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Yearning to Labor
Youth, Unemployment, and Social Destiny in Urban France
By John P. Murphy UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9497-4
CHAPTER 1
On Edge
(Un)Employment and the Bad Reputation of Limoges's Outer City
"What," the bank employee asked me, "could an American possibly be doing in an as out-of-the-way place as Limoges?" I had arrived in the city the previous evening and was eager to get down to business, but I had a number of practical concerns to attend to first, including opening a bank account. When I explained to the woman who sat down to help me that I would be conducting research in the city's outlying housing projects, her expression turned grave. "Don't go into those neighborhoods," she whispered. "They're full of Muslims, and they don't like Americans." According to her, four years earlier, on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when word of the terrorist attacks in the United States had reached Limoges, residents of the housing projects descended into the streets of their neighborhoods. Car horns rang out in celebration, and cries of joy filled the air. This "appalling clamor," the bank employee told me, was heard all the way in the city center.
A few days later I had lunch with Christophe in the pleasant courtyard behind the medieval timbered building where he lives, just steps from the Cathedral of St. Étienne, a landmark of Limoges's city center. A teacher at a vocational high school, Christophe is well versed in the problems facing youth as they transition between school and work life. As we discussed ways of making contact with potential research subjects, I mentioned my recent visit to the public housing office, where I had been told that long waiting lists would prevent me from renting an apartment in the outer city. "It's probably for the best," Christophe said with a shrug. "No one would have talked to you anyway. People in the housing projects keep to themselves. There's no sense of community. Besides," he continued, "there's a lot of gang violence. It's better you steer clear of those neighborhoods."
Soon after my discussion with Christophe, I met with Louise in her city-center office. A municipal official who directs various community service and outreach initiatives, she was interested in my project for the practical insights she thought it might provide the city. She was careful, though, not to sugarcoat what she expected my experience in the housing projects to be like. "You're in for a difficult year, I'm afraid," she told me. "The housing projects are not a pleasant place. So many of the buildings are run down, there's trash everywhere, and no one seems to care. To be sure, budgets have been cut in recent years, but the city can only do so much. Now more than ever, we need residents to take on their share of communal responsibility. They need to be active participants in turning their situation around."
Commentary like this is not surprising in France. Since the early 1980s, when riots erupted on the outskirts of Lyon, the banlieue, or outer city, has been the focus of intense, if intermittent, media attention. It has also figured prominently, mostly in a negative light, in a number of popular feature films, including the 1995 blockbuster La Haine. One result is that today the word banlieue evokes for many French people all sorts of fears and anxieties about an unraveling of the social fabric, from a breakdown of cultural consensus, to uncontrollable drug and alcohol abuse, to rampant youth violence, to an overall lack of sociability and collective responsibility.
In this chapter I trace the development of Limoges's outer city, focusing not only on the physical construction of these neighborhoods but also the ideas associated with them — ideas that have led many in Limoges to be "on edge." The long-standing bad reputation of these areas, I argue, belies an important shift: whereas in the past outer-city residents were viewed as potentially dangerous because of their collective, working-class consciousness and proclivity for group militancy, today's outer-city inhabitants — especially young people — are feared for their perceived individualism and cultural isolationism. This discontinuity, I maintain, maps onto transformations in the employment landscape, especially the end of full employment and the spectacular rise in short-term work contracts, particularly among the youngest and the least qualified. Feared by many, today's unemployed outer-city youth are viewed as particularly visible representatives of what some are calling "new dangerous classes."
Workers Rising
By some accounts an urban center and by others a provincial backwoods, Limoges is known for many things, not least of which the fine china that bears the city's name. But what is perhaps one of Limoges's most defining characteristics is its deep-rooted leftist tradition, evident even to casual observers of the city by its many street names paying homage to heroes of the French left. Although a relatively understudied region of France, a number of scholars — notably, American historian John Merriman and French historian Alain Corbin — have produced works examining the city and surrounding countryside. What, they have asked, accounts for the precocious development of leftist politics in this remote part of France? Why did Limoges become "the Red City," France's "First Socialist City"? The answer, these authors suggest, lies in part in patterns of industrialization and urbanization that were specific to Limoges.
