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 \emph{Littré} defines \enquote{liberal} as \enquote{that which is worthy of a free man.} Doesn't that sound good? And \emph{The Petit Robert} gives us a convincing list of antonyms: \enquote{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.
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!
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 \enquote{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 \emph{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:
These are the \emph{watchdogs} already denounced by Nizan, the \emph{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.
Maurice Cury is a poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter and television, radio and theatrical author. Latest publications: \emph{Les orgues de Flandres} (The Organs of Flanders) (novel),
\emph{La Jungle et le désert} (The Jungle and the Desert) (poems and texts) E. C. Éditions, \emph{Le Libéralisme totalitaire}.
This is, to use adam Smith's terminology, taken up by Marx, the era of \enquote{primitive accumulation.} (or better, to make Adam Smith's term more accurate, \enquote{Previous accumulation}).
How will capitalists (who possess the wealth likely to be converted into means of production (machines, raw materials, etc.)) and \enquote{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 \enquote{thinkers} and vulgar economists of the nineteenth century, tells us that originally, society has been divided into two categories:
\enquote{It goes without saying that some piled treasure on treasure, while the others soon found themselves devoid of everything.}\footnote{\emph{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, \emph{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 \emph{L'homme, cet inconnu} (Man, the unknown)'\footnote{Dr Alexis Carrel, \emph{Man, the unknown}, Paris, Plon, 1935.} that the former were genetically superior, and the latter, inferior.
And Karl Marx observes: \enquote{In the annals of real history, it is conquest, enslavement, the reign of brute force that has always prevailed.}\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{op. cit.}, p. 164.}
An old one, the one provided by Karl Marx's \emph{Capital} in its development on \enquote{primitive accumulation} (Book I, VIIIth section)\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{op. cit.}, pp. 153-22.}.
The other, more recent, certainly richer in information and more \enquote{up-to-date}, will be provided by the great work of Fernand Braudel: \emph{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, \enquote{\emph{Braudel as seen by Pierre Daix}}, La Pensée n° 307, 3rd trimester 1996, pp. 160-161.}.
The dominated was, of course, exploited, and often in the most brutal way, but the exploitation was \enquote{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 \enquote{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, \emph{Primitive, Archaïc and Modern Economies}, (Ed. George Dalton) Boston, Beacon Press, 1968.}.
\enquote{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;
The capitalist can use this supplement for personal consumption, but he can also \enquote{accumulate} it in order to increase the mass of his capital. This is \enquote{expanded} reproduction.
was mainly consumed by the privileged classes and relatively little \enquote{reinvested}.
The productive cycle was repeated more or less on the same scale. \enquote{Growth}, to the extent that it existed, was very slow and almost imperceptible.
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.
This \enquote{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.
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 \enquote{liberated} and expropriated constitute a growing mass of wanderers and destitute people,
subjected in England to the ferocious legislation on the \enquote{Poor laws}, ready-made workforce, 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 \enquote{temperate} colonies.
The end of the \enquote{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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:
the small English peasantry was virtually eliminated in favour of the \enquote{Landlords}, the large landowners, replaced by capitalist farmers, or, in Ireland, by tenants, precarious, expellable at will.
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:
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 —
\enquote{incorrigible scoundrels} — released… \enquote{Thanks to the nonchalance of the justices of the peace and the foolish compassion of the people}, adds the commentator\footnote{Ibidem, p. 177}.}
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 \enquote{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.
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.
The Spanish settlers, concerned to make a quick fortune, while living \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
\section{The Black Slave Trade\footnote{\label{foot18}For an overview: Serge Daget, \emph{La traite des Noirs} (The Black slave trade), Éditions Ouest-France Université, 1990, 300 p. For details: \emph{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.}}
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,
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 \enquote{triangular} trade;
the slave ship, at first, brings to the coast of Africa \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
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.
\enquote{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: \emph{The slave trade and slavery of the Congolese by the Europeans}, Paris, Vanelsche, 1929, pp. 97-98.}
Hilliard d'Auberteuil (quoted by Gaston Martin\footnote{Gaston-Martin, \emph{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):
\enquote{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.}
The expression \enquote{to work like a nigger} has remained in french language.
The \enquote{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{\emph{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.
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 \emph{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 \enquote{was recorded with great difficulty} and was not executed\footnote{\emph{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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, \emph{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.), \emph{The Economies of the Indian Ocean. Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century}, London: F.Cass, 1989.}.
This \enquote{Arab} slave trade was sometimes put forward to try to \enquote{excuse} the European slave trade, on the theme \enquote{We were not the only ones}.
The problem is that this \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
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, \emph{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 \enquote{produced} by the Sudanese slave trade can be estimated at 750,000 (plus 10 to 30 per cent of \enquote{losses} during transport, and an unevaluable proportion of losses at the time of capture)\footnote{Gérard Prunier, \emph{La traite soudanaise} (The Sudanese Black trade) (1820-1885); \emph{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, \emph{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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: \enquote{Here is China paid in smoke, and what smoke!}\footnote{F. Braudel, \emph{ibid.}, p. 191.}
For the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) the history of the colonial administration of the Dutch \enquote{unfolds a picture of murders, of betrayals, corruption and baseness that will never be equalled}\footnote{Thomas Stanford Raffles, \emph{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 \enquote{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, \emph{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{Zamindars}, who were tax farmers in the Mughal Empire.
The \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
18 famines from 1875 to 1900 caused 26 million deaths\footnote{J. Chesneaux, \emph{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 \enquote{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).
\enquote{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, \emph{op. cit.}, p. 193.}
Since the sixteenth century, the French, followed by the English, have benefited for their counters, the \enquote{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 \enquote{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:
\enquote{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 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 \enquote{United Provinces}) revolted against Spain, in the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century,
(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 \enquote{landlords}, but embarrassed the industrialists by bidding the price of bread and the level of wages.
But in contradiction with the principles of \enquote{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 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.
\enquote{Immediately the custom of procuring so-called \enquote{apprentices}, workhouses belonging to the various parishes of London, Birmingham and elsewhere, was born.
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, \emph{The Curse of the Factory System}, London, 1836. Quoted by Karl Marx, \emph{op. cit.}, p. 200.}
\enquote{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, \emph{L'Esprit des Lois} (1748), he ironize on the laziness of the peoples of Europe:
\enquote{having exterminated the people of of America, had to enslave those of Africa, to use them to clear so much land}.
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?
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 \enquote{civilizing mission} of European capitalism to \enquote{clear so much land}.
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 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 \enquote{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.
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 \enquote{slave economy}, whose only activity was the penetration of peaceful areas, raids, captures, transport and sale of prisoners.
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:
\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 \enquote{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.
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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{markets};
more than a hundred shopping counters on African shores having agreed on a floor price for \enquote{ebony wood}, the item \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
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 \enquote{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, \enquote{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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: \enquote{Killing kids is a shame!}
And that brave people roared around him: \enquote{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 \enquote{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: \enquote{Rather the King of Prussia than the Republic}, interesting premonition of the well-known \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
Roger Bordier is a novelist and essayist. Among his titles: \emph{Les blés}, Prix Renaudot, \emph{Un âge d'or, le Tour de ville, Meeting, La Grande vie, La Belle de mai}. Last publication: \emph{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 \enquote{workshop manager} shared with his \enquote{companions} the paid part of the collective work while ensuring \underline{\enquote{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,
In his book \emph{On the Silk Worker, monograph of the Lyon weaver}\footnote{\emph{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 \enquote{the state of the master worker in contract and that of the master merchant, manufacturer or having manufactured}.
And he adds: \enquote{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{contract by mutual agreement} between the client and the worker:
\enquote{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.}.
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.
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, \enquote{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 \enquote{social language}:
\enquote{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, \emph{French proletariat before Marx} – Tome I – Plon, p.480.}.
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 \enquote{invisible hand of the market} to solve in pain – provided they are wise enough – the social disaters of capitalist development…
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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 \enquote{2 cents crisis}:
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,
Revealing text if there is one and which explains what the historian Maurice Garden writes in his thesis \emph{Lyon and the Lyonnais in the eighteenth century}:
\enquote{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, \emph{Lyon and Lyonnais in the XVIIIth century}, Flammarion, 1975, p. 331.}.
\enquote{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.}.
The revolt of the \enquote{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, \emph{Les Révoltes des Canuts (nov. 1831-avril 1834)} (The canuts revolts), Paris, Maspero 1982 and Maurice Moissonnier, \emph{Les Canuts \enquote{Vivre en travail ou mourir en combattant}} (The Canuts: \enquote{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 \enquote{wage question} always arises, revived by the alternation of crisis (the \enquote{dead}) and recoveries (the \enquote{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 \enquote{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:
\emph{L'Écho de la Fabrique}. Born in 1828, an association of master workers, \emph{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 \enquote{the father of the workers},
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 \emph{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.
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:
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.}.
\enquote{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.}}
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 \enquote{enlighten the workers} by making them understand that \enquote{what is illegal cannot be profitable} and advises him:
\enquote{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.}
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: \emph{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,
\enquote{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{\emph{Histoire des insurrections de Lyon en 1831 et 1834} (History of uprisings in Lyon in 1831 and 1834), Lyon 1834, pp. 79-80.}}
Not without having (account of the soldier Guillon) finished among the wounded opponents \enquote{a little young man who could be ten years old and whose bullet had broken his arm …}\footnote{M. Moissonnnier, \emph{Les canuts}, \emph{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.
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 \enquote{corporation of workers} — disarmament — cancellation of the tariff replaced by a mercurial which recorded the wages per piece practiced:
\enquote{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.}.
This praise of wage \enquote{flexibility} is not – alas! – considered in 1998 as a cynical old thing! For the learned economists of the \enquote{single thought} it is even the recipe for happiness as offered by capitalism…
From 5 to 22 June 1832, at the trial of Riom, brought against a sample of carefully selected \enquote{officials}, 22 defendants appeared, including 13 workers accused of rebellion, sedition, call to murder, murder, looting and violence.
Among them the \enquote{negro} Antoine Stanislas whom Monfalcon describes \enquote{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 \enquote{the wives of workers, real furies, torturing the wounded dragons}\footnote{Monfalcon, \emph{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{benevolence of the magistrates}, \enquote{the incredible softness of the public prosecutor' office}, \enquote{the public manifestation of doctrines incompatible with the maintenance of any public order},
\enquote{the deplorable judgment of the Assize Court of Riom}. And our man concludes:
\enquote{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{\emph{ibid.}, pp. 118 à 122.}}
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 \enquote{social cleansing} operation.
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 \enquote{move}. On December 13, 1831, under the pen of Saint-Marc Girardin, the Journal des Débats announced the maturation of a new situation:
\enquote{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.}
\enquote{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,}}
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, \emph{Les Canuts}, \emph{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 \emph{Devoir mutuel} of carefully supervised workshop leaders, on the second Sunday of February 1832, the companions founded their own organization:
\emph{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 \emph{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 \enquote{men in the golden chest} — as the \emph{Echo de la Fabrique} which survived the turmoil call them — do not pay enough attention to this \enquote{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 \enquote{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 \emph{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\footnote{AML, Doc. Gasparin, Volume I.}:
\enquote{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.}
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 \enquote{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: \enquote{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).
\enquote{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 \enquote{wrong spirit} is reborn.
In February 1833, the \emph{Precursor} published a text that the prefect called a \enquote{manifesto of the heads of workshops on workers' coalitions} and Thiers agreed with Gasparin to describe it as \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
\enquote{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:
\enquote{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.
Thiers, this time is alarmed by \enquote{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 \enquote{the courage to wait}:
\enquote{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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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
\enquote{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:
\enquote{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{\emph{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!}}
The goal is clearly set: \enquote{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,
\enquote{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 \enquote{the leaders of the coalition}. That's it, the workers \enquote{very noticeably guilty} desired by Thiers. Their trial is set for April 5.
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 \emph{Devoir mutuel})\footnote{National Archives BB-21 -407- The bill tabled on February 24, 1834 is voted on March 25, 1834.}.
\enquote{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:
\enquote{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, \emph{op. cit.}, pp. 211-212.}.
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 \enquote{middle ground} and the \enquote{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:
\enquote{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{\emph{idem.}, pp. 229-230.}.
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:
\enquote{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}.
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 \enquote{spring of the peoples} of that year!
The peak of violence is reached on Saturday 12, rue Projetée in Vaise. Monfalcon, though well disposed towards the forces of \enquote{order}, gives a description:
\enquote{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:
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!
Inevitable or programmed? \enquote{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{\emph{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 \enquote{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: \enquote{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:
\enquote{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}.
\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: \enquote{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 \enquote{democratic} ballot box,
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 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 \enquote{of the day before} and republicans \enquote{of the next day} put an end to the delaying speeches.
