5
Radicals and Socialists in the Vineyards

The economic devastation that the working class and small vineyard owners experienced during the depression years of the 1880s and early 1890s profoundly influenced the development of left politics in the Aude. We have already seen how rural voters turned to radicalism in the prosperous 1870s before the phylloxera attacked their vines. Once the vineyards of the Aude entered a period of prolonged economic depression, however, indebted petty bourgeois vintners and vinedressers were even more attracted to the interventionist program of southern radicals and their promise of statist solutions. Economic depression simultaneously proved to be fertile soil for the growth of socialism as the ideas of Marx, Engels, Guesde, and Lafargue made their way into southern vineyards.

Yet socialism in the Aude was very different from the revolutionary socialism that developed elsewhere in France in this period (particularly in departments such as the Van or the Cher), mainly because it retained close ties to southern radicalism. Like the radicals, Audois socialists appealed primarily to unemployed rural artisans and impoverished small property owners in urban villages, and soft-pedaled the collectivism that characterized socialism elsewhere. Moreover, they did not attempt to carry the message of class struggle to the vineyard working class, a task that revolutionary syndicalists took up around the turn of the century (and which we will examine in Chapter 6).

Radicalism and Socialism in the Aude: Political Culture, Organization, and Ideology

Radicalism in southern France developed as a seemingly paradoxical mixture of liberalism and statism. On the one hand, radi-

cals defended small winegnowers' and artisans' independence, and on the other, they supported the nationalization of railroads and banks, lower rail rates for agriculture, the reduction of indirect wine taxes and land taxes, and the establishment of a progressive income tax.^[1] In 1884, winegnowers in the Comice agricole de Narbonne who attacked the government's free trade policy on foreign wine supported radical programs for government intervention in the wine market and revision of tariffs.^[2]

Radicals in lower Languedoc distinguished themselves as well by embracing the dual traditions of the Republic of 1792 and the démoc soc republicanism of 1848. As Leo Loubère has pointed out, these men supported improvements in workers' living and working conditions and, in the period before labor unions were legally sanctioned, championed workers' rights to organize and to strike. Clemenceau's left-leaning program of 1881 called for a shorter workday, employer responsibility for work safety, worker participation in the establishment and application of workshop regulations, and abolition of the law against the International Workingman's Association and the livret .^[3] Camille Pelletan, who represented this strain of southern left radicalism, defended miners in the Gard against the government's attempts to break strikes in 1881 and 1893, and in 1901 proclaimed that the newly formed radical party united "all sons of the revolution, whatever their differences, against all men of the counterrevolution."^[4]

The rich associational life of vineyard villages that favored the formation of démoc soc and republican organizations in the late 1840s also facilitated the formation of radical political groups in the Third Republic. By the late 1870s radicals who met in masonic lodges in Lézignan and Sigean and in "free thought" societies (sociétés de libre pensée ) in the Narbonnais and in the villages around Carcassonne were drawing vinedressers and rural artisans into their fold.^[5] Thus, aided by a sympathetic press—newspapers such as La Fraternité , Le Bon Sens , and Le Républicain de Narbonne —radicals established an organizational base in the countryside well before they were a formal political party.

With the Aude's vineyards withering under the ravages of phylloxera, the return of formerly exiled Communards to political life (thanks to the amnesty of 1880) allowed socialism to establish itself in southern soil. In 1880 one of these men, Paul

Narbonne, founded the newspaper that eventually became the voice of socialism in the Aude, L'Emancipation sociale (to be renamed La République sociale when Ernest Ferroul took it over in 1891).^[6] Devoted to the "eternal principles of justice and freedom," Narbonne's paper dedicated itself to fighting "authoritarianism in all three of its forms: the altar, the throne, and 'bourgeoisisme.'"^[7]

