PART THREE
REARMAMENT, REPRESSION, AND WAR, 1938-1940

The letter, in short, suggested that employers had run the industry irresponsibly and that calls for eliminating the forty-hour week were in bad faith as well; only the initiatives of the Popular Front had saved aviation from ruin. Moreau went on to extol the progress that the CGT and the national companies had made in training new workers, which, among other things, obviated the need to lengthen the workweek: Is it not true that before 1936 apprenticeship training had been completely abandoned, and the bosses willfully sacrificed the future of our industry to their super profits? . . . Today apprenticeship schools are organized in several nationalized factories, and reeducation programs are functioning normally. We can point out with pride to those who disparage us that every Saturday 80 young people gladly sacrifice a good portion of their leisure time to learn trades without remuneration in our factory in Berre. And we are persuaded that if it were possible to take more, there would not be just 80 but at least 200 youth who come under their own funds to work. . . . We say that production can and must be increased by hiring the unemployed, reeducating personnel, purging management, outfitting every aircraft factory with modern equipment. We demand that sanctions be taken against industrialists who fail to deliver raw materials on time.So insidious had the influence of employers been on the industry, Moreau felt, that it was necessary to purge the ranks of the foremen and technicians who had been hired before 1936 "more for loyalty [to management] than for professional worth." From Moreau's perspective the lines of conflict in the industry lay not between workers threatened by rationalization and engineers bent on applying new methods. Rather, they lay between the Comité des Forges and their loyal supporters, on one side, and employees, managers, and officials who wanted to modernize the industry, on the other.

This productivist perspective embracing the virtues of efficient manufacturing while portraying the bosses as the enemies of modernity derived in part from tradition, in part from the politics of the late 1930s. Revolutionary syndicalists in the late nineteenth century had argued that it was management, not labor, that prevented French industry from modernizing. In the France of the family firm, small enterprise, and Malthusian business practice there was something to be said for this contention. In the 1920s neither CGT moderates nor CGTU Communists condemned rationalization outright despite a number of strikes in which metalworkers fought against the stopwatch, speedups, and wage incentive programs. Since 1918 CGT moderates had endorsed rationalization as a way to improve workers' living standards and reduce their hours, provided that an effort was made to rationalize all aspects of the enterprise and not just workers' tasks, and provided that it was accompanied by contrôle ouvrier an opportunity for workers themselves to play a role in overseeing the process. Communist militants, even when they adhered to the "class against class" line in the late 1920s, defended rationalization in the Soviet Union as a model for combining productivism and revolution. By the 1930s most militants across the spectrum of left-wing opinion viewed rationality, discipline, and orderly methods of production as positive ideals the labor movement, not the patronat , was equipped to uphold. After 1936, however, it became even more essential for militants to safeguard these values in the interest of protecting the labor reforms of the Popular Front especially the forty-hour week, which was, after all, initially promoted as a rational, orderly method for reducing unemployment. Committed as they were to national defense, CGT militants also defended the forty-hour week as an efficiency measure: better to modernize production and schedule multiple shifts than exhaust the work force with a forty-eight-hour week. From 1937 on, militants spoke up continually for retooling, factory reorganization, apprenticeship programs, retraining, the recruitment of unskilled workers whatever it took to improve production within the framework of the limited workweek. And in keeping with their syndicalist heritage, they reasserted the claim that contrôle ouvrier went hand in hand with improvements in manufacturing techniques.

The CGT's support for rationalization remained consistent even after the Munich crisis and the general strike of 30 November had poisoned relations between the union and the Daladier regime. In late 1938 the Fédération des Métaux (FTM) published a pamphlet reaffirming its productivist position. Citing one example after another, it called attention to shortages, bottlenecks, and disruptions in production, the needless modifications, indecision, or confusion that plagued all aircraft factories, "nationalized or private." Like Moreau's letter, the FTM pamplet closed with a list of demands reiterating the union's support for rationalization: The Fédération des Métaux and the workers in aviation have already shown their desire to improve production; they have made proposals and will do so again with the aim of creating conditions for harmonizing production:

1. Respect for the labor laws and the application of the collective contract in the aircraft industry.

2. Nationalization of the engine-building and accessory firms.

3. A survey of the many firms that are currently needing orders (in rolling stock, machine construction, etc.) and that could easily make accessories, parts for motors and airframes, and even assemble airplanes.

4. An immediate survey in all localities of the unemployed who could be hired and who, when teamed with skilled workers, could facilitate the creation of two or three shifts.

5. The development and implementation of measures to retrain the unemployed rapidly.

6. The improvement and renovation of machinery.

7. The establishment of open orders for mass production, facilitating the methodical organization of production.

8. The reorganization of the bureaus of the Air and Finance ministries, simplifying administrative formalities and enabling these bureaus to serve the national companies effectively for the benefit of production, qualitatively and quantitatively.

9. Take whatever measures are necessary to prevent the sabotage of production.

By bringing together both the political demand for extending nationalization and the bureaucratic demand for greater efficiency, the FTM sought to maintain its claim to be a modernizing force in the industry. Needless to say, the union did not call attention to the possible contradiction that lurked within this position the potential conflict between challenging hierarchical authority through contrôle ouvrier and accepting it in behalf of defense production. But given the CGT's stake in rearmament, in the success of the national companies, in the union's voice in managerial decision making, and in the limited workweek, it made sense to promote retooling and greater efficiency.

The CGT's support for rationalization stands in contrast to what happened in Britain. By the 1930s the main British trade union for skilled metalworkers, the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), had a well-established tradition of opposing the "dilution" of the work force, that is, the increased use of less-skilled laborers either by breaking down production into simpler tasks or by assigning semiskilled workers to tasks for which the union believed they were unqualified. In 1936 the AEU organized a defense against dilution in the aircraft industry, an effort that sparked strikes at Fairey Aviation, Dobson and Barlow, the De Havilland Company, and a number of other British airplane companies between 1936 and 1938. At Rolls Royce Derby skilled workers fought in 1938 over a time-and-motion study and won.In fact, the labor movement in British aviation became deeply divided between skilled metalworkers in the AEU and new, less-skilled "dilutees" whom the Transport and General Workers Union gradually came to recruit. Despite moderately successful negotiations between the AEU and employers over dilution in the summer of 1939, the issue remained a source of controversy throughout the Second World War.

What accounts for the difference between the British and French responses to rationalization? After all, changes in manufacturing technology per se did not differ enough in the two countries to explain the workers' reaction. The answer lies in national politics and the nature of the trade union movements. If in France aircraft workers had witnessed the rise of a Popular Front and the nationalization of much of their industry, their counterparts in Britain still worked in a more conventional environment. Conservative politicians, for the most part, presided over rearmament from 1935 on, and they kept the industry in private hands. To expand production, the British Air Ministry developed a vast network of "shadow factories" plants belonging to private automobile and other metalworking companies that were converted to airplane construction. Aerial rearmament, in effect, was largely contracted out to the private metalworking sector. Under these circumstances British aircraft workers were more likely to continue in the style of shop floor combat that had characterized the metalworking sector throughout the interwar period. For skilled metalworkers, that meant keeping a vigilant eye on manning levels, wage differentials, and job classifications issues that had preoccupied British metalworkers during the First World War.

British labor leaders, moreover, were less inclined than were their CGT counterparts to challenge the legitimacy of the capitalist entrepreneur and more inclined to defend the shop floor privileges of skilled crafts. In fact, craft unionism lay at the heart of the battle in British aviation over rationalization. The AEU in Britain, though officially not a pure craft union since 1926, derived its strength from the solidarity of skilled craftsmen eager to defend their wages and their autonomy from the encroachments of less-skilled dilutees. This tradition of craft exclusivity had sturdy roots in the early development of skilled unions in nineteenth-century Britain and in the extensive use of internal contract systems, in which skilled workers contracted as self-managed squads to carry out jobs for their employers. As a result, British manufacturers in the metal trades, even in the first decades of the twentieth century, tended to be more dependent on their skilled workers for shop floor organization and supervision than were their counterparts in France. This legacy played an important role in fueling the shop steward movement in British metalworking during the First World War, when stewards gained a good deal of influence over shop procedures and set a precedent that skilled workers tried to build on when aircraft rearmament began in the mid-1930s. Although a minority faction of Communists in the British aircraft industry tried to temper the craft exclusivity of the skilled unions in an effort to organize the less skilled, the traditional ethos of protecting the crafts endured. From rearmament until the end of the war it was the strongest of the crafts in aviation, the sheet metal workers, that led the campaign against dilution.

In France, by contrast, the CGT had gone a long way toward overcoming the conservative undercurrents of craft unionism. Even by 1914 most of the major federations in the French labor movement had become bona fide industrial unions, organized by industry rather than craft. The FTM was no exception. Although it did not eliminate craft unionism altogether, it succeeded in linking crafts together under a single federation, where militants learned to subordinate sectional concerns to the interests of metalworkers in shipbuilding, automaking, aviation, machine building, and other industrial branches. If in the 1930s skilled workers still dominated the FTM, the metalworking federation nonetheless made considerable headway in appealing to skilled and unskilled alike. The PCF, moreover, was particularly eager to build a base of support in the growing ranks of the semiskilled; and as Communist militants became increasingly powerful locally in aviation, the emphasis on class solidarities, rather than on craft privileges, only deepened.

Thus, CGT militants in French aviation had little incentive to encourage skilled workers to question Albert Caquot's plans for reorganizing production. To do so would have run against the grain of both tradition and strategy. Not that the CGT was oblivious to the dangers rationalization posed to its constituency. In April 1938 the CGT won the right to be consulted if, in the course of retooling, managers wanted to reassign workers to lower-status jobs. Likewise, the union fought hard to protect wage differentials that had always distinguished skilled from semiskilled work. But the thrust of CGT policy was to channel shop floor militancy away from any exclusionary concern over dilution toward issues that divided workers least overall wage levels, hours, and trade union involvement in the management of the industry.

It is hard to know the extent to which skilled workers in aviation agreed with their local trade union leaders. The archives, however, reveal no sign of the kind of rank-and-file rebellion against rationalization that took place in British aviation or for that matter in the coal mines of northeastern France between 1935 and 1938.In aviation, worker support for the CGT remained strong throughout 1938, and there is no indication that minority factions in the labor movement the Catholic CFTC, revolutionary syndicalists, Trotskyists, or moderates associated with René Belin's newspaper, Syndicats tried to organize against retooling, work discipline, factory reorganization, or the "work ethic" of the CGT. Had a significant number of workers voiced hostility to these objectives, it seems likely that one minority faction or another would have tried to capitalize on such disaffection. The character of rationalization in aviation, the stake workers had in the success of the national companies and the Popular Front, and the CGT's unambiguous support for retooling encouraged workers to adapt to changes in production.

What did trouble workers in aviation, as in other industries, were the effects of inflation and threats to the forty-hour week. Wage rates remained a central preoccupation as workers watched their purchasing power decline. By February 1938 the cost of living for Parisian metalworkers had increased at least 38 percent since June 1936, but their wages had climbed only 21 to 30 percent. Moreover, wages and the wage differentials skilled workers wanted to preserve had symbolic value: they said something larger about the value of one's labor.

Similarly, by 1938 the forty-hour week had become both a bread-and-butter issue and a shibboleth. Since the early 1930s the CGT had promoted the forty-hour week as a way to broaden employment in a depressed economy. In aviation, where workers had faced big swings in employment, the idea was especially appealing as a way to stabilize the job market and reduce layoffs. The forty-hour, five-day week also gave workers that great achievement of June 1936 the weekend. Because the CGT had put such stock in the forty-hour law, and employers in most industries had opposed it so vehemently, it became the chief symbol of Popular Front labor reforms, an emblem of working-class power that aroused so much passion that politicans, militants, and employers all had trouble assessing its real impact on the French economy.Not surprisingly, even though the French aircraft industry, in contrast to the British, avoided strikes over dilution before the war, labor conflict abounded in 1938 over wages and hours. The trouble had its roots in June '36: the Matignon Accord, the forty-hour law, and the collective contracts, while temporarily restoring social peace in the country, also established a set of benchmarks over wages, hours, and trade union power at the workplace which workers and employers were bound to fight over in the months and years ahead. Léon Blum had managed to postpone a new showdown over wages and hours in the spring of 1937 by extending the collective contracts of June 1936 for a second year. By early 1938 a new round of conflict appeared inevitable as CGT militants and employer representatives in a number of industrial branches faced the challenge of renegotiating contracts.

The stormy climate for contract talks pervaded aviation as well, where, given the demands of rearmament, the stakes were particularly high. Negotiations between employers and the CGT had begun during the fall of 1937 but reached a stalemate when the engine builders broke away from the Union Syndicale. With employers divided, and with a change of command in the Air Ministry as La Chambre replaced Cot, the prospects for productive talks seemed as remote as ever in early 1938. Leaders of the CGT had uncertainties of their own as conflict continued between Communist militants, who led the union in most airplane factories, and their rivals, mainly moderates and Socialists, who hoped to expand their local influence. CGT leaders felt under acute pressure to win a new contract that would enhance the standing of the FTM in the industry, offer material advantages to workers, and provide a continuing basis for social peace and rearmament. As Georges Charrière, a leading CGT militant, put it, "Aircraft employers must know that their personnel cannot accept a national contract that does not include indispensable guarantees for maintaining purchasing power through sliding-scale wages, the control of hiring and firing as it already exists in some factories with very good results, and the maintenance of the forty-hour week and the weekend. . . . Public authorities, the premier, the ministers of air and labor, who have been diligently represented in these discussions, must also understand that 'social peace' and the improvement of production . . . depend in part on these guarantees."

