3
Economic Crisis and Class Formation

Commenting on life in the vineyards of the Aude at the beginning of the 1880s, the head of the Société nationale des agriculteurs de France, J. A. Barral, painted a depressing picture of decline and decay:

In villages where everyone was comfortable, where the population was dense, today, trouble is everywhere; inhabitants emigrate; there is no longer any work; people are leaving to seek their fortune in the new world or in Algeria, so as not to die of hunger in France. And now, when I consider the families of vineyard owners, . . . how many rich men—millionaires—have I seen who no longer have a centime?^[1]

This portrait, which clashed so dramatically with the prosperity of the golden age of the vine, described the beginning of a series of economic crises from which southern viticulture has barely recovered over a hundred years later. The first, the phylloxera crisis, resulted in the destruction of over half of the Aude's vines between 1879 and 1886. Just as the vineyards began to recover in the 1890s, an exceptionally abundant harvest in 1893 caused wine prices to plummet, not to rise again until three years later. Finally, the great wine glut of 1900–1901 again drove vineyard owners and vinedressers alike to despair; its repercussions continued right up to World War I. The long-range political and social effects of these crises are explored in some detail in the chapters that follow. Of the three, however, the phylloxera crisis brought about the most far-reaching changes. It transformed the economy and work rhythms of vinegrowing, thus accelerating the concentration of large vineyard capital and the development of the large "industrial" vineyard (though not expro-

priating the viticultural petty bourgeoisie). It also led to significant changes in the wine market. Most important, it irrevocably changed the work and class relations of the vineyards and of vineyard communities. These changes led to the forging of a class identity among vineyard workers and help to explain both the emergence of socialist politics and the explosion of labor protest in the Aude between 1888 and 1914.

The Phylloxera and the Changing Economy of Vinedressing

During the 1860s and 1870s, while Audois vinedressers and proprietors alike reaped the profits of expanding vineyards, winegrowers in the rest of France suffered the worst agricultural disaster in the history of French viticulture. Vineyards that formerly flourished under the Mediterranean sun now turned brown and bare as vine leaves yellowed and withered in the space of a few months. Winegrowers wrung their hands as harvests dwindled to nothing and debts mounted. The phylloxera, introduced into France on American vine cuttings, spread with alarming rapidity through the southeast and more slowly through the southwest. By 1871 it had destroyed nearly all of the vines in the Vaucluse and the Gard, and by 1875 much of those in the Hérault as well. Small growers and large, artisans and local merchants, railway men and bankers—all suffered. The ruinous insect recognized no class boundaries. Winegrowers in the Aude, temporarily spared, profited both from the rising wine prices that resulted from short supplies (as high as 50 francs per hectoliter in some areas) and from a virtual monopoly of the southern wine market. From 1878 to 1884 the Aude's income from wine was three times what it had been in the period of prosperity before the phylloxera.^[2] In the summer of 1878, however, traces of damage appeared in the Audois villages of Ouveillan, Argelliers, Ginestas, and Mirepeisset. By 1882 one thousand hectares had been attacked; four years later over one hundred thousand hectares, 54 percent of the Audois vineyard, had been totally destroyed.^[3] Wine production in the Aude dropped drastically, from almost five million hectoliters in 1882 to just short of two million in 1887.^[4] Although the nationwide economic depression

closed down workshops in the west of the department, the bulk of the Aude's industrial depression in these years resulted from the phylloxera, which affected the building trades and cooperage.^[5] Entire families, financially ruined by the disaster, departed for Algeria or for industrial centers. The somber streets of vinegrowing villages, houses dotted with "For Sale" signs, could not have contrasted more sharply with the gaiety and abandon of just a few years earlier.

In some ways winegrowers in the Aude fared better than their counterparts in other Mediterranean departments. They could use profits accumulated in the l870s to replant and treat their vines, and they were able to take advantage of methods of prevention and treatment proven effective elsewhere by the early 1880s.^[6] Moreover, the government had by now begun to grant vineyard owners subsidies for treatment and to free them from land taxes.^[7] But Audois vignerons could not entirely escape the ruinous cost of treating damaged vines. The least expensive remedy, spraying with carbon sulfide, cost 180 to 200 francs per hectare. Submersion of vines in water from irrigation canals that drew on the Aude River was more reliable but also more expensive, costing up to 1,800 francs per hectare. And replanting a vineyard entirely in sandy soil, where the phylloxera could not survive, required between 2,500 and 3,500 francs per hectare.^[8] Despite government subsidies to local associations formed to fight the phylloxera, the amounts landowners received amounted to only a fraction of the total cost required.^[9] Still, southern wine producers became increasingly dependent on government assistance, a fact that made Audois winegrowers sympathetic to state economic intervention and powerfully influenced their politics.

