Workers and community: the case of the peat-cutters and the shipbuilding industry in Saint-Nazaire, 1881-1910.

In February 1901 in the French town of Saint-Nazaire, a port and shipbuilding center in western Brittany, the Penhouet shipyard reinstated its spring schedule of lengthened work days and an extended midday break of one and a half hours. About one-third of the workforce, all of them skilled shipwrights who resided in the nearby rural community of Saint-Joachim, immediately went on strike to keep the shorter midday break. The remaining workers, however, residents of Saint-Nazaire's working-class quartiers, refused to sanction this strike and even lobbied management to institute the extended lunch period. The local press was quick to note that the strike, which was "not about a salary increase," had a "very different character" from many previous shipbuilding strikes.(1) Indeed, this strike illustrates how loyalties and affiliations shaped by community and culture could function at the workplace to counteract workshop identities and issues. By examining the origins and operation of these associations within the shipbuilding workforce, this paper underscores the importance of community and culture in shaping workers' identities and demonstrates how these issues played a significant part in both fostering and limiting labor solidarity and labor conflict. The findings will suggest how the study of residential settlement patterns, diverse cultures, community affiliations, and the role of part-time occupations are all issues important in understanding labor history in the nineteenth century, as in the present.

Historians have repeatedly warned against characterizing the development of the European working-class as an identical, linear process that began with the first signs of factory smoke and culminated in the formation of an urbanized, industrial workforce that held similar political objectives and shop floor agendas. They have questioned the conceptualization of industrialization as an inexorable process that slowly yet steadily built an urban industrial workforce while dissolving the cultural patterns and kinship ties that had defined traditional rural communities. Such a view assumes that urban residential patterns and industrial work settings quickly replaced both family networks and rural culture in determining occupation, household organization, politics, and social relations among the uprooted. It further supposes the working class somehow responded to urban settlement and work by sharing a particular set of dispositions about their world and then acted collectively to alter their place within society. Recent research has challenged these rigid models from several angles and historians now recognize that the process of industrial transformation did not always proletarianize workers nor create a homogeneous working class with a unified labor agenda. Focusing on the social and cultural context of the transition to industrial work, some historians have demonstrated that many communities of peasants newly dependent on industrial wages created alternatives to both urbanization and proletarianization.(2) Moreover, we might add that industrialization also failed to create a single political product, that is, a labor agenda held in common by all workers.(3) As Jean Quataert has noted, proletarianization was not "the final social product" of industrialization for all workers. Instead, the "outcomes" of the transition to industrial work and urban settlement for workers were varied and diverse.(4)

Yet other historians have suggested that the diversity of these outcomes can best be understood by shifting from a concentration on workplace struggles to the broader identities arising from community affiliation and association. Many historians of American and European labor have begun to investigate workers' communities, demonstrating that the strategies and identities embedded in residential communities, shared consumer concerns, and cultural associations are essential components in workers' adaptation and activity. In this vein, James Cronin argues for the salience of settlement patterns and neighborhood social institutions in the urban revolts immediately following World War I. In his study of the working-class suburbs of Paris in the twentieth century, Tyler Stovall demonstrates that consumer and community concerns replaced workshop issues as the source of politicization and organization.(5)

This study focuses on the adaptation of worker-peasants to shipbuilding employment in Saint-Nazaire after 1881. It demonstrates that the rural community shaped the culture and identity of the worker-peasants and illustrates how these workers drew on their resources to mix industrial work with agricultural production. It suggests that workers' responses to industrial issues may not have signified a sharp break with past traditions and forms of work but in fact reflect important continuities. In pursuing this avenue, the study attempts to deepen our understanding of the shifting meaning and activity of the term community.

The Peat-Cutters of La Grande Briere

The shipbuilding industry in Saint-Nazaire presents an excellent case study for the issue of community and class formation because here the labor force came to industrial work from two distinct communities. A small port town of 800 in 1840, Saint-Nazaire suddenly became an industrial city in 1881 with the installation of two large shipbuilding yards that employed 4,000 workers. Saint-Nazaire's two shipbuilding yards, the Loire and Penhouet, drew most of their unskilled workers from Saint-Nazaire's new residential quartiers but found skilled workers in the rural communities just to the north of Saint-Nazaire, in the marshland known as La Grande Briere. In 1911 the two yards employed 61% of male heads of household in Saint-Nazaire and 75% in Saint-Joachim, the largest of the seventeen Briere communes.(6) Although these two groups began work in the yards at the same time, they did not become an homogeneous workforce with a common response to the problems and hazards of industrial employment. Instead, the differences in resources, in skills, and, ultimately, in their sense of class identification, separated these communities and dictated their different dispositions to workshop issues. Saint-Nazaire's urban workforce embraced mostly unskilled laborers who had migrated from neighboring departements only recently in search of employment in shipbuilding. Their position as wage laborers lacking alternate opportunities shaped their response to urban settlement and shop floor issues. Dependent on industrial wages, urban workers turned to unions and strikes to redress their work grievances and chose socialist councillors to represent them in city government. In contrast, while the agricultural resources and cultural traditions of the Saint-Joachim community caused them to welcome industrial employment, these factors also reduced their dependence on industry and became the source of some indifference to workshop issues. In both cases, the interaction of community resources and affiliation with work-based experiences created diverging responses to the transformations in life and work facing these communities.

In the Briere, community sentiment and identification derived from the specific problems facing marshland residents, and can be measured in their struggles to preserve their traditions and their physical community. While the meaning and significance of community affiliation for both urban and rural inhabitants have yet to be fully investigated by historians, many have looked to the presence of cultural associations and fraternal organizations as one means of measuring community sentiment. Briere villages supported a variety of associations and activities--church organizations, social groups, and sports clubs, as well as annual summer festivals--but their popularity alone is insufficient to explain the source and extent of community affiliation. Patterns of life and work particular to the marshland community, specifically the limitations of marshland agricultural production, and a unique system of land distribution and management, afforded residents with priorities and assets, that is, a community identity, vastly different from that of urban workers and of other communities of peasants. Those resources shaped their adaptation to industrial employment.

The most important defining feature of La Grande Briere was the swampland that covered almost 8,000 of its 20,000 hectares, greatly restricting the land available for settlement and cultivation.(7) In fact, the French government had granted the seventeen Briere communes title to La Grande Briere in 1461 in part because the region was considered without value.(8) Boats and waterways dominated life in the marshland for many of the marshland's seventeen communes, and almost year-round isolation, complete during the winter months when flooding cut off access to nearby villages, forced Briere families to produce most of their own food and fuel and to engage in a variety of economic pursuits. Each Brieron family survived on a mix of agricultural and artisanal activities fashioned by the resources available in their section of the marshland.(9)

Agriculture sustained their community. Residents fished and cultivated such marsh crops as black oak trees, leeches for medicinal use, and reeds for bedding and roofing. In areas with sufficient land they also farmed and raised livestock. It was the cultivation of peat, used throughout France as low-cost heating fuel, that ranked as the Briere's principal agricultural crop; in fact, in the mid-nineteenth century the Briere produced one-fifth of the national peat harvest.(10) Like other marshland industries, cultivation of this crop, known as tourbage, varied from commune to commune depending on the availability of land. For the commune of Saint-Joachim, seven islands at the center of the marsh with nearly 5,000 residents and, according to the Prefect in 1834, only enough arable land to feed its population for three months out of the year, the production and sale of peat constituted the "sole resource."(11) Harvest statistics clearly demonstrate the importance of this crop to the local economy. While the sixteen other Briere communes harvested an average of 8,700 cubic meters of peat each in 1840, primarily for their own heating purposes, the Saint-Joachim community harvested 50,000 cubic meters, marketing it to families from Brest to Bordeaux and bartering it for foodstuffs at local markets.(12) A government official underscored the significance of peat production for the Saint-Joachim economy in the 1830s; by his account 95% of the 300,000 peat bricks harvested annually by each family was sold in regional markets as heating fuel.(13) Not surprisingly then, Saint-Joachim residents faced the short harvest season with the dedication due their primary crop; villages emptied at harvest time as men, women, and young children invaded the marshland with their cutting tools to extract and dry the crop whose sale would sustain them for another year.(14)

