Source
The year 1910 saw more strikes — one and a half million of them — than in 1906, with more workers involved and more days lost than in any of the previous three years.
It was to be the last desperate burst of militancy in the fight to halt declining living standards and arrest the employers' offensive, before the oncoming storm of the First World War.
The key strike was that of the railway workers.
Their last major victory had been almost twenty years earlier, when they had won the right to cut the working day to twelve hours.
Discipline was vigorous: there was an elaborate system of fines for insubordination, drunkenness or being late, while dismissal merited the forfeiture of one's pension rights.
Accidents were common: on the Nord railway there had been one accident every day for the previous ten years; forty-three per cent of a sample of retired railwaymen had suffered at least one accident at work, and compensation was negligible.
To add insult to injury, their real wages had dropped consistently since the turn of the century, so that Permanent-Way men got less than ordinary navvies.
The national railway strike lasted only two weeks.
The 'Independent Socialist' Minister, Aristide Briand (another ex-syndicalist) went one further than simply calling in the army and arresting two hundred leaders.
As it was a strike by 'civil servants', and consequently illegal, he proclaimed a State of Emergency, and mobilized every railway worker into the army; any worker failing to report for duty would be arrested and tried under military law for desertion before a court martial.
The strikers responded with hundreds of acts of sabotage: 'hit squads' of twenty to thirty strikers attacked and stopped trains in the outer suburbs, on their way to or from Paris; signal cables were cut, signal boxes burnt out, points sabotaged, and gunshots exchanged with the army.
Forcibly sent back to work, the railway men worked to rule and misdirected goods, but it was all in vain — after two weeks, the strikers had been bludgeoned into submission, three thousand dismissals followed and troops were used to smash sympathy strikes by dockers and electricians.
The general atmosphere in France in the run up to war was one of working class defeat.
In some areas of Paris, young Victor Kibalchich encountered a "terrifying world of utmost poverty, spiritless degradation; the borderline of humanity under the rubble of a great city.
There, a tradition of total, overwhelming defeat had been kept up for at least ten centuries". He saw Paris as "an immense Jungle where all relationships were dominated by a primitive individualism" (rather than an anarchist one).
"To be yourself would only have begun to be possible once the most pressing needs were satisfied."
This series of posts will insure that these anarchists' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
Don't lose hope now, dear reader.
We've made it this far.
At some point the ride gets easier.
Rule by force has had it's day.
When everybody sees the iron fist in the velvet glove we win.
We just have to survive its death throes.
There is a reason these facts are not in the modern curriculums.
Setting rewards to burn only burns the author portion of the payout.
The crowd isn't silenced.
Please cheer loudly, if that is your thing.
