8
Conclusion: Capitalism, Socialism, and Syndicalism in the French Countryside

In the nineteenth century capitalist economic relations emerged in the French countryside much as they did in the towns and cities of industrial France. Railroads and banks opened villages and towns to the larger world of commerce long before France actually developed a national market. Among the resin workers of the Landes, the lumbermen of the Cher and Nièvre, and the vignerons of lower Languedoc, the customary moral economy of small peasant communities gave way to the contractual relations of the cash nexus. These developments had a profound, if somewhat varied, impact on the political culture and social relations of rural society. Faced with the seemingly inevitable emergence of a new division of labor, new authority relations, and new forms of work discipline, peasants in some parts of France started out on the long (and sometimes not so long) road to becoming proletarians. Their story shows how rural workers contributed to the formation of that complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, the French working class, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, in the Aude, their story helps to explain the Midi rouge .

Most historians who have studied the impact of economic and social change on the French peasantry have focused on the development of political culture, ideology, and electoral politics.^[1] Some have shown how left-wing politics emerged in response to both national and local political and economic trends. In lower Languedoc, however, a powerful (if short-lived) labor movement, inspired by revolutionary syndicalism, developed in

competition with socialism as a response to agricultural capitalism and the class tensions it produced. The experience of peasants and workers in the Aude suggests new ways of looking at the development of left-wing politics in the countryside and at the growth of a rural labor movement among men and women whose status lay somewhere between "peasants" and "proletarians.

To begin with, the protourban winegrowing villages of the Aude could hardly have differed more from the isolated peasant communities in which, as Eugen Weber has argued, rural dwellers were insulated from national political movements at least until the 1870s. Nor is it clear that the peasants and rural workers of the Aude obediently heeded local notables when it came time to cast their ballots under the Third Republic.^[2] By the 1840s and 1850s rural capitalism had brought Audois peasants into contact with a world that stretched far beyond the confines of their tiny villages, with new ideas and new politics—long before railways, roads, and schools brought the official, bourgeois Republic into their lives on a daily basis.^[3]

The development of radical republican and democratic socialist (démoc soc ) political groups in the Aude in the mid 1800s, a period of economic transformation, confirm the findings of Edward Berenson, Ted Margadant, and John Merriman. They have shown how peasants, partly through association with urban and rural artisans, took part in a national republican movement that swept France during the Second Republic and the very early days of the Second Empire. In the Aude as well, densely settled rural communities, with their traditions of sociability and shared community concerns, fostered the development of left-wing political clubs, barn meetings, and secret republican groups. Within these communities artisans and rural workers could fashion a politics separate from that of conservative rural notables. Peasants' contacts with local and regional market towns also facilitated the spread of republican and démoc soc ideas.

In much of rural France these left-wing groups died out when the Second Empire closed off political activity and when rural artisans made their way to the higher wages and (so they imagined) more stable employment in towns and cities in the 1850s and 1860s.^[4] But the Aude experienced neither the "ruraliza-

tion" of the countryside nor the end of radical, left-wing politics in this period. On the contrary, the development of vineyard capitalism created precisely the conditions in which that radical political tradition could grow and flourish. Démoc soc clubs and secret republican societies had roots deep enough to survive harsh Second Empire repression. Rural artisans meanwhile, who benefited from the "golden age of the vine," stayed in protourban winegrowing villages, bought land, and prospered. Eventually they joined agricultural laborers and small landowners to lay the foundations of radicalism, and then socialism, in the countryside.

Economic depression rather than prosperity, however, provided the real impetus for the flowering of left-wing politics in the Aude.^[5] As economic expansion came to an end in the 1880s, small vineyard owners abandoned free-market liberalism and welcomed the Radicals' model of an interventionist state. Because Audois radicalism retained a real sympathy for the needs of small producers, it did not merely become another version opportunist republicanism, unlike radicalism elsewhere in lower Languedoc or in France as a whole. In Masonic lodges and free thought societies, radicals rubbed elbows with men who, first known as "radical socialists," later distinguished themselves by their perception of class struggle, sensitivity to the needs of the great mass of French men and women, and revolutionary goals. Still, a communal base in local political clubs, shared interests in a climate of near-perpetual agricultural depression, and a common following among impoverished small vinegrowers meant that socialism stayed close to its radical heritage in the Aude.^[6] While Radicals and Socialists increasingly drew apart nationally, in the Aude they continued to cooperate electorally until the eve of World War I.

Socialists in the Aude, then, looked very different from those who waved the banner of revolution and collectivism in the Varois countryside. Tony Judt has shown how Socialists' collectivist discourse in Provence helped small-scale producers develop communal solutions to the problem of the competitive market. In the Aude, socialism lacked a strong collectivist and revolutionary component. Such rhetoric held little appeal for small property owners struggling to hold on to their small par-

cels of vines, so Audois Socialists steered clear of it; only after the SFIO's 1909 St-Etienne congress did they begin to talk seriously about promoting cooperatives. Moreover, Socialists in the Aude paid scant attention to the problems of rural workers until well after the revolutionary syndicalists demonstrated their capacity to mobilize the rural working class.

