6
Revolutionary Syndicalism and Direct Action

On an unseasonably cold May morning in 1903, in the sleepy village of Peyriac de Mer, ninety-five workers on one of the largest vineyards in the Narbonnais laid down their tools, walked out of the vines, and declared the formation of a labor union. Resisting their employer's efforts to increase their working hours—but not their wages—they pointed out that he had made 200,000 francs on his last harvest, and refused to return to work until he had granted them a wage increase.^[1] This uneventful and short-lived strike was the first in a long series of occasionally violent confrontations between labor unions and vineyard owners that spread throughout the Midi before World War I. From 1903 to 1914, the peaceful vineyards of the south saw some of the most dramatic conflicts between labor and capital and between vinegrowers and the state of the prewar years, which culminated in the famous winegrowers' revolt of 1907.

This explosion of mass protest was created and coordinated by the revolutionary syndicalist labor unions that formed in the densely populated urban villages of the south. In the Aude, the labor movement drew on both the community solidarities and the class differences aroused by prolonged economic depression, and reflected the shifting class identity of vinedressers. Although workers' identity was undoubtedly shaped by their contact with socialism, labor leaders tried to present an alternative to political socialism, and between 1903 and 1914 they rejected collaboration with socialist politicians. Yet, just as Audois socialism developed along reformist rather than revolutionary lines, syndicalism in the Aude focused on bread-and-butter improvements for workers instead of social revolution. Syndicalism, like socialism, developed tactically, in response to local con-

ditions, interests, and capacities for action. This was both its strength and, ultimately, its weakness in the Aude.

The Emergence of Agricultural Unions in the Aude

From the early 1880s, under the impact of the depression and following the legalization of labor unions, an organized labor movement began to take shape all over southern France. In the Aude in the 1880s, agricultural workers in the Minervois, northwest of Narbonne, formed insurance societies to assist in the expenses of illness, funerals, and unemployment.^[2] When the wine depression of the 1890s threatened workers with unemployment and unskilled Spanish workers began to compete with local workers for scarce jobs, vineyard workers took the first steps toward unionizing. Rumors that estates in Narbonne had hired Spanish workers in exchange for a meal sparked a protest meeting in October 1896. Local workers drafted a letter to the prefect, asking that he protect the interests of French workers by discouraging the employment of Spaniards.^[3] In 1897, vineyard workers in Narbonne, Cuxac, and Ouveillan formed the earliest agricultural workers' unions; four years later, workers in Bages, Coursan, Lézignan, and Ornaisons organized. By early 1905, sixty-seven agricultural workers' unions had emerged in the Aude, grouping close to seven thousand members (Table 20).^[4] These unions developed under the influence of local Bourses du travail, all affiliated with the revolutionary syndicalist Confédération générale du travail (CGT). The Bourses in the Aude—in Carcassonne from 1892, and in Narbonne from 1893—functioned much as Bourses elsewhere: first and foremost as job placement bureaus, but also as social and educational centers for the working class. They maintained libraries; sponsored lectures; gave courses in grafting, pruning, and shoemaking; and, during the wine crisis, offered unemployed workers jobs on public works projects.^[5] The Bourses played an important role in organizing vineyard workers in the Narbonnais. The Coursan union provides a good example of early-twentieth-century vineyard workers' organizations, their leadership, and their social base.

The wine market crisis of 1900–1901 brought major wage cutbacks for Audois workers, and large vineyard owners laid off

even more workers than usual during the slow months of January, February, and March. On a rainy April day in 1901, members of the Narbonne Bourse du travail gathered 170 workers from Coursan in the Café Pech (appropriately enough, on the rue de la Révolution) and formed the Syndicat des cultivateurs et travailleurs de la terre de Coursan.^[6] The term cultivateur in the union's name reflected its diverse membership. For in addition to landless laborers, the union also included impoverished small property owners who now worked part-time on the large estate vineyards. Even for those who were no longer landowners, the term cultivateur reflected members' self-perception as independent craftsmen, as men who were masters of their own destiny—and therefore not thoroughly proletarianized. The conflation of the term cultivateur with the sense of day laborer also appeared in the regional agricultural workers' federation (see below), which appealed to "this poor martyr who is called cultivateur or terrassier because . . . for a long time our sweat has watered this earth that feeds the capitalists."^[7]

Although no records for the union survive, other sources pro-

vide some insight into its membership. The twenty-six union members who were arrested during the strikes of December 1904, for example, had a mean age of thirty-eight. The fact that only four were actually born in Coursan, although all lived and worked there, reflected the great geographic mobility of vineyard workers in the post-phylloxera years.^[8] The experience of François Cheytion, who headed the Coursan union from 1903 until his death in 1914, typified the mobility of young rural working-class men at the turn of the century. This vineyard laborer was born in Montpellier, Hérault, on January 14, 1875, the oldest son of Louis Cheytion and Marie Borie, both vineyard workers. Like many working-class families living in Coursan around 1900, the Cheytions had fled the Hérault during the phylloxera crisis sometime in the 1880s. In Coursan they found jobs working the vines and continued to raise their family, which by the turn of the century had grown by three more children.^[9] After finishing school, François immediately went to work in the vineyards; military service took him briefly away from Coursan, but he returned, and in 1898 he joined the cercle d'études sociales there. This began a political education that eventually led him to run unsuccessfully for a deputy's seat from the Hérault in the 1902 legislative elections.^[10] Perhaps this disappointing experience (he received only one vote!) fueled his syndicalist disdain for the legislative process. Later that year he joined the union in Coursan and rapidly became one of its most vocal and active members.

