CONCLUSION

In late nineteenth-century France certain social theorists, concerned with what they saw as a morally and politically degenerate working class, advocated removing workers from the noxious Parisian slums and resettling them outside the city. By isolating them from cafés and other evil urban influences and by making them property owners these theorists believed they could move the workers of Paris toward bourgeois respectability and political reliability.

By the early twentieth century this vision had been largely achieved, not by the recipes of social theorists, but as a consequence of the patterns of capitalist urbanization. The increasing price of land in the capital, its growing specialization of function, and the resultant crisis of working-class housing made Paris inhospitable to most workers after 1900. The development of industry in the suburbs and connection of that area to the city through mass transit facilities made suburban working-class habitation more feasible. The rise of the allotments converted a strong possibility into an overwhelming reality.

Yet the political consequences of this evolution sharply contradicted the hopes of many middle-class observers. Allotment life turned out to be a vicious parody of the dream of home ownership, with the result that by the mid-1920s the anger of the mal-lotis had become a crucial political issue. In Bobigny and many other suburban communities the French Communists rode this issue to political dominance. The political history of the Paris suburbs thus seemed to rest on a profound paradox: instead of "moralizing" the working class, suburbanization created the

Red Belt, menacingly encircling the city that no longer had room for its working-class inhabitants.

By the mid-1920s the PCF had a dominant position in the political life of Bobigny that has remained little contested. As such, Bobigny is a fitting symbol of the Red Belt that French Communists created in the Paris suburbs during the interwar years. However, the PCF's easy success in Bobigny was not representative of its electoral history in the region. During the 1920s it faced sharp competition from the Socialist party and the Radicals for suburban votes, only emerging as the predominant political force in the heady years of the Popular Front. It was this "springtime of the French Left," from 1935 to 1938, that made the Red Belt an enduring part of the national political landscape.

Although the French Communist party did not immediately take control of the Paris suburbs, it was from the beginning proportionately much stronger in the Department of the Seine than in the nation as a whole (Table 20).

In the Paris suburbs, the PCF received a percentage three times its national vote during the interwar period; the suburban population was strongly working class, which helps to explain this roughly constant differential. As Bobigny demonstrated, workers were more likely to vote Communist. PCF vote totals in the suburbs of the Seine, however, unlike those in Bobigny, did vary significantly, mirroring the shifts of the Party's national vote totals. Communist strength in the area was responsive to changes in the Party line.

Another indicator of Communist influence in the Paris suburbs was the number of municipal governments it controlled. At its birth in 1920 the PCF was the dominant political force in sixteen municipalities out of a total of seventy-nine in the suburban Department of the Seine. By the eve of the 1925 municipal elections a number of suburban administrations had defected, and the French Communists controlled only four city halls in the suburbs of the Seine. The 1925 elections doubled the number of their suburban municipalities to eight, and the next set of elections further increased the score to ten. In municipal as in legislative elections, the Popular Front caused the real breakthrough. In the municipal elections of 1935 the PCF finally surpassed the number of suburban city halls it had begun with, winning control of twenty-seven, more than any other political party.^[1]

An electoral map shows us the PCF's three geographical strongholds in the Department of the Seine in the 1920s and 1930s: the suburbs directly to the north of Paris, those to the northeast, and those located south-southeast of the capital. To the north, Saint-Denis, Clichy, Gennevilliers, Epinay, Villetaneuse, Pierrefitte, and Stains all had Communist municipalities for at least part of this period. To the northeast, the PCF controlled Bobigny's city hall; the canton of Noisy-le-Sec regularly sent Mayor Clamamus to the Chamber of Deputies. South of Paris, Ivry, Vitry, Villejuif, Choisy-le-Roi, and Alfortville were communities where the PCF was especially strong in the interwar years.^[2]

There were also suburban zones in the Department of the Seine where the PCF was extremely weak. The French Communists never made much headway in the highly industrialized working-class suburbs of Suresnes, Boulogne-Billancourt, and Puteaux directly to the west of Paris; these communities remained bastions of the Socialists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, the PCF was weak in Antony, Rungis, Creteil, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, and Bry-sur-Marne, along the southern and eastern peripheries of the Department. These areas generally voted for the Radicals or the Right in municipal elections.

