Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption, 1834-1930 9781501734755

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CONSUMER COOPERATION IN FRANCE

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CONSUMER COOPERATION IN FRANCE The Politics of Consumption, 1834-mo

Ellen Furlough

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 1991 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published in 1991 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2512-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-55726 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

© The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction Intersecting Histories: Cooperation, Consumerism, and “Le Mouvement Social”

PART I

i

Origins and Early Years of Consumer Cooperation

1 Prologue to Consumer Cooperation: Workers’ Associationism, 1834—1851 2 Competing Strands: Individualism versus Collectivism,

15

29

1851-1885

PART II

Consumer Cooperation and the Politics of Commercial Concentration

3 The “Retailing Revolution”: Consumer Cooperatives

69

and Chain Stores 4 Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”: The Union Cooperative

79

Contents

VI

5

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Pillar”: Socialist

119

Consumer Cooperation

PART III Strains and Tensions within Consumer Cooperation 6 Cooperation in the Nord

169

7 Women and Cooperation

199

PART IV Consumer Cooperation and Capitalist Commerce 8 Waltzing with the Capitalists: Re-visioning Consumer

227

Cooperation, 1912-1919 9 “A Movement for All Consumers”: Consumer

259

Cooperation in the 1920s Conclusion

293

Bibliography

297

Index

309

A cknowledgments

I could not have imagined or written this book without the generous support, advice, and inspiration of various institutions and people. The Council for European Studies funded exploratory research in Paris. A grant from the Social Science Research Council made possible more extended research in Parisian and provincial archives and libraries. A timely faculty development grant from Kenyon College enabled me to return to France for the conclusion of my research. In France, coopera¬ tors, librarians, and archivists assisted me in important ways. Jean LaCroix, president of the Federation Nationale des Cooperatives de Consommateurs, was very generous with his rich knowledge of cooper¬ ative history. Francois Burette provided access to cooperative archives in Denain and offered me personal papers. Jean Ponard produced exten¬ sive archival materials in Saint-Claude and helped those materials come alive by giving me a tour of the former Maison du Peuple. I am especially grateful to Jacqueline Burolla of the FNCC archives, who not only provided crucial documents but also made me feel welcome. My thanks as well to Therese Ho of the Bibliotheque Intercooperative and Colette Chambelland of the Musee Social. I am happy to thank teachers, colleagues, and friends who have generously shared their knowledge and provided the crucial personal support that makes academic labor not only possible but rewarding. My Vll

VI11

A cknowledgments

greatest debt is to Joan Wallach Scott. At every stage of this project she has encouraged me to ask hard questions, provided support while I searched for answers, and read and critiqued seemingly endless drafts. Joan Scott introduced me to social history and women’s history, and her work has continually challenged and inspired me. I thank her for lively and intelligent conversations, added insights, exacting standards, and inspired teaching. I am grateful as well for her constant example of engaged scholarship and the lesson that being a woman and an intellec¬ tual involves creativity, courage, and the mutually sustaining strength of all of us. Mari Jo Buhle, Burr Litchfield, and Susan Amussen read and com¬ mented on earlier versions of this book. Donald Reid read and critiqued the manuscript several times and generously shared his knowledge of French history. Carl Strikwerda read several chapters and offered excel¬ lent suggestions. I am grateful as well to the members of the working group on Americanization, especially Jean-Christophe Agnew, Victoria de Grazia, and Miriam Silverberg, for helping me think more critically about consumerism. Leora Auslander, Dagmar Herzog, Susan Whit¬ ney, and especially Tracey Wilson have shared with me the highs and lows of writing and research, and I appreciate their insights and ongo¬ ing friendships. Other friends, Beth Bethel, Elizabeth Castelli, and Mary Lou Savage, contributed in various ways to making this book possible. I also appreciate the helpful suggestions of the anonymous readers who evaluated the manuscript for publication. In France, Mi¬ chelle Perrot, Maurice Agulhon, and Roger Verdier kindly discussed aspects of consumer cooperation and offered helpful advice on sources. I am especially grateful to Claire Chevalley, who has introduced me to many delightful people and places in France and helped me navigate the intricacies of communicating with French archivists. Colleagues and friends at Kenyon have been unfailingly helpful, warm, and generous. Peter Rutkoff read and edited the manuscript, and I thank him for his intelligent and discerning comments as well as his encouragement and good cheer. My thanks as well to Joan Cadden, Clifton Crais, Lori Lefkovitz, Will Scott, and Roy Wortman for their astute advice and unstinting examples of scholarly commitment. Shelly Baronowski and Constance Bouchard are wonderful and caring col¬ leagues who shared their wealth of knowledge about the ins and outs of shepherding a manuscript into print. I also thank Mary Hopper for

