EDITED BY ALAIN CORBIN JEAN-JACQUES COURTINE GEORGES VIGARELLO
A H ISTORY O F VIR ILI TY
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" 19 Working-Class Virility T hierry Pillon
Wo r k i n g - c l a s s v i r i l i t y cannot be separated from the way it is depicted. The image of a strong, masculine workforce, ready for labor and fighting, becomes an integral element of the early twentieth-century imaginary. Tied in part to revolutionary struggles, the image disappears with the weakening of communist parties by the end of the century. But beyond the social and political construction of a myth, it is in the experience of working, in the bonds woven together through working-class communities, that the values of courage and virility are felt. While during the first part of the century male culture found the means of affirming and consolidating itself in daily work, the last part of the twentieth century had a profound effect on its underpinnings. Largely devalued by the transformations of labor and social changes, the brutal affirmation of masculinity in deed as well as word has lost its function as a marker for identity. While the demonstration of virility does not disappear in working-class milieus, it does have less and less support in the domain of labor.
Representations Depicting the Industrial Worker While the depiction of labor and of workers is ancient, a “new aesthetic program�1 at the end of the nineteenth century foregrounds the industrial worker and highlights such masculine attributes as strength and brawn. When they focused on scenes of working during the nineteenth century, artists had frequently depicted peasants or craftsmen. Indicative of this
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interest for the world of workers are the works of Gustave Courbet, such as The Stone Breakers, remarkable for its precision, or those of Jean-François Millet, such as The Cooper. Numerous other examples could augment this description of social types of the nineteenth-century rural and artisanal world. In the last part of the century, one aspect of modern social life changes the perspective of the artist’s gaze. Industrial development along with the machine and its forces become objects of representation. In 1880, Huysmans sets out the program for it: All of modern life is to be studied. Everything is yet to be done. . . . All of man’s labor as he toils in factories, on the assembly lines: all of this modern fever caused by industrial activity, all the magnificence of machines—this is still to be painted and will be painted, so long as the modernists truly worthy of the name agree not to shrink back and not to mummify themselves in the perpetual reproduction of the same subject.2
Prior to this appeal, painters had gotten to work on depicting the insides of factories and foundries, especially where the presence of fire and the play of light and dark lend the paintings a dramatic character. Such is the case of François Bonhommé, nicknamed “the Blacksmith,” whose canvases of the Fourchambault and Creusot foundries stand out in the 1860s and 1870s, for the “naturalist” style of compositions that highlight the grandeur of industrial architecture: metallic structures, girders, machinery, and lifting devices. In The Indret Foundries, for example, the workers appear as conquering soldiers,3 seeming nevertheless to be overtaken by the gigantism of the operations. The same impression is given in the canvas by German painter Adolph Menzel, The Rolling Mill (The Modern Cyclops) (1875) [fig. 19.1]. At the very end of the century, the works of Maximilien Luce and Constantin Meunier, both close to socialist and anarchist milieus, again change the attitude toward labor. While Luce, originally from Picardie, mainly devoted himself to outdoor scenes, work at Parisian construction sites, or factory landscapes, Meunier focused on the industrial world and on the mines in northern France and in Belgium, where he was from. The worker holds his attention above all: his body in particular, present, even powerful, and through him the expression of proletarian dignity [cf. fig. 19.2]. Thus, in The Smelter Meunier places in the center of his canvas bare-chested workers with finely drawn muscles, manipulating molten iron, protected by a blacksmith’s apron. The realism of the scene is less important than the presence of men painted like so many full-length portraits. The worker at the center of the canvas, often half-naked, can be found in many others works of the • 516 •
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Adolph von Menzel , The Rolling Mill. 1875, Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie.
Figure 19.1
For the sake of realism, the painter has represented in the same composition the whole plant and the different activities that take place there: manipulating molten iron, stockpiling it, and taking breaks. By playing on chiaroscuro effects and perspective, he gives the scene a quasi-dramatic look, making the workers “conquering soldiers.” Source: © ARTOTHEK
period: The Floor Scrapers (1875) by Gustave Caillebotte; The Wrecker (1899) by Paul Signac; and The Pile Drivers by Maximilien Luce, for example. But the work of Meunier, which is more “humanitarist” than realist,4 ennobles this proletarian figure and imparts an allegorical dimension to the life of these men who work with iron and fire. This is what his sculptures convey with even greater force. The Hammerer, exhibited at Charleroi in Belgium, summarizes the main traits of a “proletarian iconography,”5 in which the bare-chested worker keeps returning, his muscles bulging, with his work gear, a tool, and overalls. The Docker6 in Anvers picks up the same imagery of the proud, robust male. The monumental fresco, Monument to Labor, still exhibited in Brussels, is inspired by the same ideals. “The silhouette of the worker was drawn in profile as a shadow puppet, then in close-up, in depictions that disregarded him,”7 writes Michelle Perrot with regard to the popularization of the workers’ movement in France of the 1880s. The male body appears as the allegorical expression of this movement. It is an exalted body, whose • 517 •
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Constantin Meunier, Foundry Worker. 1920, Helsinki, Museum of Finnish Art.