Agricultural workers and artisans devastated by the depression flocked to political discussion groups such as the Cercle de l'union des travailleurs in Limoux or the groupes d'études sociales in villages like Coursan, Argelliers, and Cuxac. Socialist chambrées and societies sprang up in viticultural towns; by 1882 a groupe de libre pensée socialiste had formed in Lézignan, and a chambrée socialiste existed in Narbonne. Ernest Ferroul represented these groups at the St-Etienne congress, where Jules Guesde founded the Parti ouvrier français (POF).^[8] Interested in class issues, these groups aimed to "study all economic, social, and political questions of interest to workers" and to "seek . . . all measures and reforms of such a nature as to improve the condition of the proletariat."^[9] Like the secret societies of the 1840s and l850s, they allowed rural workers and urban workers to develop a shared political culture. By 1890–1891 socialist societies were active in ten villages in the Narbonnais: Armissan, Bagès, Coursan, Cuxac, Fabrézan, Fleury, Gruissan, Lézignan, Salles, and Vinassan. These and other villages—Bizanet, Marcorignan, Nevian, Moussan, Raissac, Montredon, Ouveillan, and St-Marcel—sent delegates to the eighth and ninth national congresses of the POF in Lille and Lyon. In 1891, the POF created a regional federation, based in Narbonne.^[10] In addition to participating in national organizations, this impressive network of rural socialist groups organized election campaigns, distributed party propaganda, sponsored visits of socialist activists such as Guesde, Alexandre Millerand, and Paule Minck, and organized public celebrations commemorating the Paris and Narbonne communes and May Day.^[11] Peasants and small winegrowers counted for almost 19 percent of POF membership in the Aude, and by 1896 socialists controlled thirteen municipalities in the department, including Narbonne.^[12]

Socialism in the Aude before World War I was strongly influ-

enced by its most vocal activist, Ernest Ferroul. A physician and freemason (he was a member of the Carcassonne lodge Egalité, and in 1881 he headed the libre pensée society in Narbonne), Ferroul joined the Narbonne municipal council in 1881, seven years before he was elected deputy from the Aude and ten years before becoming mayor of Narbonne. Although Ferroul sided with the followers of Paul Brousse at the divided socialist congress at St-Etienne in 1882, he joined Guesde's Parti ouvrier français in 1890, collaborated with Guesde on the paper Egalité , and marched side by side with Guesde and Edouard Vaillant during the Paris May Day celebration of 1890. Ferroul represented socialist groups from the Aude at POF national congresses at Roubaix (1884), Troyes (1888), Lille (1890), Lyon (1891), Marseille (1892), Paris (1893), and Nantes (1894); in 1893 he was elected to the national council of the POF.^[13]

Between 1891 and 1897, as socialist mayor of Narbonne, Ferroul created the social republic in microcosm, by providing urban workers with an alternative to competitive capitalism and a disinterested state.^[14] Thus he provided aid programs for the poor, gave financial assistance to the Bourse du travail (labor exchange), and established public works projects and soupes populaires to provide relief for the unemployed.^[15] In true Jacobin fashion, the municipality organized huge public celebrations on the anniversary of the First Republic and on May Day, and replaced the "République française" inscribed on public buildings with "République sociale."^[16]

During this period, Ferroul's political rhetoric evolved. Although he remained committed to the international alliance of workers, socialization of the means of production, and the conquest of municipal governments, in the 1890s Ferroul downplayed the themes of class struggle and revolutionary seizure of power.^[17] Nor did the Audois socialists who followed Ferroul promote the more revolutionary aspects of the Guesdist programme du Havre of 1880. Meeting in 1892 with agricultural workers in Lézignan, for example, Ferroul and his socialist colleague Félix Aldy supported a political solution to the social question, maintaining that their efforts to end unemployment, regulate working hours, and establish workers' retirement funds could be realized only in the context of the legally constituted

republic.^[18] Audois socialists abandoned the rhetoric of revolution and collectivism in addressing the economic issues dear to the hearts of small winegrowers in the Narbonnais. They supported vintners' demands for tariffs on foreign wine, unlike Paul Lafargue and socialists in the Var, who opposed protection on the grounds that it would starve out the urban working class.^[19]