As the neo-babouvist weaver Joseph Benoit reports: \enquote{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{\emph{Confessions of a Proletarian, op. 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 \enquote{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{\emph{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 \enquote{the first republican city of France}\footnote{\emph{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 \enquote{Flower Society} linked with the former Parisian Society of Families became \enquote{Society of Equals}\footnote{With Barbes, Martin Bernard and Blanqui.} dreamed of establishing \enquote{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 \enquote{man of the people} wearing a red cap, carrying a ammunition rifle, installed on a stretcher supported by 4 men is seen as \enquote{deification of the Revolt}, as Monfalcon notes, acerbic.
It takes place in the center of the city, arena of the intense fighting of 1834. Five thousand people participated and Monfalcon saw there \enquote{the awful reminiscence of 93}.
On the 16th, another demonstration is organized. No longer by the authorities but by the \enquote{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 \emph{The Man of the People}.
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,
Here, Martin Bernard noted on the eve of the Parisian tragedy, \enquote{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{\emph{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 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 \enquote{pacification}. In plain language of military rudeness he expressed in a letter to Thiers his fury:
\enquote{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, \emph{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.
\enquote{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 \enquote{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: \enquote{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, \emph{The Class Struggle in France}, 1850. We can consult on this whole episode in \emph{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.}
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.}:
\enquote{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 \enquote{lose its crown to save its purse} (Marx). Monfalcon \enquote{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, \enquote{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{\emph{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.
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 \enquote{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 \enquote{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.
First milestone: the bankruptcy of the political and military leadership teams.
On July 19, 1870, the Second Empire, \enquote{with a light heart}, declared war on Prussia, a heart all the lighter because, according to the Minister of War, the army \enquote{did not lack a single gaiter button}.
Six weeks later, Napoleon III capitulated pitifully at Sedan and, on September 4, the Republic was proclaimed.
The new government, known as \enquote{National Defence}, in fact \enquote{national defection}, is made up of moderate Republicans \enquote{extremely finicky on the question of order and property}\footnote{J. P. Azéma and M. Winock, Les Communards (The communards), Seuil, 1970, p. 22.}.
Presiding over this government and military governor of Paris, General Trochu, \enquote{past paticiple of the verb trop choir}\rfootnote{French pun: Trochu is pronounced the same as trop chu which is past tense of trop choir which means too much fail}, ironize Victor Hugo.
Surrounded by the Prussians since September 19, Paris, despite the extreme rigors of the siege, \enquote{chose the side of overly struggle} (Lissagaray).
The popular Paris in arms (including cannons, bought by popular subscription) is organized.
\begin{displayquote}
From then on, the fear of the \enquote{dangerous classes} resurfaced with more force than ever.
As early as September 19, 1870, Francisque Sarcey — a very reactionary journalist — observed with cynicism and lucidity:
\enquote{The bourgeoisie saw itself, not without a certain melancholy, between the Prussians who set foot on its throat, and those it called the reds, and that it saw only armed with daggers.
I don't know which one scared her the most: she hated foreigners more, but she feared the Bellevillois more.}…
\end{displayquote}
That same September 19, Jules Favre secretly met Bismarck at Ferrières to inquire about the conditions of an armistice…
However, Trochu's confidence to his friend the conservative writer Maxime du Camp: \enquote{The National Guard will only consent to peace if it loses 10,000 men.}\footnote{Maxime du Camp, \emph{Les convulsions de Paris} (Paris's seizures), Hachette, 1897, vol. I, p. 11. \emph{State of mind corroborated by the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Insurrection of 18 March}, vol. I. p. 399 and vol. III, p. 13.}
No problem: the exit of Buzenval, on January 19, 1871, resulted in the death of 4,000 soldiers and officers.
This combined fear and phobia leads to betrayal. The choice between Prussians and Bellevillois is quickly made.
Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand on April 30, 1871: \enquote{\enquote{Ah! Thank God the Prussians are here!} is the universal cry of the bourgeoisie}.
Words confirmed by Francisque Sarcey: \enquote{You cannot imagine the way this \emph{ia}\rfootnote{Francophone of the German \emph{ja}.} had been said, this \emph{ia} deeper than a mug from Germany:
\enquote{Yes, poor Frenchman, we are here, fear nothing more… You were born in a free land, ia, on a friendly land, ia, under the protection of the Bavarian bayonets, ia, ia.}
I couldn't help but repeat this ia in my turn while trying to catch the intonation.}\footnote{In the newspaper named — irony of history — \emph{Le Drapeau tricolore} (The threecolored flag), May 20, 1871.}
The armistice, signed on 28 January, delivered Alsace and part of Lorraine to Prussia.
As soon as January 3, 1871, \emph{Le Figaro} sounded the hallali: \enquote{Army of good versus army of evil… order against anarchy, the fight will be neither long nor difficult! It will be more of the fight than the battle… A crusade of civilization against barbarism.}
On March 18, Thiers executed: he sent the army, in the early morning, to seize the guns of the National Guard.
This provocative wick explode the powder keg. The Central Committee of the National Guard proclaims on March 21:
\enquote{The proletarians of the capital, in the midst of the failures and betrayals of the ruling classes, understood that the time had come for them to save the situation by taking over the direction of public affairs.
Does not the bourgeoisie, their eldest, which achieved its emancipation more than three quarters of a century ago, which preceded them in the path of revolution, understand today that the turn of the emancipation of the proletariat has arrived?}
By its birth, by its brief existence (72 days) and especially by its abundant work, the Commune, the first world workers' revolution, commits a crime of lèse-majesté, lèse-capitalism and lèse-moral order:
a government of the people by the people and for the people, elected representatives on imperative and revocable mandates, a real citizen mobilization,
the premises of self-management (restarted by the associated workers of the workshops deserted by their bosses), the first steps towards female emancipation, the role of foreigners (a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, Leo Frankel, Minister of Labour)…
During the Bloody Week (21-28 May 1871), the Versailles army had a field day.
This army, and especially its senior officers, had made its hand during the conquest of Algeria (the massacres of Dahra cave in 1845), in Mexico (\enquote{les blanca blanca} de Galliffet) and against the strikers (27 killed in Aubin and La Ricamarie).
Long at the head of this army, General Vinoy defines himself as \enquote{a man who has always regarded order as the first duty of any society.}\footnote{Communication by Jean-Claude Freiermuth, in \emph{Maintien de l'ordre et polices}, Créaphis, 1987, pp. 41-51.}
To the extent of hatred and fear, Paris is transformed into slaughterhouses. Among the many witnesses, Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross:
\enquote{This relentless repression… ended with appalling scenes of slaughter that turned Paris into a human mass grave.
We killed to kill… A real war of extermination with all its horrors, let us say it well, because it is the truth; and those who have ordained him boast and praise themselves:
they thought they were fulfilling a sacred duty; all those who belonged to the Commune, or were sympathetic to it, were to be shot.}
Extra judicial killings are innumerable: barracks, prisons (1,900 shootings at La Roquette on 28 May), gardens and squares (Luxembourg, Parc Monceau, Jardin des Plantes), cemeteries (Père-Lachaise, Montparnasse) are all mass graves; the casemates of fortifications, full of corpses, serve as incineration furnaces. The height of cruelty: Communards are buried alive, especially in the Square Saint-Jacques. According to the British newspaper Evening Standard,
\enquote{It is doubtful that we can ever know the exact figure of the butchery that is prolonged. Even for the perpetrators of these executions, it must be quite impossible to say how many corpses they made.} Between 20,000 and 30,000.
These atrocities elicit enthusiastic applause. \emph{Le Gaulois} of May 31:
\enquote{Insane people of this kind and in such large numbers and getting along together constitute such an appalling danger for the society to which they belong that there is no other possible penalty than a radical suppression.}
A few days later, \emph{Le Figaro} added: \enquote{Mr. Thiers still has an important task to do: that of purging Paris… Never such an opportunity will arise to cure Paris of the moral gangrene that has been eating away at it for twenty years… Today, clemency would be dementia…
What is a Republican? A ferocious beast… Come on, honest people! A helping hand to put an end to democratic and social vermin.}
Alexandre Dumas fils, author of \emph{La Dame aux camélias}, lowers himself to write: \enquote{We won't say anything about their females out of respect for all the women they look like when they die.}
The fear of epidemics stops the slaughter. An author of best-selling plays, Émile de Girardin, advocates that mass burials be carried out in the suburbs:
\enquote{There, nothing to fear from the cadaveric emanations, an impure blood will water and fertilize the furrow of the ploughman.}
43,522 prisoners were taken to the cellars of the Palace of Versailles, to the Satory camp or, like the convicts, to the pontoons of the ports (Brest, Cherbourg…).
Their long march is described by the Versailles journalist Léonce Dupont as follows:
\enquote{Passes before our eyes a human flock emaciated, tattered, all in rags, a mixture of robust men, old men still firm, poor devils folded in half and dragging painfully leaning on the neighbors.
Some have shoes, others savates, others are barefoot… The crowd that sees these prisoners parade before it does not know how to moderate itself… It would like to rush at them and tear them to pieces.
I have seen ladies of very soft appearance, at the height of exasperation, forget themselves until they strike poor devils with their umbrella.}\footnote{Léonce Dupont, \emph{Souvenirs de Versailles pendant la Commune} (Memories of Versailles during the Commune), 1881.} Ladies of the world and the half-world. The great photographer and writer Nadar makes a similar account\footnote{Nadar, 1871. \emph{Enquête sur la Commune} (Inquiry on the Commune), Paris, 1897.}.
One of them, Jean Allemane, recounts the brutality of the reception, then the inhuman discipline, the corporal punishment inflicted with sadism, hunger, isolation, despair, suicides…\footnote{Jean Allemane, \emph{Mémoires d'un Communard. Des barricades au bagne} (Memories of a Communard, from barricades to prison), Paris, 1910.}.
After this terrible bloodletting, Thiers plays the prophets: \enquote{We no longer talk about socialism and that's a good thing. We are rid of socialism.} Oracle quickly denied. As Pottier sings:
\repigraph{Prison and forced labour are the only possible solution to the social question. It is to be hoped that the use will become general.}{\emph{Chicago Times} (May 1886).}
As soon as the freedom to form trade unions was legalized in 1884, the repression against their activities began! Often brutal, sometimes insidious.
Certainly, the repression against the workers has always been when they revolted against the conditions that were made to them by those who lived from their work.
The companions of old supported epic struggles, suffered the repression of royal, imperial or republican \enquote{forces of order}, often with the blessing of the Church.
Let us mention only the great strike of the companion printers in Lyon in 1539. But there have been many others over the centuries!
Later, members of the International Workers' Association (the First International) were also persecuted.
Then, the workers, deprived of the right to assemble, to form defense organizations, used only authorized associations:
mutual benefit societies, transformed into resistance societies, illegal, of course.
It was under the cover of mutual societies that major strikes and riots were prepared and conducted in 1830 in Nantes, in 1831 in Paris and Limoges, as well as the revolts of the canuts, fiercely repressed, in Lyon in 1831 and 1834.
\section{The beginnings of trade unionism}
\repigraph{… My opponent was, remains and will remain the opponent of my class, the one who starves it and then,
when it screams, shoots it…}{Panaït Istrati, \emph{Vers l'autre flamme} (Towards the Other Flame)}
It was therefore in 1884 that the young French republic, third of the name, allowed the creation of trade unions.
Quite quickly, connections are made between the organizations that are formed. The Federation of Trade Unions and the Federation of Labour Exchanges were born.
They met in 1895, thus giving birth to the Conféfération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour, C.G.T.).
The workers' movement is organizing, developing; it is preparing to wage great struggles, not only for demands but also for the abolition of wage labour in order to build a society in which the exploitation of man by man is abolished and in which social justice reigns.
Capitalism, too, is organizing; the employers will respond — with the help of the governments — with very harsh blows to the workers' claims to refuse their lives of misery.
The trade unionists, the workers will pay a high price, sometimes with their freedom and their lives, for their commitment to the struggles against the exploitation of which they are the victims.
In 1885, the famous Comité des forges (forges comitee) was transformed into a professional (employers') union; the Coal Committee was set up in 1886,
then the employers' chambers of metallurgy became the Union of Metallurgical and Mining Industries, Mechanical, Electrical and Metallic Engineering and Related Industries.
Fearsome war machine against the workers still scattered in several trade union organizations.
Unfortunately, it has been found that employers are much more quickly linked up against workers than they do against their bosses.
The CGT would therefore continue the fight of the exploited against their exploiters.
Trade unionists will experience victories over the years, many defeats too, due not only to their \enquote{natural} enemies, employers and government, but sometimes also, unfortunately, to their own divisions.
The war of 1914-1918, the \enquote{Great War}, capitalist butchery, could not be prevented despite the commitments of the trade unions and the European socialist parties.
The planned general strike could not be called; the slogan: \enquote{The proletarian has no homeland} gave way to the Sacred Union…
\section{On strikes}
In 1900, strike in Saint-Étienne in January, in Martinique in February (9 workers are killed, 14 are wounded).
