PART FOUR
FROM VICHY TO THE COLD WAR, 1940-1950

[We swear] never to allow our committees to be used as stepping stones for personal gain beyond trade union and patriotic control, or for ambitions to acquire managerial posts in the airplane companies.

[We swear] to put all our technical and professional knowledge to the exclusive service of production and the management of the enterprise placed under our safety in order that French aircraft production will regain the rank it should never have lost.

Patriotism, productivism, and loyalty to the union: these were the values that Communist leaders in Toulouse wanted committee members to promote in their factories. To be sure, workers and militants expected the committees to have real power. Militants at SNCASE, for example, were determined to go beyond the experience of the Popular Front when factory advisory committees played what they felt had been a superficial role in their plant. But strictly speaking, the Accord de Toulouse did nothing to usurp the formal right of management to direct the firm.

If the committee movement posed only a mild threat to management, it posed no threat at all to the state. On the contrary, the Accord de Toulouse demonstrated that rank-and-file aircraft workers, as well as the CGT and PCF militants among them, were willing to cooperate with the embryonic regime taking shape around de Gaulle. At no point in the chaotic days of the Liberation did aircraft workers question the legitimacy of the new government. Nor did anyone challenge Pierre Bertaux's authority to oversee the talks that produced the Accord de Toulouse. In fact, the authority of the production committees ultimately depended on support from the state. As the accord stated, "The refusal by the director to apply measures recommended [by the committee] must be for specific reasons and can be the occasion for the committee to turn to a qualified representative of the Government." During the Popular Front aircraft workers had relied heavily on prefects, labor inspectors, and ministerial officials for support in strikes, grievance hearings, arbitration, and collective bargaining. From 1936 until Munich Communist militants learned to work through, rather than against, the state. When the PCF and the CGT returned to a Popular Front strategy in 1944, and when a new government of the Liberation seemed to hold such promise for the left, aircraft workers showed a willingness once again to view government officials as potential allies for labor reform. In 1944, as in 1936, contrôle ouvrière seemed to go hand in hand with expanding the supervisory authority of the state.

Within a month of the Liberation the world of French aircraft manufacturing had become thoroughly absorbed into a new era of national mobilization. Purge committees had gone a long way to clean house, not always justly, in factories, offices, and laboratories. Newly promoted managers scrambled with the help of their employers to get production going again, not always successfully on account of bomb damage, blackouts, shortages, and bottlenecks in supplies. But a kind of left-wing patriotic revivalism did a lot to compensate psychologically for the economic chaos that still paralyzed much of the industry.

Events in Toulouse on 20 September convey something of the afterglow of Liberation that continued into the fall of 1944. That day aircraft workers in Toulouse left their shops early to take part in festivities the Departmental Committee of the Liberation had planned to commemorate "the first victory of the popular army: Valmy, 20 September 1792." As the committee had arranged, employees all over town stopped work at five o'clock to lend their numbers to the crowd and "give the festival its full luster." Local troops from the FFI marched to the Place du Capitole in the center of town, where orators "exalted the victories of the Republic." Later, celebrants gathered at the Gaumont Theater for a concert by Musique de l'Air and a showing of Jean Renoir's film La Marseillaise . The following day Le Patriote du Sud-Ouest, a major Resistance paper for the region, featured its daily historical calendar, identifying what had transpired that day during pivotal years in the French past-1792, 1914, 1918, and so on. The lesson was clear: the Liberation and the continuing Allied drive were part of a long-standing Jacobin struggle-against Prussians on the eastern frontier and antirepublicans down the street. Alongside the calendar the paper ran a prominent story on the furious pace of work in the aircraft plants, where in the wake of the Liberation workers were working twelve-hour days; as one young worker at SNCASE told the reporter, "Now we can come here; it's not for the Fritz." In such an atmosphere of enthusiasm for the Liberation aircraft production slowly began to revive, and with it the contest for control in the industry.

The Air Ministry of Charles Tillon

When out of political necessity Charles de Gaulle appointed leading Communists to the provisional government, the post of air minister went to Charles Tillon, a member of the Politburo and the celebrated helmsman of Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, the principal fighting arm of the Communist Resistance. Most aircraft workers must have been delighted with the choice. A colorful figure, Tillon was part of the troika, along with Jacques Duclos and Benoît Frachon, that ran the PCF in Maurice Thorez's absence during the Occupation. Although a top man in the party, Tillon was also something of an outsider, a maverick with an independent political base in the FTP who had never quite won the confidence of Thorez and Duclos with their close Moscow connections. De Gaulle named Tillon in part to neutralize the FTP and in part to take advantage of his standing with workers in a pivotal industry. A Breton, a veteran of the Black Sea Mutiny of 1919, an experienced labor organizer, an impassioned supporter of the Spanish loyalists, and an early Resistance fighter, Tillon was more a political combatant than a politician. "A man of action," he later said of himself, "I read Marx with a little spoon." True to form, he threw himself headlong into the task of reviving French aviation.

As a Communist, Tillon viewed efforts to boost production, stimulate research, and extend the influence of the CGT as equally important aspects of a renaissance in the industry. In Tillon's mind technical progress and social reform were "inseparable." This outlook suited party strategy. On the one hand, the PCF struck a conciliatory course with its Socialist and Christian Democratic partners in government. It was patriotism and the nationalistic spirit of the Resistance that held this coalition together, and Tillon's call for a "national renaissance" in aviation, his view of the air force as an instrument "for the independence of France," spoke poignantly to these sentiments. On the other hand, the party sought structural reforms-nationalizations, social security, and labor representation in industrial councils-to keep open the road to socialism and bolster popular support for the party. Tillon's commitment to left-wing innovations in the aircraft industry became readily apparent and eventually made air policy the subject of some of the country's bitterest controversy just after the war.

First as air minister in 1944 and 1945, then as armament minister in 1946, Tillon chose to stimulate production and research simultaneously-an ambitious program that, though criticized by some politicians and engineers as unrealistic, had support from de Gaulle and the state engineering staff of the Air Ministry. De Gaulle, eager to step out of the shadow of the Anglo-Americans, endorsed a nationalist strategy for reviving defense. The career professionals in the Air Ministry, including Joseph Roos, who returned to the boulevard Victor for a short stint in 1944 and 1945, defended the orthodox view that the industry should maintain excess capacity as an asset to national security. It was this unusual alliance of Communists, engineering bureaucrats, and de Gaulle that gave Tillon the political momentum to try out his program. Until the collapse of Germany in May 1945, military mobilization made it relatively easy to finance the effort. Thereafter, however, Tillon had to fight hard to keep the industry financed at full strength in the face of pressures for demobilization. Peace, after all, had almost obliterated the industry in 1919; Tillon wanted to avoid this fate, indeed avoid demobilization altogether, in hopes of restoring the industry to international prominence and preserving it as a bastion of the Communist Party. Until mid-1946 he managed to keep the work force at around ninety thousand employees-a remarkable feat-by fighting reductions in the air force, ordering large production runs of outmoded French and German airplanes, and supporting "reconversion," that is, schemes to use airplane factories for building refrigerators, motorcycles, tractors, army field kitchens, beds, barges, baby carriages, and a host of other products to "conserve precious industrial potential essential to our national defense," as Tillon put it.To stimulate research, Tillon's staff issued a huge number of prototype contracts. Between 1945 and 1949 the Air Ministry financed 127 prototype flights, a scale of experimentation reminiscent of Albert Caquot's prototype policy of the early 1930s. Tillon's goals were nothing if not ambitious: to prevent the shrinkage of the industry during a period of military demobilization; to restore France as a competitor in aeronautical technology after it had fallen five years behind Britain and the United States; and to make the industry a showcase of labor reform-all in an era of austerity.

To pursue these goals, Tillon took advantage of the power nationalization gave his ministry. Since the nationalizations of 1936 were still widely regarded as beneficial to the industry, and since the nationalization of key industries figured prominently in the economic program of the Conseil National de la Résistance, Tillon encountered little opposition. Three new institutions emerged: the Office National d'Etude et de Recherche Aéronautique (ONERO) to coordinate research and development; a fully nationalized Air France, bringing together under state control two private airlines and the mixed company that Cot had created in 1933; and, most far-reaching of all, the Société Nationale d'Etude et de Construction de Moteurs d'Aviation (SNECMA). This new, nationalized engine-building firm derived mainly from Gnôme-et-Rhône and the airplane engine division of Renault, both of which were expropriated at the Liberation for collaborating with the enemy. The bulk of the engine sector now came under government control, fulfilling a long-standing demand on the left to break the grip of the powerful engine manufacturers on the industry. This time there was to be no lengthy inventory for indemnification, as had occurred in 1936 and 1937; the government simply expropriated the Gnôme-et-Rhône stock by an ordinance of 29 May 1945, paid off the small stockholders at a cost of about five hundred million francs, and confiscated the rest of the five-billion-franc firm. The legislation made the rationale for bold action explicit: "During the Occupation the directors lost all awareness of national duty and centered their efforts on satisfying the needs of the enemy. . . . Patriotic conscience demands a complete reorganization of this company . . . to enable the French engine-building industry to recover the technical capacity that will place our national aviation in the first rank. The State alone currently possesses the authority sufficient to assume this task." Such rhetoric conveyed the faith, widespread in 1945, in the regenerative capacity of the government.

In addition to nationalizing research facilities and the all-important engine sector, Tillon enhanced the prominence of the national companies in the airframe sector. Most new orders for prototypes and serial production went to nationalized firms. A few private firms disappeared. The SNCAN absorbed Caudron, SNCASO took over the Farman plant that had prospered during the Occupation, and SNCASE claimed a portion of Latécoère's research facilities in Toulouse. By the spring of 1946 seven out of eight employees in the industry held posts in the nationalized sector.Just as important as the boost Tillon gave to nationalized firms was the purge he carried out among their top management. In January 1945 he asked the directors of all four national companies to resign; he replaced them with men holding stronger Resistance credentials. To run SNECMA he turned to Marcel Weill, a polytechnicien and a Communist. These new directors shared not only Tillon's desire to keep the industry large but also his openness to labor reform. "If SNCAN has to be in the avant garde of technical progress," one new director told his board, "it also must be the forerunner of social progress." Moreover, Tillon shifted the political balance of the boards dramatically in his favor. He made board memberships overlapping so that each director sat on the boards of the other firms. In addition, the ministries of Finance, Air, and National Economy were each entitled to one representative. The latter two ministries being headed by Communists further enhanced Tillon's control, as did an even more stunning display of Communist power in aviation, the right for the CGT to name three representatives to each board, one each from the ranks of white-collar employees, workers, and foremen. Under these circumstances Tillon's influence over managerial policy in the nationalized sector went a good deal beyond what Pierre Cot had acquired during the Popular Front.

Tillon also cultivated a personal tie to the work force. He visited every major factory in the industry, some of them several times. A lively orator, Tillon used these visits to promote the PCF's "battle for production" by extolling the virtues of hard work, teamwork, and national economic independence. Often at these ceremonial occasions he awarded a deserving worker or engineer the new médaille de l'aéronautique , a bronze medallion that on one side had silhouettes of a metalworker, an engineer, a pilot, and a mechanic and on the other the words "science-128;“technique-128;“work-128;“daring" encircling a propeller. Although Tillon himself had no background in aviation, he was quick to adapt the rhetoric of the Communist Resistance-the repeated references to réorganisation, reconstruction, renaissance , and the fraternité de combat -to the special esprit de corps that had long been a part of French aviation. When he called for restoring "the prestige of French wings," everyone in the industry knew what he was talking about. And he made no secret of his political sympathies, "to be faithful to the working class, as a son to maternal love." He told a large crowd of employees at the Amiot factory near Paris, "It's a fact that there's never been in this country a working class and technical personnel as disposed to labor fervently, with a love of their work and their machines. As for me, I say to you that you have never had a better defender of your demands." How workers responded to Tillon's appeal is hard to know, although he made enough of an impression to inspire a number of apprentices to send him hand-hewn airplane models as examples of their work. There is little doubt, however, that Tillon's personality cult, his effort to establish "an unbroken link" between "the workers of aviation" and "your minister," gave him a political base in the industry from which to battle with politicians, bureaucrats, and employers at odds with his aviation policy.

Tillon's leadership at the ministry also enabled Communist militants to strengthen the CGT at the factory level. The Air Ministry made it clear, for example, that anyone fired from a nationalized company in the general strike of 30 November 1938 had a right to his job.More important, since the CGT and PCF were well represented on company boards, CGT militants won control of hiring and apprenticeship training. CGT membership soared. One account estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the personnel at SNECMA were CGT members. In a labor relations system where unions could not rely on closed-shop arrangements or payroll deductions for dues, informal control over hiring was crucial; CGT militants used it accordingly. With Tillon presiding at the boulevard Victor, CGT militants jealously cultivated their access to the Air Ministry, and Tillon respected their efforts. For example, in early 1945 local militants at SNCASE were given a say in the selection of new plant directors in Toulouse and Marseille. Influence of this sort enhanced the prestige of the CGT and served to confirm workers in their faith in the ministry.

Tillon also supported the CGT's effort to broaden its base in the white-collar ranks of the industry. The PCF's emergence in 1944 as the preeminent party in the Resistance gave the CGT a new opportunity to appeal to draftsmen, engineers, and clerical personnel who otherwise would have kept their distance from a blue-collar union with Stalinist stripes. The CGT had made modest inroads into the middle-class strata of the industry during the Popular Front, although rivalry between competing factions in the CGT had hurt the effort, and Daladier's repression cut it short. Mindful of these earlier failures, the Aviation Section of the National Union of Metalworking Cadres and Engineers hoped in 1945 to unify white-collar trade unionists within a single branch of the FTM and, in doing so, build stronger ties between engineers, clerical personnel, technicians, and workers. In many ways conditions had never been better for integrating white-collar employees into the union: these people, too, had suffered during the Occupation, their salaries had stagnated, and they were not faring well in the face of postwar inflation. The CGT geared its pitch accordingly, reminding engineers and technicians that "their salaries must be as severely compromised as the wages of workers" and that "if an enterprise is closed, they will be laid off as well." Tillon did his part to reinforce the message that all employees shared a common fate and a common mission in the aircraft industry. In his speeches he always addressed himself to "engineers, technicians, and workers," and in the two major congresses that his ministry sponsored on the future of French aviation he stressed the cross-class solidarity, the "fruitful and fraternal collaboration" of all personnel, that industrial revival required. Communist influence at the summit of the nationalized sector and in the blue-collar ranks on the shop floor made the militants that much more eager to penetrate the middle reaches of the occupational hierarchy.