Unlike nearly all other rural villages in France, subject first to the aristocracy and after the Revolution to an increasingly intrusive and centralized state, the Brierons had longstanding traditions of both self-government and self-sufficiency. Egalitarian land redistribution and representative governance distinguished this community. Here geology contributed to an unusual social order. With undisputed ownership of the marshland and its islands but little arable land, the communes instituted a system of land division that guaranteed residents equal access to the limited resources. Each family was provided with a small plot of arable land adjacent to their home while the largest parcels were maintained undivided for use by the whole commune, typically for livestock but in areas with farm land, for cultivation also. The marsh itself was also held collectively and residents shared the right to cultivate its products as they wished. Brierons living in villages with less arable land and, therefore, with smaller individual and collective plots, such as the islands constituting Saint-Joachim, found compensation and survival in the depth of the marsh and the richness of its agriculture.(15) In this way, land distribution assured all Brieron families sufficient economic resources. In 1838, in response to mounting discord between the communes over land use, the Brierons institutionalized this system of self-management, electing a representative Syndicat to regulate most aspects of life, work, and property in the Briere. The Syndicat Intercommunal de la Grande-Briere, which to this day remains the primary governing body for the marshland, presided over hunting and pasture rights, the canal system and the cultivation, sale, and taxation of all marshland products.(16) Since its establishment the Syndicat spent most of its energies adjudicating disputes between residents of Saint-Joachim and the other communes over whether to drain and divide or to maintain the communally held marshland. But disharmony and conflict aside, the system of self-management and habits of independence led one contemporary to characterize the Briere as a "petite republique."(17)

The Saint-Joachim community's attachment to and dependence on the land are amply illustrated by bitter struggles between it and other Briere communes over the disposition of the marshland. Conflict over land usage dates at least to the 1770s when several Briere communes, beginning to regard the communally held land as an impediment to economic development, proposed dividing and draining the marsh, that is, recovering the land for farming and grazing or, later in the nineteenth century, selling it as a site for local industry. For the tourbeurs, or peat-cutters, the term used to denote the Brierons from Saint-Joachim whose economic survival was contingent on this crop, drainage and division would bring economic disaster. They feared that it would not only reduce the area available to peat cultivation but force them to purchase the rights to harvest land they had long regarded as their birthright.(18) As the preservation of this community was predicated on traditional land management and unrestricted cultivation and sale of marsh agriculture, the Saint-Joachim community, outnumbered in the Syndicat, used every means available to halt the modification of land use, the regulation of production, and the imposition of new taxes. When drainage of sections of the marsh began in the 1770s, Saint-Joachim families defended their rights before the court and acted to frighten drainage workers out of the marshland.(19)

The peat-cutters' protection of cultivation rights and marshland usage emanated from a realistic reading of their precarious economic situation. Even state officials recognized that to deprive this community of access to peat would mean their "economic ruin."(20) In struggling to protect their resources, and by extension their community, the peat-cutters called on longstanding rights as property owners to unlimited production and unrestricted sale of the produce of their land. This is reflected in the battles over marshland jurisdiction and usage which continued into the nineteenth century. At first Saint-Joachim residents denied the jurisdiction of the Syndicat and cultivated peat without the requisite license. When the Syndicat met illegal production, or "pillage," with a one-year prohibition on cultivation, the peat-cutters concentrated on protecting other longstanding privileges: they rejected the right of the Syndicat to tax peat headed for regional markets, a provision that would have sharply reduced their income, and then challenged regulations on peat dust harvested from their island canals, claiming exclusive cultivation rights.(21) They even took their case before the Conseil d'Etat in 1836 but Louis Philippe rejected their suit and saddled them with court costs.

The peat-cutters did not shrink from utilizing extra-legal tactics to protect their industry. In 1832, in order to halt a local company from draining sections of the exterior marsh lands, 700 men and women from Saint-Joachim heaved peat into the canals to block the thoroughfares and impede incursions into the marsh by these outsiders and their equipment.(22) Saint-Joachim residents mounted their most vigorous defense of the marshland and their future production in 1834. With drainage of sections of the marsh about to begin anew, "'1,700 tourbeurs [from Saint-Joachim] armed with scythes, pitchforks . . . and other weapons'" blocked the drainage ditches and attacked the drainage workers.(23) It is likely that this incident led most Brierons to agree with local priest Pierre Blais that Saint-Joachim residents "imagine that all of the Briere belongs to them alone."(24) That year Saint-Joachim residents destroyed the roads leading into the heart of the marsh in order to prohibit Brierons from other communes, the majority of whom travelled by wagon, from entering the area to harvest and then to haul away the peat.(25) Finally, over a period of several years in the late 1860s, in protest over Syndicat policy as well as the disposition of its funds, the peat-cutters withheld tax payments. So enraged were the other communes that the Prefect considered both suspending Saint-Joachim's mayor, a supporter of this revolt, and using soldiers to collect taxes from each tax delinquent family.(26) While the Prefect condemned the peat-cutters and characterized them as "ignorant and almost savage," he did recognize, as they most certainly did, that "peat is [their] only resource."(27)

While Saint-Joachim's battle to protect their marshland from encroachment or drainage by the Syndicat proved largely successful through mid-century, a steady decline in peat demand and cultivation from 1860 eroded their agricultural economy and jeopardized longstanding patterns of life and work. National peat cultivation underwent a sharp drop beginning at mid-century; from 1857 to 1867 production shrunk by one-fourth and the downward slide continued over the next thirty years. The problem was particularly serious in the Briere. The natural shrinkage of usable marshland caused peat cultivation to plummet from an average of 106,000 tons in 1850 to just 6,000 tons ten years later.(28) Production recovered somewhat from this sudden drop but the decline presaged a future of continuously shrinking marshland and sharply reduced harvests. Reduced demand for peat intensified the crisis. Coal had begun to supplant the use of peat for home and industrial use and, according to a government report, even local consumption had become very restrained.(29) Peat production hovered below 20,000 tons through the 1870s and up until World War I residents rarely extracted more than a quarter of the 100,000 ton average of the 1850s. Similarly, production of peat dust declined 50% by the 1890s.(30)

Inevitably, the sudden loss of three-fourths of the principal crop made the peat-cutters "a poverty-stricken population" and threatened the community's survival.(31) But migration was not a consideration here. Instead, the peat-cutters sought alternative survival strategies within the marshland. While continuing to lobby against drainage and to defend their access to marshland cultivation, now more critical than ever, Saint-Joachim officials fashioned a variety of solutions to this devastating crisis from the material of their culture and community. Two social resources for the peat-cutters were the larger marshland community and the Syndicat. They turned to their neighboring communes for assistance and requested tax reductions, but Saint-Joachim's history of tax delinquency did not induce a favorable response. The municipal council also looked to add other industries to their shrinking economic quilt and reduce the "long bouts of unemployment" common to both peat-cutters and sailors. They even investigated digging new canals in their section of the marsh as one way to entice commerce and industry to the area.(32) These projects reveal that for the peat-cutters the solution to the sudden privation of their primary economic resource lay in alternate activities within the rural community, not detachment from the community. Their position as propertied, agricultural producers with resources embedded in ownership of the land not only shaped their identity but their response to the agricultural crisis. Consequently, long before shipbuilding assured employment and high wages for the male workforce, community leaders had demonstrated their determination to preserve the Saint-Joachim community and, to this end, looked to the resources of the marshland for a solution.

