City of Light, City of Shadows by Mike Rapport

Author:Mike Rapport [RAPPORT, MIKE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

THE RUE DU Château d’Eau runs off the boulevard de Magenta from the north-western corner of the place de la République. At No. 3, there is a solid building designed by Joseph Bouvard and built in 1892 that, then as now, houses the central Bourse du travail for Paris. The lintels of its three front entrances are ornamented with allegorical figures representing Peace, Work, and the French Republic. Farther up, the names of statesmen, inventors, artists, and industrialists who had risen from working-class backgrounds are carved into the stone.9 Peace, Work, and the Republic are all virtues that Morice’s statue nearby also celebrated—and when city funding was provided for the building, one suspects that the message was deliberate: the values of workers were to align with those of the democratic parliamentary Republic. Yet at this site they came to represent a more radical, indeed revolutionary, vision of the future, for the Republic as envisaged by the original founders of the Bourses du travail was not at all similar to the kind celebrated by Morice’s Marianne.

The Bourses du travail were labour exchanges, as they are today, but when they were founded in the Belle Époque, they had a particular political purpose. They arose from a fusion of anarchist ideas and trade unionism in the 1890s that tapped into a longer-term tradition of French working-class radicalism based on the small-scale workshop, which remained the backbone of the French economy. Workers and craftsmen and craftswomen had long sought to associate together locally in order to defend their livelihoods against merchants, big business and finance, and, periodically, the demands or intervention of the state itself. In 1884, the Third Republic legalised trade unions—syndicats—giving workers a lawful means by which they could collectively bargain for better pay, shorter hours, and more tolerable conditions. Yet they were also, potentially, revolutionary.

Among the first to realise the revolutionary possibilities of trade unions was Émile Pouget, in the anarchist journal Le Père Peinard. But the figure who refined the idea was the journalist Fernand Pelloutier, who, along with Aristide Briand (both were from Nantes in western France) wrote, in 1892, De la révolution par la grève générale (On revolution through a general strike). Insurrections using barricades, fighting soldiers in the streets, the authors argued, were invariably crushed. While not necessarily peaceful in its effects, a general strike would produce the most radical of revolutions. Three years later, Pelloutier elaborated his theory in a pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que la Grève générale? (What is the general strike?). The piece takes the form of a discussion among a small group of workers about how to hasten the arrival of a better world. One of them explains how a general strike would develop:

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