Thus, the stakes for some kind of contract rose in early 1938 for all parties for militants, who feared that without a contract workers would be forced to bear the costs of rearmament, costs that might trigger rebellion on the shop floor and fragment the CGT; for state officials, who viewed labor quiescence as essential for Plan V; and for employers, who wanted concessions from labor but were at odds with one another over how to proceed. It was in this context that a strike wave broke out in March.

The Jacomet Ruling and a National Contract

The strike wave that swept through the Parisian metalworking industry during the last week of March 1938 ended the uneasy truce that had prevailed in most aircraft factories for nearly two years. Apart from strikes at Latécoère and Renault, the aircraft industry had not had strikes since June 1936. But by 1938 conditions both peculiar to the aircraft industry and common to other branches had once again made the strike an attractive weapon. Aircraft workers shared a similar sense of frustration over employer recalcitrance and government backsliding that had led workers elsewhere (especially in public services, shoes, chemicals, and the food industry) to risk strikes in December 1937 and the weeks that followed. In aviation and metalworking, moreover, militants were eager to force employers into serious talks over contract renewal. When a new cabinet crisis on 10 March brought Léon Blum back to power, albeit in a weak coalition that even Blum expected to disintegrate shortly, it looked like a favorable moment for action.

If in May 1936 aircraft workers in the provinces launched the movement, this time the strike wave began in Paris and in several metalworking branches, not just in the aircraft industry. What is more, this time technicians were active in spreading the movement. On 23 March technicians and workers staged well-planned symbolic work stoppages of fifteen to thirty minutes in seven airframe and engine firms in the Paris region. During each of these protests delegations went to management demanding "that negotiations for new collective contracts move quickly." "It is noteworthy," one police spy reported, "that in all these factories nearly all the workers have followed this command to stop work." In the days that followed, the careful choreography that marked these union-led protests gave way to a wave of factory occupations initiated not from above but by militants and rank-and-file workers and technicians at the plant level Within two weeks one hundred thousand workers and technicians in the aircraft, automobile, and electrical-equipment industries were occupying their plants throughout the Paris region. Though the movement was largely a metalworking affair and failed to spark a nationwide strike, the tactics, slogans, and flag-draped factories were reminiscent of June 1936.

The political dynamics of the strike were reminiscent as well. As in June 1936, there was tension between union leaders at the national level and militants and workers at the factory level. Officials of the CGT found themselves in a complicated position. They had to control the strike movement to win a contract settlement in the interests of national defense; but they also needed to encourage militancy, lest other radicals outflank them on the shop floor  This latter consideration was a genuine concern since Pivertists in the left wing of the Socialist Party viewed the strikes as a crucial opportunity to win control of the Amicales Socialistes in the Paris region by opposing Blum's efforts at conciliation and encouraging workers to hold firm. These countervailing pressures sometimes put CGT militants in an awkward position, as was the case with Henri Jourdain, whom the FTM sent one evening to the Hispano-Suiza plant at Colombes, outside Paris, to rally workers to the strike movement. Just when he had succeeded in inspiring a large crowd of workers between shifts to call for a walkout, a fellow FTM militant suddenly went up to Jourdain to say the word had come down to "reverse steam":

[At first] I thought this was a joke and continued as if nothing had happened. Then Pimort grabbed me: "These guys must not walk out at any price!" I was finally convinced that it was serious. After a brief moment of hesitation, I picked up the thread of my speech on the several reasons for a walkout but then concluded, "We must not go on strike." The atmosphere was tumultuous; I spoke again briefly, and the confidence in us was such that the great majority voted against the strike. . . . My comrades literally carried me into a nearby café and revived me with a stiff drink.

This strike wave differed from that of June 1936 in two crucial ways. For one thing, Blum's aims had changed. By 1938 he, too, like many Socialists and Radicals, considered rearmament an overriding priority; having come to power again only days after the Anschluss, he committed his cabinet to national defense above all else. This was not a government flush with electoral victory, eager to break the back of managerial traditionalism; it was a beleaguered coalition desperately trying to bolster national defense. At the same time employers brought more strength to the fight in 1938 than they had in June 1936. Although as a group the aircraft employers of Paris were divided, they benefited from the renewal of political confidence most employer organizations had developed since Léon Blum's "pause" in economic policy in the spring of 1937. The CGPF, the employers' association that claimed to speak for all businessmen in France, and the UIMM, in metalworking, had succeeded in obstructing negotiations and rebuilding government support during Camille Chautemps's regime. As a result, although the CGT was a much stronger organization in 1938 than it had been during the "social explosion" of 1936, it was not in a position to dictate the terms of a strike settlement.

At the heart of the conflict lay questions of wages and hours. Leaders of the CGT were willing to expand the workweek in aviation, provided that work time beyond forty hours was paid at overtime rates. Employers had two different positions. Henry Potez, having already obtained an agreement from the CGT to continuous shifts, wanted to maintain the forty-hour week with some room for overtime hours. Pierre Forgeot, however, representing the engine builders, wanted to stick to a system of the single shift and move to a forty-eight-hour week. At issue here was not just work time but wage rates how much a worker was paid for work beyond forty hours as well as differing strategies for increasing production.

Once again, as in June 1936, it took government intervention to settle the matter. To mediate the conflict in aviation, Blum offered a proposal for all firms involved in defense production a 7 percent wage hike in exchange for a forty-five-hour week. Eager both to promote rearmament and to keep Blum in power, CGT leaders accepted the notion, only to have the employers in aircraft reject it as too costly a wage hike. When the Blum government collapsed on 8 April and Edouard Daladier came to power, Robert Jacomet, a top official in the Defense Ministry, offered employers the same deal with a sweetener that the extra hours between the fortieth and the forty-fifth would be paid at regular, not overtime, wages. Employers accepted this arrangement, which on 12 April was officially handed down as the Jacomet arbitration ruling, followed two days later by the signing of a new collective contract. The latter revised the original regional contract of 1936 and was soon to become the source of much greater controversy than its signatories could have foreseen. For the moment, though, the Jacomet ruling and the collective contract of 1938 settled the strike. Aircraft workers and technicians in the Paris region removed their banners and flags and marched out of their plants.

The collective contract of 14 April 1938 had a number of remarkable features. First of all, it was a national, and not just a regional, contract. Provincial plants were now to pay employees a fixed percentage of the rates set for Paris. Employees in a given job classification were to earn 88 percent of the Parisian rates if they worked in Marseille, Berre, Cannes, Nantes, and Saint-Nazaire, 85 percent in Le Havre, and 82 percent in all other provincial locations. Although these differentials preserved the gap employers so valued, the Parisian rates were still far enough above basic metalworking rates to give aircraft firms the highest wages rates in the provinces. The aircraft union in Bordeaux, in fact, went so far as to write the Parisian aircraft section of the FTM a letter of thanks for winning wage rates that benefited aircraft workers throughout France. From the FTM's point of view the continuation of regional wage differentials was an acceptable price to pay for the first national contract in France.

The contract also signaled a second breakthrough: it applied not only to workers but to collaborateurs as well, that is, to white-collar employees from technicians and office personnel to production directors. Representatives for both the worker section and the technician section of the FTM signed the contract, and employers had little choice but to offer the same contract to the two other minority unions in the industry the Syndicat des Cadres, a "yellow" or company union for office employees, and a tiny contingent of the CFTC, the Catholic confederation of labor. In effect this outcome strengthened the position of the CGT since CGT militants had prevailed in their efforts to speak for the personnel as a whole and solidify ties between technicians and workers. The very process of constructing a single contract, moreover, had an impact on negotiations since it made it difficult for employers to withhold from one group of employees what it had conceded to another. Hiring and firing procedures, shop steward elections, subsidies for snacks, commuting, and job transfers were now nearly uniform for blue-collar and white-collar employees alike. And the differences that remained stood out clearly. From the salary schedule for plant directors to the lengthier holidays white-collar employees could enjoy and specifications as to who should ride first class and who second class on trains taken at company expense a hierarchy of rewards and privileges that had always been integral to factory life now stood more fully exposed. A single contract for workers and collaborateurs revealed both how far the union had gone to remove the old paternalistic practices of the industry and how much of the old hierarchy remained.

In its provisions on shop stewards and working conditions the contract went well beyond the regional contract of June 1936 to clarify what employees could expect. As complex as the first contract had been, the new one far surpassed it in detail. Thirteen articles now described how shop stewards would be elected, replaced, recalled, protected from reprisals, excluded from privileges, and respected in speaking for the personnel. Nearly two years of battle over the politics of labor representation had made militants and managers eager to spell out protections for militants, ways to defend themselves from layoffs and managerial sabotage; for managers, some assurance that employee representatives would neither punish nonunion workers nor acquire too much influence on the shop floor. What emerged was a long list of rules. And both sides turned to even lengthier sets of provisions to specify procedures for hiring, layoffs, medical care, job reclassification, work reassignments, and transfers to plants in the provinces. There were even provisions to cover the special burdens that pregnant women and foreign workers faced on the job. Since 1936 workers and militants had learned a great deal about the uncertainties of life in the industry, and they looked to the contract as the chief weapon of defense. At the same time employers were learning to use contractual negotiations to their own advantage, trading concessions here for boundaries there and recognizing their own stake in minimizing some of the uncertainties employees abhorred. In an expanding industry eager to keep its work force, employers had to find ways to hold on to skilled workers and attract new ones from neighboring firms. If the new contract went beyond the previous one, it was a measure of how strong the CGT remained in the industry and how willing employers, particularly in the airframe sector, were to accept the style of negotiated conflict that workers and the first Blum government had forced on them in 1936.

Behind the settlement of April lay the heavy hand of the state. Once again it took the aggressive intervention of state officials Edouard Daladier, Robert Jacomet, Guy La Chambre, and Paul Ramadier (the labor minister) to secure an agreement. Moreover, the contract referred explicitly to the continuing presence of state officials in supervising the relationship between management and labor. Shop stewards had the right to call in labor inspectors to investigate complaints, and both sides were obliged to participate in conciliation procedures sponsored by the Air Ministry. Should conciliation fail, the contract obligated labor and management to follow the compulsory arbitration procedures established by the law of 4 March 1938. Air and Labor Ministry officials, in other words, were expected to be a continuing presence in labor relations.

Rank-and-file workers gave the settlement mixed reviews. Police reports on union meetings leave no trace of rank-and-file disgruntlement over the contract. Since its wage schedules and its provisions on hiring and shop stewards made it the most far-reaching contract in French industry, it would have been surprising to see much discontent. In fact, the aircraft contract was widely recognized as a better settlement than the metalworking contract that finally emerged in early May. But the Jacomet ruling was another story. In a single stroke Jacomet destroyed the forty-hour week in aviation for a wage hike some employees found too low. According to one account, 70 percent of the personnel at SNCASE in Argenteuil initially rejected the Jacomet ruling as a basis for ending the strike, and six hundred workers at the Kellermann plant of Gnôme-et-Rhône felt the same. A left-wing dissident at Gnôme-et-Rhône, writing in La Révolution prolétarienne, denounced the ruling as "the reestablishment of power to capital." Anger over the ruling was sufficiently widespread to force national leaders of the union into the field to explain its virtues to union locals. In the May issue of L'Union des métaux Ambroise Croizat argued that the settlement protected workers from layoffs, and the forty-five-hour week enabled them to boost their earnings. In a sense the Jacomet ruling was just what the doctor had ordered for union leaders like Croizat, who wanted to strengthen national defense without undermining the forty-hour week for French industry as a whole. In any event, rank-and-file opinion appeared divided; whereas some workers opposed any retreat from the forty-hour law, others either voiced no protest or welcomed the chance to bring home more pay. Once CGT leaders had swallowed the pill of forty-five hours, what mattered most to them was some assurance that employers would comply with the ruling and the new national contract.

Employer compliance could not be taken for granted. Georges Charrière warned his comrades to beware of attempts that employers, especially in the provinces, might make to test ambiguities in the contract. Workers feared that local managers would be slow to adjust wages to the new schedules established for Paris. This problem, however, posed only a minor danger in comparison to the real threat that loomed over the contract the schism between airframes and engines. Airframe manufacturers, especially in the nationalized sector, applauded the contract as an improvement over that of June 1936. Its clarity, its stabilizing influence, and its incorporation of legal procedures for conciliation and arbitration gave de l'Escaille, Potez, and their associates confidence in the settlement. Since labor costs could be passed on to the government, these employers were all the more willing to implement the agreement.

Not so the builders of engines. They had resisted negotiations all winter, except on their own special terms, and once the contract was signed they remained adamant in their efforts to stay clear of the Union Syndicale and the new contract. The engine builders had a long list of objections; they rejected the whole notion of a national contract that applied to workers and other employees alike. They wanted tighter strictures on shop floor delegates and greater freedom to hire, fire, and assign workers as they pleased. Provisions on hygiene, holidays, and foreign workers seemed too generous as well. Rather than handle grievances through special conciliation boards for the aircraft industry, these employers preferred to rely on the more conventional (and presumably more conservative) conciliation committees set up in each département of France.The simple way out of these matters, engine builders felt, was to avoid the aircraft contract altogether and either continue on the basis of the contract of 1936 or, if need be, conform to the new contract for metalworking as a whole. The engine builders refused to let their accommodating colleagues in the nationalized sector dictate labor relations in their private firms.