Ministerial support also helped CGT militants use production and plant committees to expand the influence of the trade union in workers' lives. As early as October 1944 Tillon called for establishing production committees throughout the industry, patterned after the committees in Toulouse, to give workers a voice in improving production. Tillon's new directors in the nationalized sector welcomed the production committee as well as the plant committee. The latter gave personnel representatives (and in reality the CGT) control over social services in the factory. Plant committee services were financed by sizable company contributions, which in the nationalized companies were equivalent to 5 percent of the payroll, substantially more than the 1 or 2 percent that metal-working companies usually provided. As a result, by 1947 these committees had come to sponsor an impressive range of activities. They organized mutual aid, retirement plans, worker gardens, and emergency support for families in need. They administered medical services within factories and converted rural estates into sanatoriums, rest retreats, and vacation colonies. They supervised consumer cooperatives, day nurseries, lending libraries, study circles, occupational and apprenticeship training, and a wide array of recreational programs-choral societies, art clubs, sports teams, and flying clubs. The Christmas trees and children's parties that had previously given employers a chance to appear benevolent in the autocratic factory now became part of the institutional life of the CGT. So too did factory cafeterias, a complex undertaking that demonstrated, as SNECMA militants were quick to point out, "that workers can run their social services themselves." Militants viewed the plant committee as a way to destroy the tradition of employer paternalism that prevailed before 1936 and was revived through the social committees of the Vichy era. The PCF and the CGT hoped to institutionalize a counterpaternalism that strengthened employees' loyalty to the union.

These advances-the high level of employment in the industry, informal influence over appointments, seats on company boards, control over hiring, the vitality of the plant committees, and the proliferation of social activities-all depended in some measure on political support from the Air and Labor ministries. To be sure, a number of these reforms had their basis in formal government statutes, thanks of course to a left-wing majority in parliament. But workers often had to rely on labor inspectors or ministry officials to ensure that employers actually granted the victories to which workers were entitled. For example, at the Société Morane-Saulnier, a private airframe firm, it took the persistent intervention of the Labor Ministry to get the company director to cooperate with his plant committee. Government pressure undoubtedly also played a role in making the 5 percent subsidy for the plant committee a standard practice in the industry. In short, ministerial support weighed heavily-and visibly-in the new balance of power in aviation that gave workers more of a say in their companies than ever before. Under these circumstances it was reasonable for CGT militants, as well as most rank-and-file workers in the industry, to assume that ministerial power and strong influence in parliament were indispensable to a strategy of left-wing reform.

The Limitations of Communist Reform

The Communist experiment in the aircraft industry had its limits-some self-imposed, others stemming from pressures outside the world of the aircraft factory and the Air Ministry. Despite Charles Tillon's revolutionary background, he pursued a pragmatic policy, particularly toward nationalization. In tinkering with the structure of the nationalized sector, he chose to maintain the national companies in their original form as semiautonomous firms rather than convert them into arsenals subject to

complete ministerial control. He also rejected the notion of merging the national companies into a single enterprise, preferring to keep some rivalry between them as a stimulus to creativity, efficiency, and company loyalty.He called, too, for "close collaboration" with private employers, warning the directors of nationalized firms that he expected them to stand up to the test of competing with the private sector. Although in 1944 he had criticized Blum's nationalizations of 1936 for keeping the leading private manufacturers at the helm of the national companies, Tillon did more to maintain the mixed public-private structure of the industry than to change it. Just as the PCF's strategy of united frontism in the post-Liberation period necessitated compromise in a wide range of national debates on public policy, so too it encouraged Tillon to build on, rather than supersede, the initial reforms of the Popular Front.

The effort to give workers a voice in their factories through plant and production committees had limitations as well. In aviation, as in other industries, the CGT and the PCF had little intention of using these committees to create a genuine regime of democratic decision making on the shop floor. On the contrary, Communist militants took care to keep the functions of the committees narrowly circumscribed so that the crucial issues of wages, hours, and working conditions would remain the primary concern of the trade union itself. The production committee served not as a foothold for workers' control but as a weapon in the "battle for production." The productivism of the CGT during the Popular Front appeared mild in comparison to the enthusiasm with which these committees embraced the virtues of industrial discipline-hard work, efficiency, technical ingenuity, and an identification with the industry and its products. Production committees offered prizes to workers with the best suggestions for cutting production time, lowering costs, or improving quality. At SNECMA the committee routinely endorsed piecework incentive schemes, time-study methods, streamlined assembly, "psychotechnique" (the use of industrial psychology in personnel management), and even output bonuses for waitresses in the factory cafeteria-methods that at least some Communist militants in the 1920s would have condemned as "capitalist rationalization."Although production committees gave personnel representatives a voice in their factories, the PCF and the CGT never promoted them as rivals to company managers. As Tillon's chief of staff, René Jugeau, explained it, committees were to supplement, not supplant, supervisory control, especially because workers were not in a position "to see all the contingencies of production." The production committees may have resonated with the esprit de l'aéronautique of skilled workers, but their limited authority and their productivism also reinforced the managerial hierarchy.

Plant committees likewise fell short of being a revolutionary innovation. By 1946 the CGT sought to draw clearer distinctions between the production committee and the plant committee by restricting the latter to matters of social welfare, largely to the exclusion of economic matters and work organization. In fact, many CGT militants were ambivalent about the plant committee, fearing that employers or non-Communist militants would exploit the institution for their own purposes. Some militants saw a disquieting resemblance between the postwar plant committees and the social committees that the Vichy government had promoted to co-opt workers into social-welfare activites at the factory level. Other militants, such as Henri Jourdain, who was responsible in 1945 for coordinating CGT activities in aviation, viewed plant committees more positively. "With plant committees," Jourdain said, "worker democracy can develop." At the CGT Congress of 1946 he told those militants who dismissed the plant committee as a trap for class collaboration, "If you were to say this to Peugeot workers at Sochaux or to workers at Gnômeet-Rhône, remembering that their plant committees now run social services with a budget of thirty to forty million francs a year, they would certainly not follow you." But if the plant and production committees were clearly "double-edged swords," as Jourdain put it, that could both empower and co-opt workers, there was no denying that by 1946 these institutions no longer embodied the open-ended and quasi-revolutionary spirit of 1944. Although aircraft militants went further toward making something of these committees than did militants in most other industries, their efforts did little to alter the structure of authority in the enterprise.

On a more pragmatic level, the reconversion program that was designed to absorb excess capacity in the industry proved to be a disappointment. The promise of reconversion had been questionable from the beginning, even in the eyes of many workers whose jobs were at stake. Jourdain later recalled "an interminable meeting at the Mureaux factory" where he did his best "to convince workers that though one must fight to give France the aviation it so badly needs, we must diversify production in our factories." By 1946 workers had become ardent supporters of the idea of reconversion as a way to maintain the industry. But it was a difficult policy to put into effect. Aircraft factories, in fact, were not always well-equipped to manufacture consumer goods in rapid order at competitive prices. "Everyone knows," reported one sympathetic labor newspaper, "that the stew pans made by SNCAC cost 1500 francs, while the commercial price ought not to surpass 400 francs."Reconversion was quickly improvised and poorly organized. Although many projects did get under way and kept thousands of people employed, workers could easily see it was a precarious strategy for preserving the industry.

The greatest limitations to reform, however, came from forces beyond the control of the PCF and Tillon's Air Ministry, forces that began to impinge heavily on aircraft workers in 1946. First of all, the job stability that Tillon's program had initially provided began to erode. Socialist and MRP leaders in parliament chose to cut military spending sharply, and much to Tillon's dismay, the PCF felt obliged to accept the policy. Once Germany had been defeated, most people in France supported a policy that put domestic reconstruction ahead of military modernization. In early 1946 the twenty billion francs Tillon had expected to have for the industry was cut to a devastating 12.4 billion. Although he declared he would not become the "minister of disarmament," he could no longer shield the industry from peacetime budgetary priorities. In April SNCASE cut its work force in the Paris region by eight hundred employees. In May Tillon tried to reassure an audience of twenty thousand employees assembled at the Vélodrome d'Hiver: "Well! Despite this reduction . . . I am today in a position to tell you that the layoffs will be limited to a few hundred and that among these several hundred not all will be permanent." Yet despite Tillon's promises, it was obvious that the specter of cutbacks, which had haunted the industry in the 1920s and early 1930s, had returned.

The government's wage policy also became a burden for workers by 1946. Inflation persisted, and to make matters worse, aircraft workers were forced to accept the wage rates decreed for metalworking as a whole rather than a separate, more favorable wage schedule like the one they had won in 1938. To an extent Tillon and the CGT may have been able to compensate for this setback by overclassifying some employees to help them maintain their wages. But overall, wage schedules slipped out of the front ranks of industry. In contrast to the late 1930s, when skilled aircraft workers were the best paid employees in metalworking, after the Liberation they fell behind their counterparts in the automobile industry in the wages they could command. This decline in relative wage position reflected in part the simple realities of demobilization-aircraft workers were no longer in great demand-and in part the inability of aircraft manufacturers, closely watched by the ministries, to pay the black-market rates that often prevailed elsewhere. Given the threat of layoffs in aviation and the postponement of collective bargaining that workers everywhere had to tolerate in the first years after the war, it was difficult for them to fight for wage hikes. Frustration of course took its toll. One Air Ministry official wrote in 1947, "The personnel is becoming skeptical; specialists and engineers of all classes are leaving the companies; the apprenticeship training programs are no longer finding the necessary recruits." Tensions also damaged the CGT: militants found themselves caught between the support of the PCF for wage constraints and the impatience of the rank and file with the policy. At Colombes layoffs and changes in the piece rate system created so much animosity that Tillon himself had to scurry out to the plant and negotiate with workers. In Toulouse tensions took the form of friction between aircraft militants at SNCASE, struggling to hold on to an increasingly demoralized constituency, and other metalworking militants in the union local who adhered more faithfully to the guidance of the FTM. By early 1947 the same frustrations over wage policy that were undermining the CGT in many industries were troubling aircraft locals as well.

What must have made job insecurity and wage constraint seem particularly unjust was that workers in aviation had by and large worked hard to revive the industry. Airframe production climbed steadily in 1945 from 80 tons in January to 210 tons the following October. The SNCAN established an impressive record of steady deliveries, producing more than nine hundred aircraft by the spring of 1947.The secret to this success was overtime. Tillon prevailed on workers to work well beyond forty hours a week, and for the most part workers complied. One company director reported that "the company personnel are currently making a magnificent effort to increase production; at certain posts the workweek has even reached sixty hours." At the SNCASO plant in Courbevoie, which according to one CFTC journalist was characterized by "a spirit of camaraderie and enthusiasm for work," workers put off their August vacations in 1945 to complete a long-awaited breakthrough for the company-its first order of a new airplane, the SO 30 R.Of course, labor productivity varied from shop to shop and from month to month. In some factories productivity lagged for lack of supplies, machinery, electricity, or proper organization. Overstaffing, overclassifying employees, and absenteeism were problems as well. Moreover, it is hard to say what workers really thought of the "battle for production." The productivist campaign of the PCF put CGT militants in the awkward position of enforcing work discipline, which according to one militant's later account triggered controversy in the party cells around SNECMA. Tillon clearly understood the danger. He went out of his way to say that in promoting production he had no plans to impose the hated Rowan wage incentive scheme or "other time-saving systems."Still, there is little evidence that many workers rebelled openly against PCF productivism, nor is there any sign that the left-wing socialists and revolutionary syndicalists who mocked it as "an attempt to transplant Stakhanovism into France" won much of a following. In SNCASE and SNCASO alone the CGT's call for suggestions about production generated more than 250 responses by mid-1947. At SNCASE managers calculated that committee suggestions reduced production time by nearly eighteen thousand hours. As two former workers at an aircraft factory in Châtillon recalled, "Ah yes! The eagerness for working! The guys were quite swollen with pride" (M. Badie); "Everyone believed in it [work] in those days. There was a different ambiance than now. We really believed in it" (M. Dugon). Despite the frustration over wages, it is safe to assume that most workers viewed Tillon's efforts to spur production and minimize layoffs as in their interest. The aircraft industry, which depended heavily on skilled workers who identified with their work and feared layoffs, did not have the same degree of resistance to work discipline as semiskilled workers mounted in the automobile industry in 1946 and 1947. Nor were workers in aviation subjected to as much rationalization of the labor process.

But if most workers responded positively to the challenge of reviving production, they were not in a position to solve the underlying problems plaguing the aircraft industry. Production rates rose, but by 1947 the industry was still building obsolete airplanes. prototypes proliferated, but most of the new models failed. The technological deficiencies that had stymied aircraft builders since 1940 still remained. Only a long-term program of research and production offered a way out of the malaise; only a long-term program, with or without reconversion, could give workers the job stability they deserved.

Tillon's Air Ministry could not surmount the political barriers to creating such a program, for behind the immediate crisis of budgetary austerity loomed several political problems that Tillon, his staff, and the CGT were powerless to overcome. The first was the difficulty of winning popular support for a defense budget now that the immediate threat of foreign invasion had been removed. Second, the international environment remained forbidding because British and American aircraft producers were eager to press their advantage as the leaders in civilian and military aviation. Air France and the French air force could not help but covet the equipment the Americans in particular could offer. As much as everyone liked the idea of industrial independence for France, many officials in the air force, parliament, and the private sector believed it would be wiser to rely on foreign producers, reduce the size of the industry, and restrict the latter to a few important niches in aviation in which French firms could eventually compete. The temptation to buy American would have been greater than it was had the French government not been short of dollars and saddled with debt, problems offset to some extent by the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of May 1946, which forgave France its war debt to the United States and provided loans in exchange for an open door for American goods. Although Tillon did what he could to keep to a minimum French reliance on British and American airplanes, even he could not eliminate it altogether. If these purchases remained modest up to 1947, the continuing dominance of British and American competitors in aviation made it politically difficult to plot-and finance-an ambitious long-term strategy for industrial recovery.

Another obstacle to planning for the aircraft industry was all too familiar to industry employees and the permanent staff of the Air Ministry tension between the Air and Finance ministries. Just as in 1937, when Pierre Cot had run up against the intransigence of the more conservative Georges Bonnet at the rue de Rivoli, so in 1945 and 1946 Tillon encountered the resistance of René Pleven. A businessman who had joined de Gaulle's entourage in London early in the war, Pleven was an economic liberal disinclined to applaud the statist interventionism of Communist and Socialist ministers in the first years of the Fourth Republic. As finance minister, he had great influence over how money was raised and spent in the industry, and his man on the board of the national companies, M. Richard, kept a close watch on company decisions, occasionally voicing dissent. As early as June 1945 the directors of the national companies complained of interference from Finance Ministry officials. By 1946 Tillon had put aside the decorum of tripartite politics to lash out publicly against Pleven's policies-his willingness to starve firms of the capital they needed for reconversion and his reluctance to pay workers in the nationalized sector what their counterparts in private firms earned. Though Pleven had not prevented Tillon from carrying out his initial program in 1945, his stature in the government grew steadily thereafter, making it impossible for the Air Ministry to dodge the blow of budgetary austerity once it came.

A fourth obstacle to effective planning for the industry had a Popular Front precedent as well-the fragility of the political coalition in power. The inherent instability of tripartite politics-the difficulty of holding together Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats once the aura of Liberation unity disappeared-had from the beginning made Tillon's vision for the industry a precarious hostage to political fortune. Policy differences and the gradual emergence of tensions between East and West had corrosive effects. By late 1946 conflicts within the government over wage and price controls, colonial policy, and Soviet-American antagonisms had widened the rift between Communists and their Socialist and Christian Democratic partners. When Léon Blum formed a new cabinet in December 1946, Tillon lost control of the Armament Ministry. One month later, Paul Ramadier, a Socialist, established yet another government, naming Tillon as minister of reconstruction but turning to a Radical, André Maroselli, to take over the Air Ministry. Though the tripartite coalition would remain in power until May, this shift in cabinet posts would soon prove fateful for the aircraft industry. It would not take long for employees to discover that Tillon's removal marked the beginning of a shift in national policy toward aviation even more fundamental than La Chambre's replacement of Cot had proved to be nearly ten years before.

