Division of Labor and the New Vineyard Laborer

The division of labor on large estate vineyards reflected nuances of skill in vinedressing. In fact, the estate vineyard in the period of expansion came to resemble a small industrial establishment, with its sophisticated division of labor and work discipline. In the last two decades of the century, as workers became ever more dependent on the large estates for work, the industrial analogy would become even more appropriate. The potential for conflict between groups of workers, as well as for the formation of class solidarity, was built into the productive relations of the estate vineyard.

Increasingly over the nineteenth century, absentee proprietors of estates in the Aude who lived in large towns like Carcassonne, Narbonne, Béziers, or Montpellier delegated the direction of the vineyard to a manager, the régisseur .^[36] These estate managers, themselves former small landowners or older workers, generally came from the Aude, and even though they had no formal training for their job, they occupied a position of high status and some privilege as the representatives of the patron .

The manager's responsibilities included directing work in the vines, distributing tools, paying wages, and keeping the vineyard's account books. In addition, he supervised the upkeep of the cave and the delivery of wine to the wholesaler (the proprie-

tor carried out the sale of wine himself). As the representative of the owner's authority on the estate, he had to be able to deal firmly with workers and suppress arguments among personnel, a role that brought him into conflict with striking workers on more than one occasion between 1903 and 1914. Hired on a yearly contract, the manager and his family lived on the estate. received unlimited wine for their own use, and were permitted use of the work animals on the estate to cultivate their own land. By 1880, an estate manager could earn a yearly salary of between 1,000 and 1,500 francs, to which might be added a bonus of 500 francs in a good harvest year.^[37] A well-paid manager could accumulate substantial savings. Jean-Pierre Aribaud, for example, régisseur on the estate of Lastours in Coursan, left 8,000 francs to his heirs in 1911.^[38] Materially, the manager was quite comfortable in comparison with other estate workers.

On those Audois vineyards where owners lived directly on the estate or in the village, the tasks of looking after work animals and resident workers were delegated to an overseer or foreman, the ramonet . These men usually came from the surrounding mountain areas of the Tarn or the Ariège, although later, after the turn of the century, Spanish immigrants often came on as overseers. If the overseer was married, his wife (the ramonette ) prepared meals for the resident personnel on the domaine and served as the head of a team of women workers.^[39] Although the ramonet was of a slightly higher status than the other resident workers, he did not have the same privileged position as the régisseur , and in the labor conflicts that filled the prewar years overseers usually sided with workers.

The social construction of authority relations between husbands and wives dictated that even though the ramonet and ramonette performed distinct tasks, only the man received the wage, from 480 to 600 francs a year.^[40] He also received the wheat, oil, salt, and wine allocation from the estate owner, which he then passed on to his wife. Besides not receiving a separate wage, the ramonette was allocated only half the amount of food accorded to the male workers whom she had to feed, a condition that lasted into the twentieth century and that was indicative of contemporary beliefs about gender differences in food requirements.^[41] Perhaps she had her revenge on this unjust system

after all, however, for "she took her pay from the economies she was able to make in the food allocations of others. One understands how this system was defective. . . . Even on vineyards where the well-intentioned proprietor gave out sufficient quantities [for the upkeep of workers] . . . the food was often terrible!"^[42] Still, in the final analysis the ramonette 's situation was better than that of the unskilled farmhands for whom she cooked.

Most unskilled labor of digging and cultivation on large estates fell to the migrant farmhand, or domestique . Some in this reserve army of labor, gagés , worked on yearly contracts (their name came from the gages —yearly wages—that they were paid); others, mésadiers , were hired and paid by the month. Most of these workers were men; generally, vineyard owners preferred to hire women on an even less permanent basis, by the day.^[43] In addition to performing unskilled hand labor, domestiques drove the wagons used for carrying tools and grapes at harvest and spread chemicals in the vines. Despite the importance of their jobs in the vineyard, these workers occupied the lowest status of all. One contemporary claimed, "A woman's work is worth more than the work of one of these men"; another emphasized that farmhands were "not as capable when it comes to the proper cultivation of the vine, which demands care and attention. These [folks] are laborers and not vignerons ."^[44] Skilled workers also looked down on the migrant farmhands as gavaches , a pejorative term meaning careless and crude. As Abel Chatelain has noted, apart from the economic threat to the local laboring population that these "foreigners" posed, as migrants they were inherently less respectable and socially inferior.^[45]

Estate owners, though, saw advantages to hiring such workers. Employers paid them less than the local skilled workers, viewing them as a submissive or passive work force that would do their bidding and then obediently return to their mountain homes in the Tarn, the Ariège, or the Aveyron. Sometimes estate owners and managers attempted to use farmhands to influence the outcome of elections. One manager from Narbonne boasted that he hired his mésadiers in October so that when elections occurred in April or May they would have the six months of

residence necessary to vote, obviously for the candidate of the manager's preference.^[46]

The working conditions and pay of these workers were deplorable. They typically worked a twelve-hour day (as opposed to six or eight hours for the day laborers), and the annual wage of thegagés , which could reach 650 francs per year (plus wheat, wine, and beans) in the expansion years, was about 300 francs less than skilled laborers' earnings. Mésadiers made even less, some 380 francs per year, and often tried to supplement these wages with piecework.^[47] Housed in dormitories or haylofts, they slept on straw, without even the barest sanitary amenities. Although their conditions improved somewhat around the turn of the century, overall the domestique remained the lumpenproletarian of the vineyards into the early twentieth century.