In June, 3 workers were killed in Chalon-sur-Saône. We could write if we were not afraid to trivialize these events: etc.!
The rising cost of living and rents force workers to live in slums; the very low wages, the methods of intensifying work in the factories, all this causes strong movements.
Strikes between 1902 and 1913. Metallurgists, miners, dockers, construction workers, textile workers, agricultural workers, taxi drivers…
The repression is extremely violent. Clemenceau and Briand (former vigorous defenders of the working class who became ministers) are at the head of the anti-working class reaction.
In Draveil, on June 2, 1908, the gendarmes shot at the demonstrators: 2 killed, 9 wounded. On July 30, in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, the army killed 7 workers and wounded 200 others.
The union leaders are arrested. Everywhere the army is sent against the strikers, a quantity of whom are arrested, dismissed by their bosses, defamed.
Thus the secretary of the coal miners of Le Havre, Jules Durand, is sentenced to death for moral participation in a strike!
His sentence was commuted to seven years' imprisonment and after an intense campaign in the country, he was released before his trial was reviewed.
But the trials had been too strong for Durand, who lost his mind. He was exonerated in 1918!
In fact Durand had been accused of a crime following a machination by big business and politicians.
Thus, the sad Briand did not hesitate to declare: \enquote{If, to maintain security, I had not had the necessary weapons, if it had been necessary to resort to illegality, I would not have hesitated.}
He didn't hesitate… There were many politicians, policemen, employers, who also did not hesitate to plot plots against trade union activists who were too active in all countries, under all regimes.
The government denied the railway workers the right to unionize, so they in turn entered the battle.
Their strike committee and 15,000 railway workers received a general mobilization order, which made Jean Jaurès say:
\enquote{They turned the cessation of work into a military offence.}
Previously, the postal workers had, in 1909, crossed their arms. Bullying, sanctions, dismissals rain down on the strikers. Another renegade of socialism, Labour Minister Viviani, proposed to the government the dissolution of the CGT.
This did not happen, but the Paris Labour Exchange was closed.
The CGT leads the struggles, supports the strikers. It will engage with almost all the unions that compose it in the demand for the eight hours:
eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of leisure. The claim, launched in 1906, did not succeed until 1919.
At the same time, the Confederation carried out intense antimilitarist propaganda, advocating the idea of launching a general strike in the event of war.
\section{The May Firsts}
\repigraph{May 1st is an act that must not degenerate
to the point of becoming a parody of bourgeois festivities
or a sunny November 11.}{Georges Dumoulin (may 1937)}
It was from 1905 that the CGT organized strikes and parades on May 1st. The motive is to get the eight-hour workday.
The watchword is: \enquote{From May 1, 1906, the workers will only work eight hours!}
On May 1, 1905, Paris was put under siege. 60,000 troops crisscross the city; there were many fights and 800 arrests, hundreds of wounded in hospitals, and two deaths. The bourgeoisie experienced panic fear.
In the provinces too, work stoppages, demonstrations, incidents have taken place, particularly in Nice, Grenoble, Montpellier, Saint-Étienne, Lyon, Rochefort…
The idea of making May 1 a day of demands came from the United States. In Chicago, a huge strike took place on May 1, 1886, and continued on May 3 and 4. These days ended in tragedy.
The police fired on the crowd, killing five and wounding several others, and then a bomb exploded among the policemen, probably thrown by provocateurs. Anarchist workers were arrested, convicted without evidence and executed.
These eight hours were seen as \enquote{a down payment by the bourgeoisie on the immense debt it owed to the working class}, as Clara Zetkin wrote. This explains the impact of this claim.
Some May 1st were impressive, either by the number of strikers and demonstrators, or by the violence exercised by the so-called police forces, or by what they symbolized.
Thus May 1, 1919, after the war, was grandiose and marked by violent incidents, in France, in the United States, in Argentina… The one in 1920 was the largest in terms of the number of participants in France.
In 1934, it was the surge against fascism, in 1936, that of trade union reunification, a prelude to the great strikes of June.
In Spain, there was a formidable demonstration of popular forces.
But they were not going to suffer ordinary repression, so to speak, but a civil war unleashed against the Frente Popular by all that Spain had of power-hungry military, fascists, Catholic fundamentalists and, of course, big landowners, masters of the economy.
Trade union confederations: the General Union of Labour, socializing, and the National Confederation of Labour, anarcho-syndicalist, were at the forefront of the fight, especially the C.N.T. which, in addition to the fight against fascism,
laid the foundations, wherever it could, of a new society.
Abandoned by the democracies, Great Britain and France, the Spanish Republic succumbed to the blows of the Francoists supported by Fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany, with the blessing of the Pope.
The French government, on the other hand, welcomed as criminals, even enemies, the republican fighters who were able to take refuge with us in 1939.
Becoming Labor Day, May 1, a few bursts aside, gradually lost its symbol of class struggle.
In countries of dictatorship, it had already been diverted into military parades; elsewhere, it has become the lily-of-the-valley festival.
It will certainly take time for it to become a day of international demand again.
\section{Repression carries on…}
1936 was the year of the great workers' victory. The sacrosanct right of property was flouted — even if temporarily — by
the occupation of factories, the right to paid rest has been recognized, as well as the right to union representation.
No other victory has achieved such fundamental gains as these.
However, as early as 1937, the repression began. It is often the employers, by their actions, who provoke strikes.
Yellow \enquote{trade union} organizations are created, such as the French Professional Unions.
In March, in Clichy, the police shot at workers; Toll: 5 dead, hundreds wounded.
In 1938, the CGT called for a strike against the decree-laws for November 30 because the decree-laws suspended a large part of the gains of 1936.
The strike is ill-prepared. Employers and government are leading the response together; activists are arrested, lockouts decided.
The police occupy \enquote{nerve centres}, railway workers and public service agents are requisitioned.
In this atmosphere of civil war, the strike is a failure (except in Nantes, Saint-Nazaire, Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand).
The repression is widespread: 500 activists are sentenced to prison terms, 350,000 civil servants are subjected to disciplinary sanctions. The Popular Front has lived…
\section{Harsh repression and insidious repression}
To break a strike, a workers' struggle, repression can be bloody; to weaken a powerful trade union organization, it can be insidious, effective in the medium term; splitting is one of the ways.
It should also be noted that splits are not necessarily caused by forces hostile to trade unionism, they are sometimes, too often, caused by the unions themselves.
On November 9, 1940, the CGT was dissolved by the Vichy government, trade unions were banned.
Defectors from the CGT, the Belin, Dumoulin, Million, Froideval, etc., rallied to the Popular Rally and the Petainist Labour Charter which planned to create corporate professional organizations, as in fascist Italy, which would bring together bosses and employees.
It is the collaboration of organized classes; strike action is prohibited.
The CGT is reconstituted in the Resistance. Its militants suffered the fate of the other resistance fighters when they were arrested either by the occupier or by the police or the Vichy militia.
A member of the National Council of the Resistance, the CGT established its program for the post-war period.
In the meantime, strikes are breaking out, demonstrations are happening despite the risks. Demonstrations on May 1, 1943 and 1944. Strikes in factories and at miners in Grenoble, Lyon, Marseille, in the mines of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, at railway workers…
After the Liberation, the CGT contributed to the reconstruction of the country, it restored the social laws of 1936, a struggle for the buying power of the workers. The employers, because of their \enquote{collaborationist} behavior with the occupier, cannot react effectively.
But in 1947, he reopened hostilities. Runaway inflation is lowering the standard of living of employees, already much lower than it was in 1938. Powerful strikes broke out: Renault, railways, press. The police intervene frequently, in short, the usual cycle.
For many, C.G.T. is too powerful. It must be weakened. The beginning of the Cold War helping, a heterogeneous conspiracy will cause a split supported by the American Federation of Labor, the American trade union federation.
The ground is ready, Force Ouvrière (Worker's strenght F.O) is born.
Four trade union federations exist: the C.G.T., F.O., the C.F.T.C.(french acronym for French confederation of Christian workers), the Fédération de l’éducation national (Feferation of National Education) (F.E.N.).
A little later, the General Confederation of Independent Trade Unions was added.
Meanwhile, the employers strengthened themselves by creating the National Council of French Employers (C.N.P.F.).
1948 was a year of powerful strike movements and, consequently, serious repressions. Strikes are long, hard.
In the mines of the North, a socialist minister, Jules Moch, sent companies of mobile gendarmes, tanks, and put the region under siege.
As a result, 4 miners were killed, 2,000 were imprisoned, hundreds were injured.
That year, there were 6,561,176 strikers and 13,133,313 strike days!
While the France is to be rebuilt, the governments of the Fourth Republic, which succeed each other at an accelerated pace,
do not hesitate to engage in a colonialist, ruinous and bloody war in Vietnam, and to exercise violent repression in Madagascar and Algeria.
In 1953, military spending represented 40\% of the France's budget! The impoverishment of the working class is well underway, corporate profits are at record highs.
The unions are leading the struggle on all fronts, against the war in Vietnam, for the improvement of the purchasing power of employees.
Repression strikes at arm's length, it is the case to say it! Workers killed by the police or the thugs of the R.P.F. (Rally of the French People, Gaullist), arbitrary dismissals.
At the XXVIII Congress of the CGT in 1951, it was noted that 3,500 workers had been prosecuted before the courts.
that 1,200 have been sentenced to prison terms, that thousands of grassroots activists, staff delegates have been dismissed…
In June-July 1953, the Laniel government claimed to take measures aimed at the rights of employees: social security, increase in rents, raising the retirement age for civil servants, etc.
At the beginning of August a formidable strike movement was launched in which, at the call of the CGT, many members of Force Ouvrière and the C.F.T.C., and non-union members participated.
The P.T.T.(french acronym for mails, phones and telegraphs), the railways, the public services, the production of gas and electricity, the Parisian transport are paralyzed.
Banks, dockers, naval officers, construction and metallurgy guys are also getting into it. 4 million strikers; requisition orders remain without effect.
Brutal repression could not be appropriate in the face of the magnitude of such a movement.
It was by methods of division that this movement was weakened by using the leaders of the F.O. and the C.F.T.C. who called for the resumption of work, following secret negotiations with the government.
The Algerian war sounded the death knell for the Fourth Republic. We were very close to the civil war. The CGT fought against the war.
The coal and iron miners had the luxury of tell de Gaulle off, who had requisitioned them. General or not, they were not willing to obey with a curtsy and a bow. !
Then came May 1968. \enquote{Ten years is enough!} But ten million strikers did not achieve mirobolous results on the social level…
\section{We continue, despite everything!}
\repigraph{What is the producer? Nothing.
What should he be? Everything.
What is the capitalist? Everything.
What should he be? Nothing.}{Pierre-Joseph Proudhon}
Trade union action and its repression were the two constant aspects of the workers' struggle against their exploitation.
We saw it in this summary of their struggles. And again, here, we have mainly talked only about our country. Elsewhere it was, often, alas, even worse.
Yet, if we compare the living conditions of workers until recently, in France, to what were those of their ancestors in the last century, we see that their actions have not been in vain.
In this incomplete summary of workers' struggles and their repression, we have cited only dates and events as examples.
We can remember that the repression of governments and employers was always extremely harsh, even ferocious, against the people:
June 1830, 1848, the Commune, to speak only of the most well-known crimes.
However, it is by tens of thousands that the actions against social injustice are counted, it is every day that workers, employees, employees fight, and it is every day that they are repressed in companies, in offices. Dark work, stubborn, without glory, but how necessary and courageous!
Liberal capitalism, ultraliberal totalitarian, relying on the rapid progress of the technical means of production, on the extraordinary computerization of communication, has been able to create unemployment of such a magnitude that it can afford to dismantle without great difficulty large parts of the social conquests acquired with great difficulty by the workers.
The globalization of the economy is presented by capitalism and its zealous servants as the ultimate phase of history, thus as the unqualified superiority of this system over all other possible systems.
This idea has penetrated into many minds even that of some of those whose profession of faith is the defense of the working class.
The trade union movement is in tatters, all confederations are being taxed by splits, the number of organisations is constantly increasing, although the number of union members is constantly decreasing!
Trade unionism has taken severe blows, it has also fallen, misguided, but it is not dead.
To rebuild a powerful force, one must have in mind what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said in Philosophie de la misère (Philosophy of misery):
\enquote{Whoever, in order to organize labor, appeals to power and capital, has lied, for the organization of labor must be the decay of capital and power.}
\section{André Devriendt}
André Devriendt is editor of the \emph{Monde Libertaire}.
He has held many trade union positions (secretary of the C.G.T. proofreaders' union, member of the national council and the board of the Federal Union of Book and Paper Industry Pensioners C.G.T., General Secretary and Vice-President of the National Press and Book Mutual, etc.).
~~~\, Jean Bruhat et Marc Piolot, \emph{Esquisse d’une histoire de la C.G.T.} (Sketch of a history of the CGT), Éditions de la C.G.T., 1966.
