The Occupation of the Factories: Paris 1936, Flint 1937

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 324-347

  Torigian, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85010113860     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0010417599002108     Document Type: Article

References (168)

1. The concept of the “Fordist-Taylorist factory system,” first developed in Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277–318, was popularized in the 1970s by France's “regulation economists” (Boyer, Aglietta, Lipietz, Coriat). It refers to those mass-production metal-fabrication plants based on the assembly-line techniques devised by Henry Ford and managed according to the “scientific” principles worked out by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The U.S. auto industry of the 1920s and 1930s best exemplifies this form of production.
2. Most accounts of the French and American occupations make reference to the other national case, but the only actual attempt to compare them is to be found in Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 125–128.
3. Notwithstanding his definitive study of the Flint occupations, Fine's treatment of the Paris strikes, based on a few English language sources, examines only their general contours, not the structural and contingent factors linking them with the Flint movement. Cf. Val R. Lorwin, “Reflections on the History of the French and American Labor Movements,” The Journal of Economic History, 17 (March 1957).
4. For example, Henri Vieilledent, Souvenirs d' un Travailleur Manuel Syndicaliste (Paris: La Pensee Universelle, 1978), 218; L'Union des Métaux (CGT), October 1935.
5. “Les Conflits de Juin dans la Région Parisienne,” Etudes: Revue Catholique d'lntérêt Générale, December 5, 1936;
6. Le Populaire (SFIO), May 28, 1936;
7. L'Aube Nouvelle (PCF), May 23, 1936.
8. The Communist-controlled Metal Union was firmly entrenched at the Bréquet plant in Le Havre and at the Bloch plant in the Paris Region. See Louis Eudier, “Bréquet-Le Havre: Première Occupation en 1936,” Cahiers d'Histoire de l'lnstitut Maurice Thorez, 1 (NS) (November-September 1972), and La Voix Populaire (PCF), March 6, 1936.
9. The situation in Toulouse is somewhat more opaque, but Daniel Brower in The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968) suggests that metal workers there had been agitated by local Communists in the days leading up to the occupation.
10. The occupations are one of the few chapters in French labor history that has attracted more than a modicum of scholarly attention. Among the many works devoted to them, 1 would recommend Saloman Schwarz, “Les Occupations d'Usines en France de Mai et Juin 1936,” International Review for Social History, 2 (1937);
11. Jacques Danos and Marcel Gibelin, Juin 36, Nouvelle Edition (Paris: La Decouverte, 1986);
12. Georges Lefranc, Juin 36: “L'Explosion Social” du Front Populaire (Paris: Julliard, 1966);
13. and Antoine Prost, “Les Grèves de Juin 1936, Essai d'lnterpreta-tion,” in Léon Blum: Chef de Gouvernement 1936–1937 (Paris: PFNSP, 1967), P. Renouvin and R. Rémond, eds. Despite these and numerous other studies, there is still a paucity of works on specific industrial sectors. This is especially the case with the Paris metal industry, which constituted both the axis of the strike movement and the axle upon which the future labor movement would turn.
14. I have tried to right this imbalance somewhat in Every Factory A Fortress: The French Labor Movement in the Age of Ford and Hitler (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).
15. Pierre Monatte, La Lutte Syndicale (Paris: Maspero, 1976), 226;
16. Saloman Schwarz, “Die Okkupationsstreik in Frankreich im Sommer 1936” (Typescript MS, Hoover Institution Archives, n.d.), 28.
17. This point is bound to be challenged, for the reigning orthodoxy holds that the strikes were purely spontaneous. Given the paucity of French labor studies and the scant knowledge of specific federations, most historians have examined the June occupations without reference to earlier sit-downs and without recognition of the real forces involved. For a corrective to this view, see my “From Guinea Pig to Prototype: Communist Labour Policy in the Paris Metal Industry, 1922–35,” Journal of Contemporary History, 34 (October 1997).