The condition of skilled day laborers (vinedressers), who made up the majority of workers on large estate vineyards, could not have contrasted more sharply with that of the farmhands. In Coursan, skilled journaliers were the largest occupational group in the village in 1866, 37 percent of the working population, and ten years later they stood at just under 45 percent. In the vineyard expansion years these men were mainly local dwellers who had been born and raised in the villages in which they worked. They enjoyed a comfortable and stable position thanks not only to the prosperity of the growing vineyard economy, rising wages, and job security, but also to the special position many of them occupied as both wage workers and property owners.

As skilled workers, vinedressers performed all the delicate hand operations: pruning, certain types of cultivation and chemical treatments, planting, cellar work, and, after 1880, grafting. Not all journaliers were skilled, however, for a clear gender division of labor left unskilled work—such as gathering branches that fell to the ground during pruning, spreading fertilizer in the vines, sulphuring against oidium and mildew, and harvesting—to women. (Their work is discussed more fully in Chapter 4.) Contemporaries considered male vinedressers to be the real artisans of the vineyard and assumed skill in vineyard work to be exclusively masculine. The fact that many male vineyard workers were also landowners—in Coursan in 1876, at least 41 percent

(and probably more) of vineyard workers owned a parcel of vines—only reinforced their status as artisans.^[48] Indeed, in addition to defining skill in gendered terms, contemporaries consciously associated skill and landownership. As one turn-of-the-century observer remarked, "The day laborer doesn't complain about work that he will later perform for himself. . . . His pride is engaged; . . . how can he appear capable of working his own property if he works clumsily or badly the property of others?"^[49]

In the golden age of vineyard expansion, landowning journaliers prospered. As wage earners they could earn 25 centimes more per day than propertyless day laborers, the wage bonus being a reward for the expertise that was presumed to come from ownership of vines. Moreover, income from their vines in the expansion years could be considerable. Assuming production costs of one hectare of vines to be 340 francs, a worker who owned one hectare of vines in 1872, harvested forty-five hectoliters of wine, and sold it at 45 francs per hectoliter could have made 1,685 francs, considerably more than a propertyless worker could have earned in a year.^[50] These workers generally enjoyed a shorter workday than other estate workers (six as opposed to eight hours) so that they might cultivate their own vines; as Smith has noted for Cruzy, the shorter workday was an important feature of the status that these skilled workers enjoyed during the Second Empire.^[51] In addition to the material security and status that landownership provided, it gave vinedressers an important measure of psychological independence from wage labor. Moreover, landowning skilled workers who did work for wages were not entirely dependent on the large estate vineyards for work, given the numerous large, nonestate enterprises that regularly hired workers. In fact, during the 1860s and 1870s the term journalier virtually disappeared from official records. Manuscript census and agricultural surveys henceforth used the term cultivateur , meaning small proprietor or small proprietor-vinedresser, whether or not the individual owned land.^[52] The shift in terminology reflected both a blurring of class distinctions and the perception of the vinedresser as a skilled worker.

Vinedressers in the Aude in the golden age of the vine enjoyed a comfortable material situation. In this period of wide-

spread landownership when labor was in relatively short supply, the high demand for skilled workers helped to keep wages high. Nominal wages rose almost consistently between 1850 and 1880 (see Table 11), comparing favorably with the national average wage of agricultural workers (1.63 francs a day in 1862, 3.11 francs a day in 1882) and with the wages of local artisans, which stagnated over the same period.^[53] Pride in the craft of vinedressing distinguished these workers from the migrant domestiques , as did their permanent residence and social roots in local vinegrowing communities.

The status, flexibility, and freedom of the vinedresser also contrasted sharply with the situation of other skilled workers in France at this time, such as textile workers, metal workers, tailors, and printers, all of whom began to feel the effects of mechanization, devaluation of skill, and new methods of work organization and supervision.^[54] Vinedressers had the advantage of creating a product for which demand continuously rose in these years but where the nature of production precluded mechanization. Ironically, these comfortable rural workers profited from the misery of their urban counterparts, who, by calling on the fruits of the vine to escape the troubles of the workplace, raised the demand for southern wine.^[55]

During the years when vineyard capitalism came to dominate the Mediterranean economy, the Aude experienced a growth and prosperity almost unparalleled in its history. By the 1860s, inspectors from the Banque de France enthusiastically reported that whatever the cost of a piece of land, a cultivateur could easily pay for it with two harvests. Vinegrowers made fortunes right and left, creating "un luxe insensé." In 1875 the government inspector A. Ditandy reported, "Land of great wealth and hard work, land of wine and of gold, the Narbonnais appears to neighboring populations as a sort of El Dorado or Promised Land, where the poor man becomes rich and the rich man becomes a millionaire."^[56] Indeed, the agricultural revolution with its accompanying changes in the forms of capitalist production, property distribution, and social structure benefited a broad spectrum of peasants, artisans, and workers in the Aude. Most important, it brought forth a new group of agricultural workers:

skilled vinedressers. These changes had profound consequences for the politics of vinegrowing communities as vinedressers joined forces with other small landowners and the artisans of prosperous wine-producing villages to defend their common interests as producers. Thus, the development of vineyard capitalism created the conditions in which left-wing—démoc soc and republican—political movements would thrive.