@ -1041,4 +1041,391 @@ Reminders have something mind-blowing, in the long run. Let's not insist? Maybe.
Roger Bordier is a novelist and essayist. Among his titles: Les blés, Prix Renaudot, Un âge d'or, le Tour de ville, Meeting, La Grande vie, La Belle de mai. Last publication: Chronique de la cité joyeuse, (Albin Michel, 1996).
\chapter{1744-1849, A Lyon's century: The canuts against profit's cannibalism}
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.
(instruments, equipment, installations).
To live, the salaried "workshop manager" shared with his "companions" the paid part of the collective work while ensuring "independently" (!) the equipment costs for the modernization and maintenance of its looms.
\section{Division of labour and exploitation in Lyon in the eighteenth century}
This is the reason why, in this city where more than a third of the population, from the eighteenth century, living meagerly from the production of fabrics as prestigious as expensive,
the "wages question" has imposed itself by dominating all social relations.
In his book "on the Silk Worker, monograph of the Lyon weaver"\footnote{Justin Godart, 1899, Lyon-Paris-1st part, p. 92-93}, the radical-socialist deputy Justin Godart, successively Minister of Labour,
Resistance fighter and provisional mayor of Lyon in 1944, highlights the role of the 1744 regulation that enshrines the definitive structure of the Lyon's silk factory.
He considers that this text set "the state of the master worker in contract and that of the master merchant, manufacturer or having manufactured".
And he adds: "The whole history of the factory will be the story of the struggle between (the weavers) and the master merchants.
And what will emerge from the study of the regulations is the enslavement of the former. The freedom of labor was only a word, the work of the merchants was only a spoliation."
This regulation of 1744, known in July, already provoked a workers' riot in the city on August 6 and 7, of such importance that the regulation was reported…
But at the beginning of 1745, after the irruption in Lyon of the troops commanded by the Count of Lautrec, it was restored while the repression was implemented.
On March 30, 1745, Étienne Mariechander, sentenced to make amends with a sign bearing the words "seditious silk worker" was hanged and strangled on Place des Terreaux.
Other penalties were distributed inflicting on the culprits a shipment to the galleys between 4 years and life, this after being marked with a red iron.
On the eve of the Revolution, in August 1786, during a wage dispute, the first great workers' militant in Lyon's history emerged:
Denis Monnet, inspiration of the "Revolt of the 2 cents" (two cents of increase per woven yardstick). A remarkably organized strike of weaving and hat makers broke out on 6 August.
On the 8th, the marshalcy slashed the demonstrators: 2 killed, a dozen wounded.
Among the troops gathered to fight this sedition, there is a battalion of the Fère whose second lieutenant is none other than the young Napoleon Bonaparte.
However, on August 9, to calm things down, the increase was granted by the city's Consular Corps. But on September 3, 1786, a decision of the king overturned this decision.
This is the signal of a new repression: two hat makers and a weaver are hanged, a multitude of prosecutions are opened including that of Denis Monnet arrested and thrown in prison.
But the Revolution is looming. Monnet, provisionally released in 1787, resumed the fight, addressing the Estates General and the King in 1789 in an astonishing memoir that announced the foundations of the modern syndicalist struggle.
He denounced the practices of the merchant-manufacturers who imposed after 1786 the return to the "contract by mutual agreement" between the client and the worker:
\begin{displayquote}
Between men equal in means and power, who by this reason cannot be subject to the discretion of one or the other, the freedom established by this regulation can only be advantageous to them;
but with regard to the silk workers, dismissed by all means, whose subsistence depends entirely on their daily work, this freedom leaves them totally at the mercy of the manufacturer, this freedom leaves them totally at the mercy of the manufacturer, who can, without harm, <suspend his manufacture and thereby reduce the worker to the wage he set as he pleases, knowing that the latter, forced by the imperative law of need, will soon be obliged to submit to the law he wants to impose on him\footnote{Grievances of the Master Workers addressed to the King and the Assembled Nation – Presentation F. Rude, Fédérop-Lyon, 1976 – pp. 5 and 6.}.
\end{displayquote}
Between 1789 and 1793, thanks to the Revolution, Monnet and his friends managed to impose, through the elected municipalities, a parity negotiation with the merchant manufacturers, to set a piece rate,
a real guaranteed minimum wage revisable every year according to the cost of living, anticipation of a sliding scale of wages. In 1792-1793 with the support of signed petitions in popular clubs, the system is applied.
But the Revolution of 1789 was that of a given epoch dominated by a bourgeoisie anxious to set limits to workers' demands. The Lyon's one is singularly timid in terms of social innovations.
It gets rid of the supporters of Bertrand and Châlier, those "maniacss" who destroy the economic order and threaten its supremacy.
