Blessed capitalism! It announces nothing and never promises.
No manifesto or twenty-point declaration programming the
turnkey happiness. He crushes you, guts you, enslaves you, torments you — in short, does it disappoints you? You have the right to be unhappy but not not disappointed, because disappointment presupposes a betrayed commitment.
Those who announce a more just, shining future expose themselves to the accusation
of deception when the attempt sinks into an awful cacophony.
Capitalism, on the other hand, wisely conducts with the present. It is. The future? He willingly abandons it to dreamers, ideologues, and ecologists. And so its crimes are almost perfect. No written record establishing premeditation.
For the Terror of 1793, it is easy for those who do not like revolutions to imagine its culprits: the Enlightenment and the unreasonable will to order society according to reasoning reason.
For communism, libraries crumble under the incriminating works. Nothing like this for capitalism. It is not to it that we can reproach manufacturing misfortune by pretending to bring happiness. It agrees to be judged only on this which has always motivated it: the search for maximal profit in minimal time. The others are interested in man; It only concerns itself with goods.
Have we ever seen happy or unhappy goods? The only worthwhile reviews are balance sheets. To speak about crimes is irrelevant. Let us talk about natural disasters. We tell you enough:
capitalism is the natural state of humanity. Humanity is in capitalism like a fish in the air. It takes the futile arrogance of ideologues to want to change the order of things, with the sad cyclical consequences that we know: revolution, repression, disappointment, contrition. This is the true original sin of man: that perpetual agitation that leads him to shake the yoke, the lyrical illusion of a future freed from exploitation, the claim to change the natural order.
Don't move: capitalism moves for you. But hey, nature has its disasters; capitalism too. Would you look for those responsible for an earthquake, a tidal wave? Furthermore, crime involves criminals.
For communism, the anthropometrics cards are easy to establish: two bearded guys, a goatee, some four-eyes, a mustache having man, one that crosses the Yangtze River by swimming, a cigar lover, etc. We can hate these faces. They incarnate.
When it comes to capitalism, there are only indexes: Dow Jones, CAC 40, Nikkei, etc. Just try to hate an index. The Evil Empire still has a geographical area, capitals. It is trackable. Capitalism is everywhere and nowhere. To whom should summonses be sent before a possible Nuremberg tribunal?
Capitalism? Cheesy archaism! Get up to date and use the right word: liberalism. The Littré defines "liberal" as "that which is worthy of a free man." Doesn't that sound good? And The Petit Robert gives us a convincing list of antonyms: "stingy, autocrat, dictatorial, dirigiste, fascist, totalitarian. You may have found excuses to define yourself as anti-capitalist, but admit that it would take vice to proclaim yourself anti-liberal.
So what is this black book of capitalism all about?
Can't you see the madness in this project's excesses?
The worst mass murderer in history, we grant you, but an assassin without a face or genetic code and who has been operating with impunity since centuries on five continents… We wish you a lot of fun. And what's the point? Haven't you heard the final gong announcing at the same time the end of the match and the end of history? It won. It monopolizes in its robust mafia-like version the remains of its enemies. Which credible opponent on the horizon?
Which opponent? The immense people of the civil parties to the trial. The dead and the living. The innumerable crowd of those who were deported from Africa to the Americas, chopped in the trenches of a foolish war, grilled alive by napalm, tortured to death in the jails of capitalism's watchdogs, shot at the Federated Wall, shot at Fourmies, shot at Setif, massacred by hundreds of thousands in Indonesia, almost eradicated like the American Indians, massively murdered in China to ensure the free circulation of opium…
Of all these, the hands of the living have received the torch of revolt of the man whose dignity have been denied. Soon inert hands of those children of the Third World whom malnutrition, every day, kills by tens of thousands, emaciated hands of the peoples condemned to repay the interest on a debt whose capital their puppet leaders have stolen, trembling hands of the excluded ever more numerous to camp on the margins of opulence.
Hands tragically weak, and disunited for now. But they cannot but join one day. And on that day, the torch that they carry will set the world ablaze.
Gilles Perrault
\chapter{Introduction}
\section{THE TOTALITARIAN LIBERALISM}
The world dominated by capitalism is the free world, capitalism, which is now called only liberalism, is the modern world.
It is the only model of society, if not ideal, at least satisfactory. There is and will never be another.
This is the unanimous song sung not only by economic leaders and most politicians,
but also intellectuals and journalists with access to the mainstream media: television, press, large publishers, usually in the hands of industrial or financial groups.
Dissident thought is not forbidden (liberalism obliges!) but channeled into a quasi-clandestine way.
So much for the freedom of expression that the proponents of our liberal system gargle about.
The virtue of capitalism is in its economic efficiency. But for whose benefit and at what cost?
In Western countries, which are the showcase of capitalism while the rest of the world is rather its back room, let us look at the facts.
After its great period of expansion in the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and the ferocious exploitation of workers, the movement that has accelerated over the last few decades has led to the virtual disappearance of the small peasantry devoured by large farms, with the consequence of pollution, the destruction of landscapes and the degradation of the quality of products (and this taxpayer's money since agriculture has not ceased to be subsidized), the virtual disappearance of small local shops, particularly food outlets, in favour of large retailers and hypermarkets, the concentration of industries into large national and then transnational firms which take on such proportions that they sometimes have larger treasuries than those of states and make the law (or claim to do so), taking steps to strengthen their power
without control, such as with the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI) over states. (United Fruit is the patron of several Latin American states.)
The capitalist leaders could fear that the disappearance of the small peasantry,
of the crafts and the industrial and commercial petty bourgeoisie would strengthen the ranks of the proletariat.
But "modernism" has provided them with the parade with automation, miniaturization, computing.
After the depopulation of the fields, we are witnessing the depopulation of factories and offices.
As capitalism does neither know or wants to share profit and work (we see this with the indecent and hysterical reactions of the bosses on the 35 hours, a measure that is nevertheless very meek) we inevitably arrive at unemployment and its cohort of social disasters.
The more unemployed, the less compensation is paid and the shorter the time. The fewer workers there are, the more pensions are planned.
This seems logical and inevitable. Yes, if solidarity is distributed over wages.
But if we take into account the gross national product which has increased by more than 40\% in less than twenty years while the wage bill has continued to decrease, it is quite different!
But this is not in the capitalist logic! Nearly twenty million unemployed in Europe, this is the positive result of capitalism!
And the worst is yet to come. Major European and American firms whose profits have never been so prosperous announce
layoffs by the hundreds of thousands. It is necessary to "rationalize" production, competition obliges!
The increase in foreign investment in France is applauded.
In addition to the dangers to national independence, it is questionable whether it is not the fall in wages that encourages investors.
The French champions of liberalism — of "modernism"! — (see Alain Madelin!) swear by England and the United States
who would be the champions of economic success and the fight against unemployment.
If the destruction of social protections, the precariousness of employment,
low wages and the short-term non-compensation of the unemployed which makes them disappear from the statistics are Mr Madelin's ideal,
I do not think it is the ideal of the workers of this country.
In the USA, a paradise of capitalism, 30 million inhabitants (more than 10\% of the population) live below the poverty line, and among these blacks are in the majority.
The supremacy of the United States in the world, the imperialist and standardizing spread of its way of life and culture can only satisfy servile spirits.
Europe would do well to be careful and react, as it still has the economic means to do so. But it would also need the political will.
To assist productive investment in industry or services, capitalism has the will to make them competitive in the face of short-term financial and speculative investments.
How so? By taxing the latter? Not at all, we lower salaries and social charges!
It is also a way of making the West competitive with the Third World. In Great Britain, they started to make children work again.
The vassal of the United States, nor his overlord, has not ratified the charter prohibiting child labor.
Caught in the infernal circle of competition, the Third World will have to lower costs and push its inhabitants a little further into misery, then it will be the turn of the West again…
Until the whole world is in the hands of a few transnationals, mostly American, and that we hardly need any more workers, except an elite of technicians…
The problem then will be for capitalism to find consumers beyond this elite and its shareholders… and to maintain delinquency born of poverty.
The accumulation of money—which is only an abstraction—prevents the production of capital goods and elementary goods useful to all.
The black book of capitalism is already written before us in its "paradise". What about his hell, the Third World?\footnote{In the dictionary of the twentieth century (Fayard), Jacques Attali puts forward the figure of one in four people living in the US below the poverty line. Worldwide, nearly 3 billion people have less than \$2 per day, 13 million die of hunger every year and two-thirds of the world's hands do not benefit from any social protection.}
The ravages of colonialism and neo-colonialism in a century and a half are incalculable, nor can the millions of deaths attributable to it be quantified.
All the major European countries and the United States are guilty.
Slavery, ruthless repression, torture, appropriation, theft of land and natural resources by major Western, American or transnational companies or by local potentates in their pay, creation or artificial carving up of countries, imposition of dictatorships, monoculture replacing traditional food crops, destruction of ancestral ways of life and cultures, deforestation and desertification, ecological disasters, famine, exile of populations to megacities where unemployment and misery await them.
The structures that the international community has set up to regulate the development of industries or trade are entirely in the hands and at the service of capitalism:
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization.
These bodies have only served to indebt the countries of the Third World and to impose on them the liberal creed.
If they have allowed the development of insolent local fortunes, they have only increased the misery of the populations\footnote{Read Philippe Panure, Le Village monde et son château (World village and its castle), le Temps des Cerises, 1995.}.
In a few decades, international capitalism will hardly need labor anymore, automation obliges!
American laboratories study in vitro cultures, which will definitively ruin the agricultural Third World (and perhaps French agriculture, the world's second largest exporter).
Instead of sharing the goods, it will be unemployment that workers around the world will definitively share\footnote{Read Jeremy Rifjin, La fin du travail (The End of Work), La Découverte, 1996.}.
Yet essential services concerning education, health, environment, culture, mutual assistance will not be provided or will no longer be provided because they do not generate profits and are of no interest to the private sector, because they can only be provided by the States or the community of citizens to whom liberalism wants to remove all power and all means.
What are the means of expansion and accumulation of capitalism?
War (or protection, like the mafia), repression, dispossession, exploitation, usury, corruption, propaganda.
The war against indocile countries that do not respect Western interests.
What was once the prerogative of England and France, Africa and Asia (the last upheavals of colonialism in India, Madagascar, Indochina, Algeria caused millions of deaths), is today that of the USA, a nation that claims to rule the world.
To this end, the United States has not ceased to practice a policy of over-armament (which it forbids to others).
We have seen this imperialism exercised in all direct or indirect interventions of the United States in Latin America and particularly in Central America. (Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Grenada), Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Timor (genocide proportionally greater than that of khmer rouge in Cambodia — nearly two-thirds of the population — genocide perpetrated in indifference — if not with complicity — of the West), Gulf War, etc.\footnote{Read Noam Chomsky, Les Dessous de la politique de l'Oncle Sam (Uncle Sam's backstage of politics), Écosociété, EPO, le Temps des Cerises, 1996.}.
War is not only fought by arms but can take new forms:for example, the United States did not hesitate to help the Moon sect in Korea to fight against communism, the fascists in post-war Italy, they have not hesitated to arm or subsidize Islamic fundamentalists like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Taliban in Afghanistan.War can also take the form of embargoes against indocile states (Cuba, Libya, Iraq), oh so deadly for the populations (several hundred thousand, even millions of dead in Iraq).
Spoliation is the obvious reason of the use of force. If you want to rob a house where the inhabitants are, it is better to have a weapon.
The practices of capitalism are close to those of the mafia, which is probably why the latter proliferates so well in its the former's soil.
Like the mafia, capitalism protects docile rulers who shamelessly let their country be exploited by large American and transnational corporations.
It thus consolidates — when it does not set them up — dictatorships, which are more effective in protecting corporate assets than democracies.
Its weapons are indifferently democracy or dictatorship, trading or gangsterism, intimidation or murder.
Thus, the CIA is arguably the largest criminal organization in the world.
Usury, another mafia process: like the mafia lends to the merchant who can never pay his debt and ends up losing his shop (or life),
countries are encouraged to invest, often artificially, and weapons are sold to them to help fight indocile states,
and they must repay eternally the accumulated interest on the debt, this way you become master of their economy.
Repression and exploitation go hand in hand: anti-union repression (which was once legal), now unacknowledged but still practised in companies,
repressive surveillance, criminal employers' militias\footnote{Read Marcel Caille, Les Truands du patronat (Bosses's thugs), Éditions sociales, 1977.}, unions initiated by the bosses (CFT) and repression against any radical workers' protest\footnote{Read Maurice Rajsfus, La police hors la loi (The Outlaw Police). Le Cherche-midi, 1996.}.
This is the price to pay to make exploitation possible.
And we know, since Marx, that the exploitation of labor is the engine of capitalism.
Western economies benefit from slavery in the Third World and from the serfdom of illegal immigrants in Western countries.
Corruption: Multinationals have such financial or political influence or pressure on all public or private officials that they stifle all resistance in their octopus tentacles.
Propaganda: to impose its creed and justify weapon stockpiling, its criminal acts and its bloody crimes, capitalism always invokes generous ideals:
defense of democracy, freedom, struggle against the "communist" dictatorship, defense of the values of the West,
while it most often defends only the interests of a propertied class, that it wants to seize raw materials,
govern oil production or control strategic locations.
This propaganda is propagated by economic and political rulers, a servile press and media.
These are the watchdogs already denounced by Nizan, the Betrayal of the clerics vilified by Julien Benda\footnote{Read Serge Halimi, Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde, Liber — Raison d'agir, 1997.}.
Supporters of liberalism, lauders of the United States, I have not heard your voice speak out against the destruction of Vietnam, the Indonesian genocid,
the atrocities perpetrated in the name of liberalism in Latin America, against American aid to Pinochet's coup d'état, which was one of the bloodiest in history\footnote{Read Chili, Le Dossier noir, (Chile, the black file) Gallimard, 1974.},
the killing of Turkish trade unionists; your indignation was somewhat selective, Solidarność but not the Disk, Budapest but not Algeria, Prague but not Santiago, Afghanistan but not Timor,
I did not see you indignant when communists or simply those who wanted to give power to the people or defend the poor were killed.
For your complicity or silence, I do not hear you asking for forgiveness.
It was during the nineteenth century that capitalism, based on wage labour, became the dominant mode of production, first in
Western Europe and the United States, then subordinating the whole world, by either indirect or direct forms of domination (colonization).
Its genesis essentially ran its course over the previous three centuries (sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).
This is, to use adam Smith's terminology, taken up by Marx, the era of "primitive accumulation." (or better, to make Adam Smith's term more accurate, "Previous accumulation").
How will capitalists (who possess the wealth likely to be converted into means of production (machines, raw materials, etc.)) and "proletarians",
(devoid of any autonomous means of subsistence and reduced, in order to survive, to become the wage-earners of the previous ones) will end up facing one another?
Bourgeois ideology, which is expressed among political "thinkers" and vulgar economists of the nineteenth century, tells us that originally, society has been divided into two categories:
Some are laborious, intelligent, thrifty
Some others lazy, squandering.
%«
"It goes without saying that some piled treasure on treasure, while the others soon found themselves devoid of everything."\footnote{Capital, book I, tome III, Paris, Éditions sociales, 1950, p. 153.}
%»
Karl Marx cites, among the authors developing this thesis, M. Thiers\footnote{Ibid., p. 153. Adolphe Thiers, De la propriété, Paris, 1848.}.
In the twentieth century, the good doctor Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize in medicine and supporter of Pétain, will explain in L'homme, cet inconnu (Man, the unknown)'\footnote{Dr Alexis Carrel, Man, the unknown, Paris, Plon, 1935.} that the former were genetically superior, and the latter, inferior.
And Karl Marx observes: "In the annals of real history, it is conquest, enslavement, the reign of brute force that has always prevailed."\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 164.}
To study this period, which began with the great maritime discoveries at the end of the fifteenth century, we will use two major sources:
An old one, the one provided by Karl Marx's Capital in its development on "primitive accumulation" (Book I, VIIIth section)\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., pp. 153-22.}.
The other, more recent, certainly richer in information and more "up-to-date", will be provided by the great work of Fernand Braudel: Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism, fifteenth-eighteenth century\footnote{Paris, Armand Colin, 3 volumes, 544, 600 and 608 p.}.
Braudel's point of view, like that of Marx, pays particular attention to the socio-economic infrastructure of history, but differs from it because it does not give a central place to the division of society into opposing classes.
The confrontation of the two points of view could have been exciting: it is unfortunately absent from the work of Braudel, who obviously had not read Marx (at least that part of Capital that covered the same subject)\footnote{Cf. J. Suret-Canale, "Braudel as seen by Pierre Daix", La Pensée n° 307, 3rd trimester 1996, pp. 160-161.}.
The class societies that preceded capitalism were characterized by a personal bond from the dominant to the dominated (slave, tributary, serf, etc.).
The dominated was, of course, exploited, and often in the most brutal way, but the exploitation was "justified", at least ideologically, by a certain reciprocity:
duty of protection on the part of the dominant, even assistance, often under a patriarchal mask.
With capitalism, social relations take on an increasingly abstract, anonymous aspect. And thereby taking on a dehumanized aspect.
Capitalism develops on the basis of commodity production, and presupposes its generalization.
Unlike previous modes of production, more or less based on an economy of self-subsistence, capitalist production is turned, from the start, towards the market: the capitalist produces to sell.
And the very relationship between the capitalist and the wage-earner is in the form of market exchange: the capitalist presents himself as a buyer of labor power, the wage earner as a seller.
