A Workforce Divided: Community, Labor, and the State in Saint-Nazaire's Shipbuilding Industry, 1880-1910

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2004 by John Merriman

A Workforce Divided: Community, Labor, and the State in Saint-Nazaire's Shipbuilding Industry, 1880-1910. By Leslie A. Schuster (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002. x plus 233 pp. $64.95).

Leslie Schuster's study of the ship-building port of Saint-Nazaire, 1880-1910, is something of a throw-back to a spate of labor-history books published on individual cities and towns during the 1970s and 1980s, challenging the applicability of the conclusions of some of them to her case study. Saint-Nazaire is interesting because "state intervention over a thirty-year period directed the pace and progress of the industry and influenced the form of labor relations," (p. 3) contributing to booms and busts in the Breton town, bringing industrial and urban growth, but also chronic uncertainty. She demonstrates with clarity the impact of critical legislation of 1881 and 1893 (and subsequent legislation as well) on shipbuilding and on that in Saint-Nazaire in particular. Schuster is informed by relevant literature to her study, a list that includes work in British and U.S. labor history. Her descriptions of ship production in the Loire and Penhouet yards, which mixed artisanal and "industrial" work and brought new types of workers to the docks with the shift from wood and then iron to steel, are particularly well done, indeed frequently fascinating. She insists on telling differences between shipbuilding and other industries, for example the less imposing role of machinery in an industry basically immune to standardization and of foremen on the pace of production, leaving skilled workers with considerable control over their work. Schuster thus contrasts the experience of Nazaire during the period in question with accounts of large-scale industrialization that "included a sudden and thorough assault on the prerogatives of the skilled, promoting the emergence of a political consciousness among these workers that then gave rise to labor organization and strikes" (p. 2). Comparisons between French and British shipbuilding are very helpful: she notes that during the Crimean War, Napoleon III was forced to charter British ships to carry French troops. She concludes that "From 1880 to the Great War, France's shipbuilding industry remained costly, profoundly underutilized, and unable to compete with the quality and price of foreign yards" (p. 67).

Schuster's research in the Archives Nationales and the Archives Departementales de la Loire-Atlantique, along with useful stops in the Archives Municipales, was thorough. She mined a variety of printed primary sources (particularly informative on the development of ship-building) and newspapers, as well. (It would have been interesting to see if a reconnaissance militaire could not have been found in the Archives du Ministere de la Guerre at Vincennes, which might have added another fascinating description of Saint-Nazaire when it was still virtually a village of about 1,000 inhabitants in the 1840s.)

Leslie Schuster knows Saint-Nazaire well. Yet, at least in the view of this reader, she is unable, despite the richness of her archival sources, to bring the town and its workers to life. There is a good deal of theoretical discussion of community, but perhaps not enough about neighborhood and la vie quotidienne in Saint-Nazaire. Seven very nice illustrations, taken from cartes postales anciennes, are not enough. The lack of a map is distressing.

There are also several odd moments. Discussing the concomitants of "community," Schuster quotes (p. 116) P.M. Jones' study of neighborhoods in seventeenth-century Paris. Peter Jones is a fine historian, worth citing, but he does not work on Paris, and the book from which the author quotes is about the Lower Massif Central in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as she later on correctly notes). On the same page, she cites David Garrioch's study of "fifteenth-century Paris." The book she probably has in mind by Garrioch is about eighteenth-century Paris (although she may be thinking of Bronislaw Geremek's Les Marginaux parisiens aux XIVe et XVe siecles [1976]). There are accents missing here and there, which is not the worst thing in the world, and minor mistakes such as Haut(sic)-Vienne.

Far more important, Schuster succeeds nicely in describing and analyzing the growth of shipbuilding in Saint-Nazaire and the expansion of its dock facilities; and the complexity of its workforce, for example, the pivotal role of riveters in an industry made up "primarily of skilled and broadly trained semiskilled workers who moved about in the yard with a great measure of autonomy" (p. 4). Schuster provides excellent examples of the ways in which shipbuilders could turn groups of workers against other groups, on significant occasions undermining solidarities and a sense of community. She shows how such shipyard factors as periodic unemployment, the physical structure of the yards themselves, and a variety of systems of compensation (including piece rates and bonuses) undercut workplace solidarities. A major contribution of the study is its demonstration of the importance of competing identities among the ship-workers of Saint-Nazaire. The most interesting chapter (number 4) contrasts the Brierons of the Briere, peasant-workers (indeed many were landowners and producers) with traditions of autonomy based on collective management of the marshland, with the more "urban-based shipyard workers," both groups largely maintaining separate identities. This is good stuff indeed, helping us understand why no cohesive "working class" emerged in Saint-Nazaire and why socialists and union organizers had very limited, uneven success in the shipbuilding town, despite periodic strikes, here reflecting the primacy of local conditions.