Figure 19.2
The blacksmith is isolated in the foreground: muscular back, angular face, naked above the waist, equipped with his tool and his apron. Stylized in this manner, a new image of the worker’s body becomes central at the end of the nineteenth century. Source: Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland/Bridgeman Images.
portrayal seems to indicate that it is the worker’s only resource, his only source of pride, his sole weapon against capital. In the major countries of Europe, numerous paintings, engravings, and sculptures rework (at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century) this image of the virile proletarian. He finds his place, for example, in the large scene of the Monument to the Republic (1889) by Jules Dalou, located in Paris, Place de la Nation. In the chariot carrying the tall figure of the Republic, “Labor” appears with the features of a naked man, with powerful muscles, holding a heavy hammer on his shoulder. At the end of his life, Dalou even imagines a workers monument in the form of the “emblem of Priapus:” I think I’ve finally found the monument to Workers that I’ve been looking for since 1889. The general arrangement would include the emblem of Priapus, God of gardens, symbol of creation—but also symbol of the boundary, cradle and tomb of • 518 •
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the poor man and symbol, finally, of the pipes of the factory, that prison where he spends his life. I want him simple, without decoration or ornament, with, if possible, the serious, imposing feature that Priapus has. Will I get it done? I am pretty old. . . .8
Dalou did not realize his project. But the sketches conserved at the Petit Palais in Paris allow us to glimpse what it might have been: a column, bulbous at one end, with figures of artisanal, rural, and industrial labor displayed below. For a number of artists, highlighting proletarian muscle against a background of tall smoking chimneys means also placing proletarian destiny under the sign of Priapus. This is the way the draftsman Théophile Steinlen, for example, illustrates the work of journalists Léon and Maurice Bonneff in The Tragic Life of Workers in 1908:9 a muscular, bare-chested worker, with a steelworker’s hammer in his hand and factory chimneys in the background. In the case of socialist and anarchist illustrators, the depiction of political combat follows a similar aesthetic. In an issue from 1907 of the satirical review L’Assiette au beurre (The Butter Dish, slang: pork barrel), the draftsman Grandjouan illustrates a violent confrontation, the face-off between workers and soldiers at the time of a mining strike. The illustration draws on the same register of masculine virility, an expression of resistance and of working-class unity: the workers’ bodies are taut, their chins forward, their eyes staring straight at the soldiers. The illustrator has accentuated the power of the bare forearms and the hands, gnarled, almost excessive in size, open like claws or firmly gripping a tool, a spade or a stick, some making a fist like a club. The virile strength of the group and their casual power are highlighted by the composition of bodies clustered into a pyramid.10 The same virile pride, and the same scene of confrontation, can be found in 1948 in a canvas by the communist painter André Fougeron, National Defense, “in which naked, muscular miners, forming a luminous hydra, push back the CRS (riot control police), dark forces of repression: workers’ power, proud and virile, ensure the defense of the quarry that looms in the background and whose scaffolding follows the line of the workers’ raised arms and tight fists. . . .”11 Two expressions of the same rhetoric of virility; two identical figures of socialist iconography.
Figures of Socialism: The New Man By appropriating this new depiction of working and labor struggles at the end of the nineteenth century, the socialist movement fashions its own iconography; • 519 •
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it takes part in a “masculinization” of its symbolic references.12 The traditional image for the French left of Marianne sporting her Phrygian cap, partially covered by a red flag, is replaced by a theatricalized figure of the blue-collar worker as a muscular man, usually bare-chested, the tool associated with his professional activity, and a factory at times in the distance. Maurice Agulhon has pointed out that this new image appears concurrently with the aging of the female allegory of the revolution.13 Eric Hobsbawm has stressed the sexism of these images of labor and resistance.14 The image that the socialist movement creates for itself of labor, through the dominant figure of man, relies on a naturalization of sexual difference, according to which women would be confined to domestic spaces only. Far from the realities of women’s work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,15 this sexist ideology is coupled with a reduction of labor to activities of strength only, to the sectors of metalworking and mining, leaving aside the textile industry, still important at the end of the nineteenth century, and especially the service and artisanal industries. True, the developing sectors, strategic industries on the eve of the war, are no doubt those on which strikes have the greatest impact. Mining’s world of iron and fire is also the backdrop of the main craftsmen in these images—starting with those of Meunier. This simplistic depiction of the worker and the emphatic valorization of strength and brawn and its embodiment in work and labor struggles should be seen as a form of abstract synthesis that Dalou’s project pushed to the limits. In their formal references to ancient statuary, these representations prefigure the pictorial vocabulary of the images of the Soviet worker, although they are not their sole models. Meunier’s sculptures and the illustrations at the end of the century portray above all a working-class tragedy; they stress the dignity of the halfnaked man, his body providing his sole asset, and underline the hopelessness of his condition and the harshness and grandeur of his struggle. In this “new dramaturgy” of labor these artists show their humanist intentions through work focused on the lives of the humblest. While the communist depiction of the worker shares with these images the comparison of labor power with virility, it also draws on other sources. George Mosse reminds us of the break represented by World War I in the genesis of these images.16 The ideal of valor that it forged and the ideology of courage, of endurance, and of male aggressivity offered to communist militancy a model for prolonging the fight in the arena of class struggle. Discipline and morality were embodied in resistance to capitalism and in the valorization of labor, the factory becoming the new battlefield. Depictions of the worker that spring from this ideal, amplified by the October Revolution, therefore first stress struggle and • 520 •