The Coursan vineyard workers' union represented the narrow, male-dominated craft unionism that developed throughout France in the nineteenth century. It did not initially invite women or unskilled workers (domestiques or terrassiers ) into its ranks, and few foreign workers dared join at first for fear of being expelled from France. Domestiques and other foreign unskilled workers did, however, often support syndicalists' strikes.^[11]

Most of the agricultural unions in the Aude were plainly hostile to women's wage work and took a frankly opportunistic position on women's union participation. Union members were fully aware that single women needed their wages, as did married women whose husbands' wages were inadequate. Although

they condemned the exploitation of women, citing their low wages, the physical demands of their work, and employers' efforts to replace male with female workers, their real fear was competition from women. In addition, they worried that women were too easily manipulated by capital and would therefore weaken the union's bargaining position. These views were by no means peculiar to the Coursan union; they characterized unions throughout the south, which, prior to about 1909, sought to remove women from the workplace altogether.^[12] Failing that, they argued for admitting women into the unions and for pursuing equal wages for equal work: "This . . . will . . . be profitable from the moral as well as the material point of view; it will be one more step toward the total suppression of wage work for women, who will henceforth be returned to domestic work, the hearth, and the family."^[13]

Some in the labor movement disagreed, arguing that women should be allowed to remain in the labor force but should be excluded from men's work. In any case, the entire discussion of women's work and union participation reflected an essentially masculine concept of class, and reinforced the gender boundaries of rural society.^[14]

The unions' negative attitude toward women's work by no means prevented the male membership of the Syndicat des cultivateurs et travailleurs de la terre de Coursan from growing. As Table 20 shows, the Coursan union almost tripled in size in six years, with about half the skilled vineyard workers in the village counting as members by 1907. (These workers were well unionized in relation to the rest of the French labor force as well: only 10–13 percent of French labor was unionized prior to World War I, and of these about half were revolutionary syndicalists; the average size of French unions was about 170.) But even official membership figures do not measure the Coursan union's real strength, for often during strikes twice as many workers walked off the job as actually belonged to the union.^[15]

Agricultural syndicalists in villages like Coursan followed the ideas and aims of the CGT's 1906 Charter of Amiens: the primacy of class struggle, the self-emancipation of the working class, the use of direct economic action (as opposed to legislation) to obtain bread-and-butter benefits (la lutte quotidienne ), the

ultimate goal of expropriating the capitalists by means of a revolutionary general strike. But like workers everywhere that affiliated with the syndicalist-inspired CGT, the unionized agricultural workers in the Aude took these ideals on board and interpreted them to serve their own interests and needs, emphasizing some and leaving others aside. Thus in the Aude, the rejection of electoral politics became an important piece of the rhetorical repertoire of some syndicalist activists. Labor leaders wanted to avoid potential political divisions among the rank and file; they also wanted to prevent the unions from being controlled or manipulated by political parties—the way many, for example, felt that unions in the Nord were manipulated by the Guesdists.^[16] For some this meant keeping union activities separate from political activities; for others it meant abstaining from voting in elections. In any case, the revolutionary rhetoric was vital to mobilizing workers: the ideology of the general strike gave workers an awareness of their own power independent of politicians.^[17] Otherwise, the union regulations pledged to establish "solidarity and mutual defense between members," and to work toward a society in which workers would finally achieve "well-being and freedom" (bien-etre  et liberté ).^[18]

On a more practical level, many agricultural unions in the Aude set up placement offices for workers, sickness insurance and unemployment funds, and assistance for traveling workers. Not all rank-and-file members looked toward long-term revolutionary goals such as expropriation of the vineyards; many joined unions for immediate reasons: increased wages, improved working conditions, and job security.^[19] After all, while waiting for the revolution workers had to eat. Moreover, from 1900 on the CGT encouraged workers to obtain contracts, which, apart from regulating basic material conditions, forced employers to recognize the union as the bargaining agent of the worker. By 1904, four unions in the Aude had succeeded in this goal: those of Montlaur, Rieux-Minervois, Salles d'Aude, and Vinassan.^[20] The signing of contracts, which from one standpoint might be considered "trade unionist" rather than revolutionary syndicalist, was in fact a tremendous victory for vineyard workers whose working conditions and wages had hitherto been determined by custom and by verbal agreements.

Three factors influenced the spread of syndicalism among vineyard workers: skill, collective workplace solidarity, and the southern French village community. First, as we have seen, the majority of local male vineyard workers were skilled (in contrast to the Spanish and Italian farmhands who began to compete with local workers toward the end of the nineteenth century). Planting, grafting, pruning, cultivation, and the application of chemicals all required manual dexterity and training. As Michael Hanagan has pointed out, artisans' determination to exercise control over working conditions and to assert their independence on the shop floor went hand in hand with both skill and their feeling that they were more knowledgeable about their work than the patron .^[21] Although vineyard workers were not threatened by mechanization, they did suffer a loss of autonomy and declining wages. Syndicalism's attraction lay in its promise of a direct defense against proletarianization, as opposed to the more distant legislative protection promised by politicians.