Accessory manufacturers were divided over whom to follow. About twenty firms, including Ratier and Messier, did business exclusively in aviation and were tied closely to the nationalized firms. They approved of the contract and supported the Union Syndicale. Dozens of other firms preferred to follow engine builders not only in rejecting the aircraft contract but also in bolting from the Union Syndicale. Even the private firms still in airframes flirted with this strategy, though they eventually decided against it^. Henry de l'Escaille, president of the Union Syndicale, could not hide his dismay at the prospect of losing still more members; he argued that the contract did not in fact apply to many of the firms that felt compelled to resign. But many employers, fearing pressures from labor or the Air Ministry to comply, fled the Union Syndicale just the same.

By mid-May a new battle had begun to take shape to determine how widely in the industry the new contract would apply. Workers and technicians had come out of the April strike still reasonably unified and armed with a contract that gave concrete form to the strategies militants had promoted since June '36. The unions now rallied their members to fight to have the contract apply in the engine and accessory sectors just as it did in airframes. As the engine builders had feared, state influence in the airframe sector had given workers the leverage to consolidate gains; the CGT now sought to pressure state officials to enforce the settlement not just in airframes but in engines and accessories as well. Though the big strikes of April 1938 had been settled, the underlying issues in the conflict for employers, profits and their authority; for workers, wages, hours, and trade union power; for state officials, rearmament and social peace all remained unresolved. The battle now shifted to new bureaucratic terrain.

The Campaign to Extend the Contract

French labor law empowered the government to determine how broadly a collective agreement could apply within an industry. Though it rarely occurred, the labor minister could extend the geographical, sectoral, and occupational reach of a contract. On 13 May 1938 the FTM sent a letter to the labor minister urging just such an action in hopes of extending the contract and the Jacomet ruling to the engine and accessory sectors: "In our opinion it is indisputable that aircraft engines cannot be used in any other industry and that an aircraft engine cannot be separated from an airframe since it is precisely the combination of these two objects which alone permits an airplane to fly." The letter went on "to refute the theory of the Chambre Syndicale des Moteurs which claims there is a perfect analogy between building airplane engines and building automobile engines." The FTM attacked this position on the basis of workers' experience: "to build aircraft engines required specialized and highly trained people [who] up to now have needed references from within this industry to get hired." The engine and accessory sectors, militants argued, were as much a part of the industry as the airframe sector and hence should fall within the jurisdiction of the contract. Since the contract named the engine sector specifically as a party to the agreement, the FTM found it self-evident that the document should apply.

The call for extension provoked a chorus of protest from employers. From official pronouncements at the UIMM to the angry outcries of individual entrepreneurs in towns like Vierzon and Châteauroux, employers lent their voices to a lobbying effort that went on for weeks. Letters flooded into the Labor Ministry from the provinces, especially from regions where aircraft plants had sprung up and expanded since the late 1920s.Amid the clamor of protest three forms of attack against the contract emerged. The first came from the engine builders themselves, who insisted on how little they had in common with airframe manufacturers and how closely they resembled other branches in metalworking. Accessory firms made a second kind of argument. Since many of them manufactured equipment for clients outside aviation, they loathed a contract that required wages applying to the aircraft industry but not to the other branches in which they had to compete. The notion of paying some employees aircraft wages and others a lower metalworking rate angered them all the more, for a dual wage schedule would surely invite labor unrest.Many employers warned that the contract would drive them out of the aircraft sector altogether.

The third attack against the idea of extension came from employers who feared the impact the contract might have beyond the aircraft industry. In Bayonne, for example, metalworking employers so dreaded the pressure aircraft wage rates would exert in their region that they managed to rally the local Chamber of Commerce to their cause. Chamber officials wrote the labor minister an impassioned plea not to extend the contract to the new Latécoère plant in their area lest it trigger labor conflict in nearby metalworker establishments, raise prices, and eventually cause an economic catastrophe for a region already devasted by the collapse of its tourist trade on account of the Spanish civil war. The fear of the new wages in aircraft was no less severe in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Pau, and many other cities and towns where employers convened to send pleas to Paris. In Châteauroux metalworking employers went to great lengths to document the sources of their hysteria, contending that the local wages at SNCASO exceeded those in metalworking, textiles, and building construction by 70, 85, and 112 percent respectively. Even farmers in this region condemned the contract loudly enough to move the prefect to write the labor minister that "agricultural workers see aircraft workers, especially the unskilled, earning very high wages while often working under less harsh conditions and lacking special skills, since a large number of them are in fact recruited from the ranks of domestic workers on farms." Because aircraft firms were paying their employees relatively well and expanding their ranks, fear spread that employers everywhere would be forced to bid up their wages. Anxiety and self-interest quickly created an impressive array of supporters for a cause that had initially sprung from the narrow concerns of the four largest engine-building firms.

Faced with such protest, how did state officials respond? In the corridors of the ministries opinions differed over how to proceed, and for three months ambivalence and disagreement prevailed. Some prefects and Air Ministry officials were inclined to agree with employers who feared the impact that aircraft wages might have on local labor markets. Naval officials, moreover, complained that the contract would lure metalworkers from the shipyards into the aircraft domain. Still, a number of officials saw merit in extending the contract. Although Daladier and La Chambre had no desire to trigger a scramble for higher wages in the metalworking sector, they considered Plan V an overriding priority and viewed the contract as a desirable instrument for stabilizing the airframe and engine sectors. Moreover, some employers concurred, namely the heads of nationalized firms, men still smarting from the schism in the Union Syndicale. In their view article 1 of the contract had made it perfectly clear that engine builders, as well as firms with departments working exclusively in aviation, were obliged to adhere to the agreement. Though the Union Syndicale officially remained silent on the issue, it was no doubt apparent that extension might remove the greatest source of antagonism among employers and allow them to tighten their ranks. In addition, a few prefects, especially those in the Cher and the Seine-et-Oise, had witnessed the battles of the industry locally and came out clearly for extension.Labor, in short, had a number of allies in the contest over extension, albeit allies with motives of their own.

The CGT was fortunate, too, to find a labor minister in the cabinet who did not blanch at the thought of imposing an innovative contract on a group of recalcitrant employers. Paul Ramadier had left the Socialist Party to join Pierre Renaudel in the "neo-Socialist" heresy in 1933. But unlike some of his colleagues in the group, Ramadier retained enough sympathy for labor and industrial reform to see the virtue of extending the contract. He was also a careful politician, and recognizing how volatile the issue had become, he turned to the National Economic Council for advice. When this quasi-governmental body of labor, business, and administrative representatives found itself too divided to issue a clear opinion, lobbying intensified at the Ministry of Labor. On 4 August Doury, Charrière, Jourdain, Duhamel, and Laborie met with Ramadier to reiterate the CGT's case for extension.When Ramadier issued his decree the next day, their efforts were rewarded: the government officially extended the contract of April 1938 to the engine sector and to accessory firms that fell within the rubric of article 1. Suddenly another twenty thousand workers in the industry had a favorable contract that renegade employers now had to uphold. Though Ramadier did not extend the contract up the occupational hierarchy to include engineers a move ultimately more threatening to employer interests than sectoral extension his decree was perceived as a stunning victory for labor. CGT officials, however, took care to acclaim it as a victory for the national interest, not simply for workers. "[We] believe," Jourdain wrote in the labor press, "that the implementation of this agreement can only have positive repercussions on the rational development of production in factories where aircraft engines are built. Several months have now shown this to be the case in the airframe firms." All along, aircraft militants had described extension as an asset for rearmament, and as the Czech crisis mounted, no one was tempted to gloat publicly over the victory.

Labor's triumph in the extension battle, however, was short-lived. Scarcely had Ramadier issued his decree when Edouard Daladier suddenly decided to challenge the most important symbol of labor reform from June 1936 the forty-hour week, which was still in force in metalworking generally, if not in the aircraft industry itself. Several factors converged by late summer 1938 that encouraged Daladier to make this move. The emerging Czech crisis had forced the government to reconsider its readiness for war. Reports during the summer from the ministries of National Defense and Labor revealed how few skilled workers could be found in the ranks of the unemployed and hence how important it was to expand the workweek. And Daladier felt under continuing political pressure to placate employer groups lobbying for a reversal in labor policy. On the evening of 21 August Daladier declared in a radio address that "as long as the international situation remains so delicate, it will be necessary to work more than forty hours and up to forty-eight hours in defense plants. In the face of authoritarian states that arm themselves without any consideration for work time, is France going to waste its time on things like that?" This speech was a pivotal moment for the country, for by attacking labor's sacrosanct forty-hour week, Daladier, who for months had vacillated between maintaining the illusion of a Popular Front and tilting toward the right for political support, finally made it clear that he wanted to rein in unions and restore business confidence in his regime. Two days later, Ramadier resigned from the Labor Ministry, and Daladier promptly replaced him with Charles Pomaret, a tough-minded deputy less inclined toward labor reform. Just when aircraft militants had seemed to win the battle over extension, the political climate had changed.

Daladier's shift in policy evoked particularly strong feelings of resentment in the aircraft industry because workers and technicians had already shown a willingness to be flexible on the work hour question. In fact, as Daladier wrote later, the chief concern of the government at the time was not to lengthen the workweek in the aircraft industry itself but rather to boost production in those private firms supplying raw materials and semifinished goods to the state arsenals and nationalized companies. Aircraft employers themselves were of mixed minds over the workweek. Although some employers, especially in the engine sector, welcomed an attack on the Popular Front's work time legislation, Henry Potez had approved of the forty-hour week as a way to bring order and predictability to production. In short, the workweek had been negotiable in aviation, at least up to a point. Daladier's attack on "forty hours," however, further polarized the situation. With government taking a firm stance against labor, even Potez changed his opinion: in September, faced with the complexity of organizing mass production for the Potez 63, he joined the ranks of those who opposed the forty-hour week.

The CGT, not surprisingly, reacted immediately to Daladier's initiative. Four days after Daladier's radio address aircraft technicians from throughout the Paris region gathered at the Maison de la Mutualité to condemn the speech and express "their stupefaction at the ill-timed attack on the forty-hour week to which [workers] are so deeply attached." Militants criticized employers for failing to comply with the Jacomet ruling and called for a policy restoring the forty-hour week, respecting labor's voice on the supervisory committees of the industry, and implementing procedures that genuinely rationalized the industry. Across town two days later, militants in the Amicales Socialistes held a similar meeting to protest Daladier's policy. Since CGT militants had been willing to negotiate flexibly over wages and hours in defense industries during the strikes of the previous April, they now felt Daladier's initiative was less a rearmament measure than an assault on the labor movement itself. Daladier's new policy increased the acrimony between labor and management just at the moment when national unity was badly needed during the Munich crisis of late September. War appeared so imminent during the heat of the crisis that Daladier felt compelled to mobilize the army, and a sense of panic quickly spilled into the arms industries. On 28 September Albert Caquot instructed all company heads in the nationalized sector to shift to a wartime footing:

Because of the German ultimatums, the factories must function at the maximum. . . . The nationalized factories must, by working next Saturday and Sunday, exemplify an understanding of the national interest. This work in the offices and factories will acquire special meaning from the fact that it is envisioned essentially as a free and spontaneous measure to safeguard the country. Any difficulty in carrying out this order will be reported to me.

This call for a "spontaneous" sacrifice of the weekend created confusion on the shop floor. Popular patriotism and Communist antifascism, on the one hand, made it difficult for workers to rebuff the request. But on the other, Caquot's appeal for extra hours came on the heels of a new assault on the labor movement. Moreover, because aircraft workers had been working more than forty hours a week since April, they now resented the government's effort to coerce workers without consulting the unions or negotiating a new agreement on hours. On top of it all, when the crisis suddenly abated on Friday, 30 September, with the Four Power Pact, the appeal to work Saturday seemed less compelling. Militants felt torn, as a police informant discerned:

Great confusion reigned yesterday afternoon [Friday] in the trade union world of aviation. During the morning a number of militants had expressed the opinion that in the light of the change in the international situation [i.e. the agreement at Munich], the plans made to work overtime on Saturday were no longer justified. Startled by this development, the aircraft technicians section, which is a part of the metalworking federation, deliberated at length. At 2:30 this group decided to work the next day nonetheless. But this decision provoked vigorous protest. It quickly became clear that the number of defections from this decision would be high. . . . So, late in the evening the technicians reversed their decision from the afternoon. It was decided that today would be a Saturday of rest like all others. The office personnel and the management worked today as usual, while the workers stayed home. In the Bloch factory in Courbevoie 600 office employees and technicians came to work while 1200 workers refused to come. The situation is the same in other aircraft factories.

Though this report may have exaggerated how many workers refused to work in the industry as a whole evidence suggests the turnout was better in some plants it conveyed how difficult it had become to demand sacrifices from a work force now thrown on the defensive by a government many workers felt they could no longer trust.

Within days after Daladier's return from Munich antagonisms deepened. Trouble broke out first in the large private engine-building firms, where the events of the past months had sown the greatest distrust. At Salmson in Paris management fired a worker, triggering a factory occupation on 6 October. This time, however, police cleared the factory by force, and the company refused to rehire fifty of the more militant strikers. Such reprisals, reminiscent of the early 1930s, inspired workers at Renault, Caudron, and Hispano-Suiza to stage half-hour sitdowns in solidarity with the fired workers. On Saturday, 8 October, seven hundred of the nine hundred employees at Hispano-Suiza refused to work overtime, even though they had done so the Saturday before. The spirit of cooperation that had prevailed in the industry during the panic of Munich disappeared as the country became more and more polarized between workers and employers, left and right, opponents and supporters of a Daladier regime moving decisively against labor. By 18 October short strikes had erupted at Bréguet in Villacoublay and at Caudron-Renault to protest the attack on the forty-hour week and violations of the contract of April 1938.In each of these strikes workers and technicians sought to defend what they had gained either in June 1936 or in the national contract of April 1938. The battle over extension had not been won in August after all; it broke out anew on factory floors.