A cknowle dements

IX

typing parts of the manuscript and for her outstanding organizational skills. Finally, I thank my parents, Fred and Adrienne Bullington, and my grandmother, Dorothy Gentry Johnson. I could never have completed this project without George Majda. A mathematician, he has learned far more about French consumer cooperation than he ever thought he would. At crucial moments, he listened to my ideas and asked percep¬ tive questions. Fie also lovingly provided the essential comfort, space, and care for our son, Andrew, that enabled me to write this book. For these contributions and for many others, I am deeply grateful. Ellen Furlough

Gambler, Ohio

CONSUMER COOPERATION IN FRANCE

INTRODUCTION

Intersecting Histories: Cooperation, Consumerism, and “Le Mouvement Social

33

This book is an analysis of the consumer cooperative movement in France from the 1830s through the 1920s. At one level, consumer co¬ operatives were simply economic enterprises that socialized ownership and profits. Like their counterparts elsewhere, French workers, artisans, and employees formed consumer cooperatives by purchasing shares, generally limited to one share per person. Consumers received profits from the cooperative in proportion to their purchases and used them for various social, political, and mutual aid purposes. Consumer coopera¬ tives typically began as bakeries or grocery stores and frequently ex¬ panded to include sales of clothing, furniture, household items, coal, and, ideally, as one cooperator said, “everything from the cradle to the grave.” By 1914, the institution was so pervasive that contemporaries considered consumer cooperatives to be the grands magasins of the working class. Although at first this may seem like a relatively simple and straight¬ forward development, the more I studied the cooperatives the more convinced I became that this movement offered an entry into the more complex history of consumerism. I became particularly intrigued by evidence suggesting that within the emerging and competitive institu¬ tions of consumerism were vastly different visions and ideologies. The historical development of consumer institutions was never a simple, 1

Introduction

2

linear process but was highly political and conflict-laden. Consumer cooperation represented one thread within political and economic de¬ bates over the meaning of consumption and the “retailing revolution ” Indeed, almost every political group in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury France had its own interpretation of the meaning of consump¬ tion. Both liberals and socialists viewed consumer cooperation as anti¬ thetical to new capitalist structures of distribution and to an individual¬ ist “culture of consumption.” My analysis of consumer cooperation as an alternative to capitalist commerce situates this movement at the intersection of two areas of historical study: consumer culture and society and French social and labor history.

The Growth of a Consumer Society and Consumer Cooperation

Studies of Western industrialized societies have traditionally noted a shift in structures and values from production to consumption and have identified this as part of the growth of a “consumer society.” Early studies of changes in consumption generally fit into three approaches. Some were part of the “standard of living” debate, which treated con¬ sumer goods as a means of measuring the material achievements of capitalist industrialization. Others, associated with “modernization the¬ ory,” cast a consumer society as an inevitably beneficial outcome of modernization. Finally, some studies criticized the growth of a con¬ sumer society. Their authors saw consumerism as alienating, inauthen¬ tic, manipulative, and antirevolutionary. They viewed commodities as compensation for powerlessness and considered desire for consumer goods a ratification of the values of a capitalist system. Recent studies have offered more nuanced views. They have ques¬ tioned notions, derived from the microeconomic theory of marginal utility, that a consumer is simply an “economic man” making rational, self-interested market choices within the limits set by income and pre¬ vailing prices. These new studies point to the ways that consumption is culturally and socially constructed, rather than economically deter¬ mined, and focus on demand. Here the cultural, social, and economic contexts for choice become potentially more important than the con¬ sumer for understanding consumerism.1 i. Anthropological theory has been particularly influential in this regard. For exam-