Maurice Dommanget, \emph{Histoire du Premier Mai} (History of the First of May), \emph{Éditions Archives et documents}, 1972.
Fernand Rude, \emph{Les Révoltes des canuts, 1831-1834} (The canuts revolts, 1831-1834), Petite Collection Maspero.
\emph{Institut C.G.T. d’histoire sociale} (C.G.T. Institute of Social History), C.G.T. Approches historiques.
Émile Pouget, \emph{La Confédération générale du travail et Le Parti du travail} (The General Confederation of Labour and the Labour Party), Éditions C.N.T., 33, rue des Vignoles, Paris XXe, 1997.
Georges Lefranc, \emph{Juin 36, l’Explosion populaire} (June 36, the grassroot explosion), Éditions Julliard, 1966.
Gérard Adam, \emph{Histoire des grèves} (History of strikes), Éditions Bordas, collection \enquote{Voir l’histoire} , 1981.
Jean-Pierre Rioux, \emph{Révolutionnaires du Front populaire} (Revolutionnaries of the Popular Front), collection 10/18, 1973.
Thierry Laurent, \emph{La Mutualité française et le monde du travail} (The French Mutuality and the world of work), Éditions Coopérative d’information et d’édition mutualiste, 1973.
Jean Maitron (sous la dir. de), \emph{Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français} (Biographical Dictionary of the French Workers' Movement), Éditions ouvrières.
Marcel Caille, \emph{Les Truands du patronat} (The Mobsters of the bosses), Éditions Sociales, 1977.
\chapter[The armed gangs of Capital in Rep. France]{The armed gangs of Capital in Republican France}
Maurice RAJSFUS
Capitalism is naturally black. Like this coal that helped to enrich the coal companies as soon as the nineteenth century. Black as the misery organized at the same time, by the forge masters.
It is impossible to forget that capitalist systems – national back then – were already taking their marks for expansion on a global scale, through colonialism.
This was the time when the big bosses explained that the economies of the industrialized countries would face the greatest dangers if it were forbidden to make children under the age of twelve work and if one worked less than sixty hours a week.
At paltry salaries, of course.
\section{The sons of workers, best cops of the owners!}
This nascent capitalist society could only rely on the men in black who had the task of defending it.
It is a fact that, for more than one hundred and fifty years, the police have rarely been used for the \enquote{protection of people and property}, its initial mission, but much more to ensure the security of capital.
We must not close our eyes on the long series of bloody repressive actions carried out by these armed gangs recruited from among the children of the working class and the poor peasantry.
After the fall of royalty in February 1848 and the failure of the national workshops, the ruling bourgeoisie encouraged young workers to enlist in the newly created mobile guard to maintain order in Paris — at a wage five times higher.
A few weeks later, during the June 1848 uprising of the Parisian workers, it was these sons of the working class who were launched against the insurgents, alongside regiments returning from the war of conquest in Algeria.
These new types of police officers will not fail in their duty, as they say: \enquote{... Atrocious massacres by the mobile guard of the army or the national guard have taken place... (June 26)
They shoot at the Conciergerie, at the town hall. Forty-eight hours after the victory, wounded and unarmed prisoners were shot... Horror, horror, horror!}\footnote{\emph{Dans les Cahiers}, de Proudhon, quoted by Édouard Dolléans in his \emph{Histoire du mouvement ouvrier} (History of the worker movement), Armand Collin, 1967, t. I, p. 241.}.
More precise information will soon be provided after five days of ruthless repression:
\enquote{We know that the bourgeoisie compensated itself for its deadly trances with unprecedented brutality and massacred more than 3,000 prisoners}\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{La lutte des classes en France} (Class struggle in France) Éditions Sociales, 1946, p. 89.}.
To which must be added the hundreds of killed on the barricades. Not to mention the approximately 12,000 workers arrested and, for the most part, \enquote{transported} to Algeria or shipped to prison.
In fact, the government of the Second Republic treated Parisians in the same way as Algerians who refused to suffer the colonial yoke\footnote{On 1848's revolution, refer more particularly to Maurice Aghulon's book, \emph{Les Quarante-huitards} (the forty-eightards), Folio-Histoire, 1992.}.
A few months later, General Changarnier, project manager of this repression, with other generals from Africa, such as Lamoricière, under the orders of the infamous General Cavaignac, head of the executive power, could declare with the greatest cynicism:
\enquote{Modern armies have less the function to fight against enemies from the outside than the defense of order against rioters.}
Quickly, these great republicans will bring to power Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, during the presidential elections of December 1848.
In 1849, in a book \emph{Les Partageux} (the Sharers), a certain Henri Wallon, historian at the orders of this bloody bourgeoisie, described the worker, \enquote{the red}, as the hereditary enemy:
\enquote{... A red is not a man, it is a red... He is a fallen and degenerate being... A dumb physiognomy,... dull eyes, fleeing like those of the pig... the insignificant and mute mouth like that of the donkey...}\footnote{Quoted by René Arnaud in December 2, Hachette, \emph{L’Histoire par l’image} (History by picture), 1967, pp. 22 et 26.}
The insurgents of June 1848, like those of July 1830, were still nostalgic for the ideals of 1789.
Subsequently, the need to defend oneself collectively, and then to try to counter the industrial society that was developing by repressing the working class, led the most lucid to constitute the 1st International, in 1864.
It was clear, however, that the repression would be even harsher because the bourgeoisie, now an unavoidable economic power, could not accept the conclusion of this Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels, in 1847:
\enquote{May the ruling classes tremble at the idea of a communist revolution! The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win!}
\section{The slaughter of the Communards}
Following the violent reaction of the Parisian workers in June 1848, the worried bourgeoisie would perfect its repressive means when the Paris Commune was crushed in May 1871.
Once again, the Republican politicians prove their will to ensure the tranquility of the economic agents. Even at the cost of killing those workers who ensured capitalist prosperity.
The army and police who worked to assassinate the Paris Commune were effectively waging war on the Parisians. (This war they didn't really want to wage against the Prussians.)
The destructive rage became more and more deadly in the last days, even when the last barricades had fallen:
\enquote{... People were shot everywhere, on street corners, in the alleys of houses, in demolition sites, wherever there was a wall to push the victims.
The lower banks of the Seine witnessed fierce massacres. At the bottom of the Pont Neuf, they shot for more than eight days.}\footnote{Maxime Wuillaume, \emph{La Semaine sanglante} (The bloody week), La Palatine, 1964, p. 249.}
Beyond a victory already assured for Thiers and the Versaillais, there was the will to kill because if, in war, we do not shoot the prisoners, it is not the same with the internal enemy for whom there is no quarter given, says Maxime Wuillaume.
\enquote{As they advanced, the Versaillais installed, from place to place, these sinister military provosts whose whole task was to kill — the judgment did not count!}\footnote{\emph{Idem.}}
Louise Michel is not to be outdone and, in her memories, she describes the entry of the Versaillais into Paris as days of nightmare:
\enquote{They cut throats in ambulances... Machine guns mold in barracks. They kill like hunting. It is an inhuman butchery. Those who, badly killed, remain standing, or run against the walls, are shot at will.}\footnote{Louise Michel, \emph{La Commune, Histoires et souvenirs} (The commune, history and memories), Maspero, 1970, t. II, p. 58.}
While the military courts sit unabated (more than 10,000 condemned to deportation), Killings continue for the sake of killing.
Without further justification. This is what the historian of the Commune, C. Talés, puts it well: \enquote{It was necessary to massacre, to be safe, for a long time!}\footnote{C. Talés, \emph{La Commune de 1871} (The commune of 1871), Spartacus, 1971, p. 120.}
This revenge on insurgent Paris is celebrated as it should be and the \emph{Journal des débats}, evoking the recent defeats of Napoleon III spreads its satisfaction:
\enquote{What an honor! Our army avenged its disasters with an invaluable victory!}
And again: \enquote{Long live order, long live the army which is it's only support!}\footnote{Quoted by Jean-Pierre Azéma et Michel Winock in \emph{Les Communards} (The communards), Le Seuil, Le Temps qui court, 1964, p. 165.}
The general staff of this army had chosen unlimited repression:
\enquote{Those who unleashed on Paris the blind force of terror ensured that the carnage was as great as possible.}\footnote{C. Talés, \emph{La Commune de 1871} (The commune of 1871), p. 130.}
Refinement was not absent from the concerns, as evidenced by the slow advance of the troop: \enquote{They wanted it to last, in order to kill longer.}\footnote{\emph{Idem}., p. 142.}
On June 15, 1871, they were still shooting at the Bois de Boulogne. \enquote{They stopped killing only when they feared being poisoned by the corpses.}\footnote{\emph{Idem}.}
At the Madeleine church, 300 federated were shot, 700 to 800 on the Place du Panthéon, etc.
Many weeks later, the episode of the little Savoyards, usual chimney sweepers of Paris, shot because they had black hands — supposedly black with powder — was told.
There was also this legend, tenacious, of these pétroleuses setting fire to Paris:
\enquote{From then on, any suspicious woman is searched; woe to her if we discover a cellar rat, matches, if she brings back a bottle: olive oil, bleach, become oil; booed, brutalized by the crowd, the oiler is shot like the women taken with weapons in their hands. Hundreds of women were murdered.}\footnote{\emph{Idem}., p. 145.}.
In the midst of this coldly decided repression, xenophobia held a prominent place:
\enquote{Republicans are being shot because the Commune was republican. It was cosmopolitan, foreigners were massacred. The fame of Dombrowski\footnote{One of Paris Commune military chiefs, just like the Cipriani brothers, Italians, or the Pole Wroblewski.} causes the death of many Poles...
All those who were Italians, Poles, Dutch, Germans, were shot, said an officer who played an active role in the repression.}\footnote{C. Talés, \emph{La Commune de 1871} (The commune of 1871), p. 145.}
Those who read the British press of the time, such as P. O. Lissagaray\footnote{Auteur de \emph{Histoire de la Commune de Paris} (History of the Paris Commune), Maspero, 1967.}, were able to pick up details forgotten by French chroniclers.
Thus, on May 28, 1871, General Galiffet, chief rifleman, addressed a group of communards prisoners:
\enquote{Let those with gray hair come out of the ranks. You have seen June 1848, you are more guilty than the others! And he rolled the corpses in the ditches of the fortifications.}\footnote{Édouard Dolléans, \emph{Histoire du mouvement ouvrier} (History of the worker movement), t. I, p. 386.}.
The massacre over, Adolphe Thiers, head of the executive power, telegraphed to the prefects: \enquote{The ground is littered with their corpses, this awful spectacle will serve as a lesson.}\footnote{\emph{Idem}.}.
20,000 Parisians killed during the battle, including women and children; 3,000 dead in new Caledonia's depots, pontoons, prisons and exile; 13,700 prison sentences, 70,000 women, children and the elderly deprived of their natural support. Following the Bloody Week, there were some 400,000 denunciations.
For his part, Jacques Rougerie, who was able to strip the historical archives of the Vincennes's Fort, notes that of the 36,909 Communards arrested, more than two-thirds were manual workers, but is it possible to separate them from the employees and servants who had opposed the Versaillais?\footnote{Jacques Rougerie, \emph{Paris ville libre} (Paris free city), Le Seuil, 1971, pp. 259-261.}
\section{The order ruled under Clemenceau!}
Twenty years after the Paris Commune, the blood of the workers will flow in Fourmies (North). On May 1, 1891, side by side, police, gendarmes and soldiers of the 145th line fired on the crowd.
There were ten dead, including several children, and many injured. The following May 1st, although less bloody, will take place for a long time under the sign of repression: violent charges of the gendarmes in the provinces and the police in Paris, as in 1893.
The numerous arrests and dismissals that follow these days demonstrate that the police and employers are in sync\footnote{Refer to à Maurice Dommanget, \emph{Histoire du 1er mai} (History of May First), Société universitaire d’édition, 1953, pp. 136-154.}.
On May 1, 1906, he put Paris under siege after having concentrated some 50,000 troops there in mid-April.
At dawn, hundreds of preventive arrests have already been made. On the Place de la République, cuirassiers on horseback rub shoulders with plainclothes policemen.
The provocations of the police and the soldier quickly did their work and barricades were erected in this popular district.
As if the police were just waiting for this signal, the police start banging randomly, also targeting passers-by.
The day ended in 800 arrests, 173 of which were maintained. Wounded people are cluttering hospitals in large numbers. There were also reportedly two deaths.
\enquote{The liberated from the Château-d'Eau left, in the evening, by bending their backs under the blows of the agents \enquote{lining the bridge}.}\footnote{\emph{Idem}, p. 221.}
In these times, which some call \enquote{Belle Époque} (good old days), it was enough for a business leader to report to the police commissioner of the neighborhood that his workers were on strike or simply challenged his authority for a squad of kepis to arrive immediately, with their batons risen.