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combat. As an example: the cover of the first issue (1 May 1919) of the Bolshevik review, The Communist International,17 shows a man with powerful muscles breaking the chains surrounding the world with his hammer. The movement of the body and the aggressiveness of the look distill the traits of the communist workersoldier and convey a more emphatic impression of violence and rage than in works of the late nineteenth century. But, although he is always big, strong, and solid, exuding good health, during the Stalinist period the Soviet worker rarely appears half-naked. Mosse sees in this a wish to present an “abstract image of the worker, man or woman,”18 even if it ends up being embodied in a real personage with the traits of Alexis Stakhanov. National Socialism draws in turn on the codes of Greek statuary to symbolize the “new man.” Thus, in Arno Breker’s sculptures, nudity and virility unite to express the power of Hitler’s regime. This aesthetic will not be taken up again until after World War II in communist regimes such as in East Germany.19 Mosse underlines the kinship of these communist images with fascist figurations, even though they differ in form: a virility that expresses energy and order, power and solidity; and poses accentuating a frank gaze, head held high, and a firm profile. In France between the wars, many aspects of this imagery can be found in the works of filmmakers and photographers. The documentary work that François Kollar, for example, devoted to métiers in France20 often plays on the same register in the expression of virility. The photo of the “railroad porter” (1932), with face in profile, muscles tensed, shirtsleeves rolled up, and bulging chest embodies the unshakeable assertiveness of the self-confident worker; the 1933 photo of the metalworker at the Longwy steel mill keeping watch over his oven shows his broad shoulders and his gaze always cast forward. The lyrical treatment of the situation, accentuated by the photo’s black-and-white contrasts, can be found in the cinema, especially in one figure who, in the 1930s, is more central than others to the personification of the worker’s power: that of Jean Gabin. In La Bête humaine, a 1938 film by Jean Renoir, Gabin shows the same profile that we see in Kollar’s photos, with angular jaw, a distant look, forearms bare, and the body half out of the machine [fig. 19.3]. Playing on the diverse forms of the expression of virility, Gabin will manage in film after film to embody them all. In the main places where men gather, the cabaret, the barracks, the prison camp, the construction site, and the factory, he consolidates the qualities of strength, self-assurance, and authority over men as well as women. His is a moral virility, imposing by its power as much as by its reserve.21 In another idiom, that of the militant film of the 1950s commissioned by the General Workers’ Confederation (CGT) or the Communist • 521 •
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Figure 19.3
La Bête humaine, film by Jean Renoir, 1938.
As the figure of the railwayman, Jean Gabin embodies better than anyone else the values of worker virility: self-assurance, strength, and authority. Public Domain
Party, the filmmakers deploy the same images to exalt the virile resistance of the worker and, through him, that of his class. The miner, for example, appears “often isolated . . . , standing straight in the frame, with powerful chest, dripping with sweat; positioned at the coal face, he and his tool, most often the jackhammer, appear fused.”22
P olitical Discipline: The Iron Man The image of the virile proletarian also owes a great deal to the construction of an archetype that ideally blends physical attributes, moral virtues, and psychological qualities. It is a social and political construct that espouses the movement of disciplinary and moralizing measures for workers during the nineteenth century. Employers, engineers, and economists do not separate the efficiency of the organization from moral discipline. Karl Marx makes this one of the essential points in his analysis of the development of industrial capitalism. Industrial historians • 522 •
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have kept on stressing these issues. The work of E. P. Thomson, Michel Foucault, and many others has greatly contributed to further elucidating them by emphasizing the sedentary and concentrated condition of workers, the educating of work corps, and the schedules around which the daily routines of working-class families are organized. The reference to virile virtues—strength, productive power, commitment to violence—and their moral equivalents—courage, stoicism, pride— are partly tied in with this concern for discipline. In this regard, employers and political movements, socialist and communist alike, have often drawn on the same sources and dealt with the same images of proletarians dedicated to their jobs. The figure of the miner is worth dwelling upon, so emblematic is it of this construction, which is true for the metalworker or dockworker as well. The development of the steel and metalworking industries, along with other mining industries during the first half of the century, the tradition of struggle in these sectors, and their geographical concentration help construct the image of a worker who loves his condition and who is prompted by values of sacrifice and bravery. “It takes a lot of long-term persuading and supervising to make of the miner the worker who corresponds to his legend,” writes Bruno Mattei.23 The enterprise begins early. The work of the mining engineer Louis Simonin, Underground Life, or Mines and Miners, written during the Second Empire, gives an early start to constructing the heroicized image of the miner: “The coal miner is naturally courageous and devoted. Always ready to sacrifice his life to save that of his comrades, he endures the toughest of trials, as we’ve seen, with stoic resignation.” This “soldier worker, disciplined and energetic,” is a man who has managed to break in his body “through the harshest exhaustion and stand up to continual perils:” “Let us salute them,” writes Simonin, “as the dark, virile combatants of the lower depths.”24 Up to the beginning of the twentieth century mining companies have had recourse to this “disciplining through mythology,”25 which draws so directly on the idiom of war. The trade union and socialist movement appropriate this image: at that point a model to identify with takes shape for the entire working class. Its reprise in Soviet Russia during the 1930s, through such a popular figure as Alexis Stakhanov, is a spectacular demonstration of this. When he goes down into the central Irmino mine in the Donets Basin at 11:00 p.m. on 30 August 1935, Stakhanov is ready to set a record to mark International Youth Day. He is accompanied by the site foreman, Petrov, a party organizer, and Milhailov, editor of the mining newspaper. He sets out with his jackhammer to attack the 85 meters of strata. When he comes back up at 5:00 a.m. on the thirty-first, he has knocked off 102 tons of coal. Stakhanov mines fourteen times the average load. Of course, • 523 •
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conditions are exceptionally good and do not take into account the preparatory work, the help of other laborers and of retaining wall workers, or the time for rest. But the only thing that counts here is the “record” and how it is used politically: “My record,” he says, “would only have been a record if they hadn’t managed to draw from it practical conclusions for the work of our shaft and of our mine.”26 In November of the same year, Soviet authorities organize a “Conference of Vanguard Workers.” Running counter to company managers, engineers, directors, and technicians, the propaganda exalts the “heroes of labor,” the “Stakhanovists:” interviewed, photographed, filmed at their workplaces, crowned with socialist glory, they are, as V. M. Molotov says in 1935, “a veritable groundswell, a potent force.”27 Stakhanov’s picture appears on the front page of newspapers, down in the mine, jackhammer in hand, absorbed in his effort. His smiling face as a proud, modest worker even appears on the cover of Time on 16 December 1935. Stakhanov always keeps his mischievous smile and his jackhammer, whether in a photo at the head of a group of workers or mounted as a bronze statue; the tool rests on his shoulder like a gun. He is even seen with his mining coworkers in procession, jackhammer on his shoulder, alongside Stalin. And, like Stalin, he sometimes raises an arm as a rallying sign or as a salute. The “hero of labor” brings together the main signs of glorified virility: the ubiquitous tool, pride, courage, and combativeness. In an article from Pravda reported in L’Humanité in 1936, we read: “The Stakhanov movement reflects like a mirror the gigantic success of socialism. . . .”28 Between the hero of labor and the party, a whole play of mirrors is put into place. The French Communist Party will play this dialectic of gratitude to a fault beginning in the 1930s. Physical strength, sturdiness of body, worker self-confidence—and most especially that of the miner—become idealized into political virtues. Marc Lazar has studied at length this veritable “political myth”:29 for the French Communist Party (CP), the proletarian is at once “loyal, fraternal, disciplined, courageous, virile, unshakeable; resolute, tenacious, generous, determined, etc.”30 His character is a triumph of strength and resistance as well as action and morality. In the 1930s, Maurice Thorez, a miner turned CP leader, personifies the qualities of dignity and courage that are as much those of his class as of his profession. After the victory of the Popular Front, in a hagiographic work, Maurice Sachs describes him in this way: “he is stocky, his body is solid. He carries on his rather broad shoulders a head whose most persistent expression is a laugh”—like Stakhanov, one might be tempted to say. His “forehead is uncovered,” and when he speaks “his face takes on . . . a certain grandeur; and, while he does not transform himself really, the timbre of his voice transforms everyone and enhances the figure who is speaking. . . .”31 Thorez’s hands, • 524 •
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“small and strong” with “broad palms formed by the manual labor of childhood,” have the peculiarity of being those of both worker and intellectual. The union of power and reserve constitutes Thorez’s singular strength. The rhetoric is persistent in the language of the French CP. In 1950, L’Humanité describes Jules Bonnel, trade unionist, Resistance fighter, and miner, like this: “Stocky, broad-shouldered, solid. Traits that express energy, intelligence and uprightness. His whole being gives an impression of powerfulness under control.”32 The working-class hero and the communist leader bear visible marks of the class they belong to; they are those emblems of a collective body in which workers are urged to recognize themselves. In this working-class body, the hand holds a particular place. It embodies strength in movement, close engagement with things, and a weapon against exploitation. Symbol of power deployed on the job, it is also a rallying sign when it is raised, fist clenched, in the face of oppressors. The CP will appeal unreservedly to this “semiology of the hand:”33 it can be found throughout the tradition of political illustration. Up to the 1980s, the CP and the CGT will use these images: hands closed around chains that are being broken, bare forearms, raised fists, hands resting on tools and on machines, and even men’s hands joined together in a sign of class solidarity.
Working-Class Values Taking a look at labor and its development allows us to see the benchmarks of virility differently. The ways of being a man relate to the different uses made of the workforce over the course of the century. From streamlining between the wars to the technical and social transformations of the 1950s and 1960s and up to contemporary unemployment, the conditions for acclaiming working-class virility are morphing. To trace their oscillations, we shall rely on eye-witness accounts, memoirs, and workers’ autobiographies. Giving the floor in this way to the workers also means granting importance to the role of storytelling in the affirmation of virility—stressing that it shows up as much in the domain of practice as in that of talk.
