Articles de revues sur le sujet « Labor, France, 1914- »

Scholars still disagree about why unions in different countries are radical or conservative. The differences between unions in France and America can be traced to the different requirements for success in strikes before 1914. In France radical unions could win large-scale strikes by involving state officials. In contrast, American unions, facing a more hostile government, avoided state intervention and learned to win strikes by providing financial support to small groups of critically positioned workers. The divergence between American and French union strategy reflected the greater success of American capitalists in winning state support against labor.

This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914). In this period, technology became skill-intensive, leading to the introduction of technical education in primary schools. I find that more religious locations had lower economic development after 1870. Schooling appears to be the key mechanism: more religious areas saw a slower adoption of the technical curriculum and a push for religious education. In turn, religious education was negatively associated with industrial development 10 to 15 years later, when schoolchildren entered the labor market. (JEL D83, I21, I26, N33, Z12)

Recently there has been great interest in the re-organization of work and its effects on labor relations during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the metal-working and machine industries. Studies of this issue have generally been framed in terms of technological advances in the steel industry in the second half of the nineteenth century, the exigencies of the market during and after the Great Depression of the late nineteenth century, and the efforts of skilled labor to defend its position on the shopfloor. In France and elsewhere the importance of national and international arms sales before 1914 made the armaments industry one of the main arenas of these developments. Until mid-century the defense industry and the business of defense had been under state control in France. Largely for economic reasons, however, the Third Republic turned over increasing amounts of defense contracting, especially in shipbuilding, to private industry. The Etablissements Schneider at Le Creusot, the Compagnie des Aciéries de la Marine at Saint-Chamond and other large private firms established themselves as profitable arms manufacturers. National and foreign government contracts for weaponry encouraged these companies to make large capital investments, to rationalize work to permit greater managerial control, and to develop authoritarian paternalist systems of labor management.

In the present paper from the constructionist perspective is examined one of the most controversial issues of the modern western historiography of the First World War - the issue of patriotic enthusiasm of 1914, its scopes and nature. On the basis of a wide range of primary sources, including Russian and foreign archives, memoirs and letters of contemporaries the author carries out a comparative analysis of the response to the beginning of the war of urban and rural population of Great Britain, France and Russia. Against the backdrop of numerous patriotic demonstrations in large cities, the rural population's response looked much more constrained and passive. At the same time the latter attests rather to the peculiarities of rural culture than to the absence of patriotic upsurge. The author points out that besides apparent distinctions there was a lot of similarities in the urban and rural population's reaction to the beginning of the war. This refers to an immensely successful mobilization of continental armies, a rush of volunteers to the British army, and a drop of the labor movement in all European countries. The author comes to the conclusion that the patriotic upsurge in Europe in 1914 was not founded on a momentary outburst of chauvinism, but reflected a broad popular consensus on the war.

The Great Labour Unrest that shook British society between 1910 and 1914 was remarkable insofar as it developed not in any cities, but mainly in ports. This gave it an international dimension which has too often been reduced to the importation of syndicalist ideas from the USA and France over to Britain by Tom Mann. But whatever influence syndicalism managed to exert in the British Isles was in fact the result of collective efforts to create international networks. The study of Madame Sorgue s visit to Hull in May 1911 provides an interesting case in point. The French activists stay in the city was at the time quite an event, and while many contemporary observers blamed her for poisoning the healthy minds of Hull workers with “outlandish ‘ISMS’”, this article argues that no political contamination would have been possible if the working population of the city had not been ready to adopt the virus in the first place.

AbstractThis essay adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the narratives of the various “coloured” units brought in to France to deal with the manpower crisis that had overtaken that theater of the First World War in 1916. The label “coloured” or “native labour” justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. However, official reports and newspaper coverage also expose a dense play of ethnographic comparison between the different colored corps. The notion was that to “work” natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. The register of comparison was also shaped by specific political and social agendas which gave some colored units more room than others to negotiate acknowledgement of their services. One dimension of the war experience for Indian laborers was their engagement with institutional and ethnic categorizations. The other dimension was the process of being made over into military property and the workers own efforts to reframe the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as the sepoy.

Abstract In May 1918, a strike movement began in Paris and swiftly spread throughout much of the country. The strikes came at a time of heightened military danger and were promptly suppressed by the Clemenceau Government. Whereas a more widespread French labour unrest in 1917 had concentrated on wage demands, in 1918 the strikes were initiated by the radical far left of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT, France’s largest labour union) and were marked by internationalist and pacifist demands. In the months leading up to the spring of 1918, radical labour leaders in the Loire and the Isère were encouraged by federal colleagues in the CGT and its radical affiliate, the Comité de défense syndicaliste (CDS), to prepare for a series of general strikes. The launching of the Ludendorff Offensives, however, persuaded the CDS to postpone a coordinated national general strike until after the military emergency subsided. Labour leaders in the Loire and the Isère disregarded these directives and launched strikes in May and June that alienated local labour movements from their already tenuous political support from Paris. Using materials from both departmental and national archives, this study examines the political dynamics which precipitated and then accelerated the appointment of far-left radicals to leadership positions within the labour movements of the Loire and much of the Isère. It argues that the industrial significance of both areas, the anarcho-syndicalist rhetoric of local union leaders, poorly timed strike actions and the Clemenceau Government’s uncompromising jusqu’au boutisme worked together as factors to condemn this understudied movement to failure.