18. Cf. Bertrand Badie, “Les Grèves du Front Populaire aux Usines Renault,” Le Mouvement Sociale, 81 (October-December 1972);
19. Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);
20. and Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
21. Maurice Moissonnier, “1936: Les Grèves d'Occupation des Usines,” Les Cahiers de l'lnstitut CGT d'Histoire Sociale, 19 (September 1986), 13–14.
22. If the Paris metal industry was the storm center of the subsequent occupations, the Renault auto works formed its eye. A key work on Renault and one of the best treatments of French Communist unionism is Jean-Paul Depretto and Sylvie V. Schweitzer, Le Communisme à l'Usine: Vie Ouvriere et Mouvement Ouvrier chez Renault 1920–1939 (Paris: EDIRES, 1984).
23. L'Humanite (PCF), June 12 and 13, 1936.
24. Thorez's order scandalized the far left. As one Socialist lamented, “The Revolution, which was there within arm's reach, has just been betrayed.” See Maurice Jacquier, Simple Militant (Paris: Denoel, 1974), 98.
25. The PCF's left wing felt a similar sense of betrayal. See Oue Faire?, July 1936.
26. Also Pierre Broué and Nicole Dorey, “Critiques de Gauche et Opposition Révolutionnaire au Front Populaire,” Le Mouvement Sociale, 4 (January-March 1966).
27. David Brady, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 82.
28. Benjamin Stoberg, “The CIO Moves On,” The Nation, February 20, 1937.
29. The UAW was formally constituted by the AFL in August 1935, but only in May 1936 did the membership gain control of the union's executive offices. On the formation of the UAW, see Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement (Ithaca: Institute of International Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1961).31
30. Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 143.
31. William Weinstone, The Great Sit-Down Strike (New York: Workers Library, 1937), 25; Daily Worker, December 26, 1936.
32. Union News Service (CIO), December 21, 1936, February 15, 1937.
33. There is some controversy over whether the Flint workers spontaneously initiated the strike, forcing the UAW to accept their fait accompli, or whether the strike was the result of a premeditated union plan. Two Communist participants have left the impression that it was a product of their strategic intervention. See Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985)
34. and Wyndham Mortimer, Organize! My Life as a Union Man (Boston: Beacon, 1971).
35. Against this view, two Trotskyist (or former Trot-skyist) historians have argued that the turbulent character of the UAW ruled out the possibility of any long-term plan and that union leaders were forced to march to the step of the ranks. See Art Preis, Labor's Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 53–54
36. and Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 115–119
37. Fine's view is closest to the spontaneity thesis. See Sit-Down, 142–147.
38. Certain press accounts also favor this thesis, such as The Chicago Daily Tribune, January 2, 1937.
39. I tend to favor the argument of the pro-Communist historian, Roger Keeran, who contends that even if the sit-downs broke out spontaneously, it hardly negates “the existence of a strategy, preparation, and a general deadline.” See The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 19.
40. Cited in Frank Cormier and William J. Eaton, Reuther (Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), 79.
41. The New York Times, January 15, 1937.
42. UAW members in seventeen other GM plants, anxious to join the fray, staged walkout or sit-down strikes of their own, but given the nature of the Cleveland and Flint operations, these additional strikes were almost superfluous. See Levinson, Labor on the March, 153.
43. Workers Age, February 20, 1937.
44. New York Times, January 23, 1937;
45. Claude E. Hoffman, Sit-Down in Anderson: UAW Local 663 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968), 38 - 59.
46. New York Times, January 27, 1937;
47. Fine, Sit-Down, 117–8, 142.
48. 1f GM managers had had “the guts to be ruthless and piratical like the old timers thirty or forty years ago or the brains to recognize changing conditions and meet them,” as did Henry Ford, these things might not have mattered as much-or so Paul Gallico claims in his novella “Sit-Down Strike,” Cosmopolitan (April 1938), 163.
49. Frederick H. Harbison and Robert Dubin, Patterns of Union-Management Relations: UAW- GM-Studebaker (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1947), 3.
50. Some rather classic works (such as Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933–1941 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970]
51. and Galenson, The ClO Challenge to the AFL) attribute the CIO breakthrough to the U.S. steel agreement, which in fact came after the Flint settlement and was very much influenced by it.