The high costs of replanting and treatment of phylloxera-stricken vines, however, were only part of the problem. Vineyard owners who replanted had to wait four years for new vines to become fully productive. Moreover, annual production costs were rising, partly because of a change in the entrepreneurial mentality of southern winegrowers.

Vignerons ' desperate efforts to rebuild the vineyards of the golden age led to more intensive cultivation and an attempt to raise yields by adding new procedures to the traditional tech-

niques of vinedressing. Unlike industries such as glassmaking and textiles, in which the introduction of more sophisticated technologies toward the end of the nineteenth century standardized and simplified production methods, vinedressing became increasingly complex.^[10] Vinedressers now fertilized their vines more aggressively and began to graft French grape stalks to phylloxera-resistant American vine roots, with instructional assistance from local agricultural associations.^[11] Vineyard owners uniformly planted high-yield varieties and cut their alcoholically weak wines (7–9°) with more alcoholic Algerian wines (13–14°). They also practiced chaptalisation more aggressively, adding sugar and hot water to the residue left in the vats after the wine had been drawn off to produce a second fermentation.^[12] Normally it was illegal to market these second wines, or piquettes , but in the 1880s and 1890s the government overlooked those who did so, even sanctioning the practice by lowering the sugar tax and by legalising the use of sugar to make third and sometimes fourth or fifth wines. The state thus supported the new entrepreneurial mentality of the post-phylloxera winegrower, which favored quantity over quality.^[13]

Despite these innovations, however, no mechanical revolution played a part in the reconstitution of the southern vineyards. Workers continued to perform virtually all tasks by hand, simply incorporating new chemical treatments and skills such as grafting into their repertoire. Rising costs now made vineyards capital-intensive as well as labor-intensive operations. Whereas contemporaries estimated that in the 1860s and 1870s annual costs of production would amount to 340 francs per hectare of mature vines for pruning, cultivation, sulphuring, harvesting, and winemaking, by 1892 that figure had risen to around 1,000 francs per hectare, taking into account additional chemical treatment, fertilizer, grafting, and more aggressive pruning.^[14] Needless to say, large vineyard owners, especially estate owners, could more easily handle these changes than small ones. Les grands could purchase chemicals and equipment in bulk, and hence more cheaply, and could also benefit from preferential rail transport rates. Most had sufficient reserve capital to meet higher production costs as well.

These changes irrevocably transformed the nature of south-

ern vinegrowing in three ways. First, they accentuated the cleavages between large growers and small—between grande and petite bourgeoisie . Second, they paved the way for the "industrialization" of southern viticulture. As one contemporary observer commented, "This [is] no longer the gardening of laborious peasants; it [is] industrial agriculture, demanding continual care, scrupulous vigilance, broad knowledge, and considerable capital."^[15] Third, they dramatically changed the southern wine market.

Transformation of the Wine Market in an Era of Crises

During the phylloxera crisis, rising demand for domestic table wine had led to massive imports of Spanish and Italian wine—an astonishing twelvefold increase in the 1880s over the previous decade.^[16] These imports did not stop once French wine production returned to normal and now that foreign wine directly competed with southern wine. To make matters worse, countries that had been clients of southern French winegrowers began to produce wines of their own; the French now had to compete with them on the European market.^[17] Small growers, who lacked the advantages of economies of scale, low transportation rates for bulk shipments, and reserve capital, suffered most from these changes. Wine dealers used the competition to pressure small growers into accepting inferior prices for their wine. Small producers often sold their meager harvests right from the vine, for fear that any delay would oblige them to accept a price lower than the one originally offered.^[18]

