without much success, that firms in the same industry stagger paid vacations.

In factories the more or less traditional struggle—both official and unofficial—over working on Monday was supplemented by new conflicts over work on Saturday. As has been seen, many workers refused to accept work on weekends, preventing employers from organizing shifts and thereby, according to one prominent Socialist, diminishing weekly production.^[59] The automobile workers of SIMCA at Nanterre “considered that their two days of rest were an invaluable gain” and did not wish to work four days one week and six days another.^[60] Employers at Saint-Denis complained about the difficulties of unloading trains on Saturdays and refused to pay for storage.^[61] In 1937 strikes, demonstrating that Holy Saturday was becoming as revered as Holy Monday, erupted in six metallurgical firms over working Saturday to recover Easter Monday. Employers reported that the Compagnie électro-mécanique at Bourget—which fulfilled contracts for the Navy—decided to recover Easter Monday on Saturday 3 April with the approval of the Inspection du travail; however 437 of its 472 workers did not appear.^[62] Vouret et fils in Le Bourget claimed that a “cell of agitators” reneged on a previous agreement to recover Easter Monday on Saturday 3 April, with the result that 105 of its 136 workers refused to compensate for lost worktime. The firm insisted that its supervisory personnel, “tired of seeing its authority flouted, shares our point of view.”^[63] Workers’ propensity to fight for a free weekend was encouraged by very popular weekend tickets, issued to such places as the seashore and picturesque villages as well as ski resorts.

The scheduling of paid vacations became another arena of struggle. As has been mentioned, union activists advised the staggering of vacations, which the Minister of Labor also advocated, so that the tourist industry could expand and workers could enjoy their holidays as comfortably as the bourgeois did. The president of the Metallurgical Employers’ Association (GIM) noted “the difficulties that have arisen inside the firms especially because of workers’ demands about scheduling their vacations.”^[64] Conflicts over vacation dates arose because of the different motivations of the workers, management, and the unions. Individually, the workers wanted to choose their dates. Summer was particularly desirable not only for its sun and warmth but also because children were out of school. Single workers might favor summer for various reasons, including acquiring a good tan, an increasingly popular symbol of health and leisure. The unions often supported the workers’ preference, though at times the CGT opposed the complete shutting down of factories during one or two weeks in the summer; the union objected to the forced unemployment of workers who did not possess the minimum six-months’ seniority to be eligible for vacation. On the other side, managers’ main priority was to coordinate vacations with market conditions and their suppliers. Employers also wanted to avoid the complications of organizing shifts and subsequent fights over vacation dates.

Middle-class skeptics remained unpersuaded by the Left’s discourse on leisure, believing that the workers had become idle and were wasting time.^[65] The employers feared that increased spare time would lead only to more drinking in cabarets. It should be noted that in France in the 1930s alcoholism was a serious problem, particularly among males. In 1933 the French consumed 2.61 liters of hard liquor per person compared to .56 liters for the English and .77 for Germans. The French also drank twice as much wine per person as the Spanish and three times more than the Italians.^[66] France possessed one establishment licensed to serve alcoholic beverages for each 80 inhabitants compared to one for 430 in Great Britain. In 1936 the unemployed spent a larger percentage of their income on wine and coffee (6.1 and 2.1 percent, respectively) than on rent (7.2) or on clothing (5.5).^[67] The jobless considered these drinks to be inelastic expenses; their percentage of the budget increased only marginally as workers’ income rose.

Logré, the chief physician at the police infirmary in Paris, noted an increase in alcoholism since the new social legislation had been enacted “because potential alcoholics have experienced, at least temporarily, a rise in their purchasing power, and they have more time to drink.”^[68] According to another source, the social reforms of the Popular Front did not diminish alcoholism, at least not in Paris. Despite a national decline in consumption of alcohol, the number of alcoholics treated by the psychiatric clinic of the Paris police increased steadily from 1935 (421 cases), to 1936 (494), 1937 (517), and 1938 (535).^[69] A delegate of the Ligue anti-alcoolique complained that, in the absence of repressive measures, increased leisure and higher pay had encouraged insobriety during the Popular Front.^[70] He cited as evidence the increasing number of establishments serving alcoholic drinks and the growing profits of large distillers, such as Pernod and Cinzano. Other backers of temperance advocated women’s suffrage as a way of diluting the political influence of drinking males.

