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.