Without completely altering this general pattern, the Popular Front did raise the French Communist party from a strong presence to the dominant political force in the suburbs of the Department of the Seine. The political breakthrough in the municipal elections of 1935 and the legislative elections of 1936 was the fruition of years of organizing by Communist militants; it also vindicated certain changes in PCF elec-

toral tactics. The PCF allied with the SFIO in 1934, ending the years of internecine quarrels that had severely weakened the French Left. During the 1929 municipal elections the PCF lost contests in Arcueil, Montreuil, and Clamart that it would probably have won if the SFIO had instructed its voters to support the Communists on the second round. The electoral alliance of 1934 meant that in 1935 Socialists and Communists did support each other on the second round of the elections, thus winning several municipalities that had been held by the Right.^[3] The Party also attracted new members because it turned greater attention to organizing neighborhoods. It adopted a less antagonistic stance toward non-Communists, halting the often bitter conflicts between itself and evangelistic Catholics and appealing more to social groups, like shopkeepers, that it had previously neglected. Finally, the new nationalism of the French Communists was clearly manifested in the suburbs, as PCF municipalities began naming streets after national heroes like Rouget de Lisle and sponsoring city festivals in honor of Bastille Day.^[4]

These changes in PCF orientation produced impressive results in the Paris suburbs. In the Popular Front elections of 1935 and 1936 the Red Belt assumed the form it would have ten years later: in the first postwar legislative elections of 1946 the PCF won almost exactly the same percentage of the vote. Moreover, in the 1935 municipal elections the Communists took power for the first time in several suburbs—such as Drancy, Montreuil, Orly, and Nanterre—that they have controlled ever since. The Red Belt evolved from a symbol of the PCF's isolation from French politics to one of its partial integration into the national political culture.

I have argued throughout that the PCF owed its success in Bobigny and the Red Belt more to community concerns than to workplace conflicts. Yet the workers of Bobigny did spend much of their lives on the job. Therefore, to test the validity of my conclusions I briefly review the conditions they encountered in the workplace, and the political ramifications of their reactions to those conditions. Given the vast diversity of industry in the Paris area during the early twentieth century, I can sketch only a general portrait, but even this should help us understand the political choices made by Bobigny's workers.^[5]

Both contemporary observers and historians of French working-class labor in the early twentieth century have emphasized challenges to skill levels and workplace control posed by changes in the production process and by the rise of a new population of semiskilled machine

operatives, the ouvriers spécialisés .^[6] Even before 1900 many commentators and union leaders warned against the dangers of increasing mechanization and the degradation of skills; such complaints increased in the years before 1914.^[7] But in this regard as in so many others, the First World War provided a turning point. Facing a shortage of skilled laborers, many employers hired unskilled women and foreigners and adopted new machines and Taylorist practices—all expedients that threatened traditions of workplace control.^[8]

Such changes characterized much wartime industrial production in the Paris area and had the greatest impact in the large metallurgical plants on the periphery of the city. Above all, automobile factories like Renault and Citroën became symbols of modern industry in the wartime and interwar years. From his studies of the working-class experience at Renault, Alain Touraine argues that French industry entered what he terms "Phase B," which introduced large numbers of semiskilled workers and mass production techniques such as the assembly line.^[9]

Semiskilled workers and assembly lines alike were evident in large metropolitan factories like Renault and Citroën. In the late 1920s Renault and Citroën began to reorganize production along more "scientific" lines, in a process referred to as rationalization that increased mechanization, made wider use of timeclocks, and broke tasks into simpler components, to increase both employees' output and employers' control on the shop floor.^[10] Rationalization, especially its greater mechanization, required more semiskilled workers, who now became a significant proportion of the industrial labor force. In 1925, for example, 46.3 percent of Renault's workers were skilled, versus 53.7 percent semi- and unskilled; by 1939 their respective proportions were 31.8 percent and 68.2 percent.^[11]

The scope and impact of these changes were often less than contemporary observers hoped or feared. The growth of the labor force and longer hours of work often related more to heightened wartime output than rationalization; many wartime innovations failed to survive after 1918. During the 1920s and 1930s even the modernizing plans of André Citroën, the prototypical American-style entrepreneur, remained only on paper; many new workplace conditions did not mature until after 1945. Yet the growth of the population of semiskilled workers was real and important. If their experience did not resemble the vision of Fritz Lang in his 1926 film, Metropolis, it differed significantly from that of prewar skilled and unskilled workers.^[12]

What was life on the job like for these new proletarians? First, we must note that a large majority were from the provinces, unused to large factories.^[13] They had to adapt rapidly to a strange new environment that was noisy, dirty, and full of big machines—and also highly controlled. The use of the timeclock and other methods to eliminate unproductive time were widespread in large Parisian factories. The jobs of semiskilled workers were usually not physically taxing. But most who described such jobs in the interwar years emphasized their boring, repetitive character.^[14] For both semiskilled and unskilled workers the basic fact of life in plants like Renault and Citroën was a lack of control over their workplace. Not only was there little autonomy in the production process, but large factories maintained networks of spies to prevent working-class discontent from getting out of hand. Discontent was expressed in passive, individualistic ways, such as very high turnover rates.^[15] Moreover, many workers accepted or at least resigned themselves to conditions as they were, in the absence of realistic prospects for change.^[16]

