“Like the nation itself as the Depression-laden 1930s
unfolded, labor was divided. Like its
enemies on the extreme Right, though for different reasons, it felt alienated
from the Republic.
Trade unionism was still bitterly fought by the employers
and scarcely encouraged by the government, even when the government was radical
and supported by the Socialists. And the
unions weakened themselves by splitting into two hostile groups.
The collapse of the general strike in May 1920 had almost
destroyed the trade-union movement in France.
Ruthlessly put down by the government of the former Socialist Millerand,
with troops, police, and strikebreakers, the work stoppage ended with hundreds
of labor leaders in jail, the CGT (General Confederation of Labor) outlawed y
the courts, and thousands of workers deprived of the their jobs for having
walked out. In despair, workingmen left
their unions in droves. For 16 years, 90
percent of French workers remained unorganized.
They sank into a deep apathy, convinced that there was no hope for them –
from the unions, from a hostile government, from a rural-dominated Parliament
that had no comprehension of a city laborer’s lot, or from the employers, who,
encouraged by the collapse of the strike, were now determined to eliminate the
unions completely, deal with their employees on an individual basis and on
their own terms, and even to sabotage the eight-hour day, which Parliament had
voted in 1919, and the mild social-insurance legislation which the two chambers
were threatening to enact, and finally at the end of the twenties did.
Without collective-bargaining power the French worker
found himself deprived of a fair share of the economic gains that came as prosperity
returned to France after the first war.
Real wages lagged behind the increase in profits and production. After the Depression hit, total wages fell by
one third and unemployment rose sharply.
But for a decade and a half labor submitted almost meekly to this
diminution. There were few strikes. Employers welcomed what they called an era of
“social stability” and “labor peace.”
Few among the prosperous middle and upper classes were aware that
beneath the economic misery of the French workers was a moral one, which was
perhaps even more degrading. A sense of
humiliation, of oppression, of helplessness, came over them. It is not surprising that many of them became
quite indifferent to the fate of the Republic whose Parliament and government
seemed to them to have combined with the employers and the moneyed classes to
shut them out of the French community.
They were doing its labor but they were receiving few of its benefits or
privileges and had little voice in it."
