#chomeurs

Road Work, Verdun.  6 septembre 1938. Conrad Poirier, BAnQ, P48,S1,P2885.

"Ouverture du refuge catholique," La Presse. May 31, 1933. Page 3. ---- Le chanoine Harbour présidera demain l'inauguration de l'asile de la rue Belmont. --- CHAPELLE ET CONFORT ---- C'est demain, avec l'ouverture du mois du Sacré-Coeur, que sera inauguré le Refuge catholique, 660, rue Belmont, juste en arrière du gratte-ciel du Téléphone Bell. Ce refuge, qui hospitalisera les chômeurs sans asile, est situé dans la paroisse cathédrale de Montréal et M. le chanoine Adélard Harbour, curé de la basilique, qui prend le plus vif intérêt à cette oeuvre, présidera la cérémonie d'ouverture. En effet, l’ancienne école protestante Belmont, où pendant de nombreuses années Ia Commission des écoles protestantes eut son siège, se trouve convertie en institution catholique et la grande salle située au centre du premier étage est transformée en chapelle, où les chômeurs trouveront le réconfort de la religion, tandis qu'ils joulront de tous les autres avantages dans le reste de l'édifice.

“Une imposante manifestation de chômeurs s'est déroulée à Saint-Denis, près Paris. Le cortège a défilé sans incidents. Les forces de police, on le voit sur notre document, étaient importantes. (R.)”

At a meeting on 4 April 1931 twenty-five delegates from various local Comités were present to designate a Commission Exécutive (CE) which was to assemble on a weekly basis and oversee the work of the CdCs. It is uncertain how often the Comité Central met, but there are police reports for 11 April, 21 April, 23 August, 6 November and 5 December 1931. Whilst the CE was initially a small body of ten to twenty-four persons, it had expanded to sixty members by November, then disappeared from view in 1932. The widest representation took place at regional congresses held under its aegis. 

Three congresses, which hosted delegates from the CdCs of the Paris region, were held in the movement’s first year: on 23 April 1931, 25 July 1931 and 14 January 1932. By September 1931, a Regional Committee of the Unemployed (Comité Régional des Chômeurs, or CRC) had been established and, to further complicate the picture, the movement adopted the title the Union des Comités des Chômeurs de la Région Parisienne (UdC). In terms of decision-making, this organizational confusion masked Parti communiste français (PCF) control. Its members took leading positions on these bodies and at the newspaper, Le Cri des Chômeurs, which was established in May 1931. Chevalier, secretary of the CCC, and Mercier, Le Cri’s editor and treasurer, were both PCF members as were many of the key personnel in the other bodies and the CdCs. Their offices were lodged in the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire building at rue de la Grange-aux-Belles. 

The PCF could exercise influence over these individuals and on the various bodies that constituted the movement. It could also resort to calling PCF faction meetings of unemployed members in order to win particular positions. For example, a faction meeting was called before the 12 November 1931 demonstration. PCF prerogatives continuously collided with the vicissitudes of unemployed activity. The communist leadership’s efforts to transcend these practical limits was at the source of the organizational complexity of the Parisian unemployed movement. This Byzantine structure generated not only highly personalized clashes but also conflict within and between institutions. To an extent, institutional duplication served the PCF in so far as it could find the line of least resistance to its directives, which could then be transmitted to the movement as a whole via larger or less politically certain bodies. Yet the movement often created countercurrents to PCF policy based on experience, greater realism, local conservatism or political differences. As a result, friction between these different bodies was frequently apparent.

In late November 1931 a police report detailed the conflict between the CCC and the UdC. The CCC was directly accountable to the PCF and attempted to discredit certain leaders of both the UdC and also the CRC; Thouron, secretary of the CRC (himself a PCF member), was a particular target. For its part the CRC wanted the movement to relocate its lodgings in the CGTU offices, an objective which put off some of the unemployed members. On 27 November 1931 a PCF faction meeting aired some of these differences. Lenoir argued for an unemployed congress on 15–17 December. This congress, he hoped, would replace the existing leadership with PCF loyalists because the movement of the unemployed should be part of the revolutionary struggle. Thouron, however, rejected subordination of the movement to the party on the grounds that it would only damage the former. Also, despite the party’s hostility to charity, most of the faction agreed on a ‘commission de secours aux chômeurs’ (commission for the relief of the unemployed). 

The conflict between hardliners and Thouron came to a head at the next meeting of the Commission Exécutive on 8 December. Again Thouron clashed with CGTU officials. Thouron successfully opposed Perrot’s suggestion of Christmas demonstrations outside nightclubs patronized by the wealthy (which the PCF leadership strongly favoured). Again to the dismay of the CCC, a congress was postponed until January. Despite his successes, and perhaps calling his opponents’ bluff, Thouron threatened to resign from the leadership of the movement at the executive meeting of 28 November. When the UdC rejected the Christmas demonstrations, the PCF and CGTU forged ahead with the protests. According to the subsequent police report, few unemployed turned up and most of the several hundred demonstrators were communists. There were fifty-four arrests and any foreigners involved had their identity cards confiscated. “

The political bureau was confused about the relationship between the workplace and the unemployed, about unemployment insurance, and the current state of organization for the unemployed. Jacques Doriot, PCF Central Committee member and mayor of Saint-Denis, proposed creating groups for them in the big works like Renault, and directing them against both employers and the state. This would entail re-labelling communist cells around these workplaces, rather than forming a real movement of the unemployed. Only Pierre Semard knew of actual developments with local organizations in Paris and insisted on the importance of their links with factories. But it had clearly registered with CGTU officials that they were expected to set up a movement of the unemployed in line with ECCI perspectives.

