The Proletarianizing of the Fonctionnaires: Civil Service Workers and the Labor Movement under the Third Republic.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, (1990). First Edition, First Printing, as stated. Octavo, blue cloth (hardcover), silver letters, x + 394 pp. Fine (As New) in a Near-Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: French civil servants, or fonctionnaires, were the first state workers in a modern industrial nation to organize, unionize, and strike. From a handful of militant teachers and postal workers grew a well-organized and powerful political force, a group with a highly developed class consciousness and a strong alliance with its blue-collar counterparts. Judith Wishnia’s penetrating study covers the period from 1884, when blue-collar workers in France were first permitted to unionize, to 1940, when the Third Republic collapsed. Her work focuses on lower-level state workers -- postal service employees, teachers, clerks in the finance offices, police -- those who keep the machinery of the state operating. Wishnia stresses the foctionnaires search for a political identity and idealogy; their class through the major labor federation, the CGT; and their emergence as an important force within the CGT and in national politics. She shows that as the expansion of state employment increased routinization work and lowered wages, French fonctionnaires became more conscious of their position as hired workers, victims of exploitation by the state just as other workers were exploited by their bosses. She further shows that the political and economic events of the time -- the Great War, the inflation of the 1920s, the depression of the 1930s, and the threat of fascism -- affected the fonctionnaires political involvement. Wishnia also examines the changing role of women in the labor force. She documents the vital role women often played in the development of fonctionnaire unionism and demonstrates the existence of a more widespread and more working-class feminism that is generally recognized. Wishnia’s analysis emphasizes the important connections between experience in the workplace and broader political and economic developments in determining working class consciousness and activity. Her book makes a valuable contribution to the study of the modern working class and the relationship of the state to workers in both the public and the private sectors.