Tillon's tenure at the Air and Armament ministries did resemble Cot's in several ways. Like Cot, Tillon had taken advantage of labor militance and a resurgence of left-wing parliamentary power to nationalize important firms and expand the power of the government in the industry. And like Cot, Tillon tried to buttress his position in government by opening the doors of his ministry to CGT militants; he cultivated political support within the work force, thereby enhancing the position of the CGT. Both men used the instrument of nationalization to restructure firms and strengthen the power of the Air Ministry, and they both watched the momentum of reform bog down at the Finance Ministry. Dismissal came to both ministers months after they had reached an impasse on the path of reform.

Beyond these similarities, however, circumstances differed in 1947 to make the political consequences of Tillon's dismissal potentially much greater than they had been when Cot lost his post in 1938. Cot left the boulevard Victor at a time when everyone agreed that the industry should expand; Tillon left amid deep disagreements over whether to diminish the industry and how far to move into the American orbit. For the PCF as well as for employees generally, the stakes in keeping the industry large were particularly high. At the same time the balance of power between labor, employers, and state officials had changed dramatically in the course of a decade. The CGT, for all its troubles in 1946, had more clout than before, especially its Communist faction. Plant and production committees, high rates of union membership, overwhelming PCF influence in the FTM, Tillon's left-leaning management team in the nationalized sector, and the PCF's sizable delegation of deputies in parliament all contributed to CGT political strength in aircraft manufacturing. By the same token, private employers were much weaker as a political force than they had been in 1938. The creation of SNECMA had nationalized the most important independent base of operations for private capital in the late 1930s, Gnôme-et-Rhône and Renault. To be sure, a few powerful private builders were still around. Louis Bréguet and Marcel Bloch (who after returning from Buchenwald in 1945 changed his last name to Dassault) quietly picked up the pieces of their wartime and prewar operations respectively. Félix Amiot fought a lengthy battle to keep his company from falling permanently into government hands. But none of these men was in a position to rally colleagues behind a counteroffensive against reform as Paul-Louis Weiller had done in 1938. The Union Syndicale, as a business association bringing together employers in both the public and private sectors of the industry, had even less autonomy from the state in 1947 than in 1939 and less power to shape employer strategy. In short, labor had strengthened and private employers weakened as organized groups in the industry.

The political balance had shifted in another way: Tillon's reassertion of ministerial authority in the industry, his nationalizations, and appointments in the nationalized sector had tied aircraft manufacturing even more tightly to national politics than it had already been in 1938. State officials, be they ministers, parliamentarians, or staff men in the ministries, held most of the cards in the aircraft deck after the Liberation-a situation that accrued to the benefit of the Communists in the short run but exposed them to setbacks as party fortunes faded later on. What the PCF had won through the ministries in 1944 could be lost by the same means when leaders with other loyalities and convictions came to power. These risks were obvious, as any militant who had experienced the reversals of 1938 knew all too well. But few militants, least of all Communist militants, saw much reason in 1944 and 1945 to question the dual strategy of mobilizing workers on the shop floor and winning influence in the ministries that had brought real dividends in 1936 and again after the Liberation. Tillon's position in the government had been crucial in making the aircraft industry an important arena for labor reform, even if his power proved insufficient to provide the budgetary support and longterm planning the industry needed.

By trying to stave off the peacetime contraction of the aircraft industry, Tillon overplayed his hand. In late 1946 the national companies were languishing without proper operating funds and long-term orders. Had Tillon remained in charge of industry policy beyond 1946, the fundamental shortcoming of his strategy-maintaining the fiction of a nationalist, productivist policy for the industry without the money or the plans to pursue it-might have severely undercut his standing with workers and hence the prestige of the CGT. By losing his post, however, Tillon spared the PCF the embarrassment of presiding over further austerity. As it turned out, his departure set the stage for a brutal series of battles in parliament and in the streets over how to reshape the industry.

Toward a Postwar Industrial Order, 1947-1950

Between 1947 and 1950 aircraft workers fought in vain against government efforts to cut the work force and reassert managerial authority. Once the tripartite governing coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats fell apart in May 1947, Communist militants were thrown on the defensive to protect what they had achieved after the Liberation from politicians, employers, and trade union rivals determined to break the near monopoly power of the Communist-dominated CGT on the shop floor. Similar battles took place elsewhere in French industry, especially in the nationalized sectors of coal, gas, and electricity, where new ministers sought to reverse policies of their Communist predecessors. The political stakes were particularly high in the aircraft and coal industries, where the CGT and the PCF had gone far to establish control over boards and management appointments; both sectors, moreover, had strategic importance-aircraft for the military, coal for the economy as a whole. In coal the conflict between the CGT and the government culminated in a bitter, violent coal strike in November 1948 in which three strikers were killed and hundreds of strikers and soldiers were wounded. In aviation industrial warfare took the form of many local strikes, demonstrations, and lockouts spread out over three years between 1947 and 1950. In both industries the outcome was the same: a government composed of Socialist, Christian Democrat, and Radical ministers triumphed over a largely Communist-led work force increasingly isolated by the politics of the cold war. As a result, officials in the Air, Finance and Labor ministries proved able to establish a more conservative managerial regime in aviation by purging Communists from important posts, reducing the significance of factory committees, reviving private firms, and establishing a modus vivendi between employers and the state that stabilized the industry on the twin pillars of employer authority and government supervision. The government's victory, however, did not purge the work force of the Communist Party. To a remarkable degree the CGT survived defeat to remain a major force in the politics of the industry for a long time to come. In the late 1940s, much as in the period of rearmament from 1936 to 1939, state intervention in the industry and Communist militancy became mutually reinforcing because CGT militants became adept as advocates in state-managed sectors of the economy. A close look at the battles over cutbacks between 1947 and 1950 helps explain the apparent paradox in which government intervention served both to weaken the CGT in the nation as a whole and to reinforce it in relationship to rival trade union confederations.

The Reversals of 1947

When Socialist premier Paul Ramadier named André Maroselli to take over the Air Ministry in January 1947, policy-making for the aircraft industry had reached a critical juncture. It was no secret that Charles Tillon's strategy for rebuilding the industry had been extremely controversial. Even if Gaullists, Communists, and many Air Ministry engineers and air force officials had supported Tillon's notion of keeping the industry big, maintaining the state's existing investment in plants, machinery, and a skilled work force, and favoring the purchase of French-made planes, there were still dissenters. Many Socialists, moderates, Finance Ministry officials, and state engineers like Henri Ziegler (who had spent the war years ensconced in British and American aviation) had a different future in mind. They envisioned a smaller, leaner industry that would gradually carve out a few specialized niches in the world market; they were open to exploring new ways to cooperate with British and American manufacturers and were prepared to have the air force and Air France purchase equipment from British and American firms-a strategy, as it turned out, the Americans would eventually help finance through the Marshall Plan. Needless to say, most employees pinned their hopes on Tillon's more nationalistic strategy, which held out the hope of protecting their jobs in a treacherous postwar economy and conformed to the patriotic spirit of the Resistance, which had not yet disappeared.

At first Maroselli's appointment did not seem to signal a shift toward the more Atlanticist strategy. Maroselli, after all, had long been one of the Radical Party's most ardent advocates of a robust aircraft industry and a strong air force. A flier himself and a veteran of the Resistance, he appeared to be a plausible champion of industry who would try to stop the hemorrhaging of the air budget. But Maroselli and Tillon came from different worlds, and 1947 was a different moment from the late 1930s, when Maroselli made a name for himself by criticizing Guy La Chambre. Maroselli had visited the United States during the war and had been taken with its modernity-he is reputed to have come back with the ambition of giving refrigerators to everyone in his town when the war was over. He had none of Tillon's ideological aversion to building up French aviation alongside, rather than in opposition to, America. As a man of the political center, he also understood Premier Ramadier's ambition to isolate the Communist Party, especially at a time when American officials were hinting that such efforts might be rewarded with American aid. Within a month of moving into the Air Ministry, Maroselli demonstrated his willingness to follow a different course than Tillon's by appointing Marcel Pellenc to investigate problems in the nationalized companies.

Pellenc, who in career and outlook was the quintessence of the postwar technocrat, was just the man to bring an aura of administrative respectability to the highly political business of rethinking Air Ministry policy. A polytechnicien and a veteran of the First World War, Pellenc distinguished himself for fourteen years as director of national radio broadcasting before becoming a professor at both the Ecole Supérieure des Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones, and the Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité. During the Occupation he withdrew from his teaching positions, joined the Resistance, and began medical training to become a doctor. Returning to public life after the Liberation, he ran unsuccessfully for parliament on Daladier's electoral list and then joined Maroselli's staff at the Air Ministry. In May 1947 he presented the minister with a secret report that soon became the battle plan for an assault on Tillon's reforms.

The Pellenc Report, made public in June 1947, offered a blistering critique of managerial practices during the Tillon era. Pellenc felt that the industry had failed to produce adequate aircraft, arguing that only half of the 2,042 airplanes built between the Liberation and the end of 1946 were suitable for regular use. Rather than assess the full range of problems-financial, technological, and political-that lay behind the crisis in the aircraft industry, Pellenc chose to focus on the problems he believed Communist partisanship had created. He criticized Tillon for purging top management in 1945, for staffing the companies with political confidants, for classifying workers at too high a level, for refusing to reduce the work force, and for subsidizing wages by inflating the production time required to build airplanes. He made much of the troubles at SNCASE, where the director had proven to be so incompetent that Tillon was forced to replace him with Georges Hereil, a political moderate and a widely respected engineer. Problems at SNCASE were only the most extreme instance, in Pellenc's view, of widespread failings-the lack of rigorous managerial control, the partisanship of Communist officials, the absence of board members with a financial stake in the firms, and the resistance to demobilization. To rectify matters, Pellenc called for massive layoffs and tighter ministerial control over the nationalized sector.

To be sure, Tillon's policies were vulnerable to attack. By delaying demobilization, Tillon and his colleagues in the Air Ministry evaded tough choices about how best to use limited resources; in the end they left it to their successors to find a less costly strategy for competing effectively in the international market. Reconversion, moreover, may have preserved jobs in the short run, but it made workers and the CGT all the more vulnerable to the political backlash that the Pellenc Report represented. In the poisonous political atmosphere of 1947 it was all too easy for Pellenc to condemn Tillon's policies through an anti-Communist diatribe and to overlook the fact that Tillon's strategy was not simply a Communist effort to preserve the industry as a political bastion; it also continued a long-standing practice in France, going back to the 1920s, of maintaining surplus capacity in the industry in the interests of national defense. But the adverse conditions of the postwar years-Anglo-American dominance in aviation, France's technological lag, the competing demands of domestic reconstruction-made some contraction of the industry necessary, at least to about two-thirds of its size in 1945. By failing to come to terms with this reality, Tillon, the PCF, and the CGT missed their chance to reshape the industry on their own terms.

The Pellenc Report gave Air Minister Maroselli the blueprint he needed to shift from Tillon's vision of the aircraft industry to an Atlanticist strategy for restructuring aviation. On 23 May he told Premier Ramadier that "at least a third of the personnel [in the industry] are not being usefully employed. . . . It is essential to address without further delay, on a governmental level, the question that since the Liberation has never been resolved or even approached in France, the 'deflating of the aircraft industry' and the systematic orientation toward other sectors, currently needing manpower, of the accessory personnel now available." Hoping to avoid wholesale layoffs, Maroselli called on the premier to assemble the ministers of finance, industrial production, national economy, labor, air, and planning in an effort to transfer workers to other industries and strengthen the program of reconversion. The main message, however, was clear. Maroselli was now prepared to demobilize the industry, reducing it to the scale that he and Pellenc believed a peacetime economy required.

This shift in policy, significantly, came just two weeks after the collapse of the tripartite coalition. Since the beginning of the year Communist deputies and CGT militants had found it increasingly difficult to tolerate the government's policy of frozen wages. Colonial policy, too, had nearly destroyed the coalition in early spring. In late April, when a wildcat strike at Renault threatened to isolate CGT militants from their own rank and file, PCF leaders finally decided to reverse course. They freed the CGT to assume command of the strike; they spoke out forcefully against the wage policy and in so doing gave Ramadier the excuse he had been looking for to dismiss his Communist ministers. Developments abroad only encouraged this break with tripartitism, as the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine and the failure of the four-power conference in Moscow in April all but made official the cold war. It was thus in a government of Christian Democrats, Radicals, and Socialists, a government with no political obligation to continue Tillon's policies, that Maroselli embarked on the effort to cut back the aircraft industry and reshape it along more conservative lines. Paul Ramadier and his new cabinet scarcely needed to be convinced of this new direction, which moderates like René Pleven had been advocating since 1945. Indeed, by the end of July both Ramadier and his finance minister, Robert Schuman, of the MRP, were pressuring Maroselli to carry out a plan to lay off about fifteen thousand employees from the nationalized sector. In his enthusiasm for rethinking air policy, Ramadier even went so far as to suggest transferring responsibility for supervising production from the Air Ministry to the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, in part to eliminate "the fragmentation of manpower between several industrial ministries [which] creates competition between them and hence raises wages." Ramadier may also have had doubts about Maroselli's commitment to slash jobs from an industry he had spent much of his political life promoting. In the end Maroselli managed to squelch the idea of transferring responsibilities, thereby preserving Air Ministry authority for overseeing the industry as a whole. But the episode demonstrated how serious Ramadier had become about radical cuts in aircraft employment.

Although it would take nearly a year for all the implications of the new policy to emerge, by the autumn of 1947 its impact had become obvious at the factory level. The national companies and SNECMA complained bitterly about financial starvation as private banks retreated from their role as short-term lenders and the Finance Ministry grew more reluctant to offer funds. Raw materials became scarce, and wage and price policy tightened the squeeze further. An 11 percent wage hike in aviation, decreed in August 1947, fell short of the 13.2 percent that the CNPF and the CGT had agreed to for the private sector generally. With inflation biting deeply into everyone's pockets, nationalized firms found it tougher to hold on to workers. Worse still, the Air and Finance ministries refused to raise the taux horaire , the average hourly wage rate on which the price of an airplane was based. This practice depressed both wages  was fiercely opposed to a policy of contraction, began to ponder the closing of SNECMA's large plant at Billancourt. By the fall of 1947 layoffs had become common enough to establish a climate of panic on the shop floor.

With everything the CGT had won in 1945 now in jeopardy, CGT militants threw themselves into organizing workers to combat the new policy. Leading spokesmen for the aircraft wing of the FTM, men like Jean Breteau and Henri Beaumont who had come into prominence during the Liberation, issued pamphlets and traveled to union locals in an effort to rally workers for "the second phase of our battle for nationalizations." In speaking out against Maroselli's policy, CGT militants stuck to the high ground of left-wing patriotism, arguing that "big capital" was bent on striking "a decisive blow against independent French aviation, which alone is capable in the current circumstances of assuring the independence of France and the dissemination of its civilization and ideas throughout the world."Once militants got wind of Pellenc's recommendations, they condemned his investigation as a political witch hunt, "a study of the curriculum vitae of cadres and engineers." By the fall of 1947 factory militants had organized local "aircraft defense committees" to agitate against the contraction of the industry, or, as militants at the Billancourt plant at SNECMA put it, "the systematic willingness of the government to make our aircraft industry a subcontractor for American aviation." These groups, which deliberately tried to appeal to employees' identification with French aviation, attracted support not only from the working-class rank and file of the aircraft unions but also from the managerial ranks. Within a few months of the government's change in policy, then, the CGT was orchestrating a campaign to oppose the contraction of the industry.