This new work, published in English, French and Mandarin, draws upon recently-discovered photographic evidence to cast a fresh light upon the work and role of the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) on the Western Front during the First World War. At its core lie the photographs taken by William James Hawkings in China and France between 1917 and 1919 and rediscovered by his grandson, John De Lucy, in 2014. These images formed the core of A Good Reputation Endures Forever—the first UK exhibition to focus exclusively on the volunteers of the CLC—and now, thanks to the efforts of John De Lucy and Steve Lau, highlights from the collection are available to a wider audience.

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. Up to now, the debate over the family wage has centred mainly on analysing British trade unions and the development of an ideal of domesticity among the British working classes, more or less taking for granted the declining women's labour force participation rate and the configuration of state/trade union relations prevailing in Great Britain. Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. In France, demands for the exclusion of women from industry were extremely rare because women's participation in industry was taken for granted. But a gendered division of labour and ideals of domesticity remained and made themselves felt in both workforce and labour movement.

In histories of European trade union movements, the observation that women industrial workers were rarely found among the membership has become axiomatic. In virtually every developed nation, it seems that once the industrial order was established, predominantly male trade unions were everywhere the rule, and female unions and trade unionists everywhere notable exceptions.

In comparative Labour history there is a long tradition of adhering to a typology of labour movements which distinguishes south-western European, ‘Latin’ labour movements (France, Spain, Italy) from north-eastern European labour movements (Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, east and south-east Europe) and invokes a third category: Anglo-American labour movements. The British Labour Party is usually subsumed under this latter category, whereas the German SPD is regarded as the spiritual leader of the second. Insofar as these comparisons explicitly deal with the time before the First World War, their argument is indeed a strong one. After all, the SPD was the largest socialist party in the world before 1914, at a time when the Labour Party did not even allow individual membership. At least in its organisational strongholds, the SPD resembled a social movement providing for its members almost ‘from cradle to grave’. The Labour Party, by contrast, is often portrayed as a trade union interest group in parliament with no other purpose than electoral representation. Where the Labour Party avoided any ideological commitment before 1914, the SPD had at least theoretically adopted Marxism as its ideological bedrock after 1890.

This article focuses on the little-known Indian Labour Corps (ILC) who hailed from the Northeast frontier of India during the Great War (WW1). It engages with the labour recruitment process, their collective experience during the long march to France, the nature of their work and life at the warzone camps, their heroic homecoming and subsequently, their life back into the heart of the hills. It argues that large numbers of hill people from the region joined the War as coolies with different perceptions, meanings and expectations closely connected to their warrior traditions. They enrolled into the ILC in large numbers for the coveted ‘ornaments’ of the hill ‘warrior’, which the War could offer to them upon their return home. Their war experiences engendered new ideas and practices, significantly reconfiguring their worldviews and their ‘homes’. Their experiences reflect the frontier dimensions of WW1.

The article examines the historical prerequisites for the creation of labor exchanges in France, Germany, and Russia in the period from 1870s to 1930s. It was determined, that the French revolutionary proletariat has initiated agency activity in the labor market to protect its rights. In Germany, the competitive relationships between private entrepreneurs and public unions effectively facilitated the solvation of the unemployment problems. The situation on Russian labor market required active agency work in employment by 1915. As a response an extensive network of labor exchanges, exchange artels of labor and employment bureaus was established. It had a great success in manage of labor supply and demand within the new economic policy (NEP) period.

The Great War was indeed a world war. Imperial powers like Great Britain drew on their far-flung empires not only for resources but also for manpower. This essay examines one important (though still inadequately studied) aspect of British wartime exigency, the voluntary and coerced participation of the British Empire's coloured subjects and allies in military operations on the Western Front. With the exception of the Indian Army in the first year of the war, that participation did not include combat. Instead coloured troops, later joined by contract labourers, played major roles behind the lines. From 1916 onwards, well over a quarter million Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, South Africans, West Indians, New Zealand Maoris, Black Canadians, and Pacific Islanders worked the docks, built roads and railways, maintained equipment, produced munitions, dug trenches, and even buried the dead. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their contribution to Allied victory begun to be more fully acknowledged. Yet the greatest impact of British labour policies in France might lie elsewhere entirely. Chinese workers seem likely to have carried the virus that caused the Great Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which may have killed more people around the world than the war itself.