In 1793 it made a pact with yesterday's opponents in a secession that was harshly repressed by the Republican armies.
After the reconquest of Lyon, on October 9, 1793, Fouché and Collot d'Herbois, rejecting Couthon's concern for selective moderation, sent Denis Monnet to the guillotine on November 27, 1793, "guilty" of not having revoked his official duties in his neighborhood!
Beyond the murky personality of Fouché, the servant of all regimes, lies the ambiguity of a power which, on March 17, 1795 (27 ventôse Year III), in an instruction to the authorities of the Rhône department persisted in holding a "social language":
\begin{displayquote}
The Revolution would be a political and social monster if it were intended to ensure the bliss of a few hundred individuals and to consolidate the misery of 24 million citizens (…).
The bourgeois aristocracy, if it had existed, would soon have produced the financial aristocracy, the latter would have engendered the nobiliary aristocracy, for the rich man soon thought of himself as made from a different dough than other men\footnote{Patrick Kessel, french proletariat before Marx – Tome I – Plon, p.480.}.
\end{displayquote}
Lip service or warning against the possible betrayals of a revolution by those who proclaim themselves its guides?
What remains is the orientation that will favor the triumph of capital. On the cultural level, there is an economic thought that Turgot and his physiocrats, Adam Smith and Ricardo have laid the foundations:
that of a fatalistic liberalism that condemns as a major mistake any regulatory intervention of states.
While waiting for the optimists, those who, like John Stuart Mill or J. B. Say, will have absolute confidence in the "invisible hand of the market" to solve in pain – provided they are wise enough – the social disaters of capitalist development…
With, as an adjuvant, the reinforcement of moralizing and necessary reason, such as this speech of the Lyon abbot Mayet held in 1786, in the middle of the "2 cents crisis":
\begin{displayquote}
To ensure and maintain the prosperity of our factories, it is necessary that the worker never gets rich, that he has precisely what he needs to eat well and dress …
In a certain class of the people, too much affluence makes industry asleep, engenders idleness and all the vices that depend on it. As the worker gets richer, he becomes picky on the choice and wage of labor.
No one is unaware that it is mainly to the low price of labour that the factories of Lyon owe their astonishing prosperity.
If necessity ceases to compel the worker to receive from the occupation whatever wage he is offered, if he manages to free himself from this kind of servitude,
if the profits exceed the needs to the point that he can subsist for some time without the help of his hands, he will use that time to form a league.
Knowing that the merchant cannot eternally do without him, he will in turn dare to prescribe laws that will put him out of state to support any competition with foreign manufactures,
and from this overthrow to which the well-being of the worker will have given rise, will come the total ruin of the factory.
It is therefore very important for the Manufacturers of Lyon to retain the worker in a need for continuous work, never to forget that the low price of labor is not only advantageous for himself but that it becomes so again by making the worker more laborious,
more well-behaved, more submissive to his wills\footnote{Abbé F. Mayet, Memory on Lyon's manufactories, 1786.}.
\end{displayquote}
Revealing text if there is one and which explains what the historian Maurice Garden writes in his thesis Lyon and the Lyonnais in the eighteenth century:
\begin{displayquote}
The more power liberal theories have in the country, the more the sovereignty of the economic laws of supply and demand is asserted, laws which, more than the regulations themselves,
push for the enslavement of the workers to those who give them work and pay them a wage\footnote{Maurice Garden, Lyon and Lyonnais in the XVIIIth century, Flammarion, 1975, p. 331.}.
\end{displayquote}
The consequence, Jaurès had seen it well:
\begin{displayquote}
The class of the Lyon master workers is in the spirit of resistance and organization or even by the sharpness of certain social formulas ahead of the working class of the eighteenth century\footnote{J. Jaurès, Socialist history of the revolution, 1939 ESI, Tome 1, p. 111.}.
\end{displayquote}
\section{1831: The canuts facing capitalism}
The revolt of the "canuts" of November 1831 because of its national and international repercussions is the best known in its broad outline. It has also been the subject of numerous works\footnote{See F. Rude, Les Révoltes des Canuts (The canuts revolts) (nov. 1831-avril 1834), Paris, Maspero 1982 and Maurice Moissonnier, Les Canuts "Vivre en travail ou mourir en combattant" (The Canuts: "to live working or die fighting", Éditions Sociales, 1988.}.
Let us remember the main features. In Lyon as in Paris (where Thiers called for a political strike by printers!), the action of the world of work was decisive, in July 1830,
in the final confrontation between the rising bourgeoisie and the aristocracy brought back to power at the Restoration.
In the Rhone city, the "wage question" always arises, revived by the alternation of crisis (the "dead") and recoveries (the "presses").