“Hanging On” Historians and sociologists have often demonstrated it: working-class culture is a culture of spending34 and of putting one’s body on the line. It involves values tied • 525 •
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to labor and to the forms of socialization that have prevailed for a long time in working-class families. The early experience of work and its hold on individuals’ lives; multitasking up to the end of the nineteenth century, then stabilization of the group; establishment of family continuity in a single trade beginning in the 1930s—all of this builds solidarity between generations around the values of effort and courage. This must be seen, no doubt, as making a virtue out of necessity. The social status of workers actually offers few chances of moving upward; within companies social relations are harsh; work conditions, hygiene, safety, and the ergonomics of the posts are deplorable for a number of professions until after World War II. Before the automation of material handling tasks, and even after the deployment of streamlining, the causes of other burnouts in a number of métiers—road workers, miners, dockworkers, and metalworkers, for example—required physical abilities of strength and power mobilized on a daily basis. Physical committedness, courage, and toughness thus remain the essential resources of labor for a long time; they bestow upon workers a legitimacy at times as precious as professional knowhow. Accounts by miners, for example, all stress the roughness of the work and the imminence of danger. Constant Malva describes, in particular, the insensitivity of miners. Through fatalism or exhaustion, the “imperative to be brave” preserves the workers by helping them “hang on.” This is also the case for manual workers in the salt marshes, whom Georges Navel speaks about between the two wars: “The weak or feeble-minded are pitilessly eliminated by the pace of the work.”35And in the 1950s men are transporting 100-kilogram sacks on their heads, as Alfred Pacini describes it, along the docks of Marseilles.36 At the smaller workplaces, the tasks are no less difficult and the conditions no less dangerous. The autobiographical narrative by René Michaud, cobbler apprentice between the two wars, evokes a world of ordinary violence toward the youngest men. The injuries and ill-treatment require of them physical strength and, above all, firmness of character, which they are forced to acquire rapidly. The dedication to work, moreover, validates belonging to the world of men and remains the prime engine of apprenticeship for a long time. The miner Louis Lengrand recalls his arrival at the mine in the 1930s: “At eight years old I said to myself: ‘Can’t wait till I’m 13 to go to work.’ When you go to the mine at 13 years old, you have your Sundays off, and you are truly a little man.”37 Jacques Tonnaire makes of this devotedness one of the qualities of a good railway worker at the time of the steam engine: “An engineer must learn to overcome incredible fatigue, break himself in hard from the very first moment and refuse any kind of self-pity.”38 Admission into the world of men has other kinds of support: alcohol, for example, with initiation • 526 •
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represented by the young worker’s first bender, which Jean-Pierre Castelain speaks about among dockworkers.39 But the roughness, the acts of bravery, and the worker’s courage have already been agreed to as conditions of the job. In Constant Malva’s mine, the output regimen establishes a competitiveness among the men that has nothing in common with Stakhanov’s heroism but reveals instead an oppressive social domination. Suspected of not working hard enough, Malva accepts the challenge: “They suspected me, and I defended myself well. Except that, in defending myself against the strong guys, I killed at the same time my weaker coworkers.”40 This is why the hardened character, elevated to the status of a moral attribute and so often affirmed in witness accounts, imposes on men new challenges, which contain so many new risks. Navel tells of the “fright” he is seized by when starting at Citroën and wonders about his ability to hold up: “Will you be as strong as the others?”41
Proletarian STRENGTH and Acts of Violence It becomes clear from this that “labor seen as hand-to-hand engagement with things has its equivalent in dares and confrontations seen as hand-to-hand combat with other people.”42 Self-assertion and violence are frequent themes in discussions of working-class manners—discussions shared by observers and by workers about themselves. The meaning of this violence nevertheless changes over the course of the twentieth century. Narratives by journeymen during the last third of the nineteenth century relate scenes of the greatest cruelty: “Here’s what you saw every day in town, like out walking: workers would meet; they wouldn’t know one another; they’ve maybe never seen each other before. And so—without the slightest explanation, they would usually rush at each other like ferocious beasts.”43 Fights that leave men “torn up and bloody.”44 Although less definitive, the use of force pervades exchanges between Parisian workers in the late nineteenth century: “He won’t be pigheaded in words, but he’ll pack a powerful wallop,” writes Denis Poulot in 1869 with regard to the “sublime” stubbornness of those who can’t be disciplined.45 “In the laboring class, muscles make the man as much as skills do,” he goes on to say. To stand out, know-how and the reputation of being a good worker are worth just as much as “the display of big biceps.”46 In the course of the survey he takes in cabarets and working-class neighborhoods at the very end of the nineteenth century, the journalist Henry Leyret notes how quickly men resort to their fists to settle a disagreement: “From 15 to 30 years old, the worker seeks fist-fights—a matter • 527 •
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of keeping his muscles in shape!”47 He delineates a characteristic peculiar to the class based on this taste for confrontation: “Workers are strong men, and they like strength; they maintain an admiration and a respect for it.”48 From this admiration of strength comes the foregrounding of the vigorous man whose attributes are all it takes to signify his value: “Riton, a young road worker of 18, built like a colossus with bulging muscles and a powerful chest”;49 the “hardened jaws” and the “bare muscles” of salt gatherers;50 the man who is “built like a Hercules.”51 Or again, this note that seems to pick up the traits of Constantin Meunier’s sculptures: the “hairy blacksmith whose brutal interjections had the roughness of the scrap iron he was molding.”52 The temperament is crafted in the image of the body—brutal, rough, and above all courageous. For the weak man who cannot “bear the pain,” who cannot be counted on, is missing some part of his masculinity.53 The account of glorious scenes, valiant fights, “battles, brawls, amazing feats”54 embellished by the group’s memory also comes from this exaltation of strength. For a long time people talk at great length about the great deeds of some men, armed with axe handles, enacted against the “cops,” the “scabs,” the “bastards.” One scene reported by René Michaud is significant: Young Henri recalled with pride the day a cop had ventured a bit imprudently into a group of fist-fighters, and he suddenly found himself face to face with this big, brutal guy. And Henri’s voice shook as he told about the pathetic moment when, with two direct, well-placed punches, the big guy laid the cop out on a rubble heap.55