Este trabajo pretende contribuir al estudio de la historia de las relaciones hispano-marroquíes y de la figura de Abdelkrim, Personaje controvertido que pasó de cantar las virtudes de la empresa colonial española a combatirla. El trabajo, que aúna el enfoque histórico con el filológico, tiene como objetivos analizar las repercusiones en clave interna e internacional de la denominada crisis de Agadir y enmarcar en este contexto la labor del rifeño como cronista en El Telegrama del Rif. Partiendo del contexto histórico que desembocó en dicho episodio, considerado por un lado como la antesala del tratado franco-marroquí de Fez de 1912, y por otro como antecedente de la primera guerra mundial, el texto realiza una primera aproximación a la contribución de Abdelkrim a la difusión de la posición española a través de sus crónicas, todas ellas escritas en árabe. Con ello se pretende ofrecer una muestra de cómo un medio de carácter militar y colonialista justificó las actuaciones españolas durante la crisis y en qué medida la inestimable colaboración de Abdelkrim ayudó a ello.

This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the ‘Developments in Dress History’ conference at the University of Brighton in December 2011. Based on research from the author's master's thesis, ‘La mode en France durant la Première Guerre mondiale’, written at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, this article examines the declining relationship between the Chambre syndicale de la couture parisienne, the couturiers and the seamstresses, which ignited an industry-wide labour strike in May 1917.

In 1920 Wang Guangqi(1892–1936), a founder member of the Young China Association (Shaonian Zhongguo Xuehui) in 1918, wrote that in the past few years a clear division had arisen among Chinese overseas students. Those studying in the United States, having been influenced by the philosophy of “worshipping money” (baijin zhuyi) wanted to build a “capitalist” China on the American model when they returned. The work-study students in France, however, were concerned with practical training and participation in the labouring world. While Chinese students in the United States received regular government scholarships and enjoyed material comforts, Wang continued, those in France spent their time “sweating and working in factories.” Since the former sought their models in the “oil barons” while the latter looked to the workers for inspiration, Wang concluded, it was inevitable that whereas students returning from the United States would be capitalists, work—study students returning from France would promote “labour-ism” (laodong zhuyi) and become part of the labouring classes.

In the years before and immediately after World War I, gendered and racialized bodies at work became the focus of debate and discussion in France amongst an informal alliance of engineers, doctors, scientists, employers, workers, and the state. Seduced by the promise of “modernity”, and the seemingly endless possibilities of science and mechanization, the state attempted to modernize public services and employers sought new ways to discipline labor for greater productivity. Both mobilized rationalization – Taylorism and work science – in the service of greater efficiency and in an effort to identify the allegedly “natural” qualities that made gendered and racialized workers suitable for certain kinds of jobs and would exclude them from others. A not insignificant dimension of this project lay in how French work scientists began to envision the potential uses of gendered French and colonial labor. The development of the French North-African and Indochinese colonial empires around the turn of the century heightened attention to racialized difference. World War I had opened the opportunity to use racialized colonial bodies, both on the military front and in the factory. Thinking about race and gender characteristics continued to influence work science and its applications in the 1920s and 1930s. Work scientists' experiments to ascertain the physical endurance of colonial male workers and white workers underscored the durability of gender meanings i n dealing with white French workers and the instability of those meanings in assessing the abilities of workers of color.

The article discusses the book Forgotten Personnel. Female labor on the railways of the Russian Empire, written by V. A. Serdiuk. This book belongs to the popular scholarly trend of “gender history,” but it is not only a work on the history of women on the railways and an analysis of their work experience. The book is equally a study of the history of Russian railways in general: the author, using new data, presents a fresh look at the development of Russian railways from 1838 to 1917. The strength of the work is the presence in each of chapter of a separate paragraph on the development of the same “gender” processes on foreign railroads, especially in the USA, Great Britain, France, and Germany. This allows us to better understand Russian problems. The monograph shows that “in terms of the number of female employees and the degree of their involvement in railway activities”, Russia was second only to France. At the same time, the article presents some comments. First of all, there is insufficient analysis of the period of Nicholas II, especially the First World War. Although general trends are shown, such as the increase in the number of women employed in the railways, nevertheless, a number of aspects require further and more detailed study. This is especially important for the railways located in the theater of military operations. However, the monograph by V. A. Serdiuk is largely a pioneering work that significantly expands our understanding of the problem.

Abstract In France, until 1914, the trade unionism of miners developed in an original way. It was a movement of industrial unionism characterized by a marked spirit of corporatism, which was soon organized on the national and international levels through federations of miners. The miners' movement had difficulties fitting in with other union organizations. The Confédération Nationale du Travail did not include miners until 1908. This late involvement resulted in part from the miners' own methods. Right from the start, they mobilized to obtain protective laws. Union organization and the strike were used as means of pressure in order to force Parlement and the government to take the miners' demands into account. Although such methods were not accepted by the more radical French labour legislation owes much to the battles of the miners. It was they who signed the first collective agreements and who practised systematic bargaining to resolve disputes over wages. By the power of their organization and commitment, the miners led the way to the sweeping trade unionism of today.