The combination of more aggressive entrepreneurship in winegrowing and a more competitive market made southern viticulture ever more susceptible to economic crises, with disastrous effects for vinedressers and small vineyard owners. By 1893 replanted Audois vineyards were in full production, yielding a monumental harvest of over four million hectoliters, and wine prices plummeted from 23 to 12 francs per hectoliter, dropping again in 1896.^[19] Falling prices translated into layoffs on the large estate vineyards, and numerous vinedressers found themselves unemployed overnight. In a spirit of contestation by

now familiar to urban villages and rural bourgs , vinedressers and landowners assembled in demonstrations of up to thirty thousand in November and December 1893 to pressure the government for assistance. Deputies, mayors, and representatives of local agricultural organizations all pleaded with the state to intervene, proposing such measures as nationalization of the Canal du Midi, lowering of railroad rates, restoration of the distiller's privilege (privilège des bouilleurs de cru , which allowed individuals to distill wine for private consumption), and an increase in tariffs on foreign wines. This radical departure from the free-trade liberalism characteristic of winegrowers a generation earlier even included the demand that local municipalities resign and that winegrowers refuse to pay the tax on alcoholic beverages.^[20]

In fact, wine prices did not improve for another three years. When harvests and prices finally did return to normal in 1897, winegrowers breathed a sigh of relief—but not for long. An exceptionally abundant harvest throughout lower Languedoc in 1900 resulted in a major, long-term, regionwide depression that lasted until World War I. Wine prices in the Aude fell as low as 5 francs per hectoliter the next year, and in 1902 as low as 1.25 francs. Although a small harvest in 1903 caused prices to rise somewhat, not until 1909–1910 did they return to respectable levels of 22, 24, and even 36 francs per hectoliter.^[21]

The political economy of the more or less constantly depressed wine market between 1900 and 1914 generated a great debate among contemporaries, who looked for monocausal explanations for the depression. Some, such as the economists Charles Gide and Pierre Genieys, charged that the wine glut of 1900–1901 was due to overproduction.^[22] Others blamed declining wine consumption. Still others pointed the finger at inadequate tariffs that failed to keep foreign wines off the French market. All, however, agreed that "fraud" bore a large measure of responsibility—that is, the production of artificial wines with sugar, water, or raisins.^[23] Some of these explanations were off the mark; others were more accurate. A recent study of the wine market in this period has shown that although fraud occupied a central place in the collective mentality of vinedressers and small peasant proprietors in the 1907 revolt (see Chapter 7), "artificial

wines represented no more than 5 percent of regional production. Moreover, wine consumption actually rose faster than southern production in the last seven or eight years of the nineteenth century.^[24] Still, contemporaries were correct to point out that the practice of cutting southern wine with more alcoholic wine, along with growing imports, increased the quantity of wine on the market and drove down prices. In fact, it was a combination of factors—fraud, cutting wine, and imports—rather than one single factor that produced the most enormous glut of southern wine that France had ever seen.

We will examine the full effects of this turn-of-century crisis on the labor and politics of Audois peasants and workers in Chapter 6. Suffice it here to say that the disaster once again plunged southern winegrowers into massive debt and outright poverty. The writer Ardouin Dumazet, traveling through lower Languedoc, sadly observed regarding the passionate devotion of southerners to their vines: "If this region were to be separated from the rest of France by some sort of disaster, the population would die of hunger in the midst of its vines."^[25] This statement was no exaggeration. Beggars roamed the countryside, often masked so as not to be identified. Between 1900 and 1906 loans made by the Caisse régionale de crédit agricole du Midi in Narbonne rose from 540,000 francs to just over 9 million francs; and by the height of the crisis the Crédit foncier had taken over two-thirds of the vineyards in the south.^[26] Not surprisingly, the nearly continuous economic depression lasting from the 1880s to World War I produced subtle changes in the configurations of property ownership in Audois vineyards.

The Shifting Property Structure of the Post-Phylloxera Vineyard and the Emergence of the "Industrial Vineyard"

Surprisingly, neither the short-term devastation of vines by the phylloxera nor the more or less permanently depressed market that followed radically transformed the property structure and landholding patterns of villages in the Aude. Rather, the pattern evident before the phylloxera crisis persisted: the coexistence of a large number of very small landowners at one end of the scale

with a small number of very large landowners at the other. Two parallel changes did occur, however, between the late 1870s and the years before World War I, and these were visible in Coursan. On the one hand, the proportion of medium and large proprietors declined in the period 1876 to 1911, and on the other, both the number and proportion of small and very small proprietors increased, and the parceling of vines continued (see Table 5).

