When France’s Railworkers Got Ideas Above Their Station
Railworkers have been decisive in the resistance to Emmanuel Macron’s dismantling of the French welfare state. These workers’ strength owes to their ability to bring traffic to a standstill — but also to a culture of solidarity built across decades of militant workplace activism.
Railway workers in France. (Wikimedia Commons)
On the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, railway worker Pierre Semard, a future leader of the French Communist Party, took part in an international delegation to Moscow. Arriving by train, he found “a town as alive as the working-class districts of Paris, with busy shop windows, resplendent with light.” Semard’s account, published in the Tribune des Cheminots, the newspaper of the railway workers’ union, relates how “a crowd of ideas clashed in my mind” as his train crossed the Russian border.
This essay is drily described by historian and academic Thomas Beaumont as “probably one of the only Communist travelogues to include details of the locomotive at the head of the train to Russia.” In Fellow Travellers, Beaumont sets out to demonstrate that the activities of Communist trade unionists on the French railways between the wars would profoundly shape the course of both left-wing politics and railway industrial relations in the country throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a number of academic studies — many in the French language — as well as first-person accounts from key participants, Beaumont relates the real experience and impact of a key group of workers in a time of mass mobilization and ideological conflict.
Ideological Conflict
By the turn of the twentieth century, railway workers in societies across the globe were developing a powerful sense of collective identity. Railway operation steadily developed into an enclosed world, mysterious to outsiders in its practices and rapidly developing jargon. And the propensity of accidents and cowboy employment practices proved fertile ground for union recruitment in Britain and mainland Europe alike.
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