The delegate of the Typographical Union (La Fédération du Livre) combated the idea of the general strike and argued that it was impossible in view of the small number of organized workingmen. But his argument had no effect on the Congress. It was rejected as of no importance because the minority of organized workingmen could carry away with it the majority.
The question of labor laws was the subject of an animated discussion at the Congress because of its importance. The answer given to this question was to determine the attitude of the General Confederation to legislative reforms and to the State in general.
The question was a very practical one. The government of Waldeck-Rousseau (22 June, 1899-6 June, 1902), in which the socialist, Millerand, was Minister of Commerce and Industry, outlined a number of labor laws which touched upon the most vital questions of the labor movement. The most important of these law-projects were on strikes and arbitration, on the composition of the superior Council of Labor, on the institution of Councils of Labor, and on the modification of the law of 1884.
The policy of the government in planning these laws was clear and expressly stated. It was the continuation and accentuation of the policy which had guided M. Waldeck-Rousseau in 1884 when he was Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet of Jules Ferry, and which had then found partial expression in the ministerial circular on the application of the new law on syndicats.
This “Circular,” sent out to the Prefects August 25, 1884, pointed out to the Prefects that it was the duty of the State not merely to watch over the strict observation of the law, but “to favor the spirit of association” among the workingmen and “to stimulate” the latter to make use of the new right. In the conception of the government the syndicats were to be “less a weapon of struggle” than “an instrument of material, moral and intellectual progress.” It was “the wish of the Government and of the Chambers to see the propagation, in the largest possible measure, of the trade associations and of the institutions which they were destined to engender” (such as old-age pension funds, mutual credit banks, libraries, co-operative societies, etc.) and the government expected the Prefects “to lend active assistance” in the organization of syndicats and in the creation of syndical institutions.[124]
The aim of Waldeck-Rousseau was to bring about the “alliance of the bourgeoisie and of the working-class”[125] which Gambetta and other republican statesmen had untiringly preached as the only condition of maintaining the Republic. In the period 1899-1902 this policy seemed still more indispensable. It was the time when the agitation caused by the Dreyfus affair assumed the character of a struggle between the republican and anti-republican forces of France. Republicans, Radicals, Socialists, and Anarchists were fighting hand in hand against Monarchists, Nationalists, Anti-Semites and Clericals. The cabinet of Waldeck-Rousseau constituted itself a “Cabinet of Republican Defense” and it sought to attain its end by securing the support of all republican elements of the country. This was the cause which prompted Waldeck-Rousseau to invite a socialist, Millerand, to enter his cabinet and to accentuate his policy of attaching the working-class to the Republic by a series of protective labor laws.
The policy of the Government was clearly expressed by Millerand in the Chamber of Deputies on November 23, 1899. “It has appeared to me,” said he, “that the best means for bringing back the working masses to the Republic, is to show them not by words, but by facts, that the republican government is above everything else the government of the small and of the weak.”[126]
The facts by which M. Millerand undertook to show this were a number of decrees by which the government tried to enforce a stricter observation of labor-laws already in existence and a series of new law-projects for the future protection of labor, such as the bill on a ten-hour day, which became law on March 30, 1900. As M. Millerand expressed it, this law was “a measure of moralization, of solidarity, and of social pacification.”
Social pacification was the supreme aim of M. Millerand and of the government. M. Millerand hoped to attain this by calling workingmen to participation in the legislative activities of the Republic, by accustoming them to peaceable discussions with employers, and by regulating the more violent forms of the economic struggle.
A decree from September 1, 1899, modified the constitution of the Superior Council of Labor, in existence since 1891, so that it should henceforth consist of 22 elected workingmen, 22 elected employers and 22 members appointed by the Minister from among the deputies of the Chamber, the senators and other persons representing “general interests.” The Superior Council of Labor was “an instrument of study, of information and of consultation” in matters of labor legislation. It studied law-projects affecting the conditions of labor, made its own suggestions to the government, but had no legislative powers.