As the production and commerce of peat diminished and plans for new economic development came to naught, shipbuilding emerged as Saint-Joachim's largest industry. Shipbuilding had been a necessary and central activity in the Briere for generations; transportation required that each family own at least one boat, and the majority of men included shipbuilding among their skills. By the 1830s shipbuilding had become the single largest industrial trade with 175 of the community's 211 tradesmen working in small, wooden shipyards in addition to their agricultural work.(33) Declining peat harvests led more workers to shipbuilding; in 1860 the number of Saint-Joachim men seeking work as shipwrights in Saint-Nazaire's shipyards increased by 100.(34) In 1862 the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (Transat) opened the Penhouet yard at Saint-Nazaire to specialize in the repair and construction of iron ocean-going vessels. It drew on Saint-Joachim workers who were both skilled and in need of alternate sources of employment. These Briere shipwrights constituted almost half of Penhouet's 1862 workforce of 1,800. Penhouet closed in 1867, forcing Saint-Joachim shipbuilders to again investigate other economic pursuits, but the ongoing crisis in peat production brought them back to Saint-Nazaire in 1881, when generous government subsidies rejuvenated the shipbuilding industry and permitted the reopening of Penhouet and the establishment of another industrial shipyard, the Loire.(35) All told, over 900 of the 1,200 men employed by the Loire yard in 1884 came from the Briere. Penhouet employed fewer Brierons, 25% of their workforce in 1901, but these workers still constituted the largest regional group at the yard.(36)

Shipbuilding Employment

This "stampede" to the Penhouet and Loire shipyards in the 1880s meant important changes for Saint-Joachim workers and their families.(37) For them, the twelve kilometers from Saint-Joachim to Saint-Nazaire meant a long daily commute following a ten or twelve hour work day; for most, it meant lodging during the week in Mean, a village on the outskirts of Saint-Nazaire, and returning to their homes only on Saturday night. More significant, however, was the dramatic shift in occupational patterns that accompanied industrial work, a shift affecting women and children as well as male workers and best illustrated by marriage and census records.(38) In 1851, before peat cultivation was endangered, 75% of Saint-Joachim residents with occupations characterized themselves as cultivateurs. Among male heads of household, agricultural work employed 52%, ship construction 29%, and maritime work 14%. Agricultural work clearly was the economic mainstay. The younger age of those employed in shipbuilding--a full fifteen years younger than those in maritime or agricultural work--suggests that even before the shock to the peat industry and the expansion of Saint-Nazaire's yards young men preferred work in this small but growing local industry, perhaps due to the higher industrial wages. By the mid-1860s, however, when peat production had fallen to one-fifth that of a decade earlier, the element of choice had lessened and the economic logic behind work in ship construction became compelling. Propelled by the death of his father and the erosion of the marshland, Pierre Corbille, 22 year-old son of cultivatrice Marianne Thomas, worked as a shipwright to help support his widowed mother and three siblings. Two of the three sons of cultivateurs Joseph Vince and Modeste Mahe also felt that agricultural production held little promise and took work as shipwrights in the 1860s. Oldest son Joachim, who as an adolescent had worked in the marshland alongside his two siblings, now supported a wife and child on his shipbuilding wage. Brother Jean lived with their parents and sister, cultivateurs, and contributed his shipbuilding income to their support. With so many of Saint-Joachim's young men seeking economic opportunity in shipbuilding, it is not surprising that oldest daughter Angelique married a shipwright.(39)

Census figures underscore the dramatic shift in occupations for men. In 1881 95% of Saint-Joachim's male family heads described themselves as shipwrights, and in 1896, thirty years after peat production first plummeted, only four family heads, just 3% of the total, listed agriculture as their primary occupation. Industrial shipbuilding now stood as the primary occupation for Saint-Joachim men. In the four decades since 1860 the importance of shipbuilding and agriculture within this community had been reversed. Agriculture, for generations the economic backbone of this community, was now a complementary activity occupying barely 200 residents on a full-time basis.(40) But even as shipbuilding emerged as the central source of employment, with local men employed in regional yards and seeking jobs in shipyards throughout France, this work remained too erratic to forsake marshland agriculture altogether. Instead, fishing, hunting, and crop production continued as supplemental industries and, as was the case for worker-peasants in the Saxon Oberlausitz, provided an essential buffer against frequent and long bouts of unemployment.(41) In fact, the Brieron's continuous reliance on peat production led Saint-Nazaire's shipbuilders to complain bitterly in the 1860s and 1880s when these workers abandoned the yards in the fall for the three weeks of peat harvest. Although commerce in peat declined even more over successive decades, Briere shipbuilders continued to leave the yards to extract peat for home use as late as 1919.(42)

The Brierons possessed a unique advantage over most rural workers undergoing the transition to industrial employment: they were able to turn their shipbuilding experience into skilled trades greatly in demand by this newly expanded industry. Although Saint-Joachim residents had proved unable to protect themselves from declining agricultural production or entice new industry to their area, they pooled their resources to prepare workers for industrial production. Every evening in Saint-Joachim from 8 to 10 p.m. a municipal training program brought skilled shipbuilders together with potential industrial workers. There the shipbuilders taught the principles of industrial design to their neighbors, sons, and cousins, assuring that shipyard recruits began their industrial careers with all the advantages of skilled workers.(43) This protective strategy proved successful. In 1896 the vast majority of Saint-Joachim workers, 93% of male family heads employed in shipbuilding, worked as charpentiers, or skilled shipwrights, with younger workers following in their footsteps.(44) Importantly, this ensured that the Brierons would not be found among the ranks of unskilled shipyard laborers, a world of low-pay and irregular employment. This situation changed briefly in the 1890s as economic hardship, perhaps accompanying another drop in peat production, caused a rise in the number of unskilled shipbuilding workers, to 26% of Saint-Joachim's shipbuilders. Much like the unskilled in any industrialized community, these workers often came from difficult or precarious economic circumstances.(45) But it is significant, however, and even unusual, that the trend towards unskilled employment was short-lived and within fifteen years the number had declined by half. The new centrality of industrial work for this community encouraged the workforce to guarantee itself skilled, well-paid positions. The resources of the community, particularly the apprenticeship program, assured their success.