The end of tripartitism and the PCF's new stance against the wage freeze put CGT militants in a stronger position to fight Maroselli head on. Now militants could link the immediate interests of individual employees with the larger struggle to defend the size, structure, and political character of the nationalized sector. In other words, demands for wage increases could go hand in hand with the need to address the other issues that were hampering these firms by mid-1947-financial constraints, the refusal to increase the taux horaire , material shortages, and foreign orders. If the dismissal of Communist ministers once again isolated militants from the crucial ministries of Air, Labor, and National Economy, it nonetheless enabled them to restore greater coherence to the program they advocated at the plant level. Cold-war politics also lent credibility to the CGT's outlook on the industry. In June American secretary of state George Marshall announced plans for the European Recovery Program, an enormous effort to aid Western Europe in the face of deepening domestic tensions. If in most sectors of the French economy it could be plausibly argued that whatever American political intentions might be, the infusion of capital was a boon to production, in the aircraft industry fears abounded that the Marshall Plan would endanger French interests. Though no militant could prove that strings were attached to the aid, the overwhelming strength of American aircraft manufacturing, its success in penetrating the French market, and the hostility of American officials to left-wing reforms made fears of the Marshall Plan quite compelling. Cartoons of a rapacious Uncle Sam giving money with one hand and selling airplanes with the other conveyed quickly and simply what the mechanics of the Plan could entail. Enemies of the national companies, militants warned, could now look across the Atlantic to replenish the nation with planes. Though anti-Americanism had figured prominently in CGT rhetoric since the end of the war, it would now serve as a rallying cry in the battle against the contraction of the industry.

In fact, American officials were hardly disinterested bystanders in the struggle over restructuring aviation. Embassy officials followed developments closely, as they had during Tillon's regime, assessing what the battle for control of the aircraft industry might mean for American manufacturers eager to sell airplanes in France and a State Department eager to see Communist influence minimized in a sensitive, defense-related industry. American officials understood that a shortage of dollars stood in the way of the air force or Air France buying American aircraft; they recognized the utility of American aid in solving this problem. Embassy officials also recognized subtle opportunities to support French officials who were trying to restructure the nationalized sector. For example, when the idea surfaced in France to buy a manufacturing license from the Douglas Aircraft Company, the American ambassador wrote this revealing telegram to Secretary of State Marshall:

In view [of] Pellenc report . . . and convenient designation of committee to study reorganization [of] French aircraft industry . . . , [I] believe supporters of principle of nationalization might attempt to use Douglas contract with nationalized factory as demonstration [of] US confidence and thereby weaken efforts [of] Minister of Finance and others to bring about at least reorganization in managing personnel many of whom are known Communists installed by Tillon. European representatives [of] Douglas aware of this possibility and intend to stall.

Although the fate of the nationalized firms ultimately rested in the hands of men in French ministries and the National Assembly, not in Washington, CGT militants were correct in assuming that international politics, including American efforts to weaken the Communist left in Western Europe, had made their industry a battleground in the cold war.

Two impediments, however, stood in the way of mounting an effective resistance to Maroselli's policy. The strike weapon, first of all, was difficult to wield in a climate where strikers could easily lose their jobs. Even worse, cold-war hostilities were widening the cleavage between Communist militants and both CFTC militants and the new anti-Communist faction within the CGT, Force Ouvrière (FO). These rivalries posed less of a danger to collective action in Paris than in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Nantes, where Socialists and other non-Communist militants had important followings. Factional fights there could be crippling. In Bordeaux, for example, Communists and FO militants together had initiated a campaign to oppose the transfer of Frigeavia, a refrigerator-manufacturing project in which aircraft workers at SNCASO took considerable pride, to the Bouguenais plant near Nantes. On 24 September 1947 eight hundred workers gathered to hear militants call for the preservation of the project, and the local prefect was sufficiently impressed by the strength of protest and the depth of feeling it evoked in workers to ask the government to keep Frigeavia in Bordeaux. But partisan rivalries quickly surfaced. Communist militants put up posters denouncing Premier Ramadier, a Socialist, as the villain behind the cutbacks, and FO militants vented their pent-up anger against Tillon, whom they accused of initiating layoffs in 1946 and favoring plants in his "electoral district of Paris." Not surprisingly, the protest proved ineffectual; Ramadier and Maroselli proceeded with the layoffs as planned, and the local prefect tried to find jobs elsewhere in Bordeaux for laid-off workers. As events were soon to show on a far larger scale, trade union factionalism of this sort undercut the effort to win a reversal of government policy.

The denouement came at the end of 1947. During the fall the PCF had been planning to mobilize workers throughout French industry into a strike movement aimed at disrupting the government, attacking the Marshall Plan, and rebuilding a left-wing coalition around the Communist Party. Price hikes and especially a government-decreed boost in the price of coal in October made workers receptive to industrial actions. But the strike wave broke upon the country more promptly than leaders had planned. Violence between police and CGT demonstrators in Marseille precipitated a general strike in the city on 14 November, just when trouble was provoking a miners' strike in the Nord. Strikes quickly spread along the rail network, in Parisian metalworking, and then to the building trades, docks, and several other industrial branches. By the end of the month more than two million workers had joined what the CGT had declared a "generalized strike." For striking workers, three struggles converged-a campaign for wage adjustments to keep up with inflation, a political battle to advance the political aims of the PCF, and a fratricidal contest with strikebreakers and FO reformists, who objected to the Communists' partisan goals and urged strikers to return to work. With the CGT divided from within, Communist militants frequently resorted to tough tactics to sustain what had become a pivotal test of strength for their wing of the labor movement.

As part of the movement in metalworking, aircraft workers joined the strike in great numbers. The strength of the PCF in the industry and the political stakes the movement came to entail left most workers in the nationalized aircraft plants around Paris with little choice but to strike. The factory occupation at SNECMA in Argenteuil made a particularly strong impression on an American foreign-service officer who reported to his superiors that the factory had become "an entrenched camp" where strikers, armed with "bottles of acid, fire hoses, and compressors loaded with gasoline to serve as flame throwers," used "plant sirens to pass coded communications back and forth" to neighboring plants at Gennevilliers and Colombes.Although there was something of an insurrectionary quality to the atmosphere of the "generalized strike," for aircraft workers the strike wave provided a much-needed chance to make down-to-earth proposals in response to the air policy of the government. On 19 November militants from the national companies presented employers and, by extension, the government with a list of demands in which two concerns figured prominently-wage hikes and the "defense of French aviation through a national policy ensuring our independence." A new national policy, militants said, should include the following:

In assigning orders, give the national companies priority.
Pay the debts the State owes to nationalized firms.
Struggle against the dismantling of the nationalized plants.
Create an advisory committee on the aircraft industry as an adjunct to the DTI [technical and industrial director at the Air Ministry].
Utilize the potential of the industry rationally in projects of reconversion.
Revise the hourly rate used in setting contracts.

This list was hardly a radical manifesto. It asked for nothing more than a return to the principles that had guided ministerial policy under Tillon, apart from establishing an advisory committee that simply expanded on the PCF's efforts in 1945 and 1946 to give the CGT more of a voice in the ministries. But the stakes were high-nothing less than the survival of the nationalized sector as an arena where the CGT could influence how factories were run, and the preservation of a work force that had become a bastion of support for the Communist Party. If the strike wave offered aircraft workers an opportunity to agitate collectively for a change in policy, its defeat proved catastrophic. On 9 December, after government repression had broken the railroad strike and created an atmosphere of near hysteria in the general public, the Communist leadership of the CGT acknowledged defeat and ordered their followers back to work. Despite the size of the strike wave, the movement fell far short of the general strike that would have been needed to win concessions on wage policy, much less pave the way for a return of Communist officials to the ministries. Moreover, many workers refused to risk striking for what appeared to be the narrow political aims of the PCF. Open hostility between Communist militants and FO reformists had weakened the strikes as well. By mid-December, when the FO minority established a separate confederation, the CGT once again was divided in two. Although the Communist wing of the labor movement remained dominant in most blue-collar industries, and especially in the aircraft and metalworking sectors, defeat and schism made apparent what had transpired over the course of the year. Cold-war politics had destroyed the postwar experiment in Communist-led reform and diminished the CGT as a force in industrial conflict.

In aviation the costs of defeat could not have been higher. Strikers at SNCASE, for example, faced swift reprisals since Georges Hereil, the company director, had no sympathy for the movement. At SNECMA and SNCAN Communist managers who allowed strikers to resume their posts eventually lost their own jobs. Vincent Auriol, the president of the Republic, wrote in his diary, "[The premier] asks that the high administrators and directors of nationalized enterprises, as well as a number of government officials, be replaced since they have shown themselves to be feeble [in the face of the strikes]. Most of them, appointed by the Communists, cannot serve the Republic since they seek to overthrow it." For militants, however, there was a higher price still, for in losing this battle the CGT had exposed how little power it had to forestall Maroselli's effort to reduce the size of the industry and reshape its structure. The strike defeat of December 1947, though by no means the end of the battle in the aircraft sector, revealed to militants, employers, and state officials alike how quickly the balance of power in the industry was shifting and hence how readily the government could proceed with its plans.

Purge and Reorganization

With the PCF isolated on the left and a new Gaullist party too weak to capture power from the right, government during the late 1940s and early 1950s rested mainly in the hands of so-called Third Force coalitions. This procession of centrist cabinets provided enough continuity to enable Maroselli and Ramadier, who served as defense minister in 1948 and 1949, to reorganize the aircraft industry along the lines Marcel Pellenc had charted in 1947. It was a period of monumental change for people in French aviation, as the government proceeded with layoffs on a massive scale. The Pellenc Report had made much of the need to shrink the industry, and in 1948 a second report, this one by Finance Inspector Albin Chalandron, gave Maroselli further ammunition to fend off Communist critics in parliament and rebellious workers on factory floors. By 1949 the work force had fallen to 49,300 employees, reduced by nearly 45 percent from what it had been at the beginning of 1947. Despite the efforts of workers and militants to resist these policies, Air Ministry officials managed to eliminate almost forty thousand people from the industry. By 1950 the government had cut the industry to its postwar low of about forty-one thousand employees. But government initiative in 1948 and 1949 went far beyond cutting the work force. Maroselli, Ramadier, and other men highly placed in the Air, Defense and Finance ministries restructured the industry on radically different lines from those Tillon had followed right after the war.

In the course of reducing the scale of the industry, government officials and company managers carried out a strategy of conservative stabilization with four main features. First of all, Maroselli took bold steps to curb the influence of the Communist Party and strengthen ministerial control of the national companies. Like Tillon before him, Maroselli had his purge. He replaced board members with his own men and in the spring of 1948 fired Marcel Weill, the head of SNECMA, as well as the top administrators in most of the other national companies. New managers then proceeded to bring the ethos of Thermidorian reaction to the shop floor. Massive layoffs gave them ample opportunity to fire important militants. And they had plenty of supporters urging them to do so. Conservative critics, such as Raymond Aron, had made much of the "excessive camaraderie" that had allegedly weakened managerial control during the Tillon era; government reports echoed these claims and called for a return to conventional labor discipline. American officials applauded the appointment of new men at the national companies, like Georges Glasser at SNCASO, who, as an embassy official wrote the State Department, was "well and favorably known to the American authorities here and in Berlin. . . . It is understood that his instructions are to begin by purging [the company] of the numerous Communists who hold key positions in the organization."

Company directors went on either to reduce sharply the importance of production committees or liquidate them altogether. By the end of 1948 only the shop steward system and plant committees, both protected by law, remained firmly in place as vehicles of employee representation at the factory level. But even these institutions became scenes of conflict. To bring the plant committees under tighter control, employers insisted on scrutinizing committee accounts. In the case of at least one company, Turboméca, the president reduced the committee's subsidy. The new director of SNCAC prohibited plant committee funds from being used to finance a "defense committee for French aviation," which he viewed as a Communist undertaking. At SNECMA, after a dispute arose between management and the plant committee over subsidizing a local air club-militants wanted to eliminate the subsidy since the club had become a tight clique-the company director used the issue as a pretext to cut the number of working hours that committee members could give to their meetings. In the same vein the SNCAC director prohibited militants from using company cars for committee business, a privilege they had enjoyed during the Tillon era. And to regain more direct control over office employees and engineers, plant directors actively recruited young newcomers to the industry, freshly trained in state engineering schools and untarnished by the political infighting of the immediate postwar period. These initiatives, combined with tighter supervision, were designed to give employers the kind of control over plants that their predecessors had enjoyed before the war.

These efforts to revive conventional supervisory authority went hand in hand with a second goal, improving productivity. This was hardly a novel objective: since the Liberation Communist militants had trumpeted loudly for ways to cut costs and accelerate production. But under the Maroselli regime the stress on productivity had different political connotations as it became part of a campaign to streamline the industry, not to transform it into an island of left-wing reform. The call for "rationalization" returned to the forefront of ministerial policy, much as it had in 1938. Employers were urged to intensify work rhythms, harness more workers to the stopwatch, and reduce the proportion of skilled workers and nonproductive employees in the work force. To be faced with the threat of cutbacks, on one side, and the pressure to step up the work pace, on the other, struck some militants as cruelly contradictory. "The workers," Henri Jourdain wrote on behalf of the FTM to Premier Ramadier in October 1947, "who have worked with all their hearts amid the worst difficulties to get French aircraft construction going again, do not understand why they should be the victims of layoffs when your government still demands increased rates of production." It was awkward, however, for CGT militants to condemn productivism altogether, having fought fiercely for greater productivity during the Tillon era. Indeed, when the CGT press denounced "the poisoned propaganda of 'productivité,'" it condemned not rationalization per se but its use as a weapon against labor. The CGT's agitation had little effect. Between 1949 and 1954 productivity rose, although it remains unclear whether work rhythms, capital investment, factory reorganization, or simply steadier production runs account for the improvement.A third feature in reorganizing the aircraft industry was a willingness to look to Britain and the United States as a source of new technology and advanced aircraft. This shift in policy away from the nationalistic stance of the Tillon period did not come easily, for it was not only the PCF but also many of the engineers in the national companies and the Air Ministry who had hoped to avoid foreign purchases. Air force officials, however, tipped the balance in 1948 toward a more international approach. To play anything more than a minor role in an emerging Western alliance, the French air force had to acquire new jet aircraft, which French firms were still not capable of producing. Under the pressure of negotiations that in 1949 would give birth to NATO, air force officials prevailed on the government to approve the purchase of British Vampire jets as well as licensing agreements that would enable French firms to build British airframes and engines in France. Similarly Air France, now headed by Henri Ziegler, stepped up pressure on the government to approve the purchase of American airliners, which were more efficient than the airliners SNCASO was trying to produce. In early 1949 this new openness to Anglo-American aviation found further reinforcement in the Surleau Commission report, the last in the series of government reports in the late 1940s making recommendations on how to reorganize the nationalized aircraft companies. The Surleau report called for an end to the effort to compete with American companies in the construction of long-distance airliners and strategic bombers. Recent prototype failures, the commission concluded, had shown how limited the French effort should be, at least in the short run. By 1949, then, the needs of the air force and Air France gave the Air and Finance ministries compelling reasons to make some carefully targeted purchases of aircraft, patents, prototypes, and manufacturing licenses from British and American industry.