During the first week of November a skirmish took place in the Bouguenais plant of SNCASO on the outskirts of Nantes that demonstrated how the social climate in the industry had deteriorated. Employees there had taken the customary holiday of All Saints' Day, and according to the contract of April 1938, they were obliged to make up the work the following Saturday. Before Daladier's attack on the forty-hour week in August 1938 most employees would probably have cooperated with this arrangement. But now workers had become so sensitive to the notion of conceding extra hours that when shop stewards polled their comrades, only 240 of 1490 employees voted to work the additional day. This decision brought Ambroise Croizat, general secretary of the FTM, rushing from Paris to warn local militants that a refusal to make up All Saints' Day "would be tantamount to breaking the contract." In fact, plant managers made it clear that employees who had failed to make up for the holiday would now have to reapply for their jobs. Faced with such a reprisal, local militants reexamined their position, convened fifteen hundred employees at a meeting in the local Bourse de Travail, and won unanimous support to negotiate a new chance to make up the work. Management agreed, and conflict subsided, but the damage had been done: workers had shown their reluctance to heed their contractual obligations for overtime, and managers had revealed their willingness to discipline labor harshly.

Meanwhile a juridical struggle had developed that called into question the status of Ramadier's extension decree of 5 August. The engine manufacturers had refused to concede defeat over the issue and no doubt took heart from Daladier's tough new labor policy. Accordingly, these employers took their case against extension to yet another agency of appeal the Conseil d'Etat, the highest administrative court in France, a body that under extremely rare circumstances had been known to suspend decrees.

Once again business, labor, and state officials presented their arguments to a governmental body that stood a step removed from the fray of industrial conflict. The engine manufacturers repeated their critique of the aircraft contract, and CGT officials offered new figures showing how productivity had improved at Gnôme-et-Rhône since the August decree. The arguments of the two opposing sides had evolved little in the months of conflict, but the lines of battle had changed in one essential respect: the ministries had shifted their stance. Charles Pomaret, the labor minister, made no secret of his antipathy for extension and for the high wages in aircraft generally. What is more, La Chambre now presented a complex argument that neither defended nor attacked extension but rather implicitly invited the Conseil d'Etat to rule as it pleased. No leading government official made a formal defense of contract extension. Just how fully the political environment had changed in industrial life since the preceding summer became all the more apparent when Conseil d'Etat issued its ruling: on 12 November it ordered the government to postpone the implementation of the Ramadier decree.

This decision came as a blow to the CGT, which with few friends in the ministries now had nowhere to turn. The engine manufacturers, of course, were elated; the gamble of schismatic tactics at last was reaping rewards. Though the contest over extension had not ended, its complex course from April to November had exposed to everyone how abruptly the fortunes of labor could change in the wake of Daladier's shift in policy. CGT militants had struggled vigorously to solidify what they had won in the strikes of the previous April. And employers, especially the engine builders, had battled hard to reverse their momentum. At stake had been two visions of labor relations in the industry on the one hand, a social compact between the CGT and employers, financed through the rearmament budget, embodied in the Jacomet ruling and the national contract, and extended beyond the boundaries of the national companies into the private sector; on the other, a reassertion of the more conventional, autocratic style of management that the engine builders hoped at the very least to preserve in the private sector. At stake, too, were profits the capacity of employers in the private sector to demand a long workweek of workers without paying them overtime rates, and the capacity of employers outside the airframe sector to ignore the premium wage rates of the national contract. The final outcome of this contest rested in the hands of a few men Daladier, Ramadier, Pomaret, La Chambre, and the judges on the Conseil d'Etat demonstrating once again how important state officials, and especially the politicians, had become in shaping social relations in the industry.

The General Strike of 30 November 1938

In early November Edouard Daladier took a giant step in implementing his tough policy toward labor by appointing Paul Reynaud as his new finance minister. Reynaud was a unique man of the center-right, disliked by most conservatives for his anti-Munich position on foreign policy but appreciated by them at the same time for his economic orthodoxy the importance he attributed to budgetary restraint, a strong franc, and the restoration of business confidence. He had opposed the forty-hour week from the start. On 4 October Daladier had been granted plenary powers for several weeks by the Chamber of Deputies, and it was to Reynaud that he turned in November to chart a more conservative course by issuing a set of decrees. On 12 November Reynaud took to the airwaves. "We live under a capitalist regime," he said, "[and capitalism] being what it is, we must obey its laws. Its laws are profit, individual risk, free markets, and the stimulus of competition." To restore a liberal capitalist economy, Reynaud ordered price ceilings lifted and government expenditures reduced, in the hope of bolstering the franc and winning back the confidence of big investors. At the heart of the decree laws lay a simple aim to restore a free market in labor, or what amounted to the destruction of the forty-hour week and an attack on the power of the unions. "Do you believe," he asked his listeners, "that in the Europe of today France can at the same time maintain its way of life, spend 25 billion on arms, and rest two days a week? I hear you say no. . . . To the foreign nations who are listening to us we announce that the France of the two-day weekend is no more." Whatever ambiguity lingered in government policy during the fall of 1938 now suddenly disappeared in a frontal assault on the labor policy of the Popular Front.

Reynaud's decree laws forced Socialists, Communists, and the CGT to find some way to mount a collective response. At the CGT congress, which happened to meet in Nantes just days after the decrees were announced, militants argued bitterly over what to do. Communist leaders called for a one-day general strike to protest Reynaud's decrees. They harbored hopes that working-class protest might provoke a cabinet crisis and bring a more avowedly antifascist government back into power. René Belin's Syndicats faction of the CGT, which approved of Daladier's diplomacy at Munich, opposed a strike, leaving the fate of the proposal in the ambivalent hands of Léon Jouhaux and the CGT centrists. The Nantes congress closed with the strike question unresolved.

As had happened so many times since 1934, initiatives at the grass roots galvanized CGT leaders into action. Between 18 and 25 November lockouts and wildcat strikes spread, especially around Paris and in the Nord, as workers squared off with employers emboldened by Reynaud's decrees to lengthen the workweek and fire militants. In the most spectacular of these wildcats, at the giant Renault works in Billancourt, aircraft workers confronted Renault-Caudron with a list of complaints over apprenticeship training, hiring practices, health and safety, wages and bonuses, and "abusive and unjustified layoffs"; in more general terms militants criticized the company for failing to hire more people, retool, and help workers improve their skills. Renault's administrators needed to pay little heed to these grievances since Daladier's government moved swiftly to clear the plant by force and refused to negotiate with CGT leaders. Aircraft militants found themselves more isolated from government officials than at any time since May 1936. Daladier's men wanted it that way. As La Chambre recalled later, "I put a stop to all direct contact between the workers and the Air Ministry, save for direct and official contacts between union representatives and my staff on questions of industrial production." With doors slamming in the ministries and conflict spreading at the workplace, Léon Jouhaux's centrist group in the CGT felt there was little choice but to support the Communist plan for a general strike on 30 November.

Meanwhile employers girded themselves for a showdown. At the UIMM Baron Petiet of the automobile industry urged his colleagues "to let the strike movement expose itself as a political movement and not let it turn into a [more narrowly defined] industrial strike." Although not all employers were as aggressive in their intentions as Louis Renault, who since February 1938 had been hankering for an opportunity to lay off militants in large numbers, most employers in metalworking, and no doubt hard-liners like Paul-Louis Weiller in the aircraft engine sector, relished the chance the general strike afforded to break the back of the CGT. Even in the nationalized airframe companies, where Henry Potez, Marcel Bloch, and Emile Dewoitine had learned to maneuver adroitly around left-wing politicians and the CGT, confrontation was shaping up, in part because Albert Caquot, the new president of the national companies, was eager to take advantage of Reynaud's decrees. On 25 November Caquot warned CGT spokesman Georges Charrière that a strike would be regarded as "a revolutionary measure" (and hence would be an invitation for repression). He went on to say it was necessary in the national interest to move to a fifty-five-hour week. The aircraft industry figured prominently in the events that followed. A high proportion of workers and technicians in the industry participated in the one-day strike, and in no other industrial branch was post-strike repression so severe. About 80 percent of the work force took part in the strike, though the scale of the protest differed noticeably in the nationalized and private sectors. In the former nearly all workers and technicians joined the strike at SNCASO in Châteauroux, for example, 2350 of 2400 wage earners refused to work but solidarity was weaker in private firms like Renault-Caudron and Regnier. Of the nationalized plants, three stood out as exceptions proving the rule SNCAN at Méaulte, where the paternalism of Potez's small company town still held sway; SNCASO at Rochefort, where workers found themselves in a new plant with little local metalworking trade unionism to build on; and SNCAC at Bourges, where the union had still not overcome the disruptions of personnel transfers and plant expansion. Elsewhere workers in nationalized plants were nearly unanimous in their protest; in cities like Nantes and Toulouse they played leading roles in the street demonstrations and scuffles with police that took place on 30 November and the days that followed.

The nationalized plants in the aircraft industry became visible centers of labor strength in the strike for at least three reasons. First, for all the conflict that had troubled local unions in aviation in 1937 and 1938 between Socialists and Communists, technicians and workers, newcomers and outsiders in the provinces the CGT had nonetheless remained especially strong in the industry. The politics of nationalization, the importance the industry still had in Paris metalworking and the red belt, and the growth of the industry on account of rearmament all contributed to trade union strength. Second, workers and technicians in nationalized firms had a great deal at stake in the strike, for it was clear that most of what they had won since 1936 a voice for employees in the national companies, a measure of contrôle ouvrier on the shop floor, power over hiring and apprenticeship, the national contract of April 1938 could be jeopardized by defeat. And third, because the national companies were not state arsenals and still had the status of quasi-autonomous firms, workers in the nationalized sector of aviation were not requisitioned, that is, legally forced by the state to show up for work, as were their counterparts in the railroads, utilities, and public transport when Daladier issued a requisition order on the eve of the strike.

Had the general strike of 30 November been victorious, aircraft workers would have been among the first to benefit, as they had in June 1936. But the general strike failed, and the strikers in aviation paid dearly. Daladier's uninhibited use of police power and the requisition order, combined with divisions in the labor movement, condemned the nationwide action to failure from the first hours of 30 November. Throughout the country government officials quickly turned the strike into a lockout, promising harsh sanctions against strikers. This initiative was all most employers needed to follow suit, and for the next two weeks those hit hardest by the strike kept their plants closed and forced strikers to reapply for their jobs. Caquot took charge of the operation in the nationalized sector, and "found in M. Guy La Chambre the support I needed to take the measures I envisaged to be in the general interest." About thirty-six thousand aircraft employees found the doors to their companies closed; employers announced that by striking they had broken the terms of the collective contract.

Labor militants protested, to little avail. On 4 December 1938, 150 aircraft militants from around the Paris region gathered at the Maison de la Mutualité to take stock of the catastrophe. The press had been invited to the meeting, and some of the major leaders on the left appeared, including Communist parliamentary deputy, Jacques Duclos. Alfred Costes, a general secretary of the FTM and a Communist, spoke at length, denying the political character of the strike, insisting that workers had not refused to work overtime for the national defense, and suggesting that government repression might force the union "to give up its collaboration on the coordinating committees" of the nationalized sector. It was an empty threat, however, since Daladier was soon to expel labor officials from a number of quasi-governmental committees. What had remained of labor participation in the boardrooms and committees of the industry gradually eroded, a casualty of the conflict.

In the aircraft industry, as elsewhere, employers used the layoffs as a way to purge plants of militants. Nowhere was this practice more extensive than in the nationalized sector. After the plants opened in the third week of December, employers prevented about 10 percent of the strikers, or about three thousand employees, from returning to work. By February 1939, 1,023 were still blacklisted. During the spring of 1939 some of these strikers were rehired, but many were deprived of their jobs. Though Daladier and La Chambre followed a conciliatory course for most rank-and-file workers after December 1938, they stuck to a punitive approach with some militants.

The Air Ministry kept detailed lists of the fired personnel, and they reveal something of the occupational composition of the group laid off indefinitely from the industry. Of 520 employees fired from a sample of fourteen nationalized firms, 327, or 63 percent, were skilled workers. Despite some plant expansion and modernization during 1938, skilled metalworkers and carpenters still served as the core of the labor movement in the aircraft industry. And despite the importance of their labor

during a rearmament drive, they still took the brunt of the poststrike repression. By contrast, only 7 percent of the fired personnel were unskilled and semiskilled workers, groups that usually composed from 10 to 20 percent of the work force. Technicians and shop floor supervisory personnel (foremen, team leaders, and inspectors normally drawn from the ranks of technicians and skilled workers) accounted for almost 18 percent of the firings a sizable proportion, revealing how militant many of the most high-ranking wage earners had remained since the summer of 1936. More remarkable still were the figures for white-collar office personnel: they accounted for 12 percent of the firings, of whom nearly 40 percent were women. Employers most likely fired office personnel merely for participating in the strike, as most employees of this sort generally refused to strike. Nonetheless, though the CGT had failed in its effort to recruit a majority of white-collar personnel into aircraft locals, these figures suggest the union had significant support in these occupational ranks in almost every factory.

The occupational composition of fired personnel varied little from plant to plant, except at SNCAM in Toulouse, where the group cut across occupational lines more widely than elsewhere. Supervisory personnel and technicians accounted for more than 22 percent of the firings, and unskilled and semiskilled workers for 18 percent; white-collar employees made up 15 percent of the group. Although the data are lacking to compare the composition of the work force across firms, these differences do suggest that the management at SNCAM felt militancy had taken root not simply in the skilled laboring ranks but quite extensively throughout the plant. The history of the firm since 1936 suggests the same: workers, technicians, and employers had waged a complex battle to nationalize the firm and, as we have seen, had gone to considerable lengths to preserve the autonomy and distinct local identity of the company. As in Bordeaux, Nantes, and the Paris region, labor militancy in Toulouse had sprung up in the fertile soil of the metalworking past. But battles of the Popular Front period had taken a special, localist turn in Toulouse, and under these circumstances trade union militancy may well have reached up into the supervisory and white-collar levels of the company hierarchy more effectively than elsewhere. When the purge came at SNCAM, it cut a wide swath.