Understanding Limoges requires situating the city's economic development in relation to more general trends in France. Most historians agree that a working-class consciousness emerged in France around the middle of the nineteenth century, when artisans, exposed to the developing logics of capitalism, began to understand themselves as exploited. In pre-revolutionary times, artisans were a driving force of the French economy, producing everything from clothing and furniture to farm tools and weaponry. Each craft had its own guild, and each guild had its own internal hierarchy, with highly codified rules pertaining to recruitment, retention, and promotion. Revolutionary legislators initiated important economic change in this regard. Viewing guilds as a vestige of ancien régime privilege, they abolished them, a move resulting in a flood of newcomers into the trades. No longer protected by guilds, artisans were forced to accept piecework at rates the new market could support, which were often below those they had been able to command before the Revolution. Historical research suggests that artisans thus began to identify their situation with that of less skilled workers, whom they mobilized in part through the creation of mutual-aid societies (Sewell 1986). These voluntary clubs provided social and economic assistance to their members, especially during times of unemployment. At first tied to particular crafts, these mutual-aid societies eventually paved the way for organizations that stretched across trades. The resulting "confraternity of proletarians," William Sewell (1980, 211) has suggested, climaxed in the 1848 Revolution in Paris, when workers demanded not only the right to assistance but also "the right to work."
Given this record, historians tend to contrast the French context with that of England. Whereas England's economy was mostly industrial by 1850, France remained a predominantly agricultural and rural society well into the twentieth century. In France, organizational change, far more than technological innovation and development, appears to have been responsible for the emergence of a working-class consciousness.
As Merriman has shown, Limoges did not entirely follow this pattern. First, the group responsible for organizing workers was not strictly speaking made up of artisans, although its members, the artistes en porcelaine (decorators who hand-painted intricate patterns on the china) shared "the same pride of craft and sense of dignity" (1985, 105). Second, in nineteenth-century Limoges, technological innovation and concentration played an important role. Indeed, "large-scale industry in Limoges," writes Merriman, "manifested some of the features of the English model of large-scale industrialization" (105).
Production of porcelain in Limoges began toward the end of the eighteenth century, after kaolin, the fine white clay that constitutes its principal ingredient, was discovered near the town of Saint-Yrieix, some thirty kilometers southwest of the city. By 1819, four porcelain factories had been established in Limoges (Merriman 1985, 28). This figure rose to seven in 1828, then to twenty-seven in 1861 (84). Although by century's end only an additional seven factories had been built, the number of workers employed in the porcelain industry had increased dramatically. Whereas in 1892 there were just over five thousand porcelain workers in Limoges, by 1905 this number had jumped to nearly thirteen thousand. Some 40 percent of the city's overall workforce was directly engaged in porcelain production at the beginning of the twentieth century. The four largest companies, including the one bearing the name of its American industrialist founder, Haviland, turned out half of all production in Limoges (167).
Technological advances, Merriman contends, drove this rapid development and concentration. The arrival of the railroad in the city in 1856 brought with it coal, which largely replaced timber as a source of fuel for the porcelain kilns. At the same time, factory owners were devising ways to streamline production and reduce dependency on labor. These included larger kilns (made possible in part by the increased heat generated from coal), new heating methods, the introduction of presses to mass-produce flat pieces, and the mechanical production of molds for sculpted pieces (Merriman 1985, 168–69). All of these innovations resulted in reduced labor costs. Consider, for example, a machine to crush kaolin, which was introduced around 1875. Not only did this invention generate a more uniform paste that was less likely to break during firing; it also replaced the workers who had previously performed the same task, albeit less efficiently, using their wooden shoes (169).
Of all the changes to the porcelain industry, those in the area of decoration, Merriman contends, had the most far-reaching effects. Porcelain production involved a number of steps, from the extraction of kaolin in nearby quarries to the preparation of this substance for shaping on pottery wheels or in molds to baking, enameling, and then finally, for some pieces, decoration. At each stage, the skill of the workers increased. Thus, the artistes en porcelaine occupied something of a privileged position. "Dignified, literate, prosperous, and relatively independent, they were as close to an 'aristocracy of labor' as existed in Limoges" (Merriman 1985, 29). Unlike most porcelain workers, artistes en porcelaine often labored at home or in separate workshops, and their efforts were (relatively speaking) well rewarded. As tastes shifted during the nineteenth century away from plain white porcelain toward more ornate pieces, Limoges's industrialists sought ways to cut the high costs associated with decoration. David Haviland proposed, as a first step, combining the operations of production and decoration under one roof (81). However, the most significant innovation involved the development and perfection of decoration plates by impression and chromolithography, which, by the end of the 1880s, had largely replaced hand painting. Although at century's end a much smaller number of artistes en porcelaine continued to find work painting the edges of plates with gold, touching up pieces, or embellishing special orders, female workers called décalqueuses accomplished the lion's share of decorating by applying mass-produced decals to the porcelain. Even though they turned out finished pieces at a much higher rate than previously possible when the painting was done by hand, they were paid far less, earning at best one-fourth of what an artiste en porcelaine had been able to command (168).