Este trabajo pretende contribuir al estudio de la historia de las relaciones hispano-marroquíes y de la figura de Abdelkrim, Personaje controvertido que pasó de cantar las virtudes de la empresa colonial española a combatirla. El trabajo, que aúna el enfoque histórico con el filológico, tiene como objetivos analizar las repercusiones en clave interna e internacional de la denominada crisis de Agadir y enmarcar en este contexto la labor del rifeño como cronista en El Telegrama del Rif. Partiendo del contexto histórico que desembocó en dicho episodio, considerado por un lado como la antesala del tratado franco-marroquí de Fez de 1912, y por otro como antecedente de la primera guerra mundial, el texto realiza una primera aproximación a la contribución de Abdelkrim a la difusión de la posición española a través de sus crónicas, todas ellas escritas en árabe. Con ello se pretende ofrecer una muestra de cómo un medio de carácter militar y colonialista justificó las actuaciones españolas durante la crisis y en qué medida la inestimable colaboración de Abdelkrim ayudó a ello.

RESUME Bien que le terme 'sociolinguistics' n'ait ete introduit dans le vocabulai-re technique de la linguistique qu'en 1952 par Haver Currie et que la socio-linguistique ne soit devenue une sous-discipline importante de la science du langage que depuis les annees soixante (v. Bright 1966), cet article main-tient qu'une telle approche du langage existait depuis longtemps, peut-etre plus de cent ans. En d'autres mots, nous avangons qu'il y avait une sociolin-guistique bien avant la lettre. En effet, on retrouve dans la linguistique generate de Wiliam Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) et de Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899) et dans quel-ques articles de Michel Breal (1832-1915) des annees 60 et 70 du siecle dernier des observations qui mettent en relief la nature sociale du langage. Les dialectologues de la meme periode, surtout en France et dans les pays de langue allemande, etaient tout a fait conscients du fait que l'etude des patois, des parlers et des langues orales en general devait etre guidee par des considerations sociologiques (v. Malkiel 1976). Dans la linguistique compa-ree et historique c'est Antoine Meillet (1866-1936), eleve de Saussure et de Breal et collaborates de la revue d'Emile Durkheim, Vannee sociologique, au debut de notre siecle, qui a insiste sur l'importance de l'aspect social (et sociologique) dans l'etude du changement linguistique (par ex., Meillet 1905). Avec ses eleves de Paris, surtout Joseph Vendryes (1875-1960), Alf Sommerfelt (1892-1965) et Marcel Cohen (1884-1974), Meillet etablit l'ecole sociologique du langage (par ex., Vendryes 1921; Sommerfelt 1932; Cohen 1956). Enfin, il existe — a cote de la dialectologie et de l'histoire des langues — encore une troisieme source de la sociolinguistique: l'etude du bilinguisme (par ex., Max Weinreich 1931; Haugen 1953). Ces trois traditions de la recherche linguistique se trouvent toutes reunis dans l'etude de Uriel Weinreich (1926-1967), Languages in Contact (1953), et puisque l'ouvrage de William Labov de 1966, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, qui est souvent cite (bien a tort) comme point de depart de la sociolo-gie moderne, representait sa these de doctorate ecrite sous la direction de Weinreich, il n'est pas etonnant de voir ces traditions, surtout celles de la linguistique geographique et de la linguistique historique, maintenues dans l'oeuvre de Labov (par ex., 1976, 1982). SUMMARY Although the term 'sociolinguistics' was not introduced into linguistic nomenclature before 1952 (see Currie 1952) and the field became a recognized field of research in the late 1960s only (e.g., Bright 1966), it is clear that the subject did not begin two decades ago. Indeed, an investigation into the sources of 'sociolinguistics' reveals that its beginnings go back at least 100 years, to the work of William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894), Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899), Michel Breal (1832-1915), and others. However, these were the first programmatic statements and a number of developments in the study of language were necessary to converge upon the kind of sociolinguistics which most students of language associate with the name of William Labov (e.g., Labov 1966), at least in North America. Interestingly enough, it is also in the work of Labov (e.g., 1972) that the origins of 'sociolinguistics' (to some extent in contradistinction to the 'sociology of language' approach associated with Basil Bernstein, Joshua A. Fishman, and others) could be traced, although neither Labov nor the prolific Dell Hymes has written anything on the history of sociolinguistics. (Indeed, the only paper that comes close to it was written by an outsider to the field, the great Romance scholar Yakov Malkiel, in 1976.) In my paper, I shall demonstrate that there are essentially three major traditions of investigation that led to 'sociolinguistics', namely, (1) Dialectology, especially the work done in German-speaking lands and in France from the 1870s onwards (e.g., Georg Wenker [1852-1911], Jules Gillieron [1854-1926], and others) — part of which had been undertaken in an effort to verify and possibility to support the neogrammarian 'regularity hypothesis' of sound changes; (2) Historical Linguistics, in particular the kind advocated by Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) and his school (e.g., Meillet 1905; Vendryes 1921), which developed into a 'science sociologique' of linguistics in general (Sommerfelt 1932) and a 'sociologie du langage' (e.g., Cohen 1956) among the younger Meillet disciples, and (3) Bilingualism Studies (e.g., Max Weinreich 1931; Haugen 1953), traditions all of which can be found united in the 1953 study of Uriel Weinreich (1926-1967), who happens to have been Labov's teacher and mentor.