Second, the skilled teams of ten to fifteen ouvriers volants or colles in which vineyard workers were organized allowed them to communicate at the work site, and their collective control over wages (they were paid as a group and divided the wage among themselves) was another element promoting "shop floor" solidarity. Team workers had a reputation for independence; they thus brought their own self-emancipatory style to Audois syndicalism.^[22]

Third, the unions emerged from the same traditions of associational life that inspired the secret démoc soc societies of the 1850s and the cercles d'études sociales and libre pensée societies of the early Third Republic. The urban village community and local sociability facilitated the development of worker solidarity. Vineyard workers, artisans, and small vineyard owners who lived close to one another in protourban villages shared a social life in cafés and clubs that easily became transformed into centers of syndicalist activity.^[23]

Skill, the work setting, and community life all reinforced people's consciousness of collective interests and were conducive to the development of syndicalist unions. But as Ronald Aminzade has noted, "Class entails more than a rational awareness and identification by workers of their own class interests. It also

involves a recognition that those interests are in conflict with the class interests of the owners of capital and employers of their labor power."^[24] The importance of syndicalism was precisely that: it provided workers with a discourse of conflict and resistance and ultimately brought them into the streets.

Workers Take Action

Between 1903 and 1905, thousands of agricultural workers in the Aude struck for higher wages and better working conditions. These strikes, beginning with the walkout at Peyriac de Mer, shared two characteristics. First, they were preeminently expressions of the moral economy of vineyard villages; second, they relied on the solidarity of whole winegrowing communities.

The notion of a moral economy, as historians E. P. Thompson, Louise, Charles, and Richard Tilly and the anthropologist James C. Scott have observed, was a fundamental component of pre-capitalist peasant societies. In early modern Europe, this concept obliged landlords and seigneurs to guarantee peasants, in the absence of civil and political rights, minimum social and economic rights, including gleaning after harvests and access to provisions in time of economic shortfall.^[25] Custom dictated that landlords and political authorities use their influence in the market to insure a "just price" for daily necessities in the peasant budget: what this amounted to was the social right to subsistence.^[26]

The growth of capitalist market relations, laissez-faire liberal political economy, and popular representation led to the temporary disappearance of the paternalistic idea that employers and landlords should insure these basic rights. Later the welfare state took over the function of providing for basic subsistence in the absence of personal resources. But this did not mean that for peasants and workers the ideal of a moral economy disappeared; rather, the concept now applied to a larger, more complex relationship, involving the employer, the market, the worker, and the wage. During the prosperous golden age of the vineyards, when custom and informal agreements regulated the price of labor (and labor was in a relatively strong bargaining position), the moral economy of the wage insured workers a just return. In

a period of crisis, however, when the new entrepreneurial mentality sought to extract a maximum effort from workers at the lowest possible price, those customary relations broke down: employers no longer adhered to the moral economy. Awareness of this violation marked many of the seventy-two vineyard workers' strikes that occurred in the Aude in 1903 and 1904. The strike of January 12–21, 1904, in Coursan illustrates how vineyard workers sought to reassert this primitive balance of local justice.

Interestingly, workers in Coursan first struck not at the height of the turn-of-the-century crise de mévente , but during the brief recovery that followed in 1903. A meager harvest had allowed wine prices to rise to 20 francs per hectoliter, thus raising workers' hopes that wages might follow the logic of both the market and the moral economy. Not only were their expectations dashed, but their situation even worsened: employers did not increase wages, and from mid November on, owing to intense rains and flooding in the vineyards, workers were laid off. Some employers began paying workers on piece rates to cut costs.^[27] Such practices had already led to strikes in the Hérault—strikes that resulted in the formation of unions and favorable settlements for workers.^[28] The success of these actions encouraged workers elsewhere to call for change. Thus, when employers refused to accept a long list of demands in January 1904, the Coursan union met, resolved to show employers that "the worker has a right to live," and called a strike for the following day.^[29]

On a brisk January morning villagers took to the streets. Someone hoisted a red flag in the bell tower of the church, and workers paraded with a red flag and a drum, singing the "Internationale" and shouting, "Vive la grève!" Some danced to the tune of the "Carmagnole" in front of the village hall. A journalist, astonished at the contrast between the almost carnival atmosphere of the strike in Coursan and the sobriety of the industrial strikes he had witnessed, observed, "Here strikers march with the flag of their demands and the rags and tatters of their poverty in a town humming with activity, where people are happy to live under . . . [blue] sky and the sun."^[30] Workers appropriated public space en masse: the whole village became the

union. The moderate republican mayor gave the strike committee a meeting room in the mairie and closed the village to all traffic. His support was not unusual: republican officials wanted to assure support from vineyard workers in an election year (municipal elections would occur later in 1904); moreover, many mayors and prefects were clearly hostile to politically conservative large proprietors.^[31]

The Coursan union did not articulate the idea of the moral economy in its strike demands, which included a standard wage of 3.50 francs for a seven-hour day, suppression of piecework and of payment by the job (travail à forfait ), the promise that no worker would be fired for striking, and the stipulation that women would be paid half what men earned, except for sulphuring, when they would earn exactly the same as men.^[32] The assertion of a moral economy was present, however, in the action itself. Workers had seen the price of wine rise after the 1903 harvest and fully expected to benefit; they also knew that the highly competitive and now depressed market differed substantially from that of the golden age and so did not expect wages to return to pre-phylloxera levels. The demand for a just wage involved the recognition that their employers profited from the price increase "through violations of [their] own duties and other people's rights."^[33] This was the same kind of argument used by the workers of Peyriac de Mer, who expected to benefit from the 200,000 franc profit their employer had made on his last harvest.