The migration of trades on the Croix-Rousse plateau, an independent commune (outside the octrois(*) barriers of Lyon, where life is cheaper) has tightened the solidarity of weavers.
The sycophancy of the press celebrating the role of "our good, our excellent workers" emboldens them. The liberalization of the law on the press allowed them in October 1831 to launch a workers' newspaper:
L'Écho de la Fabrique. Born in 1828, an association of master workers, Le Devoir Mutuel, skillfully divided into sections of 20 members so as not to contravene the law, created the conditions for developing demands that the weekly publication could popularize.
The attitude of the prefect Bouvier du Molart who, with the services rendered to the family of the President of the Council, Perrier, during the Restoration, believed that he could have a latitude of autonomous decisions and claimed to present himself as "the father of the workers",
opened the possibilities of an arbitration favorable to the weavers on their demand for an increase in the rate of wages.
Let us add that the canuts of 1831 have not forgotten the texts and experiences of Denis Monnet: the discovery in 1973, in an attic of the Croix-Rousse of a notebook of Masson-Sibut, one of the leaders of the Devoir Mutuel, proves it.
This document contains large excerpts from the 1789 memoir relating to the 1786 struggle for a wage rate demand. Thus was transmitted an experience and a reflection that inspired the approaches of 1831.
On the event level, a few benchmarks will suffice. At the beginning of October 1831, the launch prospectus of the Écho de la Fabrique appeared,
which announced the constitution of a commission of workshop managers responsible for drawing up a price of wages to be discussed, under the control of the prefect, with the merchant-manufacturers.
On October 12, a first exploratory meeting at the Town Hall, under the chairmanship of Deputy Terme, served only to reveal the deep reluctance of the masters of the Factory.
On 21 October, at the end of a meeting where the prefect was trying to convince the traders, their representatives were strongly questioned by workers' demonstrators. On the 25th, at 10 a.m., the prefect could finally bring together the negotiators elected by both parties.
The discussion stalled for a long time against the refusal of the manufacturers, until a huge demonstration invaded the outskirts of the prefecture.
According to the account of a manufacturer, in organized groups, without a cry, without provocations, thousands of canuts were present:
\begin{displayquote}
It was pity to see the hollow cheeks, the pungent complexions, the malignant and shrunken complexion of most of these unfortunate people.
Individually, they inspired only a natural compassion, the energy seemed to have to flee from such weak, undeveloped bodies, but these individuals were reunited,
they were organized, they formed a compact body, and the masses have an instinct of their strength, a power of will, which vanishes only as it spreads\footnote{The Precursor, October 26, 1831.}.
\end{displayquote}
\begin{displayquote}
When it was announced that we could no longer contain the gatherings, we had to finish everything, or rather accept everything\footnote{l'Écho de la fabrique, 13 Nov. 1831.}.
\end{displayquote}
In the evening, a wave of optimism swept over the Croix-Rousse illuminated by improvised balls.
It was trusting too much the delegates of the opposing side.
In the city, a petition circulates among the masters of the Silk Factory against the tariff, an illegal decision that they consider an attack on the economic health of the country.
The Minister of Commerce and Public Works, d'Argout, supports them in a long letter to the prefect dated November 3.
He brushes aside the argument of du Molart, who invoked the precedents of 1789 and 1793 and 1811, when Napoleon had also conceded a tariff of wages for the Silk Factory.
He invites him to "enlighten the workers" by making them understand that "what is illegal cannot be profitable" and advises him:
\begin{displayquote}
It would be better to drop the tariff than to report it in an express way. It is in order to give you time to achieve this result and not to thwart your efforts that I confine myself to expressing my regret for everything that has been done so far
and recommending that you not add anything to it that aggravates or confirms measures that the local authority cannot support and that the higher authority cannot admit\footnote{Departmental archives of Isère, Fonds Périer, audiffret-Pasquier payment.}.
\end{displayquote}
Under these conditions, the frontal impact is predictable. On November 20, the commander of the National Guard, General d'Ordonneau was promoted, during a major takeover of arms, Place Bellecour.
The Croix-Rousse battalion, which included relatively well-off workshop leaders, was noted for its undisciplined attitude.
It is that the latter, when they go looking for work, are told by the clerks of the merchants that they will only get it at prices lower than those of the tariff.
A manufacturer named Olivier even receives a solicitor by brandishing two pistols.
On November 21, under the impetus of the companions, a strike movement spread throughout the Croix-Rousse.
At morning, national guards and soldiers sent to the barriers of the Croix-Rousse are received by a hail of stones.
During the morning, the weavers decided to renew the demonstration that had succeeded on October 25.