52. A key corrective to this view is Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), 273–276.
53. Cochran, Labor and Communism, 127.
54. Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hill. Statesman of American Labor (Garden City: Doubleday, 1952), 412.
55. In Labor's Giant Step (p.50), Art Preis called the Flint strike the “Gettysburg of the labor movement.”
56. For example, Joel Seidman, “Sit-Down” (New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1937);
57. Georges Saloman, Les Occupations d'Usines devant la Loi à les Tribunaux (Paris: Libraire technique et economique, 1938).
58. Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers, 155.
59. Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920, Gwyn A. Williams, trans. (London: Pluto Press, 1975);
60. Daniel L. Horowitz, The Italian Labor Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 142–53;
61. Maurice F. Neufeld, The Italian Labor Movement in Its Political, Social, and Economic Setting (Ithaca, 1961), 371- 379.
62. Danos and Gibelin, Juin 36, 145; Fine, Sit-Down, 174.
63. The Communist International began calling for sit-down strikes as early as its Second World Congress (1920)-but with little success. After the Citroen strike of 1933, the greatest French labor upheaval since the “two red years” of 1919 and 1920, it formally renewed its call. See Correspondence Internationale (CI), August 26, 1933.
64. The tactic, however, had become part of the union arsenal as early as 1931. See L'Humanité, August 21, 1931, January 26, 1932, September 15, 1932.
65. The first spontaneous metal occupation occurred several weeks earlier at the Talbot auto works in Suresnes. See L'Humanité, January 16 and February 8, 1931.
66. For the Chenard strike, see L'Humanité, March 7–12, 1931.
67. Cahiers du Bolchevisme (PCF), July 15, 1932.
68. Daniel Nelson, “Origin of the Sit-Down Era: Worker Militancy and Innovation in the Rubber Industry, 1934–38,” Labor History, 32 (Winter 1982);
69. also Louis Adamic, “Sit-down,” The Nation, December 5, 1936.
70. Arthur M. Ross, “The Natural History of the Strike” in Industrial Conflict, Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin, and Arthur M. Ross, eds (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), 23.
71. For France, see Gary S. Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New
72. Laboring Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983);
73. Annie Fourcault, Femmes à l'U-sine dans l'Entre-Deux-Guerres (Paris: Maspero, 1982)
74. and Bobigny. Banlieu Rouge (Paris: Eds. Ouvrieres, 1986);
75. Michel Colinet, L'Ouvrier Francais: Essai sur la Condition Ouvrière (Paris: Eds. Ouvrieres, 1951).
76. For the United States, see Joyce Shaw Peterson, “Auto Workers and Their Work, 1900–1933,” Labor History, 22 (Spring 1981);
77. Fine, Sit-Down, 54–63; Stephen Meyers, “The Persistence of Fordism: Workers and Technology in the American Automobile Industry, 1900–1960,”
78. in On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work, N. Lichtenstein and S. Meyers, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989);
79. and Robert Blaumer, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 89–123.
80. John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1983), 41.
81. David F. Selvin, The Thundering Voice of John L. Lewis (New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shep-ard, 1969), 120.
82. The best source on the quantitative aspect of French unionism in this period is Antoine Prost, La CGT à l'Epoch du Front Populaire 1934–39 (Paris: Armand Collin, 1964).
83. See Louis Bergeron, Les Capitalistes en France (Paris: Julliard, 1978);
84. François Sellier, La Confrontation Sociale en France 1936–1981 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984);
85. Ingo Kolboom, Frankreich Unternehmer in der Periode der Volksfront 1936–1937 (Rheinfelden: Schäuble Verlag, 1983);
86. Marc Maurice and Francois Sellier, “Societal Analysis of Industrial Relations: A Comparison between France and West Germany,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, 17 (November 1979).
87. In their study of French strikes, Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly found that large-scale firms with an average of 1,200 workers had 75 percent fewer conflicts than those with an average of 130 workers. See Strikes in France 1830–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 219.