Throughout the spring of 1939 CGT militants tried to win back jobs for fired comrades. La Chambre and Caquot showed little mercy. They, like Daladier and Reynaud, had made their choice. Having calculated that an embittered working class was an acceptable price to pay for weakening the CGT and expanding the workweek, these officials dismantled the social compact of 1936 and reasserted a hierarchical chain of command. The rehiring process symbolized this transformation: fired strikers

could return only at the pleasure of factory supervisors. When CGT leaders tried to use their contacts with someone on La Chambre's staff, Caquot reasserted his authority to run the poststrike repression. Daladier had implicitly invited employers to establish a solid front against labor, and thanks especially to La Chambre and Caquot the divisions in the aircraft industry over how to handle the CGT quickly closed.

After the debacle of 30 November the CGT had few weapons at hand to fight back. Without powerful allies in the ministries as in 1936 ;“37, and without a popular mobilization in the streets or at the ballot box as in 1936, aircraft workers had only their national contract and the organizational cohesion of the CGT as a source of strength. Yet even these assets were losing their value. As the fissure widened between Communists and anti-Communists in the CGT, it became more and more difficult to hold the organization together. Thus, 30 November proved to be only the beginning of Thermidor in the industry. In the months that followed, La Chambre and Caquot went beyond just a purge of the plants; they reopened the battle over the national contract.

Destroying the National Contract

On 16 December 1938 Daladier held a secret meeting with cabinet and subcabinet officials to launch a new labor policy in the aircraft industry. Facing criticism in parliament for lags in aircraft production, he recognized that the defeat of the general strike gave him a new opportunity to remove what many metalworking firms claimed was an obstacle to their involvement in La Chambre's production program the national contract of April 1938. Daladier and La Chambre moved with alacrity. On 17 December the general secretary at the Defense Ministry, Robert Jacomet, told the Matériel Committee of the Air Ministry that "wage scales in the various plants working for National Defense should be unified. In doing this, it should be understood that current wages should be maintained for workers already hired, but new employees in aviation should be paid according to the collective contract for metalworking. Moreover, the decree of 5 August 1938 should be abrogated." Within a month it was done: under orders from Daladier, Labor Minister Charles Pomaret rescinded the Ramadier decree that had been suspended by the Conseil d'Etat. With extension of the national contract reversed, government officials hoped metalworking firms would respond to the needs of the industry.

La Chambre took the next step by attacking the national contract itself. On 3 March he asked that the labor and finance ministers urge airframe manufacturers to renounce the contract since only employers or the FTM were empowered to dissolve it. Meanwhile a young Michel Debré, one of Paul Reynaud's key staff assistants (and a future architect of Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic), developed an elaborate plan for reshaping the wage structure of the industry. The plan envisioned a series of steps that would gradually eliminate the wage gaps that by the fall of 1938 had made aircraft workers about 25 percent better paid than their counterparts in metalworking.Though employers had complained bitterly about wage differentials, it was the staff officials and politicians in the ministries who planned a way out.

At first the airframe manufacturers expressed ambivalence over abandoning the contract, which had, after all, provided them a measure of predictability. To be sure, airframe builders saw the advantages of closing the wage gap between aviation and metalworking as a whole. As Henry de l'Escaille, president of the Union Syndicale, wrote to Labor Minister Pomaret, "Today the artisanal character of the industry has disappeared; production methods are such that one can no longer distinguish between specialists in metalworking and aviation, particularly among the less skilled." Yet de l'Escaille and his colleagues had misgivings about abandoning the contract. They had no appetite for new talks with the CGT, and they feared "that any modification in wage rates might damage a favorable labor market." High wages had attracted skilled workers. The builders also had worries about future orders because it was just at this time that La Chambre and General Vuillemin were arguing about how much to expand the air force beyond Plan V. With this debate in mind, the airframe builders told de l'Escaille to insist that if they renounce the contract, the government should see to it that no current employees suffer wage cuts and that "construction schedules be established across several fiscal years to give the work force long-term guarantees of employment and material security."

By the end of March the pieces had fallen into place. La Chambre had secured a production program assuring firms future orders at least into 1941, and the Union Syndicale had renounced the contract. In April the industry came under the jurisdiction of the metalworking contract of 1938; never again would aircraft workers have the privilege of a separate national contract for their industry. Employers reaped a double benefit a cheaper, more flexible contract and an end to their own crippling schism. Within weeks engine builders returned to the fold, and the Union Syndicale restored its membership in the UIMM, the umbrella organization for metalworking manufacturers. The mission Daladier had launched in December was complete.

The destruction of the aircraft contract and its replacement with the metalworking agreement radically altered the formal rules governing life in the industry. Managers now had greater power to reclassify workers, set piece rates, and reassign workers. Shop floor delegates lost their say over these matters and especially over hiring and apprenticeship. The control union militants had exercised in many plants over the recruitment of new workers a practice that allowed militants to require union cards disappeared. So too did the special conciliation board the Air Ministry had established for the industry; all disputes would now follow normal conciliation and arbitration procedures locally. Vacation time shrank, and the workweek lengthened. A decree on 20 March had authorized a sixty-hour week in factories working for national defense, and by the summer of 1939 many militants were reporting it was being applied. Aware that these changes appeared brutal, de l'Escaille counseled his colleagues that it might be "psychologically opportune" to grant workers the vacations that would otherwise have been due them. Employers clearly worried about the effects of Daladier's assault on worker morale. But with the new contract in place, there was no disguising what had been lost in the general strike institutional protections for workers and a voice for the CGT in the plants.

What the new contract did to wages was less clear. In principle employers agreed to continue the old rates for existing workers and pay everyone hired after 13 April 1939 the lower rates of the metalworking contract that is, basic metalworking wages adjusted to local conditions. In practice rates varied from firm to firm. Some employers continued to pay the higher rates of the old contract because skilled labor was scarce; this practice lent credence to trade union claims that it was the laws of supply and demand, not the contract, that had kept wages high all along. Others, like Paul-Louis Weiller at Gnôme-et-Rhône, took full advantage of the new rates. Yet despite the variation a basic change had occurred: employers were free to pay the lower wages of the metalworking contract if they so chose. This wage policy, combined with the handsome funding now forthcoming for expanding production, retooling factories, and opening new plants in the west and southwest, gave employers, especially in the private sector, more incentive to hire and train new workers by the hundreds. From December 1938 to May 1939 the size of the work force in the industry shot up more than 38 percent.

Although labor militants did not remain silent in the face of these initiatives, there was little they could do to forestall them. Government repression after the general strike had eliminated the possibility of resorting to strikes and public demonstrations to protest the new contract. A number of militants remained barred from their jobs even after 25 March 1939, when Daladier, in the interests of defense production, called on employers to rehire strikers still purged from plants. Moreover, the FTM suffered defections. At Renault-Caudron CGT candidates garnered only 62 percent of the votes in shop delegate elections shortly after the general strike, a far cry from the 95 percent they had enjoyed the year before. Tiny sections of the CFTC, the Catholic trade union confederation, which had scarcely been a presence in the aircraft industry before 1939, picked up a few more members; CFTC membership at Hispano-Suiza in Bois-Colombes, one of the most significant beachheads for the organization in aviation, reached 275 in August 1939, up from 100 at the end of 1938. In addition, friction between technicians and workers in the CGT increased in some localities. At Bordeaux, for example, technicians at SNCASO switched from the FTM to the less Communist-dominated Technicians Federation in the spring of 1939.The defeat of 30 November brought out the conflicts that had long made solidarity in the work force a precarious achievement.

Even so, the CGT retained the support of the vast majority of workers, Communist militants still led the union in most localities, and union leaders stayed vocal. In the pages of L'Humanité Benoît Frachon, the leading Communist in the CGT, condemned the attack on the national contract in aviation, which "had played a considerable role in the elaboration and conclusion of collective contracts in all industries." He castigated Finance Minister Reynaud for destroying the contract in behalf of a rearmament program he was reluctant to finance.Local militants protested as well, sending the labor minister petitions denouncing the destruction of the national contract:

Employers and the government, in wanting to assimilate aircraft workers with the rest of metalworking, underestimate the responsibility that [we] have in ensuring the safety of pilots. (From Figeac)

The workers at the Bréguet factories are conscious of their responsibility to national defense. We think that production depends on the rational use of machines and the regular supply of materials, not on human effort which does not increase with the lengthening of the workday. It also depends in large part on the relationship between management and the workers. (From Villacoublay)

But testimonies to professional pride and calls for progressive labor practices fell on deaf ears in the spring of 1939. Union efforts to restore provisions from the national contract of April 1938 utterly failed.

One theme in labor's rhetoric of protest, however, did produce a flurry of activity in the ministries. Leaders of the FTM argued that the destruction of the national contract was more than a labor issue; it was an attack on "our conception of nationalization." An expansion of the industry through subcontracting into the private metalworking sectors would, these militants feared, erode the independence of the nationalized firms; and it would inaugurate a "period of superprofits" as employers took advantage of the savings they would make on labor. War profiteering had been the one evil most parliamentarians had condemned when they nationalized the industry in 1936. This charge, then, struck a chord; La Chambre felt compelled to take it seriously.

To ensure "that the state profit from all the savings realized" by the new labor policy, La Chambre sought written guarantees from the firms. Employers were to promise that if new wage scales lowered costs, they would revise their contracts with the Air Ministry accordingly. With help from Charles Pomaret at the Labor Ministry and Albert Caquot at the national companies, La Chambre secured letters from most of the firms in the industry. Predictably, however, the engine manufacturers dragged their feet so much so that Pomaret lost his patience, threatened to revive the extension issue, and turned to Daladier to put pressure on the delinquent firms, Gnôme-et-Rhône, Hispano-Suiza, Renault, and Salmson. It was a revealing moment in two respects: the vigor with which men like La Chambre and Pomaret sought to limit profiteering showed how much they wanted to avoid the scandals that had plagued arms production during the First World War; and the speed with which Daladier put a stop to the conflict exposed how willing he had become to keep the peace with the business community. On 9 March 1939 he ordered Pomaret to drop the issue.Labor militants did manage to keep one issue alive during their grim spring of 1939: the question of how to replace shop floor delegates in the wake of the general strike. Reynaud's decrees of 12 November 1938 had declared that only employees with at least one year of uninterrupted employment were eligible to serve as shop delegates. Since most workers had been dismissed in the lockouts of December, few were now eligible to serve. In early March 1939 militant technicians agreed on a common strategy to stage slowdowns, and small delegations addressed plant directors about the need to circumvent Reynaud's rules. Little came of the effort, and the issue continued to plague the industry throughout the spring. But by summer the old network of delegates had gradually emerged in informal ways throughout most of the nationalized sector. Since 1936 employers had learned the value of having some kind of shop floor delegate system, if only to maintain communication with personnel. Not for nothing did Henry Potez urge his colleagues at the Union Syndicale to recognize former delegates, strikers though they were. Officials reported that in most nationalized plants "the oldest worker representatives were consulted by management under the same conditions as shop floor delegates had been." Since the overwhelming majority of the work force still identified with the CGT, employers could not afford to ignore its militants altogether. Despite the lockouts, then, vestiges of the old delegate networks remained.

CGT locals, though beleaguered, managed to survive. Union strength varied considerably from plant to plant, and indeed by July 1939 local militants were reporting some success in recruiting new members at Hispano-Suiza, Morane, and SNCAC. But militants could do little beyond documenting the burdens that workers had to bear. At the national congress of the FTM aircraft militants testified at length to vacations denied, wages cut, and sixty-hour and seventy-two-hour workweeks. No plan of action emerged. Though some employers complained of slowdowns, Air Ministry inspectors found little awry in the shops. No doubt workers found ways to survive the fatigue; the CGT, however, was too weak to protest the speedups, overtime, and lower pay. And if many locals showed signs of life in recruiting new members by the summer of 1939, they by no means kept pace with the rapid expansion of a work force now growing by leaps and bounds. The defeat of the previous November had taken an enduring toll.

On the eve of the war Daladier, La Chambre, and Caquot had succeeded in creating a new regime in the industry. By attacking the union and dismantling the national contract of April 1938, they reestablished a more authoritarian mode of managerial practice in the industry. After 30 November little stood in the way of intensifying production to meet the rugged schedules of Plan V. Indeed, by August 1939 the industry was delivering nearly three hundred warplanes a month, up from forty a month the year before. The old paternalism that had characterized labor relations in the early 1930s crept back in, too in a new system of family allowances to supplement pay and a new housing program the Union Syndicale sponsored to shelter workers in the provinces.

State officials, however, did not restore labor relations to what they had been before the Popular Front. The CGT was still an important organization in the informal shop floor culture of the industry, even if it had been deprived of the formal representative role it had played before the general strike. The metalworking contract still provided workers with a legal framework of rights and obligations that preserved, at least in principle, the foundations of collective bargaining that had been established in June 1936. Many aircraft workers still enjoyed the premium wage rates they had won the previous year. Employers had not restored all of their own old autonomy in the plants; bargains, agreements, and above all state directives still set the tone for labor relations to a greater degree than had been the case when men like Louis Bréguet and Pierre Latécoère ran their shops as personal domains. The labor movement had been broken, but it had not been destroyed.

