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.