The Surleau Commission also urged the Air Ministry to establish a long-term plan for airplane construction in France, a fourth feature of the stabilization strategy. Every investigation into the shortcomings of the industry after the war had called attention to the absence of planning. Tillon had in fact tried to create a five-year plan of his own, but budget cuts and poor planning doomed it from the start. At first Maroselli fared no better: budgetary changes in 1947 and 1948 continued to wreak havoc on many firms, which, as the experience of the 1930s had shown, needed a steady diet of production orders to remain financially sound. It was thus a milestone in the postwar history of the industry when parliament approved a five-year construction plan for aviation in August 1950. Though the plan would later come under parliamentary attack for its inadequacies, it created the basis for financial stability, especially in the nationalized sector, for the first time since the end of the war.By limiting prototype development to a mere fifteen new models, the plan also gave the industry a sharper focus for research, which by the mid-1950s bore the fruit of several triumphs in the international market, including the Caravelle airliner and Dassault's jet fighters, the Mystère IV and the Mirage I. No less remarkable, the five-year plan called for a gradual expansion of the industry during the early 1950s, which in fact came to pass. By the end of 1952 employment in the aircraft industry had risen back up to fifty-eight thousand people, a 41 percent increase in just two and a half years. This surprising leap in employment, though stemming in large part from proper planning, parliamentary support for air budgets, and a renewed demand for airplanes on account of the wars in Korea and Indochina, nevertheless gave grist to the mill of those critics who thought Maroselli, Pellenc, and Ramadier had gone too far in contracting the industry.

The Balance of Public and Private Power

Although Maroselli attacked Tillon's labor policy, he by no means dismantled state controls over the industry. On the contrary, as Pellenc had recommended, Maroselli strengthened ministerial control over the company directors and boards of the nationalized firms, much as the Ministry of Industrial Production did in the nationalized coal, gas, and electrical-power industries. Moreover, once the nationalized sector had been purged of Tillon's managers and reorganized into only four firms (SNCAN, SNCASO, SNCASE, and SNECMA), the Finance Ministry began boosting their capitalization to put them on a sounder financial footing. In this respect Maroselli's approach to the nationalized sector was much like La Chambre's and Daladier's a decade earlier: in both instances the Air Ministry rebuffed the CGT but reaffirmed nationalization as a virtue and reasserted state authority over these firms.

Like La Chambre, however, Maroselli also made room for a revival of private entrepreneurship alongside the national companies. By 1950 several private builders, especially Marcel Dassault, Louis Bréguet, and the engine company, Hispano-Suiza, had returned to prominence. This revival of private enterprise was bound to be more circumscribed in the late 1940s than it had been from 1938 to 1940, when a larger number of private firms profited from the rearmament effort. Many private entrepreneurs, in aviation as in other industries, had suffered a loss of prestige, and in some cases even a loss of their companies, for collaborating with the Germans. The nationalization of most of the engine sector in 1945 had weakened the private sector all the more. Still, the return of more moderate leaders to the ministries after 1946 made it possible for politicians, military officials, company directors in the nationalized sector, and private employers to accommodate one another more harmoniously than had been the case in the immediate aftermath of the war.

For one thing, the purging of Communists from the nationalized firms and from the Air Ministry restored a more conventional environment of professional decorum in the boardrooms and offices of the industrial elite. Even though Tillon and his staff had shared a common interest in keeping the industry big with many of the career civil service engineers in the Air Ministry and national companies, they were men cut from different cloth-political activists of modest origins, not graduates of the grandes écoles. After 1946 top posts in companies and the ministries returned to professionals who had much in common with the engineers and administrators in private airplane companies. There was room in this world for new men, like Stéphane Thouvenot and Henri Ziegler, engineers who had won posts in the Air Ministry in the late 1930s, as well as for some of the aging veterans, like Louis Bréguet or Henry Potez, whom Maroselli turned to at one point to run SNECMA after he had fired Marcel Weill. Although the old guard by no means staged a restoration-state officials and younger men remained firmly in control of industrywide policy-with Communists purged, a more homogeneous crowd staffed the top echelon of the Air Ministry and the companies, both public and private.

The career of Georges Hereil illustrates how public officials and private employers came to collaborate effectively with one another in this period. During the late 1930s Hereil had become involved in the aircraft industry as a young man through the unusual avenue of the law. As an official for the Tribunal de Commerce de la Seine, he became a bankruptcy expert, and it was in this capacity that he administered the liquidation of Lioré et Olivier and Dewoitine. Success in this delicate business earned him subsequent assignments to solve administrative problems in the industry. When SNCASE ran into trouble in 1946, he took over the firm with a mandate from the Air Ministry to restore it to working order. He quickly established a reputation for leadership, and by 1948 he became not only the most prominent administrator in Maroselli's stable of national company directors but also the president of the Union Syndicale des Industries Aéronautiques, the employer association. A state appointee and a newcomer to aviation elected to serve as the head of one of the last refuges of private influence in the industry-such a development could not have occurred in the 1930s, when the old guard still had considerable power. Hereil used his post at the Union Syndicale cleverly, lobbying the government on behalf of his colleagues for price subsidies and greater research support while affirming the basic directions of ministerial policy. His ascendancy (he was to become the "father" of the Caravelle in the early 1950s) signified the relative harmony that had come to prevail within the aircraft elite by the late 1940s.

Not that conflicts had disappeared. On the contrary, in 1948 controversy flared within employer circles and the Air Ministry over how to reorganize the national companies. One report on reorganizing SNCAC went so far as to call for a radical change in the whole structure of the nationalized airframe sector, "the creation of a single national company along the lines of SNCF [the national railroad network], in which all the relevant aircraft manufacturing installations will be integrated." There is no evidence that the Air Ministry seriously considered such a dramatic revision in structure, but genuine debate did focus on the notion of breaking up SNCAC and distributing its most productive plants between SNCASE and SNCASO. Such a move would have helped reduce the size of the industry while preserving large plants in Bourges and Château-roux. The directors at SNCAC made an impassioned plea to keep the company intact. They argued that a dynamic administrative team had evolved since the war, a pool of talent that would be lost if the firm were absorbed. Meanwhile Henry Potez intensified the debate by calling for a radical change of an opposite kind-the breaking up of SNECMA into four separate firms. "Beyond a certain size," Potez argued, "a company loses in flexibility the advantages it gains in concentration; management no longer has contact with the different wheels of the machine." Searching for some coherence in all this confusion, Georges Houard, still editor of Les Ailes, called for restoring "the stimulus of competition" in the nationalized sector-by preserving SNCAC and breaking up SNECMA as Potez had envisioned.

Significantly, no one in these debates rose to question nationalization altogether. Although there were still plenty of businessmen and conservative politicians who felt uncomfortable about nationalization, there were no calls for denationalizing portions of the industry. Nonetheless, implicit in this call for "competition" was the fear that industrial concentration would "statize" the industry. At roughly the same time as Potez and Houard were advocating the virtues of competition, the Paris Chamber of Commerce was lobbying to change the statute on public enterprises. Chamber officials proposed revisions in the law so that it would become illegal for the ministries to increase the capital stock of the national companies without parliamentary approval. This campaign was designed to give parliament a chance to check the growth of the nationalized sector while at the same time providing opportunities for private investors to buy stock (and influence) in the firms. In the Thermidorean

atmosphere of the late 1940s businessmen and their political allies hoped to limit the scope of the postwar nationalizations without attacking them directly.

Maroselli and his colleagues in the government had no desire to weaken the internal cohesion of the nationalized sector. The potential conflict between competition and concentration had been built into the structure of the national companies from the beginning, and when faced with the choice, every air minister from Pierre Cot to Charles Tillon had opted to concentrate the industry further. Maroselli followed suit. By the end of 1949 he buried any notion of breaking up SNECMA, while proceeding with the absorption of SNCAC into SNCASO and SNCASE. The pressures of international competition, the larger effort to streamline the industry, the rising costs of research and development, and the desire to maintain centralized control over firms in the wake of the Tillon experiment compelled the ministry to reorganize the nationalized airframe sector into three large firms.

At the same time the Air Ministry enabled several private firms to regain an important share of the market. By 1949, 47 percent of the work force in the aircraft industry was employed in the private sector, up from about 37 percent three years before.Draconian layoffs had struck the nationalized sector much harder than the private firms. A complex network of small and medium-sized firms accounted for some of this share, but the survival of a few substantial companies was central to the revival of the private sector. Military officials played an important role in this development, just as they did in opening France to British and American airplane manufacturers. Hungry for up-to-date aircraft, air force officials became enthusiastic supporters of the two planes that restored Marcel Dassault as a leader in airplane manufacturing, the MD 315 colonial liaison aircraft and the Ouragon jet fighter. Louis Bréguet's firm made its comeback with airplanes for the navy and Air France, as did Hispano-Suiza with a project to build British jet engines under license. Air force officials had never wanted to become dependent on a single manufacturer in aviation; this resurgence of a few strong private firms, alongside the nationalized companies, suited their interests even as it provided them with much-needed new equipment. A deliberate policy in the Air Ministry of restructuring the industry around a mixture of public and private firms, combined with the success of a few private builders in responding to military needs, ensured a new life for Dassault, Bréguet, Hispano-Suiza, Turboméca, and for a while even Morane-Saulnier.

Marcel Dassault's achievement in particular, like Georges Hereil's advancement, reveals something about how the industry had evolved by the late 1940s. After surviving Buchenwald, Dassault returned to France determined to make a fresh start. He gathered his leading aircraft engineers and financial confidants to launch a new firm in Bordeaux; he also managed to steal Louis Servanty, a brilliant designer, from SNCASO. At first he kept the firm small, subcontracting to the national companies much of the less profitable subassembly work involved in production. Clever planning and skillful engineering then quickly established the firm as an important force in the industry. Dassault boasted one of the few research labs that could consistently produce reliable prototypes. But the key to his success lay in his ability to maneuver within the labyrinthine world of military bureaus, parliamentary committees, and the ministries. He cultivated an elaborate network of powerful associates, and from 1951 on he held his own seat in parliament, first as a deputy and later as a senator from Beauvais. In short, he was able to harness the resources of the state-its contracts, subsidies, and investment funds-while at the same time offering his firm to the service of military aviation. He left the riskier business of building commercial aircraft to the national companies. Dassault's triumphant return to the aircraft business suggests that the survival of a private sector had as much to do with the adaptations of private employers to politics of a state-dominated industry as with the willingness of state officials to see a few private firms prosper alongside the national companies.

A similar kind of symbiosis took place in the revival of the Union Syndicale. From 1944 to 1948 the organization had remained paralyzed from within by tensions between left-wing administrators in the national companies and more conservative entrepreneurs. After 1947, however, internal antagonisms diminished. Hereil, Dassault, and the other members of the organization recovered the capacity to articulate a sense of the collective interest of employers in both the nationalized and private sectors. As it became more common for top engineers and administrators to shuttle between state service and company posts in the course of a career, these cleavages would narrow all the more. In addition, the growth of the private sector enabled private employers to claim additional voting strength in the organization, and this too boosted morale. Although the Union Syndicale would never recover the strength and autonomy it had lost in 1936-state predominance destroyed that-it regained enough internal cohesion to play a role in the politics of the industry, not least in collective bargaining.

Of course, in restoring a central place for private entrepreneurship in the industry, Air Ministry officials by no means had to start from scratch. At no point in the checkered history of business-state relations had ties between private entrepreneurs and the Air Ministry been severed completely. Pierre Cot had offered Potez and Bloch a lucrative way to work in the public and private sectors simultaneously, and even Charles Tillon had been careful not to eliminate a number of important private builders. State officials during these two periods of left-wing resurgence may have had enough autonomy from the business community to reorganize the industry. But all along, the private sector remained too significant a resource, and private businessmen too powerful politically, for any air minister to contemplate an all-out assault on private capital in aviation. Even so, the shifts in regime from Cot to La Chambre and from Tillon to Maroselli had an enormous effect on the kind of balance struck between public and private power in the industry. And the shift after 1946 proved particularly long lasting. By 1950 government officials and company directors had built the personal and organizational ties that made for stable relations between the state and aircraft manufacturers. To be sure, conflicts would persist over wage and pricing policy, contract provisions, import and export strategy, allocation of resources between military and civilian production, and notions of international cooperation in manufacturing. But the fundamental questions-the size and control of the nationalized sector, overseas purchases, a role for private firms-had been settled. A small group of public and private companies could each count on a future in the long-term planning and financing of the industry. Each of the major firms had a research laboratory, a prototype factory, and a network of production facilities. And as Albert Caquot had advised in 1938, public and private firms could all be enlisted as partners in the mass production of a successful airplane, as was the case with the MD 315. At the same time a division of labor was emerging in which each of the major firms developed a specialty within the aviation market. As a result, state officials and industrialists at last arrived at a common understanding about how the industry was to be run: nationalized and private firms would coexist and even cooperate jointly in building airplanes; traditional managerial authority would prevail on the shop floor; and the government would retain its power to shape the evolution of the industry as a whole. State capitalism in France had come of age.

Workers' Response

If the government succeeded in stabilizing the industry as Marcel Pellenc and André Maroselli had envisioned, it was not because of cooperation from labor. On the contrary, labor resistance to Maroselli's policies continued after 1947 despite the defeat of the "generalized strike." Most efforts to protest plant closings and layoffs erupted at SNCAC and SNECMA, the two firms most dramatically affected by Maroselli's policy after 1947. During the summer of 1948 the new management of SNCAC began to close down its plant in Billancourt, the old Farman facilities that had figured prominently in the strikes of the interwar period. Laid-off workers did what they could to disrupt the closing. When trucks were packed to transfer equipment to other SNCAC plants in the provinces, angry workers managed to unload the vehicles just before their scheduled departure. A few days later a large crowd of demonstrators, mostly laid-off workers from the firm, stormed into the factory courtyard and blocked the trucks a second time. "It was only after several weeks," the company director later reported, "that the transfer of equipment could occur, on a Saturday afternoon, a day when no one was working, under the protection of the police." The protest galvanized opposition to the closing, but in the end it failed. Nothing weakened the government's resolve to shut down the plant.

The next year the story repeated itself on a much larger scale. When the government decided to liquidate SNCAC, shutting down all its Paris plants and transfering its largest provincial facilities to SNCASE and SNCASO, employees occupied several factories. Labor delegations then rushed to parliament and the key ministries to demand that a policy that threatened the jobs of thousands of employees be reconsidered. CGT spokesmen were quick to link the fate of the firm to the larger theme of economic independence that had become prominent in the Communist press since 1947, suggesting that "it is not just a question of SNCAC . . . [but of] a plan for deindustrializing France, desired by American financiers and industrialists who want to make France a semicolony with a predominantly agricultural economy." The protest won a delay, but no more. Within months the firm was absorbed.