The economic crisis confronting Saint-Joachim also meant changing patterns of work for the commune's women, who had always shared in agricultural production and, like many nineteenth century rural women, had very specific agricultural duties.(46) Reduced crop production and often unstable industrial employment after 1860 made the contributions of these women even more essential to family survival while at the same time leading women to expand the range of their activities. A study of a similar rural community in Northern Italy where the men had turned to industrial employment has demonstrated that the worker-peasant economy depended on the expanded home and farming duties of the "housewife-farmer."(47) This describes the situation in Saint-Joachim. With the men occupied with industrial work and the agricultural economy shrinking, women necessarily adopted an increased variety of economic activities. Consequently they no longer described themselves to census enumerators as cultivatrice but rather identified themselves under the broad rubric of menagere, or housewife. While menagere has often indicated a restriction of women's work, in this case it signifies an expansion of women's role. A few examples may illustrate the evolution. Although Pierre Francois worked as a shipwright, irregular and seasonal employment made it necessary for his family to continue marshland cultivation. Like most local women, Pierre's wife, Rose Taconet, took on responsibility for fishing, farming, and peat cultivation, as well as expeditions to nearby communities to sell her fish. By broadening their roles to encompass a new variety of activities essential to the household, Rose and other Saint-Joachim women now best described themselves as menageres. Even women in households with few resources and ongoing dependence on the agricultural labor of all family members also utilized the term. In 1851 Jeanne Aoustin and her husband Julien Moyon supported themselves and their two-year old son, Etienne, on marshland production. Fifteen years later when the family had grown to five, the census reported Julien as the sole agricultural producer but Jeanne as a menagere. Both family size and the poor farming conditions in the marsh required Jeanne to take on new marketing duties and increase her and her adolescent children's agricultural duties. In this light, the term menagere became an appropriate description for the diversity of tasks, both in the home and fields as well as outside the community, that Jeanne Aoustin, Rose Taconet, and other Saint-Joachim women undertook to support their families. Census and marriage records underscore this striking transition in women's work patterns. Nearly all of Saint-Joachim wives, 94%, called themselves cultivatrice in 1851, but the figure fell to just 4% fifteen years later when 89% described themselves as menagere.

As Saint-Joachim's married women assumed greater responsibility for agricultural work, home work, and the marketing of crops, younger women responded to changing economic opportunities by turning to trades outside the home and marsh and adding a variety of new occupations to women's work roles. Unlike men, Saint-Joachim's women could not find employment in Saint-Nazaire. As a center for shipbuilding and ancillary metallurgy industries, Saint-Nazaire remained a single-industry town where, according to a 1905 British report on the condition of the French working class, the "employment of women in factories [was] non-existent."(48) Even normally sizeable urban activities like laundry work did not exist at Saint-Nazaire because of an insufficient water supply.(49) But work outside the home had become imperative, and by 1896 the number of Saint-Joachim's brides employed outside the home had risen to 40% from 16% in 1881. As economic necessity dictated permanent employment outside the home, Saint-Joachim's younger women sought more skilled occupations.(50) By 1896 fewer brides were working in unskilled jobs, a mere 4%, while those working as tailors, a skilled trade requiring apprenticeship, increased to 27%.(51) In 1911 the number employed at skilled occupations--tailors, seamstresses, and flower-makers--had grown to 34%.

The census records the same evolution in the employment patterns of daughters. By 1896 all employed daughters worked in trades other than agriculture, the majority as tailors or flower-makers. From the 1880s the local flower-making industry offered both high wages and stable employment and became a desired trade for Saint-Joachim women. In 1895 Julien-Henri Mahe, a local wine merchant banking on the presence of a captive female labor force, established a flower-making factory in the center of the village of Saint-Joachim, just across from the church, and ran it with the help of his nephews, the Moyon brothers or, as they were better known, Moyon-des-Fleurs. A rival shop opened in the same period and together the two employed up to 138 local women. Although Mahe struggled to mechanize his operations and intensify production, these jobs remained much-sought-after by young women because they conferred both status and high wages. Photographs of these flower-makers at work suggest another attraction of that trade; it was the only local shop that brought groups of women together under one roof, providing an opportunity to develop and maintain friendships.(52)

Although industrial employment dramatically transformed the work lives of the Brierons, the reconfiguration of the economy did not rupture longstanding social and household patterns, as can occur under the stress of migration, poverty, or industrialization. In fact, family and household patterns demonstrate that the transition to shipbuilding work actually preserved the rural community, if not traditional occupations and patterns of work, by providing an alternative to migration and dislocation. These measurements also indicate some economic improvement in Saint-Joachim after 1881. Shipbuilding work brought better employment opportunities while agriculture insulated the community from the hardships of unemployment. By this time the shift in men's occupations to shipwright had given Saint-Joachim workers employment options: many worked at the Transat's Saint-Nazaire repair yard, a small number worked in local yards, while yet others awaited the opening of Penhouet and the Loire which would soon require a workforce of nearly 4,000.

Industrial employment did not cause social disruption but instead assured the continuity and stability of household and socialization patterns in Saint-Joachim. Shipbuilding work strengthened the prominence of nuclear households as families no longer had to collect relatives under one roof for survival. Nuclear families increased from 51% of households in 1866 to 67% in 1881. Declining marriage age also suggests better conditions for many families. As shipbuilding absorbed the male workforce and as parents depended less on the wages of their offspring, the mean marrying age for both men and women fell; for men it dropped from 28 in 1881 to 25 by 1911 and for women from 25 to 23 in the same period. A valuable contrast to the impact of industrialization on these families can be found in the marriage records of the unskilled workers flocking to Saint-Nazaire's new working-class districts: in 1881 the mean marrying age of unskilled urban residents stood at 34 for men and 30 for women, 6 to 7 years later than their skilled and property-owning colleagues in the Briere. The more tenuous economic position of Saint-Nazaire's unskilled workers caused them to delay their marriages.

Patterns of family and social affiliations within Saint-Joachim also underwent little change. Traditional marriage patterns, strong family ties, and overlapping family and work associations remained in place to World War I. Although nuclear families had long dominated, Saint-Joachim families did not live in isolation from one another. On the contrary, these families are best described as "'face-to-face' communities"(53) where a "complex web" of connections and associations linked nuclear households.(54) Primarily settlements of kin, Brieron communities were a "true community of relatives, so much that neighborhood and cousinhood [were] confused."(55) The limited number of family names in these communes attests to the strength of family connections. Most households in Saint-Joachim's villages represented a connection among just six families; Moyon, Vince, Aoustin, Mahe, Ollivaud, and Halgand. Despite industrial work that took male residents outside the geographical limits of the rural community, interwoven familial and social relations continued to dominate and residents remained "confined to nearby relations for the essentials of [their] social life."(56) In fact, a "rigorous endogamy" sustained this complex network of family and social relations. Many of Saint-Joachim marriages were unions of cousins, one-third for the years 1860 to 1880, and this pattern continued unchallenged through the first thirty years of industrialization.(57) That family and social affiliations remained entwined and unaffected by the shift in occupations is further evident in the predominance of family and community members attending marriage ceremonies. In over 75% of marriages in 1881, 1896, and 1911, all four witnesses were relatives of the couple, and over 85% of these witnesses resided in the Saint-Joachim commune.

The picture was far different for Saint-Nazaire's mostly unskilled, urban-dwelling shipbuilders. Here family was much less conspicuous as only 27% of marriages saw family members fill all four witness spots. The choice of witnesses points to the adoption, following migration, of a neighborhood and residential community distinct from workplace and family ties as the basis for association and networks. When metalworker Louis-Marie Jacobert married Julie Melanie Maillot, for example, in Saint-Nazaire in June of 1896, their witnesses included the bride's brother-in-law, a sailor, and three friends from the city--a water carrier, a musician, and a manual laborer. Saint-Nazaire couples drew on contacts from the larger urban community, choosing neighbors, local merchants, and cafe owners to stand as witnesses in 55% to 70% of marriages over the thirty year period. While Saint-Nazaire marriages indicate broadening social contacts in the face of migration and industrialization, Saint-Joachim marriages highlight the stability of traditional social relations--community and kin--and the absence of workshop associations. For these shipbuilders, industrial employment did not presage new social relations and traditions but preserved the rural community and permitted the maintenance of conventional affiliations.