The notions of justice and the moral economy also surfaced later around issues other than the wage. In Fleury in November 1905, for instance, workers struck against an estate owner who they believed did not employ enough workers for the size of his vineyard.^[34] But in the age of competitive market relations, the idea of the moral economy—or even of the right to work—meant little to employers.

Family and community solidarity was a second important component of strike activity in the Aude. The Coursannais who struck in January 1904 counted on the support of their families and of the entire village. Women marched and demonstrated with the men even though they were excluded from the union; women and children patrolled the vineyards to discourage

strikebreakers from working. Shops closed, and local businesses shut down. Artisans took up collections for the strike fund, and workers as far away as Brest sent contributions to their comrades in Coursan.^[35] Nearby supporters sent food. Community solidarity also appeared in the official strike statistics, which put the number of strikers at 1,000 (700 men, 250 women, and 50 children), even though the union counted only about 350 members at this time. The truly impressive support of small proprietors, artisans, and village merchants demonstrated their collective dependence on the vineyard economy—to which the union appealed in its "call to solidarity":

Our exploiters refuse to recognize our right to live; those who produce nothing absorb everything, while the laboring class that produces all the social wealth has no bread for itself and its children. . . . Our wages do not permit us to live; in spite of our good intentions, we cannot pay the baker and the grocer who have done us favors in hard times.

Comrades, with the spirit of solidarity, strike with us to prove to the bourgeoisie that the working class is united; do as we are doing; stop your work. Let women, small shopkeepers, and small proprietors . . . lend us their moral support.^[36]

Higher wages for workers would, of course, enable village merchants to survive; yet interprofessional solidarity during strikes also emerged from artisans' own history of struggle over workplace issues, and from their experience of organizing with vineyard workers in political groups and clubs or in the Bourse du travail.^[37]

Community support was one factor that accounted for the strike's success. In an agreement reached on January 21, nine days after the strike began, the union won all but two of its original demands. Employers refused to eliminate payment by the job but agreed to a modified version of an across-the-board wage increase, to 3.50 francs for a seven-hour day from February to October, but not during the slower winter months.^[38] This settlement was significant: for the first time journaliers in Coursan succeeded in establishing a minimum wage for workers on all estate vineyards in the village.

Successful strikes boosted the morale of unions throughout the Aude. By the end of March 1904 some nine thousand vineyard workers had struck in forty-five Audois villages (Table 21). Contemporaries estimated that 150 strikes had occurred in the Aude, the Hérault, the Pyrénées-Orientales, the Gard, and the Bouches-du-Rhône, involving approximately fifty thousand workers.^[39] Almost everywhere in the Aude, workers succeeded in obtaining wage increases and improved working conditions, including the suppression of piecework and better wine allocations. These victories, however, were short-lived. Most workers still had no contracts, and employers were under no pressure to respect strike settlements.^[40] When in the following months the price of wine again fell to turn-of-the-century levels, proprietors refused to honor the recent accords, and cut hours and wages. In March and April 1904, and at the end of October, strikes broke out anew in Coursan, Fleury, and Canet after employers laid off workers.^[41] Employers' violation of earlier agreements, together with workers' continued willingness to resist, encouraged radical activists in the labor movement who argued for a general strike.

The FTAM and the General Strike

Led by an activist minority that included François Cheytion from Coursan and Paul Ader from Cuxac d'Aude, and inspired by the rush of unionization after the turn of the century, a regional agricultural workers' organization, the Fédération des travailleurs agricoles du Midi (FTAM), formed in Béziers in 1903. This new federation comprised close to fifteen thousand members at its peak in 1904 (Table 22) in the five departments of the Aude, the Hérault, the Pyrénées-Orientales, the Gard, and the Bouchesdu-Rhône. Affiliated with the CGT, the FTAM attempted to coordinate strikes and create links between vineyard workers throughout the Mediterranean region through annual congresses and the union newspaper Le Paysan (replaced in 1907 by Le Travailleur de la terre , edited by Paul Ader). An initially diverse membership included vineyard workers, revolutionary syndicalists, anarchists, and small proprietors, and early congresses reflected a mixture of interests ranging from millenarian appeals for revolution by means of a general strike to wage issues and the creation of legislation (on work accidents, retirement, and agricultural conseils de prud'hommes ) to benefit agricultural workers.^[42] Increasingly, however, radicals like Cheytion dominated the federation; these men condemned the idea of working for social legislation, arguing instead for direct action and a general strike of agricultural workers across lower Languedoc.^[43] The attempted general strike of 1904–1905 shows the limits of syndicalist action on a regional basis; in the evolution of the FTAM we see how a militant revolutionary syndicalist minority tried to push the labor movement in the Aude forward.

