The Ideological Divide

French unions, when finally legalized in 1884, developed along ideological rather than craft lines, creating a unique landscape of competing visions for worker emancipation. This fragmentation, often seen as a weakness, actually reflected the intellectual richness of French labor movements and their refusal to separate economic from philosophical questions.

The revolutionary syndicalists, strongest in the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) founded in 1895, rejected political participation entirely. Influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and later Georges Sorel, they believed that direct action—strikes, sabotage, and ultimately a general strike—would destroy capitalism without need for political parties or state power. Their vision was of a society organized by free associations of producers, with no government beyond voluntary cooperation between trades.

Victor Griffuelhes, CGT secretary from 1901 to 1909, articulated this philosophy: "The union is not merely an instrument for improving wages. It is the living cell of the future society. In learning to manage our own affairs, to practice solidarity, to challenge authority, we prepare ourselves to manage all of society." This prefigurative approach—building the new world within the shell of the old—gave French unionism a utopian dimension absent in more pragmatic labor movements.

The socialists, organized in various parties that eventually unified in the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) in 1905, saw unions as important but subordinate to political action. Jean Jaurès, the great socialist leader, argued for a synthesis of reform and revolution, using democratic institutions to gradually transform capitalism while preparing for its eventual transcendence. His assassination in 1914, on the eve of World War I, deprived French socialism of its most talented theorist and symbol of unity.

Catholic workers, long discouraged by the Church from joining secular unions, began organizing separately in the 1880s. The Rerum Novarum encyclical of 1891 legitimized Catholic social action, leading to the formation of Christian unions that rejected class struggle in favor of collaboration between workers and employers within a framework of Christian morality. These unions, strongest in traditionally Catholic regions like Alsace and Brittany, offered an alternative to socialist materialism while still defending worker interests.