The market, the commodity, the commodity production appear very early in the most diverse societies.
But they are not the exclusive, let alone initial, forms of exchange:
archaic societies present "non-market" forms of exchange, highlighted since Durkheim.
Karl Polanyi had the merit of stressing the specificity of these exchanges in relation to market exchange\footnote{Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaïc and Modern Economies, (Ed. George Dalton) Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.}.
In "simple" market production, the agricultural or artisanal producer owns his means of production.
It produces in part or in whole, no longer to directly cover its own needs, but to sell, on a market where products are exchanged
through monetary equivalents, with producers specializing according to a social division of labor.
With productive capitalism, the capitalist, owner of the means of production (land, machinery, raw materials, etc.)
"buys" from the worker the use of his labor power for a wage that roughly corresponds to the amount necessary for the reconstitution and reproduction of this labor power;
This amount being less than what's produced by the implementation of this labour power.
The supplement thus emerging (Marx's "surplus value" or "surplus value") belongs to the capitalist.
The capital advanced and implemented in production by the capitalist is thus at the end of the cycle reproduced and increased by a supplement.
The capitalist can use this supplement for personal consumption, but he can also "accumulate" it in order to increase the mass of his capital. This is "expanded" reproduction.
In earlier societies, the product of exploitation (of the slave, the tributary, the feudal dependent — serf or villain)
was mainly consumed by the privileged classes and relatively little "reinvested".
The productive cycle was repeated more or less on the same scale. "Growth," to the extent that it existed, was very slow and almost imperceptible.
In contemporary (productive) capitalism that is being set up thanks to the industrial revolution, with the widespread use of mechanical energy,
advances in labour productivity will allow for "expanded reproduction" on an increasingly broad scale, in short, "growth."
This productive capitalism appeared as early as the Middle Ages, in an embryonic form, in Italian cities in the form of "manufacture"
("Factory" practicing in the same place the manual division of labor, or work at home, the capitalist providing the raw material,
for example the thread to the weaver, and buying the manufactured product from him).
But, until the end of the eighteenth century, capital was essentially in forms that Marx called "antediluvian",
market capital or finance capital (usurious) forms that had appeared as early as antiquity.
In these forms, there is also accumulation, but not through the creation of wealth: capital here just to take its tithe from existing production.
The advent of productive capitalism, essentially industrial, in addition to the technical conditions already mentioned, presupposes economic and social conditions.
The first condition is the existence of a "free" workforce, that is to say, free from feudal or seigneurial obligations and servitudes;
but also devoid of any autonomous means of subsistence (and in particular land).
This "liberation" took place in England at the end of the fourteenth century and ended during the first Revolution, that of Cromwell, in the seventeenth century.
In France, it will take place with the Revolution of 1789, and, later, in the rest of Europe, under the direct or indirect influence of revolutionary and Napoleonic conquests.
This "liberation" is inseparable from a massive impoverishment and the expropriation of the small peasantry.
In England, this phenomenon began during the reign of the Tudors and was amplified in the eighteenth century; it is slower and more limited on the mainland.
The peasants thus "liberated" and expropriated constitute a growing mass of wanderers and destitute people,
subjected in England to the ferocious legislation on the Poor laws, ready-madeworkforce, when the time comes, for the capitalist industrial enterprise.
The rural exodus will feed, in the nineteenth century, urban and industrial growth and emigration to America or to the "temperate" colonies.
Let us return to the English example, studied by Karl Marx. Serfdom disappeared there at the end of the fourteenth century.
Most of the peasant population was then made up of small independent, relatively well-off tenants.
The end of the Wars of the Roses (civil war between feudal clans) and the advent of the Tudor dynasty were accompanied by two phenomena:
the dismissal of the feudal "suites" maintained by the nobles (fallen or ruined) threw on the roads a first mass of people without fire or place;
on the other hand the parvenus who overtook the place of the old ruined or extinct nobility undertook to "assert" their domains by expelling
massively the peasants holding their land to convert it into sheep pastures:
the rise of the wool factory of Flanders, of which England had long supplied the raw material, the resulting rise in the price of wool encouraged this speculation.
In vain, laws of Henry VII (1489) and Henry VIII prohibited the demolition of peasant houses and tried to limit the extension of pastures.
The Reformation and the confiscation of the property of the clergy - including suppressed religious orders - a quarter to a third of the lands of the kingdom,
distributed by Henry VIII to favorites, led to an acceleration of the phenomenon:
all those parvenus who had become "gentlemen" continued to expel the peasants.
The small and medium-sized peasants, the "yeomen", still provided the bulk of the troops of Cromwell's English Revolution.
But by 1750, the evolution was complete:
the small English peasantry was virtually eliminated in favour of the "Landlords", the large landowners, replaced by capitalist farmers, or, in Ireland, by tenants, precarious, expellable at will.
\begin{displayquote}
The creation of the proletariat without fire or place — dismissed from the great feudal lords and farmers victims of violent and repeated expropriations —,
was necessarily going faster than its absorption by the nascent factories… So a mass of beggars, thieves, vagrants came out.\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 175.}
\end{displayquote}
Hence, from the end of the fifteenth century, a fierce legislation against the poor.
A law of Henry VIII stipulated that robust vagrants would be condemned to the whip; tied up behind a cart, they would be whipped until blood trickles down from their bodies.
After which, they would be imprisoned. A subsequent law of the same king aggravates the penalties by additional clauses:
in case of recurrence, the vagrant must be whipped again and have half of the ear cut off; on the second recurrence, he will be hanged.
In 1572, Queen Elizabeth renewed this legislation:
\begin{displayquote}
Under the almost maternal reign of Queen Bess tramps were hanged in batches, arranged in long lines.
Not a year passed that there were not three or four hundred hanging on the gallows in one place or another, says Strype in his Annals.
According to him, Somersetshire alone counted in one year forty executed, thirty-five marked with red iron, thirty-seven whipped and one hundred and eighty-three —
"incorrigible scoundrels" — released… "Thanks to the nonchalance of the justices of the peace and the foolish compassion of the people," adds the commentator.\footnote{Ibidem, p. 177}
\end{displayquote}
The "law on the poor" of the same queen (1597) made the indigent a burden on the parishes.
The "assistance" of the parishes consisted in locking up the needy in hospices or "Workhouses".
These are actually prisons where they will be subjected to exhausting work and barely fed.
The Law on the Poor was not repealed until 1834… But only because the English bourgeoisie finds it intolerable to have to pay a tax to maintain "slackers".
The destitute will continue to be sent to hospices where they work at least 18 hours a day and where they're carefully given clothes and food only at a lower level than that of the lowest paid worker!
\section{Slavery and mercantile colonization}
Another prerequisite for the advent of capitalism was the extension and generalization of market relations.
They are realized from the sixteenth century with the extension to the whole world of European maritime trade, with the appearance, for the first time in history, of a real world market.
The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1492) for the benefit of the crown of Spain, led to the conquest of the continent.
The two main states that exist there, the Aztec Empire in Mexico and the Inca Empire in Peru were destroyed in 1519 and 1532 respectively.
The conquerors, who had initially thought they had found India, were looking for spices (they did not find any) and gold.
They found some, but in small quantities; after the looting of local treasures, gold panning will give little and its resources will be exhausted before 1550.
But soon the Spaniards discovered and exploited very rich deposits of silver, in Mexico (New Spain) and Peru (present-day Peru and Bolivia).
Trade with America is a royal monopoly. It was subcontracted to a privileged merchant company based in Seville.
It is done by a fleet of galleons, grouped for security reasons (they are often attacked and looted by privateers, English in particular).
This fleet departs every year from Seville, then Cadiz, to Havana, a fortified place that serves as its first port of call.
Then it leaves for the Vera Cruz (to serve New Spain) or for the Isthmus of Panama, where men and products are transshipped on the Pacific shore.
There a fleet took them to Callao, serving Peru and the Andean countries.
Some ships go to the port of Cartagena, to serve New Granada (colombia and Venezuela today).
This fleet brings from Spain manufactured products and supplies.
Any importation by other stakeholders is deemed to be contraband ("interlope" trade).
It is through America that Spain communicates with its only Asian possession, the Philippine Islands:
every year, a galleon departs from Acapulco, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, to Manila; he brings money there, and in return takes away the products of China.
America exports little except money.
The Spanish settlers, concerned to make a quick fortune, while living "nobly" (without working with their hands) subjected the Amerindian population to a frenzied exploitation,
accompanied by barbaric treatment (torture, mutilation) to rule by terror.
The population of the Antilles, the first lands reached by the discoverers, who could not bear slavery and forced labor, was decimated by ill-treatment,
sometimes leading to collective suicides, and by diseases introduced by Europeans and to which it was not immune.
The population of Hispaniola (Haiti), estimated at half a million in 1492, was reduced to 30,000 in 1514, practically wiped out during the sixteenth century.
In general, the population of the Antilles will be the object of an almost complete genocide:
in the nineteenth century, the last Caribbean (a few dozen) will be deported to the island of Dominica where they will lose the practice of their traditions and their language.
On the continent, the Amerindian population will not be annihilated, but will be terribly affected for the same reasons:
in New Spain (Mexico) the population, estimated at 25 million in 1520, fell to 7 million in 1548, and was reduced to less than one and a half million in 1595-1605, a decrease of 95\% in three quarters of a century.
In Peru, work in the silver mines of Potosi is fueled by the "mita", the chore, an institution borrowed from the ancient Inca Empire, but which then leads to a distant deportation, at more than 3,000 meters above sea level, to work underground.
The working conditions are such that few come back: the required people, before departure, are invited to follow the Mass of the dead…
The demographic collapse would have been less in Peru than in New Spain, but would have reached 20 to 30\% between 1530 and 1660.
In total, the population of Spanish America, which was of the order of 50 million at the end of the fifteenth century, decreased to 9-10 million in 1570 and to 4 or 5 million in the middle of the seventeenth century.
It was not until the end of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century that a slow demographic recovery was achieved.
In North America, a land of temperate colonization, the repression or annihilation of the Indians was from the beginning a condition of European settlement:
in 1703 the Puritans of New England granted by decree a bounty of 40 pounds sterling per Indian scalp or for each Redskin taken prisoner.
In 1720 the bounty was raised to 100 pounds.
\section{The Black Slave Trade\footnote{\label{foot18}For an overview: Serge Daget, La traite des Noirs (The Black slave trade), Éditions Ouest-France Université, 1990, 300 p. For details: De la Traite à l'esclavage (From Slave trade to slavery) (Actes du colloque international de Nantes, 1985), Paris, 1988, 2 volumes, XXXII-551 and 733 p.}}
Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas, was outraged by the treatment to which the Amerindians were subjected.
He denounced it in particular in his Brevissima Relation de la Destrución de las Indias.
In 1542 he obtained the prohibition of the slavery of the Indians (which did not change much to their fate) and proposed to replace them with African slaves.
He had to repent of it afterwards.
In fact, the employment of black slaves imported from Africa had already started.
During the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had gradually recognized the coasts of Africa to the west of the continent.
They will find some gold (gold that was previously exported, by the Saharan way, towards the Arab world).
They will also bring back slaves. But this export will only take on its full dimension when it is directed to America.
In fact, the blacks will only replace the Indians in the regions where they have been practically exterminated,
the coastal plains of the Gulf of Mexico, the West Indies, and especially the Brazilian Northeast, colonized by the Portuguese.
And the development of African slavery will be closely associated with that of the sugar plantation.
The cultivation and processing of sugar cane, which came from India, was introduced in the late Middle Ages to the islands of the Mediterranean.
colonized by Venice and Genoa (Chio, Cyprus, Crete) then in Sicily and Andalusia.
At the end of the fifteenth century, they were introduced to the Atlantic islands: Madeira, Canary Islands, Saõ Tomé.
The production of cane sugar is from the outset a real agro-industry:
planting and cutting cane, crushing in sugar mills, clarification and concentration of sugar in boilers,
crystallization, then refining, leaving as a by-product molasses, consumed as such or distilled for the production of alcohol (rums and tafias).
It cannot work with artisanal production: it required large numbers and strict discipline of work that only slavery could provide at that time.
Slaves were employed in the Mediterranean plantations.
In the early sixteenth century, the cane was introduced to the Spanish West Indies, but its development was limited by the lack of manpower.
It was Portuguese Brazil that first imported African slaves on a large scale: around 1580 it became the first producer of cane sugar.
In the Lesser Antilles, partly abandoned by the Spanish and colonized by the English, French and Dutch,
colonization was primarily the work of Europeans who employed a workforce of "indentured labourers";
thoses labourers pay for their journey through a "commitment" of work of 3 to 7 years for the benefit of those who recruited them.
This systemworked poorly; servitude, even temporary, had disappeared from European habits; recruited from among the marginalized, the committed had little aptitude for agriculture, let alone tropical agriculture.
During the seventeenth century, they will be replaced by black slaves, and the crops performed so far (tobacco, indigo) will be marginalized in favor of the sugar plantation.
During the temporary occupation of Brazil by the Dutch, the latter were introduced to the sugar agribusiness:
expelled after the Portuguese reconquest, they will introduce sugar cane in the Lesser Antilles.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, the slave population became the majority:
thus, in Barbados (British) whites were still in the majority in 1645 (three quarters of the population);
in 1667, the proportion was reversed: whites made up only a tenth of the population.
The sugar plantation was from the outset a capitalist enterprise: it required large investments in land development, industrial equipment (mills, boilers, etc.) and the purchase of slaves.
Due to the length of the crossings, cash inflows are long-term.
The capitalist is here the merchant (often also a shipowner) either by investing directly in the plantations or by financing the planters by advances.
The plantation economy is in complete dependence on foreign trade:
almost everything it produces (mainly sugar, incidentally tobacco, indigo, coffee), is intended for export to Europe;
almost everything it consumes, tools, clothing, and even food, is imported.
The plots allocated to slaves for food crops, for which they are granted a maximum of one day a week, are not enough to support them.
Flour and wines from Europe, dried or salted cod from North America, are imported.
The American demand for slaves, linked to the development of the plantation economy, caused the rise of the slave trade; the slave trade takes the form of the "triangular" trade;
the slave ship, at first, brings to the coast of Africa "trade goods" (textiles, hardware, bimbeloterie, alcohols, then powder and firearms), all products intended for the consumption of privileged layers of African society, organizers and beneficiaries of trafficking.
From the coast of Africa, the slave ship left with its cargo of slaves for America, and exchanged its slaves for colonial goods (sugar, tobacco, coffee, etc.).
However, since the price of the cargo of a slave ship is equivalent to the loading of four ships in colonial goods, much of the trade is done in "droiture", tools and goods from Europe against colonial goods.
One exception: Portuguese Brazil directly trades its imported slaves for tobacco and rum.
Growing rapidly in the second half of the eighteenth century, the slave trade will become, until the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
the dominant form of trade between Europe and Africa.
Europeans will quickly give up penetrating the interior of Africa: coastal states specialize in the role of intermediary, providing them with the human commodity,
and defending their fruitful monopoly both against the Europeans and against the African populations of the Interior.
It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that explorations into the interior of the continent began, with the idea of direct access to the African market.
How many Africans were transported across the Atlantic, from the early sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century
(the slave trade continued for several decades after its prohibition, in 1815 north of Ecuador, in 1842 for the South Atlantic)?
The most recent estimates put the number of people transported at between 10 and 15 million.
But to this demographic bloodletting must be added all the human victims resulting from the hunting of slaves and their transport.
The hunt for slaves had become, for the ruling strata of African states, the most lucrative activity:
for a captive taken prisoner, how many deaths were made during the raids on the villages?
How many then died along the way, in the convoys leading the prisoners to the coast, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers?
How many dead in "repositories" on the coast? How many deaths at sea during transport?
Because they were often numerous, especially when an epidemic broke out on board, due to overcrowding, hygiene and food conditions, during a crossing of several weeks.
To this should be added, in Africa itself, the consequences of the permanent insecurity resulting from the hunt for slaves:
populations reduced to famine by the destruction of their villages and crops, forced to take refuge in areas of difficult access but deprived of resources.
To assess it, it would be necessary to multiply the number of transported by a coefficient of several units, which it is impossible to specify:
50 million? 100 million? In America itself, until the end of the eighteenth century, the demographic evolution of the slave population was negative:
in the French part of Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti), in 1789, 2.2 million slaves had been imported in 50 years: only 500,000 remained.
Fénelon, governor of Martinique, in a 11 April 1764 letter to the minister , was surprised by this negative development and highlighted the causes of this depopulation, which forces the constant import of new slaves:
bad food, excess work, imposed even on pregnant women, very frequent diseases of children.
The slave trader Degrandpré, quoted by the R.P. Dieudonné Rinchon acknowledges:
\begin{displayquote}
Admittedly, we were speculating about the excess of their work and we were not afraid of making them die of fatigue, if the price we get from their sweat equals the price of their purchase.\footnote{R. P. Dieudonné Rinchon: The slave trade and slavery of the Congolese by the Europeans, Paris, Vanelsche, 1929, pp. 97-98.}
\end{displayquote}
Hilliard d'Auberteuil (quoted by Gaston Martin\footnote{Gaston-Martin, Histoire de l'esclavage dans les colonies françaises, Paris, P.U.F., 1949, pp. 124-125.}), who resided twelve years in Saint-Domingue, wrote (in 1776):
\begin{displayquote}
One third of the Negroes of Guinea usually die in the first three years of transplantation, and the laborious life of a negro, made in the country, cannot be estimated at more than fifteen years.