We have distinguished the rhetoric and programs of national party leaders from the interests of peasant producers and their local leaders. These differences, while not unusual in political and labor movements, are important. They remind us that French socialism, far from emerging as a ready-made solution to the problems of workers and peasants, developed strategically to fit local interests and local conditions.

The vineyards and protourban communities of the Aude suggest that southern French rural society was far less homogeneous than the work of Tony Judt or Eugen Weber would lead us to expect. Much as Harvey Smith and Jean Sagnes have found for the Hérault, viticultural capitalism in the Narbonnais generated a new rural working class that coexisted with the small vignerons and rural artisans who had been plying their trades in Audois villages for generations. The development of this new rural working class was very different from that of the urban working class, made up of artisans and industrial workers.

Indeed, modern understanding of the working class has been based largely on an industrial model. According to this model, the formation of the European working class occurred as industrial capitalism gradually deprived workers of property, skill, and control over work rhythms, knowledge, and hiring. Historians studying French workers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have stressed the elements of social disruption in the process of urban working-class formation: the breakdown of traditional communities, the decline of artisanal skills and customary relations within trades, changes in family relations and in the perception of women's work, and the transformation of working-class culture brought on by migration and immigration. Workers found themselves increasingly oppressed psychologically and materially until socialism and syndicalism provided a language, a consciousness, and a practice of resistance. Even though the story of class formation based on the classic indus-

trial model has had to account for differences separating skilled and unskilled workers, labor aristocrats and proletarians, women and men, the vineyard workers of the Aude do not fit this picture.

For one thing, although contemporaries spoke about "industrial viticulture," the vineyards of the Aude exemplify a capitalist agriculture whose development transformed the social relations of production without fundamentally altering traditional forms of production. Thus, vinedressers did not suffer de-skilling from new technology as glassblowers, textile workers, iron workers, machinists, and many other industrial workers did. Rather, changes in landholding, the development of new entrepreneurial strategies, and new forms of labor control altered the relations between workers and vineyard owners. Immigration to the Aude of skilled and semiskilled vinedressers during the phylloxera crisis, while it saturated the labor market and created competition for "locals," did not destroy bonds of community or create rivalries destined to break down craft identities.

Labor solidarities and the capacity for action did not develop only at the point of production. The same characteristics of the protourban village (density of settlement and sociability, for example) that nourished Radical and Socialist political culture facilitated the development of an autonomous labor movement among agricultural workers and provided essential support in times of labor conflict. The village provided the "social and political space to resist economic change and forge political responses [broadly conceived] to shifts in [workers'] condition."^[7] Workers also drew on the solidarities of vinedressers and small proprietors throughout the region. Thus community (in both the village and the larger regional sense) proved to be as important as craft or class in the rural labor movement.

What, then, did class mean to agricultural workers in rural France? Although vinedressers experienced the complementary processes of proletarianization and impoverishment, they did not constitute a "proletariat" in the same sense as unskilled urban industrial workers. The fact that many rural workers had been (or remained) landowners, or that numerous poor small vineyard owners became part-time or even full-time workers, made the class status of vinedressers extremely complex. Work-

ers and small winegrowers shared corporate solidarity and a fierce sense of independence, as well as a common sensitivity to the consequences of prolonged agricultural depression for the "little guy." Along with this went an inherent suspicion of, if not outright hostility toward, les grands .

Many workers would have agreed with Jaurès that the small winegrower stood on labor's side, not capital's. But the same complexity of class that at one moment bolstered the labor movement could, when mixed with a radical and increasingly rigid syndicalist leadership, become a recipe for its decline. Here we agree with Harvey Smith that the 1907 revolt and its aftermath played a large role in the misfortunes of the regional labor movement before the war, although we disagree about the nature of that role. The 1907 revolt threw into relief the different origins and interests of the diverse membership of the labor movement, and irrevocably widened the gap between a radical activist leadership and a more moderate rank and file.

The story of the workers and winegrowers of the Aude points to several important lessons for the history of the French labor movement more generally. First, the story of class formation is incomplete without a consideration of the dynamics of gender, both in the relations of production and in the workings of the labor movement. The gender-based division of labor permitted employers to maintain control over all workers. It did so partly by institutionalizing definitions of skill and wages that kept women at the bottom of the workplace hierarchy. In this respect the estate owners of the Aude were no different from employers in other settings throughout Europe and North America. Employers could keep men's wages low (or, indeed, cut them) with impunity because they knew that either married women and older children would make up the difference through wage labor or the family would absorb the consequences by sacrifices made within a gendered domestic economy. Male syndicalists' masculine concepts of class and craft solidarity, which facilitated the organization of men, together with women's acceptance of the gender-based division of labor, prevented disruption of this system, with its multiple dimensions of human exploitation. Ultimately the institutionalization of gender differences in the

workplace (and, by extension, in the unions) undermined the unions capacity to build a mass movement in the Aude. Thus, unwittingly, men and women collaborated in the proletarianization of the rural working class.