We have explained the presence of heterogeneous winning coalitions in social revolutions. In an overcrowded agrarian society, two almost identical non-productive enforcers, the landed political elite, collude and bargain over transfers with one of the two peasants to contest over a piece of land, as property rights for land are not well defined. In any other scenario, neither the grand coalition nor the coalition of two peasants and one enforcer forms, thereby deposing the other enforcer with positive probability. So, social revolutions never occur. If foreign wars weaken an enforcer, such as in China (1911), France, and Russia, adding one unit of capital makes the coalition of the peasant, the now worker, and one of the enforcers (now an industrial political elite) attractive: The excess labor can work with it; the weaker enforcer retaliates less and the stronger one more, if excluded. However, if the weaker one (the still-landed political elite) proposes first, a grand coalition forms in which he or she gets less than the other members do (desertion). There is conflict among peasants and among landed elites; thus, the concept of a coalition is more appropriate than that of a class.

Starting from his confrontational allegiance and parochial thesis, namely in his Essays and Lectures of William Robertson Smith(1912), William Robertson Smith discredits Arab travellers for their zealous keenness to discover Western cultural intricacies. He has examined the cultural practices and social kinships of Semite people and studied their theologies. William Robertson Smith went as far as to assume that “The Arabian traveller is quite different from ourselves. The labour of moving from place to place is a mere nuisance to him, he has no enjoyment in the effort, and grumbles at hunger or fatigue with all his might” (Smith, 1912, p: 498). My particular interest is in Jurje Zaidane’s Rihla Ila Oroba (1912) as a culturally inspired travel account to France and England. It is not only a voyage to discern the intricacies of the Western civilizational repositories but an interesting endeavour to demonstrate the long-standing tradition of Arabs’ presence in British and French cultural repertoire. His voyage shows the extent to which Arabs were inspired by Western modern logos. Jurje Zaidane minutely lingers on infinitesimal details of each country. I argue that this travel is a parallel occidentalist discourse that tries to create a counter-discursive narrative. Jurje Zaidane, from the perspective of a well-versed essayist, novelist and erudite traveller, cross-examines French and English cultural contexts. Ranging from the narration of public spaces to comments on French and English women, the journey towards the Other is vicariously shifted to Self-inquiry and discovery. Broached from a postcolonial micro-historicist approach, this paper aims at stultifying both the orientalist discourse and the occidentalist premise predicated on Hassan Hanafi’s allegiance to Occidentalism. This article concludes that Zaidane’s travel displays heterogeneous discourses that do not re-install sharp divisive between the East and the West.

During the First World War, more than 800 Norwegian ships were sunk by hostile action, with a loss of about 2,100 seafarers. The Norwegian merchant fleet was extremely important for Norway's economy and for securing the import of vital goods. In addition, Britain and her allies needed goods carried in Norwegian merchant ships, such as coal shipped across the Channel to France. This article examines the relationship between Britain and Norway during the war, concentrating on the roles of two important resources, coal and maritime labour. The first part of the article outlines the wartime Anglo-Norwegian relationship. Negotiations around the so-called ‘coal trade surplus’, and how the surplus was allocated, are analysed in the second section. The coal trade surplus derived from British coal exports to Norway and was transferred from the British to the Norwegian Government in 1919. The British Ministry of Shipping, in recognition of the efforts of Norwegian seafarers, demanded that part of the surplus should be allocated to their well-being and to a memorial for the Norwegian merchant seafarers who had perished during the war.

The myth of Mr Butskell: the politics of British economic policy, 1950–1955. By Scott Kelly. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. viii+248. ISBN 0-7546-0604-X. £42.50.The Labour party and taxation: party identity and political purpose in twentieth-century Britain. By Richard Whiting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+294. ISBN 0-521-57160-X. £45.00.British social policy since 1945. Second edition. By Howard Glennerster. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 2000. Pp. xii+260. ISBN 0-631-22022-4. £15.99.Governance, industry and labour markets in Britain and France: the modernising state in the mid-twentieth century. Edited by Noel Whiteside and Robert Salais. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp. xi+295. ISBN 0-415-15733-1. £45.00.The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1918–19)Hugh Gaitskell (Labour chancellor of the exchequer, 1950–1) remarked in 1957 that ‘professional politicians, when they have been in the job for any length of time, are not well fitted for really deep thinking, partly because they have no time for it and partly because the very practice of their art involves them in continual simplification’. This candid observation has important implications for the study of how past politicians formulated policy. The books under review all deal with differing aspects of British (and also, in one case, French) economic and social policy in the twentieth century. They all show, to varying degrees, that parties, governments, and other political actors have proffered apparently simplistic and muddled solutions to important problems. But was this because of intellectual deficiency on their part, or was it an inevitable consequence of the exercise of what Rab Butler, Gaitskell's Conservative successor, famously called ‘the art of the possible’?