Saint-Joachim families faced serious challenges to their community and economy in the years after 1860. Their culture and resources--landownership, patterns of work, and habits of isolation and self-management--led them to integrate shipyard work within the pattern of rural work and life and sheltered them from the economic hardships that, for many, dictated migration and a radical restructuring of household and socialization patterns. Moreover, preservation of the rural community, landownership, and agricultural production provided the "cultural continuity," that is, the resources, essential to the adjustment to industrial employment.(58) Saint-Joachim's rural communities survived the transition to industrial work with community and family, rather than work, serving as the primary basis for affiliation and for adaptation to their new economic circumstances.

Unemployment and Strikes

Although shipbuilding expansion enlarged the workforce in Saint-Nazaire in the years after 1882, the experience of the Brierons shows that it did not create a homogeneous working class with a single political agenda. Integrating new employment opportunities into longstanding agricultural patterns allowed the Brierons to resist the pull of industrialization and an identity as wage laborers, just as the wage dependence of urban unskilled workers dictated a different identification and a different agenda. This divergence is seen most clearly in the response to unemployment. Unemployment remained endemic in the French shipbuilding industry: the highly erratic production cycle often left nearly 50% of family heads in both communities unemployed.(59) Most urban shipyard workers had few strategies to survive extended unemployment and relied on the charitable assistance of the city.(60) In the Briere layoffs did not result in social dislocation or elicit calls for aid because the majority of workers simply resumed agricultural work. Although the marsh provided less produce than it had fifty years earlier, intensified exploitation for brief periods assured that the Brierons "suffered less from these bad periods than their colleagues newly arrived" and living in Saint-Nazaire.(61) Paul Prioux, a Saint-Joachim official, explained the significance of one local resource; "[r]evenues from fishing are like the skeleton of the body; they permit [the Briere community] to await the coming of better times with the end of unemployment and prevent the migration of [shipbuilding] personnel."(62)

Unionization rates and strike demands also demonstrate the divergent interests and priorities of these two communities of workers. The city-based working class addressed their dependence on industrial wages with unionization. Worker-peasants from the Briere, however, responded to workplace concerns as peasant owners with agricultural options and little identification as industrial workers. Despite intensive organizing campaigns by the local Bourse du Travail and by Alphonse Merrheim, president of the national metalworkers union, these workers refused to join unions. The one union established for Saint-Joachim workers had only forty-seven members while Saint-Nazaire shipbuilders established eighteen craft unions in the first twenty years of ship production.

Urban shipbuilding workers struck over two dozen times between 1880 and World War I in defense of wages and for uniform pay scales. Worker-peasants from the Briere, however, rarely struck and their issues reflected their interests as part-time landowners and commuters. The strikes of Brieron shipwrights illustrate that their primary concerns lay with their rural community and their agricultural responsibilities rather than their jobs as shipworkers. In July 1861 Saint-Joachim shipwrights struck for a reduced work day during peat season.(63) Although skilled, the Brierons apparently did not share the objectives or the agenda of other groups of skilled workers. In 1899, for example, Brieron shipwrights struck to force the Penhouet yard to provide them with tools. Unlike many skilled workers who struggled to maintain the prerogatives, tools included, of skilled work, the Brierons regarded this as an unwanted expense and hoped to dispense with it.(64)

The different political agendas of the two communities of workers was sharpest in the strikes of 1893 and 1901. In December 1893 the Loire shipyard cut its work day to eight hours, a common move in winter months. Initially, the Loire's 1,700 workers supported a strike for a longer work day as "the needs of workers [for wages] increase during the winter" when cultivation of the marsh and of urban workers' garden plots became less possible.(65) Management reinstated the old nine hour day schedule, but the Brierons, who worked outside on unlit ship berths and thus an hour less, demanded yet another extension of the work day to offset the seasonal reduction in agricultural production.(66) They notified their colleagues by telegram that they would stay out for a ten hour day and, in the spirit of solidarity, "hoped that the workers of Saint-Nazaire would do the same."(67) They did not. The divergence of objectives between the Brierons and the less skilled urban workforce was again apparent in the 1901 strike discussed at the opening of this essay. In February 1901, when Penhouet announced the end of the one hour winter midday break, Brieron shipwrights refused to return to the standard extended break. Working in the yards meant a very long day for them, a lengthy commute at five in the morning and then a cold midday meal while wiling away an hour and a half before the afternoon shift. In this strike Briere workers sought to restructure the industrial schedule to fit their interests, which meant reducing their unpaid time in the city.(68) Although both strikes failed because urban workers did not share the Brierons' objectives, they illustrate that the interests of worker-peasants, arising from their community and culture, determined workplace concerns distinct from that of their urban, working-class colleagues.(69)

Despite these profound differences, Saint-Nazaire's shipbuilding workers could on occasion unite in common cause against management. They came together in defense of traditional work practices and patterns and the authority of some workers to make decisions and act independently on the shop floor.(70) In this case, much as Craig Patton has recently shown for German workers, workshop "control" issues "transcend[ed] occupational or industrial boundaries" because the focus of management's increased authority was not limited to work procedures but included various aspects of the "work environment."(71) Since the custom-made nature of vessels impeded standardization and required the deployment of vast numbers of semiskilled workers in this industry, Saint-Nazaire's shipbuilding companies moved to gain control of the shop floor and enhance efficiency by other means, often provoking unanimous strike actions.(72) One such strike occurred in August, 1892 at the Loire when management removed the doors dividing two work areas to facilitate the "necessary surveillance." Forgeworkers vehemently protested this infringement on standard work practices as well as the "dangerous currents of air" now released throughout the shop.(73) Within three days, management faced a strike by 1,000 of its 1,300 workers.(74) This time both Saint-Nazaire and Briere shipbuilding workers found common cause in maintaining their autonomy and control over production and hiring. Strikers insisted that management dismiss a foreman who had fired two forgeworkers for protesting the change, rehire those workers, and reinstall the two doors. Furthermore, they demanded the repeal of a medical exam requirement for all new employees, a recent regulation that intruded on the autonomy of crew leaders to select their own work teams. With these demands workers struggled to prevent management from controlling employment and production. Finally, in a most unusual strike demand, workers insisted on the "planting of a mature chestnut tree" in the shipyard.(75) While this may have been a simple request for shade, it most likely was yet another way that workers tried to shape the industrial environment to their needs rather than concede to management's dictates. In fact, Director Guichard found all the demands prejudicial to management's authority and "incompatible with

the order and discipline that must reign" in his shipyard.(76) Workers united to protect their autonomy and power in the productive process again in 1910 when Penhouet hired British shipbuilders, "masters in the art of naval construction," to help restructure and streamline production, anticipating a one-fifth increase in output in the joining shop alone.(77) The new program jeopardized job security while plans to reorganize production threatened workers' control.(78) This troubled workers from both communities who were already affected by unemployment and shrinking job prospects. Both communities of workers therefore precipitated a strike action, but again without satisfactory results.(79)

Conclusion

Historians have often found unions, political parties, and skilled trades to be the mobilizing forces behind strikes and labor protest in the nineteenth century. This was not the case in Saint-Nazaire's shipyards. Here, community interests and residential resources determined the emergence of workshop concerns and strikes. They also gave rise to two distinct sets of objectives and actions. Urban workers united to protect their employment opportunities and work conditions within the limitations of a single industry town and the unpredictable nature of the shipbuilding industry. Intent on safeguarding their future, defined in this case as survival of their families and their children's families within an urban setting, urban workers struggled for minimum wages, uniform salaries, and advancement ladders for the young, the apprenticed, and less skilled shipyard workers. Agricultural resources gave worker-peasants from the Briere a different level of commitment to industrial production. They evolved a set of concerns that led the shipwrights to strike separately and often in opposition to urban workers. Wages concerned them less than minimizing the time spent away from their families and community. But as a result of the diminished contribution of peat to the community's economy, these workers too became invested in protecting traditional patterns of production, hiring, and work relations.