To oppose his boss was already to put public order in danger. Among other bloody episodes, Clemenceau will have to his credit many anti-worker shootings:
{
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{--}
\begin{itemize}
\item On June 19, 1907, the army fired on the winegrowers in revolt in Narbonne. There are five dead and about twenty wounded.
\item On July 26, 1907, in Raon-L'Étape, in the Vosges, the textile strikers were facing the army: three dead and thirty wounded.
\item On June 2, 1908, in Draveil (Seine et Oise), the striking workers, who threw stones at the gendarmes who had come to dislodge them, saw two of their comrades killed and ten others seriously wounded.
\item On July 30, 1908, in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, the troop fired salvo at strikers and passers-by, while cavalrymen charged swords in the clear: four dead and many wounded.
\end{itemize}
}
Paradoxically, the republican constitution of 1875, the secular school of Jules Ferry, the laws on the press and the right of association, the separation of Church and State, etc. have in no way changed the harshness of the vigilantes in power.
It is enough to recall how, after crushing the fascist riot of February 6, 1934, in Paris, in front of the Chamber of Deputies, the republican government launched its police against the workers who demonstrated, on February 9, in support of the democratic institutions: six dead, shot almost at point-blank range\footnote{Sur cette soirée du 9 février 1934, refer to the debriefing pages published in \emph{L’Humanité} (The Humanity) du 10 février 1934.}.
\section{From the unthinkable to the unspeakable}
It is impossible to write off the role played by the police and gendarmerie as prison warden against the Spanish republicans and the fighters of the international brigades, as early as February 1939, after Franco's victory.
Just as we must not forget the fate reserved for the anti-fascists and German Jews who fled Nazism and who found themselves, in October 1939 and May 1940, in 110 concentration camps, under the vigilant guard of the same servants of the order who, as at the Camp des Milles, explained to the internees, during the debacle of the French armies, that they were going to be handed over to the Nazis by them\footnote{On these inglorious episodes of the French police and gendarmerie, refer essentially to \emph{La lie de la Terre} (Scum of the Earth), by Arthur Koestler (Calmann-Lévy, 1947); \emph{Les camps en Provence}, collective work (Ex, 1984); \emph{Le Diable en France}, by Lion Feuchtwanger (Jean-Cyrille Godefroy, 1985);
\emph{Zones d'ombre}, collective work (Alinéa, 1990); \emph{Exils en France}, collective work (Maspero, 1982); \emph{Les Bannis de Hitler}, collective work (EDI, 1982); \emph{Le camp de Gurs}, by Claude Laharie (chez l'auteur, 1985); \emph{Vivre à Gurs}, by Hanna Schram and Barbara Vormeïer (Maspero, 1979).}.
Soon followed the most despicable episode of the French police forces: their role under the Nazi occupation, in the northern zone and in the Vichy France, in the so-called \enquote{free} zone.
For four years, police and gendarmes, GMR, and even customs officers in many circumstances, will unconditionally put themselves at the service of the Gestapo.
With little misgivings at the task they are asked to accomplish, these 200,000 men, often recruited at the time of the Popular Front, will indulge without qualms in the hunt for Jews, Gaullists, Communists, Freemasons, etc.
No matter who gives the order, the main thing is to fulfill the mission with maximum zeal.
When liberation comes, It will be never meant to judge, both the men and the institutions that engaged in criminal activities from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1944.
It is true that General de Gaulle, back in France, preferred to use these men than the forces of the Resistance and the maquis.
The calculation was consistent: just as for the magistrates, the prefectural administration and the high civil service, the man of London knew that these men would be all the more loyal to him because they had failed despicably during the past four years\footnote{Refer to \emph{La Police de Vichy} (Vichy's police), by Maurice Rajsfus, Le Cherche midi éditeur, 1995.}.
It is worth noting that if, in 1945, some 4,000 police officers were \enquote{dismissed}, momentarily — those having been a little more collaborator than the others — these officials were reinstated by the prefect of police Baylot, in the early 1950s\footnote{Auguste Lecœur, \emph{Le Partisan} (The partisan), Flammarion, 1963.}.
As these men had lost a few years, they were counted a copious catch-up of salary, while a rapid advancement – faster than for their colleagues – immediately placed them in the leading spheres of the Paris police.
\section{Republican police? Wishful thinking!}
Although on a completely different scale, the Fourth Republic, born from the Resistance, did not escape the repressive temptation.
As early as 1945 these Republican Security Companies (RS) were formed, which would be illustrated in a very sinister way.
Curiously shaped, by a strange amalgam between these GMRs (tl note: stands for Groupe Mobile de Réserve/mobile reserve group) who had served Vichy and the Gestapo and FFI(Forces Française de l'intérieur/ Inside Frecnh forces) and FTP(Francs Tireurs et Partisans/Mavericks and partisans) fighters from the maquis or urban guerrillas, the CRS(Companies Républicaines de Sécurité/Republican security companies ) were the perfect illustration of this short memory that concerned as much deep France as the new authorities.
From the end of 1947, three years after the liberation of the France from the Nazi yoke and the Vichy regime, the CRS, new soldiers of the order, did not hesitate to shoot at striking workers.
There will be three dead in Valence and one in Marseille, as well as many wounded.
Faced with the first major wave of strikes since the Liberation, the government, still composed of politicians from the Resistance, had the National Assembly pass a law called \enquote{republican defense}.
This meant the provision to the Minister of the Interior, Jules Moch, of a force of 80,000 men, responsible for \enquote{enforcing the freedom of work}\footnote{\emph{Idem.}, p. 234.}.
At the same time, a parliamentary assembly, also composed mainly of former resistance fighters, voted on texts that wanted to jeopardize the right to strike (recognized in the 1946 constitution), the right to organize, individual freedoms, and freedom of the press.
(The old class conflicts were reviving and the police were acting as arbiters in these circumstances.)
In October 1948, a major strike movement was launched by the miners, rapidly extending from Nord-Pas-de-Calais to the Basins of the Loire and the South-East.
Immediately, the Republican power sent the troops, the mobile gendarmes and policemen in large numbers, on the mine tiles and in the corons.
In all, several thousand men were released against these miners, presented two years earlier as heroes of work.
This real army launched against the \enquote{black mugs} had tanks, machine guns, chenillettes, radio cars, transport and reconnaissance planes.
It was war. At the head of this repressive force was Jules Moch, supported by the young Raymond Marcellin\footnote{\emph{Idem.}, p. 238.}.
Following the pitched battles that are sure to erupt, there will be three dead, many wounded and thousands of arrests.
In the face of this ferocious repression, the American miners' union leader, John Lewis, remarked:
\enquote{The French government would rather send American bullets into their bodies (miners) than put bread in their shrunken stomachs.}\footnote{\emph{Idem.}, pp. 238 et 239.}
On 12 November, more than a thousand miners were arrested for violating the freedom to work and three hundred of them sentenced to prison terms.
1,800 miners will be dismissed for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin alone.
The memory of the terrible years of the Occupation was barely dispelled, but the social dialogue could only take place under the shelter of the batons and guns of the CRS.
Admittedly, it is not possible to compare this repression to that experienced by the Forty-Eighters and the Communards.
Yet, just as in June 1848, and in a certain way in May 1871, the members of the forces of order were mainly from the working classes and, what is more, for some, fighters of the Resistance...
Facing the deep country, the strikers of 1947 and 1948 were alone. The keeping of order can therefore be ensured without too much fuss.
Freed from the weight of the Nazi occupation, the population of this country had returned to its usual indifferent, even selfish behavior.
Who, then, advised to shout their indignation, after May 8, 1945, when the French navy had bombed Sétif and some cities in eastern Algeria, when the army and the police, accompanied by the settlers – all tendencies combined – shot Algerian militants in the streets?
Who wanted to know that there had been tens of thousands of Algerian deaths on a land still reputed to be French while the good citizens rejoiced, on the same day, at the defeat of Nazi Germany?
This was followed by the Indochina war, with the desire to make the Vietnamese understand that democratic freedoms were reserved – sometimes – only for the French of France, then a terrible repression in Madagascar, in 1947.
After opening fire on French workers in 1947 and 1948, the police had no difficulty shooting at Algerian workers who had the audacity to join the parade of July 14, 1953, in the midst of Parisians:
\enquote{This is certainly not the first time that Algerians have been killed in demonstrations, but never before has it happened so openly, in the heart of Paris.}\footnote{Claude Angeli and Paul Gillet, \emph{La Police dans la politique} (Police in politics), Grasset, 1967.}.
Quickly, the spiral of colonial wars no longer offending a population that thought above all of its own well-being, the Algerian conflict, from the autumn of 1954, could be modestly referred to as a law enforcement operation, with hundreds of thousands of deaths at stake; preluding the collapse of this Fourth Republic born of the struggle against the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupier.
\section{The Fifth Republic, a police society}
As early as May 13, 1958, it seemed obvious that the French police were in communion of spirit with the perpetrators of the Algiers coup that would lead de Gaulle to power.
Once again Minister of the Interior, Jules Moch is no longer the idol of the police who have their eye fixed on the events in Algeria:
\enquote{The police? He has known since May 13 that there is no need to rely on her. That evening, leaving the Palais-Bourbon, he saw the agents and inspectors marching by, booing the deputies. He heard the cries of \enquote{Death to the Jews}.
The majority of Paris' 20,000 peacekeepers are won over to Commissioner Dides'\footnote{Jean Dides, police commissioner, dismissed in 1954, then rallied to Poujadism. Previously in charge of an anti-Jewish service at the Paris police prefecture from 1942 to 1944.} movement for an authoritarian regime.}\footnote{Serge et Merry Bromberger, \emph{Les 13 complots du 13 mai} (The 13 conspiracies of May 13), Fayard, 1959, p.82.}.
Quickly, after the arrival of De Gaulle in \enquote{business}, it is not appropriate to invoke human rights, especially those of Algerians.
In the autumn of 1960, the first major demonstrations for the independence of Algeria were brutally repressed.
With all the more ease that hundreds of thousands of young French people now do their military service in the Aurès, where their officers teach them to \enquote{break} these \enquote{trunks of fig trees} insensitive to civilization ...
To better control the fighting desires of Algerians of France, the prefect of police Papon decided to establish an unfair curfew, penalizing this population, already weakened, from October 5, 1961.
This is a well-studied provocation. Indeed, from January 1 to August 31, 1961, more than 450 Algerians were shot, in fact coldly murdered.
In this climate, the application of the curfew can only provoke a response. On 17 October 1961, the leaders of the FLN(tl note:Front de libération Nationale, the algerian national liberation movement) Federation of France call on Algerians to hold a peaceful demonstration in Paris.
During this evening, in front of tens of thousands of Algerians, in Sunday clothes, who came to protest \enquote{with dignity} against a scoundrel decision, the police are unleashed with a murderous savagery.
Twelve thousand people were arrested and crammed into the sports park of the Porte de Versailles, in the grounds of the Palais des Expositions, at the Vincennes sorting centre, in the very courtyard of the police prefecture where, under the gaze of the prefect Papon, murders happened.
In the streets of Paris, a huge ratonnade takes place and, from the bridges, dozens of Algerians are thrown into the Seine, in the icy cold of night\footnote{Refer to the testimonies quoted by Jean-Luc Einaudi in \emph{La Bataille de Paris} (The battle of Paris) Le Seuil, 1991.}.
This massacre, denied by the prefect Papon and the Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey, before the municipal and parliamentary assemblies, is obvious.
The IGS\rfootnote{Inspection générale des Services, the police policing the police} investigates, and discreetly suggests that there were 140 deaths.
For its part, the FLN France Federation lists more than 250 dead and some 400 missing.
This repression is hardly known to the Parisian population because many media are discreet to say the least.
Few witnesses dare to evoke the event.
Fortunately, a courageous photographer, Élie Kagan, crisscrossed Paris during this infernal night, then providing implacable documents that the press would hardly use, apart from \emph{Libération}, \emph{L'Humanité}, \emph{France-Observateur} and \emph{Témoignage Chrétien}\footnote{The photos taken that evening by Elie Kagan were collected by the Anne-Marie Métaillé editions, as well as in \emph{Le silence du fleuve} (Silence of the river), by Anne Tristan, Au nom de la mémoire, 1991.}.
Oblivion does the rest and public opinion will remember only the death of the eight communist militants, who died murdered during the demonstration of February 8, 1962, at the Charonne metro station. All French, it is true.
A police society, the Fifth Republic naturally developed parallel police forces such as the SAC, where mobsters frequented the men of the Gaullist networks.
In the sinister Ben Barka case in 1965, the active agents of the SDEC (tl:Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage, french intelligence agency from 1945 to 1982) will work in partnership with men in the field, as if it were a long habit\footnote{On the Ben Barka case,refer to Daniel Guérin's book, \emph{Ben Barka, ses assassins}(Ben Barka, his murderers), Pion, 1981.}.
In the shadow of these mobsters, there were former members of the Carlingue (French Gestapo where some policemen met in the company of mobsters) and even the prefect Papon who, like others, \enquote{covered up} this abominable operation.