Intersecting Histories

Recent analyses of consumerism have also been concerned with map¬ ping its characteristics. Jean-Christophe Agnew sees consumer culture as a “whole way of life—a society-wide structure of meaning and feel¬ ing organized primarily around acts of purchase” and display.2 Rather than cataloging the emergence and dissemination of various consumer goods, newer studies have built on Thorstein Veblen’s central insight that goods serve to indicate a person’s wealth and social status.3 Objects are sold and exchanged as cultural bundles, wrapped in social, cultural, and gender relations that signify a person’s “lifestyle” and personality. Indeed, in a consumer society, according to William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, “the separate domains of ‘persons’ and ‘goods’ have collapsed and been absorbed into a more general, fluid setting where symbolic constructions play with an infinite variety of possible pathways to personal satisfaction.”4 Jean Baudrillard characterizes con¬ sumer society as a spectacle of abundance, a “celebration of the object” where the benefits of consumption are no longer the result of one’s labor but the essential ingredients for fulfilling one’s social role and status. Acquisitiveness becomes a social norm, and the objects of con¬ sumption signal social standing and social boundaries while embodying codes of conduct and aspiration.5 Another consistent characteristic of consumerism is emulation (a “Veblen effect”), which combines with entrepreneurial merchandising to constantly create new wants and pro¬ voke new needs.6 Finally, studies stress the crucial characteristic of

pie, Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood have argued that consumption is “the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape.... Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for subsistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture.’1 In Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Basic, 1979), 57~59- Economists have also been revising their views on the “economic man.” See Amartya Sen, Choice, Welfare, and Measurement (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 2. Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Memo: Americanization and Commoditization” (pa¬ per presented at the Americanization Workshop, Rutgers University, May 1987), 2. 3. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899). 4. William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products, and Images of Well-Being (Toronto: Methuen, 1986), 11. 5. Jean Baudrillard, La societe de consommation: Ses mythes, ses structures (Poitiers: Aubin, 1970), 17. An excellent analysis of Baudrillard’s work on consumption is in Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stan¬ ford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 6. The series of essays in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloom¬ ington: Indiana University Press, 1982), was particularly influential for this perspective.

Introduction

4

private, unquenchable desire, the seemingly endless longing and lacking that is essential to modern consumerism. The historical sociologist Colin Campbell has called this “modern hedonism,” wherein “attaining an object of desire is likely to eliminate the pleasures associated with anticipatory day-dreaming.” The consumer “is continually withdrawing from reality as fast as he encounters it, ever-casting his day-dreams forward in time, attaching them to objects of desire, and then subsequendy ‘unhooking’ them from these objects as and when they are attained and experienced.”7 Campbell thus characterizes consumerism as the dreamlike—and ultimately unattainable—search for pleasure. A parallel project has been to recover a discernible history of the growth of a consumer society in the Euro-American world. Here histo¬ rians have diverged, notably on consumerism’s chronology. Contribu¬ tors to the important collection of essays edited by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears dated the emergence of consumerism in the United States to the 1880s and the growth of an urban professionalmanagerial class.8 Europeanists have pushed back its emergence to the early modern period and have made demand and markets central to analyses of capitalist development.9 Although there is no consensus about the moment of the maturation of a consumer society, most studies concede that many crucial components were in place by the late nineteenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century onward in Europe in general and France in particular, an explosion of forms related to commodity trans¬ actions was combined with a growing intensity of discussions about the roles and meanings of consumption. Consumption emerged as a consis¬ tent referent enmeshed within a discursive and institutional web that included economic theory, political movements, and the social and cultural roles of class and gender. Historians have focused on analyses of 7. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modem Consumerism (Ox¬ ford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 86-87. 8. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon, 1983)9. Examples of these perspectives include Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modem Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Develop¬ ment of a Consumer Society in Early Modem England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Fernand Braudel, Lesjeux de Vechange (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979); and D- E. C. Eversley, “The Home Market and Home Demand, 1750-1780,” in Land, Labour, and Population in the Industrial Revolution, ed. E. L. Jones and E. E. Mingay (London. Edward Arnold, 1967), 206—259.

