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.