Abstract
Christian Chevandier's Cheminots en Greve is a social, political, and institutional history of railroad workers in France from 1848 to 2001. It is told from the standpoint of the role of strikes in forming the occupational identity of these workers, known in France as cheminots (Chevandier finds the earliest use of the expression dating back to 1898; by the 1930s the Academie Francaise officially recognized it as a French word). Cheminots belong to various crafts and trades. They drive the trains, repair locomotives and rolling stock in shops and factories, sell tickets in stations and collect them in trains. Although the book is largely structured around a chronological account of railway strikes, Chevandier looks beyond the strike for sources of cheminot identity. These include the evolving structure of the French railroad system from private companies to state ownership, the role of skill and technological change, and especially union strategies, structures, and above all divisions. Along the way he revisits earlier treatments of French labor and railworker history, and takes up old historiographical controversies debating, confirming, and refuting well-known scholars from Annie Kriegel to historians of a younger generation like George Ribeill and Atsushi Fukasawa.
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