Intersecting Histones

5

die development of the new form of the department store, of discus¬ sions among French intellectuals about the “consumer revolution” of the second half of the nineteenth century, and of the ways in which art functioned as a sign of social distinction for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Others have explored the impact of consumer culture on constructions of masculinity and femininity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the influence of “Americanization” on European market culture and institutions from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period.10 Each of these studies adds a fascinating piece to an increasingly complex yet incomplete history of a “consumer society,” which began to mature in the mid-nineteenth century. Each explores one aspect of a process whereby the dominant structures of a modern consumer society became capitalist and individualist and in which the dominant ideology referred to a shared perception of modernity that valued efficiency and rationalization. The structures and ideology of consumerism implicitiy preserved hierarchy (class and gender) amid explicit notions of con¬ sumers’ equal access to goods and a style of life. By the 1920s, the notion of the “consumer citizen” had emerged to signify the fulfillment of the liberal ethos—unlimited mass consumption and the blurring of class distinction.11 At the same time, little is known about the dynamic interplay of tensions, contradictions, relations of power, and alternative possibilities in the construction of this particularly capitalist, individualist, and ac¬ quisitive culture of consumption. We know even less about the history of the ways in which “consumption is subject to social control and political definition.”12 To the extent that some studies fail to explore the ways in which conflicts and contests over definitions of consumption 10. For examples see Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Remy Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984); Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985); and Victoria de Grazia, “The Arts of Purchase: How American Publicity Subverted the European Poster, 19201940,” in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 221-257. 11. The term “consumer citizen” is from Miriam Silverberg, “Living on the Urban Edge: Culture and Sub-Culture in Taisho Japan” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, March 1986). 12. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6.

6

Introduction

shaped the emergence of a specifically capitalist and individualist con sumer society, they implicitly assume a kind of linearity and intentionality about the process. I argue instead that changes in consumption, like changes in production, have a complex and conflict-laden history. Studies of alternative discussions, visions, and institutions, such as consumer cooperation, are crucial for an understanding of the ideolo¬ gies and institutions that became dominant. How did the dominant structures and ideology of modern consumer society become capitalist, individualist, and acquisitive? Were there alternative or competing strat¬ egies? Case studies are needed to illuminate the techniques and ideolo¬ gies of both the successful and the unsuccessful contenders who forged the “consumer revolution” from the mid-nineteenth through the mid¬ twentieth centuries. French history provides a particularly promising arena for an analysis of the emergence of a modern consumer society, for France played a pioneering role in the development of such consumer institutions as advertising and department stores. By the late nineteenth century, the major contenders in France for control over the processes of consump¬ tion and distribution were department stores, chain stores, consumer cooperatives, and independent small shopkeepers. Unlike the capitalist, individualist ethos of department stores and chain stores and, to a lesser extent, small shopkeepers, the values of cooperatives were democratic and collective. Consumer cooperation was a market-centered move¬ ment that for a time offered an alternative to certain aspects of competi¬ tive commercial capitalism. The consumer cooperative movement was a movement of selfconscious consumers—cooperators who considered themselves con¬ sumers and constructed a movement around consumer issues. Yet an analysis of this movement shows that for much of its history it embod¬ ied few of the characteristics associated with the emergence of modern consumerism. Cooperators recognized that commercial forms could be vehicles for social visions and avenues of change. Cooperators under¬ stood very well what William Reddy has recently analyzed—the ways in which “exchange relations” were relations of power.13 They recognized that needs and gratifications in the market could be political and ideo¬ logical, as well as individual. Cooperators rejected the political and 13. William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modem Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Intersecting Histories

j

ideological constructions of a “free market” and sought instead to construct a market culture and a consumer ethos that challenged the emerging market culture and the emulatory, private, dreamlike, selfindulgent consumer ethos of commercial capitalism. Consumer cooperatives also offer a key to the multiple meanings and representational aspects of commerce since they gave a concrete form to political motives and visions. They provide a cultural text for the strug¬ gles, conflicts, and contradictions within an emerging consumer cul¬ ture. As Agnew has said of the Anglo-American theater, the cooperative movement “did more than reflect relations occurring elsewhere; it mod¬ eled and in important respects materialized those relations.”14 A case study of cooperation shows how the use and meanings of institutions shaped and represented people’s political values and visions. It also suggests ways in which definitions within an emerging consumer cul¬ ture get controlled, denotes the mechanisms through which instru¬ ments of consumer culture become instruments of social and state power, and analyzes the cultural construction of gender within con¬ sumer institutions.