\end{displayquote}
The expression "to work like a nigger" has remained in french language.
It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the servile population stabilized and began to grow naturally:
various factors led to this: the rise in the cost of slaves, the interruption of the slave trade during the Napoleonic Wars,
the great fear aroused among the slavers by the revolt in Santo Domingo (Haiti).
Slave owners will be interested in maintaining and reproducing their labor.
To maintain the discipline of their slaves, the owners had to impose a regime of discrimination and terror.
The "Black Code" enacted in 1685, during the reign of Louis XIV, collection of regulations concerning the government, the administration of justice, police, discipline and trade of negroes in the French colonies\footnote{The Black Code... In Paris, at Prault, Imprimeur-libraire, 1767. Reproduction in facsimile: Basse-Terre, Société d'histoire de la Guadeloupe; Fort-De-France, Société d'histoire de la Martinique, 1980.} in force until 1848
(with the exception of the colonies where the abolition of slavery decreed by the Convention was applied from 1794 to 1802), laid down the official rules.
It punishes with death any assault by a slave against his master or against free persons, as well as the theft of horses or oxen;
If a slave is fugitive for more than a month they will have their ears cut off and will be marked with a red iron with a fleur-de-lis on his shoulder;
if they reoffends, they will have their shank cut and will be marked with a fleur-de-lis on the other shoulder; the third time he will be punished with death.
The tortures (marks and mutilations) were not abolished until 1833.
Masters have the right to have their slaves chained and whipped "when they believe that the slaves deserved it."
Except in the cases provided, it is in principle forbidden for masters to torture, maim or kill their slaves.
But in fact, the masters, whatever they do, are never punished:
the courts, in the hands of the settlers, had as their principle that a master could never be convicted on the complaint of a slave, for fear of jeopardizing the authority of the slave regime.
In his report on the Troubles of Santo Domingo, the conventional Garran notes that there is no example of a master brought to justice for killing or maiming a slave.
An ordinance of 1784 which limited to 50 the number of lashes that a master could inflict on a slave "was recorded with great difficulty" and was not executed\footnote{Garran-Coulon report, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, An V, tome 1, p. 25.}.
Marriage and sexual relations between settlers and slaves are in principle prohibited: in fact, the settlers took slave concubines and, very quickly, a layer of mestizos was formed, hierarchized according to their proportion of "white" blood.
In 1789, in the French part of Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti) there were 35,440 whites, 509,642 slaves, and 26,666 freedmen and "colored people."
Freedmen and free men of color could own plantations and slaves but were subject to strict discrimination: in 1789, the settlers denied them political rights.
In a pamphlet published in 1814, Vastey, secretary to King Christophe (Henri 1st, immortalized by aimé Césaire's play) lists the tortures inflicted by the settlers on the slaves, especially during their insurrection:
slaves burned alive or impaled, limbs sawn, tongue, ears, teeth, lips cut or torn off, hung upside down, drowned, crucified on boards, buried alive,
tied on anthills, thrown alive into sugar boilers, thrown down slopes in barrels bristling with nails inside, finally, given alive to be devoured by dogs trained for this purpose\footnote{Notes to Baron Malouet, Minister of Marine and Colonies…Au Cap Henry, chez P. Roux, imprimeur du Roi, October 1814, pp. 11-12.}.
Rochambeau Jr., commander after the death of General Leclerc of the expeditionary force sent by Bonaparte to reconquer Saint-Domingue and re-establish slavery, buyed dogs in Cuba specially trained for this purpose.
It goes without saying that the example given here of the French colonies, for the treatment of slaves, can be extended to all the other colonies.
The prohibition of the trade, despite the repression of the British squadrons, was not enforced and it was not until around 1860 that the traffic ended.
After a "great fear" of the slavers due to the insurrection of the slaves in the French part of Saint-Domingue, which led in 1804 to the independence of the Black Republic of Haiti,
the first half of the nineteenth century saw a new boom in American slave plantations.
This time no longer in the context of mercantilism, but of the market dominated by modern, industrial capitalism:
the rise in the south of the United States of the slave plantation, to supply raw materials to the English factories of Manchester and its region;
the rise of slavery in Cuba (for sugar production) and in Brazil (sugar and cocoa) for European consumption.
Slavery was not abolished until 1833 in the English colonies, in 1848 in the French colonies,
in 1866 in the United States (after the defeat of the Southerners in the American Civil War), in 1886 in Cuba (Spanish colony) and in 1888 in Brazil.
Forbidden in the Atlantic, the slave trade will experience a new development in the nineteenth century in East Africa, especially in Sudan (dependence on Egypt) and in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.
The Sultanate of Zanzibar, created by the Arabs of Oman, controlled from the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba the entire coast of the Indian Ocean, from Somalia to Mozambique\footnote{See Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Integration of an East African Business Empire into the World Economy (1770-1873), Ohio University Press, 1987, 320 p. and G. Clarence-Smith (Ed.), The Economies of the Indian Ocean. Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, London: F.Cass, 1989.}.
This "Arab" slave trade was sometimes put forward to try to "excuse" the European slave trade, on the theme "We were not the only ones".
The problem is that this "Arab" slave trade was driven by the demand of the European capitalist market.
Indeed, its main objective was the search for ivory: by the slaughter of elephants, but especially by the looting of the "treasures" in elephant spikes accumulated by the chiefdoms of Central Africa.
Parts of the Nile or Zanzibar, looting expeditions destroyed villages, massacred or enslaved the population, the captives being destined to play the role of porters, to transport the ivory.
Slavery was a kind of "by-product" of ivory plundering: the slaves who survived were sold to the Middle East where domestic slavery remained,
or used as labour in the clove plantations of Zanzibar, the main supplier to the world clove market, controlled by the British.
The European market was indeed demanding ivory, solicited by the consumption of the wealthy classes: billiard balls, piano keys, knife handles for Sheffield cutlery.
We can estimate the number of slaves exported to Asia, through the Indian Ocean, in the nineteenth century, at 400,000\footnote{François Renault, Problems of research on the trans-Saharan and Eastern slave trade in Africa in De la Traite à l'esclavage, already quoted in footnote \vref{foot18}, tome 1, pp. 37-53.};
The number of slaves "produced" by the Sudanese slave trade can be estimated at 750,000 (plus 10 to 30 per cent of "losses" during transport, and an unevaluable proportion of losses at the time of capture)\footnote{Gérard Prunier, La traite soudanaise (The Sudanese Black trade) (1820-1885); ibid., volume 2, pp. 521-535.}.
\section{The Road to India and Asian Colonization}
While the Spaniards, after believing they were reaching the Indies from the west, colonized America, the Portuguese explored and opened, at about the same time, the eastern route, bypassing the African continent from the south.
Vasco da Gama reached India (the real one) in 1498.
The eastern colonization will first be the fact of the Portuguese, following the principle of the royal monopoly, then of the Dutch, the English, the French, who competed with them.
With some exceptions, and at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, the territorial possessions of the colonizers were limited to coastal trading posts.
Europeans come to India, incidentally to Indonesia, China and Japan, for luxury goods:
spices (pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc.) and oriental handicraft products (luxury textiles: muslins, cashmere, and Indian (painted cotton canvases), silks, lacquers and porcelain from China).
Impossible to offer in return European manufactured items: Asians do better and cheaper.
We must resign ourselves to paying off purchases in cash. It is American silver that balances the purchases of Asian trade.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, one-third, perhaps even half of the silver provided by America, was absorbed by China\footnote{F. Braudel, op. cit, volume 2, p. 169.}.
The latter tightly controls its entrances and only the Portuguese have been able to establish a trading post in Macau.
Japan, on the other hand, closed itself in 1638 to European trade, with the exception of limited and controlled access to the port of Nagasaki, reserved for the Dutch only.
However, from the seventeenth century, the Dutch, to ensure the monopoly of spices take control, directly or by interposed local sovereigns, of the Moluccas, then Java where they established the capital of their commercial empire, Batavia (now Jakarta).
During the eighteenth century, French and English undertook to consolidate their trading posts by a territorial hold.
Dupleix's French attempt was considered a personal initiative and disavowed by the French East India Company.
This attempt was abandoned following the French defeat in the Seven Years' War (1763). The British East India Company took over.
Plassey's victory (1757) resulted in the company's takeover of Bengal. The style of colonization and commercial relations will then change radically.
To trade, the company adds as a source of profits the fiscal exploitation of the conquered territories. Then begins the "repatriation" of money and other wealth accumulated in India.
At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the movement began that would transform India from a supplier of manufactured and luxury goods to a supplier of raw materials for British industry (cotton, jute).
This will also transformt India into a buyer of manufactured products of English industry, resulting in the ruin of traditional craftsmanship.
For China, it is even later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the reversal takes place: to settle the purchases of Chinese products (silks, tea) silver is gradually replaced by opium imported into China by the East India Company.
It was around 1820 approximately that the balance reversed to the detriment of China.
The "Opium War" (1839-1842) forced China to open five ports, cede Hong Kong, and especially the import of opium that the Chinese government had tried to prohibit.
In Braudel's words: "Here is China paid in smoke, and what smoke!"\footnote{F. Braudel, ibid., p. 191.}
\section{What consequences for peoples?}
For the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) the history of the colonial administration of the Dutch "unfolds a picture of murders, of betrayals, corruption and baseness that will never be equalled"\footnote{Thomas Stanford Raffles, The History of Java and its dependencies, London, 1818, quoted by Marx, op. cit., p. 194.}.
The author of this judgment is the governor whom the English appointed during their occupation, during the Napoleonic Wars.
Looting, enslavement, extortion, all means are good to ensure the Dutch East India Company which exploits Indonesia until the end of the eighteenth century record profits.
The state, in the nineteenth century, will do even better: from 1830, Governor Van den Bosch establishes the "system" that bears his name: forced cultures, forced labor.
Peasants have to provide one-fifth of their best land, one-fifth of their working time to provide free export products. Forced crops and forced labour will often go far beyond official boundaries:
we will go so far as to demand a third or even half of the land, and in working time from 66 to 240 days a year\footnote{Charles Robequain, Le monde malais (the malese world), Paris, Payot, 1946, p. 351.}. At the same time, the property tax doubles.
Later the establishment of plantations (tobacco, rubber trees, oil palms, etc.), will lead to the recruitment of "contractual" labor, actually forced laborers treated worse than slaves.
In India, the English will find the support of certain social strata – in particular merchants and bankers – who will become intermediaries of British trade.
In 1793, by a simple regulation, the administration of the East India Company changed the status of the "Zamindars", who were tax farmers in the Mughal Empire.
The "Zamindars" then became large landowners, British-style Landlords, in the territories in which where they were responsible for collecting taxes whereas peasants were reduced to the condition of precarious tenants.
Monopolies of salt, opium, betel, and other products were granted to senior employees of the company, who made quick fortunes.
But the worst was yet to come, with the destruction of handicrafts: India's economic equilibrium was based on the association of agriculture and handicrafts (textiles in particular).
From 1814 to 1835, imports of "Indians" into Britain fell by three-quarters; conversely, imports of British industrial cotton into India are multiplied by 50!
The ruined craftsmen had to retreat to the work of the land, already overloaded. A governor-general of India could thus say that the bones of the weavers whitened the plains of India.
Periodic famines became a feature of India:
18 famines from 1875 to 1900 caused 26 million deaths\footnote{J. Chesneaux, L'Asie orientale au XIXe et XXe siècles, Paris, PUF, 1966, p.189.}. There will be others in the twentieth century (that of Bengal, in 1943, will make 3 to 4 million deaths).
For China, the first opium war will be followed by other European military interventions aimed at imposing the law of great capitalist powers, which will be awarded port "concessions".
Since 1842, they have required China to limit customs duties on imported foreign goods to 5\%.
We will witness a dislocation of the traditional economic circuits, a worsening of misery that will lead to peasant insurrections, the most important of which was that of the Taï-Pings (1851-1864).
We can summarize with Marx:
\begin{displayquote}
The discovery of the gold and silver countries of America, the enslavement of the natives, their imprisonment in mines or extermination, the beginnings of conquest and plunder in the East Indies,
the transformation of Africa into a kind of commercial garenne for the hunt for black skin, these are the idyllic processes of primitive accumulation that signal the capitalist era at its dawn\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 193.}.
\end{displayquote}
\section{Eastern Europe and the "second serfdom"}
Dependency and exploitation through the global market of America, Asia and Africa have also affected the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
The Ottoman Empire was gradually penetrated by Western trade.
Since the sixteenth century, the French, followed by the English, have benefited for their counters, the "ladders of the Levant", from exterritoriality.
In Eastern Europe (roughly, east of the Elbe) the local aristocracy, to purchase luxury goods from Western Europe (clothingfurniture, wine, etc.) intensified its exploitation of the peasantry.
By taking ownership of the land and generalizing serfdom.
This is what historians call the "second serfdom" that is developing in Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Prussia) at the very moment when serfdom is disappearing from Western Europe.
It will reach its peak in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, under the reign of Catherine II, and will take forms close to slavery pure and simple.
It will make possible this classified ad in a St. Petersburg newspaper:
"For sale, a wig maker and a cow of good breed". This reinforced exploitation of the peasantry allows the large owners to make money by massively exporting food and raw materials to Western Europe: cereals, flax, wood, etc.
The maritime cities of the Hansa (German and Baltic), then the Dutch, finally the English, will be the intermediaries and beneficiaries of this trade.
The colonial system of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries is based on monopoly:
royal monopoly at first for Spain and Portugal, then monopoly of privileged companies such as the various companies of the Indies (Dutch, English, French).
The doctrine of foreign trade is mercantilism, advocated by Colbert:
the enrichment of the king (and the kingdom) is considered to be linked to the acquisition of the maximum amount of monetary cash; for which it is necessary to import at least as possible and export as much as possible.
Hence a protectionist customs policy.
Competition between trading nations will often take on a violent course: piracy (privateering) and abuses of all kinds. It will often lead to wars:
in the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside dynastic rivalries, economic motivations took an increasing place:
thus, in the war waged by Holland (the "United Provinces") revolted against Spain, in the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century,
in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Seven Years' War, in the Anglo-French conflict under the Revolution and the Empire.
The advent of industrial capitalism was accompanied by the promotion of "liberal" ideology.
Industrial capitalism comes into conflict with previous institutions: criticism of monopolies, corporate regulations, colonial "Exclusive"
(a rule that forbade the colonies to trade with foreign nations, and to produce manufactured goods whose supply was to be reserved for the metropolis),
criticism of protectionism, trafficking and slavery.
However, this liberal ideology is of variable geometry:
it triumphed in nineteenth-century England with the repeal, in 1846, of the protectionist laws on wheat.
These laws responded to the interests of the "landlords", but embarrassed the industrialists by bidding the price of bread and the level of wages.
But in contradiction with the principles of "free trade", the same England imposes on India a discriminatory customs policy.
It penalizes Indian exports of manufactured goods, and encourages imports of British industrial products.
England fought the slave trade through her Atlantic surveillance squadron, but supported the Southerners slave owners, their cotton suppliers, during the American Civil War…
The United States and Germany will achieve their industrialization under the aegis of a protectionist policy.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the triumph, including in England, of imperial protectionism.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, colonial trade fueled finance capital (usurious):
the bank in fact at that time did not practice productive investments, but lent to the States, to the sovereigns.
Those who pay are the subjects, subject to tax obligations, that is to say in the final analysis especially the peasants.
The financial centers are successively Genoa which changes the money of the King of Spain into gold coins necessary for the pay of his mercenaries.
Genoa will finally be a victim of the bankruptcy of the Spanish state
Then, the trade in colonial products was concentrated in Antwerp, which was until 1575 the first financial center in Europe.
The insurrection of the Dutch against the King of Spain ruined Antwerp and brought amsterdam to the center of great commerce and finance.
In the eighteenth century, this function passed to London.
In colonial trade, monarchical states and, of course, bourgeois states like the Netherlands, are linked by their interests to the merchant and financial bourgeoisie.
Colonial policy was conducted with the means of the State.
This association, sometimes conflictual, is also manifested by the development of public debt and taxation.
Public debt and taxation that contribute powerfully to the exploitation and impoverishment of the peasantry, and constitute one of the levers of primitive accumulation.
Sovereigns, to immediately obtain the money they need and save themselves the burdens and delays of collecting taxes,
To finance the collection of certain taxes, according to a practice that dates back to antiquity.
This is what the "fermiers généraux" will do in France, who immediately provide the king with the money he needs.
These tax farmers are remunerated by collecting certain taxes on the soverign's behalf.
With a profit margin that sometimes reaches 100\% and is never less than 30\% (notoriously usurious margin).
Moreover, governments borrow, first from bankers and then directly from the public.
François 1st launched in 1522 the first public state loan by asking the bourgeois of Paris to lend him 200,000 pounds, for interest.
These were the first "rents on the town hall", guaranteed by the revenues of certain municipal taxes.
\begin{displayquote}
Public debt operates as one of the most energetic agents of primitive accumulation.\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit, p. 196.}
\end{displayquote}
This method of plundering state resources for the benefit of the rich is flourishing today more than ever. (the Pinay and Giscard borrowings provide the contemporary illustration).
Colonial system, fiscal abuses, public debt, impoverishment and expropriation of peasants are preparing, in various ways, the advent of industrial capitalism.
All these means, however, were not sufficient, at first, to provide the manpower that nascent industrial capitalism needed.
It will be provided for in England by the use of the children of the "workhouses".