The Ferroulists, moreover, actively cultivated their ties with radicals, appearing regularly at banquets and public forums to honor radical luminaries such as Camille Pelletan, Gustave Rouanet, and Léon Bourgeois.^[20] Radicals and socialists also rubbed elbows in groupes d'études sociales in Coursan and Argelliers, and closed ranks during the antirepublican reaction of the 1890s. As the century ended, the rhetoric of Audois socialism bore an uncanny resemblance to that of southern radicalism. By 1898 Ferroul, now sounding more like Jaurès than Guesde, insisted on the centrality of the republic to the socialist project and on the importance of constitutional revision and measures such as the income tax. That year the congrès socialiste in the Aude designated Ferroul as the socialist candidate; it then appealed to the broad spectrum of "radical, radical-socialist, and socialist voters" to prepare an electoral strategy.^[21]

Ferroul's moderate, evolutionary stance at this point was not so different from Guesde's strategy of emphasizing legislative reform to recruit workers to the POF between 1893 and 1898.^[22] But the two men parted company on other issues. In 1899 both Aldy and Ferroul left the POF in protest over Guesde's condemnation of Alexandre Millerand's entry into the ministry of Waldeck-Rousseau alongside Minister of Defense General Gallifet, known as the "butcher of the Commune." Ferroul argued that socialists should exclude no activity that would help them to "improve their effectiveness and influence; tactical differences between men who agree about fundamental doctrinal principles should not divide socialists from one another."^[23]

Socialists, Small Vineyard Owners, and the Agrarian Question

Not only did socialists in the Aude increasingly divest themselves of rhetorical references to revolution, but they focused their attention mainly on urban and rural artisans and small vineyard

owners, not the impoverished vineyard working class. In the Narbonnais, socialists energetically supported the interests of small vignerons devastated by the ravages of the phylloxera and the general depression of the 1880s and 1890s; one looks in vain in the pages of La République sociale or in socialist campaign speeches for references to the plight of agricultural workers, who suffered most from the phylloxera crisis. In the campaign for the 1893 elections Ferroul took the POF program to the countryside, promising nationalization of the Canal du Midi, railroads, and mines and establishment of agricultural credit, but he said virtually nothing about agricultural workers, whose situation had scarcely improved despite the modest recovery of the wine market in 1893.^[24] For the small vineyard owners who supported Ferroul, however, socialism meant opposition to the anarchy of the free market and a demand for state regulation, not a mise en question of the capitalist system. This was the real meaning of the social republic in the Aude, and it differed little from the message of southern left radicalism.

Why did socialists, who claimed to represent the working class, support small vintners' demands for tax and tariff reform but fail to address the concerns of vineyard workers? It is unlikely that socialists were unaware of the plight of rural workers or blind to rural poverty. Ferroul's strategy of support for small vineyard owners may have been designed to assure him financial backing (from departmental officials); it was also undoubtedly related to the fact that many rural artisans and vineyard workers were also small property owners. In short, socialists may not have seen landless rural workers as a separate constituency at this stage.

In fact, the socialists were probably well aware of the complexities of class identity in the Aude. The vineyard working class was exceptionally heterogeneous at the end of the nineteenth century. Vinedressers and small proprietors shared similar conditions, and both faced proletarianization, if not destitution. Impoverished worker-owners and artisans sympathized with their nonlandowning confreres; these groups mingled and mixed in the local political clubs that flourished in the 1880s and 1890s, and formed a common political culture.

The socialists' decision to tone down their revolutionary rhet-

oric and back small winegrowers, then, was consistent with the general POF strategy of appealing to peasant farmers. France was still very much a nation of small-holding peasants. They had to be brought into the socialist fold.