They descend on the city by the thousands by taking the climb of the Grande Côte. As their only weapon they have this black flag on which is inscribed the motto found by the companion Jean-Claude Romand: Live working or die fighting.
At the bottom of the climb stands the 1st Battalion of the National Guard formed mainly of merchant manufacturers who have their offices in the neighborhood.
Guns against chests, the masters of the Factory shoot. The demonstrators retreated to the plateau, taking away their dead: the insurrection broke out.
In vain in the afternoon the prefect of Molart and General Ordonneau tried a negotiation. During this one, General Roguet throws a hand on the slopes of the Croix-Rousse.
The insurgents then held the two plenipotentiaries until the early morning, while the line troops, substituting for the defection of the National Guard, advanced towards the plateau and installed defenses.
The General Roguet, of the Town Hall where he sits, issues an optimistic proclamation about the prospects of an inevitable victory.
He put artillery in battery in front of the Pont Morand and the Brotteaux to avoid a surprise from workers who fire from the left bank of the Rhône.
However, the night is decisive. Outside the Croix-Rousse, the working-class neighbourhoods took sides. Detachments are formed which, bypassing the city, reinforce the defenders of the plateau.
New fighters in solidarity with the canuts gathered at La Guillotière, and in old Lyon, on the right bank of the Saône. A ring of fire gradually forms around the center and the peninsula. The besieged become the besiegers.
As Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, chronicler of the city, ideal caricature of thepro Louis-Phillippe bourgeois, writes, from that moment on,
\begin{displayquote}
The aggression of the workers (sic!) got the upper hand. (…) The general insurrection of workers of all classes in the districts of Lyon decided the fight's odds\footnote{Histoire des insurrections de Lyon en 1831 et 1834 (History of uprisings in Lyon in 1831 and 1834), Lyon 1834, pp. 79-80.}.
\end{displayquote}
On the night of the 22nd to the 23rd, in the early morning, the canuts went on the offensive, forcing the soldiers to a hasty retreat.
Not without having (account of the soldier Guillon) finished among the wounded opponents "a little young man who could be ten years old and whose bullet had broken his arm …"\footnote{M. Moissonnnier, Les canuts, op. cit., p. 188.}
The young man was probably more than ten years old, but the conditions of existence of the canuts were such that their size remained, as noted by the boards of revision, clearly in deficit.
This withdrawal left the "law enforcement" side only a quadrilateral put in defense in the peninsula, around the town hall.
The moral state of the troops, the total defection of the National Guard, the growing strengthening of the insurrection left only one possible way out: the evacuation of Lyon.
On the morning of the 23rd, the last barracks were occupied after the confused, difficult and expensive retreat of the army, along the left bank of the Rhone, heading north.
Then something happened that stunned honest observers of the time: in collaboration with the prefect of Molard, who remained in the city, and who relied on the workshop leaders of the Devoir mutuel, the order was maintained by the victors.
Neither rape nor looting, as feared by the rich of the peninsula. Better: two thieves caught in the act are shot by the insurgents who are responsible for ensuring in the city the safety of people and property
(with the exception of one house, that of the manufacturer Auriol transformed into a blockhouse by the army).
Meanwhile, in Paris, the government launched against the city four regiments of line, two regiments of dragoons, three batteries of artillery in addition to the troops driven out of Lyon.
All under the command of Marshal Soult, with the guarantee of the Duke of Orleans, son of the king (an iron fist in a velvet glove so to say).
The objectives of the expedition were clearly set by Casimir-Perier: dissolution and prohibition of any "corporation of workers" — disarmament — cancellation of the tariff replaced by a mercurial which recorded the wages per piece practiced:
\begin{displayquote}
The Government cannot intervene and lend its authority to give a sanction and fixity to stipulations which must not only have the most voluntary and free character, but which, by their nature, can only be variable like the situation of industry\footnote{National Archives 42-AP-22, File 2.}.
\end{displayquote}
This praise of wage "flexibility" is not – alas! – considered in 1998 as a cynical old thing! For the learned economists of the "single thought" it is even the recipe for happiness as offered by capitalism…
On December 3, 1831, coming from the north and the south, the armies raised against the canuts entered Lyon to restore ORDER!
From 5 to 22 June 1832, at the trial of Riom, brought against a sample of carefully selected "officials", 22 defendants appeared, including 13 workers accused of rebellion, sedition, call to murder, murder, looting and violence.
Among them the "negro" Antoine Stanislas whom Monfalcon describes "the eye on fire, the foaming mouth, the bloodied arms (…) uttering a barbaric cry every time that one of his bullets hit a soldier on the Morand Bridge."
They lacked the flower girl, Antoinette Pascal, acquitted of the prosecution, whom the same had classified in "the wives of workers, real furies, torturing the wounded dragons"\footnote{Monfalcon, op. cit., p. 82.}.