This pattern in Coursan reflects a departmentwide trend. By the 1890s, just under half the property owners in the Aude owned less than one hectare (an increase over 1882), whereas the number of large property owners had declined, as had that of medium owners (see Table 4). At the same time, owners of over ten hectares in the department now controlled 59 percent of the land; those owning under one hectare, 8.4 percent.^[27] It is true that some large vineyard owners in the Aude sold undesirable parcels to offset the enormous costs of reconstitution, and again sold land during the great turn-of-century wine glut.^[28] By and large, however, owners of estate vineyards in Coursan (Pontserme, La Française, and La Ricardelle) profited from the 60–70 percent decline in the price of land by acquiring new land. The estate of Lastours grew spectacularly from 36 hectares in 1879 to 114 hectares in 1884, and the Laforgue family built its holdings from 28 to 107 hectares during the phylloxera years.^[29] Still more important, large estates continued to dominate the local economy not only in terms of size but also in terms of the vast quantities of wine they produced. The village of Vinassan near Coursan provides a striking example, for here the four largest vineyards accounted for almost 70 percent of the total wine produced in the village.^[30]

A few enterprising large vineyard capitalists managed to build estates from scratch in this period, among whom many were absentee proprietors. A case in point is Léopold Roudier, a wealthy banker from Béziers, who purchased 300 hectares of completely ruined vines for 700,000 francs in June 1892 to build the estate of Jouarres in the Minervois. By 1897, after an enormous capital outlay that included building an ultramodern winery and acquisition of an additional 218 hectares, Roudier's vineyard employed some 120 to 140 workers.^[31] As an absentee owner, Roudier typified a new type of entrepreneur who lived

far from his estate and relied on a manager (régisseur ) for daily vineyard administration. These men included Cyprien Crozals, a wine merchant from Béziers and owner of La Française in Coursan, and the owner of Lastours, Louis Cazals, an engineer from Bordeaux. By the turn of the century 340 absentee proprietors held land in Coursan, as opposed to 133 at midcentury.

Another new type of entrepreneur became increasingly common in the late nineteenth century as well: the multiproprietor, who owned two and sometimes three estate vineyards, not all necessarily in the Aude. Between 1897 and 1900, sixty-five such men in the arrondissements of Narbonne and Carcassonne owned a total of 139 estates.^[32] Adolphe Turrel, opportunist deputy from Narbonne, accumulated five large vineyards in the vicinity of Narbonne; the comte de Beauxhostes, president of the Comice agricole de Narbonne, owned five even more widely dispersed estates that together produced a mammoth sixty-six thousand hectoliters of wine annually. In the Narbonnais, the enormous output of these multiproperties accounted for one-third of production in the area. As Rémy Pech has observed, the combination of size, production capacity, and management style (by régisseur ) were all suggestive of "viticultural capitalism and a viticultural industry."^[33]

This, then, was how large vignerons experienced the subtle changes in landownership of the post-phylloxera vineyard. But what of the small petty bourgeois vintners who continued to dominate production in the hilly Corbières region south of Carcassonne and who still figured prominently in the Narbonnais? If capital emerged from the end-of-century crises reinforced, how did labor fare?

Amazingly, small vineyard owners managed to survive the era of crises that to all appearances should have wiped them out. These individuals, mainly vinedressers and artisans, held on to their precious if capricious vines. In the Aude overall, vinedresser landowners declined in number during the phylloxera crisis and after (from 26 percent in 1882 to 19 percent ten years later).^[34] By 1896, vinedressers in the land records of Coursan amounted to only some 12 percent of total landowners (see Table 1), and they also owned less land than previously (0.53 versus 0.65 hectares). Nonetheless, these records identify only

two-thirds of the landowners in that year, and it is possible that they underestimate the true number of vinedressers who possessed land in the village. It is also possible that even within the Aude conditions varied. In the arrondissement of Narbonne, for instance, almost 50 percent of the vinedressers owned vines, and in the Minervois as many as 65 percent of the workers may have owned land around the turn of the century. In the village of Arzens, some 90 percent of the vinedressers owned their own vines before World War.^[35] Some artisans also benefited from falling prices and land sales during the phylloxera and were able to acquire new land. Antoine Jacques Pagès, a cooper who had purchased a minuscule five ares of vines in Coursan in 1873, increased his holdings to twenty-six hectares by 1911.