Lancashire, for its spinning and weaving, needed "small and agile fingers".
\begin{displayquote}
Immediately the custom of procuring so-called 'apprentices', workhouses belonging to the various parishes of London, Birmingham and elsewhere, was born.
Thousands of these poor abandoned children, aged seven to fourteen, were thus sent north.
The master (the child thief) was responsible for dressing, feeding and housing his apprentices in an "ad hoc" house near the factory.
During the work, they were under the eye of the guards.
It was in the interest of these prison warden to make these children work to excess.
Because their own pay decreased or increased depending on the quantity of products they knew how to extract from thoses children.
The mistreatment was the natural consequence…
In many manufacturing districts, mainly in Lancashire, these innocent beings, without friends or supporters, who had been handed over to the masters of the factory, were subjected to the most horrific tortures.
Exhausted by the excess of work… they were whipped, chained, tormented with the most studied refinements.
Often, when hunger twisted them the hardest, the whip kept them at work.\footnote{John Fielden, The Curse of the Factory System, London, 1836. Quoted by Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 200.}
\end{displayquote}
These practices, contemporary "liberalism" has extended them to tens of millions of children, in Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand and elsewhere.
Thus came to the world the triumphant Capital, "sweating blood and mud through all pores"\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 202}.
\section{Jean Suret-Canale}
Jean Suret-Canale, volunteer veteran of the Resistance, interned resistance fighter, clandestine militant of the communist youth from 1939 to 1944,
former member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, is an honorary lecturer at the University of Paris VII.
A geographer and historian, he is the author of a dozen books on black Africa and the Third World.
In his 118th Persian Letter, Montesquieu noted in 1721 that Africa's coasts
"must have been furiously stripped for two hundred years that little kings or village chiefs sell their subjects to the princes of Europe to carry them to their colonies in America".
In a later work, L'Esprit des Lois (1748), he ironize on the laziness of the peoples of Europe:
"having exterminated the people of of America, had to enslave those of Africa, to use them to clear so much land."
In the same place (XV, 5), he draws attention to the economic dimension of the problem:
"Sugar would be too expensive, if we did not work the plant that produces it by slaves."
Eleven years later, Voltaire explains in Candide (chap. XIX), through the mouth of a mutilated slave:
"It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe"…
Everything is said, in a few words: the wealth of the conquering Europe, the cradle of capitalism, was built on the exploitation and extermination of the Amerindians and on that of the coastal peoples of West Africa:
The Native American population fell in three centuries from 40 to 20 million people (with in some cases a total extinction, as in the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles, as well as on the east coast of North America)
The African population had to suffer a loss of 20 million people (ten million dead and ten million deported) in three centuries of trafficking, that is to say from 1510 to 1850 approximately.
The revenues of the servile economy, which for the great European powers accounted for more than half of the export profits in 1800, cost the lives of more than thirty million human beings.
The Americas numbered forty million men at the time of the European invasion:
more than five million for North America (Canada and the United States) the rest, in equal parts, in Central America (mainly Mexico) and in South America, in the Andean regions, equatorial forests and southern pampas.
We remain stunned by the most recent censuses: The United States has less than 2 million Indians!
If natural demography could have played a role (for example, as in Europe during the last three centuries), the Native Americans of the United States would have to be at least thirty million.
What happened in Peru and Colombia, Chile or Argentina, where Indians, just like mexico, are only in the majority, whereas they should constitute, if there had been no genocide, 90\% of the general population?
And this regardless of the miscegenation and other "assimilations" that some believe can use to blur the figures.
The case of the Amerindians therefore boils down to a sinister count: at least twenty million people were sacrificed to God Profit in a direct way, through massacre, misery, deportations and dispossession.
Details are missing. The overall picture is, however, terribly edifying:
Restive, stubborn, diabolically allergic to the forced labor that the colonists imposed on them, the Amerindians, declared foreigners on their own land, were thrown into nothing by the European emigrants.
For its misfortune, Africa was in turn sacrificed on the altar of the "civilizing mission" of European capitalism to "clear so much land."
\section{The collapse of Africa}
Neither Montesquieu nor Voltaire had the ability to attempt it, but this macabre count, we can now do it.
We can carry it to the liabilities of an economic system based on the transformation into capital of surplus value extorted from forced laborers, the slaves.
Two hundred and fifty years after the humanists of the Enlightenment, we have everything we need to measure the barbarity of nascent capitalism:
shipowners' logbooks, masters' reports, travellers' accounts, amounts of marine insurance policies, plans and number of vessels,
the statements of account of the enriched slave traders, the books of the freedmen, the liquidation of inheritances, the value of the currencies, the quantified balance sheets of the triangular trade,
the statements of the ship's doctors, the bounties paid to fugitive slave hunters, the accounts of lynchings, the minutes of the trials and the count of executions.
No serious historian disputes this figure anymore.
No researcher today seeks to minimize the extent of the catastrophe that was for Africa its encounter with the fledgling capitalism of the metropolises of Europe.
This capitalism could only reach maturity thanks to the extraordinary profits generated by the invasion of one continent (America) developed by populations torn from another, Africa.
Altogether, ten million African deportees reached the New World between 1510 and 1860. More than two million perished during the crossing.
Eight million disappeared between the place of their capture in Africa and the coastal trading posts where the survivors of the raids were embarked.
This brings us to a minimum of twenty million people taken from African demography.
At the great time of the slave trade, from 1650 to 1850, deportation reached 100,000 Africans per year. Previously, from 1500 to 1650, the rate was lower: from 15,000 to 40,000 people embarked per year
But the most terrible period for Africa coincided with the rise of cotton cultivation in the United States, between 1800 and 1850: up to 120,000 people displaced annually.
It is obvious that we cannot drain a continent without dramatic consequences in this way:
First of all, on the statistical level of the strict demographic "shortfall", it is worth noting the steady decline of Africa's weight in the world population:
in 1600, it represented 30\% of all human beings. The figure fell to 2\% in 1800.
The fall continued until 1900, when only 10\% of humanity lived in Africa. The west coast, from Senegal to Angola, is obviously the most affected.
The coastal forests and savannahs are literally raked by African kinglets who with their armies capture and then transport the prisoners to the exchange zones.
In these sectors, the male population is declining: between Mauritania and Senegal, 20\% of the total population has been deported in three centuries.
The demographic deficit on the coasts of Guinea, the Gulf of Benin, Cameroon and Angola is such that, in most regions of the Sahel and even in the forests of Congo, fearsome imbalances are reached:
barely 50 men per 100 women in Benin, 70 men per cent women in Biafra, less than 50 men per cent women in Congo, Shaba, Angola.
Further north, between Central Africa and Mali, in Côte d'Ivoire and as far as Gambia, there are barely six men for every ten women.
The continuous decline of the population of West Africa during this period is explained by an annual drain (over three centuries) of three inhabitants out of a thousand on average.
This may seem inconsequential, but it must be said that it is 3\% over ten years, and 30\% over a hundred years!
Given regional variations and fluctuations over time, specialists agree on a minimum of 15\% of the population deported between 1700 and 1850.
As a result, during the same period, it is not possible to record any increase in the general population of Africa (while at the same time European demography exports its surplus to the New World and is ready to populate the whole world).
The economic impact is incredibly violent: kingdoms beating money are rejected at the tribal stage. Federations of tribes break up into wandering communities.
Constituted empires are crumbling, cities are abandoned, fields left fallow for lack of farmers.
General insecurity is blocking trade, intracontinental trade is shrinking at the regional level.
A long economic stagnation accompanies the demographic fall.
An economy of brigandage and raiding regresses the taste for work.
It becomes easier to get rich, or simply survive, by kidnapping your neighbor's son than by cultivating his field.
At the same time, the ideological and political consequences aggravate the continent's stagnation:
slave kings violently impose personal dictatorships contrary to traditional village democracy.
Palaver gives way to allegiance, the payment of tribute in captives replaces diplomacy.
In the midst of this collective decadence, the situation of women (made supernumerary by the deportation of men) deteriorated significantly:
gigantic harems are being formed, made up of bought women, widows and girls sold, unmarriable and useless.
With the captives too scrawny to be bought by the Europeans and the old men in surplus, an abundant herd intended for human sacrifices is fueled,
whose practice is skyrocketing in Africa from the seventeenth century.
Slowly the continent is sinking into a barbarity that it had never really known:
the slave trade during the African Middle Ages had never been anything but exceptional, even marginal.
Islam in the Sahel had not been able to impose polygamy. Human sacrifices were rare and limited to strictly defined occasions.
At the same time, the "African market" is experiencing a real structural reversal:
before the arrival of Europeans, black Africa lived around what was called the "Saharan Sea":
the central desert, traversed by caravans like so many ships going from port to port, served as an economic hub:
exchange between the west coast and eastern Sudan, trade with the Islamic civilizations of the Maghreb.
On the other hand, the ocean, bordered by thick forests, served as a limit, offering no real economic interest.
However, suddenly, the construction of the counters by the European powers turned the African economy inside out like a simple sock.
In less than a century the prosperous peoples of the wooded savannahs became a granary of slaves and the warlike kingdoms of the coastal forests took over,
creating real empires of "slave economy", whose only activity was the penetration of peaceful areas, raids, captures, transport and sale of prisoners.
The relative prosperity, due to the economic take-off of West Africa (sensitive from the twelfth century), could not survive such shocks.
By 1800, the entire continent had regressed by a millennium.
It seems inconceivable that twenty million men, women and children have been uprooted from their homes and land to address a productivity problem:
given the risks of transatlantic trade, the wage bill had to be reduced to zero in order to obtain a satisfactory profit.
Thus, the calculation of the cost of production of coffee, cocoa, sugar and cotton could only be favorable by cancelling wages, in order to extort maximum surplus value;
the slave worker, whose total cost was limited to his purchase price and the strict food necessary, thus constituted a kind of living jackpot:
Producing between five and ten times the surplus value of a European employee, the slave contributed to the enrichment of the white settlers, slave traders and merchants of the mainland.
In the late seventeenth century, when the servile population in the United States was numerically equal to that of white immigrants, it produced 80 per cent of the gross national product of the American colony.
We can thus see that it contributed to the collective wealth (since it did not receive any benefit from it) in such an overwhelming way that when it reached, around 1800,
Two-thirds of the general population, white Americans had practically abandoned all productive roles to limit themselves to the highly remunerative tasks of trade to Europe.
It was not until the end of the century that white European immigrants flooded the population of African descent in successive waves and for the first time secured a significant and then majority share of gross domestic production
(without, however, participating mainly in the sharing of gross domestic income, because of the wage exploitation suffered by the German, Polish, Russian, Italian and Irish newcomers).
Slave traders, simple hidalgos and unscrupulous adventurers at the beginning of the sixteenth century, were only able to transport about ten thousand captives a year, to the British Colony of the North, the French and Spanish West Indies, and Portuguese-occupied Brazil.
Remaining marginal until 1650, this rapine trade, although lucrative, was not yet a significant source of income.
Easy to buy, with a rather low selling price (between 5 and 10 pounds from 1650 for a healthy man from 15 to 30 years old),
slaves died quickly and were just as quickly replaced; one year of life expectancy in Brazil and the West Indies, barely two years in French Louisiana.
Five pounds in 1650 accounted for a quarter of the monthly income of an American craftsman on the East Coast.
For example, a century later, the same slave traded for a used rifle and four barrels of powder. Not enough to really make a fortune…
For slavery to become the main pillar of nascent European capitalism, and not only the opportunity for subsidiary income for the feudal economies of the Middle Ages, it was necessary the conjunction of several elements:
\begin{enumerate}
\item The construction ex nihilo of a market based on a demand for products deemed rare, and sold expensive despite a low cost of production.
\item The establishment of a real monetary circulation around the transatlantic slave trade, and for this the rationalization of transport.
\item The joint regulation of the price of slaves and the cost of their maintenance.
\item The establishment of agreed prices for bonded labour products, the organisation of the return to Europe of most of the investment profits without hindering the reinjection,
at the local level of colonial economies, of the minimum necessary, in order to avoid unproductive hoarding.
\end{enumerate}
These elements necessary for maximum extortion of the surplus value produced by the slave workers of the New World were all gathered only around 1800.
The ensuing economic boom was such that it can be said without hesitation that European capitalism would not have experienced its extraordinary growth in the nineteenth century without the decisive contribution of the labor of the slave labor of the New World.
Appearing under Louis XIV, the fashion of "French breakfast" (coffee with milk, or cocoa with cane sugar) became a universal phenomenon throughout Europe from 1750.
Sweet honey teas were suddenly abandoned for the new breakfast, even in the deepest layers of the people, even in the countryside.
The demand was such that the New World increased its import of slaves tenfold and converted to new cultures intended to supply Europe with exotic drinks in fashion:
the French Antilles, for example, abandoned the cultivation of spices and embarked on sugar production around 1700,
while Brazil converted to coffee and everywhere there was an attempt to acclimatize cocoa, and even tobacco, also made fashionable by the court of France.
This first market created, another succeeded it when shortly after 1800 an American engineer found a way to card, spin and weave cotton.
Suddenly, the entire southern United States began to cultivate this culture. The demand for slaves skyrocketed in all areas of production:
Cuba imported between 1800 and 1850 more than 700,000 additional slaves, attached to the cultivation of cane.
The southern United States brought more than 150,000 slaves a year between 1810 and 1830 into the cotton belt.
Far from the tinkering of the beginnings, a real "servile capitalist economy" was born.
The resale of coffee and sugar production from America accounted for 50\% of the France's export earnings in 1750.
With regard to the circulation of money and the transformation into capital of the capital gains produced by the rationalization of the transport of slaves,
there are many indications of the extraordinary nature of the profits generated by bonded labour:
the boom of port cities engaged in this traffic, the parallel flowering of banking companies living off the trade,
the specialization of some shipowners is a tangible sign of the capitalization in Europe of the profits of the exploitation of Africans deported to the New World.
It has become common to say that Bordeaux, Nantes or even Lisbon owe their most beautiful areas, their most beautiful monuments to repatriated capital.
But what about Liverpool or Amsterdam, not to mention Copenhagen and Stockholm?
For if it is true that England alone transported half of the deportees (it ceased the trade in 1812) and the Portuguese a quarter,
small countries like Holland and Sweden owe their economic take-off to the slave windfall (per capita income from the benefits of the slave trade was ten times higher in the Nordic countries than in France, for example).
The Dutch had made the transport of captives, like the Danes and Swedes, a profitable specialty:
the adaptation of aeration awnings, the cleaning of holds, the systematic showering of prisoners, better food rations and faster vessels had reduced mortality to less than 10 per cent of the captives transported.
At the same time, in squalid ships of French, Portuguese and English adventurers, mortality could reach 50\%, generally settling around 30\% of deaths.
The nascent capitalism's liability when it comes to the ten million deaths of the transatlantic slave trade makes little doubt since this trade had from the beginning the appearance of a fairly organized market,
structured by regional and even international agreements, trying to best meet the fluctuating demands of European planters and importers of exotic commodities.
There was never a "Slave Stock Exchange", but a set of completely standardized business practices, which can be known today from many accounting documents.
Bought in Africa by a pre-capitalist barter system (one slave for twenty liters of brandy in 1770, or two pieces of cloth, or two hats and a necklace of shells),
therefore not very rational and quite dicey, the captives had a fixed price as soon as they arrived in America, according to their age, gender, health and local needs.
The transformation of profits into investments, the transfer of capital gains to Europe or the big colonial cities, the state subsidy to slave shipowners (Richelieu in 1635),
English taxes (from 1661), the regulation of punishments inflicted on slaves in order to avoid mortality rates contradictory to profitability (Colbert in 1685),
all this indicates that from the seventeenth century the servile economy of the New World was as important a pillar for primitive capitalist accumulation as the enclosure movement or the founding of the Lombard banks a few centuries earlier.
The King of Spain gave the green light to slave ships by a decree of 12 January 1510. The first African captives were landed in Hispaniola a year later, in 1511.
After a century of "tinkering", during which the elements of servile capitalism were put in place, official stock market ratings of exotic commodities imported into Europe began to reflect the state of the "markets";
more than a hundred shopping counters on African shores having agreed on a floor price for "ebony wood", the item "acquisition" was limited to that of transport costs.
The fifteen or so ports between the Rio de la Plata and New York Bay provided most of the reception of the captives having also agreed,
the average selling price of a healthy adult slave fluctuated (in constant pounds) from five to twenty units of account from 1800,
or between one and twice the price of a draught animal, ox or horse. The only thing left was to regulate the price of commodities
Given the services rendered by the slave, it was for three centuries an excellent deal for the profitability of investments in both Americas.
On the one hand, the importance of the profits of bonded labour can be measured by the particular productivity ratio that characterizes it:
the wage bill tending towards zero, the ratio between production (whatever it may be) and this mass gives an infinite value, a mathematical image of the maximum possible extortion of the surplus value produced.
On the other hand, the monopoly situation associated with a captive market ensured profits that enabled Europe to establish a solid pre-industrial capitalism.
Which enabled Europe to move to a higher stage during the nineteenth century, that of the conquest of the world.
After imposing "parisian breakfast", the servile economy (constituted by the system banks / shipowners of Europe / slave kings of Africa / transporters / planters and exporters of America / importers of Europe) put cotton in fashion.
Having constituted the need (after having managed to put out of fashion honey, herbal teas, linen and silk) it first responded to it in a simply mercantile way with taxes and protectionist barriers,
then in a more capitalist way in the modern sense, through franchises, cartels, joint-stock companies and competition.
