Schools and the paternalist project at Le Creusot, 1850-1914

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1993 by Donald Reid

Eugene Schneider, head of the Le Creusot metalworks, the leading metallurgical center in France, died in 1875. Three years later, residents of Le Creusot launched a campaign to erect a statue in his honor. Their effort was crowned with success. Fifteen thousand subscribers paid for a sculpture by Chapu. Ferdinand de Lesseps presided over inauguration of the statue, the occasion of an enormous celebration in the summer of 1879.(1) The impressive bronze statue was a constant presence in Le Creusotins' lives. They passed it daily; its image adorned the student notebooks used in the city's schools.(2) The statue depicted a woman of the people directing her shirtless twelve-year-old forgeworker son's attention to the elevated presence of Eugene Schneider. A turn of the century poet captured this moment:

The mother, to her son, said, showing the Creator Of the great city: here is your benefactor Let your heart, my child, full of gratitude Place all its confidence in the name Schneider Love and respect a name which should he dear to you Love and respect a name your father respects.(3)

This statue's curious substitution of Schneider for the worker father encapsulated the way in which the authority of the firm, often described in the paternal metaphor, came to stand in for that of the father.4 The statue of Eugene's successor, Henri Schneider, incorporated a similar iconography. Paid for by 25,000 subscriptions collected after his death in 1898, it was placed in front of the Hotel-Dieu he had built.(5) The statue showed the three ages of man at Le Creusot: "the child in the uniform of the Schneider schools; the worker in his work clothes, the old man wearing the cap and frock of the factory retiree."(6)

Paternalist firms establish a system of benefits and institutions which act to insulate their workforces from the labor market; they use a variety of means to control freedom of expression and organization and to substitute managerial authority for that of the family, the shopfloor, and the community.(7) These phenomena are significant, but they obscure the way in which the most developed paternalist enterprises interpret their mission not simply as the attraction and control of workers, but as promotion of a set of techniques to create employees. In this instance, the paternalist system refers primarily to the metaphor of the father as progenitor; the other aspects of paternalist practice flow from this activity. It renders "natural" the social process of the formation of labor, both in terms of skills and personal attributes and in terms of a culture which shapes the employee from childhood. In recalling Le Creusot in the early twentieth century, an engineer explained, "I have the impression that at Le Creusot you were almost born a metallurgical worker, a mechanic. This was an integral part of ourselves; it was what I call the pre-formation."(8)

The foremost paternalist firm in nineteenth-century France was unquestionably the Le Creusot metalworks owned by the Schneider family. The network of social institutions established for workers at Le Creusot was as famous as the steam engines and armaments produced in its factories. Louis Reybaud wrote during the Second Empire, "the town and the factory are two sisters which have grown up under the same tutelage"(9); Victor Turgan described Le Creusot at the time as "paternally governed by the mayor who was also the factory director."(10) This insular setup in turn reduced state interference in the running of the community: the public prosecutor reported in 1858 that his deputy "was quite amenable to leaving repression of serious crimes to the paternal discipline of the managers.... The directors seek to make Le Creusot a kind of arcanum into which no outside eye can penetrate and compromise their authority as family fathers and their credit as businessmen."(11) Observers' references to a "paternal" culture mirrored the language used by the firm itself. It is impossible to comprehend fully managerial conceptions of Le Creusot culture without entering into the language of the father metaphor in which it was often articulated.

The firm actively promoted a communal life built around Schneider family celebrations: major festivities at Le Creusot coincided with events in the life of the family: births, baptisms, marriages and birthdays were occasions for dinners and public celebrations. Frequently the residents of Le Creusot offered a gift to the Schneider family which, like the statues, embodied that which the Schneiders most coveted: public confirmation of their own self-conception as the fathers of their workers.(12) The company conceived of community history in terms of father-employers past - and never more so than when the paternal order was threatened. In a notice posted during the 1899 strike, Eugene II, son of Henri and grandson of Eugene, reminded workers:

Thirty years ago, after a two-day work stoppage, the workers returned to the factory and had no reason to regret having put their faith in my grandfather and my father. Do as they did: those who take up their work will not regret having had faith in me.(13)