Unemployment posed several problems. First, Desurmont observed that unemployment might depress the industrial struggle. This could be prevented, he argued, if the struggles of the unemployed were linked to the factories. In addition, a dramatic rise in working-class racism coincided with massive job losses. On 24 October the political bureau invited Henry, an immigrant, to make his assessment of the situation. He suggested that continuing immigration and alarming anti-foreign agitation were even spreading xenophobia among party members and trade unionists. Five weeks later, discussion turned once again to unemployment and immigration. Frachon noted anti-foreigner and anti-Semitic campaigns in the rival Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) and that even CGTU stone cutters were arguing in favour of repatriation.

By the time of the second international day of struggle against unemployment, held on 25 February 1931, unemployment had in fact begun to rise in France. The communists had redoubled their efforts to establish a movement of the unemployed with the slogan ‘no place in which there is unemployment is to be  without its unemployed committee on 25 February’. In an effort to launch a Parisian movement of the unemployed, the PCF mounted its ‘January–February’ campaign. L’Humanité (the PCF newspaper) advertised meetings for the unemployed, for 15 January. Whether owing to poor organization, or the wildly unrealistic demand for unemployed benefits to be raised to nearly three times their existing levels, the unemployed did not take these meetings seriously. Attendance was derisory: twenty people turned up in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, twelve in the 11th, while the meeting in Bagnolet was abandoned due to lack of interest.

At the beginning of February, a new body, Le Comité Central des Chômeurs de la Région Parisienne (Central Committee of the Unemployed of the Paris Region, or CCC), organized a well-attended public meeting (1,000 according to the organizers and 700 according to police figures). Arrachart, from the building workers’ section of the CGTU, was the main speaker. It was the first sign that the Parisian movement could mobilize large numbers. With the exception of a meeting of a hundred in Boulogne-Billancourt and two meetings of several hundred people in Saint-Denis, meetings organized by the local Comité des Chômeurs (Committee of the Unemployed, or CdC) had generally been small, usually mustering no more than between twelve and twenty-five persons. The Comintern’s international day of action against unemployment on 25 February 1931 was to be the climax of the January–February campaign. The CCC met on 5, 7 and 11 February to discuss and organize it. Committee members noted the deep scepticism of militants about the event. On 11 February, Monceaux, who chaired the CCC, argued against a mass demonstration. It was not until 24 February that the CCC was definitively won around to the idea of a demonstration outside the Chamber of Deputies on 25 February.

For almost a month, L’Humanité and La Vie Ouvrière (the newspaper of the CGTU) campaigned for demonstrations on 25 February. Other papers, notably Le Figaro and L’Ami du Peuple, created an alarmist climate anticipating a revolutionary day of action. On the day itself, as the departmental police of the Seine reported, the communists were foiled at every assembly point. The report continued: 

‘Order was maintained; the physiognomy of the street was not changed at any time; transport functioned normally; the freedom to work was assured. Nowhere was there a demonstration.’ 

In different parts of the Parisian region, repression took its toll. There were seven arrests as militants addressed the Gnôme and Rhône workers at their factory gates. At Citroen and Renault plants, four activists fled from security guards; two were later apprehended. At the cardboard factory of Delaunay-Belleville, Genovesi, the deputy mayor, was arrested for inviting the workers to a meeting. Likewise, mayor Richard and councillor Demanger were arrested for addressing the workers of Pierrefitte. Only fifty unemployed went to the mairie of Montreuil, but three meetings did take place: 800 attended in Boulogne, 430 at the rue de Clisson in the 13th arrondissement, and 350 at La Bellevilloise (the communist co-operative store, rue Boyer). After the meeting at La Bellevilloise fifty people began to sing the Internationale; even this small act of defiance led the police to disperse the crowd. At 9 p.m. in Aubervilliers, the police arrested eleven demonstrators when a group of a hundred began to sing the Internationale near the mairie. In all, over the course of the day of action and the previous evening, 188 arrests were made, twenty-one of them involving foreigners who were likely to be deported.

Afterwards, the CCC delegate meeting blamed the police, the unemployed, the CdCs and the CCC itself for the failure of the journée. The Bobigny delegate criticized the unemployed from his area for not responding to the call of Clammaus, the communist mayor who had done so much for them. The SaintOuen representative believed that the débacle stemmed from the arrests of activists, but another said it was the nonchalance of the CCC and the CdCs that was responsible for the poor results. At the following meeting of the CCC, a pessimistic Monceaux, who was the chair and leading figure of this body, complained about apathy, noting that there was almost complete inactivity amongst the unemployed. Activists were aware of the failure of the day of action and that the CdCs were simply not large enough to mount an effective demonstration in the face of police repression. However, the Confederal Bureau of the CGTU reacted to the outcome in a different manner. It demonstrated deep dissatisfaction with the CCC and appointed Lucien Montjauvis to rectify the situation. 

Despite the best efforts of activists, the level of unemployment was by no means comparable with the situation elsewhere in Europe and the day’s agitation had proved disappointing. Le Populaire, the SFIO paper, described the day as ‘a miserable failure’. International Press Correspondance (Inprekorr, the bulletin of the Comintern) admitted the frailty of the unemployed committees, which were geared to solidarity rather than struggle. The PCF and CGTU were called upon to ‘liquidate these shortcomings without fail, and to ensure better contact’ between the unemployed and factory workers.”