Bourse du Travail
With the tremendous growth of industrial capitalism in the last twenty years of the 19th century and the continued migration of workers to cities, the traditional system of meeting places for those seeking work was overtaxed.
[1] The Republican government of Gambetta relied upon the support of working class voters, and so helped create the first Bourses du Travail under the control of newly legalised labour unions.
While there was no legal obligation for the state or the municipality to put in place these buildings, their construction helped both the workers' movement and surveillance of its activities.
Business interests and the police saw the formalisation of Bourses du Travail as a way to channel the labour movement away from revolutionary change or to keep an eye on those who promoted it.
The ideology behind the explosion in Bourses du Travail, popularized by revolutionary syndicalists like Fernand Pelloutier, intended to create in them the key organizational component of radical economic transformation.
These institutions were central to the notion of Revolutionary Syndicalism which dominated the Confédération Générale du Travail, France's largest labor federation in the first twenty years on the 20th century.
Bourses du Travail, like civil marriage or lay funerals, filled a communal role once played by local parishes.
In February 1851 François Joseph Ducoux submitted a bill to the Legislative Assembly that proposed to establish a state-run Labour Exchange in Paris.
The French Revolutionary tradition was evolving into the economic sphere of union organising, rather than the seizure of power (exemplified by Auguste Blanqui).
[9] Many of the leaders of the Bourse du Travail went on to lead the CGT, and the FBT was a co-equal partner with individual unions in the CGTs founding.
It became, like much of the French left, dominated by the Communists ideological vision, which saw the loose federalism of Revolutionary Syndicalism as a reason for the failure of the 1918-1919 strike wave.
From here on, the CGT followed a British and American model of local trade specific unions, federated into a single national structure.
[12] A split, eventually into three federations, created a French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO)-dominated CGT, the United General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail - unitaire or CGTU), where communists cohabited with anarchists and revolutionary trade unionists, and the Revolutionary Trade Unionist General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail - syndicaliste révolutionnaire or CGTSR) in 1923 when the communists gained control of the CGTU.
The Bourses du Travail survived, often as a single organisation union hall, while the history of splits in the French labour movement saw the buildings pass from one hand to another, revert to municipalities, or disappear entirely.
Anarchists of many stripes point to the Bourse du Travail as an example of a directly democratic, small scale federalist institutional structure.
[16] The rulers of Belgian Congo created a Bourse du travail at Katanga in 1910 as a state controlled hiring hall, in an attempt to lure labor to areas of planned industrial (mostly mining) concentration.
Attempts by local officials to recast this cynically created employment agency into a more worker run operation suggest that the idea of a Bourse du travail never lost its syndicalist connotations.