It has become a truism of French social history that skilled workers are more likely to become involved in union and radical political activity than those with little or no training.^[17] This is borne out by the experience of French workers between the wars. Except for the years immediately after World War I, French unions before 1936 were small and weak, rarely winning the adhesion of more than one-tenth of the labor force. Their members tended to be either skilled workers or government employees; the overwhelming numbers of semiskilled and unskilled workers remained indifferent. Given this situation, strike activity in these years was anemic at best. Citroën experienced only three significant strikes between 1920 and 1935, all of them failures. Until the massive upheavals of the Popular Front, most semiskilled and unskilled workers remained firmly outside the French labor movement.^[18]

Renault, Citroën, and other large suburban factories were not typical of the average workplace, which provided no refuge from the changes they symbolized.^[19] Smaller workshops in the 1920s and 1930s had fewer machines, and rationalization was a vague rumor rather than a concrete threat. Yet semiskilled and unskilled labor was widely used in the Paris region; even outside the giant industrial fortresses workers had little interest in or control over their jobs. Arnold Brémond, a Protestant theology student who worked in several factories in Ivry during the mid-1920s, noted that whereas skilled workers loved to talk

about their jobs, others preferred to talk about sex. Henri Vielledent describes in his memoirs the frustration of having been trained as a skilled metalworker only to end up trapped in a semiskilled job.

These were the conditions that Bobigny's workers, who were mostly semiskilled and unskilled, faced on the job. They had little opportunity to exercise control over jobs that often had no intrinsic interest. Moreover, the expression of radical political views was strongly discouraged by employers and by fellow workers as well.^[20] Therefore the average workplace provided only meager opportunity to develop union or political consciousness, let alone activism, before 1936. Given this situation, it is not surprising that their residential problems gave the workers of Bobigny a focus for their energies that also helped form a Communist political consensus there.

Clearly, Bobigny was not an exception as much as an advanced example of the widespread influence French Communism enjoyed in the Paris suburbs during the interwar years. We can now answer the question why Bobigny strongly and consistently supported the PCF. To sum up the arguments I advance here, Communist strength in the community derived from four specific considerations.

First, the conditions of urban growth in the Paris area in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century set the stage. Increased residential segregation created working-class ghettoes like Bobigny, whose social composition differed radically from that of other French communities at large. The general tendency of French workers to vote for the Left was accentuated in Bobigny by the absence of elite populations that could have exercised a countervailing political influence. The disastrous, chaotic suburban growth contributed to the problems and changed many hopeful homeowners into embittered mal-lotis, whose resentment was to have profound political implications.^[21]

Second, the ability of Bobigny's Communists to deal with the manifold problems of their community was crucial. The crisis in the allotments was the largest challenge. The PCF alone did not lift Bobigny's mal-lotis out of the mud—the national Sarraut Law was instrumental in this effort—still the municipality worked to resolve the problem. It also made major efforts to provide urban facilities, like schools, utilities, and marketplaces, commensurate with the size of Bobigny's population.

Third, the strong community networks and their support for the PCF facilitated its political dominance. The local interest committees and the

associations syndicales gave an institutional framework to the Communist presence in Bobigny's neighborhoods. Strong, general working-class solidarity made Balbynians receptive to the PCF's ideology and to its view of red Bobigny as a working-class citadel.

Fourth, Mayor Clamamus's dynamism and determination deserved much of the credit for the PCF's success in Bobigny during the interwar years. Although structural factors like the local population's social composition figured in the political life of the Paris suburbs, individual personalities also exercised a significant impact on community politics. Mayors often dominated their cities in this period. Clamamus was such a strong mayor, the symbol and to a large extent the architect of red Bobigny. His greatest contribution to the people who continually reelected him was in dealing with the allotments, both as mayor and as a member of the Chamber of Deputies. In many other ways, Clamamus worked to build a resilient political culture in Bobigny and place the community prominently on the map of French communism.

Underlying these four factors in the PCF's political strength in Bobigny was a distinct working-class consciousness. Throughout the period local workers voted predominantly for the Left, first the Socialists and after 1920 the Communists. The PCF municipality's handling of urban problems during the 1920s strengthened this tradition but did not create it; Bobigny's workers voted Socialist even before the SFIO had any such accomplishments to its credit. The similarly successful reconstruction of the Communist polity in Bobigny after 1944 in spite of Clamamus's treason resulted from the resilient working-class identification with the Left.

This identification was not unique to the workers of Bobigny in twentieth-century France, but local conditions reinforced their class consciousness. Bobigny's workers lived in a monochrome world, where their neighbors and acquaintances were almost all from their own social class. Moreover, if working-class Balbynians were unlikely to meet many members of another class, they were still less likely to join another class: the majority came from working-class backgrounds that made upward mobility an elusive option.