The case of shipbuilding workers in Saint-Nazaire teaches two salient lessons. Although recent historical work has advanced a new understanding of the social impact of industrialization, the story of the Brierons forcefully demonstrates that industrialization was not the same experience for all workers and did not forge a homogeneous working class with like political objectives. Although the shift to industrial employment brought a host of changes for Saint-Joachim families, they actively resisted both proletarianization and urbanization.(80) They responded to the economic crisis facing them in the 1860s by developing various economic strategies, all based on the resources of their marshland, that might protect them from social upheaval and the dissolution of their community. The decision to combine industrial and agricultural activities--the decision to commute--and create a sharp separation between industrial work and family life provided an alternative to migration and dislocation and thereby assured the maintenance of the Brieron community and the worker-peasant culture. In this way, culture and community remained the framework from which these worker-peasants responded to their work experiences and their workplace colleagues.

Secondly, this study suggests that the workplace is neither the best nor the only place to look for the genesis of workplace conflict. Instead, historians must recognize that community issues and resources played a vital role in workers' perception and pursuit of workplace issues. Unfortunately, "community" is not always easy to discern for the historian. Its meaning is cloudy precisely because it changes with each new residential settlement and each new group and thus comes to embrace a wide variety of diverse identifications. In Saint-Joachim, community identity emerged from patterns of work, close-knit family ties, habits of self-management, and landownership. For Saint-Nazaire's urban workers, who shared only the struggle to carve out a future in an unfamiliar urban setting, community appears to have been less inclusive and more strongly rooted in everyday realities, emerging from newly developing residential and workplace contacts. Although the meaning of the term alters with the group and the circumstances, "community" refers to the issues that bind and define a group, whether they are limited to urban housing and transportation concerns or inclusive of work, settlement, and kin, as in the Briere. The divergent political objectives of the Brieron and of the urban workers arose from the interaction of community, that is, the resources, affiliations, and interests of each, with shop floor issues. It is to these issues and interactions that historians must turn their attention.

Department of History Providence, RI 02908

ENDNOTES

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1992 meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies. I would like to thank Fanny Montois and Patrick Baron for their friendship and hospitality during many research trips, Vicki Caron, Elizabeth Colwill, Robert L. Cvornyek, Judith A. DeGroat, W. Scott Haine, J. Stanley Lemons, Eric Schuster, and Les Stasey for their comments and George Kellner for guidance and inspiration. Bruce C. Nelson provided valuable encouragement as well as suggestions and criticisms on several drafts. I am particularly grateful to J. Harvey Smith for his ongoing support and his careful reading of this essay.

1. La Democratie de l'Ouest, February 1901.

2. Michelle Perrot, "Une Naissance Difficile: La Formation de la Classe Ouvriere Lyonnaise," Annales ESC (July-August 1978): 830-837; Jean H. Quataert, "A New View of Industrialization: 'Protoindustry' in the Role of Small-Scale Labor Intensive Manufacture in the Capitalist Environment," International Labor and Working-Class History 33 (Spring 1988): 3-21; "Combining Agrarian and Industrial Livelihood: Rural Households in the Saxon Oberlausitz in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Family History 10, 2 (1985): 145-162; "A New Look at Working-Class Formation: Reflections on the Historical Perspective," International Labor and Working Class History 27 (Spring 1985): 72-76; Douglas R. Holmes, "A Peasant-Worker Model in a Northern Italian Context," American Ethnologist 10, 4 (1983): 734-748; Douglas R. Holmes and Jean H. Quataert, "An Approach to Modern Labor: Worker Peasantries in Historic Saxony and the Friuli Region over Three Centuries," Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (1986): 199-216; Wanda Minge-Kalman, "Household Economy During the Peasant-to-Worker Transition in the Swiss Alps," Ethnology 17, 2: 183-197; Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 37-41; Tamara K. Haraven, "The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change," American Historical Review 1 (February 1991): 95-124.

3. Quataert, "A New View of Industrialization," p. 11.

4. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848-1914 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 2.

5. James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Urbana, 1987); Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley, 1990); Michael Hanagan, Logic of Solidarity (Urbana, 1980); Joan Wallach Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux (Cambridge, 1974); Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia 1868-1903 (Princeton, 1977); Alan Dawley, Class and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York, 1979); David Crew, Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860-1914 (New York, 1979); James E. Cronin, "Labor Insurgency and Class Formation: Comparative Perspectives on the Crisis of 1917-1920 in Europe," in Work, Community and Power, ed. James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia, 1983); Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working Class Radicalism in Dusseldorf, 1890-1920 (New York, 1981); Joyce, Visions of the People; Ira K. Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986).

6. Since shipbuilding was the only local industry, but subjected workers to frequent periods of unemployment, unemployed workers are included among Saint-Joachim's shipbuilding workforce. Archives Departementales de la Loire-Atlantique (ADLA) 2M207, 2M274, 2M341, Denombrement de la population, Saint-Joachim; ADLA 2M211, 2M279, 2M344, 2M345, Denombrement de la population, Saint-Nazaire.

7. Augustin Vince, Brierons . . . naguere (Saint-Nazaire, 1981); A. Andouard, "Les Progres de l'Agriculture dans la Loire-Inferieure, depuis un siecle," Annales de la Societe Academique de Nantes 10 (1889): 45; Alb. Larbaletier, La Tourbe et Les Tourbiares (Paris, 1901), p. 57; Armand Audiganne, La Region du bas de la Loire (Paris, 1869), p. 7; Henri Baudrillart, Les Populations Agricoles de la France. vol. 1, Normandie et Bretagne (Paris, 1885), p. 555; Alphonse de Chateaubriant, The Peat-Cutters, trans. F. Mabel Robinson (New York, 1927), p. 28.

8. This grant was confirmed by Francois I in 1538, Charles IX in 1566 and Louis XIII in 1629. Gerard Locu et Nadine Froger, A La Decouverte de la Briere (Paludiers, 1976), p. 60; Chateaubriant, The Peat-Cutters, p. 82; "Saint-Joachim," Les Annales de Nantes 163 (1971): 27-38.

9. Jean-Pierre Fleury, "Ouvriers-Paysans, Ouvriers Ruraux de Briere. 'Les Brierons,' essai d'appproche d'une communaute ouvriere et rural." (These du Troisieme Cycle, Sociologie, Universite de Nantes, 1980), pp. 66-68.