It was really in May and June 1968 that the French police and gendarmerie gave the full measure of their talent.
From May 3, 1968, after the entry of the CRS at the Sorbonne, the police will go wild, attacking the students as if they were real enemies.
For six weeks, over the course of the demonstrations, thousands of Parisians – and it will be the same in many provincial cities – will be ruthlessly bludgeoned, assaulted with combat gas.
Who can know how many of them have suffered such sequelae that they have never fully recovered.
Police bludgeoned in the streets, beat boys and girls who fell to the ground, bludgeoned and sometimes tortured in police stations. It was war\footnote{Report to \emph{La Police hors la loi}, by Maurice Rajsfus, Le Cherche midi éditeur, 1996.}!
From June 1968 to March 1974, under the senior direction of Raymond Marcellin, the France was under almost permanent siege.
During this period, the real center of power was in the Ministry of the Interior.
Everything that constitutes the driving forces of the France of human rights is suspected of a spirit of protest, and necessarily repressed with the greatest rigor.
One can no longer write, express oneself publicly, publish, make films, stage plays, or even paint, sometimes, only under the vigilant control of Raymond Marcellin.
The police, and the justice at its service, watch for the slightest rustle in high schools, as at the University\footnote{Report to \emph{Mai 68, sous les pavés, la répression}(May 68, under the cobblestones, repression), by Maurice Rajsfus, Le Cherche midi éditeur, 1998.}.
A police society, the France is in great danger of abuse.
The police state is waiting for us, even when the majority changes sides. The France is one of the democratic countries with the largest law enforcement agencies. We have:
To these traditional law enforcement agencies must be added about 12,000 municipal police officers.
In large cities such as Paris, hundreds of highly repressive public transport controllers are assisted by the men of the Network Protection and Security Group (GPRS) equipped with batons and tear gas.
Nor should we forget: private security companies, often in liaison with the police, building guards, and the many indicators, paid or volunteer, that it is not possible to quantify.
In a few years with the disappearance of conscription, the government will have a professionalized army of some 250,000 men, ready to carry out all the missions of repression.
So, once again, France is not a police state, not yet, but our society is more sensitive to security ideology than to numerous violations of human rights.
Without any illusions about the capacity of the police to suppress, we must first note the inconsistencies in the recruitment and training of police officers.
Similarly, the selection criteria implemented are equally questionable.
That said, it is certain that, for the past fifteen years, it is in order not to fall into unemployment that one chooses to repress one's contemporaries.
Until about 1950, police training lasted less than a month and the level of recruitment was at the level of the certificate of studies. The police were not too rough outside of repressive missions.
Nowadays, the police academy lasts a year, and the new police officers, all at the baccalaureate level or bac plus two, have never been so racist, so sexist, so violent.
The policeman has turned into a vigilante, which is not his function, but Justice is a good mother with deviant police officers...
\section{Maurice Rajsfus}
Maurice Rajsfus is the author of twenty-two books, mainly devoted to repressive systems.
Last publications : \emph{Mai 68, sous les pavés, la répression}(May 68, under the cobblestones, repression) (Le Cherche midi éditeur, 1998) et \emph{En gros et en détail, Le Pen au quotidien} (In bulk and in detail, Le Pen on a daily basis) (Paris-Méditerranée, 1998).
He chairs the Observatory of Civil Liberties, which publishes the monthly bulletin \emph{Que fait la police?} (What does the police do?) He is one of the founders of the network Ras l'Front\rfootnote{Antifascist network, \emph{Ras l'} stands for Ras le bol, fed up with; Front for \emph{Front National}, main French far right party}.
\chapter[The Great War: 24,500 casualties per day]{The Great War: 11,500 dead and 13,000 wounded per day for three and a half years}
Jean-Pierre FLÉCHARD
\begin{flushright}
\enquote{\emph{C’est le tango des joyeux militaires}
\emph{Des gais vainqueurs de partout et d’ailleurs}
\emph{C’est le tango des fameux va-t-en-guerre}
\emph{C’est le tango de tous les fossoyeurs}}
\enquote{This is the tango of the merry soldiers
Happy winners from everywhere and elsewhere
This is the tango of the famous warmongers
This is the tango of all gravedigger!}
\textbf{Boris Vian}
~
\enquote{\emph{Celle, mon colon, que j’voudrais faire}
\emph{C’est la guerre de 14-18}}
\enquote{The one, my man, that I would like to do
It's the war of 14-18}
\textbf{Georges Brassens}
~
\enquote{\emph{Armons-nous et partez}}
\enquote{Let's arm ourselves and you leave}
\textbf{Anonymous}
\end{flushright}
Two French municipalities stand out: one is the only one not to have erected on its main square a monument to the dead of the war of 1914-1918, because its 15 mobilized all returned alive from the front,
the other, Gentioux, in the Creuse, has a monument to the dead that has never been officially inaugurated, in fact, it represents a schoolboy pointing to the inscription \enquote{Cursed be war!},
all the others have a war memorial, which reveals better than the dryness of figures the scale of the massacre.
In this field, the plaque dedicated to the dead of the 1914-1918 war, in the hall of the town hall of Bezons, bears the inscription \enquote{war to war, hatred to hatred}.
No French commune, with one exception, has escaped the gigantic butchery, which, out of 7.8 million mobilized for more than four years, or nearly 30\% of the French working population, has left 1.4 million dead on the battlefield and sent back to their homes more than a million invalids.
\section[The influence of the military-industrial lobby]{The influence of the military-industrial lobby, the international powder cartel}
From 1904, antagonisms were entrenched, national passions were exacerbated, crises multiplied and worsened, either over Morocco or over the Balkans, until 1914 when the Sarajevo attack unleashed the dreaded catastrophe, the European war.
The general situation and the balance of power were altered in Europe, not only by the Franco-British entente, but by the defeats that Russia, at that very moment (1904-1905) was suffering in the Far East.
Wilhelm II and his Chancellor Bülow tried to take advantage of the weakening of Russia to break the Entente Cordiale.
\subsection{The question of Morocco provoked a violent Franco-German conflict (1905-1906).}
Despite the continued development of German force, Wilhelm II, like Bismarck, was haunted by the fear of encirclement.
The agreement of France and England, coupled with an alliance with Russia, agreements with Italy and Spain, seemed to him to be a threat to German expansion plans.
Pushed by his advisers, Bülow and Holstein, he undertook a major diplomatic offensive, targeting both France and Russia.
On the France, Germany exercised a brutal action, bellicose in appearance, by opposing like a veto to its Moroccan policy: the kaiser's speech in Tangier, then the resignation of Delcassé had the effect on French opinion of a new Fachoda, a national humiliation.
Conversely, William II lavished friendly words on the tsar, who was angered by defeat and revolution; he thus led him to the Björkoe meeting, where a secret pact of German-Russian alliance was signed, a prelude to a great continental league of which Germany would be the head.
This policy did not produce the expected results. The Pact of Björkoe, incompatible with the French alliance, remained a dead letter.
The Algeciras Conference (1906), convened at the request of Germany to settle the Moroccan question, rejected most of the German proposals, entrusted the France and Spain with the police of the Moroccan ports.
The Entente Cordiale, far from being broken, became narrower; much more, it expanded into the Triple Entente, after England and Russia had, by the agreement of 1907, settled all their Asian disputes.
In Germany the haunting of encirclement grew, the European atmosphere became stormy. A second peace conference in The Hague (1907) failed to stop the arms race, on sea and land.
\subsection{Austro-Russian antagonism festered in the Balkans (1908-1909).}
The political or national questions that arose in the BalKans or Central Europe were even more serious than colonial disputes,
because they put at stake the existence of the Turkish Empire, the existence of Austria-Hungary itself, and in turn the the foundations of European balance.
Of these issues, the most serious were the question of Macedonia, astill Turkish province but of mixed population and coveted by Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia;
the question of Bosnia, Turkish province ruled by the Austrians, but populated by Serbs, and where the Serbian nationalism was beginning to spread;
the question of the Detroits — Bosphorus and Dardanelles — that Russia, locked in the Black Sea, wanted to open to its war fleet.
After its failures in the Far-east, Russian politics, under the leadership of Minister Isvolsky, returned to its traditional objectives in the Balkans.
However, in 1908, a Balkan crisis broke out, provoked by the Turkish Revolution:
the Young Turk National Party seized power and forced Abd-ul-Hamid to accept a constitution (the sultan, having tried to recapture power, was deposed the following year).
To put an end to the Yugoslav agitation, Austria, led by a bold minister d'Aerenthal, decreed the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bulgaria also took advantage of the crisis to proclaim itself independent. As for Isvolsky, despite all his efforts, he could not obtain from the powers the opening of the straits.
The annexation of Bosnia — a violation of the statute established in Berlin in 1878 — resulted in a European crisis.
War almost broke out between Austria and Serbia, whose national aspirations were aimed at the annexed provinces.
Russia, dissatisfied with its failure, supported the Serbs, until the day when the threatening intervention of Germany forced it to yield and Serbia, and to recognize the fait accompli (1909).
Nothing seemed to be able to resist the German force.
\subsection{To settle in Morocco, the France had to cede part of the Congo (1911).}
In Morocco, after new incidents (about Germans deserting the Foreign Legion), Germany had concluded with the France an economic agreement (1909). But this agreement worked badly.
When, to unblock the sultan and the Europeans besieged by rebels, French troops entered Fez (1911), Germany declared the status of Algeciras violated and, to obtain compensation, sent a warship to Agadir (southern coast of Morocco).
This time it encountered strong resistance. England vetoed any establishment of Germany in Morocco.
But the French government (Caillaux) was in favour of a peaceful solution; the Franco-German negotiations, although interspersed with drums of war, resulted in an agreement:
in exchange for freedom of action in Morocco, the France ceded part of the French Congo to Germany (1911).
Instead of producing appeasement, this agreement only exacerbated Franco-German passions and antagonism.
Germany, in order to intimidate its opponents, increased its armaments. In France, after so many alerts, we no longer wanted to be intimidated:
Minister Poincaré, a supporter of a policy of firmness, strengthened, through new agreements, France's ties with Russia and England (1912).
\subsection{From Morocco the crisis spread to Tripolitania and then to the Balkans (1911-1913).}
From 1911 to 1914, crises followed one another and Europe, as if caught in a fatal spiral, was blindly heading towards catastrophe.
The immediate consequence of the establishment of France and Spain in Morocco was the establishment of Italy in Tripolitania (1911).
But the Tripoli expedition spawned an Italo-Turkish War (1911-1912), during which the Italians occupied Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands.
In turn, the Italo-Turkish War spawned a war in the Balkans. A Balkan league — Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro — had been formed under the aegis of Russia.
Weakened Turkey was attacked by the coalition and defeated everywhere; the Bulgarians were stopped only 30 kilometers from Constantinople, in front of the lines of Chataldja (1912)
The collapse of Turkey finally revived all European and Balkan rivalries.
Austria, master of Bosnia, did not want at any price a Greater Serbia, to which its Serb subjects would necessarily be attracted.
To remove Serbia from the Adriatic, it created a principality of Albania. On the other hand, the partition of Macedonia gave rise to a second Balkan war (1913):
the Bulgarians, by a sudden attack, tried to crush the Serbs; they failed and were themselves defeated by a Serbia-Greece-Romania coalition.
The Treaty of Bucharest gave Silistria to the Romanians, Thessaloniki to the Greeks, Monastir with much of Macedonia to the Serbs. The Turks kept in Europe only Constantinople and Adrianople.
This pacification was not sustainable. No agreement was possible between Austrian policy and Serbian national demands. Russia's relations with Austria and Germany continued to worsen.
All the powers, worried, intensified their armaments (military laws of 1913 in Germany and France). We had reached the point where each of the antagonistic groups, confident in its strengths, was determined not to back down from the other.
\subsection{After the Sarajevo bombing, the Austro-Serbian War led to Russian intervention and general war.}
On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, the Archduke, heir to Austria and his wife were murdered. The murderer was a Bosnian, but the attack had been prepared in Belgrade.
(It was later known that at the head of the plot was an officer of the Serbian General Staff, the colonel Dmitrievich, leader of a powerful secret society, the Black Hand.)
Long eager to attack Serbia, Austria had was hitherto retained by Germany. This time it obtained its support. In secret meetings, in Potsdam (5-6 July), in a Council in Vienna (7 July), the risk of a European war was weighed and accepted.
William II, it is true, considered war unlikely (the tsar would not support regicides) and expected the neutrality of England with which he was about to conclude a colonial agreement.
Suddenly, on 23 July, Austria presented an ultimatum to Serbia, whose demands were deliberately unacceptable. Despite a very conciliatory response (and a call for arbitration), there was a Austrian-Serb break-up on July 25 , and declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July.
But already the location of the conflict, demanded by Germany, proved impossible. Russia, determined not to let Serbia be crushed, began its military preparations.
