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.