The official chronicler of the bourgeois municipal power, surgeon at the same time as librarian of the city, did not hesitate to translate into a "historical" vision the fantasies of his caste!
To these thirteen defendants were added nine honorable citizens (including the lawyer Michelangelo Perrier and some journalists) charged with provoking the revolt and attempting to establish the Republic.
For the honor of the jury and the magistrates of Riom, the trial turned to the confusion of the accusers: all were acquitted, with the exception of Romand convicted of another offence of theft, minor, prior to the events
The gentle Monfalcon vituperated at the "benevolence of the magistrates", "the incredible softness of the public prosecutor' office", "the public manifestation of doctrines incompatible with the maintenance of any public order",
"the deplorable judgment of the Assize Court of Riom". And our man concludes:
\begin{displayquote}
When jurors, elites of the country, chosen from among the most enlightened and most interested in good order, are seized with such vertigo, all that remains is to veil one's forehead and wait with resignation for the last blows to public order\footnote{ibid., pp. 118 à 122.}.
\end{displayquote}
The actual number of victims of these days of rioting is unknown.
An estimate by the conservative historian Steyert, reluctant to exaggerate workers' losses, suggests 29 deaths in the army and national guard and 60 among the canuts, 150 wounded in the repressive forces and 100 in the insurgents.
False figures for sure as far as the latter are concerned: in the climate of repression, it was inappropriate to go to a doctor or hospital because the police were vigilant.
These figures are in any case to be related to the number of forces involved and the reduced effectiveness of the armament of each party.
A real social purge accompanies this violence (provoked, let us not forget, by the platoon fire of the merchants-manufacturers of the 1st legion of the National Guard). The worker's logbook imposed by the Empire, will serve to purify the world of canuts.
This document, without which a worker is deemed to be a vagrant and which contains, in addition to civil status data, a list of his employers and their certificates, attesting to his loyalty to his hiring commitments,
is renewed by the police commissioners of the neighborhoods where the interested parties reside. The refusal of renewal hits those who have been distinguished and who are thus forced to leave the city. In short, a "social cleansing" operation.
\section{1833/1834 — The Spider's strategy}
In the aftermath of the insurrection of the canuts, the authorities discovered all the national and international repercussions.
In Joigny, Auxerre, Chalon-sur-Saône, Mâcon, the military columns of repression had provoked demonstrations of solidarity with the insurgents.
The event was in itself unheard of: the second French city, for 12 days, had fallen into the hands of its workers.
On the night of 25 to 26 November, calls had been posted in the suburbs of Paris to imitate the canuts of Lyon.
Metternich himself, who inspired the absolutist reaction in Europe, declared: "I regard the Lyon affair as very serious."
It was indeed a historical event according to historian Pierre Vilar's definition:
a sign, that of the entry into a new period, a product, that of an incubation more than forty years linked to the social results of the evolution of a developed economic center, a factor in the European development of social contradictions.
Finally, the moment when the structural effect modifies the conjuncture by marking, producing, integrating into a significant historical "move". On December 13, 1831, under the pen of Saint-Marc Girardin, the Journal des Débats announced the maturation of a new situation:
"The barbarians who threaten society are not in the steppes of Tartary, they are in the suburbs of our manufacturing cities (…) Proletarian democracy and the Republic are two very different things. Republicans, monarchists of the middle class (the bourgeoisie-M.M.), whatever the diversity of opinion on the best form of government, there is only one voice yet, I imagine, for the maintenance of society. However, it is going against the maintenance of society to give political rights and national weapons to those who have nothing to defend and everything to take. "
On March 14, 1832, Casimir Périer, whom cholera was to wipe out of the world of the living three months later, outlined Gasparin's future task:
\begin{displayquote}
You still have associations to dissolve, but you will rightly prefer to operate in detail instead of hitting the masses and provoking discontent and resistance. This judicious way promises good results\footnote{Municipal Archives of Lyon (AML), Doc. Gasparin, Volume II,}.
\end{displayquote}
This is the strategy of the spider that throws its sons at its prey, paralyzes it in its web before hitting it to death.
Périer gone, it will be Adolphe Thiers who will become the direct and assiduous correspondent of Gasparin as evidenced by the rich collection deposited in the municipal archives of Lyon.
The secret funds of corruption flow in pactole towards the Rhone prefecture\footnote{M. Moissonnnier, Les Canuts, op.cit., p. 130.}. To stimulate the zeal of the political police, the prefect proposes to pay the commissioners remuneration modulated according to the volume of the working population of their home neighborhood.