From the very founding of the FTAM, agricultural workers had debated the idea of a general strike to standardize wages and hours across the region. In fact, the 1904 settlements differed markedly from locality to locality and from department to department. In Lézignan, Aude, for instance, workers won a six-hour day in winter and a nine-hour day in summer, whereas in Carcassonne winter hours were seven and summer, eight. Likewise, hourly wages varied from 35 centimes in Carcassonne to 50 centimes in Coursan and in villages around Montpellier, Hérault.^[44] Although rank-and-file union members such as small

proprietors were frankly unenthusiastic about an additional untimely and costly work stoppage, the FTAM called a strike for December 1, 1904,^[45] appealing to "the exploited of the earth" to unite in striking for standardized wages and working conditions for vineyards throughout southern France.^[46]

The strike call caused close to ten thousand workers to walk off the job in the Aude, the Hérault, and the Pyrénés-Orientales alone, with half of the strikes (twenty-two of forty-one) occurring in the Aude (see Table 21). Here the issue of the moral economy of the village community was somewhat less visible than earlier. In some villages, workers had already gained many of the conditions spelled out in the strike demands; elsewhere workers struck for as yet unachieved conditions: the 50 centime minimum wage and the suppression of piecework. These men and women did not see the general strike as leading to a transformation of capitalist viticulture; rather, they viewed a corporative mass strike as a means to win additional concessions from employers.

Moreover, syndicalists now used violence and sabotage to force employers' hands. In early December 1904 in Coursan and Fleury, strikers set fire to the doorways of houses and burned a

pile of vine trimmings at the château on the Salles d'Aude estate of Celeyran. In Pouzols they raided a proprietor's wine cellar and dumped out seven hundred hectoliters of wine, and in Mirepeisset they pushed a railway car onto the main line, intending to provoke a derailment. In Fleury they cut telegraph lines. In Ventenac d'Aude at the end of January strikers broke into a régisseur 's home and tried to force him to resign; in St-Nazaire they broke into a château, cut the telephone lines, and threatened the owner, compelling him to sign their list of demands.^[47] The recourse to violence spoke volumes about the escalation of class tension in the space of a few months.

Again community solidarity provided essential strike support. Masons, wagon drivers, wine cellar workers, and carpenters all walked out in support of vineyard workers, and in Narbonne the Bourse du travail organized a general strike of all Bourse affiliates.^[48] Sympathetic mayors in Coursan, Fleury, and Narbonne (Ferroul) again supported the strikers, this time by refusing to accept government troops sent to "protect the right to work" and by protesting the use of troops to intimidate workers. These men also protested against military and police obstruction of the right to strike, as southern left-wing radicals had by now done on several occasions.^[49] In addition, the strike elicited remarkable solidarity and support between villages. Workers from one village helped those of another; strong unions helped out weak. Fifty men from Cuxac reinforced strikers in Sallèles; the Narbonne union sent men to Marcorignan; strikers in Coursan, Armissan, and Vinassan helped their comrades in Fleury. Cyclists rode from village to village, carrying messages and relaying news between union headquarters and workers.^[50]

Buoyed by the spirit of intervillage support and emboldened by strike leaders, unions became more aggressive in imposing strike discipline and control than in earlier job actions. In Coursan, not only did the union try to prevent traffic from circulating in the village, but union members now entered the distillers' and wine merchants' shops to bring employees into the streets to join the strike.^[51] Police apprehended cultivateurs for appropriating provisions from housewives and servants on their way home from market. These efforts to secure "contributions" to the

strike fund in fact underscored the nearly desperate economic situation of many vineyard workers' families.^[52]

Indeed, since the settlements of the previous winter workers' material situation had hardly improved at all. In the Hérault, placards emblazoned with "Du pain ou la mort!" (Bread or death!) appeared during demonstrations, along with flags bordered in black. In the village of Bessan, Hérault, strikers impaled a piece of bread atop the flagstaff, and in Florensac women stood before troops and police shouting, "Du pain!"^[53] Women obtained provisions for the strike fund, forced nonstrikers to leave the vineyards, and collected money for strikers in neighboring villages. In Coursan, when the prefect sent mounted police to the village on December 6 to "protect the right to work," a crowd of some two hundred women and children lay down in the main road leading to the village to prevent them from entering. When a fight broke out between demonstrators and police, twenty-one were arrested for "obstructing the freedom to work," including the fifty-three-year-old mother of François Cheytion. Later, in March 1905 in nearby Salles d'Aude, women from Coursan threw themselves on the ground before mounted police who were attempting to disperse a crowd of strikers.^[54] In this way women played on the social conventions that regarded them as the "weaker sex" to discourage violence. Their activities reveal much about the importance of community in southern French "urban villages" for forging strike solidarity.

Community support also helped workers win concessions from employers, even though no unions obtained the full list of FTAM conditions. In Vinassan workers demanded the firing of a régisseur who refused to respect their contract; this the employer did, and journaliers returned to work. In Montredon and Cuxac employers promised to abide by earlier accords, and workers won a shorter workday and an increased wine allocation. In Sallèles d'Aude workers and employers signed a renewable contract for the first time. In Coursan a compromise settlement resulted in proprietors agreeing to provide work for the unemployed on public works projects and to increase workers' wine allocation. Most important, employers agreed to recognize different degrees of skill among unionized workers by paying

grafters more than other workers: 4 francs for seven hours of work and two liters of wine per day, throughout the year.^[55] Despite these favorable settlements, however, as a mass movement the general strike failed.