French Social History and Consumer Cooperation

This project grew out of my interest in the history of the French labor movement. I was struck by the frequency with which documents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries referred to consumer cooperation. Not only was cooperation discussed at socialist and trade union congresses, but those congresses often took place in the con¬ sumer cooperatives. A glance at major socialist and trade union news¬ papers such as UHumanite or La Vie Ouvriere shows regular columns and features on cooperation. Consumer cooperatives handed a large part of the labor militancy of the period, and many socialist and trade union leaders were cooperators. There were consumer cooperatives all over France, and my preliminary research suggested that they played important roles in local politics. Yet as I continued research on the roles of cooperation among French workers, it became clear to me that there was a real contradiction between the evident importance of the move14. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, isso-uso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), xi.

Introduction

8

ment within the working-class political universe of the period and the neglect of the movement by modern scholars of French labor and social history. Most modern studies of the French working-class movement recognize the producer cooperative movement of the pre-1848 period and dismiss the consumer cooperative movement that followed its demise. The reasons for this neglect remain unclear. I suspect, however, it is related to two issues: the general suspicion that those in labor history have of nonworkplace-inspired political mobilization, as opposed to traditional political avenues such as trade unions and socialist parties, and the tendency of some labor historians to search for their own political ancestors. Because the cooperative movement became, argu¬ ably, the most “reformist” of the major working-class institutions, it may simply have lacked appeal. For many years, then, the only substan¬ tial study of French consumer cooperation was the one completed by Jean Gaumont in 1924. Since the advent of the “new” social history, there have been a few studies of French consumer cooperation, as well as some incorporation of consumer cooperation within broader analy¬ ses. There are, for example, a straightforward institutional study of the socialist wing of French consumer cooperation and an analysis of co¬ operation as a carrier of working-class political reformism.15 Neither looked at the movement beyond national organizations, the actions of movement leaders, or at the links between this movement, workingclass politics (especially at the local level), and consumer issues. Equally neglected has been the role of women in the cooperative movement. I was also drawn to consumer cooperation because of two collections of published documents from the British cooperative move¬ ment, Life as We Have Known It and Maternity: Letters from Working Women.16 These richly evocative texts showed how consumer coopera¬ tion was an important stepping stone for women’s political mobiliza¬ tion. I was curious to know if there was a comparable women’s move¬ ment in France. An analysis of women and cooperation might add new insights to an ongoing historical inquiry about women and class con¬ sciousness, because cooperation was for the most part a class-based in15. Roger Verdier, “La longue marche de la cooperatipn: De la verrerie ouvriere (1895) au Pacte d’unite (1912),” Ph.D. thesis, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1981, and Nathalie Pilhes, “Socialisme et cooperation: De la Revolution au reformisme, 18791914,” M.A. thesis, University of Paris I, 1983. 16. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, ed., Life as We Have Known It (New York: Norton, 1975), and Davies, ed., Maternity: Letters from Working Women (New York: Norton,

1979).

Intersecting Histories

9

stitution outside the workplace and also a movement organized around an area traditionally consigned to women, that of consumption. Working-class men and women were engaged in vigorous debates and activities around consumer issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and incorporated issues of consumption within the working-class movement of the period. At first this connection seems paradoxical how did the working-class movement, ostensibly orga¬ nized around the struggles and concerns of producers, come to define consumer cooperation as an essential part of its political strategy? What were the results of the interweaving of cooperation, socialism, and trade unionism? What would an analysis of this interplay reveal about working-class practices and attitudes toward consumption and con¬ sumer institutions? The answers to these questions point to the ways in which the “politics of consumption” offers insights into a particular political cul¬ ture that flourished in France among workers, artisans, and some em¬ ployees and bourgeois in the early Third Republic. This political culture was linked to traditional republican concerns, yet it retained important elements from the political and social visions of the generation of 1848 and the class consciousness of the generation of 1871. It was a par¬ ticularly militant period, especially from the late 1880s through the 1910s. Many explanations have been advanced for the intensity of labor struggles during those years, as well as the general political mobilization that resulted in significant electoral gains for French socialists. One important explanation that has been missed is the role of consumer cooperatives. It was precisely the interweaving of political socialism, trade unionism, and cooperation that accounted for the strength of the labor movement prior to World War I. Consumer cooperation ex¬ pressed and channeled a significant critique of capitalism, specifically capitalist consumer culture, at the same time that it offered resources and space within which to organize political activities. To neglect that critique is to miss the richness and depth of that historical moment and to mute the extent of people’s visions, aspirations, and struggles within that particular political culture. Such neglect also erases an important radical critique of consumer society that had concrete, grass-roots form as a working-class institution.17 i/. The neglect of consumer cooperation not only mutes an important grass-roots critique but also implies that the writings of elite theorists were the only critiques of capitalist consumerism. If one were to trace the intellectual threads of such critiques from

