Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
Fellow Travellers examines the shifting practices and strategies adopted by Communist militants as they sought to build and maintain support on the railways. In a period in which the Communist party struggled to establish a foothold in many French workplaces, activists on the railways bucked the trend and set down deep and lasting roots of support. They maintained this support even through the sectarian period of the Comintern’s shift to class against class, deepening their participation within railway industrial relations and gaining the experience of engagement with managers and state officials upon which they would build during the years of the Popular Front. Here France’s railway employees joined alongside their fellow workers in shaping a new social contract for workers, extending the principle of democratic representation into the workplace. While the Popular Front experiment proved shortlived, its influence was long lasting. In the post Liberation period, the key tenets of the Popular Front experience re-emerged within the nationalised SNCF, shaping the particular character of railway industrial relations – the peculiar mix of collaboration and hostile confrontation between management and workforce that continues to make the French railways one of the most contested sectors of the modern French economy.
Trade ReviewReviews 'A thoroughly researched and original study that makes a valuable contribution on an important and under-researched subject.'
Professor David Howell, University of York
'Thomas Beaumont’s meticulous new book... not only stands as the first monograph-length study of communist railway trade unionism, but also offers a complex and nuanced portrait of interwar French communism more broadly... [Fellow Travellers] deserves to be read widely by historians of France, labour, and the left alike.'Robert W. Lewis,
Labour'
Fellow Travellers is a clearly written and well-researched book. Beaumont has consulted government, police, PCF, and union records both to fill a significant gap in our knowledge of the French trade union movement and French Communism and to provide a sophisticated analysis of the culture of railway trade unionism.'
Matt Perry,
Labour History ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1: Railway Workers at WarChapter 2: Railway Workers and the ‘Après Guerre’Chapter 3: Railway Workers and the Communist ChoiceChapter 4: StabilisationChapter 5: International ConnectionsChapter 6: ‘Hostile Participants’: Communists and Railway Industrial Relations in the Class against Class era, 1928-1934Chapter 7: Railway Workers and the Popular Front: Victory to Defeat, 1936-1939ConclusionBibliography
