World War I: Transformation Through Tragedy

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 shattered the labor movement's internationalist dreams. Despite pledges that workers would never fight their class brothers in other countries, French unions rallied to the "Sacred Union" of national defense. The CGT's leadership, which had planned a general strike against war, instead supported mobilization. This betrayal of internationalist principles created lasting bitterness and contributed to the movement's post-war fragmentation.

The war transformed French industry and labor relations in profound ways. Women entered factories in unprecedented numbers, replacing mobilized men and proving their capacity for supposedly masculine work. The state, needing maximum production for the war effort, intervened extensively in labor relations, establishing minimum wages in munitions factories and creating arbitration procedures for disputes. These wartime measures, intended as temporary expedients, established precedents for permanent state involvement in the economy.

The factory floor became a site of technological and social revolution. American-style mass production methods, introduced to meet military demands, challenged traditional craft skills and worker autonomy. The influx of colonial workers from Africa and Indochina, brought to replace French workers at the front, introduced new racial dynamics to French workplaces. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed more French civilians than the war itself, demonstrated workers' vulnerability to forces beyond capitalism's control.

By war's end, French labor movements had been fundamentally transformed. Over a million French workers had died in the trenches, including many of the most militant union activists. Those who returned brought revolutionary ideas inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The old certainties—patriotism, gradual progress, the inevitability of socialist victory—had died in the mud of Verdun and the Somme.