Participants in the insurgency are spied on in all their movements and observed in all their relationships. The maneuvers, in the hope of rallying a Michelangelo Perrier or Lachapelle and Lacombe fail, but Pierre Charnier does not resist it who ends up entering the secret police.
Other methods were implemented because, in addition to the devoir mutuel of carefully supervised workshop leaders, on the second Sunday of February 1832, the companions founded their own organization:
les compagnons ferrandiniers du Devoir who cover, under the old clothes of the classic but declining companionship, a protest group that allies itself with the Devoir mutuel.
The prefect, henceforth, chaperones the manufacturers, reveals to them the threats resulting from the union of the employees, in particular with regard to the affairs of the first labour court of France which was installed in Lyon.
The "men in the golden chest" — as the Echo of the Fabrique which survived the turmoil call them — do not pay enough attention to this "family council" that Napoleon I instituted in Lyon on March 18, 1806.
In this city and in this Silk Factory, where conflicts are periodic, the emperor's goal was to create a conciliation body where the "merchants-manufacturers" would remain in the majority and would have the presidency.
However, the 15 Jan. 1832 Louis-Philippe had signed an ordinance reorganizing these prud'hommes and, appearing to take into account the wishes of the canuts,
he had increased the number of elected officials to 9 manufacturers and 8 workshop managers while removing the distinction between incumbents and substitutes.
The canuts had taken the opportunity to propose in the Echo de la Fabrique the admission to the proceedings of a lawyer or a qualified attorney (taking up a request put forward in 1830 and supported by a petition with 5031 signatures).
At the same time, the questions brought before the council often deviated on the interpretation of the market prices board that the workers' representatives wanted at least to transform into a compulsory scale.
These skilful proposals and the exploitation of the failures of the masters of the Fabrique were likely to transform the primitive character of the council and to allow, at the limit, the presidency togo to a master worker.
This is what alarmed Thiers, promoted to Minister of Commerce and Public Works, who became the new mentor of Prefect Gasparin.
On 11 Jan. 1833 he told him of his apprehensions:
\begin{displayquote}
Instead of an arbitration tribunal, circumstances have made it a compact body and you know better than I do what the factional spirit wanted to do with it.
You know that they are now asking for the abolition of the voice that is given to manufacturers and therefore the presidency reserved for them,
that they want to try to distort the institution of fraternal conciliation by involving lawyers, that the price rate is kept under the name of market price board, that at least this is the opinion of the workers and the claim they attach to it (…).
You have also seen, in the anarchic meetings whose minutes are printed, the most hostile speeches in the mouths of speakers, workshop leaders, who do not neglect to adorn themselves with the title of member of the labour court\footnote{AML, Doc. Gasparin, Volume I.}.
\end{displayquote}
In agreement with Gasparin, Thiers seized the Council of State by instructing a master of requests (director of his ministry!) to conduct the case smoothly. The latter carries out his task.
On 24 May, he informed the Minister that the Council of State agreed "to facilitate the enjoyment of the majority by manufacturers (…) and that an amendment has been proposed to maintain, whatever happens, this enjoyment:
an absent labour court would be replaced by an alternate of his class even when the presence of that alternate would not be necessary to complete the legal number of two-thirds of the Council".'
On May 30, in the minutes following the Council's judgment, the master of petitions scribbled to Thiers information as laconic as it was triumphant: "the case is won at the Council of State". This says a lot about the serene independence of this institution…
On June 21, 1833, a new ordinance signed in Neuilly by Louis-Philippe specified that the elected representatives of the labor courts would be divided into incumbents and substitutes (articles 1 and 2).
"that in the event of the absence or incapacity of a titular industrial tribunal, an alternate of the same factory or class shall always be called upon to sit regardless of the number of members present".
But beyond the legal-administrative adventures, the "wrong spirit" is reborn.
In February 1833, the Precursor published a text that the prefect called a "manifesto of the heads of workshops on workers' coalitions" and Thiers agreed with Gasparin to describe it as "a system dictated by the enemies of our industry and the country."
In this case (and for the moment), believes the minister, it is necessary "not to take any active role in the debates that exist in order to escape any reproach, such seems to me the role of the administration". But saving appearances does not mean remaining inert.
"We must as much as possible prevent the manufacturers from giving in to the coalition because that would be weakness and not caution to avoid blood." And Thiers is reassuring:
\begin{displayquote}
The coalition does not have enough unity to last 8 days.
The workers have their arms, the entrepreneurs their capital. If the workers abuse their strength (sic!), they give the entrepreneurs the right to use theirs, that is, to keep their money and to deny subsistence to those who refuse work.
The entrepreneur can wait since he has the capital\footnote{ibid., 27 February 1833.}.
\end{displayquote}
It is therefore necessary to let things rot by staying the course.