After a century, the equilibrium of prices, achieved by supply/demand regulation, literally caused European capitalism to take off.
Just a reminder of the extravagant human cost of this fulfillment:
7 to 8 million Africans killed during the raids or died during the journey to the slave trading posts of Africa. Two million dead during the crossing. Another two million, died of exhaustion in the first year on the plantations.
An impossible to specify number of deaths due to ill-treatment, suicides, revolts, repressions, lynchings and outright massacres.
For Africa, all this has led to a historical and cultural regression without example, a demographic collapse sufficient to stagnate the African population,
definitive hatreds, economic destructuring, the cancellation of growth and a backwardness that the colonial invasion will only aggravate.
Despite tendentious historians who attribute to African feudalities the initiative of the slave trade or accuse the Arab kings of having perpetuated it,
despite the thurifers of liberalism who refuse to quantify the profits of the servile economy and to associate them with the rescue and then the take-off of the European economies,
it must be said and not afraid to repeat oneself: a set of indisputable facts shows that the nascent capitalism did not only bled the peoples of Europe (this calculation can be made elsewhere).
It took off on a mass grave as history, which was already bloody, had never seen before: twenty million Amerindians exterminated in three centuries, and twelve million Africans killed on the job at the same time.
Two entire continents sacrificed to establish a criminal system without morals and without any law other than that of profit. More than thirty million human beings murdered by capitalism, in a direct and unquestionable way.
\section{Philippe Paraire}
Author of Les Noirs Américains, généalogie d'une exclusion, coll. "Pluriel intervention", Hachette, 1993.
\section{Bibliography}
\begin{itemize}
\item Franz Tardo-Dino, Le collier de servitude (The necklace of servitude), Éditions Caribéennes, 1985.
\item Ibrahim Baba Kaké, La traite négrière (The slave trade), Présence Africaine, Larousse Nathan international, 1988.
\item Jean Meyer, Esclaves et négriers (Slaves and Slaves traders), coll. "Découvertes", Gallimard, 1986.
\item Hubert Deschamps, Histoire de la traite des Noirs (History of the slave trade), Fayard, 1972.
\item Kenneth M. Stamp, The peculiar institution, Random House, New York, 1956.
\item Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the making of America, Collier Books, New York, 1987.
\item Partick Manning, Slavery and African Life, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1990.
In the days and months following the storming of the Bastille, particularly in August, a very lively workers' agitation, more important and resolute than one might perhaps imagine two centuries later,
shook various corporations and in sometimes confused features, certainly, began to draw the true face of a modern class struggle.
Already in April, a riot directed against the manufacture of the prestigious paper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon had clearly shown that in a certain Parisian population, where destitution faced opulence, tension was running high.
The factory employed four hundred people (a quarter of them children) and it is not clear whether they were among the many rioters.
The essential, paradoxically, is elsewhere, and first of all in the rumor that spread in a short time to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine:
Réveillon would have made remarks that were not very favourable to those who, already so badly paid, were likely to be even less so. True? False?
Misery answered by throwing itself into the street, then it paid the price by seeing the dead of a terrible repression fall while demonstrators were hanged the next day, others violently molested, others imprisoned.
It was still, as we said, only in April: the wind was blowing against the poor; they had the impression after July 14 that it was finally going to turn in their direction.
For Jaurès, what is remarkable about the storming of the Bastille is that it gave the people a first awareness of its strength.
Indeed, this consciousness developed with a staggering magnitude, an uninterrupted impulse that is proper, not to say the very definition of authentic revolutions,
in many exploited, overexploited, and not only — since they were, it seems, the most prompt — in shoemakers and wig makers for example,
but also among those who were called "the women of the hall". That said, the most spectacular action, the most passionately symbolic too, was certainly that of the tailor boys.
What do they want? First a better salary and, in any case, forty cents in any season. Secondly, that second-hand clothes dealers should not be allowed to make new clothes.
We must obviously ask ourselves about this last point: such a requirement is too similar to that of master tailors anxious to eliminate competition so that the relative neutrality of the latter toward their employees does not seem somewhat suspicious.
We guess the blackmail: ah! without the second-hand clothes dealers, we could pay you better. It doesn't matter, though:
that there was in this sense a conjunction of interests does not detract from the quality of the initiative, the concrete form of a wage demand and the will to organize which were indeed on the side of the workers alone.
But what to do? Get together and discuss? They chose lawns facing the Louvre and soon became worried:
how to prevent undesirables from crossing the enclosure? To be sure to find themselves between tradespeople, only, and in the number of three thousand since this figure was actually reached?
There was no question of asking for a membership card that we did not even think of yet in this feverish, primitive, embryonic trade unionism. Then, an idea springs up. It was simple:
the essentially manual work, heavily daily, damaged the skin to such an extent, pricked it so deeply, so durably from needle strokes to needle strokes all year round that it would be enough, to enter, to show his mutilated fingers.
There, no one could be mistaken, no one could cheat: the observers knew too well what to expect. This physical proof was therefore the first card. For the workers bruises testified. Against the workers murders multiplied .
We will not take stock of it, we will not indulge, like others in other places, in a macabre and maniacal accounting.
It would be bad to honor memories that we have learned to respect a lot because they are a part of ourselves, but we will try to make the essentials understood,
at least through painful, unforgettable facts, which constitute the long martyrology of the French working class, all too much designated victim of capitalism.
The owners, as we know, were quick to set up the roadblocks in the form of laws, regulations and controls.
Under the pretext a little too clever, and of course in the name of freedom, to suppress for both employers and employees a corporatism considered in this case reductive,
the Le Chapelier law of 1791 against coalitions and the right to strike actually hit those who, in order to survive, have little to offer but those miserable hands whose tailors had made an identity document.
The warning having carried, the bourgeoisie, by structuring itself, integrated it. Still, that was not enough. The Le Chapelier law could not offer, despite appearances, a constantly guaranteed protection.
This general measure was aimed at strong, dangerous, but occasional events; it did not provide the certainty of policing described, so to speak, in the schedule of tasks.
This is what the institution of the Worker's Record Book remedied in 1803. On this, it is useless to elaborate at length:
it is easy to imagine what the negative assessments of a boss on a booklet which, moreover, can only be issued by the police, can mean for a worker.
Without the employer's consent, it is impossible to leave one's employment. So, to do without a booklet? In this case, one is called a vagabond. Six months in prison.
Thus, in French society, a single class, a very large social entity that will become more and more so, is placed at all hours under official surveillance. The tone is set, the power says to the workers: I keep an eye on you.
And from the barrel of a gun. It will not stop. Ladies and gentlemen the managing directors of the competent Humanists LLC,
docile old schoolchildren of a system that has passed on to you its pedagogies of selective indignation, you who give lessons because you have learned yours too well,
it is gladly that you repeat, alluding to the old social hope on which these guns always remain pointed and which persists in us, including as a scar: beware, you are heirs! Let's admit. But so are you.
Therefore, since you like accounts, we have the right to ask you. Why, when 1830 was announced, did you find nothing else to send but bullets to those young Masons of Creuse who, in the capital where they were professionally renowned,
cracked at the task for a crump of bread at noon, a broth in the evening and a rotten mattress — when they found one — from cheapstake landlords?
They couldn't take it anymore, the little masons, they left their construction sites. Fire! It's crazy what this brief syllable, image as much as word, contains for you of spontaneous charm;
it is the instinctive poetry that justifies your commandment. Fire in Paris, fire in La Ricamarie, fire in Fourmies, fire in Le Havre, and fire, fire, fire!
And why in 1834, rue Transnonain, did you have your weapons pointed at the basements in order to shoot directly into the cellars through the sigh?
What for? Here we can give you the answer if you do not know it: it is because, in these cellars, most often lived working families.
For a vague uprising and some barricades in the Saint-Merri district, the military authorities had deemed it useful to move without delay to reprisals. Transnonain Street, nearby, offered the amenities we have just mentioned.
Thus died, without much possibility of escape, let alone defense, between the oozing walls of their sad basement, women, children, old men.
Daumier illustrated in a shocking way this beautiful feat of the 35th line regiment under the orders of a general whose name will be trumpeted later in other places: Bugeaud.
The barricades of Saint-Merri, however weak they may have been, caused serious trouble because, at the same time, the intractable canuts of Lyon were once again asserting their rights.
Three years after their insurrection of 1831, this new anger was confusing, especially since, as in Paris, it was not unrelated to the action of the Society of Human Rights, scourge of the government and employers.
This time, the canuts were protesting against an unfair decision depriving them of a relief allowance and their mutuals.
Fire! How many dead? Two hundred, it is thought. There would have been six hundred in 1831, and since then, that year had reconstituted for some in figures of a superstition.
So scary! Masters of the city while the civil and military authorities had withdrawn (prefiguration of the Commune of 1871), installing at the Town Hall a council of sixteen canuts, the insurgents had not, however, initially assigned such goals to their real combativeness.
Far from it. They only wanted, and indeed obtained, a minimum tariff. The worst part is that, in this conflict, the first orientation was that of a collaboration of classes. Who broke it?
Everyone had signed, including, with the manufacturers and the industrial tribunals, the duly mandated representatives of the Chamber of Commerce and the prefect himself.
And then it was made known, first by means, then openly, that the signatories had had to give in to the unacceptable pressures of an overexcited mass.
Bosses, other bosses, others, the notables reject without precaution the agreement, finally supported by the prefect who goes so far as to make these insane remarks:
It is only a commitment of honour. Indeed. He adds: not mandatory. The execution, he explains, and we know the song (still relevant) is a matter of everyone's good will.
The canuts also had their sense of honor, the real one. While workshop leaders are put out of work, to make an example, they understand very well what they have just been taught:
that a word given to an employee is worthless. It is difficult to push the contempt so far and it was the explosion. The press got involved, deploying an aggressive zeal. Workers' movements are contagious, wrote Le Temps, calling for prompt repression.
It was heard. The prosecutor of Lyon welcomed with some cynicism, forgetting in passing his dignity as a magistrate, to note that justice now meets the support of the armed force: it can act.
Finally, the President of the Council Casimir-Périer cracked down on the troublemakers: let the workers know well that there are no remedies for them but patience and resignation.
Thoses two words did not fell out of fashion. In these times of massive unemployment, homelessness, "suburban sickness", people on welfare support, regulars of the Restaus du coeur\rfootnote{Food charity founded by a French humorist, several millions lunches distributed each year.},
young people without a job or prospect, even with diplomas in their pockets, what language do we hold by not holding it, because it is the great mystification in fashion? Patience. Resignation.
Let us make no mistake about it. Capitalism of the first half of the nineteenth century speaks bluntly. Capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century practices the unspoken.
In the meantime, refined intellectuals have enabled this metamorphosis to succeed.
In the meantime we also continued, since the fold was taken, to line up troopers here, policemen there, more and more often the two together. Fire!
Fire on the proletarians of June 1848 who it is better not to remember that they were also insurgents of February, not the least numerous, not the least courageous.
That said, is it necessary to take such a close look? Is it necessary to maintain the national workshops when we can replace them, even superficially, some occupations that we will think of better defining later, if necessary?
But the brave proles are tired of the role of dupes; they reflect, observe, criticize. In short, they are able to analyze situations with more political finesse than previously assumed. They summarize, build synthesis.
What are they actually being offered? Enlistments in the army (to shoot their brothers?) or precarious displacements, destructive of family life. Still these dubious compensations are not really assured: after the dedication in February, the destitution in June awaits most.
How, under such conditions, would the street and the barricades not have appeared once again as the only recourse? Fire!
and one can have the painful impression, certainly, that the revolution is turning against itself. But this is only an aesthetic of the mind carried towards romantic visions:
much more prosaically, it is a question of consolidating the absolute power of the ruling class and better basing profit, on misery if necessary. Especially since it is very difficult to do otherwise in a social and cultural organization that itself has injustice as its foundation.
When Louis Blanc is offered, for some uncertain ministry of progress, an incredibly derisory sum, he calls out: You are asking me to give hungry people a course on hunger. It was useless, indeed. It is more expeditious, more efficient to simply suppress the hungry.
Especially when they have the bad taste to get angry. The real numbers will never be known. Four thousand dead? Five thousand?
Rioters were pursued in Montmartre to the great quarries where, colliding of course with the protruding verticals that closed the ground, they became a perfect target.
What a beautiful exercise: salvo after salvo, they fell. Not one survived. Think about it, careers! A godsend, this kind of open-air Transnonain street.
However, the cellars have an attraction that stems from their natural mystery and it must be believed that a nostalgia remained: elsewhere, other unfortunate people were locked up in an underground where no one ever knew how long their agony lasted.
These physical details seemed secondary and three years later Badinguet-Bonaparte carried out his coup.
It remained for him to become emperor, which is family trait, and this glorious atavism aknowledged, to arrange to bring up to date some profession of faith: did he not love the people, was he not the friend of the humble,
did he not have concerns of an altruistic and philanthropic nature, had he not spoken out in favour of the extinction of pauperism, even though there was a lot of laughter when talking about "the extinction of pauperism after ten o'clock in the evening"?
Unfortunately, it does not appear that his wife shared his views. When the commanding officer of the detachment fired without warning into the crowd at La Ricamarie on June 16, 1869 in order to be able to arrest striking miners,
the emotion was so vivid in front of the thirteen dead and the many wounded that people of Saint-Étienne, near Ricamarie, and also of the surroundings, respectfully addressed Empress Eugenie. They asked her, without judgment, only for help for the victims.
Very Christian, in short. Here is what the very Christian Empress of the French replied:
Rescuing families who were not afraid to offend brave soldiers who only did their duty, would be the most unfortunate example in the eyes of this bad population of Saint-Étienne.
This dispended in advance another bad population, that of Aubin, in the Aveyron, who tried and tested the same things and with one more death a few months later, to present Her Majesty a suffering request in due form.
Such steps are often motivated, at least primarily, by the relentless fate of orphans. Private charity tries to impose itself where the official order cannot act. Or wouldn't want to.
It is that it has many other areas to monitor, other human considerations to put forward and that it is already difficult enough for it to control ages, places, schedules and statistics with regard to child labour.
Successively, from boondoggle to boondoggle, It will be tried to show through the years, or more precisely the decades, a grumpy understanding that the stiffness of the bosses does not grasp well.
However, it is necessary to spare them, those same bosses. Not before eight years, would it suit you? Ten years? Twelve years in the mines, thirteen years for night work for example?
The child labour force, like the underpaid female workforce, contributes very effectively to the growing prosperity of the manufacturing world.
When the first labour inspectors made an initially timid appearance after 1874 and a little more supported in the early 80s, the companies where children were illegally employed had developed a game of hide and seek since it could not be practiced at school.
Be careful, an inspector is there! and the little legs trotted quickly to what was familiar and had been designated in advance, often a carriage with piles of bags that one folded down on oneself.
What would we have said to these illiterate puny people? They were accomplices, so as not to be too hungry, of those who exploited them against those who defended them. At least they ate.
Kids? You have long made them martyrs. And real ones. In the demanding sense that your distinguished authors give to the word.
During the Bloody Week of May 1871, while the Commune, sublime and disproportionate, bequeathed its message while extinguishing, a real hunt, not only for the too famous "pétroleuses"\rfootnote{Female Communard supporter and fire-raiser}, but also for children, was carried out in certain neighborhoods.
Given that it was sure that this Gavroche like brood, obviously skilled at sneaking everywhere, had lit a lot of fires.
Versailles intended of course not to spare anyone. According to Maurice Dommanget, the reactionary historian Dauban tried in vain, on Rue de la Paix, to rescue a five-year-old girl from death.
Four children were shot with their mother who had just obtained oil for lighting. A witness friend of Camille Pelletan later told the latter how other children, obviously very poor, were taken to a barracks to be executed by firing squad.
He noticed that one of them, who was sobbing, had barefoot in wooden hooves. Then the heavy doors closed as he cried out to the gunmen: "Killing kids is a shame!"
And that brave people roared around him: "On the contrary, let us get rid of it, it's Scoundrel seed!"
Scoundrel seed! Did he also belong to this fearsome and so low category the little Émile Cornaille who, on May 1, 1891 in Fourmies, in the North, his meager body riddled with bullets, had like a long spasm in front of the tavernt the Golden Ring where he tried to take refuge?
He was ten years old and carried with him this mysterious weapon that was found in his pocket at the time of burial: a spinning top.
The shooting of Fourmies has taken on an exceptional character in history while others were as much, if not more deadly. Perhaps it was because it intervened at a time and under conditions when such atrocities seemed less easy to conceive.
After all, there had been the influence of the famous "Republic of the Republicans", the great laws of the 1880s, the authorization finally granted to the workers to form their own unions and even, as such, to take legal action, etc.
But there had also been, just a year before, the first of May 1st, that of 1890 which, by announcing itself, caused such fear to the bourgeoisie that Paris was literally put under siege.
Several regiments in full reached the capital on a forced march, they brought from Versailles – always Versailles! — imposing artillery batteries and all police stations, from the smallest to the largest, were put on permanent alert.
It was so excessive that even the right-wing press showed some annoyance. Chroniclers wrote that France seemed to mobilize more in 1890 against its workers than in 1870 against the Prussians.
It was therefore that Blanqui had not been wrong to say that the slogan of many bourgeois was: "Rather the King of Prussia than the Republic", interesting premonition of the well-known "Rather Hitler than the Popular Front" of 1936.