At their 1880 congress in Le Havre, the Guesdists had adopted a radical agrarian program calling for the immediate collectivization of land, mines, and farm equipment. At their 1892 congress in Marseille, however, they cast aside their revolutionary rhetoric in favor of a more moderate platform calling for a minimum wage for agricultural workers; the creation of agricultural arbitration councils; the distribution of land to propertyless families; the establishment of a retirement fund from a tax on large estates; a reduction of sharecroppers' and tenants' rents; payment to sharecroppers and tenants of an indemnity from the surplus value they created on the property they farmed; the purchase of land and agricultural machinery by municipalities, which would then rent them to small farmers; the establishment of consumers' cooperatives; the suppression of sales tax on properties worth less than 5,000 francs; and the revision of land survey records (cadastre ).^[25] Nowhere did they mention class struggle in the countryside or the collectivization of peasant property.^[26]

The relative lack of attention to the needs of landless laborers by a party that claimed to represent the working class was note-worthy. And in 1894 Guesde and Lafargue went still further, calling peasant property the "tool of the peasant, as the plane is of the cabinetmaker and the scalpel is of the surgeon. The peasant, the cabinetmaker, and the surgeon, who exploit no one with the tools of their trade, do not have to fear that they will be taken away by a socialist revolution."^[27] In fact, some socialists believed that impoverished small property owners could be likened to workers. In the ensuing debate on this issue, for instance, Jean Jaurès (who helped draft the considérants to the 1894 revised program) drew an analogy between the small peasant proprietor and the worker: "Between large holdings and small, there is not only a quantitative difference, but . . . a qualitative one; the former is an expression of capital, the latter of labor."^[28]

Ferroul and his supporters, however, did not translate these national debates and prises de position into a clear or consistent

strategy. Their rhetorical attacks on private property and agricultural capitalism in La République sociale were not matched by concrete efforts to recruit agricultural workers.^[29] Still worse, in some areas of France Guesdists failed to back rural workers' struggles, such as those of the lumbermen of the Allier, Nièvre, and the Cher who tried to form unions in the early 1890s—a serious omission for a major socialist political party claiming to represent the working class. Nonetheless, small vineyard owners and artisans continued to support socialists in the winegrowing Aude, even after Ferroul temporarily lost the municipality of Narbonne in 1897.^[30]

Electoral Politics and Alliances: The Stormy Fortunes of Radicals and Socialists in the Aude

While the development of an organizational base in popular associations did not make socialist victories in national elections a foregone conclusion, the severity of the agricultural depression in the Aude in the 1880s helped to draw workers and petty bourgeois vignerons into socialist ranks. Socialist electoral successes were also linked to charismatic local personalities like Ferroul and Aldy and to socialists' alliances with left radicals.

Socialist politicians began to challenge (but not beat) radicals in the legislative elections of 1881 and in an 1883 by-election in Narbonne arrondissement (Table 18). In 1881, for example, Joseph Malric, left-radical mayor of Sigean, with strong personal political ties in the Narbonnais, won a deputy's seat in a close race against Emile Digeon, who captured Coursan and other winegrowing villages faithful to this local Communard.^[31] A similar phenomenon occurred in 1883, when Clovis Papinaud, left-radical cooper and former mayor of Cuxac d'Aude, ran against two socialists: Digeon and Eugène Fournière, collaborator on L'Emancipation sociale , who had recently broken with Guesde and joined Brousse's possibilists.^[32] Papinaud embodied the shifting ground between left radicals and Audois socialists of the 1880s and 1890s. He had been imprisoned with Narbonne and Digeon following the repression of the Paris Commune, and he had also collaborated on L'Emancipation sociale . Now, though, he ran as a left radical. Once again, winegrowing communities gave

the strongest votes to socialist candidates, who promised relief to distressed winegrowers.^[33] The real significance of the elections, however, was that they marked the beginning of a period of electoral cooperation between socialists and left radicals: Digeon and Fournière stood down on the second ballot to support Papinaud.