Overall, though, continued landownership no longer automatically meant material comfort. Just as Harvey Smith has found for Cruzy, Hérault, the continued parceling of land resulted in lower status for small landowners in the Aude, who could now barely eke out an existence from their vines. How did these courageous men and women cope—and why did the grande bourgeoisie vinicole allow them to survive?

Small owners, like large, benefited from local and national financial assistance, as well as from the suspension of land taxes. Ultimately, however, they survived by eliminating labor costs, performing the work themselves, and by working from dawn to dusk. In the Minervois, friends and neighbors exchanged labor services and formed "bourrades" to help one another cultivate their vines on Sunday mornings.^[36] Some of the agricultural associations (syndicats agricoles ) that appeared in the Aude and elsewhere after 1884 also assisted small vineyard owners by enabling them to purchase equipment, fertilizer, and vines cheaply. Large owners lent equipment and the use of their wineries to small vintners in return for labor services on their estates. And, as we have already noted, they lent money. In fact, more than a few small landowners financed the reconstitution of their vines after the phylloxera by becoming indebted to les grands .

Large vineyard owners, it seems, were convinced that small property ownership combined with entrepreneurial paternalism would ultimately guarantee social stability. Moreover, it was in their interest to encourage the survival of small vineyard

property: the little income that workers could now eke out of their tiny properties would justify keeping their wages low. The continued existence of small owners would also provide a reserve army of labor that would not burden employers with a permanent wage bill. Finally, some large owners saw vinedresser-owners as potential allies in the battle to defend their interests before the state.^[37] Whether these visions of a community of vignerons were borne out is another matter, as we shall see later.

Repeated economic crises, even as they reinforced the dominant position of large vineyards, created a new entrepreneurial mentality, and brought about important changes in the wine market, did not destroy small peasant producers at the bottom of the social ladder. The gradual and visible impoverishment of small vignerons led them to form alliances not with les grands , but with landless workers, to whom they grew increasingly close in both economic status and shared interests.

Proletarianization of the Vinedresser

The creation and re-creation of the European working class at different stages in the development of capitalism and in different milieux across the nineteenth century occurred as the result of changing material conditions, changing ideology, and changing social life. Because class consists in the relationships of human beings to one another and to the productive forces that govern their lives, class composition itself changed. Individuals' "membership" in a class shifted as their relationship to productive forces changed and as their perceptions of relatedness and shared interests altered. This was no less true in the sunny villages of the winegrowing Aude than in the dark industrial centers of Lille or St-Chamond. Here we examine the changing material conditions of vinedressers; we will look at ideology and political culture in Chapters 5 and 6.

Vinedressers in the Aude acutely felt the impact of the economic crises of the early Third Republic on both wages and the structure of the labor market. When the phylloxera finally appeared in the department in the early 1880s, vineyard workers still enjoyed the same high incomes and comfortable conditions that had characterized the 1870s. As soon as the insect began to

decimate vines locally, however, employers cut wages by as much as one-third (Table 11) and reduced the number of work hours and days. Many workers were simply laid off.

Far from improving once harvests returned to normal, the vinedressers' situation worsened in the 1890s because of structural changes in the labor market. One result of the economic crises was the appearance of a new labor force.^[38] Immigration to the Aude from surrounding departments had begun in the late 1860s, swelling the vinegrowing population of areas such as the

Narbonnais; this immigration continued through the 1880s. Although the population of Coursan peaked in 1891 and stagnated thereafter, by the turn of the century well over half of all male vinedressers who married in Coursan came from outside the Narbonnais (see Table 10). Most had traveled to Coursan from other departments in the region—the Hérault, the Gard, the Tarn, the Ariège, the Aveyron, and the Lozère. Yet increasingly, new immigrants now came from beyond the borders of France—from Spain, and a few from Italy. Between 1876 and 1891, foreigners living in Coursan jumped in number from 26 to 267.^[39] These immigrants, who rarely succeeded in obtaining land of their own, were especially tied to the estate vineyards. The majority performed unskilled work as terrassiers or as farmhands, planting and digging new vineyards (such as Roudier's estate, Jouarres) for piece rates that undercut the wages of skilled French vinedressers. When an estate owner in Narbonne, for example, offered thirty-five centimes a square meter for a job leveling land in part of his vineyard, the French workers whom he approached asked sixty centimes; an Italian agreed to do the job for thirty.^[40] Competition also came from small vineyard owners who could no longer live from their land and turned to the estates for work. Vinedressers later accused these men of competing with them for jobs.