Ready to clash with matter, with other men, with the police—these are qualities that must be taken on, implemented, or at the very least transmitted and embellished in memoirs. For we should not underestimate the part that theatricality plays in these narratives. Although the acts of violence are often vouched for, they reveal a ritualization that should not suggest a world of pure fury. Over the course of the twentieth century, relations between men are still brutal; the violence, however, seems diminished compared to the accounts about journeymen, some of whom lost their lives in fights along the roads of France.56 It is not that references to strength and its uses lose their significance. But the social and juridical changes—in particular, the right to work—that structure relations between workers and bosses as well as the codification of professional training and career paths, confer on the spoken word such value that acts of explosive violence get a lot of press.57 This does not eliminate • 528 •
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the symbolic order of a male world defined apart from women in which courage, strength, and temerity remain collective markers. But confrontation, while still direct, takes some detours: often it only takes a little intimidation to impose one’s authority. Physical power and the “magnetism” of certain men suffice to bring conflicts to an end,58 Jean Oury reminds us after World War II. One scene will reveal how violence has been displaced. In a small metalworking company in the early 1950s, Oury gives an account of a veritable duel of strength. Between himself, a young worker, and an older man a fight breaks out over driving a metal stake into the ground; with everyone watching, they compete for who will hammer faster, harder, imposing his rhythm on the other; the fight is violent but displaced, with no physical contact between the two men, who nevertheless confront one another with “rage,” like “madmen,” “indirectly.” The victory of the young worker will win the men’s respect; “the wanker’s getting flabby,” they say; a few more punches with a “company bully” will end up making him equal to the others.59 The “big mouth,” the man who “stands up to the bosses and managers” is a persistent figure in the working-class world, where “any weakness of character is prejudicial.”60 Virile confrontation in this case consists as much of speech as of actual violence.
Wearing Out of Virile Values Streamlining of Labor and Virile Resistance The twentieth century is marked by rapid developments that disrupt reference points for identity. In this regard “Taylorism,” the name given to the principles developed by the American engineer Frederick W. Taylor, represents a profound change. Of course, “Taylorism” does not permeate equally all sectors of industry; its applications are not always faithful to its inventor, and while it is present in large factories, smaller shops, still numerous between the two wars, are outside the influence of its methods. But the root of Taylorist principles—prescription of operating modes and times, precise timing—dispossesses workers of a major part of their organizational autonomy. Between the worker and his labor is interposed a supervisor in charge of organizing the work. The supervisor is no longer the manager or taskmaster of olden days, when work teams were still organized by themselves, served multiple purposes, and forged interpersonal relations based on skills acquired over time. Time calculation, standardization of parts, and simplification • 529 •
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of operations individualize and specialize the work. The logic of the job gives way to a new salary framework and the contracting of training courses, of qualifications, and of wages. The new work discipline, tied to efficiency, becomes a national issue at the time of World War I. The assembly line, which Henry Ford finalizes in 1914, applied in France to the production of mortar shells during the war, is developed in the automotive industry during the 1920s.61 Taylorism and Fordism combine between the two wars to create a new industrial landscape and new work habits that require other physical and mental aptitudes. It is not that the use of strength disappears, any more than does its function to signal virile identity, but the organization of labor implies other activities and consequently other stressors that are less dependent on brute energy than on sustained attention. For workers obliged to do the most repetitive tasks, boredom is predominant—the monotony of simple gestures, always identical and repeated all day long. Engagement is intense, to be sure, for the pace is increased (the first implementations of efficiency timing in automobile factories actually leads to strikes—at Berliet in 1912, at Renault in 1913), but it demands less effort than attention and skill and more maintaining of energy than exerting of strength. The particular wear and tear produced by assembly line work acquires its own designation: “industrial fatigue.” Georges Friedmann has described this fatigue in the large Taylorized factories between the two wars.62 He has shown how the pace of “piecework” lowers nervous resistance in the strongest of men and leads to anxiety and affective and nervous disorders, as vouched for by psychologists as soon as assembly lines were set up in France.63 And the force that Simone Weil speaks of in the factories of the 1930s is mainly that which allows resistance to exhaustion: “I am very close to concluding that the salvation of a worker’s soul depends first on his physical constitution. I do not see how those who are not sturdy can avoid succumbing to one form or another of despair.”64 Efficiency norms quickly appear for what they are: insidious requirements with which the worker is not always in a position to comply. According to Navel, who went through the experience, they require the first worker up to attain a record that is in reality inaccessible: “Timekeepers and samplers fought against the worker.”65 In this case, muscular power is no longer a resource. In the automotive factories, for example, “flunking” referred to workers’ inability to keep up with the pace of the assembly line; they were overwhelmed and literally overtaken by the work. The more skilled, toolmakers, regulators, who are in charge of precision operations, are nonetheless subject to the rational organization of the work. Navel again describes them at the Berliet plant in the 1930s: • 530 •
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Their hands made only a small back-and-forth movement. They carried out a job of extreme precision. [. . .] For a long time their work required no stress from them; there was boredom, but a boredom accepted and digested. None of them felt like becoming a road worker in order to go back to a life involving the whole body.66