Second, the case of the Aude reminds us that in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France workplace organization and electoral politics did not always overlap.^[8] Syndicalist labor organization and socialism in the Aude sprang from different roots, adopted different organizational strategies, and flourished within different constituencies. It is true that syndicalist leaders in the Aude did not draw masses of workers into the unions on the basis of leaders' hostility to electoral politics. Nor did syndicalism succeed in providing a complete alternative to socialism. Workers did vote. But the fact that these two movements often found themselves at loggerheads helps us understand why, in a country with such a rich revolutionary tradition and wealth of labor and socialist leadership, no mass mobilization of the working class ever occurred.^[9]

Third, the story of Audois vineyard workers warns us against overemphasizing union membership figures as a measure of the labor movement's strength. Here the Aude confirms a general pattern of twentieth-century unionization: fluctuating membership coexisting with strong support for strikes. The fluidity of union membership in the Aude and elsewhere in Mediterranean France tells us less about the failure of agricultural syndicalism than about the nature of rank-and-file participation, which shifted according to workers' capacity to pay dues and their perception of the need for union activity.^[10] The ability of southern unions to influence and obtain support from nonunionized workers and the community during a strike was at least as important as the numbers of dues-paying members it could count. Indeed, as we have seen with respect to women, in closely knit vineyard villages community was just as important as the union in mobilizing the rural working class.

Fourth, the case of the Aude illustrates the disjuncture between syndicalist discourse on the one hand and the practical interests and preoccupations of workers on the other. Rural syndicalists in the Aude, like workers everywhere, walked a narrow line between long-range revolutionary aspirations and the

short-term, day-to-day issues of wages, hours, and working conditions. They affirmed the independence of the labor movement, the primacy of class struggle, and the revolutionary value of the general strike, defended sabotage, and condemned the legislative process. Yet even as their radical rhetoric increased in intensity and volume, labor leaders in the Aude never actually proposed the revolutionary expropriation of the vineyards. In practice, labor activism turned on immediate, piecemeal reforms and the restoration of a certain moral economy that had disappeared from the relations between labor and capital; overturning those relations was never a serious goal.

The coexistence of radical rhetoric with moderate pragmatic objectives was not unusual. All over France, syndicalism in practice hardly matched its dramatic claims.^[11] Most French workers wanted bread-and-butter improvements in their working lives, and these the unions obtained. Tant pis pour la révolution. For much of the CGT's rank and file, membership in that organization did not entail a commitment to its revolutionary doctrine.^[12] Yet syndicalism was not therefore, to borrow from Stearns, a "cause without rebels." Rather than being a coherent theory or body of doctrine, syndicalism was the result of practice. And syndicalist practice differed from place to place as workers strategically (and, we might add, wisely) responded to local conditions.^[13]

By now historians of the French working class and socialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have discovered a veritable kaleidoscope of political forms and class identities. The rural workers of the Aude are part of that fragmented picture. They show us—in case we need reminding—that the story of working-class movements and politics in modern France is one of enormous diversity and difference. Indeed, it barely seems possible to talk about either the French working class or the French socialists (even after 1905) as a bloc, once we recognize the variations in political culture and class identity that sprang up across different regions and between different communities. In one place (the Var), socialism was revolutionary and collectivist; in another (the Aude), it was relatively reformist and petty bourgeois. In one area (the Nord), socialists sought to harness and tame independent workers' movements; in another (the

Tarn), they nurtured workers' organizations and struggles; still elsewhere (the Aude), they fostered unions in urban areas and offered moral and occasionally material support to rural workers. These variations attest to the richness of the socialist and working-class movements and to the ability of workers and their allies to create effective organizations and strategies of contest commensurate with local conditions and requirements. Yet alongside the divisions between unions and parties, rhetoric and action, over the long term that very richness and diversity across regions and trades militated against the development of a united working-class movement.

Despite this shortcoming nationally, as a local movement and as an expression of class interest syndicalism made a real difference in the lives of vineyard workers in the Aude. Ironically, the very intransigence and combativeness that ultimately condemned Audois syndicalists to a minority position simultaneously enabled them to make tangible gains for agricultural workers, something the Socialists had not done by 1914. Moreover, it gave workers a language of struggle that contributed as much to the construction of class identity as did changes in the realm of production. Thus, the culture of syndicalism played a vital role in shaping the rural working class and in mediating the intricate relationships among peasants, workers, capital, political parties, and the state.