10. In the 1880s France had 600 peat bogs on 46,000 hectares of land with the Loire-Inferieure, location of the Grand-Briere, ranking among the top two peat-producing regions. Figures on the quantity of peat production in the Briere are only rough calculations because officials had difficulty measuring artisanal extraction. Estimates for the period 1840 to 1855 when national production stood at 400,000 tons annually indicate that the Briere produced nearly one-fourth of that total. A. Andouard, "Les Progres," p. 47; Jean Baptiste Bielawaski, Auvergne et plateau central: Les Tourbieres et la Tourbe (Clermont-Ferrand, 1892), pp. 118-120; Ministere de l'Industrie. Direction des Mines. Les Tourbieres Francaises v. 1 (Paris, 1949), pp. 163-64; Charles Berthelot, La Tourbe, exploitation et conditionnement (Paris, 1943), p. 25; Larbaletrier, La Tourbe, pp. 57-59; Georges Negre, La Tourbe (Paris, 1927), p. 86; Georges Franche, La tourbe et le lignite: gisements, extraction, emplois (Paris, 1914), p. 10; Pierre de Montgolfier, La tourbe et son utilisation (Paris, 1918), p. 24.

11. Archives de la Commission Syndicale de la Grande-Briere Mottiere-Donges (AC-SGB), Enquete, 29 April 1834; Fernand Gueriff, Briere de brumes et de reves (Nantes, 1979), p. 156; Yves Jean Beloiel-Benoist, "La Grande Briere de 1836 a 1936. Etude de l'Evolution Professionelle, Sociale et Economique" (These de Doctorat, Universite de Nantes, 1938), p. 350; Vince, Brierons, pp. 23, 29, 234; Audiganne, La Region, p. 12.

12. These figures reflect the exceptionally good harvest of 1840 when the Briere produced 139,000 cubic meters of peat. Locu and Froger, A La Decouverte, p. 21; Vince, Brierons, pp. 31-32; Beloiel-Benoist, "La Grande Briere," p. 172.

13. ADLA S1 1706, "Rapport de l'Ingenieur des Mines," 13 August 1839.

14. Chateaubriant, The Peat-Cutters, p. 24. In addition, Saint-Joachim produced most of the 15,000 to 20,000 tons of black peat dust, a peat byproduct, harvested locally for sale to industries.

15. Jean-Pierre Fleury, Jean-Paul Molinari, Christian Moriniere, "Conditions de Vie et de Travail des Ouvriers Brierons," Cahiers de l'Observation du Changement Social 4 (CNRS) (1982/1984): 306-310. The Brierons maintained this pattern of landholding into the twentieth century. As late as 1946, 77% of landholdings over 50 hectares in the commune of Saint-Joachim were held and worked collectively.

16. Albert Guihaire, "La Briere dans le Droit Coutumier" (These pour le Doctorat, Universite de Rennes, 1942), p. 10; Audiganne, La Region, pp. 10-11; Vince, Brierons, pp. 27-31; A. Gernoux, "La Grande Briere," Les Annales de Nantes et du pays Nantais 163 (1971) 31; Baudrillart, Les Populations, pp. 557-558.

17. Audiganne, La Region, p. 10-11.

18. ADLA S1 1706 "Syndicat de La Grande Briere," 15 December 1866.

19. Locu and Froger, A La Decouverte de la Briere, p. 21.

20. ACSGB, "Enquete," 29 April 1834.

21. ADLA S1 1717, 29 June 1849; S1 1712, 1 March, 8 August, 5 September 1854, 18 August 1894.

22. Vince, Brierons, p. 26.

23. Vince, Brierons, p. 26.

24. Abbe Pierre Blais, De la frairie des marais a la Chappelle: Histoire d'une commune de Briere et de ses environs (Pontchateau, 1984), p. 185.

25. ACSGB, Ingenieur des Mines, 29 September 1834.

26. In a 1992 interview the President of the Syndicat noted that mistrust of Saint-Joachim residents continues to this day and explains why the seventeen Briere communes have never elected a Saint-Joachim resident to serve as Syndicat president. Interview with Lucien Gerard, President de Commission Syndicale de la Grand-Briere-Mottiere, 14 June 1992; ADLA S1 1717, 1873.

27. Vince, Brierons, p. 29.

28. Fleury, "Ouvriers-Paysans," p. 285; Andouard, "Les Progres," p. 48; Ministere de l'Industrie, Les Tourbieres Francaises, p. 169; Larbaletrier, La Tourbe, p. 58. The extent of national marshland shrinkage, one-sixth in the ten years from 1882 to 1892, suggests the scope of the problem for the Briere. There are, however, indications that the absence of regulation and method in past cultivation was partly responsible for the marshland's declining fertility. See Mongolfier, La tourbe, p. 25.

29. Vince, Brierons, p. 34.

30. Leon Maitre, "Notice sur La Grande Briere," Societe de Geographie Commerciale de Nanates (1897), p. 160.

31. Andouard, "Les Progres," p. 48; Fleury, "Ouvriers-Paysans," p. 25; Baudrillart, Les Populations, p. 559, ADLA S1 1717, Syndicat de la Grande-Briere-Mottiere, 7 August 1871.

32. Archives Municipales de Saint-Joachim, "Counseil Municipal," 24 December 1882, 14 August 1892; ADLA S1 1712, 18 November 1894.

33. This figure doubled by 1861 when 25% of family heads or 34% of those employed worked as shipwrights. Yves Durand, "Les structures familiales dans les marais Atlantiques au XIXe siecle," Enquetes et Documents IV, Universite de Nantes (1978), p. 98; Daniel Sicard, "L'Industrie Navale et le Developpement de la Ville de Saint-Nazaire, 1862-1939," in Saint-Nazaire et la Construction Navale, ed. by Ecomusee de Saint-Nazaire (Nantes, 1991), p. 56; Vince, Brierons, p. 175.

34. Beloeil-Benoist, "La Grande Briere," p. 172.

35. Pierre LeConte, Ateliers et Chantiers de la Loire (Paris, 1931), p. 19.

36. Marthe Barbance, Saint-Nazaire: Le Port, La Ville, Le Travail. (Moulins, 1948),p. 493; Ecomusee, Saint-Nazaire, p. 43; Augustin Vince, "Entre Loire et Vilaine. Etude de Geographie Humaine: La Population dans la Presqu'ile Guerandaise et les Pays Bas." (These de Geographie, Universite de Poitiers, 1966), p. 220; Vince, Brierons, p. 237.

37. Fleury, "Ouvriers-Paysans," p. 104.

38. ADLA 2M207, 2M274, 2M341 Denombrement de la population, Saint-Joachim 1851, 1855, 1881, 1896, 1911; Archives Municipales de Saint-Nazaire, Etat Civil-Actes de Mariages, 1881, 1896, 1911. Marriage records apply to the entire commune while census figures apply only to the commune's fourteen largest island communities.

39. Yves Jean Beloeil-Benoist's study of the seventeen Briere communes demonstrates that Brieron adolescents followed their elders into the shipbuilding yards "under pressure of financial obligation," as has been shown to be the case in Saint-Joachim. Yves Jean Beloeil-Benoist, "Les effets de l'industrialisation et des lois Ferry sur les enfants et adolescents de Grande-Briere, 1800-1939," Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l'Ouest 97 (1990): 80-88.

40. Fleury, "Ouvriers-Paysans," p. 525; Vince, Brierons, p. 237.

41. Industrial work brought more cash into the family economy but residents still relied on agricultural production. Vince, Brierons, p. 146. Quataert found a similar situation in the Saxon Oberlausitz. Quataert, "Combining Agrarian and Industrial Livelihood," pp. 149-157.

42. Leslie Ann Schuster, "Strikes, Skill and Community in Saint-Nazaire's Shipbuilding Industry, 1880-1910" (Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1991), pp. 147-184; Parc Naturel Regional de Briere, Compagnie des Marais des Donges, 1 August 1919; Baudrillart, Les Populations, p. 557; Barbance, Saint-Nazaire, pp. 509-510; Edward Lorenz, "Two Patterns of Development: The Labour Process in the British and French Shipbuilding Industries, 1880 to 1930," Journal of European Economic History 13 (1984): 614.