88. Antoine Audit, Les Fédérations Confédérées et Unitaires des Métaux. Lieu d' emission d'Analyses SocioEconomiques 1922–1935 (Universite de Paris l: Memoire,1986) 86; Collinet, L'Ouvrier Français, 109–16
89. Benoît Frachon, “Juin 1936 … Histoire et Enseignements,” Les Cahiers d'lnstitut CGT-d'Histoire Social, 17 (March 1986).
90. Jean Coutrot, Les Leçons de Juin 1936: L'Humanisme Economique (Paris: CPEE, 1936);
91. Maurice C. Charvardes, Eté 1936: La Victoire du Front Populaire (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1966), 132.
92. S. Galois [Simone Weil], “La Vie et la Grève des Ouvrières Métallos,” La Révolution Prolé-tarienne,10 June 1936.
93. For the analogous situation in the United States, see Weinstone, The Great Sit-Down Strike, 29–33;
94. and Daily Worker, January 16, 1937.
95. Steve Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (New York: Adama Books, 1984), 23–33, 41–50, 70–71;
96. Irving Howe and B.J. Widick, The UAW and Walter Reuther (New York: Random House, 1949), 3–46.
97. New Masses, May 4, 1937.
98. Melvin J. Vincent, “The Sit-Down Strike,” Sociology and Social Research, 21 (July-August 1937), 27
99. Robert Mossé, L' Experience Blum: Un An de Front Populaire (Paris: Sagittaire, 1937), 33.
100. All the great state-altering movements of the 1930s, in my view, represent some form of what James Burnham called The Managerial Revolution (New York: John Day, 1941), the New Deal and the Popular Front being left-liberal variants of what the Nazis did in Germany and the Bolsheviks in Russia.
101. See also John A. Garanty, “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression,” The American Historical Review, 78 (October 1973). Not unrelatedly, both the New Deal and the Popular Front attempted to incorporate the new industrial unions into the meshings of the managerial state.
102. Verité, July 1934; L'Union des Métaux, October 1935.
103. Danielle Tartakowsky, “Stratégies de la Rue: 1934–1936,” in La France en Mouvement 1934–1938 (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1986), Jean Bouvier; ed., La Voix du Peurple de Paris (CGTU), June 1935.
104. Le Prolétaire (PCF), May 16, 1936;
105. Le Peuple (CGT), May 5, 8, 14, and 22, 1936;
106. L'Ouvri-er Metalluraiste (CFTC), September 1937.
107. Tristan Remy, La Grande Lutte (Paris: Eds. Sociales Internationales, 1937), 108;
108. Robert Du-rand, La Lutte des Travailleurs de chez Renault: Raconté par Eux-Même 1912–1944 (Paris: Eds. Social, 1971), 63;
109. Julien Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy. 1934- 1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988), 92.
110. Gérard Noirel, Les Ouvriers dans la Société Française: XlXe-XXe Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 175.
111. Evident on every page of the industry's two main union papers: L'Union des Métaux (COT) and Le Métallo (CGTU).
112. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), 303.
113. Also William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 184;
114. Murray Edelman, “New Deal Sensitivity to Labor Interests,” in Labor and the New Deal), M. Derber and E. Young, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957.
115. Fine, Sit-Down, 31; “Why Did the Auto Workers Strike?,” Social Action 3 (February 15, 1937). In fact, collective bargaining had been legalized by the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932- provided labor was able to force the employers to engage in it.
116. Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union, 77.
117. John T. Flynn, The Decline of the American Republic (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955), 50.
118. Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis, 248–52;
119. Robert H. Zieger, John L. Lewis, Labor Leader (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 88–90.
120. Cochran, Labor and Communism, 107.
121. Workers Age, January 23, 1937;
122. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 61–63.
123. Fine, Sit-Down, 111.
124. John L. Lewis, “The Next Four Years,” The New Republic, December 23, 1936;
125. Workers Age, March 13, 1937;
126. Robert H. Zieger, The CIO 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 39–41.
127. New York Times, February 5, 1937; Chicago Daily Tribune, January 27 and February 13, 1937;
128. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years with General Motors (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 393.