Fewer than half of Audois unions affiliated with the FTAM (twenty-two of forty-five) followed the strike call. The same situation occurred in the Hérault and Pyrénées-Orientales, and no strikes at all occurred in the Bouches-du-Rhône. Among those unions that did strike, walkouts took place at different times and for different lengths of time. Settlements inevitably departed from the federation guidelines and from those of individual village unions. Workers in Cuxac, for example, settled on lower wages than did their neighbors in Coursan; workers in Sallèles d'Aude abolished piecework, whereas the Coursannais did not. Indeed, as the rank and file had argued earlier, wages, hours, and conditions varied too much from locality to locality and department to department to allow establishment of a regional standard.^[56] Finally, the decision to call the strike for December was unquestionably a strategic error. December was one of the least active months in the vineyard calendar, a time when employers would be under little pressure to make concessions. Workers clearly appreciated this fact. It is not surprising, then, that some unions were reluctant to participate in the strike. In the end, both socialists and syndicalists criticized the action—socialists for its "localized, corporatist character" and the fact that workers had given in to the CGT's direct-action tactics, syndicalists for its poor timing.^[57]

The general strike's failure had three important consequences for the regional agricultural workers' movement. For one thing—and most noticeably at first glance—union membership declined. As Table 22 suggests, between 1904 and the first trimester of 1905 FTAM membership fell drastically by over five thousand members, even though twelve more unions joined the federation during this period. By the end of 1905 another four thousand members had left. Although not all unions lost members (the Coursan union in fact grew between 1904 and 1907, from 359 to 487; see Table 20), membership fluctuated after 1907. As Paul Ader clearly saw, many workers' narrow vision of unionism meant that the attainment of higher wages and shorter

workdays signified the end of the struggle. "Their eagerness declines, their cohesiveness is broken; the viticultural crisis only makes the situation worse; the worker looks no further than holding on to his job."^[58] This pattern was not peculiar to agricultural workers; urban industrial workers' union membership also dropped off after periods of prolonged labor conflict.

Second, for those who stayed in the unions willingness to confront employers also appeared to wane in the aftermath of the general strike. Only seven strikes occurred in 1905 and 1906, and only three unions staged job actions (see Table 21). To be sure, the failure of the general strike did enervate the movement, but the continued decline of workers' living standards (see Chapter 6) also made it hard for workers to pay union dues, especially since workers had already sacrificed four or five weeks' wages in the recent strikes. Overall, events in the Aude bear out Charles Tilly and Edward Shorter's finding that before 1914 French workers held back from striking during inflationary periods, precisely because inflation mitigated against advantageous settlements for workers and made strikes doubly costly. This factor undoubtedly influenced the unions' weak participation in the general strike.^[59]

Third, the FTAM became increasingly dominated by a radical leadership—Cheytion and Ader—committed to the revolutionary syndicalist idea of an "active minority." As Philippe Gratton has pointed out, whereas before 1905 moderates in the FTAM supported legislative reform such as accident legislation or arbitration councils, these men were soon drowned out by radical activists whose position was strongly antilegislative. In impassioned speeches at annual congresses, Cheytion appealed to workers to abandon politicians' empty promises: only direct action could bring immediate results to the working class; workers should forget about "so-called social legislation" and the meager measures of "les légiféreurs bourgeois."^[60] In addition, the FTAM now more openly supported sabotage and boycotts as legitimate tactics in class war, tactics that were part of the arsenal of striking workers elsewhere in France. They also agreed to support the CGT-organized general strike planned for May 1, 1906, as part of a general May First celebration (recently revived at the confederation's 1904 Bourges congress). The CGT pro-

posed to use this movement to demand the eight-hour day; vineyard workers would use the opportunity to demand a six-hour day (to reduce unemployment), the 50 centime hourly wage, and a wine allocation for all workers throughout the year.^[61]

Radical revolutionary syndicalist leaders also shifted their position on collaborating with small vineyard owners to combat fraudulent production of wine—that is, the production of second wines by chaptalisation, the dilution of wine with water, and the manufacture of wine from raisins—which most southerners believed to be responsible for the wine market depression. During the spring and early summer of 1905, a populist movement of small vineyard owners was launched in the face of the continued depression. Viticultural defense committees (comités de défense viticole) appeared throughout the Narbonnais and in the Bittérois in the Hérault, and the socialist municipality of Narbonne as well as several villages established public works projects for unemployed agricultural workers.^[62] When legislation to control fraudulent wine production, sponsored by Audois deputies Félix Aldy, Albert Sarraut, and Gaston Doumergue, failed to pass, the defense committees appealed to the entire winegrowing population to unite behind a tax strike and the resignation of municipalities.^[63] Although no mass movement occurred, several municipalities did resign briefly, and villagers prevented authorities from seizing property of those who refused to pay taxes.^[64] At first the FTAM denounced fraudulent production of wine and encouraged workers not to participate in it. Later in 1905, however, the federation rejected cooperation with employers in combatting fraud, saying that workers should not waste their time worrying about the sale of a product that did not belong to them but should stick to defending their wages. The FTAM reminded its members that employers had been only too willing to use troops against them during the general strike: "Any economic entente with [them] . . . is contrary to the goal of syndicalism, which is the emancipation of the workers by the workers."^[65]

As Philippe Gratton has pointed out, this position threatened to split the FTAM rank and file from federation leaders by ignoring small vineyard owners' vested interest in the struggle against fraud.^[66] Moreover, it illustrated the very heterogeneity

of union membership and fluidity of class identity that later divided the labor movement. Ultimately, federation members did not follow the militant leadership, joining instead with vineyard owners of all kinds in the huge 1907 winegrowers' protest.