No less important, state officials retained even expanded on the power nationalization had given them during the Popular Front. To be sure, after August 1938 Daladier pursued a course designed to reestablish investor confidence in the franc, employer cooperation with rearmament, and an expansion of the national defense sectors. He did so by attacking the labor reforms of June 1936. In the end his course of action served to vindicate the most recalcitrant of the employers, the engine builders in the private sector, who had opposed the national contract of April 1938 and had resisted the request to give back excess profits. But in the process Daladier and La Chambre reaffirmed the authority of the ministries to make the critical choices for the industry as a whole. Although Daladier's policies had made the industry safer and more profitable for private enterprise than had been the case under Pierre Cot, government officials kept the power of initiative they had taken from employers during the Popular Front. In this respect the La Chambre era at the Air Ministry involved both change and continuity a radical shift in labor policy in the second half of 1938 and a continuation of the process by which state officials had become increasingly responsible for investment strategy, the organization of production, wage setting, and work hour policy, the mediation of conflict, and the relationship of the industry to purchasers and competitors abroad.

For workers, the tumultumous experience of 1938 and 1939 reinforced a basic lesson learned during the Popular Front: the road to labor reform in the factory led through Paris and its ministries. The dual tactics of shop floor organizing locally and lobbying at the Air, Labor, and Finance ministries, which had served workers well in 1936 and 1937, worked only when sympathetic politicians ran the ministries. What workers had won through state intervention they lost as readily through state repression. The implications of this experience were obvious: workers either had to make advances without the support of state officials, which in the aircraft industry, as in much of the French economy during rearmament, appeared impossible, or they had to await more promising political circumstances, which in the summer of 1939 seemed remote.

The achievement of building a viable and vibrant trade union movement in aviation out of the strike wave of June 1936 made the defeats of 1938 and 1939 that much more demoralizing. Because the CGT had become better integrated into the administrative apparatus of the industry in 1937 through board memberships, arbitration procedures, negotiations, and informal lobbying, militants experienced Daladier's repression as more than just another in a long series of reversals that had punctuated the history of the labor movement. They took it as a repudiation of the cooperative approach to labor relations CGT officials had embraced both to advance the prestige of the labor movement and to serve the cause of national defense. Daladier's claim that the November decrees were essential for the rearmament drive struck militants as disingenuous a thinly disguised rationale for reestablishing employer autocracy. When bottlenecks and disorganization still impeded production; when employers such as Paul-Louis Weiller and Louis Renault seemed more bent on reducing wage costs than on expanding production; when Finance Minister Paul Reynaud made it clear that his decrees were designed to restore investor confidence in the economy, it was easy for militants to feel, as Léon Jouhaux did, that the attack on labor reform was aimed "much more at the restoration of the employer's authority than at any economic restoration.

Daladier's policy seemed particularly unjustified because the CGT had gone out of its way to embrace the cause of rearmament, give ground on hour and wage demands, and advocate efficiency. As a result, months after 30 November CGT leaders continued to express cynicism about the government's intentions, as did Robert Doury of the FTM, for example, who spoke in July 1939 of the emerging Polish crisis as "a second Munich" in which "the terrain is being prepared for an attack on metalworking wages." For all the controversy that swirled around the industry during the Popular Front period, there nonetheless had been some sense of common purpose that linked workers, state officials, and a more progressive generation of entrepreneurs even into the summer of 1938. Repression undermined that spirit just when it was needed most when the "Polish affair" became something more than a second Munich.

The Fall of France

Although the war against Hitler had long been expected, people in the French aircraft industry who worked every day behind a riveting gun or a milling machine, designed new prototypes, and pored over blueprints, as well as those who worked at the Air Ministry on the latest reports on airplane deliveries, were all unprepared for the war when it came. For one thing, it came too soon. Only five days before the blitzkrieg in Poland, General Vuillemin, the air force chief of staff, wrote Air Minister Guy La Chambre yet another of his disheartening memoranda. He said that the Germans and Italians had sixty-five hundred frontline aircraft, nearly twice the thirty-eight hundred that France, Britain, and Poland could command. Even worse, the French still had no modern bombers, just as they had had none during the Czech crisis the year before. Though Plan V was narrowing the gap in fighters, France still lagged dangerously behind. Moreover, Hitler's invasion of Poland on 1 September and the Anglo-French declarations of war that followed two days later forced everyone in the industry to face the same terrible challenge that the country had confronted in August 1914 mobilizing men for battlefield fighting while at the same time stepping up production for what most French strategists still believed would be a very long war.

If the organizational challenge resembled that of the first war, the political climate in France did not, and in this respect, too, the people of France were ill prepared in September 1939. In 1914, despite years of antimilitarist agitation by the socialist and syndicalist movements, it turned out to be relatively easy to establish an union sacrée that would unify the country behind the war effort, at least initially. But after nearly a decade of domestic conflict in the 1930s, after June 1936 and November 1938, after the acrimony Munich had inspired within the ranks of both the left and the right, the French people went to war more divided among themselves than they had been at any stage of the First World War. Edouard Daladier's government had done little in 1939 to heal the political rifts that had widened after Munich and the general strike.

As if all this were not enough to weaken the spirit of national unity, the last week of August 1939 brought one more blow the Nazi-Soviet Nonagression Pact. Its announcement stunned public opinion in France, as it did everywhere, and bewildered the French Communist Party. By the end of September Communist militants found themselves having to accept an almost incomprehensible change in political line defending the pact, condemning the Daladier regime, and calling for peace in a war they were suddenly required by the Comintern to portray as a rivalry between imperialist powers. After years of serving as the staunchest advocates of antifascism, the PCF had to become a pro-peace party. This shift created havoc in the CGT, compromised militants, and gave the Daladier government an excuse to ban the party, close down Communist newspapers, dismiss more than twenty-seven hundred Communist municipal councillors, deprive PCF senators and deputies of their seats, dissolve hundreds of Communist-led CGT locals, and arrest about thirty-four hundred militants.One other feature of September 1939 made it different from the outbreak of the previous war. The battlefields of eastern France did not materialize. Hitler hung back, finishing off Poland and waiting for a more propitious moment to strike in the west. French and British military leaders, determined to follow a defensive strategy, waited as well. France settled into the drôle de guerre , or "phoney war," a psychologically corrosive waiting game that lasted until May 1940. People could hardly help mull over questions that by their very nature weakened the spirit of national unity. Will the war really come? Need it be fought at all? The ambivalence and disunity with which the nation's political leaders went into the war in September continued to fester through long months anticipating the Battle of France.

Under these circumstances the outbreak of war, which should have made it easier to harness the resources to build airplanes, confronted the industry with a new set of problems how to protect manpower and matériel from the competing demands of military mobilization and the production of other kinds of military equipment; how to maintain social peace in the factories in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; and how to boost production beyond what even the optimists had planned. And for aircraft workers, the ten-month ordeal, from the beginning of the "phoney war" to the defeat of France, created a host of new hardships material, emotional, and political. The way people addressed these problems of economic coordination and personal survival reflected in large part the new balance of power between labor, business, and the state that Daladier's government had established by the summer of 1939. Their difficulties played a subtle but important role in the defeat of 1940.

Mobilization

Responsibility for yet another revision in Plan V fell to Guy La Chambre and the Matériel Committee. In an extraordinary meeting on 12 September 1939 the committee agreed on the need to jump from a rate of 330 airframes a month to a staggering 1600 by June 1940. La Chambre and Joseph Roos, the industrial director of the air force, confessed doubts that such goals could be met, given shortages of aluminum, machine tools, and skilled labor that had long plagued the industry. But the unflappable Albert Caquot reassured them, and his optimism prevailed. The committee agreed to expand plant, purchase equipment, and boost the work force to as many as three hundred thousand workers by the following June. At Caquot's request, however, the plans were to remain secret "so as not to damage the goodwill of the industrialists."Yet another change in schedule might undermine the confidence of employers who wanted a stable, predictable environment in which to do business. Caquot and La Chambre had no desire to provoke employers unnecessarily as they went about taking the fate of the industry into their own hands more resolutely than state officials had dared before.

But despite their assertiveness, Caquot and La Chambre did not revolutionize the role of the state in the industry; on the contrary, wartime mobilization reinforced the relationship between business and government along the lines La Chambre had pursued before the war. The Air Ministry strengthened its control over the evolution of the industry as a whole while giving private and nationalized firms an equal chance to expand. Indeed, since the new goals of Plan V depended as much on the engine and accessory sectors as on the airframe sector, private firms flourished with a host of new contracts. In the airframe sector, though the greater portion of expansion took place within the national companies, Louis Bréguet's private firm continued to play a major role in the expansion of the industry in southwestern France. Even the beleaguered Union Syndicale recovered more of a role for itself when the Air Ministry turned to the body to coordinate the distribution of raw materials among its members and supervise the development of worker housing. In short, wartime production sustained the balanced expansion of public and private sectors that had been going on since La Chambre had come to the Air Ministry.

Even so, the Air Ministry tightened its control over industrywide decisions as state officials walked a narrow path between respecting managerial autonomy and directing the industry with a stronger hand. When Hispano-Suiza, for example, expressed reluctance to share with other firms its blueprints for spare parts, an angry La Chambre threatened to requisition the designs. When Messier proved unable to meet huge new orders for landing gear, Caquot forced the firm to yield its manufacturing license to larger firms like Citroën. Moreover, the Air Ministry continued its policy of foreign purchases, turning again to the United States for new orders. This time the reliance on American manufacturers was even greater than in 1938, for now the ministry not only purchased equipment but invested ten million dollars to double the capacity of American engine production. By March 1940 the ministry had pursuaded Britain to join in a common order of forty-five hundred American planes. The diplomacy of foreign orders and the demands of industrial coordination within France kept the Air Ministry firmly in command of the transformation of the industry during the war. Though the structure of ownership and the traditional managerial hierarchy remained intact, the government reasserted its authority to make decisions above the level of the firm.

If war production required the Air Ministry to use a forceful hand with employers, it also demanded bureaucratic strength within the government itself. La Chambre, after all, was not the only minister overseeing industrial production; he had to compete for resources in the larger rearmament effort. During the summer of 1938 Daladier had named Raoul Dautry to create a new Armaments Ministry to coordinate all forms of arms manufacturing. Such a move endangered La Chambre's program because Dautry would now have the authority to distribute resources in accord with the needs of all three military branches. His policy, moreover, might have upset the delicate balance of power that La Chambre, Caquot, and the major industrialists had established between state and private power in the industry. But Daladier recognized the centrality of the aircraft program in the war effort, and in the fall of 1939 he decided that the Air Ministry should have first priority in supplies. Dautry largely complied with this policy; as a board member of Hispano-Suiza and as chairman of the Dautry commission on civil aviation in the late 1920s, he was no stranger to the aircraft industry. La Chambre, then, enjoyed a degree of autonomy that gave his ministry the necessary leverage to accelerate production.

Manpower posed the most worrisome problem for the Air Ministry during the first months of the war. Just as in 1914, the outbreak of war disrupted production as thousands of workers, regardless of skill, reported for military duty. For months Air Ministry officials had pleaded for plans that would have averted just this confusion. When the industry most needed its experienced workers, twenty thousand of them had been called to arms and were only gradually reintegrated into the factories as affectés spéciaux , or mobilized workers still under military authority. Raoul Dautry wrote later that in the First World War soldiers had resented the special treatment accorded affectés spéciaux and that this legacy may have encouraged officials to delay assigning them to factories during the second war. In any case factory assignments came slowly, and by November only eight thousand employees had found their way back to plants. According to one account, six hundred of the seven hundred skilled workers at one Amiot plant had been mobilized, and it took until February 1940 for most of them to return. Caquot, La Chambre, and many employers complained bitterly to the military about the sluggishness of the process. Such disorder, combined with the the rapid expansion of the industry, made labor shortages acute by December.

In response the government created compagnies de renforcement , or teams of two hundred soldiers assigned to work in plants while earning a soldier's pay. This initiative sparked a heated debate among ministries. The Labor Ministry sought to dissolve these teams but ran up against the minister of the interior, who argued that soldiers would be a source of order and discipline in the factories. The air force high command, ironically, believed the contrary that exposure to workers and their "propaganda" would contaminate soldiers with subversive views. The Air Ministry agreed; though the compagnies de renforcement continued in other defense plants, La Chambre dissolved them in the aircraft industry, choosing instead to make do with affectés spéciaux and older workers sheltered by age from military duty.

Although skilled workers remained in great demand throughout the war, expansion called above all for new semiskilled workers, trained on the job for the simpler tasks involved in mass-producing airplanes. Once war was declared, teenagers, colonial workers, Spanish refugees, and other immigrants filled these posts in greater numbers, but it was women who entered the factories by the thousands. Before the war women made up only 1 to 2 percent of the blue-collar work force in the aircraft industry; they were largely restricted to canvas sewing and simple electrical work. The shift to all-metal airplanes, male unemployment, trade union hostility to female employment, and a government family policy geared toward keeping mothers at home had all but excluded women from the industry. Yet by the beginning of 1940 women had climbed to about 20 percent of the work force in aircraft manufacturing. At SNCASO in Châteauroux as many as a thousand women were employed, or 36 percent of the work force at the factory. Rationalization, the vacancies created by mobilization, and the legacy of the previous war paved the way for women to move into the shops. Problems for women abounded discriminatory wages, inadequate child care, sixty-hour workweeks, male trade union militants ill equipped by tradition and inclination to champion their cause, and employers reluctant to assume responsibility for the training programs the Labor and Air Ministries initiated during the first months of the war. Still, as the work force climbed toward 250,000 by June 1940, women continued to fill a sizable portion of the posts.