If the outcry at SNCAC proved futile, at SNECMA workers managed to sustain a much more visible effort to challenge Maroselli's reorganization of the industry. And not surprisingly: SNECMA, with factories in the red-belt suburbs of Gennevilliers and Argenteuil and on the boulevard Kellermann in the Thirteenth Arrondissement in Paris, had become a leading stronghold of the CGT. SNECMA workers for the most part lived in working-class Paris and its suburbs, a world where since the mid-1930s metalworkers and their families had become accustomed to the CGT as an everyday presence in their lives. Moreover, Marcel Weill's directorship of the company had enabled CGT militants to come closer to realizing their vision of working-class power in industrial enterprise at SNECMA than at almost any other company in France. The Pellenc Report had called for eliminating as many as half of the fifteen thousand jobs in the company, the deepest single cut in the industry. When Maroselli began to act on that recommendation, a bitter clash between workers and the government became inevitable.

During the first half of 1948 social relations at SNECMA deteriorated into a state of industrial warfare. In March the government fired company director Weill, who then published a letter to employers that fanned the flames more. He told them he was fired for three "political reasons": for promoting an "independent national industry," which upset "the men who are making our army and economy a foreign appendage"; for making SNECMA as efficient "as private firms of comparable size," which disturbed the enemies of nationalization; and for "respecting trade union rights and collaborating with your elected committees," which angered "the men . . . who use the national aircraft companies . . . as a war machine against the living conditions of workers." "Dear friends," Weill concluded, "I bid farewell. . . . [Someday,] in [a] liberated France, work will have integrity and workers will be masters of their fate and their future. Then we will construct together the most beautiful engines in the world!" These expressions of bitterness toward the government and solidarity toward employees no doubt spoke poignantly to the CGT faithful. But even workers less enamored with the union understood that Weill's firing signaled a full-scale assault on the company's work force. Everyone knew that Weill's replacement, an administrator named Lepicard, had orders to lay off workers. CGT militants responded promptly on the front page of Revue mensuelle , the newspaper of SNECMA's plant and production committees:

We Accuse: the Air Minister, M. Maroselli, and the Finance Ministers, MM. Schuman and René Mayer, of having prepared this evil coup for fourteen months by creating artificial difficulties in the company's financing and by failing to pay the firm on schedule.

The government has ordered M. Lepicard to carry out [layoffs] with the aid of M. Pellenc, who henceforth will direct the meetings of the board of Directors, but the personnel of SNECMA will opposed the layoff lists that have already been prepared on the order of the gravediggers of our company.

Lepicard, meanwhile, found it difficult to proceed with layoffs. A number of labor inspectors in the Paris region, most likely appointed after the Liberation or during Ambroise Croizat's term of office at the Labor Ministry, refused to approve dismissals on the grounds that these workers were "indispensable" to the firm. Only by appealing up through the hierarchy of the Labor Ministry could Lepicard win approval for cutbacks. Strikes, too, disrupted the firm, as workers and cadres struggled in four separate job actions to secure wage hikes to catch up with inflation. Beyond these troubles the firm floundered in a morass of financial difficulties. For over a year it had been falling into debt, so much so that Weill had borrowed from the social-security and family allowance funds of the firm to cover immediate expenses. Militants blamed the government for deliberately fostering these problems by withholding long-term credit, denying export licenses, failing to pay the firm for its engines in a timely fashion, and refusing to raise the taux horaire . The financial crisis only deepened under Lepicard's command.

The focus of conflict then spilled onto the floor of the National Assembly in June when the government introduced a bill aimed at bringing the situation at SNECMA under control. The proposed legislation would enable the government to dismiss the board of directors of the company and empower a special administrator to reshape SNECMA over the course of six months by cutting personnel, dropping unprofitable activities, restricting reconversion projects, reestablishing a clear division between production and research, and reinforcing "effective technical control over manufacturing." To carry out this task, the air minister would turn to Henry Potez. To facilitate his efforts the legislation would guarantee funding of up to 950 million francs and authorize an advance of an additional billion francs. The government hoped that with suitable financing and the political mandate of parliament a veteran administrator of Potez's stature could tackle the problems in a firm that had become both the linchpin of the industry and a center of trade union power.

This proposal triggered one of the most violent parliamentary debates in the early Fourth Republic, a heated exchange of charges and countercharges the press dubbed "the trial of SNECMA." It became the occasion to replay in defamatory speeches the clash in outlooks that lay behind the shift in the Air Ministry from Tillon to Maroselli. Maroselli called attention to Tillon's excesses as air minister-his cars and chauffeurs, his subsidies to Communist newspapers in the firms-and Tillon responded in kind. "The 12 percent that French aviation consumes of the military budget," Tillon said, "ought to be increased by reducing the credits spent on the "Jules Moch army'" (a reference to police repression the previous December). Communist deputies also attacked the Potez appointment-"what counts for Monsieur Potez are the profits of capitalist companies"-and called instead for an administrator with no ties to other firms, no connections to "the elites of Pétain." At one point deputies literally came to blows in the hall outside the Assembly. In the end party loyalties determined the outcome: a Communist bill to maintain SNECMA at its current level was defeated by the non-Communist majority, and the government's statute was approved.

The scene of battle returned to SNECMA itself when on 15 September 1948 all thirty-six hundred workers at the Argenteuil plant occupied their factory while a large crowd of workers from other factories staged a noisy demonstration at SNECMA headquarters in central Paris. This impressive display of CGT power in the company, buttressed this time by FO and CFTC militants, forced Potez to postpone massive layoffs-as did a wholly unexpected turn of events a few weeks later. In November Potez suddenly broke from his government-prepared script by threatening to resign if the government failed to come forth with funds before, rather than after, he initiated layoffs. Relishing the irony of the situation, CGT militants quickly jumped to Potez's defense. "We congratulate M. Potez, who after several months at SNECMA has realized that the evil is not in our factories but in the ministerial services and in the government which, unconsciously in some cases, consciously in others, is sabotaging our company." Delegates from the plant committee then proceeded to petition parliamentary officials for a new course of action-immediate funding to keep the company intact, an autonomous managerial team free from ministerial interference, cancellation of the debts inherited from Gnôme-et-Rhône, and a long-term production plan that would put the firm on a solid footing. With the CGT and Potez now both lobbying in the corridors of government in behalf of contrary visions for the company-this was the moment when Potez floated his unpopular notion of breaking up SNECMA into four enterprises-workers once again won a reprieve.

The contraction of SNECMA, however, was just a matter of time, for the crushing of the coal miners' strike in December 1948 and the isolation of the PCF in national politics gave the government even more flexibility than before. In 1949 the government, armed with the Surleau Commission report and the votes in parliament to back it up if need be, proceeded with the final step in restructuring the industry. Maroselli appointed Henri Desbruères, a polytechnicien and former Air Ministry engineer who had directed Air France from 1945 to 1948, to head SNECMA and carry out its reorganization. This time there was little delay. Layoffs began in June, triggering half-day strikes in solidarity with the victims. The heaviest blow came on 23 August, when workers at the Argenteuil factory returned from their summer vacations to find the plant "transformed into a citadel," as the labor press put it, surrounded with sandbags, barbed wire, and fifteen hundred guardsmen of the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, the national riot police. Desbruères and Maroselli had seen to it that the factory occupation of the previous fall would not be repeated. That morning several thousand workers marched to the plant, then around town, protesting what militants preferred to call a lockout instead of a closing. Since merchants in the area had grown to depend on the SNECMA employees who lived in Argenteuil, much of the town was in an uproar. But the usual avenues of redress that had proven useful to aircraft workers since the mid-1930s-the factory occupation, the appeal to the local prefect and the parliamentary delegation, the effort to bring ministerial officials into sympathy with labor-were all precluded. By September, when Desbruères cut back production at the Kellermann and Gennevilliers plants, forty-four hundred employees had lost their jobs. In the face of defeat CGT militants did what they could to sustain opposition to Desbruéres's program for restructuring the company. They appealed to government officials, published tracts, and called for research on new engines, for the restoration of projects Desbruéres had abandoned, and for "correct prices" that would bring SNECMA the profits it deserved. They continued to make much of the need to produce nonaeronautical products, in part as a way to keep jobs afloat, in part as an expression of the new pacifism that by 1949 had become central in Communist sloganeering. But demands of this sort fell on deaf ears at the Air Ministry. By the fall of 1949 there was no escaping it: workers had lost the battle at SNECMA, the last fortress in the struggle against the government's crusade to transform the aircraft industry.

State Capitalism and the CGT

In retrospect it is hard to see how workers could have reversed government policy once the CGT had lost the "generalized strike" of November and December 1947. Since 1935 workers had prospered politically only under the aegis of a united left-wing front. Not surprisingly, then, the cold-war division of the left broke the momentum of reform. The split between FO and the CGT, though not as damaging in aviation as in some industries, nonetheless weakened the link between Parisian workers and their counterparts in the provinces, especially in Nantes, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, where Socialist militants and FO made some headway.Moreover, once the Air Ministry shifted to a policy of demobilization, it became nearly impossible for aircraft workers, whatever their political affiliations, to preserve alliances in the work force across regions, factories, and firms-alliances that had proven so fruitful during the Popular Front and in 1944. Massive layoffs pitted workers against one another. For example, when workers at Dassault's new plant in Bordeaux advocated a plan to build the Dassault 450 as a new fighter for the air force, militants at SNCASO in Toulouse felt betrayed in their own drive to win government support for the SO 6020. With everyone's job on the line, the competition between firms for contracts undermined the CGT's effort to unify workers behind a common strategy of collective defense.

These conditions also made it nearly impossible to coordinate strike strategies beyond single factories, much less between firms. When workers and technicians at a number of factories managed to stage brief strikes for wage hikes at various moments in 1948, especially in the rebounding private sector, their protests always (with the exception of one strike at Bréguet) remained confined to single factories. Employers were quick to take advantage of labor's isolation. When a strike threat surfaced in January 1950 at SNCASO in Saint-Nazaire, the director threatened to "transfer the execution of current of future orders to other factories." Georges Hereil, the head of SNCASO, responded to a succession of brief work stoppages in his shops in Toulouse by threatening a lockout, adding that "this temporary closing will in fact become permanent because the Ministry cannot support all the existing factories. . . . If it sees a factory close, it will surely prevent its reopening." Since company directors could count on the ministries to back up their threats, it became all but impossible for workers to build solidarity across plants.

Solidarity between blue-collar and white-collar employees suffered as well in the late 1940s. The Communist wing of the CGT had always had difficulty winning the support of office employees and engineers since it first tried to do so in 1936. Shop steward elections in the late 1940s and early 1950s showed FO and the CFTC gaining some ground in the white-collar ranks even as the CGT maintained its prominence with blue-collar workers.It was one thing for left-leaning engineers and supervisory personnel to come under the thrall of the CGT during the spirited days of the Liberation, and quite another to stick with it after the cold war, anti-Communist purges, and the PCF's own increasingly doctrinaire Stalinism cast a pall over the CGT. Some middle-class employees, in fact, remained CGT supporters, but most took refuge by voting for representatives from FO, the CFTC, or, increasingly in the course of the 1950s, the even more moderate Confédération Générale des Cadres (CGC).

Conservative stabilization weakened the CGT as a force with which managers and state officials had to contend. Without political allies in top management and in the Air Ministry the CGT lost influence over hiring and prestige on the shop floor. Active membership in the union declined, as it had after the defeat of the general strike in 1938. What happened in aviation corresponded to the fate of the labor movement throughout France, where the CGT lost at least half its membership by the early 1950s from its 1946 peak of more than five million members. Most of those who left dropped out of active involvement in unions altogether rather than joining up with the CFTC or FO, which remained very much minority confederations in the 1950s. In aviation, as elsewhere, the French unions suffered a setback in 1947 and 1948 from which they never recovered, leaving French workers with one of the weaker labor movements in Western Europe.

But after the defeats of the late 1940s the unions did not revert to the state of extreme weakness that had crippled them in the 1920s and early 1930s. Nor did repression undermine the relative strength of the CGT vis-à-vis its trade union rivals in the blue-collar ranks of most industries, including aircraft manufacturing. On the contrary, by 1950 the Communist-oriented CGT had weathered repression well enough to remain entrenched in the industry. Government policy in the late 1940s, in fact, did more harm to FO and the CFTC than to the CGT. Union militants in these smaller, more moderate federations suffered the burden of their political affiliations with Socialist, Christian Democrat, and Radical governments that froze wages and eliminated jobs. Force Ouvrière militants were well aware of this liability. One Socialist militant at SNCASE in Toulouse wrote Daniel Mayer, the Socialist labor minister, that further delay in adjusting the salaries of plant supervisors "will bring us ridicule and interfere with our propaganda." When FO militants in Bordeaux appealed to the Ramadier government to spare their SNCASO factory from cutbacks, their efforts were of little avail. Although FO militants tried to argue, with some justification, that the layoffs had begun under Tillon, there was no denying that the draconian measures of 1947-128;“49 came at the hands of Socialists, Radicals, and Christian Democrats. Their policies, by pitting workers against the state, gave Communist militants the chance to function as uncompromising advocates for a threatened work force.

The CGT's criticism of the Marshall Plan, moreover, probably sounded more persuasive and less doctrinaire to aircraft workers than to employees in most other industries. American aircraft, after all, did represent a threat to French jobs; the procurement decisions of Air France, the air force, and the Atlantic Pact powers appeared to be leading, as militants warned, to "a vassalization of our aircraft industry." Amid the hardships of the late 1940s it was easy to play on these fears. In parliament Tillon went so far as to question American motives during the war: "We must remember that French airplane factories were bombed particularly heavily by the Anglo-Americans throughout the last months of the war. Perhaps now we can better understand why." Aircraft militants were among the more outspoken labor critics of American policy, as was FTM leader Henri Beaumont, who in 1949 before a crowd of workers at SNCASE in Marignane spoke with enough conviction to be arrested "for demoralizing the army and the nation." Even though anti-Americanism diminished the capacity of the CGT to wield influence in parliament and the ministries, on the shop floor it helped CGT militants maintain their credibility as defenders of a work force under siege.

Sporadic reports in the labor press make it clear that CGT militants also managed, through their victories in factory elections for plant committees and personnel delegate posts, to remain a powerful presence on the shop floor despite firings, anti-Communist purges, and repression. In the Paris region they maintained their dominance, but even in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Nantes, where the Socialist Party was strong, the CGT held its own. In 1948 the CGT won elections for three personnel delegates at SNCASO in Nantes, matching the two the FO won and the one that went to the CFTC. In the plant committee elections at SNCASO in Bordeaux a year later the CGT outpolled FO, 291 to 256, in voting by both blue-collar workers and nonsupervisory white-collar employees. And in Toulouse in 1951 CGT militants won eight delegate posts to FO's three in the blue-collar ranks of SNCASE. These victories enabled militants to retain their influence as shop floor spokesmen as well as keep alive the ethos of CGT boosterism that had suffused the cafeterias, medical clinics, vacation camps, and retirement parties during the Tillon era.

The return to collective bargaining also lent legitimacy to the CGT. On 11 February 1950, after months of negotiation and a nationwide strike the previous November, parliament finally approved a bill restoring collective bargaining over wages throughout the economy. After years of wage and price controls, which by 1949 had done more to hold down wages than prices, it came as a relief to workers to renew the struggle for collective contracts. Since the law authorized agreements between employers and "the most representative union," collective bargaining usually confirmed CGT militants as legitimate spokesmen for workers in the industry.