While the phylloxera silently ate away at the Aude's vineyards, socialists Ferroul and Digeon cooperated with radicals in the scrutin de liste elections of 1885.^[34] They ran on the standard radical program calling for separation of church and state, amnesty for political prisoners, reform of land taxes, institution of an income tax, nationalization of railroads, canals, and mines, and social legislation.^[35] Predictably, the radical-socialist list was strongest in the vinegrowing eastern half of the department, where workers and small vignerons gave it 37 percent of the vote (in Narbonne arrondissement), polling strong majorities in Coursan (62 percent; see Table 18), Fleury (58 percent), and Salles (44 percent).^[36] Three years later, at the height of the vineyard depression, the sudden resignation of Papinaud from his seat as deputy from Narbonne opened the way for the first socialist victory in the Aude, when Ernest Ferroul was voted into the Chamber of Deputies (see Table 18).^[37] Despite the division that Boulanger fostered between socialists (Ferroul briefly flirted with Boulangism) and radicals (who refused to make alliances with Boulangists), Ferroul held on to his deputy's seat in 1889.^[38]

In the 1890s, however, socialist fortunes in the Aude did not follow those of socialists nationally. Whereas the 1893 elections brought Guesde, Vaillant, and Millerand to the Chamber of Deputies (Jaurès had been elected as a socialist in a by-election earlier that year), Ferroul lost to a radical, and Félix Aldy lost to the opportunist large vineyard owner Adolphe Turrel (Table 19).^[39] Socialist supporters charged that the elections had been fixed. In Coursan women banged on pots and pans to protest the ballot count, an angry crowd threatened a radical member of the municipal council, and the mayor was struck on the head. Fights broke out, and a detachment of cavalry from Narbonne finally charged in to disperse the demonstrators. The incident vividly demonstrated the growing division between radicals and socialists at the base, among rural villagers, even if the programs of the groups' leaders were essentially similar.^[40]

Again in 1898, while the POF sent twelve deputies to Paris (seven of whom came from the south), socialists in the Aude lost elections to Opportunists (see Table 19). This time, charges of electoral fraud precipitated a parliamentary inquiry, invalidation of the elections, and the withdrawal of the Opportunist

candidate.^[41] As in 1893, abstentions in Coursan were much higher (36 percent in 1893, 37 percent in 1898) than the national average during the Third Republic (29 percent).^[42]

The reversal of fortune for socialist politicians in the Narbonnais is curious, given an apparently well-organized popular base in villages throughout the area. To be sure, the existence of groupes d'études sociales and socialist free-thought societies did not guarantee electoral victories—particularly since socialism in the Aude was dominated by a small number of powerful personalities. Workers and former landowners who had become full- or part-time workers may have been alienated by Ferroul's lack of interest in the rural working class. In 1893 in Coursan, where

the voting population included over 500 vineyard workers, Ferroul received only 253 votes (and abstentions reached 41 percent); clearly, he did not have the full support of agricultural workers.

In both 1893 and 1898, however, employer pressure on workers to vote for the Opportunist or abstain may have also played a role. It was common knowledge that régisseurs used electoral pressure to intimidate workers and score a few points with the patron , and in this period of low wages and stiff competition for jobs workers quite likely responded.^[43] In addition, the suspicious combination of socialist losses and high abstentions, which reached 40 percent in winegrowing areas, may have resulted because radicals and socialists represented similar interests in the countryside.^[44] Not only did both present themselves as defenders of petty bourgeois vineyard owners, but some radical candidates even called themselves socialists. This is not entirely surprising, for even after the formation of the Radical party radical leaders in the Aude referred to the party as the Parti républicain radical et radical socialiste.^[45] Finally, at the same time that local political movements became more integrated into national politics, charismatic local political leaders and favorite sons continued to pull considerable weight, even as they replaced the notables who had controlled local politics in an earlier age.^[46] Thus, in the 1890s climate of agricultural depression and antirepublican reaction—when the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus affair challenged the republic and divided the left—Opportunist Adolphe Turrel, who defeated socialist Paul Narbonne in 1898, could benefit from his image as the paternalistic notable and grand propriétaire to promote himself as the candidate of défense viticole . Moreover, Turrel actually addressed some of the problems of agricultural workers, which neither Ferroul nor Aldy did. In fact, when wine prices fell drastically after the 1893 harvest it was Turrel, not Ferroul or Aldy, who spoke to the plight of rural laborers.^[47]

