FRANCE: On Strike

Two million French government employees walked off their jobs last week in a 24-hour strike that left the nation in a state of near paralysis. Trains stopped, telephones went dead, gas and electricity flickered. State banks stopped payments, mail went undelivered, state-employed gravediggers refused to bury the dead.

In all the bigger cities, garbage piled high in the streets. Paris had neither subways nor bus lines, and at its railroad terminals, thousands of tourists, including many Americans, sat on their suitcases and fumed. “I’m sick to death of these unstable countries,” said an angry Englishwoman. “From now on I will never leave British soil.”

On the French frontiers, customs officers waved motorists past without checking passports or luggage. In the coal fields, 173,000 miners downed tools. Southwestern winegrowers seized the opportunity to demonstrate against the government’s refusal to buy up surplus wine. Led by their local mayors, 100,000 farmers blocked the highways with wine barrels, while priests tolled the church bells in ecclesiastical approval. There had been nothing quite like it since the Popular Front days of 1936.

Beginning in Bordeaux. The strike began in Bordeaux among the poorly paid postal workers. Rumor gave it wings. French workers, squeezed in the economic scissors of higher prices and stationary wages, worried that the new Premier, Joseph Laniel, was planning to economize at their expense. They got their blow in first and walked off the job.

From the Socialist Force Ouvrière unions, the call went out for a general stoppage. Catholic unions joined in; so did the Communists. After 24 hours, most of the Socialist and Catholic unionists began trooping back to work. Postal workers stayed out; so did the Communists, hoping to use the strike to bring down the government. This week, when Laniel’s reforms were finally announced, the Reds ordered 270,000 Communist railroad men (more than half the total force) to stop the trains again. In some provincial towns, police and soldiers pitched in to sort the mail and started makeshift deliveries, but in Paris the mail sacks mounted higher and higher.

“Popular Front?” Actually, Laniel’s reforms were more feared than fearsome. Pensions would be lowered, rents slightly raised, the swollen French bureaucracy would be lightened by the dismissal of 4,000 temporary clerks. These were the kinds of cuts a rightist government could be expected to make, but they did not get to the heart of the ailing French economy (see below). They merely convinced the workers that the cabinet intended an assault on the French welfare state.

One result was a slow coming together of both big workers’ parties—Socialists and Communists—at least on the bread & butter issue. The Reds talked boldly of a new “popular front” which would force the vacationing National Assembly to reconvene, and though the Socialist leaders hung back, many of their rank & file were tempted. France’s bristling barriers between left and right were once again hardening.