Rond 1910 werd in de BWP de Vlaamse kwestie een vrije kwestie. De ‘versmelting’ van twee volken in een ‘âme belge’, via tweetaligheid, werd afgewezen. Onder impuls van Huysmans beriep het Vlaamse socialisme zich op de idee van culturele autonomie: het recht op onderwijs in de moedertaal van de lagere school tot de universiteit en dus de vernederlandsing van de Gentse Rijksuniversiteit. Daarmee behoorde het Vlaamse socialisme tot de voorhoede van de Vlaamse beweging. Het Waalse socialisme daarentegen verdedigde nog de superioriteit van het Frans en de mythe van een tweetalig Vlaanderen, en kantte zich tegen die Vlaamse hoofdeis.Tijdens de tweede fase (1919-1935) was de Vlaamse beweging verzwakt en het Vlaamse socialisme verdeeld. Huysmans slaagde er slechts met moeite in om een ongunstig partijstandpunt ter zake te verhinderen en de Vlaamse kwestie als een vrije kwestie te behouden. Het ‘Compromis des socialistes belges’ van november 1929 was gebaseerd op regionale eentaligheid en een minimale tweetaligheid in het leger en de centrale besturen. Het legde mee de fundamenten van de evolutie naar het beginsel van de territorialiteit inzake bestuur en onderwijs (1930 en 1932).Tijdens de derde fase (1935-1940) hield die pacificatie geen stand. Conflicten versterkten elkaar. De partijleiding kwam in handen van de Brusselaar Spaak en de Vlaming De Man, die met zijn Plan van de Arbeid in 1933 de BWP even uit de impasse had gehaald. Het ging om een nieuwe generatie die het socialisme een andere inhoud wilde geven: streven naar een volkspartij in plaats van klassenstrijd, een ‘socialisme national’, een autoritaire democratie als antwoord op een aanhoudende politieke crisis. Vooral aan Waalse kant werd daartegen gereageerd. Tevens werd de evolutie in het buitenlandse beleid, de zelfstandigheid los van Frankrijk, bekritiseerd. De Spaanse burgeroorlog en de eventuele erkenning van generaal Franco dreef de tegenstellingen op de spits. Voor het eerst had de partij met Spaak een socia-listische eerste minister (mei 1938-januari 1939). Hoewel alle socialisten tegen Franco waren, verschilden de Waalse socialisten van mening met de meeste Vlaamse socialisten over de vraag of de regering daarover moest vallen. Er was ook de tegenstelling over een al dan niet toenadering tot de christelijke arbeidersbeweging vanwege een dan noodzakelijke schoolvrede en een subsidiëring van de katholieke ‘strijdscholen’. Daarop entte zich de taalkwestie. In de Kamer viel de fractiecohesie terug tot 53%.De Vlaamse socialisten waren niet alleen veel sterker vertegenwoordigd in de fractie (40% in 1936), hun zelfbewustzijn nam ook sterk toe. Ze ergerden zich steeds meer aan het bijna exclusieve gebruik van het Frans in de fractie, in het partijbestuur en vooral tijdens congressen. Wie geen of weinig Frans kende, wilde niet langer als minderwaardig worden behandeld. Zeker als dat samenviel met een andere visie. Het eerste aparte Vlaams Socialistisch Congres ging door in maart 1937. Het wilde de culturele autonomie zo veel mogelijk doortrekken, maar keerde zich tegen elke vorm van federalisme, waardoor de Vlaamse socialisten in een klerikaal Vlaanderen een machteloze minderheid zouden worden. Bij de Waalse socialisten groeide de frustratie. Ze organiseerden aparte Waalse Congressen in 1938 en 1939. Ze benadrukten drie vormen van Vlaams imperialisme. De ongunstige demografische evolutie maakte een Vlaamse meerderheid in het parlement en politieke minorisering mogelijk. De financieel-economische transfers van Wallonië naar Vlaanderen verarmden Wallonië. Het verlies aan jobs voor ééntalige Walen in Wallonië en in Brussel was discriminerend. Dat laatste zorgde voor een francofone toenadering en een gezamenlijke framing. Het flamingantisme had zich al meester gemaakt van Vlaanderen, bedreigde via tweetaligheid nu de Brusselse agglomeratie, waarna Wallonië aan de beurt zou komen. Op 2 februari 1939 stonden Vlaamse en Waalse socialisten tegenover elkaar. De unitaire partij dreigde, naar katholiek voorbeeld, in twee taalgroepen uiteen te vallen. Zover kwam het niet. De wallinganten, die een politiek federalisme nastreefden, hadden terrein gewonnen, maar de meeste Waalse socialisten bleven voorstander van een nationale solidariteit. Mits een nieuw ‘Compromis’ dat met de Waalse grieven rekening hield. De mythe van het Vlaamse socialisme als Vlaams vijandig of onverschillig is moeilijk vol te houden. Wel ontstond na de Tweede Wereldoorlog een andere situatie. Tijdens de jaren 1960 behoorde de Vlaamse kwestie tot de ‘trein der gemiste kansen’ . Na de Eerste Wereldoorlog en de invoering van het enkelvoudig stemrecht voor mannen werd de socialistische partij bijna even groot als de katholieke. De verkiezingen verscherpten de regionale en ideologische asymmetrie. De katholieke partij behield de absolute meerderheid in Vlaanderen, de socialistische verwierf een gelijkaardige positie in Wallonië. Nationaal werden coalitieregeringen noodzakelijk. In de Kamer veroverden zowel de socialisten als de christendemocratische vleugel een machtsbasis, maar tot de regering doordringen bleek veel moeilijker. Die bleven gedomineerd door de conservatieve katholieke vleugel en de liberale partij, met steun van de koning en van de haute finance. Eenmaal het socialistische minimumprogramma uit angst voor een sociale revolutie aanvaard (1918-1921), werden de socialisten nog slechts getolereerd tijdens crisissituaties of als het niet anders kon (1925-1927, 1935-1940). Het verklaart een toenemende frustratie bij Waalse socialisten. Tevens bemoeilijkte hun antiklerikalisme de samenwerking van Vlaamse socialisten met christendemocraten en Vlaamsgezinden, zoals in Antwerpen, en dat gold ook voor de vorming van regeringen. In de BWP waren de verhoudingen veranderd. De macht lag nu gespreid over vier actoren: de federaties, het partijbestuur, de parlementsfractie en eventueel de ministers. De eenheid was bij momenten ver zoek. In 1919 was het Vlaamse socialisme veel sterker geworden. In Vlaanderen behaalde het 24 zetels (18 meer dan in 1914) en werd het met 25,5% de tweede grootste partij. Bovendien was de dominantie van Gent verschoven naar Antwerpen, dat met zes zetels de vierde grootste federatie van de BWP werd. Het aantrekken van Camille Huysmans als boegbeeld versterkte haar Vlaamsgezind profiel. In een eerste fase moest Huysmans nog de Vlaamse kwestie als een vrije kwestie verdedigen. Zelfs tegen de Gentse en de Kortrijkse federatie in, die de vooroorlogse Vlaamsgezinde hoofdeis – de vernederland-sing van de Gentse universiteit – hadden losgelaten. Naar 1930 toe, de viering van honderd jaar België, was de