With the turn of the century, however, socialists suddenly awakened to the potential of mobilizing agricultural workers. As the wine market depression of 1900–1901 once again brought the economy of the Aude to its knees, Ferroul and Aldy paid somewhat more attention to vineyard workers, whose situation

had been steadily worsening. In an effort to address the growing unemployment in rural villages, Ferroul now proposed a law (which passed in the Chamber of Deputies on January 16, 1902) easing the rules that governed the financing of public works projects and authorizing communes to employ workers on these projects for the duration of the depression.^[48] Likewise, Aldy proposed legislation to regulate work conditions; establish a minimum wage, retirement funds, unemployment insurance, and social insurance for all workers, agricultural and industrial alike; and extend laws on work-related accidents to agricultural workers.^[49] With support from the Radical Federation of the Aude, Aldy now beat Turrel in the legislative contest of 1902. Still, it is not clear that Aldy captured the support of vineyard workers everywhere. In Coursan, for instance, 24 percent of the voters (though not necessarily only vineyard workers) abstained, and much of his support in the district came from railway workers, building workers, and artisans in Narbonne. One thing is clear, though: in 1902 the political constellation shifted as the revolutionary syndicalist unions began to organize vineyard workers throughout the Aude.

Ferroulist socialism in the Aude was very different from the socialism in the Var painted by Tony Judt, and somewhat more akin to that described by Harvey Smith and Jean Sagnes for the Hérault.^[50] In contrast to the revolutionary collectivism of Varois Guesdists—notably Allard—Guesdists in the Aude (like their counterparts in the Hérault) followed the more moderate path of left radicals in supporting artisans and small winegrowers. One is thus inclined to accept Claude Willard's assessment of Guesdist socialism in Mediterranean France (which Judt rejects for the Var) as plausible for the Aude:

On the shores of the Mediterranean, the POF took up where Jacobinism and radicalism left off. Voters and even party members didn't attach themselves to its specifically socialist or its revolutionary or Marxist character; rather, they came to the POF as the most advanced party, the most republican party . . . the most democratic party. . . . In this region, Guesdism . . . allowed itself to be reshaped, in part absorbed, by different political currents that were more or less colored by socialism.^[51]

Rather than adopt cooperative solutions to rural depression, which Judt argues the peasants in the Var did, winegrowers in the Aude looked toward an interventionist and protectionist state. This was the basis of their attraction to socialism. Moreover, the ideal of state protection for southern wine producers—not the revolutionary expropriation of capital or political power—was what lay at the heart of the great winegrowers' revolt of 1907. And this ideal was, of course, shared by both radicals and socialists. In fact, the frequent blurring of distinction between radicalism and socialism in the Aude may help to explain why socialism had difficulty expanding beyond the Narbonnais, and why radical "favorite sons" remained more solidly entrenched there than in the rest of lower Languedoc.

Not only the character of Audois Guesdism differed from that of the Var, but rural constituents' responses to socialism differed as well. judt argues that in the Var small producers' collective patterns of existence—their interdependence and cooperation—led them to "political movements which appealed to collective interests."^[52] In the Aude, the agglomerated urban village facilitated the transmission of socialist ideas, and day-to-day relations between workers and small vineyard owners influenced these groups' perceptions of shared interests. As we shall see, the physical setting of the village itself furthered labor solidarity. But the idea of cooperation coexisted with a fierce independence on the part of small growers, workers, and artisans. This independence appeared in the revolutionary syndicalism of workers and small producers, and in the near absence of practical cooperative approaches to production and distribution in the Aude (in cooperative wineries, for example) before World War I.^[53]

Although socialists in the Narbonnais did not appeal directly to rural vinedressers, these men could not help but be influenced by the activism of the 1880s and 1890s. Through their involvement in local socialist organizations—the chambrées socialistes and libre pensée societies—and in the Bourse du travail supported by the socialist municipality in Narbonne, agricultural workers came to associate and share a common political culture with artisans and small winegrowers. Socialist politics helped to create the rural working class by giving workers a language in which to express their grievances and new lenses

through which to view their identity as workers. In the end, though, revolutionary syndicalism, its limitations notwithstanding, was far more successful than socialism in mobilizing agricultural workers and winning them tangible gains in the years before World War I.