Society for French Historical Studies

Abstract

Labor history was alive and well at a conference of Society for French Historical Studies held at Ohio State University on March 29-31, 1990. In two panels and one plenary session?a total of nine papers?French labor historians examined a variety of issues ranging from representations of labor and workers in socialist thinking, labor press, and labor congresses, to workers' reactions to portrayal of work and labor in Paris Exhibition of women in unions, and managerial strategies in controlling women workers in Paris metal trades. Recently, French labor historians have examined disjuncture between representations of work in France on one hand, and workers' own vision and experience of work and labor organization on other. (See, for example, essays in excellent collection edited by Steven Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp, Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice [Ithaca and London, 1986]). Two papers at conference focused on this theme. Joy Hall (Auburn University), in Worker and Socialist Responses to Social Economy Exhibit at Paris Exposition of 1889, argued that exhibit, designed to further solidarist ideals of social peace between workers and employers and to promote mutualism for its moral as well as its economic benefits, proved to be a disappointment for workers. Their voices were lost in reformers' efforts to promote management-oriented reform; no place was given to demonstrating realities of workers' experience. K. Steven Vincent (North Carolina State University), in Representations of Labor and Workers in Nineteenth-Century French Socialist Thought, traced ambiguity of French socialist thinking on work from Lafargue's defense of the right to be lazy to Fourier's argument that work could be liberating if not fulfilling and Proudhon's idea that a committed, creative labor force, conscious of its moral obligation, could save society from decadence. Vincent argued that socialists idealized worker-as-hero even when reality suggest ed differently?although it is true that, as Steven Zdatny (Rice University) pointed out in his comments, socialists' overidealizing of workers' potential for action was not unusual or unique: all political parties did this. This moralizing tendency spilled over into discussions of women, where socialists praised virtues of femme au foyer. They were less concerned with exploitation of women in workplace than they were with problem of demise of home.