129. New York Times, January 28, 1937; Chicago Daily Tribune, January 28, 1937;
130. George Martin, Madam Secretary: Francis Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 401–402.
131. Cited in Kraus, The Many and the Few, 270.
132. J. Woodford Howard, Jr., “Frank Murphy and the Sit-Down Strikes of 1937,” Labor History, 1 (Spring 1960).
133. Chicago Daily Tribune, January 18, 1937.
134. New Masses, January 19, 1937.
135. Arthur M. Schlessinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 571.
136. Benoît Frachon and Gaston Monmousseau, Pour une CGT Unique! Pour l'Action de Masse! (Paris: Les Publications Révolutionnaire, 1934);
137. L'Etincelle de Boulogne-Billancourt (PCF), June 1935;
138. L'Ouvrier Métallurgiste, September 1937.
139. Le Travailleur Parisien (CGT), October 1936;
140. Pierre Monatte, “La Class Ouvriére Reprend Confiance en elle,” La Révolution Prolétarienne, July 10, 1936;
141. Raoul Dubois, Au Soleilde 36 (Paris: Messidor, 1986), 80 - 88.
142. Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 93, 130;
143. Fine, Sit-Down, 66–69.
144. Ziegler, John L. Lewis, 85.
145. Daily Worker, May 11, 1936.
146. Melvyn Dubofsky, “Not So ‘Turbulent Years’: Another Look at the American 1930s,” Amerikastudien, 24 (January 1979); Zieger, The CIO, 44–45.
147. Chicago Daily Tribune, January 22, 1937; New Masses, February 9, 1937.
148. David J. Saposs, Communism in American Unionism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 119.
149. Earl Browder, “The American Communist Party in the Thirties,” in As We Saw the Thirties, Rita James Simon, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 230. Henry Kraus, who played a key role in the Flint strike, claims UAW leaders were deeply impressed with the French sit-downs and drew the proper lessons from them.
150. See Heroes of Unwritten Story: The UAW, 1934–39 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 205 - 206.
151. This view, however, was not shared by all observers. For example, Levinson, Labor on the March, 169–171
152. Mortimer, Organize!, 103.
153. Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis, 259;
154. Galenson, The ClO Challenge to the AFL, 124.
155. Virtually every public statement by the Paris Metal Union, as well as the UAW leadership, emphasized the social and corporate nature of the strikers' demands. See Depretto and Schweitzer, Le Communisme à l'Usine, 192–7
156. 0n labor's propensity to act as a social movement, see Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
157. and Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka, and François Dubet, Le Mouvement Ouvrier (Paris: Fayard, 1984).
158. Kraus, The Many and the Few, 46;
159. J. Barrue, “Le Syndicalisme au Tournant,” La Révolution Prolétarienne, January 10, 1937;
160. Benoît Frachon, Le Rôle Sociale des Syndicats (Paris: CCEO, 1937). Unlike the union hierarchy, the ranks continued to resort to the sit-down-highlighting the difference between the problems of institutionalization and those of routine conflict resolution. There were also differences between the Weinstone leadership of the Michigan state CP, which played a major role in the UAW, and the CP national office under Earl Browder, with the former prone to engage in actions, such as disruptive sit-downs, frowned on by the more “conservative” national leadership, which was reluctant to rock the boat, especially after October 1937, when FDR in his “quarantine the aggressors” speech signed on to the Soviets' collective-security policy.
161. See Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York: Twayne, 1992), 81- 84.
162. Also Benjamin Stolberg, The Story of the CIO (New York: Arno, 1971), 160.
163. The Monthly Labor Review, 18 (August 1938), 360–362.
164. The UAW claimed that of the industry's 517,000 production workers, 320,000 were unemployed by late 1937 and 196,000 on short time. See Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 562–563.
165. See Michael Torigian, “The Defeat of the Popular Front: The Paris Metal Strike of March-April 1938” (forthcoming).
166. P.K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 142–3; Lefranc, luin 36, 267, 294.
167. For example, Henri Prouteau, Les Occupations d'Usines en Italie et en France (Paris: Libraire Technique et Economique, 1938), 243;
168. Henri du Passage, “L'Occupation des Usines,” Etudes (September 5, 1936), 595.