Yet the return to collective bargaining did not lead to the kind of showcase contracts that aircraft workers had won in 1936 and 1938. Militants in the CGT certainly maintained the practice of defending wage differentials within the skill hierarchy of metalworking that skilled workers had always wanted to protect, differentials that Communists in the industry had respected despite the egalitarianism of party ideology^. But militants were in no position to win the privileged wage base for aircraft workers that rearmament had provided in the Popular Front era. Even though employment in aviation expanded steadily again after the brutal contraction of the late 1940s, growing to more than ninety thousand employees by 1962, the industry never witnessed a return to a separate contract. Employees in the 1950s had to bargain within the framework of regional contracts for metalworking as a whole, just as their predecessors had had to do after the CGT had been vanquished in 1939, Wages in the early 1950s in aviation tended to stick closely to the levels of those received by comparably skilled workers in other metalworking branches, rather than surpass them as they had in the 1930s. After the strike failures of the late 1940s, not least a string of defeats over wage issues at Hispano-Suiza in late 1949, metalworkers and aircraft workers had to begin the new decade with mediocre agreements. The return to collective bargaining, then, completed the process of stabilization Maroselli and Pellenc had begun in 1947, even as the collective bargaining law gave CGT militants an aura of respectability at the negotiating table.

But the key to the CGT's survival as the leading faction of the labor movement lay at a deeper level, in the ability of its militants to respond to the expanding role of the state. Communist militants came to predominate in the labor movement in aviation in large part because they were better equipped than their rivals, organizationally and ideologically, to respond to the emergence of state capitalism. Once the PCF became committed to a united-front strategy in 1934, its militants adjusted quickly to the tasks of lobbying government officials, pressuring the ministries to state officials as well as employers. Two rounds of their grievances to state officials as well as employers. Two rounds of left-wing innovation in the aircraft industry, first under Blum in 1936 and second under Tillon in 1945, confirmed for workers how sensible it was to view the state as an instrument of reform. Likewise the episodes of retrenchment, under Daladier in 1938 and Maroselli a decade later, taught workers how much it mattered who ruled. Under these circumstances it made sense for workers to support local militants who could promote a strategy that linked shop floor agitation with a political movement at the national level.

Not only did the bureaucratic centralism of the CGT and the PCF make it easier for Communist militants to respond to the government's increasing presence in the industry; the statism in French Communist ideology helped as well. Bolshevization of the PCF in the 1920s had weakened the anarchist sensibilities that had initially inspired some party militants, and by the late 1920s a state-centered vision of revolutionary change, rooted both in Guesdism and Leninism, had come to prevail. In contrast to trade union moderates and revolutionary syndicalists, who still defended the Amiens principle of separating unions and parties, Communist militants entered the Popular Front period unencumbered by the antipolitical and antistatist views many non-Communist militants still shared. It was easier for Communist militants to build organizational links between union locals and plant cells, on the one hand, and the FTM and the PCF, on the other. In a technologically advanced industry where the degree of capitalization had become great and the market was shaped by international politics, it made sense to jettison the syndicalist tradition for a Jacobin, statist orientation. It served militants well locally to be part of a coherent movement focused on policy and power nationally.

By the same token the politicization of life in the aircraft industry created fundamental strategic problems for the CGT's rivals, FO and the CFTC. These minority confederations formally rejected the notion of linking unions to parties. In any event they suffered from the failure of the SFIO and the MRP to cultivate extensive organizational roots in working-class France. Not surprisingly, CFTC militants argued explicitly for ways to depoliticize the aircraft industry-to insulate it from the political upheavals that had rocked aviation so profoundly since 1936. J.-M. Loge, a leading CFTC militant involved in aviation, argued that "these perpetual changes in orientation" had led to "an enormous loss of authority for managers. . . . We think French aviation will develop fully when our political leaders stop trying to make our industry an antichamber of parliament and content themselves with appointing people solely on the basis of technical competence to head our companies and factories." L. Desgrandes, another leading CFTC militant, even went so far as to suggest "the possibility of appealing to private capitalists, with participation in the management of the enterprises, to limit this risk of politicization. Certain factories could even return to the private sector." Although the CFTC supported the nationalizations, these militants clearly understood that state intervention and the politically charged atmosphere in which it had occurred in the 1930s and 1940s had made independent trade unionism all the more difficult to pursue.

If the PCF benefited in these years from the politics of state intervention, the party also changed in the process. By adapting so shrewdly to state intervention, CGT militants made Communist trade unionism a more reformist movement that it had been in the early 1930s without completely eliminating the revolutionary self-image of the PCF. The Tillon experiment, and the struggle to defend it, served to domesticate the PCF and the CGT, just as the Popular Front experience had done before the war. The day-to-day experience of interacting with state officials-on company boards, national councils, and conciliation committees as well as within the ministries-acclimated militants to the gradualism of industrial reform. After the Liberation plant and production committees drew large numbers of militants into this process of adaptation. "Through plant committees," Benoît Frachon, the general secretary of the CGT, said in 1946, "our trade union organizations are today to a large degree schools of education, administration, and management for the working class." Productivism, the work ethic, a respect for hierarchy-none of the basic values of the industrial enterprise came under criticism. To be sure, Communist militants upheld an anticapitalist vision. Tillon, Jean Breteau, and other militants remained biting in their criticism of the self-interested entrepreneur. L'Union des métallurgistes , the monthly newspaper of the Fédération des Métaux, with its periodic references to the Soviet Union, Stalingrad, and "the valiant Red Army," made no secret of its solidarity with Moscow. Moreover, throughout the 1950s Communist militants would become unrelenting in their ideological attack on "state monopoly capitalism" in a rapidly modernizing France. But in practice the Communist-oriented CGT came across at the grass-roots level as the one institution that was prepared to defend workers within the politicized, centralized industrial world of state capitalism. In this respect the aircraft industry, though atypical in its market structure, was nonetheless an important arena of working-class formation, for it was here and in a few other nationalized sectors that workers developed a style of trade union militancy geared for the dirigiste economy of postwar France.

It is now clear in retrospect, however, that the achievement of building an enduring state-centered and Communist-oriented trade unionism in French aviation carried a price for workers. For one thing, it tied their prospects to the political fortunes of a Communist Party that would continue to be victimized by the anti-Communism of the 1950s and to party leaders who proved ill disposed toward de-Stalinization. The CGT's strategy of depending on party influence and channeling grievances toward the ministries made sense so long as the PCF could wield influence within the government and so long as the left was united behind a Popular Front strategy. Once the left broke in two in 1947, most CGT supporters, who had little desire to shift their loyalties to FO, were stuck with a Communist movement that was particularly vulnerable to the ill effects of the cold war. Ironically, the very expansion of state control in the industry that CGT militants had promoted since 1936 made it relatively easy after 1946 to purge labor from the company boards and national planning bodies, to say nothing of informal access to the ministries, that had become vital to CGT strategy. To make matters worse, although it was beneficial to have linked the CGT to a rising Communist Party during the Popular Front and the Liberation, after 1947 partisan connections subjected the labor movement in aviation, as in all other industries in France, to bitter internal divisions. Rivalries between the CGT, FO, CFTC, and CGC weakened worker solidarity and widened the cleavage between blue-collar and white-collar employees. In the end close ties to the Communist Party made it tougher, not easier, for militants to overcome the long-standing sources of trade union weakness in France-political divisiveness, employer hostility, an underdeveloped collective-bargaining system, and the open shop, all of which stood in the way of recruiting reliable, dues-paying members.

Furthermore, those features of the CGT that made its militants so effective in representing workers in the 1930s and 1940s-its hierarchical organization, its discipline, its affiliation with the Communist Party, and its focus on the struggle for state power-also undercut its capacity to respond flexibly to the rank and file. As Communists, militants were expected to subordinate workers' immediate concerns to the larger political priorities of the party. After 1948, as the PCF's political line hardened, Communist militants had to agitate against military production in accord with the party's peace campaign, and they found themselves, like their predecessors in the early 1930s, in the awkward position of opposing the immediate bread-and-butter interests of their fellow workers.Similarly, CGT militants were ill prepared to respond to demands for

employee autonomy and trade union democracy, which cut against the grain of a Communist movement whose leaders remained committed to party-dominated unionism and "democratic centralism." If Stalinism served as an asset in the 1940s for militants in a state-led industry, it would eventually become a liability, especially when a new generation of skilled workers responded enthusiastically to notions of autogestion (self-management) in the late 1960s. Not surprisingly, given the skilled nature of aircraft and the legacy of working-class radicalism that had developed there, the first wildcat factory occupation in the great strike wave of May 1968 would take place at Sud-Aviation in Bouguenais.

An Industry Unique and Exemplary

Between 1928, when the French government created the Air Ministry, and the late 1940s, when state officials and company managers reached an understanding about how to operate in a state-managed industry, social relations in the aircraft business altered dramatically. At the beginning of this period managers enjoyed a good deal of independence from the state in running their factories; state officials dealt with the industry at arm's length and were both too weak politically and too inhibited ideologically to reorganize an inefficiently structured industry "from above"; aircraft workers collectively had no meaningful voice in aviation and for all practical purposes no viable unions. By 1950, after more than a decade of political upheaval from the rise of the Popular Front through the Occupation and Liberation to the repression of the late 1940s, the triangle of industrial politics had changed. Employers and state officials had established a modus vivendi in which employers retained some autonomy in running their internal operations but had come to depend on state officials as the key planners, financiers, and strategists for the industry as a whole. Workers had come to rely on trade unions, and especially the Communist-oriented CGT, which despite the setbacks of 1938 and 1947 had become a force in its own right in the industry. By the early 1950s a new institutional structure for aviation, with a mixture of public and private firms, a division of decision-making responsibility between companies and the ministries, and an enduring set of reasonably stable trade unions, had emerged that would change only marginally in the two decades that followed.

To be sure, a number of developments since then have modified the institutional and social landscape. The Europeanization of the aerospace industry from the 1960s on has created new connections between companies in several countries, even as it has made the government more important than ever as an interlocutor between ministries and firms outside France. The eventual consolidation of the national companies into Aérospatiale in 1970 has carried forward the logic of industrial concentration that had its beginnings in 1936, just as the nationalization of Dassault-Bréguet in 1981 has accentuated the process of state intervention. No less striking has been the steady growth in the proportion of technicians and engineers in the work force to the point where technicians have come to outnumber workers in the Aérospatiale factory in Toulouse. The corresponding decline in the proportion of blue-collar workers, combined with the national decline of the French Communist Party in the 1980s, has hurt the CGT, although it has not enabled FO or the CFDT to emerge as a dominant confederation in the industry. But despite these changes, the overall pattern of industrial politics that emerged by the early 1950s has remained largely intact. The period from the Popular Front to the cold war remains the decisive moment of social transformation in the life of the aircraft industry.

This two-decade process of change gave rise to a style of industrial relations that in retrospect might be characterized as both conflictual and stable. From 1950 on, labor relations in aviation remained contentious as a domestic cold war continued to pit CGT militants against state and company officials. Labor relations remained politicized, not simply because France itself stayed polarized between Communists and the mainstream parties, but also because expanded government power in the industry kept social relations political, bound up in the contest for power in parliament, the parties, and the ministries. Between 1936 and 1948 company managers and trade union officials in aviation had learned their lessons well: to defend their interests in matters of hiring, wages, working conditions, and job control, they had to lobby through political channels. And they have continued to do so ever since.

As a result of what happened in the 1930s and 1940s, employer recalcitrance, CGT militance, and state dominance in the aircraft industry became mutually reinforcing features of an industrial-relations environment in which conflict tended to be channeled up the hierarchy, toward Paris, and into the political arena.Employers remained reluctant to legitimize the CGT at the factory level and continued to depend on state officials to back up their resistance to meaningful dialogue between companies and unions. And workers, if no longer as enthralled with the CGT as they or their predecessors had been in 1937 or 1945, nonetheless continued to support its militants in delegate and plant committee elections. The state capitalism and a statist brand of working-class radicalism that had emerged from the Popular Front, the war years, and the beginnings of the cold war became characteristic features of French aviation in the postwar era. But even though this politicization of the industry made labor relations more volatile and gave workers even more of a stake than they already would have had in the electoral success of the PCF, the industry never succumbed to serious political upheaval after 1950 apart from the great strike wave of 1968. Since life in the industry depended heavily on national politics, and since centrist or right-led coalitions remained in power through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the pattern of triangular relations that had emerged by 1950 endured.

Some historians may question how important these changes in the 1930s and 1940s really were because many features of French industrial politics before 1930 clearly remained a part of the landscape after 1950. In international terms the French trade union movement was relatively weak before 1930, and it has remained so to this day. To some extent, too, state intervention in labor relations was nothing new. Since the 1830s mayors, deputies, prefects, and occasionally even cabinet ministers had been arbiters of labor conflict. From the early nineteenth century on, working-class radicalism had borne the stamp of a centralized, interventionist state. Whether as democratic-socialists in 1848 or Guesdists and revolutionary syndicalists in the late nineteenth century, working-class militants had always been more preoccupied with the state as an instrument of oppression, and in the eyes of some militants a potential instrument of class emancipation, than was the case in the Anglo-American world. Moreover, a strong case can be made that the First World War and the labor clashes that followed it in 1919 and 1920 were pivotal in shaping the left-wing unions and Communist Party that played such important roles later in promoting working-class radicalism. And of course the dirigiste style of industrial management that became such a prominent aspect of French industrial recovery after 1944 stemmed in part from the gradual expansion of the state's economic role since the seventeenth century.

But to see the industrial politics of the 1930s and 1940s as primarily a continuation of older patterns is to underestimate how undetermined the future really was for French workers and enterpreneurs in the late 1920s and early 1930s and how circumscribed state intervention remained up to that point. No one in 1930 could have predicted that an enfeebled Communist Party would soon emerge as the dominant force in a mass trade union movement or that workers would soon win legal rights to trade union membership, shop stewards, collective bargaining, and paid holidays-the welcome harvest of June 1936. Nor would it have been any easier to anticipate how thoroughly the Communist wing of the labor movement would incorporate-without openly proclaiming-the moderate agenda and reformist methods of the old CGT majority of 1918. The labor movement in France took a decisive turn during the Popular Front that could hardly have been seen as inevitable beforehand. It was only under the impact of unexpected events, such as the riots of 6 February 1934, the elections of May 1936 and the strike wave that followed, the defeat at the hands of Germany and the humiliation of foreign occupation, and the exhilaration of the Resistance and Liberation that workers and militants established enough mutual respect and understanding to make the CGT a mass movement.Similarly, the degree of state intervention in the economy that took place during rearmament and the Occupation and after the war, and the extent to which it was permanently institutionalized, marked an abrupt change from the liberal orthodoxy that had prevailed in governing circles in the early 1930s. Precisely because the French state had an impressive legacy of mercantilist intervention, conservatives and most Radical Party leaders bent over backward in the Third Republic to place careful limits on direct taxation, public works, state-owned enterprise, welfare provision, and the regulation of industrial relations. Only with the traumatic events and political polarization between 1935 and 1950 did government leaders make the leap to nationalization, state economic planning, Keynesian fiscal policy, and ministerial controls over vast portions of the credit system that would make France the most state-centered economy in the capitalist world.