Moreover, wealthy families had left Paris in 1890 for the countryside, as more than one did in 36 during the occupations of workshops, warehouses and various engine rooms.
In the end, this first 1 May took place, despite more or less severe clashes, without very serious confrontation on the whole and a delegation to which Jules Guesde belonged was even protocolarily received in the Chamber of Deputies.
So why Fourmies? We're still wondering, in this regard, about an aberrant disproportion. We can leave aside the ridiculous episode of the local commissioner throwing a fuss, revolver in hand, rather a hoot for the strong guys of the factories,
but how not to ask serious questions about the massive presence of all these soldiers, officers and non-commissioned officers, on the way in which a kind of war organization had been prepared against the possible strikers
— the mayor Auguste Bernier and the president of the industrial society Charles Belin possibly had something to do with it — on the passion of the sub-prefect, on the rapid arrival of a prosecutor and so on? Fire!
Already, in the morning, a rally having taken place in front of the "La Sans-Pareille" spinning mill to encourage those who were there to join the movement, the armed group, under the orders of a lieutenant, was undoubtedly more intervening than it should have been.
Several men were arrested and then, in the face of protests from their wives and friends, it was assured that they would be released by noon. This was not the case. Anger began to growl.
Here too, as with the canuts sixty years earlier, a promise given to workers was worthless. Naturally, the afternoon parade could only reflect this exasperation, but finally it was not very dense and threatened little.
There was even some joy. But it can't be accepted either, joy. Fire! A twenty-year-old girl, Maria Blondeau, walked at the head of the procession, a hawthorn branch in her hand. Fire!
Hit in the face, Maria was literally scalped, her long red hair flew away with the hawthorn in the beautiful sunlight of the North. and — hold on, do you want that clarification? — it was never found, her hair.
Only parts of brains and bones were found at the corner of the sidewalks.
Enough! Enough, you might say, delicate souls who know how to pray so well for the rises to heaven and the rises in the stock market. Enough. But what do you believe? These details disgust us as much as they do you. To whom do we owe them?
Nine were killed. Their names are inscribed on a stele at Fourmies: Louise Hublet, twenty years old; Charles Leroy, twenty-one years old; Gustave Pestiaux, sixteen years old; Émile Segaux, thirty years old; Félicie Tonnelier, seventeen years old; Maria Blondeau, twenty years old; Émile Cornaille, ten years old; Maria Diot, seventeen years old; Kléber Giloteaux, nineteen years old.
Giloteaux, conscript of the year, flew a tricolor flag above his head. Fire!
Maria Blondeau and her hawthorn have entered the legend. As for Commander Chapus, who had twice given the order to shoot, he was later decorated by General Gallifet, another connoisseur.
For no investigation was opened, no one responsible was sought, no one was finally prosecuted with the exception of Lafargue, who had the good idea to be among the speakers of a meeting in April,
and the Fourmie's trade unionist Culine who, during the parade, wrote an article on a cabaret table. Still, the merit was great: the culprits had been discovered. And not just any of them.
On the one hand the directors of companies in the North hated Culine, on the other hand Paul Lafargue, a great representative of socialism in France, also happened to be one of Karl Marx's sons-in-law.
Six years in prison for the first, one year in prison for the second. These two leaders had made remarks which, the expectations of the judgment, could only incite a serious subversion.
Basically, the nine Fourmiesans shot had been shot by propaganda, not by bullets. In the House, MP Ernest Roche, who had shown parliamentarians a bloodied shirt, was temporarily excluded.
It was in Fourmies that the Lebel rifles, replacing the heavy Chassepot, were for the first time tested on human targets.
They were used for others on May 1, then there were other rifles, other men behind the guns, other men still behind the men, some placed at political heights. Brilliant heights, sometimes.
The radical Clemenceau before the war of 1914-18, the socialist Jules Moch after the war of 1939-45 were repressive. But should we list? There were deaths in Le Havre in the twenties, in Paris on February 9, 1934 among anti-fascist militants, however.
Reminders have something mind-blowing, in the long run. Let's not insist? Maybe. But let us also lose nothing of the tragic thrill that resonates in our memories an echo of ancestral hatred: Shoot, they are only workers.
\section{Roger Bordier}
Roger Bordier is a novelist and essayist. Among his titles: Les blés, Prix Renaudot, Un âge d'or, le Tour de ville, Meeting, La Grande vie, La Belle de mai. Last publication: Chronique de la cité joyeuse, (Albin Michel, 1996).
Very early, Lyon, in the sixteenth century, began to become a center working with precious fabrics exported throughout Europe, then to the New World,
thanks to a developed banking and commercial apparatus, initiated in the Renaissance by transalpine money handlers.
The Rhone city was therefore early a pole of primitive accumulation of capital benefiting from a special circumstance.
The extended reproduction was facilitated by a system which placed on craftsmen reduced to wage labour the burden of the amount necessary for the increase in fixed capital.
To live, the salaried "workshop manager" shared with his "companions" the paid part of the collective work while ensuring \underline{"independently"} (!) the equipment costs for the modernization and maintenance of its looms.
This is the reason why, in this city where more than a third of the population, from the eighteenth century, living meagerly from the production of fabrics as prestigious as expensive,
the "wages question" has imposed itself by dominating all social relations.
In his book "on the Silk Worker, monograph of the Lyon weaver"\footnote{Justin Godart, 1899, Lyon-Paris-1st part, p. 92-93}, the radical-socialist deputy Justin Godart, successively Minister of Labour,
Resistance fighter and provisional mayor of Lyon in 1944, highlights the role of the 1744 regulation that enshrines the definitive structure of the Lyon's silk factory.
He considers that this text set "the state of the master worker in contract and that of the master merchant, manufacturer or having manufactured".
And he adds: "The whole history of the factory will be the story of the struggle between (the weavers) and the master merchants.
And what will emerge from the study of the regulations is the enslavement of the former. The freedom of labor was only a word, the work of the merchants was only a spoliation."
This regulation of 1744, known in July, already provoked a workers' riot in the city on August 6 and 7, of such importance that the regulation was reported…
But at the beginning of 1745, after the irruption in Lyon of the troops commanded by the Count of Lautrec, it was restored while the repression was implemented.
On March 30, 1745, Étienne Mariechander, sentenced to make amends with a sign bearing the words "seditious silk worker" was hanged and strangled on Place des Terreaux.
Other penalties were distributed inflicting on the culprits a shipment to the galleys between 4 years and life, this after being marked with a red iron.
On the eve of the Revolution, in August 1786, during a wage dispute, the first great workers' militant in Lyon's history emerged:
Denis Monnet, inspiration of the "Revolt of the 2 cents" (two cents of increase per woven yardstick). A remarkably organized strike of weaving and hat makers broke out on 6 August.
On the 8th, the marshalcy slashed the demonstrators: 2 killed, a dozen wounded.
Among the troops gathered to fight this sedition, there is a battalion of the Fère whose second lieutenant is none other than the young Napoleon Bonaparte.
However, on August 9, to calm things down, the increase was granted by the city's Consular Corps. But on September 3, 1786, a decision of the king overturned this decision.
This is the signal of a new repression: two hat makers and a weaver are hanged, a multitude of prosecutions are opened including that of Denis Monnet arrested and thrown in prison.
But the Revolution is looming. Monnet, provisionally released in 1787, resumed the fight, addressing the Estates General and the King in 1789 in an astonishing memoir that announced the foundations of the modern syndicalist struggle.
He denounced the practices of the merchant-manufacturers who imposed after 1786 the return to the "contract by mutual agreement" between the client and the worker:
\begin{displayquote}
Between men equal in means and power, who by this reason cannot be subject to the discretion of one or the other, the freedom established by this regulation can only be advantageous to them;
but with regard to the silk workers, dismissed by all means, whose subsistence depends entirely on their daily work, this freedom leaves them totally at the mercy of the manufacturer, this freedom leaves them totally at the mercy of the manufacturer, who can, without harm, <suspend his manufacture and thereby reduce the worker to the wage he set as he pleases, knowing that the latter, forced by the imperative law of need, will soon be obliged to submit to the law he wants to impose on him\footnote{Grievances of the Master Workers addressed to the King and the Assembled Nation – Presentation F. Rude, Fédérop-Lyon, 1976 – pp. 5 and 6.}.
\end{displayquote}
Between 1789 and 1793, thanks to the Revolution, Monnet and his friends managed to impose, through the elected municipalities, a parity negotiation with the merchant manufacturers, to set a piece rate,
a real guaranteed minimum wage revisable every year according to the cost of living, anticipation of a sliding scale of wages. In 1792-1793 with the support of signed petitions in popular clubs, the system is applied.
But the Revolution of 1789 was that of a given epoch dominated by a bourgeoisie anxious to set limits to workers' demands. The Lyon's one is singularly timid in terms of social innovations.
It gets rid of the supporters of Bertrand and Châlier, those "maniacss" who destroy the economic order and threaten its supremacy.
In 1793 it made a pact with yesterday's opponents in a secession that was harshly repressed by the Republican armies.
After the reconquest of Lyon, on October 9, 1793, Fouché and Collot d'Herbois, rejecting Couthon's concern for selective moderation, sent Denis Monnet to the guillotine on November 27, 1793, "guilty" of not having revoked his official duties in his neighborhood!
Beyond the murky personality of Fouché, the servant of all regimes, lies the ambiguity of a power which, on March 17, 1795 (27 ventôse Year III), in an instruction to the authorities of the Rhône department persisted in holding a "social language":
\begin{displayquote}
The Revolution would be a political and social monster if it were intended to ensure the bliss of a few hundred individuals and to consolidate the misery of 24 million citizens (…).
The bourgeois aristocracy, if it had existed, would soon have produced the financial aristocracy, the latter would have engendered the nobiliary aristocracy, for the rich man soon thought of himself as made from a different dough than other men\footnote{Patrick Kessel, french proletariat before Marx – Tome I – Plon, p.480.}.
\end{displayquote}
Lip service or warning against the possible betrayals of a revolution by those who proclaim themselves its guides?
What remains is the orientation that will favor the triumph of capital. On the cultural level, there is an economic thought that Turgot and his physiocrats, Adam Smith and Ricardo have laid the foundations:
that of a fatalistic liberalism that condemns as a major mistake any regulatory intervention of states.
While waiting for the optimists, those who, like John Stuart Mill or J. B. Say, will have absolute confidence in the "invisible hand of the market" to solve in pain – provided they are wise enough – the social disaters of capitalist development…
With, as an adjuvant, the reinforcement of moralizing and necessary reason, such as this speech of the Lyon abbot Mayet held in 1786, in the middle of the "2 cents crisis":
\begin{displayquote}
To ensure and maintain the prosperity of our factories, it is necessary that the worker never gets rich, that he has precisely what he needs to eat well and dress …
In a certain class of the people, too much affluence makes industry asleep, engenders idleness and all the vices that depend on it. As the worker gets richer, he becomes picky on the choice and wage of labor.
No one is unaware that it is mainly to the low price of labour that the factories of Lyon owe their astonishing prosperity.
If necessity ceases to compel the worker to receive from the occupation whatever wage he is offered, if he manages to free himself from this kind of servitude,
if the profits exceed the needs to the point that he can subsist for some time without the help of his hands, he will use that time to form a league.
Knowing that the merchant cannot eternally do without him, he will in turn dare to prescribe laws that will put him out of state to support any competition with foreign manufactures,
and from this overthrow to which the well-being of the worker will have given rise, will come the total ruin of the factory.
It is therefore very important for the Manufacturers of Lyon to retain the worker in a need for continuous work, never to forget that the low price of labor is not only advantageous for himself but that it becomes so again by making the worker more laborious,
more well-behaved, more submissive to his wills\footnote{Abbé F. Mayet, Memory on Lyon's manufactories, 1786.}.
\end{displayquote}
Revealing text if there is one and which explains what the historian Maurice Garden writes in his thesis Lyon and the Lyonnais in the eighteenth century:
\begin{displayquote}
The more power liberal theories have in the country, the more the sovereignty of the economic laws of supply and demand is asserted, laws which, more than the regulations themselves,
push for the enslavement of the workers to those who give them work and pay them a wage\footnote{Maurice Garden, Lyon and Lyonnais in the XVIIIth century, Flammarion, 1975, p. 331.}.
\end{displayquote}
The consequence, Jaurès had seen it well:
\begin{displayquote}
The class of the Lyon master workers is in the spirit of resistance and organization or even by the sharpness of certain social formulas ahead of the working class of the eighteenth century\footnote{J. Jaurès, Socialist history of the revolution, 1939 ESI, Tome 1, p. 111.}.
\end{displayquote}
\section{1831: The canuts facing capitalism}
The revolt of the "canuts" of November 1831 because of its national and international repercussions is the best known in its broad outline. It has also been the subject of numerous works\footnote{See F. Rude, Les Révoltes des Canuts (The canuts revolts) (nov. 1831-avril 1834), Paris, Maspero 1982 and Maurice Moissonnier, Les Canuts "Vivre en travail ou mourir en combattant" (The Canuts: "to live working or die fighting", Éditions Sociales, 1988.}.
Let us remember the main features. In Lyon as in Paris (where Thiers called for a political strike by printers!), the action of the world of work was decisive, in July 1830,
in the final confrontation between the rising bourgeoisie and the aristocracy brought back to power at the Restoration.
In the Rhone city, the "wage question" always arises, revived by the alternation of crisis (the "dead") and recoveries (the "presses").
The migration of trades on the Croix-Rousse plateau, an independent commune (outside the octrois(*) barriers of Lyon, where life is cheaper) has tightened the solidarity of weavers.
The sycophancy of the press celebrating the role of "our good, our excellent workers" emboldens them. The liberalization of the law on the press allowed them in October 1831 to launch a workers' newspaper:
L'Écho de la Fabrique. Born in 1828, an association of master workers, Le Devoir Mutuel, skillfully divided into sections of 20 members so as not to contravene the law, created the conditions for developing demands that the weekly publication could popularize.
The attitude of the prefect Bouvier du Molart who, with the services rendered to the family of the President of the Council, Perrier, during the Restoration, believed that he could have a latitude of autonomous decisions and claimed to present himself as "the father of the workers",
opened the possibilities of an arbitration favorable to the weavers on their demand for an increase in the rate of wages.
Let us add that the canuts of 1831 have not forgotten the texts and experiences of Denis Monnet: the discovery in 1973, in an attic of the Croix-Rousse of a notebook of Masson-Sibut, one of the leaders of the Devoir Mutuel, proves it.
This document contains large excerpts from the 1789 memoir relating to the 1786 struggle for a wage rate demand. Thus was transmitted an experience and a reflection that inspired the approaches of 1831.
On the event level, a few benchmarks will suffice. At the beginning of October 1831, the launch prospectus of the Écho de la Fabrique appeared,
which announced the constitution of a commission of workshop managers responsible for drawing up a price of wages to be discussed, under the control of the prefect, with the merchant-manufacturers.
On October 12, a first exploratory meeting at the Town Hall, under the chairmanship of Deputy Terme, served only to reveal the deep reluctance of the masters of the Factory.
On 21 October, at the end of a meeting where the prefect was trying to convince the traders, their representatives were strongly questioned by workers' demonstrators. On the 25th, at 10 a.m., the prefect could finally bring together the negotiators elected by both parties.
The discussion stalled for a long time against the refusal of the manufacturers, until a huge demonstration invaded the outskirts of the prefecture.
According to the account of a manufacturer, in organized groups, without a cry, without provocations, thousands of canuts were present:
\begin{displayquote}
It was pity to see the hollow cheeks, the pungent complexions, the malignant and shrunken complexion of most of these unfortunate people.
Individually, they inspired only a natural compassion, the energy seemed to have to flee from such weak, undeveloped bodies, but these individuals were reunited,
they were organized, they formed a compact body, and the masses have an instinct of their strength, a power of will, which vanishes only as it spreads\footnote{The Precursor, October 26, 1831.}.
\end{displayquote}
\begin{displayquote}
When it was announced that we could no longer contain the gatherings, we had to finish everything, or rather accept everything\footnote{l'Écho de la fabrique, 13 Nov. 1831.}.
\end{displayquote}
In the evening, a wave of optimism swept over the Croix-Rousse illuminated by improvised balls.
It was trusting too much the delegates of the opposing side.
In the city, a petition circulates among the masters of the Silk Factory against the tariff, an illegal decision that they consider an attack on the economic health of the country.
The Minister of Commerce and Public Works, d'Argout, supports them in a long letter to the prefect dated November 3.
He brushes aside the argument of du Molart, who invoked the precedents of 1789 and 1793 and 1811, when Napoleon had also conceded a tariff of wages for the Silk Factory.
He invites him to "enlighten the workers" by making them understand that "what is illegal cannot be profitable" and advises him:
\begin{displayquote}
It would be better to drop the tariff than to report it in an express way. It is in order to give you time to achieve this result and not to thwart your efforts that I confine myself to expressing my regret for everything that has been done so far
and recommending that you not add anything to it that aggravates or confirms measures that the local authority cannot support and that the higher authority cannot admit\footnote{Departmental archives of Isère, Fonds Périer, audiffret-Pasquier payment.}.
\end{displayquote}
Under these conditions, the frontal impact is predictable. On November 20, the commander of the National Guard, General d'Ordonneau was promoted, during a major takeover of arms, Place Bellecour.
The Croix-Rousse battalion, which included relatively well-off workshop leaders, was noted for its undisciplined attitude.
It is that the latter, when they go looking for work, are told by the clerks of the merchants that they will only get it at prices lower than those of the tariff.