This attitude is difficult to hold because, after the skirmishes of February, a latent strike movement rebounds in July!
Thiers, this time is alarmed by "the weakness of the manufacturers who has made triumph the pretensions of the workers or rather the actions of those who push them (sic)" and to conclude that manufacturers must be given "the courage to wait":
"It is now up to the government to give them the means, because its duty is to protect all those who do not know how to protect themselves, because it is instituted to protect the weak."
In short, between February and July 1833 (800 to 1,000 looms stopped), the "strength" of capital needed the help of the state apparatus !…
Especially since the republican opposition seems to be strengthening in the city and democratic societies are launching petitions in favor of press freedom attacked by the "middle ground" in power.
A new step was taken in a letter from Thiers dated 6 Aug. 1833. What he recommends in a document he writes directly at home, without going through the editors of the ministry, is outright
"to direct them, to stimulate them so that they resist by a wise union the tyranny of coalitions. But the very uncertain means itself does not seem to me, as much as to you, the only way to use. And we still need to go further:
\begin{displayquote}
I ask here for all your zeal, all your attention. A careful police force can seize many facts deemed implausible. Didn't a happy coincidence make you meet and seize mutualists who were going to ban looms?\footnote{ibid., Thiers à Gasparin, 1833.} (…)
I think that we must rely a lot on the time that will divide the leaders and that will distract them a lot too, but we must absolutely not give up the legal channels,
we must watch with great activity to the search for the facts deliverable to the courts, unless we use them with the appropriate caution!
\end{displayquote}
The goal is clearly set: "To have on hand some prisoners who are very significantly guilty" to sue them together in a great trial where they would appear as seditionaries,
"I hope we will not be reduced to this necessity, I hope we will never be exposed to it!"
Style clause! To go this direction is already to settle there.
On February 12, 1834, a meeting of mutual workshop leaders consulted its base on the strike. A majority opts for the struggle, the watchword of suspension of work is launched for the 14th.
On this date, 20,000 looms stopped. The burial of a weaver will give the opportunity for a show of force of the organizations of master workers and companions.
Tension rises for 8 days, carefully controlled by the police who arrest six mutualists on charges of being "the leaders of the coalition". That's it, the workers "very noticeably guilty" desired by Thiers. Their trial is set for April 5.
A few days before this one, the announcement of the discussion in parliament of a law banning associations is received as a provocation.
Interesting detail that shows to what extent the situation in Lyon influenced the behavior of the bourgeois monarchy:
it was the prefect Gasparin who, obsessed with the republican and workers' plot, had proposed on May 2, 1833, the introduction of legislation banning all associations, even if they are made up of less than 20 members (in the case of Devoir mutuel)\footnote{National Archives BB-21 -407- The bill tabled on February 24, 1834 is voted on March 25, 1834.}.
In a few days, 2,557 signatures are gathered on a petition that ends as follows:
"The mutualists protest against the liberticidal law of associations and declare that they will never bow their heads under a stultifying yoke, that their meetings will not be suspended,
and, relying on the most inviolable right, that of living by work, they will be able to resist, with all the energy that characterizes free men, any brutal attempt, and will not shrink from any sacrifice in defense of a right that no human power can take away from them."
It was in 1834, fifty years, to the nearest month, before the law of 1884 legalized trade union organizations! A reminder that sheds light on the value of the fiddly judgment that the indispensable champion of the triumphant bourgeoisie, J. B Monfalcon, formulated in this regard:
\begin{displayquote}
Workers who had made use of their intellectual faculties only to push their shuttle equally from left to right and from right to left, discussed, slandered the work of the three powers and decreed revolt (…)
The terrible consequences of the mental aberration of the workers cannot make us ignore the ridiculousness of the recitals of their protest\footnote{Monfalcon, op.cit., pp. 211-212.}.
\end{displayquote}
This hateful aggressiveness is a real document on the atmosphere that prevailed then in the distinguished circles! Atmosphere maintained, built, one could say…
The opening of the trial on Saturday, April 5 causes a huge crowd around the criminal court.
It is marked by many incidents when the decision to postpone the case to the following Wednesday, the 9th, and to judge behind closed doors, is made.
On Sunday, April 6, the funeral of a mutual workshop leader followed by 8,000 mutualist master workers and ferrandinier companions takes place, accompanied by cries against the "middle ground" and the "tyrants".
Never was a confrontation so predictable and prepared.
On April 9, a large number of manufacturers packed his goods and left the city\footnote{According to Monfalcon, pp. 221-223.}. One thousand five hundred men are gathered in 15 battalions and 2 infantry companies, flanked by 2 squadrons of cavalry and an artillery regiment with 10 batteries.