43. There is some evidence that this program prepared workers for the skilled trade of tracing and exerted some control over hiring. Jean Varnier, "Aoustin le Jeune: Enfant de la Briere," Bibliotheque du Travail 416 (1 Decembre 1958): 21; Jean Aubin, "Le Mouvement Ouvrier a Saint-Nazaire," Cahiers d'histoire de l'institut de recherches marxiste 22 (1985): 129-150.

44. Only few Brierons worked in other shipbuilding trades. Marriage records for 1881 show only one shipbuilder who was not a shipwright. Of those sons working in the yards, 98% followed their elders to become charpentiers. By 1911 this figure fell to 81%, with 18% diversifying into other skilled shipyard trades.

45. The majority of these households were headed by unemployed.

46. This is best illustrated in peat cultivation where the men cut and extracted the bricks while teams of women transported the sodden bricks, stacked them in pyramids to facilitate quick drying, and sheltered each pyramid from the elements with reeds.

47. Holmes, "A Peasant-Worker Model," pp. 741-742.

48. Great Britain, Board of Trade, Cost of Living in French Towns. Report of an enquiry by the Board of Trade into working class rents, housing and retail prices together with the rates of wages in certain occupations in the principal industrial towns of France (London, 1909), (Observations made in 1905), pp. 233-234, 320.

49. Saint-Nazaire's inadequate water supply posed a serious problem for the city; it impeded the establishment of local industry and even forced passenger liners docking at the port to contract with laundries in nearby Nantes.

50. For a discussion of the economic contribution of women to the working-class home see Jeanne Boydston, "To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence," Radical History Review 35 (1986): 7-25.

51. This evolution suggests improved economic conditions as more families could afford to apprentice their daughters. Vince, Brierons, p. 117.

52. Herve Olivaud and Christine Durand, "Les fleurs d'oranger: Une industrie rurale en Briere," ArMen 25 (1990): 36-43; Marilyn J. Boxer, "Women in Industrial Homework: The Flowermakers of Paris in the Belle Epoque," French Historical Studies 12 (1982): 401-423; Vince, Brierons, p. 237-238; Beloeil-Benoist, "Les effets de l'industrialisation," pp. 86-87.

53. Roger Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 1987), p. 169.

54. Hareven, "History of the Family," p. 103, 108.

55. Vince, Brierons, p. 120.

56. Ibid., p. 128.

57. Ibid., pp. 126-128.

58. Elinor Accampo, Industrialization, Family Life, and Class Relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914 (Berkeley, 1989), p. 10.

59. High unemployment in the French shipbuilding industry can be attributed to the high cost of French vessels and a state subsidy system that hindered rather than encouraged production. In addition, ship construction occurred in distinct stages and dictated a revolving pattern of hirings and dismissals. Schuster, "Strikes, Skill, and Community," pp. 131-137.

60. Beginning in 1903 these workers took a more active approach to unemployment, creating organizations to pressure city and industry officials for aid and for work.

61. Vince, Brierons, p. 266.

62. Le Petit Nazairien, 29 March 1908. While agricultural activities protected the community against unemployment, Prioux stressed that they also protected the shipyards by helping to maintain a permanent workforce.

63. ADLA 1M2309, "Sous-prefet," 3 July, 3, 7 August 1861.

64. La Democratie de l'Ouest, 21, 25 June 1899; Phare de la Loire, 21, 22 June 1899; ADLA 1M2314, 20 June, 18 July 1899.

65. L'Avenir, 24 December 1882; ADLA 1M2311, "Gendarmerie," 14 December 1893.

66. France. Ministere du Commerce. Statistique des Greves, (Paris, 1890-1914), 1893, p. 324-325; AN BB 18 1932, 16 December 1893; ADLA 1M2311, "Sous-Prefet," 16 December 1893, "Prefet," 16, 18 December 1893, "Commissaire Special," 16, 17 December 1893, "Greve des ouvriers," December 1893; Le Populaire, 15 December 1893.

67. ADLA 1M2311, "Prefet," 16, 20 December 1893. Director Guichard capitalized on the divisions between the two communities to break the strike. He raised the specter of wider dismissals among urban workers, the workforce with the least resources and thus less able to sustain an extended strike.

68. The Briere strikers proposed that management add the half hour deducted from lunch to the paid work day. Phare de la Loire, 8 February 1901; La Democratie de l'Ouest, 8, 10 February 1901; L'Avenir, 10 February 1901; Le Courrier de Saint-Nazaire, 9 February 1901.

Ten years later when management found the long lunch break to be inefficient they cut it to an hour and installed a lunchroom in the yard to keep workers on site.

69. Progres de Nantes, 8, 17 February 1901; ADLA 1M627, "Commisaire special," 15 February 1901.

70. The first such strike occurred in 1882 at the Loire when nearly all 1,100 workers struck to protest the reduction in the work day from ten to nine hours. AN F7 4658, "Prefet," 19-21 December 1882; ADLA 1M2309, 20 December 1882, January 1884; L'Avenir, 24 December 1882.

71. Craig Patton, "'Proletarian Protest'?: Skill and Protest in the German Chemical Industry, 1914-1924," Journal of Social History 25 (Summer 1992): 766. Also see David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979).

72. Schuster, "Strikes, Skill and Community," pp. 92-147.

73. L'Avenir, 7 August 1892; Phare de la Loire, 4 August 1892.

74. The first public strike meeting brought 900 workers from both communities together to support a general strike. Strike solidarity remained high during the week-long action, which saw strikers stoning workers who tried to return to the yards. La Democratie de l'Ouest, 3 August 1892; Phare de la Loire, 4 August 1892; Progres de Nantes, 7 August 1892; ADLA 1M2310, "Capitaine Verand," 4 August 1892.

75. La Democratie de l'Ouest, 3, 7 August 1892; Le Courrier, 6 August 1892; ADLA 1M2310, "Sous-prefet," 8 August 1892.

76. Management did agree to plant a chestnut tree but left the issue of the medical exam to the discretion of the foremen, thus promoting their authority. More importantly, the company enhanced shop floor surveillance by replacing the wooden doors with glass panels. ADLA 1M2310, "Capitaine Verand," 10 August 1892, "Sous-prefet, 13 August 1892; Le Courrier, 6 August 1892; La Democratie de l'Ouest, 7, 8, 12 August 1892; Progres de Nantes, 8, 13 August 1892; L'Avenir, 7 August 1892; Phare de la Loire, 8 August 1892.

77. La Democratie de l'Ouest, 8 June 1910.

78. Workers objected strenuously to the new procedures on the grounds that they encouraged sloppy practices and sacrificed quality. ADLA 1M528, "Commisaire Special," 9, 13 June 1910, "Commisaire central," 9 June 1910.

79. Barbance, Saint-Nazaire, p. 387-388; Le Travailleur, 5, 7 June 1910; La Democratie de l'Ouest, 7, 8 June 1910; ADLA 1M528, "Commisaire special," 13 June 1910, "Sous-prefet," 9 June 1910, "Commisaire central," 9, 14 June 1910.

80. In his study of the workers of Lyon, Yves Lequin found that the destruction of the traditional rural community precipitated the creation of a modern industrial working class. See the discussion of Lequin in Perrot, "Une Naissance Difficile," p. 835.