An investigation conducted from 1934 through 1937 in one large Parisian power plant found that at least 16 percent of the work force were alcoholics.^[71] According to the physician, the personnel of the enterprise had good working conditions—a collective bargaining agreement, employment security, paid vacations, generous sick leave, and a retirement plan. Their housing too was considered more than adequate. The 173 cases of alcoholism out of a total work force of 1,092 (that contained only 15 women) were therefore not caused by “the habitual excuses of slums, unemployment, and insecurity.” Forty-seven of the alcoholics were from Brittany, which meant that 32 percent of the Bretons working at the plant were dipsomaniacs. The alcoholic 16 percent of the personnel were responsible for approximately 25 percent of the sicknesses and accidents both on and off the job. These workers missed 31 days of work per year compared to 17 for nonalcoholics.^[72]

Another physician characterized French workers as “the most alcoholic in the world.”^[73] Admissions of alcoholics and others with alcohol-related illnesses to mental institutions rose almost 16 percent from 1936 through 1938. In the interwar period in many homes, the apéritif, especially anise-based beverages, began to complement the traditional popularity of wine and beer.^[74] Some families believed that the two liters of wine per day, apéritifs excluded, were the necessary minimum for working adults.

Activists complained that “the same workers who do not feel rich enough to buy a union educational brochure, which could lead them from moral misery, do not hesitate paying in a bar for expensive alcoholic poisons that destroy their health and stupefy them.”^[75] Militants criticized “unaware comrades, who before joining the CGT passed their time playing cards and betting on the horses.”^[76] A CGT official lamented that all too often only students visited the youth hostels, whereas workers spent “their Sundays in a smoke-filled café.” The bars, music halls, and dances of Montmartre seemed to be more attractive to wage earners than the universities of work or other improving occupations.^[77] In terms of monies spent, horse racing was by far the most popular sport.

The tourist industry’s conception of leisure was often little different from the CGT’s. The industry criticized the lack of “social tourism” in France and urged that all classes participate in leisure activities.^[78] These activities should compensate for the unnatural labor of modern times through a “momentary return to nature,” which would eventually improve the workers’ capacity to work. A new company, Union française des loisirs, offered its services to employers who wanted to respond to a new need, the organization of leisure in aid of “social pacification.” Thus, both the dynamic sector of the tourist industry and the Left agreed that organized leisure was a necessary alternative both to the harshness of the workers’ laboring life and to the licentiousness of traditional popular culture.

So did the employers. Following the precedent of management-sponsored summer camps, the bourgeois elite desired to remake workers’ leisure in ways similar to those suggested by working-class organizations. For them, workers’ free time had to be organized and channeled to produce a cleaner, healthier, and happier working class. Louis Renault advocated “public works necessary for the organization of leisure.”^[79] The tough-minded employers did not object to the sporting and leisure activities sponsored by the CGT and the PCF but rather to their alleged attempts to indoctrinate youth with “Marxism.”^[80] The review, L’Europe nouvelle, which vigorously fought the forty-hour week, nevertheless asserted that workers’ rest (repos) must be converted into spare-time activities, and it hoped that in the future the dream of a Paris surrounded by stadiums might be realized. One authority called for “scientific organization of leisure” so that workers might return to their post with more energy. Sports, in particular, would improve body and mind and therefore output.^[81] Municipalities were urged to continue their construction of bathhouses and day-care centers. In the tradition of nineteenth-century philanthropy, it was asserted that new and clean housing would encourage workers to spend more time with their families. Workers wanted not socialism but property, specifically homes with gardens.