Introduction

IO

That historical moment has passed, and the cooperative movement today is a relatively small sector of the French economy and one that insists on its political “neutrality” The national headquarters of the French consumer cooperative movement is a modern multistory struc¬ ture located in the upscale area of Boulogne west ot Paris. Yet there are remnants of the movement’s heritage. For example, cooperative food¬ stuffs are noted for their purity (cooperatives, after all, were pioneers in the “natural food” business), and in some provincial towns one can still sense elements of the ways cooperators formed a kind of community, a “family enlarged.” I caught glimpses of this spirit in Saint-Claude in the Jura department, where I had traveled to work in the archives of the local cooperative, the Fraternelle. I wandered through the town until I arrived at the cooperative and asked to speak with the manager. A flurry of activity commenced while people went in search of the person they called “Pere” Ponard. Monsieur Ponard was from the family that had managed the cooperative since the 1890s, and he proudly took me to the siege of the cooperative. It seemed symbolic that everything was in

disarray. The cooperative was moving from the building built in 1910, where the courtyard was dominated by a bust of the socialist Jean Jaures, to a sleek new structure that would have been indistinguishable from any modern grocery store except for the COOP logo on its front. Cooperation is no longer a radical alternative to capitalist commerce. This book traces the cooperative movement from its origins within associationism in the 1830s, through its multiple relationships with reformers and radicals, to the crucial shift when cooperation came to signify a corrective, rather than an alternative, to capitalist commerce. This book addresses the history of consumer cooperation on both national and local levels and explores the political dimensions of dis¬ tribution and consumption. It is not meant to be an exhaustive account of French consumer cooperation. My treatment of the history of consumer cooperation begins with an overview of the movement’s origins and early years from the 1830s to the 1880s. The first chapter locates the beginnings of consumer cooperation within associationism between 1834 and 1851. The second chapter exam-

the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, it would probably include Marx on commodity fetishism, Thorstein Veblen on conspicuous consumption, writers from the Frankfurt school, and underconsumptionist theorists such as Paul Sweezy.

Intersecting Histories

ii

ines the emergence of different strands of consumer cooperation— radical and reformist—from 1851 to 1885. Radical cooperators of the 1860s revived consumer cooperatives as a way to fund strikes and labor activism. Reformists, in contrast, cast cooperatives as a part of a pro¬ gram for working-class “self-help” and as one way to inculcate certain values. The next section, on consumer cooperation and the politics of com¬ mercial concentration, first surveys developments within French com¬ merce, notably the emergence and growth of chain stores, and then compares them with consumer cooperatives. This section—and the book as a whole—focuses on issues of management, profits, share¬ holding, advertising, types of goods sold, commercial culture, and the relationships among commercial forms and other political and social groups, to differentiate cooperative and capitalist commerce. The next chapter turns to the founding and growth of a national cooperative organization in 1885, the Union Cooperative. This organization was the fulfillment of the historically reformist thread of consumer cooperation, but it nonetheless elaborated commercial strategies different from those

practiced by department stores and chain stores. In contrast, socialist cooperators rediscovered radical notions of cooperation and founded the Bourse des Cooperatives Socialistes in 1895. Movement theorists argued that cooperation was both an agent of resistance to capitalism and a worker-controlled space within capitalist society from which to construct an alternative economic system. The book’s third section consists of two case studies. They focus on strains and tensions within consumer cooperation and suggest some reasons why cooperation was unable to sustain a serious challenge to capitalist commerce. One case study analyzes cooperatives in the Nord department. The other exam¬ ines women’s roles and the construction of gendered identities within consumer cooperation. The theme of the last section is the growing similarity between consumer cooperation and capitalist commerce from 1912 through the 1920s. Here I examine the process whereby cooperation ceased to pose itself as an alternative form of commerce. One chapter explores the triumph of the reformist thread within consumer cooperation over the radical one after the merger of the two wings of the movement in 1912 into the Federation Nationale des Cooperatives de Consommation (FNCC) and the movement’s close collaboration with the French gov¬ ernment during World War I. The final chapter, on cooperation in the

12

Introduction

1920s, examines the manifestations and meanings of the movement’s

representation of itself as a corrective to capitalism’s abuses rather than its alternative. The adoption of several capitalist commercial strategies, combined with the negative treatment of a small group of communist cooperatives, completed the transformation. The history of consumer cooperation, then, has important implica¬ tions for understanding the consolidation of a capitalist culture of consumption and for the decline of a radical critique of that consumer culture, as well as its radical potential, within socialist theory and working-class politics. This book is offered as a contribution to the continuing debates surrounding our understandings of consumer cul¬ ture and consumer society and the course of French working-class culture and politics.