A manufacturer named Olivier even receives a solicitor by brandishing two pistols.
On November 21, under the impetus of the companions, a strike movement spread throughout the Croix-Rousse.
At morning, national guards and soldiers sent to the barriers of the Croix-Rousse are received by a hail of stones.
During the morning, the weavers decided to renew the demonstration that had succeeded on October 25.
They descend on the city by the thousands by taking the climb of the Grande Côte. As their only weapon they have this black flag on which is inscribed the motto found by the companion Jean-Claude Romand: Live working or die fighting.
At the bottom of the climb stands the 1st Battalion of the National Guard formed mainly of merchant manufacturers who have their offices in the neighborhood.
Guns against chests, the masters of the Factory shoot. The demonstrators retreated to the plateau, taking away their dead: the insurrection broke out.
In vain in the afternoon the prefect of Molart and General Ordonneau tried a negotiation. During this one, General Roguet throws a hand on the slopes of the Croix-Rousse.
The insurgents then held the two plenipotentiaries until the early morning, while the line troops, substituting for the defection of the National Guard, advanced towards the plateau and installed defenses.
The General Roguet, of the Town Hall where he sits, issues an optimistic proclamation about the prospects of an inevitable victory.
He put artillery in battery in front of the Pont Morand and the Brotteaux to avoid a surprise from workers who fire from the left bank of the Rhône.
However, the night is decisive. Outside the Croix-Rousse, the working-class neighbourhoods took sides. Detachments are formed which, bypassing the city, reinforce the defenders of the plateau.
New fighters in solidarity with the canuts gathered at La Guillotière, and in old Lyon, on the right bank of the Saône. A ring of fire gradually forms around the center and the peninsula. The besieged become the besiegers.
As Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, chronicler of the city, ideal caricature of thepro Louis-Phillippe bourgeois, writes, from that moment on,
\begin{displayquote}
The aggression of the workers (sic!) got the upper hand. (…) The general insurrection of workers of all classes in the districts of Lyon decided the fight's odds\footnote{Histoire des insurrections de Lyon en 1831 et 1834 (History of uprisings in Lyon in 1831 and 1834), Lyon 1834, pp. 79-80.}.
\end{displayquote}
On the night of the 22nd to the 23rd, in the early morning, the canuts went on the offensive, forcing the soldiers to a hasty retreat.
Not without having (account of the soldier Guillon) finished among the wounded opponents "a little young man who could be ten years old and whose bullet had broken his arm …"\footnote{M. Moissonnnier, Les canuts, op. cit., p. 188.}
The young man was probably more than ten years old, but the conditions of existence of the canuts were such that their size remained, as noted by the boards of revision, clearly in deficit.
This withdrawal left the "law enforcement" side only a quadrilateral put in defense in the peninsula, around the town hall.
The moral state of the troops, the total defection of the National Guard, the growing strengthening of the insurrection left only one possible way out: the evacuation of Lyon.
On the morning of the 23rd, the last barracks were occupied after the confused, difficult and expensive retreat of the army, along the left bank of the Rhone, heading north.
Then something happened that stunned honest observers of the time: in collaboration with the prefect of Molard, who remained in the city, and who relied on the workshop leaders of the Devoir mutuel, the order was maintained by the victors.
Neither rape nor looting, as feared by the rich of the peninsula. Better: two thieves caught in the act are shot by the insurgents who are responsible for ensuring in the city the safety of people and property
(with the exception of one house, that of the manufacturer Auriol transformed into a blockhouse by the army).
Meanwhile, in Paris, the government launched against the city four regiments of line, two regiments of dragoons, three batteries of artillery in addition to the troops driven out of Lyon.
All under the command of Marshal Soult, with the guarantee of the Duke of Orleans, son of the king (an iron fist in a velvet glove so to say).
The objectives of the expedition were clearly set by Casimir-Perier: dissolution and prohibition of any "corporation of workers" — disarmament — cancellation of the tariff replaced by a mercurial which recorded the wages per piece practiced:
\begin{displayquote}
The Government cannot intervene and lend its authority to give a sanction and fixity to stipulations which must not only have the most voluntary and free character, but which, by their nature, can only be variable like the situation of industry\footnote{National Archives 42-AP-22, File 2.}.
\end{displayquote}
This praise of wage "flexibility" is not – alas! – considered in 1998 as a cynical old thing! For the learned economists of the "single thought" it is even the recipe for happiness as offered by capitalism…
On December 3, 1831, coming from the north and the south, the armies raised against the canuts entered Lyon to restore ORDER!
From 5 to 22 June 1832, at the trial of Riom, brought against a sample of carefully selected "officials", 22 defendants appeared, including 13 workers accused of rebellion, sedition, call to murder, murder, looting and violence.
Among them the "negro" Antoine Stanislas whom Monfalcon describes "the eye on fire, the foaming mouth, the bloodied arms (…) uttering a barbaric cry every time that one of his bullets hit a soldier on the Morand Bridge."
They lacked the flower girl, Antoinette Pascal, acquitted of the prosecution, whom the same had classified in "the wives of workers, real furies, torturing the wounded dragons"\footnote{Monfalcon, op. cit., p. 82.}.
The official chronicler of the bourgeois municipal power, surgeon at the same time as librarian of the city, did not hesitate to translate into a "historical" vision the fantasies of his caste!
To these thirteen defendants were added nine honorable citizens (including the lawyer Michelangelo Perrier and some journalists) charged with provoking the revolt and attempting to establish the Republic.
For the honor of the jury and the magistrates of Riom, the trial turned to the confusion of the accusers: all were acquitted, with the exception of Romand convicted of another offence of theft, minor, prior to the events
The gentle Monfalcon vituperated at the "benevolence of the magistrates", "the incredible softness of the public prosecutor' office", "the public manifestation of doctrines incompatible with the maintenance of any public order",
"the deplorable judgment of the Assize Court of Riom". And our man concludes:
\begin{displayquote}
When jurors, elites of the country, chosen from among the most enlightened and most interested in good order, are seized with such vertigo, all that remains is to veil one's forehead and wait with resignation for the last blows to public order\footnote{ibid., pp. 118 à 122.}.
\end{displayquote}
The actual number of victims of these days of rioting is unknown.
An estimate by the conservative historian Steyert, reluctant to exaggerate workers' losses, suggests 29 deaths in the army and national guard and 60 among the canuts, 150 wounded in the repressive forces and 100 in the insurgents.
False figures for sure as far as the latter are concerned: in the climate of repression, it was inappropriate to go to a doctor or hospital because the police were vigilant.
These figures are in any case to be related to the number of forces involved and the reduced effectiveness of the armament of each party.
A real social purge accompanies this violence (provoked, let us not forget, by the platoon fire of the merchants-manufacturers of the 1st legion of the National Guard). The worker's logbook imposed by the Empire, will serve to purify the world of canuts.
This document, without which a worker is deemed to be a vagrant and which contains, in addition to civil status data, a list of his employers and their certificates, attesting to his loyalty to his hiring commitments,
is renewed by the police commissioners of the neighborhoods where the interested parties reside. The refusal of renewal hits those who have been distinguished and who are thus forced to leave the city. In short, a "social cleansing" operation.
\section{1833/1834 — The Spider's strategy}
In the aftermath of the insurrection of the canuts, the authorities discovered all the national and international repercussions.
In Joigny, Auxerre, Chalon-sur-Saône, Mâcon, the military columns of repression had provoked demonstrations of solidarity with the insurgents.
The event was in itself unheard of: the second French city, for 12 days, had fallen into the hands of its workers.
On the night of 25 to 26 November, calls had been posted in the suburbs of Paris to imitate the canuts of Lyon.
Metternich himself, who inspired the absolutist reaction in Europe, declared: "I regard the Lyon affair as very serious."
It was indeed a historical event according to historian Pierre Vilar's definition:
a sign, that of the entry into a new period, a product, that of an incubation more than forty years linked to the social results of the evolution of a developed economic center, a factor in the European development of social contradictions.
Finally, the moment when the structural effect modifies the conjuncture by marking, producing, integrating into a significant historical "move". On December 13, 1831, under the pen of Saint-Marc Girardin, the Journal des Débats announced the maturation of a new situation:
"The barbarians who threaten society are not in the steppes of Tartary, they are in the suburbs of our manufacturing cities (…) Proletarian democracy and the Republic are two very different things. Republicans, monarchists of the middle class (the bourgeoisie-M.M.), whatever the diversity of opinion on the best form of government, there is only one voice yet, I imagine, for the maintenance of society. However, it is going against the maintenance of society to give political rights and national weapons to those who have nothing to defend and everything to take. "
On March 14, 1832, Casimir Périer, whom cholera was to wipe out of the world of the living three months later, outlined Gasparin's future task:
\begin{displayquote}
You still have associations to dissolve, but you will rightly prefer to operate in detail instead of hitting the masses and provoking discontent and resistance. This judicious way promises good results\footnote{Municipal Archives of Lyon (AML), Doc. Gasparin, Volume II,}.
\end{displayquote}
This is the strategy of the spider that throws its sons at its prey, paralyzes it in its web before hitting it to death.
Périer gone, it will be Adolphe Thiers who will become the direct and assiduous correspondent of Gasparin as evidenced by the rich collection deposited in the municipal archives of Lyon.
The secret funds of corruption flow in pactole towards the Rhone prefecture\footnote{M. Moissonnnier, Les Canuts, op.cit., p. 130.}. To stimulate the zeal of the political police, the prefect proposes to pay the commissioners remuneration modulated according to the volume of the working population of their home neighborhood.
Participants in the insurgency are spied on in all their movements and observed in all their relationships. The maneuvers, in the hope of rallying a Michelangelo Perrier or Lachapelle and Lacombe fail, but Pierre Charnier does not resist it who ends up entering the secret police.
Other methods were implemented because, in addition to the devoir mutuel of carefully supervised workshop leaders, on the second Sunday of February 1832, the companions founded their own organization:
les compagnons ferrandiniers du Devoir who cover, under the old clothes of the classic but declining companionship, a protest group that allies itself with the Devoir mutuel.
The prefect, henceforth, chaperones the manufacturers, reveals to them the threats resulting from the union of the employees, in particular with regard to the affairs of the first labour court of France which was installed in Lyon.
The "men in the golden chest" — as the Echo of the Fabrique which survived the turmoil call them — do not pay enough attention to this "family council" that Napoleon I instituted in Lyon on March 18, 1806.
In this city and in this Silk Factory, where conflicts are periodic, the emperor's goal was to create a conciliation body where the "merchants-manufacturers" would remain in the majority and would have the presidency.
However, the 15 Jan. 1832 Louis-Philippe had signed an ordinance reorganizing these prud'hommes and, appearing to take into account the wishes of the canuts,
he had increased the number of elected officials to 9 manufacturers and 8 workshop managers while removing the distinction between incumbents and substitutes.
The canuts had taken the opportunity to propose in the Echo de la Fabrique the admission to the proceedings of a lawyer or a qualified attorney (taking up a request put forward in 1830 and supported by a petition with 5031 signatures).
At the same time, the questions brought before the council often deviated on the interpretation of the market prices board that the workers' representatives wanted at least to transform into a compulsory scale.
These skilful proposals and the exploitation of the failures of the masters of the Fabrique were likely to transform the primitive character of the council and to allow, at the limit, the presidency togo to a master worker.
This is what alarmed Thiers, promoted to Minister of Commerce and Public Works, who became the new mentor of Prefect Gasparin.
On 11 Jan. 1833 he told him of his apprehensions:
\begin{displayquote}
Instead of an arbitration tribunal, circumstances have made it a compact body and you know better than I do what the factional spirit wanted to do with it.
You know that they are now asking for the abolition of the voice that is given to manufacturers and therefore the presidency reserved for them,
that they want to try to distort the institution of fraternal conciliation by involving lawyers, that the price rate is kept under the name of market price board, that at least this is the opinion of the workers and the claim they attach to it (…).
You have also seen, in the anarchic meetings whose minutes are printed, the most hostile speeches in the mouths of speakers, workshop leaders, who do not neglect to adorn themselves with the title of member of the labour court\footnote{AML, Doc. Gasparin, Volume I.}.
\end{displayquote}
In agreement with Gasparin, Thiers seized the Council of State by instructing a master of requests (director of his ministry!) to conduct the case smoothly. The latter carries out his task.
On 24 May, he informed the Minister that the Council of State agreed "to facilitate the enjoyment of the majority by manufacturers (…) and that an amendment has been proposed to maintain, whatever happens, this enjoyment:
an absent labour court would be replaced by an alternate of his class even when the presence of that alternate would not be necessary to complete the legal number of two-thirds of the Council".'
On May 30, in the minutes following the Council's judgment, the master of petitions scribbled to Thiers information as laconic as it was triumphant: "the case is won at the Council of State". This says a lot about the serene independence of this institution…
On June 21, 1833, a new ordinance signed in Neuilly by Louis-Philippe specified that the elected representatives of the labor courts would be divided into incumbents and substitutes (articles 1 and 2).
"that in the event of the absence or incapacity of a titular industrial tribunal, an alternate of the same factory or class shall always be called upon to sit regardless of the number of members present".
But beyond the legal-administrative adventures, the "wrong spirit" is reborn.
In February 1833, the Precursor published a text that the prefect called a "manifesto of the heads of workshops on workers' coalitions" and Thiers agreed with Gasparin to describe it as "a system dictated by the enemies of our industry and the country."
In this case (and for the moment), believes the minister, it is necessary "not to take any active role in the debates that exist in order to escape any reproach, such seems to me the role of the administration". But saving appearances does not mean remaining inert.
"We must as much as possible prevent the manufacturers from giving in to the coalition because that would be weakness and not caution to avoid blood." And Thiers is reassuring:
\begin{displayquote}
The coalition does not have enough unity to last 8 days.
The workers have their arms, the entrepreneurs their capital. If the workers abuse their strength (sic!), they give the entrepreneurs the right to use theirs, that is, to keep their money and to deny subsistence to those who refuse work.
The entrepreneur can wait since he has the capital\footnote{ibid., 27 February 1833.}.
\end{displayquote}
It is therefore necessary to let things rot by staying the course.
This attitude is difficult to hold because, after the skirmishes of February, a latent strike movement rebounds in July!
Thiers, this time is alarmed by "the weakness of the manufacturers who has made triumph the pretensions of the workers or rather the actions of those who push them (sic)" and to conclude that manufacturers must be given "the courage to wait":
"It is now up to the government to give them the means, because its duty is to protect all those who do not know how to protect themselves, because it is instituted to protect the weak."
In short, between February and July 1833 (800 to 1,000 looms stopped), the "strength" of capital needed the help of the state apparatus !…
Especially since the republican opposition seems to be strengthening in the city and democratic societies are launching petitions in favor of press freedom attacked by the "middle ground" in power.
A new step was taken in a letter from Thiers dated 6 Aug. 1833. What he recommends in a document he writes directly at home, without going through the editors of the ministry, is outright
"to direct them, to stimulate them so that they resist by a wise union the tyranny of coalitions. But the very uncertain means itself does not seem to me, as much as to you, the only way to use. And we still need to go further:
\begin{displayquote}
I ask here for all your zeal, all your attention. A careful police force can seize many facts deemed implausible. Didn't a happy coincidence make you meet and seize mutualists who were going to ban looms?\footnote{ibid., Thiers à Gasparin, 1833.} (…)
I think that we must rely a lot on the time that will divide the leaders and that will distract them a lot too, but we must absolutely not give up the legal channels,
we must watch with great activity to the search for the facts deliverable to the courts, unless we use them with the appropriate caution!
\end{displayquote}
The goal is clearly set: "To have on hand some prisoners who are very significantly guilty" to sue them together in a great trial where they would appear as seditionaries,
"I hope we will not be reduced to this necessity, I hope we will never be exposed to it!"
Style clause! To go this direction is already to settle there.
On February 12, 1834, a meeting of mutual workshop leaders consulted its base on the strike. A majority opts for the struggle, the watchword of suspension of work is launched for the 14th.
On this date, 20,000 looms stopped. The burial of a weaver will give the opportunity for a show of force of the organizations of master workers and companions.
Tension rises for 8 days, carefully controlled by the police who arrest six mutualists on charges of being "the leaders of the coalition". That's it, the workers "very noticeably guilty" desired by Thiers. Their trial is set for April 5.
A few days before this one, the announcement of the discussion in parliament of a law banning associations is received as a provocation.
Interesting detail that shows to what extent the situation in Lyon influenced the behavior of the bourgeois monarchy:
it was the prefect Gasparin who, obsessed with the republican and workers' plot, had proposed on May 2, 1833, the introduction of legislation banning all associations, even if they are made up of less than 20 members (in the case of Devoir mutuel)\footnote{National Archives BB-21 -407- The bill tabled on February 24, 1834 is voted on March 25, 1834.}.
In a few days, 2,557 signatures are gathered on a petition that ends as follows:
"The mutualists protest against the liberticidal law of associations and declare that they will never bow their heads under a stultifying yoke, that their meetings will not be suspended,
and, relying on the most inviolable right, that of living by work, they will be able to resist, with all the energy that characterizes free men, any brutal attempt, and will not shrink from any sacrifice in defense of a right that no human power can take away from them."