The disappearance of worker initiative for a large part of the personnel at Taylorized factories opens to insidious questioning the values of virility not only in terms of abilities, limited from now on to a structured performance, but also by revealing a new kind of wearing down caused by small, brief, and repetitious actions. Skilled workers do not disappear, for all that. In numerous industries, they assert their skills and succeed at impressing the boss, at least when the labor market permits it. Quitting the company without notice, for example on impulse, is still an affirmation of pride. Maurice Aline, a worker between the two wars, recalls this about toolmakers in the Paris region: “If something was not to their liking, they would say to the boss, with a certain casualness: ‘Cash me out, I’ll collect my tools and pack my bags.’ ”67 The same experience held true for René Michaud, cobbler apprentice: “One slightly salty expression from the manager, a slightly abrupt questioning, which my precious pride could not abide, and I would leave the place. . . .”68 In the large Taylorized factories, worker mobility represents, along with lounging and sabotage, continual forms of everyday resistance. Among these acts of assertiveness, the self-inflicted injury, called the “macadam,” gave the worker the benefit of a work stoppage covered by medical insurance. In the mines, before World War II, Xavier Charpin cuts a coworker’s hand with a stone. A ritualized episode, a show of virility in which each plays his part as the other looks on: We pull off the stunt neat and clean; the skin is broken by the stone. Hector doesn’t say a word. He shakes his hand every which way. He looks like he’s hurting a lot. Very quickly, he collects himself and calms down. He puts his finger up to the lamp. The cut is bleeding a little—it’s pretty deep, and the fingernail is torn away. Hector looks at me; he seems relaxed, though slightly pale. His voice shows no sign of emotion: “It’s O.K.; I’ve got my wound; I’ll have time to take care of myself. Touch my hand—you’re a real man. I never thought you’d be able to do it.”69
In these practices, which between the wars can still establish reputations, we should see, no doubt, an expression of those “defensive strategies” that psychologists talk about;70 through such practices, the identity is asserted of a class “whose wealth lies only in its labor power,” as Pierre Bourdieu has written.71 But • 531 •
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the moment this power is no longer required by labor, the values that it supported grow weak as well.
Sociological and Technological Changes, Transformations of Working-Class Virility Between the 1950s and the early 1980s, the working class undergoes changes that deeply affect its values, its points of reference, and how it is depicted; virility is no exception. Though the postwar period experiences a growth in the number of workers, it does so at the price of a diminution of its relative percentage in relation to salaried employees as a whole and a deskilling of one part of the group: a gradual rise in the number of semi-skilled workers and manual laborers, principally women and immigrants. Beginning in the 1970s, the transformations in the French industrial landscape and the crisis in the large steel mills and mining fields result in the upheaval of the foundations of collective identity. The values of dignity and the pride in workmanship rooted in a métier or a specialty are directly affected by these changes. Professional mobility and new types of housing and consumption contribute to the unraveling of traditional communities. Since the end of World War II, workers have been experiencing an improvement in their quality of life; “consumer society” is accessible to them and mass media open up other cultural reference points for them. But this opening up of the group takes place against a backdrop of massive unemployment beginning in the 1980s. While these changes are gradual and produce different effects, depending on the categories of the workers, they demonstrate nevertheless a profound transformation of the standards and values of the group. In numerous métiers, however, possessing strength is still imperative. This is first because of the forms of organizing work, as on construction sites, for example, where despite the progress made in automation, many tasks require a considerable deployment of physical force. The same is true among dockworkers and miners. In the factories, the institution of Taylorism does not eliminate virile behavior. The monotony of the work leads to erotic dreaming: “Nightfall arrives, and so do our phantasms,” writes Charly Boyardjian in his account of factory work in the 1970s. The symbolic confrontation between men is kept up: “. . . Don’t talk about fucking, you got such a small tool there! . . . When you’ve fucked as many girls as I have, you’ll have the right to talk.”72 In this world of the factory, the body remains a resource that ensures one’s place in the group of men: “We shouldn’t • 532 •
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forget the automatic, widely used gesture that consists of feeling the weight of a friend’s testicle sac,” writes Marcel Durand with regard to Peugeot workers in the 1980s and 1990s. Exhibiting one’s anatomy in response to an insult belongs to the same register of display and defiance—surely a comforting gesture for these workers, who are French males and for whom “it’s reassuring to know there are some more exploited than oneself: immigrants and women.”73 But here the bragging and the confrontations do not refer back to a legitimacy acquired or valorized through labor. This type of behavior is probably less a matter of “moral benefit”74 than a way out of boredom and repetitiveness. No doubt the most senior still seek legitimacy in the assertion of physical dominance. Such is the case of union delegates, for example, who are often “big mouths.” Similarly, among former miners there still persist those spending habits, “valiant bouts of anger” and “agonistic generosity” that Olivier Schwartz describes among workers of the North in the 1980s. Such activities as gardening, odd jobs, and moonlighting, which men get into unreservedly, reactivate a masculine form “of agonistic involvement with things” that for a long time on the margins of labor was the means of getting additional income.75 But meanwhile, automation has transformed workers’ labor. Though the movement begins earlier, it affects more and more professional specialties after World War II, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s. New skills appear—and with them new workers in charge of surveillance and the tasks of controlling the automated processes. At that point the term “new working class” is used to designate these workers, who are henceforth freed from work involving strength and whose new name/title aligns them with white-collar technicians.76 The changes cause a gradual separation from the work material, a loss of contact in favor of screen, keyboard, and desk—at least for the fringe of skilled workers. There is a tendency toward expanding the “service sector” of the activity, in which physical exertion is no longer constitutive of the job and which is conveyed by euphemisms: no longer worker but “operator,” “monitor,” “associate.” Otherwise, the feminization of labor, traditional in industrial and service sectors, today concerns every activity—to the point of speaking of an “inversion of genders” for certain professions.77 To this is added the strong trend, since the 1980s, toward individualization of careers, of remuneration, and of skills, now called “competencies.” The most contemporary forms of labor organization also structure worker initiative. The proliferation of rules and procedures, the continual control of work, the evaluation charts, and the respect for “quality norms” limit the free play of know-how based on experience. Finally, the proliferation of short-term labor contracts, especially temporary work, atomizes labor collectives. • 533 •