I

Prologue to Consumer Cooperation: Workers’ Assoeiationism, 1834-18S1

Cooperative associations first emerged in the 1830s and 1840s as a strategy within the larger associationist movement. Assoeiationism was both a theoretical and an organizational alternative to the competitive individualism of early industrial capitalism. For skilled urban workers, capitalism signified disorder, corruption, injustice, and the fragmenta¬ tion of their trades. Workers drew on their corporate traditions and the writings of utopian socialists to construct a thorough critique of capital¬ ism and an associationist alternative. Although their critique recognized the pervasiveness of capitalism, many of their strategies for its subver¬ sion centered on issues of labor and trade organization, the arenas of the most fierce discussions and bitter contests. Producer cooperative asso¬ ciations were the focus of workers’ efforts to challenge a system based on competition for individual gains. Restricted by the repressed politi¬ cal climate and the continuation of laws against labor coalitions, skilled workers chose the legal framework of producer cooperative associations to institute collective ownership of the means of production and main¬ tain skill and control over their crafts. To symbolize their commitment to an associated community of producers, workers used the watch¬ words democratic and social in describing their projects for reform. Democratic connoted self-government, and social signified concern for the collectivity rather than the individual. These terms were elevated in 15

16

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

the 1840s to the hoped-for political guarantee of their “liberty” of association: a Democratic and Social Republic. Skilled workers recognized that capitalism was a pervasive system and that this system caused oppression and disruption not only in the work process but in all aspects of social life.1 They saw consumption as a particularly important arena for a critique of capitalism and for the formulation of an alternative system. Consumer associations were al¬ ways part of the discussions of association in the 1830s and 1840s, even if they were not the major focus for strategic action. In their theoretical assumptions and their organization, consumer cooperative associations paralleled the producer associations of the 1830s and 1840s. Like pro¬ ducer associations, consumer cooperatives sought to realize the associa¬ tion^ vision of a collective and democratically constituted social order. For skilled workers in the 1830s, the idiom of association embodied both a critique of industrialization and a comprehensive social and economic program. Despite the continued prevalence of small-scale production, the advent of early industrial capitalism dramatically altered skills, patterns of control, and the pace of work for skilled urban work¬ ers. Furthermore, the postrevolutionary political system maintained the 1791 legislation abolishing corporations, which denied traditional forms of collective control and protest, and championed the “liberty” of indus¬ try instead of the “liberty” of association. Under the new system, entre¬ preneurs were free to introduce techniques such as confection, which replaced items crafted by a single artisan with lower-quality, standard¬ ized items manufactured in separate processes by different workers. The attendant division of labor, dilution of skills, and loss of control over the processes of production generated an outcry among skilled workers of the period. Contemporaries located a source for the disrup¬ tion of their trades in unregulated competition among individuals. Victor Considerant (1808—1893), a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and a disciple of Fourier, argued that “competition, so praised by our economists, is only a furious war causing bankruptcy, misfortune, and all types of disaster ” Impugning the ideological centerpiece of the competitive system, he further argued that laissez-faire entailed theft, 1. See Joan Wallach Scott, “Work Identities for Men and Women: The Politics of Family in the Parisian Garment Trades in 1848,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 93-112, for a discussion of how capitalist prac¬ tices disrupted family work dynamics and how workers’ discussions of the family served as the basis for a critical antithesis to capitalism.