All this force, gibernes filled, backpacks, with food for two days is distributed at the strategic points of the city leaving perfectly free the surroundings of the court where a workers' demonstration took place.
The crowd who feared the provocation decided to evacuate the completely exposed place Saint-Jean and retreated into the adjacent streets, improvising to protect themselves, barricades with some planks and other materials seized on the spot.
It is about 10 o'clock when an incident occurs. Gendarmes and a platoon of the 7th Light begin to clear the rue Saint-Jean, the workers retreat behind their protections.
At this moment a shot leaves. Monfalcon, himself, points it out as follows:
\begin{displayquote}
A police officer, Faivre, mortally wounded by a soldier, at the moment when he was rushing on the barricade is brought to the concierge of the hotel de Chevenières\footnote{ibid., pp. 229-230.}.
\end{displayquote}
Half-confession of the provocation confirmed by two sources. First the story of J. L. Philippe, columnist of the Association des compagnons ferrandiniers, a document available at the Maison des canuts, rue d'Ivry:
\begin{displayquote}
An agent provocateur fired a pistol shot. The doors of Saint Jean opened and a discharge was made. By a providential effect a man was killed. Who? The agent provocateur! The struggle began on all points of the city and its suburbs.
\end{displayquote}
Second testimony, the confidences made by the prosecutor Chegaray to Joseph Benoit author of the Confessions of a proletarian\footnote{Presentation M. Moissonnier, Éditions Sociales, 1968, p. 54.}.
The first, elected as the second to the Constituent Assembly, confirmed this fact to the second in the euphoria of the short "spring of the peoples" of that year!
The struggle will continue from Wednesday 9 to Monday 14, on the right bank of the Saône, in the peninsula, at Guillotière and Croix-Rousse.
A part of the troops, who returned from Algeria, was distinguished by their ferocity in all sectors of the popular Lyon fallen into the trap.
The peak of violence is reached on Saturday 12, rue Projetée in Vaise. Monfalcon, though well disposed towards the forces of "order", gives a description:
\begin{displayquote}
They rush to the houses, break the doors, get their hands on everything that is offered to their fury. (…) Any man found with his hands and lips blackened by the powder was shot.
Forty-seven corpses attest to revenge: 26 are those of insurgents taken up with arms in hand, 21 (how terrible the civil war is!) does not belong to the party that fought:
we see children, impotent old men hit in their homes by projectiles\footnote{Monfalcon, p. 261.}.
\end{displayquote}
The violence of this carefully prepared repression aims not only to hit the world of work (the canuts but also the workers of the other suburbs)
but to oppose the dangerous alliance of republicans and employees of industry and crafts, sealed against the law prohibiting associations.
Is it necessary to give another proof of this? Three days after the massacre of Vaise, on April 15, in Paris, rue Transnonain, against the republican workers who are fighting for the same cause,
another massacre occurs that Daumier will illustrate with a shocking and symbolic lithograph!
When Thiers sent Gasparin a telegram of approval, asking for clarification, he wrote: "French blood has flowed, it was inevitable"…
Inevitable or programmed? "Six hundred men on both sides were put out of action, of which nearly 300 perished on the battlefield or in the bed of pain," Monfalcon wrote.
And Steyert puts forward the estimate of 57 military deaths and 220 civilians, 267 military wounded and 180 civilians. These figures really make one think: they suggest that one side (which the reader will easily guess) had a certain propensity to finish off the wounded…
But Claude Latta\footnote{Repressions and political prisons in France and Europe in the nineteenth century, Société d'histoire de la révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle, Presentation P. H. Vigier. Claude Latta: the victims of the repression of the second revolt of the Canuts, pp. 27 to 30}, counted 131 dead in combat and 192 wounded, 190 killed in the civilian population and 122 wounded. It reproduces a testimony of Abbé Pavy, vicar of Saint-Bonaventure, a church located in the center of the peninsula:
a 16-year-old child hit by 8 bullets "had hidden under the corpse of an insurgent who covered him entirely (…) two others aged 18 to 20 had just been discovered behind a confessional in the chapel of Saint Luc (…).
We urge the leaders and urge them to postpone the execution of these unfortunate people out of pity! Everything was useless: "They were caught red-handed with arms in their hands, justice must have its course, withdraw",
and ten shots hit them almost at point-blank range; the confessional is flooded with their blood"… In June 1834, Monfalcon, an aesthete of history, ended his account with these words:
\begin{displayquote}
The insurrection of Lyon will always be one of the most original episodes of our long Revolution, so fruitful in extraordinary events, and will henceforth occupy some of the most beautiful pages of the annals of our city,
and of the history so remarkable of the French of the nineteenth century.
\end{displayquote}
He was wrong. It wasn't over. June 1849 would bring him other satisfactions…
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