Likewise it was during these years that the French government came to play a direct formal role in the regulation of industrial relations. Legal innovations during the Popular Front and after the Liberation gave rise to uniform rules governing holidays, training, collective bargaining, the conciliation of disputes (and for a brief time their compulsory arbitration), a mandatory system of shop steward representation and plant committees, and, by the 1950s, a style of wage negotiation pegged to a national minimum wage. This legal framework, combined with the prominence that prefects, politicians, and labor inspectors increasingly enjoyed in mediating disputes, made French labor relations more state-centered and state-regulated on a day-to-day basis than anywhere else in the West. If in the process French workers were not able to establish one of the stronger labor movements in Europe, they at least salvaged from the wreckage of 1947 and 1948 a durable set of trade union federations better equipped to defend the interests of workers in this highly politicized environment than were unions before the Popular Front. In short, the conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s, though building on deeply rooted patterns in industrial politics, led government officials to develop new forms of state economic management, forced employers to adapt to them, and enabled workers to throw their support behind a Communistled trade union movement. What resulted was a blend of state capitalism and working-class radicalism that made French industrial politics distinctive in postwar Europe.

The aircraft industry, of course, was not the whole of France, and the experiences that workers, managers, and government officials had there were in some ways unique. No industry lives up to the fictional norm of being "typically" French-certainly not aviation. With the state as prime purchaser, prime mediator with foreign markets, and prime source of development capital, aviation was an unusual industrial sector. Its importance to national defense gave politicians a special stake in finding solutions to problems that might have festered longer in other industrial sectors. Its association with rearmament and demobilization subjected workers to an unusually volatile labor market and made them particularly vexed by questions of job security and long-term planning for the industry. No other industry in the manufacturing sector of the French economy could boast such a highly skilled work force, and relatedly, few industries came close to paying the wages aircraft workers enjoyed, especially between 1935 and 1945. Politics, moreover, played particular havoc with the industry. When cold-war politics rocked France in 1947, only the coal industry had as brutal an anti-Communist purge of its managerial ranks as did aircraft, and only in the film industry did employees develop as strong a network of anti-American defense committees. The aircraft industry stood out as a privileged arena of public controversy on account of its obvious importance to the national defense, the intensity of the controversies surrounding it, and no doubt, too, the special interest people took in a field of technology in which France had been a leader, at least until the 1930s.

Still, despite the unique features of the aircraft industry, the transformation in relations between employers, workers, and the state that took place there both promoted and reflected larger trends in France. For one thing, the two rounds of innovation and retrenchment that occurred between 1936 and 1940 and between 1944 and 1950 corresponded closely to broad national shifts in politics and labor relations. What made the aircraft industry so important to the contending parties of left and right, to labor militants as well as employers, was not only its significance for national defense but also its role as an exemplary arena for industrial reform. When the Blum government chose to play a more direct role in arbitrating conflicts in 1936, when it opted to harness the resources of industry more effectively for the rearmament effort, and when it legislated reforms giving the CGT greater influence in industrial relations, all these changes took place most visibly in the nationalized sector of the aircraft industry. Likewise when Daladier chose to roll back overtime costs, hour restrictions, and CGT influence in 1938, the ensuing battle was nowhere more turbulent than in aviation, where workers had gone furthest to institutionalize the labor reforms of the Popular Front. The industry played the same kind of exemplary role in business-state relations: the larger effort to find new ways to combine governmental supervision and private entrepreneurship in the rearmament economy of the late 1930s found its most explicit expression in the blend of nationalized and private companies that Cot and La Chambre fashioned out of the airframe sector.

The same thing happened after 1944, when aviation once again assumed a role in industrial politics much greater than its size alone would have warranted. During the second round of left-wing innovation and conservative retrenchment several major issues in the early postwar period-the political consequences of nationalization, the role of the CGT in company management, the relationship of industry to American military and economic power-were all played out in the aircraft industry with front-page headlines. The debates over air policy held people's attention in France, as in Washington, because it was in this industry that first the PCF and then the Third Force governments of the late 1940s hoped to set the tone for labor relations and industrial strategy. Likewise in 1950, as in 1939, government leaders and the major manufacturers worked out a consensus on running the industry that gave employers enough autonomy within their firms, and the ministries enough control over planning and investment, to serve as a model for other state-led sectors.

The aircraft industry was exemplary of larger trends in the 1930s and 1940s not only because major questions of national policy were fought out there but also because the processes that led to state capitalism, and to the particular kind of working-class radicalism it engendered, were not unique to aviation. The problems that plagued the industry in the early 1930s and then subsequently opened the door to state intervention beset much of the French economy. The survival of a plethora of small family firms, combined with a willingness of employers and state officials to see that most of these firms endured, resembled the Malthusianism that stymied industrial concentration in much of the rest of the economy. Too many inefficient firms survived through cartelization and market protection. In aviation this strategy, combined with the complicity of an Air Ministry eager to maintain a large number of small and mediumsized firms, left no company big enough to reorganize facilities for the scale of production a rearmament drive would soon require. Although nationalization was by no means the only way to rationalize the industry, it certainly became an attractive one to left-wing leaders once employers and Air Ministry officials had failed to concentrate the industry by other methods in the first half of the 1930s. The survival of the family firms in aviation, and the failure of those companies to modernize for rearmament, paved the way for nationalization, much as economic inefficiency, the defeat of 1940, and collaboration by employers during the Occupation made it easier for reformers to argue for nationalization in coal mining, gas and electricity, automaking, urban transport, and other industries after the war.

Left-wing resurgence and working-class militance also played important roles in propelling the process of state intervention, and in this respect, too, the aircraft industry was not unique. It took left-wing parties, in 1936 and in 1945, to break with tradition by nationalizing industry, just as it took the strikes of 1936 and the popular insurgency of the Liberation to bring the CGT into a position of influence in the management of nationalized enterprise. The airframe sector probably would have been nationalized by the Popular Front government without the strikes of June 1936 because the Popular Front coalition had already committed itself to nationalizing war industries, and some Air Ministry officials had been considering such a policy as early as 1934. But the "social explosion" made the political battles over nationalization far more volatile than they would have been otherwise and gave workers more hope for altering authority relations in the new national companies. Much of the same dynamic of politicization occurred in the late 1940s, when the PCF sunk even deeper political roots into the work force of companies, especially in the Paris region. By the same token, labor gains in 1936 and 1944-128;“45 made conservative stabilizers like Daladier and Ramadier all the more intent to find ways to break the back of the CGT without diminishing the power of the ministries to manage the industry as a whole. This strategy of repressing labor without reversing state control of the industry ensured that the nationalized sector would remain a highly politicized, and hence deeply contested, arena of labor relations for years to come. Here, too, these basic patterns in left-wing resurgence and conservative retrenchment held not only for aviation but also for the other key nationalized sectors of the postwar economy-especially coal, gas and electricity, public transport, and automaking (Renault).The experience in aviation during the 1930s and 1940s held special significance in the history of labor relations for another reason as well. By the 1950s it had become clear that the strength of the French labor movement rested heavily on trade unions in the public sector, that is, in public services and the nationalized sector of industry. In the 1960s more than half of the membership of both the CGT and FO, and nearly half of the members of the CFDT, came from the public sector. Railway workers, miners, gas and electric workers, postal and telegraph workers, teachers and civil servants, as well as employees at Renault and the nationalized aircraft companies, served as the mainstay of the labor movement during the three decades of remarkable economic growth following the Liberation. To a large extent this same pattern has continued to prevail during the tougher times of the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the brand of working-class radicalism aircraft workers developed in the era of the Second World War-CGT-oriented, productivist, and optimistic about the potential gains workers can make in state-supervised industries in periods of left-wing political resurgence-had special resonance for a labor movement focused increasingly in the postwar era on the state-centered sectors of the economy.

A final glance across the English Channel at the British aircraft industry in the same period suggests how fundamentally French the story of aviation we have traced proved to be. As was the case in every country trying to sustain an important aircraft industry in the interwar period, in Britain the government played an essential role in financing research and development and in purchasing most of the industry's products. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s British governments, like their French counterparts, maintained an inefficiently large number of medium-sized firms on the assumption that excess capacity and experienced companies would be essential in the event of another war. But unlike the French, when it came time to expand production in the mid-1930s, British leaders chose to keep the industry private and avoid any heavy-handed restructuring. Instead the British Air Ministry enlisted major automobile and other metalworking firms into a network of "shadow factories" to build airplanes. After the war the ministry stuck to the prewar practice of maintaining a relatively large set of small and medium-sized private firms that continued to enjoy a great deal of independence in the day-to-day management of their operations. Only in the late 1950s, when the costs of research and development and the competitive nature of the global aerospace market forced the British to face up to the need for further industrial concentration, did the government use its financial and market leverage in the industry to rationalize fourteen major airframe companies and five engine firms into a leaner structure of five private enterprises. In short, if technological change and market pressures subjected both the French and the British aircraft companies to similar pressures toward concentration in the years between 1930 and the late 1960s, in Britain state officials remained more reluctant to accelerate the process and more loath to tamper with the autonomy of private entrepreneurs. A stronger tradition of separating public and private power and, just as important, a less polarized political climate in the pivotal years from 1935 to 1950 enabled politicians and civil servants to minimize direct state intervention in industrial management. Even in those industries the British did nationalize in 1945, state-business relations remained less politicized and less dominated by the ministries than was the case in postwar France.Not only did the British maintain private airplane firms in the 1930s and 1940s. Labor relations in the industry remained much more a matter of direct union-management negotiation at the factory and company level in Britain than in France, where the Air, Labor and Fiance ministries played active roles in settling labor questions. British airplane factories were by no means free of labor conflict. On the contrary, skilled aircraft workers in Britain challenged the reorganization of work and the "dilution" of the work force more aggressively than did their French counterparts. But in Britain neither the employers nor the unions, especially the traditional craft unions that predominated in aviation, wanted to depart from a tradition of keeping the government out of direct labor-management relations. As important as rearmament and the war were in expanding the British aircraft industry and in catapulting it into a new age of jet technology, British aircraft workers did not witness the thoroughgoing revolution in triangular relations that happened across the Channel. Even into the 1960s and 1970s labor relations remained localized at the plant level where shop stewards were no less important as spokesmen for workers than were top union officials in a highly decentralized system of collective bargaining.The tendency to maintain conventional boundaries between state and enterprise in Britain reinforced a style of working-class militance in which skilled workers focused their energies on protecting their shop floor prerogatives rather than on challenging the legitimacy of industry management through agitation in the political arena. To be sure, a vibrant Communist movement developed in British aircraft factories during rearmament in the mid-1930s. As in France, so too in Britain an expanding airplane industry provided fertile ground for the revival of labor organizing after the setbacks workers experienced in the Great Depression. Communist militants, moreover, continued to operate with some success in British aircraft factories throughout the Second World War. But at no point did this committed minority of organizers come close to challenging the dominant position of trade union stalwarts who remained loyal to the Labour Party. The major unions representing workers in British aviation-the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the National Union of Vehicle Builders, the sheet metal workers unions, and the Transport and General Workers Union-all continued to adhere to a more depoliticized vision of labor militance aimed at preserving the autonomy of the unions from political parties and keeping the state from assuming too prominent a role in labor relations. As a result, labor relations in British aviation remained more decentralized, more focused on direct bargaining with employers, and more dominated by the craft-specific concerns of skilled workers than was the case in France.These differences in the way triangular relations between workers, employers, and government officials evolved in France and Britain stemmed in part from the degree of state control in the two countries and in part from the attitudes people brought to questions of state intervention. Employers, civil servants, politicians, and labor leaders made quite different choices about how to exploit the capacity of the state to shape the industry. In Britain all three sides in the triangle of industrial politics, though at odds over wages, job control, and working conditions, rejected the Jacobin conception of state intervention-that is, seeing government power as a means to achieve social and national goals-that ultimately prevailed in France.

The roots of these differences, of course, ran deep into the past. By the late nineteenth century some of the contrast between the state's involvement in dispute settlement in France and its relative remoteness in Britain had already been established. But politics in the 1930s and 1940s played an essential role in pushing the two industries along divergent institutional paths. In a more politically polarized France dramatic shifts in ministerial control between 1936 and 1948 enabled several regimes to put their stamp on the aircraft industry and in so doing reinforced the belief that state power could and should be used to shape industrial relations. By contrast, the continuity of Conservative Party rule in Britain during rearmament and the war, followed by a Labour government that did little to alter the institutional landscape in aviation, helped insulate the British aircraft industry from radical change. Moreover, in Britain permanent civil servants and military officials played a major role in shaping policy, in contrast to France, where it was the politicians, men like Pierre Cot, Guy La Chambre, Charles Tillon, and André Maroselli, who played decisive roles in transforming the industry. Under these circumstances CGT militants, operating from a weaker position than their British trade union counterparts, did not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunities Cot and Tillon presented to use the ministries to benefit labor. And French aircraft manufacturers, who in the early 1930s had been able to keep control over labor matters through their Chambre Syndicale, found themselves after the nationalizations of 1936 much too divided to fight against the state's involvement in labor relations. After 1936 they, like their workers, became more dependent on government to protect their interests.

The potent blend of state capitalism and working-class radicalism that distinguished French from British aircraft manufacturing by the late 1940s in fact set the former apart from virtually all other aircraft industries in the West. If state intervention increased in every major European aircraft industry during the Second World War, and in the United States and Canada as well, only in France did it take the form of extensive nationalizations. Only in France did the process radically politicize industrial relations. And only in France, where the left emerged from the Resistance and Liberation in an especially strong position, did postwar

nationalizations in aviation and other industries become the occasion for an ambitious attempt to expand the power of the trade unions at every level of the industrial hierarchy. Little wonder the experience left powerful memories and durable myths, especially for the CGT, long after the labor movement suffered its reversals in the late 1940s.

If a history of the aircraft industry cannot capture all the important changes in industry politics that took place in France from the Popular Front to the cold war, it nonetheless can shed considerable light on how rearmament, war, and domestic political upheaval gave rise to a dirigiste industrial economy and a concomitant form of working-class radicalism. Historians have grown accustomed to describing the transition to the Fourth Republic as a process of breaking the stalemate that made the Third Republic politically stable but socially and economically languid. Although there is much truth in this view, it tends to overlook how contentious labor relations remained in postwar France. The same conditions that broke the impasse in economic and political life-the Popular Front, the defeat, the Occupation, and the Liberation-also transformed the world in which French workers lived and the labor organizations to which they turned. The intervention of the state in the economy, a catalyst for postwar growth, did much to weaken employer organizations, politicize industrial relations, and encourage workers to support the Communist vision of trade union militancy. The continuing interplay between social conflict and the penetration of state power, as Tocqueville recognized more than a century ago, has long given French politics its revolutionary character. It accounts in large part for the failure of France in the middle decades of the twentieth century to conform to the patterns of social democracy found elsewhere in the industrial West. And it accounts, too, for why the transition to the Fourth Republic involved not the resolution of industrial conflict but its institutionalization, and hence its perpetuation, within a new and distinctly French form of capitalism-state-centered, economically dynamic, and socially charged.