During the 1930s the more traditional activities, such as gardening, began to be replaced or complemented by the car. On the Left and Right many argued that the future of transportation for both leisure and work should be the private automobile. Pervasive propaganda glorified the machine and its drivers. For example, in the summer of 1938, various newsreels featured “the Grand Automobile Rally at Trocadéro,” where “the most recent and most elegant cars” were presented by their owners, “whose dress,” it was announced, “matched the colors and lines of the autos.”^[82] For its part, Humanité criticized French automobile builders for failing to “democratize” the automobile.^[83] The PCF daily complained that “the car, this marvelous newborn that provides so much work for laborers,” was too expensive for the proletariat. Communist and union militants agreed that the automobile was beautiful and that the prosperity of the nation depended on the motor-vehicle industry. The Fédération des métaux urged nationalization of the industry if capitalist automobile manufacturers proved incapable of providing a “democratic car.”^[84]Syndicats asked, “What good does it do to build more automobiles, if most people cannot buy them?”^[85] Both literally and figuratively, working-class organizations helped to pave the way to a future in which the private car would become the centerpiece of work, leisure, and transportation. Louis Renault concurred with his class enemies that the price of automobiles must be lowered so that “one day every family in France can have its own little car.”^[86]Usine, published by the metallurgical industrialists, wanted to popularize cars as Kodak had cameras.

Workers were encouraged to consume commodities more accessible than automobiles. Advertising in both leftist and rightist publications propagated the virtues of consumption and awakened desires that many were able to satisfy only after World War II. Nevertheless, in the 1930s a whole range of goods—cameras, radios, bicycles, watches, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, hunting rifles, bedroom sets, gourmet foods, cosmetics, and still other articles—were temptingly offered to French workers. Bargain stores in Paris—Prisunic, Monoprix, and Multiprix—encouraged mass consumption of many of these items. If cars remained merely a wish for most French workers, the purchase of a motorcycle, almost nonexistent in Spain, was easier. The most obtainable means of transportation remained the bicycle; its numbers doubled from four million in 1920 to eight million in 1939. Many wage earners commuted to work—and to strikes—on their bikes.

Radios became more available to those with modest incomes, and their sales rose from 1.3 million in 1933 to 5 million in 1939.^[87] Over 65 percent of working Parisians and 28.2 percent of those unemployed possessed a radio in 1936. Twice as many Parisian working-class households owned radios than books.^[88] Employed workers spent over 50 percent more on tobacco than on books and newspapers, thus demonstrating the continuing vitality of the oral component of French working-class culture. The CGT believed—not entirely without reason, it seems—that the “average working-class family” could purchase household items such as “costly” vacuum cleaners if it reduced spending on wines and apéritifs.^[89] The union could have added cigarettes.

Yet some workers saved and labored to acquire healthier commodities and services. After the First World War, many men who had become familiar with arms in the trenches took up hunting as a sport, and the number of permits issued between the war and the early 1930s tripled.^[90] Advertisements for rifles in the working-class press showed that many Parisian workers were interested in shooting. As in the Aéro-clubs, sportsmen from the upper classes, however, disdained the new hunters and refused them admittance into exclusive associations. To prevent the democratization of the sport, these wealthy enthusiasts desired to raise the price of a hunting license.

Women of all classes participated in a new world of consumption, continuing to frequent beauty salons and using more cosmetics than earlier generations had. Over one-third of working-class households in Paris contained a sewing machine;^[91] with the spread of electricity into urban homes, many consumers acquired an electric iron. Many young families bought furniture on credit. Even when workers earned relatively high wages, they spent less of their income on housing than lower middle-class employees did. The result was substandard housing, and the size of apartments and the number of rooms were insufficient. The possibilities of spending both time and money on lodgings were limitless.

Given the need and appetite to consume, wage hikes were workers’ key demand during almost all strikes. Metallurgical employers charged that the Communist leaders of the Syndicat des métaux hid the “political” nature of their strikes by emphasizing economic and professional grievances.^[92] On occasion, workers refused a workweek that fell below forty hours. In 1937 one delegation of workers protested against a thirty-five-hour week that management attributed to a lack of orders.^[93] It is significant that the delegation’s protest came less than two weeks before Christmas, a period of heightened consumption. In contrast to celebrations of noël before the Great War, festivities during the Popular Front included expanded gift giving and more widespread use of Christmas trees.