If employers had difficulty recruiting workers rapidly enough to meet production schedules, they had little trouble exerting control over the conditions of labor. Just as in the First World War, industrial mobilization gave the government enormous power to coerce workers to work long hours cheaply. When war broke out, the government suspended the compulsory arbitration system and the wage adjustment clauses written into collective contracts. By November the Labor Ministry went a step further by imposing a wage freeze, which condemned defense workers to a steady decline in real wages because prices continued to rise. To some extent even employers had misgivings about the wage freeze, as it undermined their own capacity to lure skilled workers away from other metalworking plants. They told La Chambre that frozen wages might damage worker morale. It also troubled them to see the government play so strong a role in setting wage levels. But employers stopped short of actively opposing the freeze. After all, a policy that stabilized wage costs was not entirely unwelcome, especially to private builders, who had fought so hard the year before against the extension of the national aircraft contract.

Shop floor discipline toughened as well. The National Service Law of 11 July 1939 gave employers the authority to reduce the wages of workers who made trouble or slowed down production. In addition, the Air Ministry assigned teams of air force personnel to keep a watch over shops.Military discipline in effect was the rule since most employees in the industry were either requisitioned civilians, subject to arrest for suspicious activity, or mobilized workers, subject to transfer into the army. Under these circumstances some employees had to shoulder unusually heavy burdens. Of course, there were the long hours, the loss of the weekend, the stagnant wages. Women had difficulties watching out for their children. Many of the affectés spéciaux assigned to factories far from home faced the cruel dilemma of having to spend most of the wages on their own living expenses, leaving them little to send home to their families. Although most skilled workers continued to be employed in skilled jobs, some of them, as one police official in Bordeaux reported, feared being replaced by "requisitioned workers, as well as Spaniards and women," only to be sent to military units "despite their age." Employees of all sorts felt the burdens of mobilization directly in transfers, reassignments, long hours, family separations, a loss of autonomy on the shop floor and the esprit de corps that went along with it, and not least a decline in standards of pay.

The Labor Movement in Disarray

Even if the Nazi-Soviet Pact had not thrown the CGT into a tailspin, workers would have been in a weak position to protest these conditions. Daladier's repressive policy since the fall of 1938 had greatly undermined the capacity of the CGT to defend workers' wages, to say nothing of labor's role in decision making on the shop floor. The militarization of industrial discipline, the heavy police presence in factories, and above all the repression of Communist militants virtually destroyed any prospect for reviving the labor movement. As thousands of new semiskilled workers took up posts in the assembly halls of the industry, the experienced corps of skilled workers who had constituted the committed rank and file of the CGT between 1936 and 1938 lost its power to set the tone for shop floor politics. However sympathetic many unskilled newcomers might have been to a resurgence of the CGT, the rapid transformation of the work force made it all the more difficult for CGT militants to reverse the yearlong decline of the labor movement in the industry.

Of course, the Nazi-Soviet Pact greatly compounded their troubles. The full scope of the catastrophe took a while to comprehend, partly because it took several weeks for the PCF to adopt the Stalinist line of opposing the war and partly because some militants did not face up to the brutal reality of the pact until the Soviet army invaded Poland on 17 September. Once the party fell into line with the Comintern, Communist militants at the plant level faced agonizing choices to abandon the party altogether, to stick with the party but ignore as much as possible the call to oppose the war effort, or to adhere to the party strategy of opposing the "imperialist war." Some militants, though dismayed by the pact, nevertheless felt compelled to close ranks behind the party at a time when the PCF was under such brutal governmental attack. A few militants may have had the ironic good fortune of a Henri Jourdain, who after eluding the police in Paris went to Marseille for naval duty, where he remained isolated from the party leadership, unable to get underground copies of L'Humanité and ignorant of the pro-peace position of the party during the phoney war. Most militants, however, were put in an untenable position politically and forced into either internment, clandestine activities, or a quiet withdrawal from trade union politics. Their influence in the factories diminished accordingly.

But their influence did not disappear entirely. Militants met secretly, distributed tracts anonymously, and supported workers in efforts to protest working conditions through slowdowns and a few rare work stoppages. Many militants followed the pragmatic tactic of remaining silent on political issues while encouraging workers to defend their immediate interests. Military officials in the Paris region reported brief slowdown strikes at the Renault-Caudron plant in Issy-les-Moulineaux as well as at Bréguet in Aubervillier and SNCM in Argenteuil. Police officials believed Communist agitators lay behind a discernible decline in output at SNCASE in Villacoublay, as in several other armament factories. But it is hard to say how much moral authority Communist militants really wielded during the phoney war in the company of the skilled workers who had followed their lead since 1936. The police and the military have left only a sporadic record of political activity in the factories, and their reports are undoubtedly colored by the anti-Communist hyperbole that was characteristic of these months. It is certainly safe to say that many Communist militants contributed to the atmosphere of disaffection, distrust, and resentment that the government's tough labor policies produced throughout the defense sector. As one police official reported, "Up to now [revolutionary propaganda] does not seem to reach the mass of the working population. . . . However, it finds a sympathetic hearing among factory workers, especially in aircraft construction." It is not surprising to find government officials concerned with the continuing presence of the PCF in the most strategically sensitive of defense industries, the one in which the party had done so well before the general strike of 1938. Nevertheless, repression and the Nazi-Soviet Pact kept Communists in the shadows, limiting what militants could accomplish as agitators on the shop floor.

However torn many Communists may have felt between their responsibility to defend the new pro-peace position and their Popular Frontist commitments to national defense and many of them must have felt conflicted indeed few militants went so far as to engage in sabotage in the aircraft industry. To be sure, there were plenty of rumors about sabotage to keep the military police busy, and on rare occasions such rumors had something to them. In May 1940 six young workers at SNCAC were arrested for allegedly placing brass wires in twenty Gnôme-et-Rhône engines. In Bordeaux rolled-up copies of the left-wing newspaper Populaire bordelais were discovered hidden within a wing to disrupt flap motion. Prosecutors at Riom turned up about a half-dozen cases of this sort. One air force official reported graffiti on factories walls reminding readers "that one hour delay at work is an hour won for the victory of the proletariat." Police surveillance undoubtedly had some effect. Moreover, subtle slowdowns by stealthy militants could have escaped the attention of policemen and supervisors; right-wing critics of the government asserted that they were common. But in fact PCF leaders were not inclined to promote sabotage, and on two occasions clandestine issues of L'Humanité condemned rumors of desertion and sabotage as "provocations."The errors of new workers who were inexperienced, overworked, and poorly trained posed a much more serious problem than did the efforts of a few saboteurs.

If the PCF's stance toward war production turned out in practice to be ambiguous condemning the war but repudiating sabotage employers and government officials tried hard to isolate militants. Repression ranged from dismissal of Communist militants from the administrative councils of the national companies to mass firings and reassignments to the army. In his defense at the Riom trial La Chambre went so far as to contend that Daladier's decision to dissolve the Communist Party "had its origins" in La Chambre's warnings about the strength of the PCF in the aircraft industry. From September through June military police rooted out workers suspected of slowing down production. And nonCommunist personnel were by no means immune. In a major purge at SNCM, the nationalized engine-building firm, only 51 of the 102 employees fired or reassigned to the army were so treated "for Communist propaganda." Socialist militants, in fact, also complained of the reprisals they endured. Spanish refugees suffered especially cruel treatment since many of them had taken jobs in the aircraft plants of southwestern France and, as anarchists and Communists, were then thrown into internment camps after the outbreak of war. But for the most part the Air Ministry directed its efforts against French Communists; as late as June 1940 two hundred "Communist leaders considered the most dangerous" to the industry were arrested Repression left the CGT in the hands of the Syndicats group on the labor right and the small core of centrists around Léon Jouhaux. For aircraft workers, this shift in leadership meant the virtual collapse of the union since most aircraft locals had associated with the Communist mainstream of the FTM, even in cities such as Nantes and Toulouse where the labor movement in most other industries was more Socialist in its orientation. Nationally the FTM fell into the hands of Marcel Roy and Léon Chevalme, whose trade union constituencies lay largely outside the aircraft sector. The January issue of L'Union des métaux , the first issue published since the outbreak of the war, exposed inadvertently how isolated the CGT moderates still were throughout most of the metalworking industries. Much of the issue was devoted either to attacking the Communists or to conveying information about wartime labor policies. There were few of the reports from the field, the calls for collective action, or the revelations of exploitation and wrongdoing that had filled the pages of the paper before the war. Appeals to women workers lacked conviction: "Women comrades in metalworking, do not hesitate, come join the CGT." As for trade union activity locally, the situation in Bordeaux was typical. Police spies there reported in early 1940 that the CGT local in aviation was in shambles: union meetings lacked quorums to conduct business, and those workers who did attend were unable to plan strategy despite the fact that rank-and-file workers in the industry had plenty of grievances.Worse still, government policy undermined what little credibility CGT moderates could claim as spokesmen for employees in the industry. In contrast to the First World War, when Albert Thomas, the Socialist armaments minister, integrated labor leaders into the boards and committees that supervised manpower policy, the Air, Labor and Armament ministries now virtually excluded the unions. There was no union sacré and little effort to bring workers and employers together into a tripartite structure of wartime management. CGT moderates, then, had no basis on which to appeal to aircraft workers for their support and no leverage within the industry with which to enhance their legitimacy.

Government repression of PCF militants and the weakness of the CGT moderates left rank-and-file workers fully exposed to managerial coercion. The National Council of the CGT called for higher wages, shorter hours for women and children, and protection for mobilized and requisitioned workers against dismissals but to little avail. There was no room for the unions in a policy of industrial mobilization that relied essentially on fear, supervision, and a sense of patriotic duty to inspire workers. Because government repression and the PCF's own repudiation of a Popular Front strategy had undermined the CGT as a force for promoting a productivist ethic in the industry, policing the work force became all the more vital as the months wore on. Supervisory reports on how troubles were handled show that employers depended mainly on threats, dismissals, and surveillance to keep people in line.

Toward Defeat

If by the winter of 1940 employers and state officials had managed to expand the work force and keep it under control, problems of technical coordination still daunted them. To begin with, engine production still created serious bottlenecks, making it harder to finish airplanes and begin new orders. Hispano-Suiza's performance was particularly disappointing; its plant at Bois-Colombes increased production a mere 15 percent between September and June, compared to 43 percent the eight months before the war. Propeller production lagged behind as well, forcing the Air Ministry to turn to American producers. Armaments created yet a third source of delay, as finished aircraft sat idle in factory sheds awaiting artillery. La Chambre considered the idea of mounting artillery on airplanes directly at the factory site, but he decided instead to keep the procedure centralized at special military armament centers for fear of "Communist troubles" and because it was not always clear what artillery to install on airplanes when they left the factory. In short, difficulties synchronizing production, transporting parts around the country, and getting airplanes on line in the air force continued to plague the Air Ministry until the armistice. As much as La Chambre, Caquot, and their staffs had accomplished in their two years in power, shortcomings remained that left them exposed to criticism.

And their critics were eager to carp. Throughout his ministry La Chambre had encountered the hostility of right-wing senators and deputies who for reasons of ambition, personal rivalry, employer lobbying, and genuine disagreement with policy kept sniping at him for the deficiencies of the industry. Antagonisms came to a head in early February 1940, when the Air Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, meeting in secret session, engaged La Chambre in an unusually bitter debate on the progress of the aircraft program. Fernand Robbe, a deputy from Seineet-Oise, attacked his record, criticizing the performance of the industry, questioning the quality of the new aircraft, and even doubting the production figures of the Air Ministry. La Chambre stood his ground, defending a policy that had increased production from 500 planes in 1938 to 2,277 the following year. Still, the shrillness of debate spoke poorly for La Chambre's political position.

At about this time controversy also surfaced within parliamentary and military circles over Marcel Bloch. Despite the criticism that politicians had often leveled against aircraft manufacturers as a group, individual industrialists had largely escaped attack. But Bloch was vulnerable; his privileged relationship to the air Ministry, his prominence, and the fact that he was a Jew made him a political target. A blemished record hurt him as well. Several of his models, the Bloch 150, 162, and 174, had taken inordinately long to reach the stage of serial production, and he had acquired a poor reputation as an administrator. When military police began investigating a wide range of allegations a fraudulent performance test, a tolerant attitude toward Communists and slowdowns, nepotism, and the expropriation of state funds and SNCASO workers for his private shops in Bordeaux La Chambre finally felt compelled to fire Bloch as head of SNCASO. But controversy continued. Critics charged that Bloch continued to run the firm behind the facade of Paul Mazer, a leading Air Ministry engineer appointed to replace Bloch. And La Chambre continued to draw fire for allegedly protecting Bloch all along.

Not surprisingly, when Daladier's government fell in late March, La Chambre lost the Air Ministry. His close association with Daladier, along with his confrontations with parliamentary critics, had made him a natural casualty of the cabinet crisis. His aggressive pursuit of American purchases and his close ties with the young moguls of the industry, men like Block, Potez, and Dewoitine, had long made him suspect to the old guard and its parliamentary allies. To replace him the new premier, Paul Reynaud, turned to one of La Chambre's most persistent critics, André Laurent-Eynac, who from 1928 to 1930 had already served as the country's first Air Minister. Laurent-Eynac also had the good fortune of being an outstanding voice for an aggressive production program while at the same time enjoying close ties to the older fraternity of airplane manufacturers who had dominated the industry in the late 1920s.