Two additional factors contributed to a more competitive labor market, as well as to the sharpening of class distinctions in vineyard villages. First, the enormous expense of reconstituting vineyards after the phylloxera, vastly increased annual costs of production, and the inability of many small vineyard owners to sustain themselves through prolonged periods of depression all meant that many vinedresser-owners of microproperties now experienced landownership more as a liability than a benefit. Because of growing indebtedness, if not impoverishment, microproprietors, like the landless immigrants who now competed with them, relied more than ever on wage work. One contemporary observer bemoaned the fact that "today, whoever has a bit of vines also has debts. The small property of the day laborer has no other effect than that of taking away their independence." Under changed conditions, this writer noted prophetically, landownership could no longer be expected to confer

stability and political conservatism: "[These worker-owners] cannot be counted on to resist the progress of socialism."^[41] Second, in a village like Coursan, where medium and large proprietors declined in number over this period, workers now had a more limited choice of employers and became more dependent on the large estate vineyards for income.

By far the most important factor in the making of a vineyard working class in the Aude, however, was the change in work rhythms and routines.^[42] Male vinedressers in the region, unlike many skilled industrial artisans in France at this time, did not experience a downgrading of their skills as the technology of vinedressing grew more sophisticated. On the contrary, these "artisans of the vineyard" added new tasks to their repertoire: grafting, preparation of vines for submersion, plus the more aggressive use of insecticides and fertilizer. Yet even as their work became more complex and demanding of dexterity and technical expertise (as in grafting especially), their position deteriorated—both materially, in relation to other workers on the estates, and practically, with the introduction of new forms of labor control and work discipline.

Within the hierarchy of the estate vineyard, the distinction between day laborers and other personnel sharpened in the postphylloxera period. For managers, overseers, and farmhands, material life improved between 1881 and 1900. The manager who earned a yearly salary of 1,000 to 1,500 francs in 1880 saw his income rise to between 1,400 and 1,800 francs in the 1890s.^[43] More managers acquired land after the crisis as well. In addition, the position of the estate manager became more important over the years, both because of the growing complexity of viticulture, which required more careful administration and prudent engineering, and because absentee and multiple estate ownership made management by proxy increasingly common. The position of overseers also improved in the 1880s and 1890s. Their salaries increased, and, like the managers, more became landowners. Finally, unskilled farmhands benefited from employers' efforts to reconstitute their vineyards. These men, mostly immigrants, who undertook the strenuous digging of canals and replanting, now increasingly worked on yearly contracts rather than by the month. Given the relative stability of prices during

this period (see Chapter 4), increased wages meant that the purchasing power of most estate employees increased. The situation of skilled vinedressers, however, was another story. Their position became less, not more, secure.

Not only did vinedressers face dwindling returns from their own vines and competition from unskilled immigrant workers in the 1880s and 1890s, but they also faced declining wages and a shorter work year. As we have seen, employers almost immediately cut wages and the number of workdays during the phylloxera crisis, and wages did not improve thereafter (see Table 11). Vinedressers in the Aude earned some 500 francs less, annually, in the 1890s than they had during the golden age of the vine. Moreover, although the vinedresser was normally hired on at the end of October for the year, custom rather than contract fixed the terms of employment. Because employers calculated wages on a daily basis and sometimes paid workers a piece rate, in slow seasons they might dismiss workers for weeks at a time. In wet weather workers had to dress the vines in mud and rain. Such conditions were not new, but workers could tolerate them more easily in a period of high wages. The quality of relations between employers and workers changed as well. More rational-minded estate owners in the 1890s suppressed such traditional practices as granting workers the right to glean after harvest or to gather wood and vine trimmings (an important source of cooking fuel in the forest-poor Aude) for their own use. Employers' increasing reliance on estate managers, too, led to a breakdown in the personal relations between employers and workers that had earlier allowed these age-old customs.^[44]

The gradual and complex process of class formation, however, resulted from much more than the deterioration of material conditions; it was also the product of changing work relations. In the post-phylloxera period, new forms of labor discipline reflected employers' efforts to rationalize production. Employers now expected day laborers to work fixed hours and to follow a work routine set forth by the employer or his estate manager. The establishment of a seven- or eight-hour day meant that workers who owned vines had less time for private cultivation. Likewise, in the 1890s estate owners used piece rates more frequently to extract maximum output. In the age of vineyard

expansion, workers tolerated piece rates insofar as they permitted worker-proprietors to dress vines on an estate at their own pace, without the constraint of a fixed workday, so that they could later work their own vines. In the 1890s, however, employers used piecework to replant their vines as cheaply as possible, playing on the willingness of immigrants to work under this system. Not surprisingly, in many of the strikes that occurred in the Aude after the turn of the century vinedressers demanded the abolition of piece rates.