In vain the English government, very peaceful, multiplied the offers of mediation. Germany rejected them at first, and then only answered them when English neutrality began to appear doubtful (29-30 July). Too late.
Austrian intransigence played into the hands of the military staffs eager to act. Russia decided on July 29 the partial mobilization, on July 30 the general mobilization.
Germany retaliated on July 31 with a double ultimatum, to Russia and France, followed on August 1 by a declaration of war on Russia, then on August 3 by a declaration of war on the France.
As soon as the conflict began, the Triple Alliance broke up while the Triple Entente asserted itself. Italy invoked the purely defensive character of the Triplice to remain neutral.
The English government, very divided and hesitant, initially undertook only to defend the French coast of the English Channel (2 August).
The violation of Belgian neutrality by German troops decided it to break up with Germany (4 August) and to commit itself thoroughly:
\enquote{Just for a piece of paper!} cried German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg (alluding to the treaties that guaranteed Belgian neutrality).
In parallel with the great politico-military maneuvers, the great European industry has not failed to organize itself to make governments and peoples bear the weight of its expansion.
There, nationalism and patriotism are no longer in order, only the cash drawer counts. A true internationale is thus organized, extending its ramifications to all future belligerent countries.
Two examples will suffice:
The International Organization of Powder, Explosives and Ammunition Manufacturers:
{
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{--}
\renewcommand{\labelitemii}{}
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-0.25em}
\item Nobel Trust (Great Britain), subsidiaries:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-0.25em}
\item England 7
\item Germany 5
\item Japan 1
\end{itemize}
\item Rhein-Siegener (Germany), 3 factories
\item Kôln Hottweiler powder factory (Germany)
\item Various German arms and ammunition factories
\item French Dynamite Society (France)
\item Société Générale pour la fabrication de la dynamite
(France)
\item Franco-Russian Dynamite Company (France)
\end{itemize}
}
The steel industry:
{
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{}
\renewcommand{\labelitemii}{}
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-0.25em}
\item UNITED HARVEY STEEL COMPANY
\item Vickers \& Armstrong (Great Britain)
\item Krupp \& Stumm (Germany)
\item Schneider-Le Creusot (France)
\item Societa degli alti forni Fondiere Acciane di Terni (Italy)
\item Participations through Krupp and Schneider in participation
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-0.25em}
\item Skoda \& Pilsen (Austria)
\item Poutiloff (Russia) (share, complementary to Voss)
\end{itemize}
\item Trade agreements to limit competition:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-0.25em}
\item Le Creusot – Krupp
\item Armstrong — Krupp
\end{itemize}
\end{itemize}
}
They obviously maintain links with arms manufacturers, in particular:
{
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{}
\renewcommand{\labelitemii}{}
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-0.25em}
\item Deutsche Waffen-und-Munitions Fabriken in Berlin
\item Waffenfabrik
\item Doellingen Workshops
\item Subsidiaries:
\item 1) Germany: Mauser: 1,985,000 M
\item Düren (metallurgy): 1,000,000 M
\item 2) Belgium: National Factory of Weapons of War of Herstal:
3,000,000 shares
\item 3) France: French company for the manufacture of ball bearings:
total capital
\end{itemize}
}
\begin{table}
\caption{Financial situation of the two main belligerents in 1914}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|l|r|r|}
\hline
& GERMANY & FRANCE \\
\hline
Population & 67 million & 39.6 million \\
\hline
National wealth & 400 billion & 325 billion \\
\hline
National revenues & 52.5 billion & 36.5 billion \\
\hline
Average national wealth per capita & 5,970 F & 8,207 F \\
\hline
Average national income per capita & 783 F & 946 F \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
\begin{table}
\caption{Production (million tonnes) in 1914}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|l|r|r|r|}
\hline
& COAL & STEEL & CAST IRON \\
\hline
Germany & 191 & 18 & 12 \\
\hline
Austria-Hungary & 15 & 5 & 4 \\
\hline
France & 41 & 4 & 9 \\
\hline
Great Britain & 35 & 4 & 5 \\
\hline
Russia & 292 & 9 & 11 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
Thanks to these two internationals, which are only the most obvious example, imitated as they were by the suppliers of the stewards, the vehicle manufacturers, the manufacturers of clothing, etc.,
the war would prove to be an excellent deal for big international industry, which would use its influence to make it last as long as possible, stirring up nationalist passions through a press financed by them openly or covertly.
\section{The great butchery}
The European war has taken on the proportions of an immense cataclysm.
It has spread to the whole world; but it was in France that it reached its maximum intensity and caused the most devastation; and it was in France that the German force finally had to capitulate.
The coalition of the Central Empires (strengthened in October 1914 from Turkey) seemed far inferior to a coalition that encompassed the France, the Russian and British empires, Belgium, Serbia (and even Japan).
But England had only a small army; the Russian army, very numerous, was poorly organized; everything depended on the resistance that the France would offer to the powerful German army.
\subsection{Germany is trying to overwhelm the France and seems on the verge of success.}
Germany's plan was to throw itself into France with almost all its strength, quickly put it out of action, and then turn against Russia.
Undoubtedly, it did not have as in 1870 a great numerical superiority, but it counted on the superiority of its technical preparation, its reserve formations, its heavy field artillery, its siege artillery (guns of 420), finally on the surprise effect that its maneuver in Belgium would produce.
The French army possessed a superior equipment of light artillery, the 75; but it lacked almost completely heavy artillery; his infantrymen in red trousers were target; they had been trained in a reckless tactic of excessive bayonet offensive.
The first major battle, known as the Battle of the Borders, took place from 20 to 23 August. Both opponents had taken the offensive.
The German General Staff, commanded by de Moltke, wanted to turn the eastern fortifications and overflow the left wing of the French army: for this purpose he forced the fortified camp of Liège and threw 5 armies out of 7 into Belgium.
The French General Staff, commanded by Joffre, wanted to paralyze the enemy maneuver with a lightning attack in Lorraine and the Ardennes.
But the French offensive, which ventured into difficult terrain, was broken at Morhange in Lorraine (20 August), in the Ardennes (22 August).
The Franco-English left wing, attacked at Charleroi and Mons and threatened with envelopment, managed to evade and retreat (23 August).
The German victory resulted in the loss of Belgium and the invasion of France. The Germans, haunted by the fear of the snipers, took terrible repressive measures (sack of Leuven and Dinant).
\subsection{The German plan failed on the Marne, then on the Yser.}
However, the goal, the annihilation of the French forces, was not achieved.
By a rapid advance, the Germans endeavour to wrap the opponent's wings, or to corner him on the Swiss border.
But in Lorraine, from 29 August, they were held in check; the other French armies retreated methodically,
until the day when the reckless advance of the German right (von Kluck) provided the governor of Paris, Gallieni, with the opportunity for a flank attack (5 September).
At Joffre's call, all the French and English armies then resumed the offensive (6 September).
After several days of struggle, the Germans, threatened to see their right wing broken and cut in two, retreated to the Aisne where they retreated.
The victory of the Marne resulted not only in the withdrawal of the Germans, but in the collapse of their initial plan; it also had great moral significance and restored to France confidence in itself.
Seeking to outflank each other on the western side, the two adversaries eventually extended their lines to the sea.
After the capture of Antwerp (9 October), the Germans again attempted to strike a decisive blow by seizing Calais;
but all their assaults were repulsed before Ypres and the Yser by the Allied forces, placed under the direction of Foch (October-November).
Thus, contrary to predictions, the 1914 campaign ended in the west without decisive results.
It was the same on all fronts.
In the east, the Russians, who had invaded East Prussia to release France, suffered a disaster at Tannenberg (29 August), but they defeated the Austrians at Lemberg in Galicia (September).
Bloody battles without result took place in Poland around Warsaw (November-December). At sea, the Germans did not dare to risk great naval battles; they were limited to commerce raiding, then to submarine warfare.
Finally, if they could not prevent the Allies from conquering their colonies, the Turkish alliance allowed them to ambush in the straits and threaten Egypt.
\subsection{Movement warfare is followed by trench warfare}
Both exhausted, the armies came to a standstill face to face, in improvised entrenchments that formed a continuous line — 780 kilometers from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Thus the war turned into trench warfare.
On both sides, work was made to constantly strengthen defensive organizations. — networks of barbed wire, shelters dug underground or concreted, succession of lines at depth, barrages, flanking machine guns.
Weapons suitable for close combat, grenades and bomb launchers, defensive weapons abandoned since the Middle Ages, steel helmets, were put back into use.
But on both sides they also worked to perfect the offensive means to pierce the opposing lines: heavy artillery especially and aviation developed in colossal proportions.
We worked hard to find new machines, capable of producing a lightning surprise effect: the Germans made use in 1915 of flaming liquids and asphyxiating gases, the French and the English built from 1916 tanks or tanks, mounted on steel tracks.
To manufacture this enormous war material, it was necessary to multiply the war industries: the war took more and more a scientific and industrial character.
As a result, it also became an economic war. England, master of the seas, blocked German ports and hindered German supplies (especially food products).
Germany retaliated by inaugurating the blockade by submarines (torpedo of the large English liner Lusitania, May 7, 1915, more than 1100 victims).
\subsection{The war continued in 1915 and 1916 without decisive results.}
From year to year, the war continued, expanded, intensified without leading to more decisive results than in 1914.
The Allies had the superiority of the population, but, for lack of preparation, method and especially for lack of a single direction, they could not take advantage of it at first (England did not establish compulsory service until 1916).
The year 1915 was marked by the entry into the war of Italy against Austria, Bulgaria against Serbia and the Allies. It was above all the year of eastern setbacks:
while the Anglo-French failed in their attempts to force the Dardanelles by sea and land, the Austro-Germans managed to break through the Russian front of Galicia, to push back the Russian armies, to occupy all of Poland, Lithuania and Courland;
then, reinforced by the Bulgarians, they crushed the Serbian army and conquered Serbia (October-December);
an Allied relief expedition landed too late at Thessaloniki, but remained there despite the opposition of King Constantine and rallied the remnants of the Serbian army.
On the Western Front, the multiple French offensives (Vauquois, Les Éparges, Battles of Champagne and Artois) only resulted in decimating the numbers (400,000 men killed or prisoners).
The Italian army came to rest in the lines of Trisonzo, on the road to Trieste.
The year 1916 was marked by the entry into the war of Portugal and Romania on the side of the Allies. It was especially the year of Verdun, the greatest battle of the war by its duration and its relentlessness:
Returning to their 1914 plan, the Germans (Falkenhayn) wanted to strike a decisive blow on their main opponent, the French army;
they attacked in front of Verdun (21 February), but their furious efforts, prolonged for five months, broke against the stubborn resistance of the French, commanded by General Pétain.
Military supremacy appeared to be on the verge of passing to the Allies, who in turn took the offensive on the Somme and Galicia.
Germany in distress handed over the supreme command to the victors of the Russians, Hindenburg and his deputy Ludendorff. They managed to stop the Allied offensive and conquer almost all of Romania.
At sea, the British and German fleets clashed at the Great Battle of Jutland without decisive results (31 May 1916).
\subsection{In 1917, submarine warfare and the Russian Revolution jeopardized the Allied cause.}
Despite its conquests, Germany was exhausted by the blockade.
To impose peace on the Allies, it resorted to desperate means, such as excessive submarine warfare (January 1917).
The new submarine war, depriving the neutrals of the right of free navigation, had an almost immediate effect: the entry into the war of the United States against Germany, at the call of President Wilson (April 6, 1917).
But the United States had only a small army, and its intervention in Europe seemed difficult, if not impossible.
Moreover, Germany thought itself saved by the Russian Revolution. The misconduct of the war had ended up discrediting tsarism.
Suddenly the revolt broke out on March 11, 1917, and Nicholas II had to abdicate (March 15). The Russian Revolution soon took on the character of a social revolution:
Supported by the soviets, committees of delegates of the workers and soldiers, the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Trotsky, seized power and maintained it (November 7). All of Eastern Europe was plunged into anarchy.
After unsuccessfully proposing a general armistice, the Bolsheviks concluded the Brest-Litovsk Armistice with Germany (December) and began peace negotiations. Germany seemed to have won the game in the east.
In the west, the German army, initially cautiously held on the defensive, had been brought back by Hindenburg to strong positions against which a new French offensive, even more reckless than the previous ones, broke (Battle of the Aisne, 16 April).
With troops brought back from the east, the Austro-Germans were able to break the Italian front at Caporetto (October) and invade Veneto as far as Piave.
Signs of weariness were manifested in all the belligerents (secret negotiations, mutinies, defeatism). But in France, the coming to power of Clemenceau revived energies and put an end to any policy of compromise.
The new head of the army, Pétain, knew how to inspire trust and avoid unnecessary killings.
\subsection{In 1918, the Great Battle of France ended with the defeat of Germany.}
In March 1918, Germany imposed the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk on Russia and Bucharest on Romania.