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The forms of virile sociability, furthermore, are weakened by the lifestyles and work modes of the younger generation that has benefited from the prolongation of their lycée study, the acquisition of professional diplomas, and the idea of social advancement by means of intellectual work. Changes in points of reference and practices and more pervasively in class lifestyle undermine identification with former workers, which used to serve as a means of integration. Thus, in the renovated workrooms of hospital cleaning services, where desks have replaced workbenches, the youngest workers give up posting nude pin-ups, identified with a “traditional territory of virility,” in favor of a more individual appropriation of the premises.78 The work unit itself is different from that of the older workers. “Visual conformity,” bearing, gesture—what Bourdieu has named bodily “hexis”—clearly distinguishes the young workers from the older ones.79 In certain working groups, the young abandon the blue overall, the primary working-class symbol, in favor of jeans and T-shirts.80 They play on other behavioral registers that result from an expanded culture and classroom socialization. Speech re-establishes its rights over the most brutal forms of self-assertion. A young union delegate in an automobile factory thus tells that he “right away understood” that he “had to lose” his “glasses and wear contacts.” . . . Glasses were not okay with the “old guys.”81 At the workplace, the opposition between the young and the old reflects a “crisis of succession” at work in other domains such as family and culture. Having lost their legitimacy as a result of the new forms of labor organization, workers’ acquisition of education certificates, and the erosion of community ties, the values of virility are affected more than anything else by massive unemployment. With it, the principal spaces of masculine legitimacy recede: in the workplace for sure but also in the social situations associated with it: the café and friends. This “investment from the outside” is from then on threatened by a “reflux toward familial space,” which is traditionally feminine.82 Running away, self-destructive behavior,83 or commitment to domestic affairs: male reactions are diverse but they are all signs of an upheaval in social roles on which the legitimacy of virile conduct was based. The youngest cannot evade the movement; certain ones see looming the devaluing of their educational credentials without being able to turn to traditional resources offered by work that involves use of the body.84As has been said with regard to England, the working class is “threatened in its economic survival, but also powerless to get to the root of it by traditional physical resources alone.”85 This weakening of the values of working-class virility winds up on the terrain of politics. Besides the decline in the Communist Party’s influence and in union membership, it is the forms of face-to-face protest that • 534 •
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are tending at this time to soften, to favor self-control—indeed to abandon violence during protest demonstrations.86
Enclaves of Virility No doubt the values of combativeness and energy have not entirely disappeared though. They reappear among the youngest workers, in those “last bastions of the expression of virility:”87 sports, especially team games, such as soccer, in which a male collective is maintained and reiterated as matches and training take place.88 There is here a public demonstration of physical qualities, along with pugnaciousness and aggressiveness: the extolling of strength, the withstanding of pain, and collective rituals such as showering. The masculine sociability of these young men recovers former characteristics by which physical exertion is displayed for evaluation by the group and contributes to male bonding. Working-class youth, those of the “projects” along the beltways of large cities, reproduces in its way the traditional forms of behavior in which violence and physical skills still represent major identity markers for boys. The very old link between body and character, between bravery and moral authority here maintains its pertinence.89 References to force, to strength, to toughness, indeed to insensitivity toward social relations, sketch out a symbolic universe in which the ritualized use of violence, both physical and verbal, constitutes a legitimate means of settling conflicts and asserting oneself. David Lepoutre has studied at length among youth of the “projects” the complex ways of starting fights, their codes, and the norms that organize them. In the eyes of others, not every act of violence has the same value: in group combat, for example, regardless of the boisterousness of the action, one must know how to stay in character and not turn away when one is a boy known for fighting like a girl—i.e., by scratching and biting.90 It is therefore a complex violence, in spite of appearances. Speech holds a pre-eminent place through verbal sparring, in which the most eloquent stand out, the “big kidders” and the “gabbers” being the most impressive.91 Still, these enclaves of virility find no counterpart in the work world—quite the opposite, actually. Gang behavior remains poorly adapted to the shop floor environment and its discipline. The “youth of the projects” find themselves destitute, isolated between the oldest of working-class traditions and young women, great numbers of whom work today in the factories. Their virility ends up “discredited” as a result.92 Labor also keeps its distance from the outbursts of collective acts of • 535 •
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violence. Thus, recent “riots”—those of 2005, for example, which were partially political in character93—find no relevance in the institutional logic that held sway for so long over work conflicts in which the working class had been engaged since the 1930s. Identification with one’s own territory, the rejection of the police and social institutions, and the experience of arbitrariness explain, above all, these working-class revolts. Manifestations of working-class virility have been developed and maintained by speaking out in a self-justificatory way. Because of technological changes and the weakening of community ties, that kind of speaking out has today lost its legitimacy in the work world. It is no longer able to reflect practices that have now lost their validity.
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