But if Laurent-Eynac's appointment seemed to be a tilt back toward an older, more conservative outlook that had prevailed in the days before the Popular Front, this was a mirage. Although Laurent-Eynac had initially opposed nationalization in 1936, by 1938 he had come around to supporting the policy; he recognized that the nationalized sector was "wonderfully" suited to Caquot's schemes for mass production. It was a measure of how much of a consensus had emerged during la Chambre's tenure at the Air Ministry that a right-leaning establishmentarian like Laurent-Eynac had become comfortable with the blend of public and private ownership that nationalization and rearmament had produced in the airframe industry. From March 1940 to the defeat three months later Laurent-Eynac and his technical director, Colonel Meny, did nothing to alter the relationship between the industry and the builders that had developed under La Chambre and Caquot. Apart from an effort to intensify the repression of communists even more Reynaud feared an insurrection when the Battle of France began Air Ministry policy remained unchanged.

For all the travails the industry encountered during the phoney war, the rate of production increased more rapidly than ever before, even more swiftly than in Britain and Germany. Between September and June French firms produced 2,927 warplanes, though only 2,604 were certified as battle-ready and fewer still were integrated into squadrons. During the six-week Battle of France production continued to increase, allowing the air force to replace many of its losses from the first days of combat. Moreover, the policy of decentralization proved worthwhile; during June 80 percent of the industry remained at work, compared to 20 percent for the rest of the armament sector.After a half-decade of struggle to break through the impediments to mass production, the industry at last demonstrated that it could mount a rearmament drive of equal intensity to that in Britain and Germany.

Unfortunately, the achievement came much too late to redress the imbalance in air power. German frontline aircraft still outnumbered those of the Allies by a ratio of nearly three to one in the Battle of France. In qualitative terms the comparison was even grimmer. The French air force had only about 170 bombers, in contrast to 1,120 in the Luftwaffe, and little to match the Stuka, the German dive-bomber that terrorized French soldiers in May. Most French models flew at lower speeds than their functional counterparts in the Luftwaffe. Though France was relatively well matched in ground matériel, the country was outclassed in the air.

A shortage of aircraft was by no means the principal cause of a defeat that in strictly military terms had more to do with strategic error and the army's incapacity for rapid movement on the ground. Had the air force had more planes, the high command most likely would have dispersed them as a secondary arm of support rather than integrate them into the mobile air and tank units that proved pivotal in the battle. The failure to use the planes at hand was at least as decisive as the failure to produce them in greater numbers. Even so, aircraft shortages were part and parcel of these fundamental strategic and tactical shortcomings. Doctrinal conservatism may have impeded the development of the aircraft industry throughout the 1930s in France. But at the same time the deficiencies of the industry had made it all the more difficult for military planners to envision tactics and strategies that would have taken greater advantage of a rapidly advancing aeronautical technology. Naturally enough, then, in the somber aftermath of defeat people asked, Why was the sky empty of allied planes? Conflicting answers provoked a bitter debate.

Participants in the industry were quick to cast blame in many directions. Right-wing critics of the government recited the litany of accusations that had become commonplace by the outbreak of the war the excesses of Cot and the Popular Front, the forty-hour week, Communist subversion, La Chambre's failure to be even tougher than he was with the CGT and employers like Bloch. Of course, La Chambre and Caquot took a different tack; they blamed the air force high command for accepting traditional doctrines, underestimating matériel needs, and misusing the airplanes they had. As for employers, their views ranged widely, from Louis Peyrecave at Renault, who staunchly defended La Chambre's efforts, to Marius Olive and several others, who criticized everything from nationalization to the bureaucratic formality of the Air Ministry. In effect the debate over aircraft shortages mirrored the very conflicts that had beset the industry since rearmament began, and the arguments would be rehearsed anew by prosecutors and defendants at Vichy's showtrial in Riom in 1942.

Beyond the search for the heroes and villains of rearmament, four problems loomed large in the late 1930s that account for the shortcomings of the aircraft industry. First, air doctrine certainly did stymie the development of a coherent plan for building an adequate air force. Military planning had a direct impact on the industry because priorities for equipment set the agenda for technical innovation, factory expansion, and investment in new manufacturing methods. A conservative army elite systematically undermined every effort to develop a strategic bombing force and a more ambitious notion of tactical air power goals that might have prompted the industry to construct modern aircraft less late in the day. As a result, plans I and II, which did represent something of a breakthrough in 1935 and 1936 by at least committing the government to a rearmament program, produced airplanes that were obsolete even before they were completed and further delayed the conversion of factories for the more suitable airplanes of Plan V. By 1938 the air force high command had become so resigned to a secondary role that it discouraged further industrial expansion. The delay of rearmament and mistakes in shaping production programs derived above all from a lack of commitment to aviation by the high command.

Second, fiscal conservatism impeded the rearmament effort, especially in its critical early phases. A policy of fiscal austerity under the conservative governments of Gaston Doumergue and Pierre Laval in 1934 and 1935 made it impossible to contemplate a serious change in the subordinate role that aviation had had in national defense up to that time and that was reflected in the limited scale of Plan I. Pierre Cot had to proceed with his nationalization program under strict budgetary constraints, which forced him to stay clear of the engine sector. More important, antipathy at the Finance Ministry delayed retooling, and Paul Reynaud's efforts to prop up the franc remained a constraint on procurement even into 1939. To be sure, by 1940 the government had spent a great deal of money on plant expansion, tooling, and new orders. But the gravitational pull of budgetary austerity throughout most of the 1930s reinforced the inclination of military planners, parliamentary leaders, and even the builders themselves to think small about the capabilities of the industry.

This deficiency leads to a third fundamental shortcoming, entrepreneurial conservatism, which first compelled the state to nationalize the airframe sector in 1936 and persisted in employer circles until the war. As La Chambre phrased it politely in parliament, "The industrialists generally have a tendency to minimize their possibilities." The engine firms in Particular were loath to invest in their own expansion; they in effect forced the government to finance the modernization of their firms while they waged an aggressive campaign against the Air Ministry's efforts to purchase engines abroad. Entrepreneurial conservatism even survived in the nationalized sector, where most employers expressed greater concern for the stability and predictability of future orders than for the expansion and modernization of their firms. In 1938 at least one national company failed to take advantage of the right to organize second and third shifts, despite the opportunities to do so. Caution was not restricted to the industrialists; it also kept bankers away. All this made it essential for the Air, Finance, and Labor ministries to remain at the center of planning, financing, and decision making, a tendency that made daily life in the industry all the more politicized and employers all the more reluctant to take the initiative.

Managerial traditionalism and state intervention shaped the contours of the fourth major problem in the industry the failure to create a social contract with labor. Once workers destroyed the old regime of managerial autocracy in June 1936, the battle raged to define a new social order in the workplace. For a short while it appeared possible for workers and technicians to build a place for themselves in the institutional politics of the industry. During the Popular Front Communist militants managed to blend a vision of contrôle ouvrier , or trade union power in hiring, training, and shop floor supervision, with a pragmatic program of labor representation, collective bargaining, and the forty-hour week. To a degree Cot was willing to integrate labor into the politics of the industry on this basis. But after succeeding in giving the industry a more rational structure through nationalization, he encountered powerful opposition to further reform from investors, employers, and Georges Bonnet, the minister of finance. The first opportunity to construct a social contract in the industry, combining trade union participation and industrial modernization, broke on the rock of finance.

The next chance to find a social compromise through the national contract of April 1938 and the Jacomet ruling on the workweek collapsed as well, when Daladier chose to restore business confidence by attacking the unions and the forty-hour week. Despite the willingness of Communist militants to give ground on work hours in the interest of national defense a willingness in fact to discipline the work force as well as press for reforms La Chambre dismantled the national contract and nearly destroyed the union. Daladier argued at the time and in his defense at the Riom trial that it was only after the repression of December 1938 that production accelerated in the industry. No doubt sixty- and seventy-hour workweeks made a difference in output even as they exhausted the work force. But the boost in production after January 1939 had more important sources retooling, expansion, and the reorganization of production. Moreover, Daladier's labor policy came at a price lower morale and a climate of distrust in the workplace.

It is impossible to know precisely how poor employee morale really was during the phoney war, much less to measure its impact on production. La Chambre was moved in parliament "to pay homage . . . to the men and those admirable women who work spontaneously and with enthusiasm." But many people at the time, both inside and outside the defense industries, believed morale was not what it could have been. Alexander Werth, one of the most astute foreign observers of France, said workers' attitudes toward the war "became increasingly morose and sceptical."To be sure, the PCF's opposition to the war accounted for some of this alienation. So too did Daladier's anti-Communist policy, which, as Werth argued, probably did more to arouse working-class sympathy for the party than would have been the case had Communists been given greater freedom to embarrass themselves defending Stalin. At the very least Daladier's labor policy made it more difficult for workers to rally enthusiastically behind the government. The persistence of work stoppages, even in a climate where troublemakers ran risks of being assigned to military units, testified to the acrimony that prevailed in the industry. Even at SNCAC in Bourges, which had never been a particularly protest-prone factory, employees mounted a campaign against their managers in April 1940 to get a Monday holiday for Pentecost. More telling still was the 17 May 1940 issue of Syndicats . As the battle raged in northeastern France, even these anti-Communist moderates of the CGT could not keep themselves from expressing their exasperation over labor repression. "Social injustice is demoralizing," ran the headline to Marcel Roy's column, in which he went on to write: "Discipline imposed under duress does not generate great production. If one really wants greater and greater production, you have to take workers' mentality into account. You must let metalworkers make use of the institution of the personnel delegates, and to do that delegates must be given guarantees that protect them from repression that is as stupid as it is, in many cases, unjustified." With Communists fearing arrest, and moderates like Roy expressing this degree of bitterness over the disappearance of meaningful labor representation in defense industries, France was a long way indeed from the union sacrée of 1914.

The survival in the British aircraft industry of a social compact between employers, workers, and the state throws the dismal condition of French labor relations into sharper relief. The British aircraft industry was obviously not without turbulence on the shop floor. As we saw in chapter 6, skilled workers in the Amalgamated Engineering Union had resisted the dilution of the work force from 1936 on, whereas French aircraft workers had largely followed the lead of the CGT in accommodating the reorganization of production. But in late August 1939, just when the Nazi-Soviet Pact threw the CGT into upheaval, the climate for labor cooperation improved on the other side of the English Channel. The AEU and the major employers organization in metalworking, the Engineering Employers' Federation, finally reached an agreement on dilution, a settlement that enabled employers to take on semiskilled labor peacefully by giving the AEU some say over how it was done. The agreement was something of a setback for the AEU, but as war appeared imminent, AEU leaders felt increasing pressure from both the British government and the leadership of the Trades Union Congress to make concessions in behalf of rearmament. As a result of this compromise, employers and the unions went into the phoney war with open lines of communication and with the basic institutions of collective bargaining and labor representation intact. And since the Communist movement was much weaker in Britain, the Nazi-Soviet Pact did much less to undermine the unions from within or inspire a wave of antiunion repression. Though labor relations were far from harmonious in Britain during the war years, it was nonetheless possible for trade union leaders, employers, and government officials to maintain a framework for ongoing negotiation and to appeal in behalf of their constituencies to a common sense of national peril. These assets a capacity to carry on industrial relations and a sense of national cohesion were precisely what the French squandered through domestic conflict before and during the phoney war.

Since the 1960s historians seeking to explain the defeat of 1940 have steered away from the kind of sweeping indictment of French society that Marc Bloch offered in his passionate book Strange Defeat , preferring instead to focus on the battlefield an outmoded and inflexible defense doctrine, inadequate preparation for a war of rapid movement, and tactical errors once the battle had begun. This approach offers a healthy corrective to the tendency to blame everything from alcoholism to the pacifism of village school teachers for the Wehrmacht's successful assault through the Ardennes forest. Still, Bloch was right to see military events embedded in social and political life. The experience in the aircraft industry certainly points to a number of ways in which military planning, procurement priorities, economic policy, and social conflict became increasingly interconnected in the course of the 1930s. The deficiencies of the aircraft industry, though not a direct cause of the catastrophe, both derived from and contributed to the failure of French leaders to establish a program for aerial rearmament in the mid-1930s that was at once realistic, farsighted, and coherent.

No major power found it an easy task to build a modern air force in the 1930s; the British also stumbled, though not as badly as the French, in the effort both to keep abreast of a rapidly evolving technology and make a timely commitment to mass production. But in France the challenge of planning, financing, and implementing a rearmament program took place in a political environment where it remained extremely difficult to establish an enduring partnership among workers, employers, and public officials. When the Popular Front governments of 1936 and 1937 made important concessions to workers, business leaders and investors withheld their support. And when Daladier and Reynaud restored business confidence, they did so by attacking the CGT. Then during the phoney war, PCF support for the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Daladier's repression of the party made it virtually impossible to create something other than an autocratic mode of labor management. Although the French aircraft industry did indeed produce airplanes at a respectable pace in 1939 and 1940, an atmosphere of distrust, fear, and suspicion poisoned the workplace. If this story in aviation, and similar stories in other industries, did not lead directly to the collapse of the army in May 1940, it did inspire people (Marc Bloch and many others) to think that something profoundly wrong had happened to the body politic, that France's own war with itself had caused the defeat.

In this respect social conflict during the phoney war had its greatest impact not so much on rates of production as on states of mind, especially after June 1940. Ironically, just when the industry had demonstrated it could respond to the challenge of mass production, albeit tardily, the people who made it happen workers, engineers, employers, politicians, and soldiers faced the painful challenge of acknowledging defeat. Everyone looked for ways to explain the nation's failure and the industry's as well. It was thus with feelings of collective failure, bitterness, betrayal, and disbelief that many of these same people who had built the warplanes of the armée de l'air faced the task of making planes for the Luftwaffe.