Vlaamse beweging opnieuw sterker geworden en werd gevreesd voor de electorale doorbraak van een Vlaams-nationalistische partij. Een globale oplossing voor het Vlaamse probleem begon zich op te dringen. Dat gold ook voor de BWP. Interne tegenstellingen moesten overbrugd worden zodat, gezien de financiële crisis, de sociaaleconomische thema’s alle aandacht konden krijgen. Daarbij stonden de eenheid van België en van de partij voorop. In maart 1929 leidde dit tot het ‘Compromis des Belges’ en een paar maanden later tot het minder bekende en radicalere partijstandpunt, het ‘Compromis des socialistes belges’. Voortbouwend op de vooroorlogse visie van het bestaan van twee volken binnen België, werd dit doorgetrokken tot het recht op culturele autonomie van elk volk, gebaseerd op het principe van regionale eentaligheid, ten koste van de taalminderheden. Voor de Vlaamse socialisten kwam dit neer op een volledige vernederlandsing van Vlaanderen, te beginnen met het onderwijs en de Gentse universiteit. Niet zonder enige tegenzin ging een meerderheid van Waalse socialisten daarmee akkoord. In ruil eisten zij dat in België werd afgezien van elke vorm van verplichte tweetaligheid, gezien als een vorm van Vlaams kolonialisme. Eentalige Walen hadden in Wallonië en in nationale instellingen (leger, centrale besturen) recht op aanwerving en carrière zonder kennis van het Nederlands, zoals ook de kennis ervan als tweede landstaal in Wallonië niet mocht worden opgelegd. De betekenis van dit interne compromis kreeg in de historiografie onvoldoende aandacht. Dat geldt ook voor de vaststelling dat beide nationale arbeidersbewegingen, de BWP vanuit de oppositie, in 1930-1932 mee de invoering van het territorialiteitsbeginsel hebben geforceerd. Een tussentijdse fase C uit het model van Miroslav Hroch.___________ ‘Frenemies’? 2Communitarian tensions in the Socialist Party 1919-1940. Division, Compromise. Crisis. Part Two: 1935-1940 Around 1910, the Flemish question became a free question in the BWP. The ‘merging’ of two peoples in a Belgian soul (âme belge) through bilingualism was rejected. According to Huysmans, Flemish socialism appealed to the idea of cultural autonomy: the right to education in one’s native language from primary school to university, and therefore, the transformation of the state University of Ghent into a Dutch-speaking institution. Hence, Flemish socialism became part of the vanguard of the Flemish Movement. Walloon socialism, on the contrary, continued to support the superiority of French in Belgium and the myth of a bilingual Flanders. It turned against this key Flemish demand.The next stages were dominated by the introduction of simple universal male suffrage in 1919. The Catholic Party maintained an absolute majority in Flanders, the Socialist Party acquired a similar position in Wallonia. During the second phase (1919-1935) initially the Flemish Movement was weakened and Flemish socialism divided. Huysmans hardly managed to keep the Flemish question a free question. The ‘Compromise of the Belgian Socialists’ (Compromis des socialistes belges) of November 1929 was based on regional monolingualism and a minimal bilingualism in the army and the central administration. The territorial principle in administration and education (1930 and 1932) was accepted. Dutch became the official language in Flanders.During the third phase (1935-1940) pacification did not hold. Conflicts strengthened one another. The party leadership fell into the hands of the Brussels politician Spaak and the Fleming De Man. The latter had just offered the BWP an answer to the socio-economic depression with his ‘Labour Plan’ (Plan van de Arbeid). This new generation wanted a different socialism: rather a people’s party than stressing class conflict, a ‘national socialism’, an authoritarian democracy as a response to a persistent political crisis. In particular Walloons reacted against these developments. At the same time, they critisized the foreign policy of diplomatic independence from France (‘los van Frankrijk’). The Spanish Civil War and the possible recognition of General Franco stressed the divisions. With Spaak, the party had a Socialist Prime Minister for the first time (May 1938-January 1939). While all socialists were opposed to Franco, Walloon socialists had a conflicting view with most Flemish socialists on whether the govern-ment should be brought down on this subject. There was also a conflict over the question of rapprochement with the Christian labour movement concerning a truce over the school question and subsidies for the Catholic ‘propaganda’ schools. The language question worsened the situation. In the Chamber, party cohesion dropped down to 53%.Not only were the Flemish socialists much more strongly represented in the socialist parliamentary group (40% in 1936), their assertiveness also increased. They became more and more annoyed with the quasi-exclusive use of French in their parliamentary group, in the party administration, and mostly during party congresses. Those who knew little or no French no longer wanted to be treated as inferior. Especially, when they had different opinions. The first separate Flemish Socialist Congress was held in March 1937. The Congress wanted to pursue cultural autonomy as far as possible, but opposed any form of federalism, as Flemish socialists would become a powerless minority in a clerical Flanders.Frustration grew among Walloon socialists. They organised separate Walloon Congresses in 1938 and 1939. They emphasized three forms of Flemish imperialism. Unfavourable demographic developments made a Flemish majority in Parliament and political minoritisation likely. Financial-economic transfers impoverished Wallonia to the benefit of Flanders. The loss of jobs for monolingual Walloons in Wallonia and Brussels was discriminatory. This contributed to common framing among Francophones: “Flemish radicalism” was accepted in Flanders, presently threatening the Brussels agglomeration via bilingualism, and Wallonia would be next.On 2 February 1939 Flemish and Walloon socialists opposed one another. The unitary party was in danger of splitting into two language groups, following the Catholic example. It did not come to that. The Walloon radicals, who pursued political federalism, had won some ground, but most Walloon socialists remained supporters of national solidarity, provided the adoption of a new ‘Compromise’ that took account of Walloon grievances.The myth of Flemish socialism as hostile or indifferent to Flemish issues is hard to maintain. After the Second World War, however, the situation became different.

