Gerald Friedman, State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1876-1914, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 317. $55.00 (ISBN 0-8014-2325-2).
This is an interesting but frustrating and sometimes wrongheaded book. In it, economist Gerald Friedman compares the different variables that affected the growth, ideological outlook, and success rate of French and American labor unions at the turn of the century, particularly with regard to the conduct and outcome of strikes.
1876-1914 was the period when the U.S. labor movement, after incorporating a wide range of workers under the "producerist" umbrella of the Knights of Labor in the mid-1880s, retreated into the conservative craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In France, by contrast (which had a smaller labor movement consistent with its less industrialized economy), unionized workers were torn between the National Federation of Trade Unions, controlled by Jules Guesde and the Marxists, and the National Federation of Labor Exchanges led by Fernand Pelloutier. In 1902 the two groups merged into the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), led by revolutionary syndicalists, which in 1906 orchestrated a wave of strikes on behalf of the eight-hour day much as the Knights of Labor had done in America in 1886. The outcome was a series of bloody clashes between the French government and the strikers that forced the CGT to adopt a less aggressive and more reformist policy not unlike that of the AFL.
Friedman interprets this narrative in an interesting but frequently misleading way. Rightly insisting that the responses of the state and of employers are just as important to the outcome of strikes as those of the workers themselves, he argues that despite its smaller size the CGT was just as successful-if not more successful-than the AFL was in winning strikes. This was partly because the syndicalist leaders of the CGT, unlike those of the AFL, were able to mobilize support among industrial workers in railroads and steel, and partly because French employers were less able to invoke the power of the state against the workers than their U.S. counterparts were. Although they allied with monarchists and other reactionaries to fight the unions, French employers never secured the same degree of state support that Americans employers did. Nor did French industrial culture possess the same commitment to laissez-faire economics and possessive individualism that American capitalism did. Thus, despite the contempt that AFL leaders like Samuel Gompers showed for French syndicalist tactics, the CGT managed to organize significant numbers of workers in heavy industry whereas the AFL confined itself to the skilled trades.
Entering a debate joined long ago between those who believed that the CGT's main constituency was skilled workers, and those who argued that the revolutionary syndicalists were "a cause without rebels," Friedman argues that the confrontational tactics of the CGT won many strikes not simply in small French craft establishments but in large industrial ones also. However, since in his regression analysis (120) he lumps strike grievances in both small and large establishments together under a single heading, it is impossible to determine in which kind of establishment the CGT was most likely to succeed. This leaves the debate over its constituency up in the air. Moreover, although the author shows convincingly that the French government established more extensive procedures for strike mediation than its U.S. counterpart did, he fails to convince this reviewer that the French state treated labor unions less oppressively than the American state did. It is true that in the 1906-1908 period Prime Minister Clemenceau held the ring between the employers and the unions, and that he introduced a number of progressive measures into the French National Assembly. But the French authorities arrested the main leaders of the CGT in the 1908 strike wave, and French soldiers killed several strikers at the massacre of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges.
Friedman's comparative analysis of the role of the French and American states is misleading in other ways also. It is true that U.S. troops were sometimes used against strikers, for example in 1877 and 1894, and that class conflict reached just as high a level in the U.S. as it did in France. But federal interventions into American labor disputes were carried out to enforce court injunctions mandated by a weak and divided state that was never seen by U.S. workers as an enemy in the same way that the centralized French state was seen by workers in France. The critical variable in comparing Franco-American labor relations, as Val R. Lorwin pointed out as long ago as 1958, is whether or not "labor movements most dependent on the state may show greatest hostility towards the state" (Val R. Lorwin, "Working-class Politics and Economic Development in Western Europe," American Historical Review 58 [1958]: 341). This question, which has been discussed fruitfully in more recent years by J. P. Nettl, Aristide Zolberg, and Pierre Birnbaum, is ignored by Friedman.
Friedman's neglect of the "degree of stateness" question, along with his failure to distinguish properly between the development of republicanism in America and France, also vitiates his discussion of American exceptionalism. He takes both Old Left historians such as Selig Perlman (who was not really Old Left) and New Left historians such as Sean Wilentz to task for failing to deal with this question properly. Supporters of the exceptionalism thesis usually invoke the peculiarities of the American state and its two-party system in their discussion of the matter, as well as other issues such as the dominance of capitalist values. But since, in my view, he misreads the state issue, even though he comes down on the side of exceptionalism, he does not really tell us anything new about the matter.
In sum, this book has the wrong title. It tells us very little, for example, about state making as such. A better title would have been: Labor Unions and Strikes in America and France, 1876-1914. At that level, it provides us with a lot of new and fascinating information. But it does not tell us very much else.
John H. M. Laslett University of California, Los Angeles
<http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/18.3/br_5.html> -- Yoshie
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