A striking paradox of Bobigny's political history is that Communists achieved strength in a community composed for the most part of property owners. In fact, owning property in Bobigny strengthened class consciousness. It forced working-class neighbors to depend on one another for immediate mutual aid and for a long-term political solution to their common problems. The bitterness of the mal-lotis stemmed

largely from the belief that once again the workers had been cheated out of their due. The crisis of the allotments hammered home the lesson that workers could better themselves only through class action, not through individual self-reliance.

This working-class community consciousness was the basis of PCF strength in Bobigny, and local Communists willingly cultivated and politicized it. It was in this context that symbolic activities like red baptisms and the renaming of streets had significance. The PCF gave Bobigny its definition and identity; Bobigny was a commune ouvrière, something to be proud of, not a miserable slum. Yet the activities of the PCF did not foster working-class consciousness but rather reflected its political importance. Bobigny's workers voted for the Communist party as part of their class identification and took pride in the achievements of the PCF municipality as in something they themselves had accomplished.^[22]

This study of Bobigny has focused on two major forces in twentieth-century France, the working class and the French Communist party, and on the relation between them. For historians of the PCF the story of Bobigny offers two interesting paradoxes. Despite its constant stress on the workplace as the main locus of proletarian politicization, the PCF put most of its efforts in Bobigny into residential issues. In the late 1930s Communists emphasized the urgency of local workplace conflicts but subordinated such conflicts to consumer issues like housing, schools, and utilities.

From this flows the other observation, that communism in Bobigny was not simply a miniature version of the national PCF ideology. The traditional view of French communism in the 1920s and 1930s has been of a tightly centralized organization in which all ideas came from the top and originally from Moscow. Bobigny's Communists did respond to major shifts in the Party line, as the community's experience of the Popular Front demonstrates. Yet local concerns always strongly conditioned their responses. For example, the red baptisms were more a reaction to local evangelism than to official Communist pronouncements on religion. Moreover, the Party's attempts to reshape its local structure were often unsuccessful; Bobigny's PCF militants remained subordinated to its city councillors. In light of these experiences we observe that French communism was a product of Party ideology and of local problems.

As for the history of modern French workers, the rise of the Red Belt in the Paris suburbs suggests that students of working-class politiciza-

tion after 1914—especially of unskilled and semiskilled workers—might well complement their emphasis on the workplace with greater attention to the residential sphere. Historians of nineteenth-century French social history have demonstrated the value in studying the workplace of artisans and skilled workers. The efforts of these groups to hold on to control of their workplace and to resist de-skilling did much to shape the history of working-class politics.

By the interwar years, however, the battle for control of the productive process was a lost one, as far as many workers were concerned. This situation and the increasing distance between work-place and residence have led twentieth-century workers to favor their homes over their jobs. Workers in Bobigny could do little to improve their wages or working conditions during the 1920s and 1930s, but they could vote for a municipality that would deal with the allotments. Paved streets may not have brought the revolution nearer, but they made life easier and gave Bobigny's workers a sense of empowerment in the present and feelings of hope for the future.^[23]

Finally, the experience of Bobigny in the early twentieth century offers insights on the urban dimension of both class and politics in modern France. Social class was extremely important in Bobigny, but it was perceived more as a function of urban structure than of workplace stratification. This suggests that although class structure's objective cause may be the system of production, people's actions follow subjective perceptions that we in turn must consider in studying class consciousness and its political consequences.

The history of Bobigny also furnishes valuable lessons on urban politics, both its potential and its limitations. Urban politics enabled the Communists to put together an almost unshakable alliance of workers and employés in Bobigny and to lay the foundations for the Red Belt. Thus as an electoral device it proved to be of great value. But politics, especially revolutionary politics, consists of more than elections. Electorally useful, urban politics in the Paris suburbs failed to provide the direct challenge to capitalism that supposedly formed the PCF's raison d'être. This experience does not mean that urban politics necessarily lacks revolutionary content or significance, just that French communism in the Red Belt evolved more as an electoral formation than as a social movement during the early twentieth century.^[24]

Consequently, the rise of the Paris Red Belt during this period stands out as a graphic example both of working-class political radicalism and of the political impact of French capitalism. The fact that so many

suburban workers voted Communist, especially during the Party's lean and hungry years, illustrated the workers' desire for urban amenities, and the depth of their alienation from bourgeois society. Yet capitalist urban development shaped this alienation. Both the PCF's ideological emphasis on the factory, and its practical concern with neighborhood problems, reflected the balkanization of working-class life into separate spheres of home and work that was so much a product of capitalist urbanization. The Communists' grafting of revolutionary phraseology onto matter-of-fact urban administration ultimately could not substitute for policies to heal this split and challenge the forces that created places like Bobigny. The Communists' achievements in improving the quality of life in the Paris suburbs were real and important; but they could not alter the urban evolution of the Paris metropolitan area. The Red Belt was certainly a working-class fortress, but it was also a working-class prison. The keys to its gates remained as always within the city.