In order to meet new and old needs, some workers demanded overtime; others approved piecework. When at the end of 1936 upholsterers went on strike to eliminate piecework, a minority of workers in certain firms favored pay incentives but “lacked the courage to speak up.”^[94] As in Barcelona, an undetermined number of wage earners engaged in moonlighting (travail noir) despite the unions’ hostility. The CGT would sometimes accuse workers in company unions like the Association des ouvriers Gnôme et Rhône of moonlighting and thereby stealing work from the unemployed.^[95] Penalties were established not only for workers who labored during their paid vacations but also for those who hired them.^[96] Yet the extent of working off the books remains unknown.^[97]

An expanding range of leisure possibilities induced others to work hard for future vacations and weekend outings. In most working-class families, both parents had to be wage earners in order to afford a vacation.^[98] At SIMCA—where work slow-downs were common even among those paid by the piece—workers increased production to earn higher piecework wages as summer vacations neared.^[99] Wage earners’ roles as producers and consumers sometimes conflicted. In July 1936 women who shopped in Parisian working-class neighborhoods “were delighted that the forty-hour week allowed them to finish their housekeeping chores during the week and to keep the weekend intact.”^[100] However the application of the forty-hour week also resulted in the closing of food shops from Sunday noon until Tuesday morning. The Monday closings severely limited the possibilities of a weekend outing since perishables bought on Saturday would not last until Tuesday in the summer heat. Without refrigerators, discontented workers were forced to shop on Sunday morning. Shop clerks, though, insisted on dividing the forty-hour week into five days of eight hours with Sunday and Monday free, against their employers’ desire for six working days. The clerks’ representative justified their decision by asserting, “Sales no longer depend on the opening of stores but on the purchasing power of the masses.”^[101]

The discourses on the problems of unemployment and leisure revealed that many on the Right and on the Left shared the values of the “civilizing offensive.” Unemployment they solved by putting the jobless to work building roads to improve traffic circulation, apartment houses to lodge workers, and automobiles to move the masses. The unions and parties of the Popular Front found the answer to the issue of leisure in organizing healthy and wholesome activities. The Left defined unemployment and leisure as problems whose solutions would be found in the development and construction of a city of habitations à bon marché and of productive factories from which workers could commute to specialized leisure areas. In this sense, the Left’s views on leisure meshed with its vision of the working class as devoted producers and potentially salubrious consumers. It reduced the working week so that the unemployed, who were supposedly eager to work, could obtain jobs and increase their buying power. Leisure for the workers had value not just for its own sake but also to make the class better producers in the workplace. Like some sectors of the patronat, the CGT, SFIO, and PCF argued for the restorative powers of loisirs.

At the same time, the leaders of the Left were genuinely moved by labor’s new right to leisure. In a well-known speech at the Vichy regime’s show trial at Riom in 1942, Léon Blum described what he perceived as one of his major accomplishments:

I did not leave my office very much…but when I did and crossed the Parisian suburbs, I saw the roads lined with old jalopies, motorbikes, and tandems with working-class couples wearing matching sweaters. It all showed that the idea of leisure awakened in them a natural and simple style, and I had the sense, in spite of everything, of having brought sun and light into dark and difficult lives. We not only took workers away from the bars and provided them with more opportunity for family life but gave them hope for the future.^[102]

Discounting Blum’s repetition of leftist rhetoric on alcoholism and the family, we can nonetheless agree that workers did become very attached to the Popular Front’s reforms granting a shorter working week and paid vacations. This desire to reduce worktime produced difficulties for the coalition. The Popular Front was trapped between its productivist promises to the nation and its consumerist constituents. Parisian workers did not show their gratitude to the Left for its advanced social legislation by working harder and producing more efficiently. Although at Renault resistance to work decreased before August vacations, it increased in the fall, after the first summer vacations had ended. Despite the restorative discourse of the Left, alcoholism did not decline in Paris and may have become more pervasive. Paralleling their lack of subordination in the workplace, many Parisian workers, like their Barcelonan counterparts, continued to use their free moments in ways that both union officials and employers condemned.

Ironically, it was the workers’ attachment to the reduced working week, perhaps the major reform of the Popular Front, that helped disrupt the unity of the leftist coalition and greatly contributed to its downfall. The Popular Front was popular because of its expansion of leisure, and it was hardly surprising that its end was provoked by the workers’ actions to resist more worktime.

Notes