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Cet ouvrage constitue les actes de la Journée d’études La linguistique urbaine en URSS organisée par la section de langues et civilisations slaves (actuellement section des langues slaves et de l’Asie du Sud) et le CRECLECO (Centre de recherches en histoire et épistémologie comparée de la linguistique d’Europe centrale et orientale) le 18 octobre 2013 à l’Université de Lausanne, avec le soutien financier du Centre de linguistique et des sciences du langage. Cette journée d’études avait pour but de réunir des chercheurs de cinq pays, la Suisse, la France, le Royaume-Uni, la Pologne et la Russie, autour d’un sujet qui passionnait les linguistes soviétiques des années 1920-1930, à savoir l’étude de la langue de la ville. A l’intérieur de ce sujet général, les communications des intervenants ont porté sur la koinè de la ville, le bilinguisme, les sociolectes d’une même ville en interaction, la différenciation linguistique entre ville et campagne, ainsi que sur l’argot portuaire ou encore le jargon des voleurs. Les intervenants ont entrepris de suivre en détail comment la linguistique «urbaine» soviétique d’une part se place dans une tradition française représentée par Lazare Sainéan (1859-1934), et d’autre part, développe ses propres méthodes et styles de recherche, et inspire même toute une génération de linguistes, jusqu’à William Labov. C’est pour confronter les différents études et angles de vue sur le sujet que la participation de spécialistes de cinq pays est nécessaire. Rappelons ici que la linguistique urbaine, ou la sociolinguistique urbaine, acquiert le droit de cité à partir d’un nom connu, celui de William Labov (Language of a Inner City, 1972). Les intervenants ont mis l’accent sur les activités de linguistes qui ont été aux premières loges de la mutation sociale de 1918 en Russie. Ceux qui ont fondé les branches de la linguistique appelées plus tard «dialectologie urbaine» et «sociolinguistique urbaine».