The FTAM's radicalization also appeared in the strong antimilitarism it nurtured prior to World War I, one area where the rank and file and the more radical leadership were in basic agreement. While peasant hostility to military conscription was well known, pre-1906 antimilitarism was largely a protest against use of the army to intimidate workers, protect capital, and break strikes—things that were by now familiar to workers in the Aude.^[67] Indeed, the government's use of troops to "protect the right to work" in southern vineyards was well timed to coincide with the building antimilitarist feeling in the CGT. As early as 1900 the CGT launched an effort to organize soldiers and conscripts and called on them not to fire on strikers (the famous sou au soldat ). Following the general strike, in the spring of 1905 the Narbonne section of the Association internationale antimilitariste appealed to "our friends, soldiers. . . who are merely proletarians torn away from [your] families and. . . work, [you] must not act as the guard dogs of capital!"^[68] Soldiers in the Midi, for the most part local men, could not help but be influenced by such appeals. In March 1905, in the first of several incidents in which the military openly sympathized with strikers, the soldiers of the 100th infantry, brought to Salles d'Aude to "maintain order," marched through village streets at night singing the "Internationale" and fraternizing with striking workers.^[69] In a similar vein, the arrest and sentencing of the signatories of the antimilitarist affiche rouge evoked an angry response. The affiche, which urged workers to resist conscription, had been sponsored and signed by a loose group of syndicalists, socialists, and anarchists. After these men were jailed in December 1905, the Syndicat des cultivateurs et travailleurs de la terre de Coursan issued a protest against the "unjust, criminal sentence inflicted on its comrades" and sent a "fraternal, revolutionary greeting to its comrades who are victims of these government atrocities." Union members marched out of their meeting shouting, "A bas les armées; à bas les patries!"^[70]

Syndicalists' belief in the importance of the minorité agissante

led the FTAM leadership onto a more radical path. The gap between an extremist leadership and a more moderate rank and file reflected the heterogeneity of the movement itself, which included not only landless workers—those constituting, in a sense, the beginnings of an agricultural proletariat—but also small vineyard owners. The latter were men whose near impoverishment and status as part-time workers allowed them to identify with the concerns of workers; they sought social legislation for agriculture, participated in the viticultural defense movement, and rejected the use of sabotage. Movement leaders François Cheytion, Paul Ader, and Justin Reynes, however, were not landowners; they had little to lose by rejecting the viticultural defense movement or by supporting sabotage as a weapon in the class war. The more radical stance of the FTAM leadership, then, although it was partly a reaction to the failure of the general strike, was also a reflection of differences between leaders' and rank-and-file workers' relationship to production. Syndicalist leaders' more radical position also extended to the sphere of electoral politics.

Syndicalists, Socialists, and Electoral Politics

Syndicalists had always manifested a certain rhetorical hostility to electoral politics and legislative solutions to workers' problems, but that hostility increased during this period of labor unrest in the Midi. Many syndicalists remained hesitant about if not hostile to collaboration with socialists. As one delegate to the founding congress of the FTAM (in 1903) pointed out, "When [a socialist employer pays] his workers . . . two francs a day and withdraws their wine allocation from the beginning of August, he deserves to be treated as a capitalist and as the enemy of the worker."^[71] In the eyes of another syndicalist, socialists were no more trustworthy than radicals or Bonapartists: "If the Empire shot down workers at La Ricamarie, Constans did the same at Fourmies, and Millerand did the same at Chalons . . . were we to have our 'friends' in power, or those who call themselves our friends, it would be the same. . . . How can we be sure that even a socialist government would satisfy our demands?"^[72]

Syndicalists' reservations about politics emerged from their

practical efforts to establish their independence from political parties. The POF in particular made no secret of its disregard for syndicalist autonomy or syndicalist use of the strike. Ernest Ferroul, for instance, more than once defended the Guesdist position concerning strikes, arguing that the conquest of political power was far more important than the strike to the reconstruction of society; the strike was merely a secondary tool and could not, in and of itself, bring about the revolutionary expropriation of capital.^[73] Southern syndicalists knew that Guesdists discouraged the use of strikes elsewhere in France, and it was in this context that their rhetorical distancing from political parties occurred—even after the SFIO supported syndicalist autonomy and in principle accepted the revolutionary value of the general strike. Some workers' hostility to electoral politics resulted also from their own experience of being pressured by employers or estate managers. Not everyone shared these views, however, as Paul Ader implied when he deplored workers' failure to disengage themselves from "democratic prejudices" and their continued attachment to "diverses manifestations éléctorales."^[74] In fact Simon Castan, head of the Syndicat des travailleurs de la terre de Narbonne, argued that "it would be madness to think that the proletariat must detach itself from political struggles. Economic action cannot succeed without political action."^[75]

Socialist unification in 1905, combined with awareness of the government's willingness to use force against workers, compelled syndicalists throughout France to debate cooperation with Socialists prior to the CGT's 1906 congress at Amiens. Meeting in Arles that summer, the FTAM defeated the proposal of the Fédération du textile for establishing ties between the CGT and the newly unified Socialist party (Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, or SFIO)—"so that when circumstances warrant it, our exploiters and our governments will find themselves face to face with a united working class."^[76] In a heated debate, Paul Ader argued that the Socialist party was a political party like any other, neither more nor less immune to political opportunism. While acknowledging the work of socialist leaders Jaurès, Vaillant, and Sembat, Ader (who had by now left the POF) also attacked Guesde's opposition to the CGT's campaign for the eight-hour day and the reformism of others

like Basly, Socialist leader of the miner's union. Were the syndicalists to ally with the Socialists, Ader argued, they would quickly become dominated by the SFIO. The unions would do better to remain autonomous; that way the Socialists would be forced to take them seriously.^[77] Thus the FTAM adopted a position that foreshadowed the CGT's rejection of cooperation with the SFIO several months later.