Then, for the third time, it resolved to concentrate all its forces in the west and strike a decisive blow on the Allies before the Americans entered the line.
The German offensive that began on March 21 lasted until July 18. Led by Ludendorff, it resulted in great tactical successes, but not a decisive victory.
Thanks to a new method — absolute secrecy of preparations, intensive and brief artillery preparation, massive use of toxic shells — Ludendorff had solved the problem of breakthrough.
On three occasions, in Picardy (21 March), Flanders (9 April), and the Aisne (27 May), the English and French fronts were broken. The Germans approached Amiens, Calais, Paris, which they bombarded without truce by planes and long-range guns (120 km).
The situation was critical for the Allies. They finally decided to entrust the single command to the French General Foch (26 March). The United States hastened its troop shipments (nearly 10,000 men a day in June).
Pétain developed new offensive and defensive methods (attack without artillery preparation, mass use of light tanks and aircraft). In June, a fourth German offensive on Compiègne was quickly halted.
The reversal of the battle took place from 15 to 18 July: it was the second victory of the Marne, a decisive event of the war.
Stopped in their offensive in Champagne, then suddenly attacked from the flank, the Germans, as in 1914, had to retreat from the Marne to the Aisne.
The victory of the Marne marked the beginning of a great Allied offensive. Foch did not give the bewildered enemy time to pull himself together and replenish his reserves.
By a methodical widening of the battle, he multiplied his attacks on all points of the front; the Germans were constantly forced to retreat under threat of envelopment.
Successively, all their defensive positions, the formidable Hindenburg Line itself, were forced (September-October). The Allies returned to Saint-Quentin, Laon, Lille.
At the same time, in Macedonia (15 September) and Palestine (18 September), decisive victories forced Bulgaria (29 September) and Turkey (30 October) to lay down their arms.
Austria-Hungary broke up and, defeated by the Italians at Vittorio-Veneto (27-30 October), abandoned the struggle (3 November).
To avoid a total disaster, Germany, in the midst of a revolution, accepted all the conditions imposed by the armistice of 11 November; by the 9th, William II had fled to Holland.
This is only the visible part of the operations, the appetite for conquest, the thirst for profit, the secret war goals and behind-the-scenes maneuvers have been its characteristics.
But under the great patriotic impulses hides a more sordid reality, that of the fierce defense of special interests.
Only one example among others illustrates the sordid reality: the fate of the Briey-Thionville basin.
\subsection{A sanctuary of international capital: the Briey-Thionville basin.}
The cannon merchants, the main ones being Schneider in France and Krupp in Germany, were closely united in a kind of international trust whose secret purpose was to increase the immense fortune of its members by increasing war production on both sides of the border.
To this end, they had powerful means to sow panic among the population of both countries, in order to persuade each that the other had only one goal: to attack it.
Many journalists, parliamentarians, were paid handsomely by them to fill this role.
Moreover, an important French munitionnaire, de Wendel, a deputy moreover, had as a cousin another German munitionnaire, Von Wendel, sitting in the Reichstag.
They were in the front row, in every country, to buy consciences and make their patriotic cries of alarm heard.
All this fine team – cannon dealers, journalists, parliamentarians – easily managed to launch the two peoples into a crazy arms race that nothing had to stop, until war.
Their respective heads of state, far from holding them back, encouraged them.
And in particular our President of the Republic, Raymond Poincaré, a Lorrain, raised in the idea of revenge and ready to any lie, to any package, to reconquer Alsace and Lorraine.
It was for these different reasons that the German and French soldiers would cut each other's throats.
They had been taught to hate each other, while the ammo makers and the staffs, fraternally united, followed with satisfaction, in the rear, the unfolding of the drama they had jointly unleashed.
To deepen this immense deception and show that patriotism and the defense of the territory are only empty words used to cover the most abominable fiddling, it is necessary to tell the story of the Briey basin, because it is characteristic, symptomatic and, on its own, should disgust the peoples to take up arms.
The iron mines of Briey-Thionville straddled the borders of Luxembourg, France and Germany. The Franco-German family Wendel owned them.
This basin was of paramount importance for the course of the war. Mr. Engerand, in a speech delivered to the Chamber of Deputies after the conflict on January 31, 1919, said: \enquote{In 1914, the Briey region alone accounted for 90\% of all our iron ore production.}
Poincaré himself once wrote:
\enquote{The occupation of the Briey basin by the Germans would be nothing less than a disaster since it would put in their hands incomparable metallurgical and mining wealth whose usefulness can be immense for that of the belligerents who will hold them.}
However, an extraordinary fact happened: as early as August 6, 1914, the basin was occupied by the Germans without any resistance.
Even more extraordinary: the major general in charge of the defense of this region, General Verraux, later revealed that his instruction (contained in an envelope to be opened in case of mobilization) formally ordered him to abandon Briey without a fight.
The truth, known long after, was the following: an agreement had been made between some members of the General Staff and French munitionnaires to leave the basin in the hands of the Germans so that the war would be prolonged
(the Germans would not have been able to continue it without the iron ore) and the profits of the gun merchants would be increased.
And long live the self-defense in the name of which we were gutted everywhere on the battlefields!
But this story — how edifying! — is not over.
During the whole conflict, there was not a single French offensive against Briey! However, it was not for lack of warnings.
Indeed, in the midst of the war, the Director of Mines sent the following note to Senator Bérenger:
\enquote{If the region of Thionville (Briey) were occupied by our troops, Germany would be reduced to the approximately 7 million tons of poor minerals it derives from Prussia and various other states:
All its manufactures would be stopped. It therefore seems that it can be said that the occupation of the Thionville region would immediately end the war, because it would deprive Germany of almost all the metal it needs for its armaments.}
The French General Staff and the President of the Republic were warned a lot of these facts.
Complete files on this case were even supplied to Poincaré by the deputy Engerand.
Poincaré refused to intervene. The General Staff refused any offensive on Briey's side.
In the absence of an offensive, of retaking the ground, we could have bombed Briey to make the facilities unusable.
On the contrary, secret agreements were made between the French and German general staffs so that trains filled with ore heading to Germany would not be bombed under any circumstances.
By the way, let's say that, of course, these same staffs had also decided not to destroy their respective headquarters...
These two gangs of mobsters \enquote{played fair}.
French airmen, however, disobeyed the orders received and dropped a few bombs on Briey's facilities. They were severly punished.
Through what means did the bombing bans had been given? By a certain Lieutenant Lejeune — all-powerful, although a simple lieutenant — who, in civilian life, before the war,
was engineer attached to the mines of Joeuf and employee of M. de Wendel.
\emph{Galtier-Boissière}:
\enquote{So as not to harm very powerful private interests, and to avoid to violate the secret agreements concluded between French and german metallurgists,
were sacrificed, in ineffective military enterprises, hundreds of thousands of human lives, except on one point:
Briey-Thionville, from which, for four years, Germany in peace drew the means to continue the struggle.}
But Wendel's Franco-German family was making a profit!
This is just one example, among many, of the collusion of ammo makers and governments of countries at war.
And yet, the human toll has been very heavy:
\begin{table}
\caption{Human toll of the 14/18 war}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|l|r|}
\hline
Mobilized & 62,110,000 \\
\hline
Deaths & 8,345,000 \\
\hline
Injured & 20,000,000 \\
\hline
Civilian deaths & 10,000,000 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|l|r|r|}
\hline
& Mobilized & Dead \\
\hline
Russia & 12,000,000 & 1,700,000 \\
\hline
France & 8,400,000 & 1,350,000 \\
\hline
British Empire & 8,900,000 & 900,000 \\
\hline
Italy & 5,600,000 & 650,000 \\
\hline
USA & 4,350,000 & 115,000 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
These figures are self-explanatory. That's more than 5,000 deaths per day on all fronts throughout the war
\section{Post-war}
\subsection{Defeated Germany signs the Treaty of Versailles.}
The armistice of 11 November was tantamount to a capitulation of Germany.
It forced it to give its fleet, part of its equipment of war and to evacuate the left bank of the Rhine that the Allies occupied.
The French received an enthusiastic welcome in Alsace-Lorraine.
Peace was settled by the inter-allied conference in Paris that opened in January 18, 1919 under the presidency of Clemenceau. 27 States were represented.
Actually all the important decisions were taken in small committee by the President of the United States Wilson, the British First Minister Lloyd George and Clemenceau.
As soon as 8 January 1918, President Wilson had formulated in 14 points his programme for peace;
this programme, which served as a basis for the work of the conference, aimed at the establishment of a new international order,
founded on the right of peoples to self-determination and through organization of a general society of nations.
But if the masses were enthusiastic for such a program, leaders and diplomats were skeptical. For Clemenceau, the main problem was to break the German force.
After difficult negotiations, the Treaty of Versailles, imposed on Germany, was signed on June 28, 1919.
The Treaty established a Society of nations, first open to the Allies and neutrals and responsible for resettle disputes through arbitration.
Germany was to return Alsace-Lorraine to France, Posnania to Poland (with a corridor giving to access to the Baltic) and accept that the fate of Schleswig, the Polish Prussia, upper Silesia was settled by plebiscite.
Besides it renounced all its colonies; it undertook to repair all damage to the France and its allies.
France, whose territory had been ravaged, received, in compensation for its mines destroyed in the North, the property of the saar mines (the territory itself was placed for fifteen years under international control).
As garantees against Germany, it obtained:
1. the reduction of the army German to 100,000 men;
2. the temporary occupation of the left bank of the Rhine by Allied forces for a period of five to fifteen years;
3. a promise of Anglo-American assistance in case aggression (promise cancelled as a result of opposition from the American Senate).
Back in the United States, President Wilson was unable to obtain the ratification of the treaty.
The United States refused to join the Society of Nations and concluded a separate treaty with Germany (1921).
\subsection{Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire are dismembered.}
The Treaty of Versailles was supplemented by the Treaties of Saint-Germain with Austria, Neuilly with Bulgaria, Trianon with Hungary, Sèvres with Turkey.
These treaties enshrined the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire and considerably altered the territorial status of Central and Levant Europe.
Austria and Hungary, separated from each other, became small states, one reduced to its German provinces, the other to territories of Magyar population.
Their Slavic provinces were divided between resurrected Poland, the new state of Czechoslovakia, and Serbia transformed into a United Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes — or Yugoslavia.
Transylvania was given to Romania which became a large state of 500,000 km2. Italy received Istria with Trieste and Trentino; it disputed with the Yugoslavs the possession of Fiume and the Dalmatian coast.
Bulgaria was losing all access to the sea. Greece received Thrace with Adrianople, and, in Asia, the port of Smyrna.
Turkey was reduced to the territory of Constantinople in Europe and Asia Minor or Anatolia. The straits came under international control, Egypt under the English protectorate;
the other Turkish provinces in Asia were to be organized into free states and placed provisionally under the tutelage of a mandatory power of the League of Nations.
All these treaties were difficult to implement, especially with regard to the demarcation of the new borders.
One could foresee that pacification would be long, painful, interrupted by new crisis. But the world was putting its hope in the League of Nations. We know what happened to it.
\begin{flushright}
\textbf{Jean-Pierre Fléchard}
\end{flushright}
\section{A few works}
~~~\, ALLARD Paul, \emph{Les dessous de la guerre révélés par les comités secrets} (The backstage of the war revealed by the secret committees), Paris, 1932
DELAISI Francis, \emph{Le Patriotisme des plaques blindées} (The Patriotism of Armored Plates). Taken separately from the paper La Paix par le droit, Nîmes, 1913
FERRO Marc, \emph{La Grande Guerre} (The Great War), Paris, 1968
GAMBIEZ, SUIRE, \emph{Histoire de la Première Guerre mondiale} (History of world war one), Paris, 1968
GIRARDET Raoul, \emph{La Société militaire dans la France contemporaine} (The military Society in contemporary France), Paris, 1953
JOLY Bertrand, The De Wendel Family Archives
MAYER A., \emph{Politics and Diplomacy of Peace Making. Containment and Conterrevolution at Versailles}, New York, 1967
MEYER, DUCASSE, FERREUX, \emph{Vie et mort des Français} (Life and death of the French), Pans, 1959
OLPHE-GALLLARD G, \emph{Histoire économique et financière de la guerre 1914-1918} (Economic and financial history of the 1914-1918 war), Paris, 1925
RENOUVIN Pierre, \emph{La Crise européenne et la Première Guerre mondiale} (The european crisis and World War One), Paris, 1962
RENOUVIN Pierre, \emph{La Première Guerre mondiale} (World War one), Paris, 1965
TANNERY, Finance and national defense, \emph{Revue des questions de Défense nationale} (National Defence Issues Review), may 1939
TOUTALN J., \emph{La Question du bassin de Briey} (The Question of the Briey Basin), Taken separately from the paper L’Aide morale, no date (1916?)
VALLUY, DUFOURCQ, \emph{La Première Guerre mondiale} (World war one), Paris 1968