Team labor was another way for employers to acquire skilled labor and impose work discipline in the post-phylloxera years. In addition to facilitating labor recruitment, team work is a classic form of labor discipline, where task organization and payment are simplified by keeping workers dependent on one another for the completion of tasks and for "self-supervision." In the Aude, teams (called colles ) of ten or fifteen skilled vinedressers circulated from estate to estate to perform operations such as pruning and grafting. Employers paid the entire team a fixed wage, which the team members divided among themselves. The leader not only hired the workers and supervised the job, but he also set the price of the job with the employer.^[45]

Although the team served as a form of labor discipline, it also held the potential for subversion. The experience of team labor and the collective wage constituted an early element of worker control that promoted workplace solidarity. Moreover, since team workers rotated from estate to estate, they enjoyed more independence than workers who were obliged to work for a single employer. Finally, team work provided an opportunity for workers to communicate with one another at the work site. These vinedressers, then, played an important role in the later development of revolutionary syndicalism among agricultural workers in the Aude.^[46]

All of these changes in work relations contributed to the proletarianization of vinedressers in the Aude, who, whether they owned land or not, now depended primarily on wages for their livelihood. The "golden age of the vine" was long gone.

By 1905, the agricultural economist Michel Augé-Laribé could write, "the high-yield . . . viticulture of the south is clear-

ly . . . industrial . . . , both because of the quantity of capital that it requires and because of the production methods that it uses: territorial specialization pushed to the point of monoculture, . . . piecework and the formation of a wage-earning proletariat."^[47] In a sense he was right. Vinedressing and wine production, already specialized and organized according to a clear-cut division of labor, grew technically more complex, if not more mechanized. Concentration of ownership and control of the market by large vineyard capital became increasingly apparent in the domination of production by a relatively small number of large growers, including some powerful multiproprietors. The transforming agents of agricultural capitalism in this era of crises, then, were not machines, but profiteering entrepreneurs ready to cash in on a booming market in vin ordinaire . Unlike some types of capitalist agriculture in industrial societies, the technical modification of southern viticulture did not require a diminished work force, but rather the reverse.^[48] Labor cutbacks came only during depressions that forced owners to keep production costs to a bare minimum—a goal they could also attain by reducing wages.

Nonetheless, even if most students of turn-of-the-century southern French viticulture agree on its "industrial" character, the analogy between agricultural capitalism and industrial capitalism cannot be pushed too far for the Aude. The evolution of vineyards did not eliminate small producers. Far from it: in the department overall, small property owners counted for 85 percent of all landowners, and in some areas, such as the Corbières, these individuals together actually produced more wine than some large growers. Furthermore, because agriculture is subject to natural diseases and climatic variations, winegrowers, who have never been able to standardize their product, faced much greater market instability than did industrial producers. Finally, although the large estate vineyards increasingly came to resemble factories in their labor discipline, large numbers of workers, and market orientation, vinedressers remained very different from industrial workers. Vinedressers did not experience proletarianization in the same way their industrial artisan counterparts did. Their status as skilled workers endowed them with a certain spirit of independence and pride in their work. More-

over, the vineyard worker shared much with the small owner, in both material condition and interests. The complexity of the agricultural working class, which included that hybrid, the worker-proprietor, who occasionally performed wage labor in the vineyards, also distinguished the two groups of workers.

At the same time, vinedressers undeniably experienced a serious degradation in their position over the years. The crises of vineyard capitalism all allowed employers to intensify their control over production and to attempt to extract as much labor as possible at the lowest possible price. Concurrently, the new entrepreneurial mentality of the post-phylloxera years destroyed the customary bonds between employers and working people, creating new relations in the workplace and in vineyard communities. We can get a clearer picture of the human scale of these changes, and particularly of the complexity of proletarianization, by looking at the gender relations of the workplace, the evolving work roles of women, and the way families coped with the depressed vineyard economy.