How did the strike movement of 1903–1905 affect election outcomes, and how did syndicalist anti-electoral discourse influence voting behavior in the Aude?^[78] The turn-of-the-century economic depression helped Socialists to maintain a base in winegrowing villages of the Aude, and associations like the groupes d'études sociales, cercles de jeunesse socialiste, and cercles républicains socialistes-révolutionnaires continued to function.^[79] Socialists captured municipalities in winegrowing towns like Couiza, Salles, and Narbonne, and Socialist municipal councillors sat in Coursan, Sigean, Carcassonne, and Cuxac. Radicalism similarly retained its populist appeal and continued to court small vintners still suffering from the crise de mévente . Thus, although Socialists competed with Radicals in municipal politics, regional economic depression and similar positions on both labor issues and solutions to the wine crisis meant that the two groups continued to cooperate in national elections.

Even though Radicalism as a national political force had degenerated "into a party of the 'satisfied' political center, its leading deputies increasingly more hostile to Socialism than to the right," in the Aude (unlike southern departments such as the Hérault, where the formation of the Radical party meant the end of electoral alliances between Radicals and Socialists and presaged the collapse of the governmental Bloc des gauches), the two groups had not yet parted company.^[80] In 1906 the SFIO agreed not to run candidates against Radicals in districts where Radicals had strong chances of winning (such as Narbonne II). Radicals likewise cooperated with Socialists in the face of rightist reaction to the 1905 law on separation of church and state.^[81]

Although the 1906 elections resulted in a Socialist victory (Aldy) in the district around Narbonne (Narbonne I), in the Aude results overall paralleled those of the elections nationwide: a solid victory for Radicals (Table 23).^[82] In the Aude, however,

Radicalism's continued strength emerged not from approval of the use of force by the Combes government to enforce the "right to work." Rather, it stood both as a vote of confidence for local men who took the interests of bankrupt vignerons to heart and as a vote against right-wing extremism, which offered little promise for extricating the local economy from its present malaise.

The influence of the strikes of 1903–1905 on the 1906 elections in the Aude is difficult to assess. Socialist Félix Aldy gained votes both in villages in Narbonne I that had experienced strikes (ten out of eleven) and in six villages that had not. But Radicals did the same. As for the working-class vote, workers clearly did not follow the anti-electoral injunctions of syndicalist leaders nationwide; nonetheless, abstentions were especially high in the two villages where syndicalist leaders lived (in Coursan, 46 percent of the voters abstained, and in Cuxac d'Aude, 39 percent)—perhaps as a response to the syndicalists' anti-electoral rhetoric, but also surely as a manifestation of loyalty to local union leaders.^[83] As we have seen, however, that loyalty was neither widespread nor enduring.

Revolutionary syndicalism in the Aude developed as both a social movement and a form of activism and protest. As a social movement, it grew out of a political culture indigenous to winegrowing communities and the work culture of skilled vinedressers. As a form of activism and protest, it proved to be a powerful manifestation of working-class solidarity in the vineyards. The rural unions succeeded in mobilizing workers to improve wages, hours, and working conditions and to win contracts as no political movement had yet managed to do. Perhaps their attention

to bread-and-butter reforms made them appear more "trade unionist" than revolutionary. Yet wage demands are not as rudimentary as they may at first glance seem; for "by incessantly raising the issue of the value of labor, the working class expresses its fundamental condition in opposition to capital."^[84] This happened in the Aude—although, in recognition of the many small vintners who marched arm in arm with landless workers in these early labor conflicts, it was, we must add, in opposition to le grand capital . In this respect syndicalism succeeded as an alternative to socialism, as a movement that could extract concessions from employers—but only very briefly.

Once workers' demands were met they withdrew from the unions, and the ranks of rural syndicalism shrank, leaving behind a radical activist rump. The next chapter examines how the winegrowers' revolt of 1907 and its aftermath further weakened and divided the labor movement. For it called into question the collaboration of workers and small vineyard owners and, indeed, the whole nature of class solidarity, and led union leaders to attempt to barricade the unions in an uncompromisingly workerist vision of class struggle that distanced vineyard workers even more from the Socialist movement in the Aude.

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Plate 1.
Coursan: the main street and town hall, ca. 1907

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Plate 2.
Villagers in Fleury, Aude, before World War I (Private collection of Rémy Pech)

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Plate 3.
Workers in the Narbonnais, ca. 1913 (Private collection of Rémy Pech)

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Plate 4.
Women doing laundry in the Aude River, ca. 1900

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Plate 5.
Demonstrators in front of Town Hall, Narbonne, May 1907 (Photo Bouscarle-Sallis, Narbonne)

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Plate 6.
"The Last Crust": carried by demonstrators from Ginestas in 1907 (Photo 
Bouscarle-Sallis, Narbonne)

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Plate 7.
Demonstrators from Canet, Aude, in 1907 (Photo Bouscarle-Sallis, Narbonne)

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Plate 8.
Women from the Aude demonstrate in 1907 (Photo Bouscarle-Sallis, Narbonne)

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Plate 9.
Women and children from the village of Bages demonstrating in 1907 (Photo Bouscarle-Sallis, Narbonne)

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Plate 10.
Ernest Ferroul and Marcellin Albert addressing a crowd in 1907 (Photo Bouscarle-Sallis, Narbonne)