Hostile Participants? Working‐Class Militancy, Associational Life, and the “Distinctiveness” of the Prewar French Labor Movement

Abstract

A new catchword has arisen in recent years to describe the French labor movement and working-class culture in the late nineteenth century. Although as yet neither as prevalent nor as controversial as the term Sonderweg (special way) once was among historians of German modernization, the word “distinctiveness” as used by scholars of French labor has already assumed a similar connotation: that is, that working-class culture, class identity, and labor militancy developed in prewar France in ways distinctively different from, and hence not readily comparable with, those of other European industrial powers—namely, Germany and Great Britain. In his analysis of labor militancy among Parisian gas stokers, Lenard Berlanstein argued that the distinctive features of the French labor movement before 1914 are exemplified by workers’ “hostile non-participation”—that is, their “deep sense of class hostility and the failure of this hostility to produce strong trade unions or socialist parties.” These seemingly paradoxical features of French working-class militancy appear to have no parallel in prewar Great Britain or Imperial Germany. Compared to Germany’s powerful Social Democratic Party (the SPD), France’s fractured socialist parties failed to enlist more than a small minority of laborers as formal members, although large numbers of industrial workers voted socialist in local and legislative elections. Trade