Alongside these technological innovations, employers increasingly sought ways to control or discipline workers. In this regard, Merriman notes that for most observers one of the most striking features of the new Haviland factory, which by the mid-1860s had become the largest single producer of porcelain in all of France, was the imposing clock over the main entrance. Although admired by visitors to the city, this "handsome Wagner," as one guidebook described the device, served more than an aesthetic role; it "regulated the arrivals and departures of the Haviland workers" (Merriman 1985, 81). Limoges's other porcelain manufacturers, Merriman explains, soon followed Haviland's lead, imposing similar measures of control.
In the factories, working conditions were atrocious, both from the stifling heat generated by the enormous kilns and the noxious fumes that permeated the air in the decoration sections. Workers experienced much higher than normal rates of illness, such as chronic bronchitis and tuberculosis, which could be directly linked to these conditions. Indirectly, alcoholism was rampant (Merriman 1985, 170).
Against this backdrop of declining working conditions, "the foreman," writes Merriman, "became a symbol of capitalism" (1985, 170). Responsible for enforcing the rules set in place by the Union des fabricants, the trade organization established by porcelain manufacturers, foremen were often depicted by workers as cruel, denying them permission to leave the factory to get fresh air or to attend to personal matters, such as caring for sick children. Such was their understanding of being held captive during their long shifts that some workers described themselves as "convicts," the foremen as "guards," and the factories as "prisons" (171). This understanding, Merriman argues, generated resentment, which in turn provided fertile ground for revolt. When in 1864 the French government legalized strikes, porcelain workers immediately struck, followed by workers of Limoges's other major manufacturers, including the shoe industry. This cooperation across trades — a first that drew national attention — led Limoges's prefect to describe the disturbance as "a war between capital and labor" (Merriman 1985, 112). According to Merriman, spatial organization in the expanding city, particularly what he describes as "class segregation," favored such cooperative militancy.
During the nineteenth century, Limoges did not benefit from any clear urban planning. Writing about the city, Corbin contrasts the newly developed "open" and "anonymous" industrial suburbs with the densely populated "traditional" city center (1975, 83) (fig. 3). He explains that as industry developed — especially the porcelain and shoe trades — peasants from the surrounding countryside migrated to the city in search of work. For the most part, these newcomers settled in modest dwellings in the industrial faubourgs on the city's edge. These neighborhoods, Corbin notes, expanded in a haphazard fashion, often following the main arteries of circulation. He likens the result to a star, with the old city at its center, its radiating points representing the faubourgs, and vast empty spaces in between. Communal worker gardens, small farms, or swamps occupied these vacant areas (83).
Although the laboring populations of Limoges's peripheral neighborhoods may have enjoyed easier access to open space than residents of the overcrowded city center, their living conditions were far from ideal. Merriman explains that life in the new industrial suburbs was nasty, brutish, and, for many, short. Quoting one local observer, he offers the following description of the workers' quarters: "wooden houses, generally inordinately high and without proportion to their width and to the width of the streets. The alleys are somber and fetid, the narrow stairways give way underfoot; the landings are encumbered with garbage, the rooms poorly ventilated, the walls are bare or covered with old wallpaper that serves as a refuge for a variety of insects. To these powerful causes of insalubrity one must add the piling of too many people in rooms that are too small (1985, 171). Improvement was slow to reach the faubourgs. Merriman reports that for much of the second half of the nineteenth century, when other urban centers, most notably Paris under Baron Haussmann, began to modernize, Limoges's elected city government did not seriously carry out a policy of urban renewal or give much attention to either city planning or public health. Only near century's end were the sewer and water systems expanded into the faubourgs, which helped to alleviate some of the workers' discomfort (206).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yearning to Labor by John P. Murphy. Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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