It was in 1834, fifty years, to the nearest month, before the law of 1884 legalized trade union organizations! A reminder that sheds light on the value of the fiddly judgment that the indispensable champion of the triumphant bourgeoisie, J. B Monfalcon, formulated in this regard:
\begin{displayquote}
Workers who had made use of their intellectual faculties only to push their shuttle equally from left to right and from right to left, discussed, slandered the work of the three powers and decreed revolt (…)
The terrible consequences of the mental aberration of the workers cannot make us ignore the ridiculousness of the recitals of their protest\footnote{Monfalcon, op.cit., pp. 211-212.}.
\end{displayquote}
This hateful aggressiveness is a real document on the atmosphere that prevailed then in the distinguished circles! Atmosphere maintained, built, one could say…
The opening of the trial on Saturday, April 5 causes a huge crowd around the criminal court.
It is marked by many incidents when the decision to postpone the case to the following Wednesday, the 9th, and to judge behind closed doors, is made.
On Sunday, April 6, the funeral of a mutual workshop leader followed by 8,000 mutualist master workers and ferrandinier companions takes place, accompanied by cries against the "middle ground" and the "tyrants".
Never was a confrontation so predictable and prepared.
On April 9, a large number of manufacturers packed his goods and left the city\footnote{According to Monfalcon, pp. 221-223.}. One thousand five hundred men are gathered in 15 battalions and 2 infantry companies, flanked by 2 squadrons of cavalry and an artillery regiment with 10 batteries.
All this force, gibernes filled, backpacks, with food for two days is distributed at the strategic points of the city leaving perfectly free the surroundings of the court where a workers' demonstration took place.
The crowd who feared the provocation decided to evacuate the completely exposed place Saint-Jean and retreated into the adjacent streets, improvising to protect themselves, barricades with some planks and other materials seized on the spot.
It is about 10 o'clock when an incident occurs. Gendarmes and a platoon of the 7th Light begin to clear the rue Saint-Jean, the workers retreat behind their protections.
At this moment a shot leaves. Monfalcon, himself, points it out as follows:
\begin{displayquote}
A police officer, Faivre, mortally wounded by a soldier, at the moment when he was rushing on the barricade is brought to the concierge of the hotel de Chevenières\footnote{ibid., pp. 229-230.}.
\end{displayquote}
Half-confession of the provocation confirmed by two sources. First the story of J. L. Philippe, columnist of the Association des compagnons ferrandiniers, a document available at the Maison des canuts, rue d'Ivry:
\begin{displayquote}
An agent provocateur fired a pistol shot. The doors of Saint Jean opened and a discharge was made. By a providential effect a man was killed. Who? The agent provocateur! The struggle began on all points of the city and its suburbs.
\end{displayquote}
Second testimony, the confidences made by the prosecutor Chegaray to Joseph Benoit author of the Confessions of a proletarian\footnote{Presentation M. Moissonnier, Éditions Sociales, 1968, p. 54.}.
The first, elected as the second to the Constituent Assembly, confirmed this fact to the second in the euphoria of the short "spring of the peoples" of that year!
The struggle will continue from Wednesday 9 to Monday 14, on the right bank of the Saône, in the peninsula, at Guillotière and Croix-Rousse.
A part of the troops, who returned from Algeria, was distinguished by their ferocity in all sectors of the popular Lyon fallen into the trap.
The peak of violence is reached on Saturday 12, rue Projetée in Vaise. Monfalcon, though well disposed towards the forces of "order", gives a description:
\begin{displayquote}
They rush to the houses, break the doors, get their hands on everything that is offered to their fury. (…) Any man found with his hands and lips blackened by the powder was shot.
Forty-seven corpses attest to revenge: 26 are those of insurgents taken up with arms in hand, 21 (how terrible the civil war is!) does not belong to the party that fought:
we see children, impotent old men hit in their homes by projectiles\footnote{Monfalcon, p. 261.}.
\end{displayquote}
The violence of this carefully prepared repression aims not only to hit the world of work (the canuts but also the workers of the other suburbs)
but to oppose the dangerous alliance of republicans and employees of industry and crafts, sealed against the law prohibiting associations.
Is it necessary to give another proof of this? Three days after the massacre of Vaise, on April 15, in Paris, rue Transnonain, against the republican workers who are fighting for the same cause,
another massacre occurs that Daumier will illustrate with a shocking and symbolic lithograph!
When Thiers sent Gasparin a telegram of approval, asking for clarification, he wrote: "French blood has flowed, it was inevitable"…
Inevitable or programmed? "Six hundred men on both sides were put out of action, of which nearly 300 perished on the battlefield or in the bed of pain," Monfalcon wrote.
And Steyert puts forward the estimate of 57 military deaths and 220 civilians, 267 military wounded and 180 civilians. These figures really make one think: they suggest that one side (which the reader will easily guess) had a certain propensity to finish off the wounded…
But Claude Latta\footnote{Repressions and political prisons in France and Europe in the nineteenth century, Société d'histoire de la révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle, Presentation P. H. Vigier. Claude Latta: the victims of the repression of the second revolt of the Canuts, pp. 27 to 30}, counted 131 dead in combat and 192 wounded, 190 killed in the civilian population and 122 wounded. It reproduces a testimony of Abbé Pavy, vicar of Saint-Bonaventure, a church located in the center of the peninsula:
a 16-year-old child hit by 8 bullets "had hidden under the corpse of an insurgent who covered him entirely (…) two others aged 18 to 20 had just been discovered behind a confessional in the chapel of Saint Luc (…).
We urge the leaders and urge them to postpone the execution of these unfortunate people out of pity! Everything was useless: "They were caught red-handed with arms in their hands, justice must have its course, withdraw",
and ten shots hit them almost at point-blank range; the confessional is flooded with their blood"… In June 1834, Monfalcon, an aesthete of history, ended his account with these words:
\begin{displayquote}
The insurrection of Lyon will always be one of the most original episodes of our long Revolution, so fruitful in extraordinary events, and will henceforth occupy some of the most beautiful pages of the annals of our city,
and of the history so remarkable of the French of the nineteenth century.
\end{displayquote}
He was wrong. It wasn't over. June 1849 would bring him other satisfactions…
\section[Order finally reigns in Lyon]{1849-1851 — Order finally reigns in Lyon}
A good bloodletting but also a trial-spectacle of the Chamber of Peers sitting in the High Court, this is the remedy administered to the population of the city of Lyon and the kingdom.
Despite the protest of the Lyonnais expressed by Eugène Baune, a republican professor at the business school, the case of the 60 Lyonnais was disjointed from the 163 indicted at the national level.
On August 13, 1835, the verdict divided the sentences as follows: Deported for life outside the national territory: 7;
Detention in a fortress (Doullens) for 20 years: 2; for 15 years: 3; for 10 years: 9; for 7 years: 4; five years in prison: 19; three years in prison: 4; one year in prison: 2;
acquitted: 9; one accused had died during the trial. That's 312 years in prison or detention (more than 9 years on average) not counting the duration of the deportation.
However, three years later, an amnesty was proclaimed on the occasion of the marriage of the Duke of Orleans: Louis-Philippe was attempting a rallying operation to the regime.
This time it was a workers' and republican insurrection, even more obvious than that of 1834, and in the hope of dividing this common front,
the members of the Society for Human Rights were hit harder than those of the workers' organizations of the Silk Factory.
Once again, miscalculation: Eugène Baune was not wrong who had told his judges on July 10, 1835: "Do you believe that the fight that was fought is the last? Our presence before you only attests to a vanguard defeat."
In fact the regime had gained 14 years of relative tranquility that could give Guizot the illusion of the durability of the censitary suffrage, he who opposed any reform calling for the lowering of the income threshold necessary to access the "democratic" ballot box,
the magic slogan of the time: "Get rich!"
In 1848, the conjunction of an economic crisis at the same time agricultural, banking and industrial, with scandals that reached the high spheres of society and with a reformist agitation that, politically reaching the country, led to an explosive situation.
It is then the weight of the working class that is decisive on the event level.
In Paris the proletarian irruption turns into a revolution what was only "reasonable" manifestations easily contained.
In Lyon, on February 25, the emergence around and in the town hall of the secret societies of the Croix-Rousse in the middle of the courteous negotiations between republicans "of the day before" and republicans "of the next day" put an end to the delaying speeches.
As the neo-babouvist weaver Joseph Benoit reports: "a strong column that descended from the Croix-Rousse thwarted all their plans and convinced them of the uselessness of their resistance.
In the evening the people commanded masterly at the Town Hall and organized a revolutionary committee."\footnote{Confessions of a Proletarian, op. cit. Cit.}.
Without delay, the secret society of the Voraces (which hid in the form of a company of Free Drinkers) planned to undertake the destruction of the forts built since 1831 on the plateau at the sites visited by Souk,
shortly after the reconquest of the city and whose arrowslits were oriented towards the rebel suburb. The Commissioner of the Republic, Emmanuel Arago, who arrived in Lyon on 28 February, was coldly welcomed when he suggested the cessation of their business:
in the afternoon of 5 March, he had to accept the idea of the destruction of "these fortified walls built by the monarchy between Lyon and Croix-Rousse at the time when the monarchy premeditated to annihilate the republican workers"\footnote{Journal d'un bourgeois de Lyon en 1848, Présentation Justin Godart, PUF, 1924, p. 4l.}.
In a city that the historian G. Perreux does not hesitate to describe at that time as "the first republican city of France"\footnote{Republican propaganda at the beginning of the July Monarchy, 1930, p.99.}, the return of the Republic found in the vanguard the neo-Babouvist militants of Lyon who,
with their clandestine "Flower Society" linked with the former Parisian Society of Families became "Society of Equals"\footnote{With Barbes, Martin Bernard and Blanqui.} dreamed of establishing "the community of goods at the same time as the Republic".
The Lyon events of the spring of 1848 offer a particular tone.
The multiple tree plantations of Liberty adopt an original ceremonial. After the ceremony, a procession drove the young girls crowned with flowers who opened the march to their homes.
At their side a "man of the people" wearing a red cap, carrying a ammunition rifle, installed on a stretcher supported by 4 men is seen as "deification of the Revolt", as Monfalcon notes, acerbic.
On April 9, an expiatory funeral ceremony is held in honor of the victims of the anti-republican repression.
It takes place in the center of the city, arena of the intense fighting of 1834. Five thousand people participated and Monfalcon saw there "the awful reminiscence of 93".
On the 16th, another demonstration is organized. No longer by the authorities but by the "mountain" clubs. It aimed to install in Perrache, Place de la Liberté, a statue of the Sovereign People due to J. P. Lepind.
It depicted a worker, chest uncovered, standing on a barricade, rifle in hand. Immediately it was baptized by the popular voice The Man of the People.
Followed by the long procession of a crowd, it was walked all around the peninsula, the place of residence of the local bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
A subscription was launched to offer a bronze replica of the monument to the "Brothers of Paris as a pledge of admiration and unity".
In June 1848, however, Lyon did not move. The government has thought of parrying the blow. It placed a massive order for silk flags that occupied the looms and while he crushed the revolt of the workers of the Parisian national shipyards,
he deployed in Lyon a spectacular security device, which delighted and reassured the "men of the golden chest".
Here, Martin Bernard noted on the eve of the Parisian tragedy, "the bourgeois element and the popular element are continually in the presence (…)
with the only difference that the devoted instincts of the people always bring them back to the principles of the Revolution, while the narrow, selfish calculations of the bourgeoisie always keep them away from them."\footnote{Lyon's history review, XII, 1913, p. 179.}
The defeat of the Parisians did not, however, affect the determination of the Lyon workers, on the contrary!
In the elections of May 1849, for the Legislative, after the disarmament of the Croix-Rousse, then of the entire National Guard of the city, the irreducibility of the workers is confirmed spectacularly:
the eleven candidates on the "red list" were elected with votes between 72,569 and 69,323, ahead of the moderate candidates (50,343 votes).
The reshuffled government after June 1848 had sent as commander of the military place, Marshal Bugeaud who had earned in Algeria – already! — its reputation as an expert in "pacification". In plain language of military rudeness he expressed in a letter to Thiers his fury:
"What raw and ferocious beasts! How can God allow mothers to make this kind ! Ah! these are the real enemies and not the Russians and Austrians."\footnote{Maréchal Bugeaud, unpublished letters, Lyon, 1849.}
Without letting himself be stopped by his theological questions, he hastened to prepare a good and decisive bringing this rebellious people to heel. The plan outlined was not carried out by him.
Through cholera, "God" recalled Thomas Robert Bugeaud, Marquis de la Piconnerie and Duke of Isly (Algeria) on June 10, 1849.
Faced with the provocative behavior of the civil and military authority, on June 4, 1849, The Republican threatened. The solution, it wrote:
"It is the dictatorship of the proletariat destroying the bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie drove out the aristocracy, as royalty buried feudalism."
… Which goes to show, the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was initiated neither by Marx nor by Lenin, but by the military terrorism of the bourgeoisie refusing social democracy!
From 15 to 16 June 1849, Bugeaud's mortal blow was dealt by General Gémeau. On the 14th, a false news of a victorious Parisian insurrection circulated in the city, when in reality the demonstration organized by the deputies of the Mountain came to a sudden end.
As Karl Marx explained: "It was only in Lyon that a stubborn, bloody conflict was reached. In this city where the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat are directly face to face,
where the workers' movement is not as in Paris enveloped and determined by the general movement."\footnote{K . Marx, The Class Struggle in France, 1850. We can consult on this whole episode in The nineteenth century and the French Revolution (Société d'histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle, Créaphis, 1992), the contribution M. Moissonnier: Les images de la République dans le monde et le mouvement ouvrier lyonnais (Republic's pictures in the world and the Lyon's worker's movement), pp. 173-189.}
Things unfolded as in the exercise against the canuts of the Croix-Rousse quickly isolated from the rest of the city held under surveillance.
In forty-eight hours, with the use of cannon, the last insurrection of the silk plateau was suppressed. The barricades of the slopes were swept away, then those of the Grande Rue and the rue du Mail.
150 corpses of insurgents were officially recorded, cabarets were closed, opposition newspapers were suppressed, peddling of printed matter was banned, 1,500 arrests resulted in 1,200 cases dealt with by the councils of war.
The state of siege preluded the maneuvers that led to the opening of the way for the imperial dictatorship.
Let us refer to the confession of the good J. B. Monfalcon, editor of the official historical directories of the city.
Commenting in the one written for the year 1852 (before the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, the text was already ready), he writes about 1849\footnote{pp. 87-88, Dépôt Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.}:
"There is no doubt that if the riot had held it would have received powerful reinforcements from socialists in the vicinity, the obstacles of all kinds encountered by the troops marching on Lyon are proof of the spirit of the neighboring populations.
Lyon was obviously chosen for the center of a socialist peasant revolt and how to calculate the chances if the National Guard had existed? It would have provided at least 10,000 men to the insurgency. "
It is obvious that this is an echo of the panic campaign in preparation for the coup d'état and aimed at presenting the year 1852, that of the legislative elections, as a scarecrow concealing the threat directed against the right to property.
Then take the yearbook of 1853, when the bourgeoisie agreed to "lose its crown to save its purse" (Marx). Monfalcon "blesses a revolution coming this time from above and no longer from the fange of the cobblestones like all the others"
because without the coup d'état, "the division was settled in advance, to each his abilities, to each capacity according to his works, to this one such ministry, to this other such fund, to the valets the habit of their master,
to the maneuver the house he has built, to the peasant the farm he exploits, to the vicious the honest woman (…) to the ignorant the public education, to the atheist the cults, to the murderer justice"\footnote{idem, pp. 93-94}.
And no doubt in Monfalcon the palm of the apocalyptic description! Which is not certain, because the propaganda writings of the time surpass themselves.
And the Second Empire, as we know, was the signal of the "festival of profits", opening to the joyful leap of French capitalism.
What remains in the city that the tourist travels, of these tragedies of the first hundred years of the birth of French capitalism?
He will gladly be shown, at the fabric museum, the admirable fabrics produced by an elite workforce: the "façonné" that required science and know-how.
The only place where one seeks to show the men who made the wealth of the Factory, Cooptiss, the House of Canuts, rue d'Ivry, has not until now obtained the public aid that it would be normal for it to benefit.
Of the canuts, the advertisement presents a falsified image produced by a distorting folklore, from which the struggles for a long time were banned.
It's all about jumping songs, good words and gastronomic recipes from poor people washed down with Beaujolais! It was not until the early 1950s that an artery of the Croix-Rousse, responding to the Lyon name "express way",
takes the name of boulevard des canuts, and the arrival in the prefectural administration of the historian Fernand Rude to be affixed, on the borough town hall, a plaque evoking the battles of 1831 and 1834.
Apart from that, the streets of the city are silent on this past and that of the Revolution of 1789, whenever it comes to workers' militants or revolutionaries: neither Denis Monnet, nor Bertrand, the Jacobin mayor, nor Joseph Châlier.
On the other hand, the open opponents of the canuts are honored: Prunelle deputy mayor (1831-1835), proclaiming the responsibility of the Saint-Simonians in the revolt of 1831,
the deputy Fulchiron "Fichu-rond" for the canuts he accused of opulence, the unnoticed Christophe Martin, 1835-1840, and Terme, 1840-1847, continuing the same discourse, Bugeaud, the inevitable, and Gasparin whose street leads in the center to Place Bellecour…
which was, quite naturally, the place of arms. On the other hand, Bouvier du Molard is unknown for reasons of abusive tolerance, but compensated by Vaïsse, prefect with a grip of the Empire and Haussmann, Lyonnais, friend of the bankers.
All associated with 81 street names bearing the names of saints. The street signs celebrate order, finally restored by iron and blood in the city of wonderful silks.
