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.