A peek at the old playbook

From The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 :

“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."