Prologue to Consumer Cooperation

17

speculation, destruction, the “spoliation of the entire social body,” and “disorder and war in all industrial and commercial relations.”2 To coun¬ ter “competition” (i.e., capitalism) and its fragmenting effects, skilled workers proposed “association,” or the right of individuals to group themselves for collective action. Through association, the social system would become characterized by cooperation rather than competition, harmony rather than anarchy, honesty rather than fraud, order rather than disorder, and fraternity rather than individual liberty. Instead of a society divided by “radical oppositions” into those with “funds, capital, and instruments of labor” and “those who have only their strength, intelligence, arms or head,” there would be mutually dependent and associated communities.3 Workers derived the notion of association from two general sources: their corporate heritage and the writings of such utopian socialists as Charles Fourier, Henri Saint-Simon, and Etienne Cabet.4 For the pro¬ tection of skills and control of the trades, workers had traditionally relied on the rituals of their corporations and on perceptions of the craft as a united community. It was logical for skilled workers to reinterpret 2. Victor Considerant, Destineesociale, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairies du Palais-Royal, 1834, 1838, and 1844), cited by E. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrieres et de Vindustrie en France de 1789 a 1870, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 2:31—32. Considerant wrote Destinee sociale to explicate Fourier’s work in a clear manner to a broader audience. 3. Considerant, Destinee sociale, 2:31. 4- It remains unclear to what extent advocates of producer associations were influ¬ enced by the English cooperative movement, which had a network of producer and consumer cooperatives in the 1820s. It is known that Joseph Rey (1779-1855) wrote of cooperation in Saint-Simonian journals during the 1820s. Rey, a judge in Grenoble, was condemned to death in 1820 for his part in an antigovernment plot. He fled to England, where he became involved with the Owenists. From 1826 to 1828 he sent reports on Owenism to France, which were published in Le Producteur and Le Globe. In one letter, he clearly linked the notion of cooperation with association, with both in clear opposi¬ tion to competition: “We think, like them [the Owenists], that the system of coopera¬ tion, that is of association, ought to replace the spirit of competition.” His letters were collected into a pamphlet, Letters sur le systeme de la cooperation mutuelle et de la communaute de tons les biens d’apres le plan de M. Owen (Paris: A. Sautelet, 1828). On Rey see “Joseph Rey” in Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier franpais, part 1, 3: 304306; Georges Weill, “Les memoires de Joseph ReyRevue Historique 157 (1928): 291-307; and Fernand Rude, (Jn socialiste utopique oublie,” Annales de PUniversite de Grenoble, 1944, 75yi04- On Owenism in France, see the special number of Communautes: Archives Internationales de sociologie de la cooperation et du developpement 30 (July—December 1971), entitled “Owenisme et utopies fran^aises”; and Jacques Gans, “Les relations entre socialistes de France et d Angleterre au debut du dix-neuvieme siecle,” Le Mouvement Social 46 (January—March 1964): 105—118. For an analysis of Owenism, a similar movement in England based on a commitment to sexual equality, see Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

jg

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

the then-outlawed corporations in terms of an “association” in order to defend the dignity of labor and the integrity of their craft. The works of the early socialists and their enthusiastic propagation by numerous disciples further reinforced the polarities between competition and association. Despite their dissimilarities, these thinkers and activists envisioned re¬ ordering society to neutralize conflict and eliminate inequality. Charles Fourier (1772-1837) advocated the reorganization of society into orga¬ nic, affective communities, in clear opposition to what he considered the degradation of human passions and fragmentation of material existence in the emerging industrial capitalist society. He especially castigated the power of commercial capitalism and inveighed against the waste and parasitism of middlemen. As one historian notes, Fourier considered merchants and commercial middlemen to be “the chief cause of poverty and of all economic ills.” Merchants were villains “responsible for high prices, food shortages, and almost all the other ills of the economy. 5 As the son of a cloth merchant of Besan^on and through his own work in commerce as a clerk and salesperson, Fourier claimed to know firsthand the dishonesty and dehumanization of commerce. In his Theorie des quatre mouvements, he stated that commerce comprised “groups of pirates” who “merely consumed while producing nothing.”6 He be¬ lieved that those in commerce falsified goods and artificially raised their cost. Fourier proposed instead “commercial associations for a just commerce with no intermediary steps between production and con¬ sumption, where all would share in profits rewarding capital, labor, and talent.7 The communal store would provide all that was necessary for daily life and serve as a direct link between producers and consumers. This system would gradually institute production, replace parasitic com¬ merce, and unite buying, selling, production, and consumption in har¬ monious association. Fourier’s vision insisted on a gradual approach. He believed that model communities, producer associations, collective consumer and credit associations, and the like would educate people in the benefits of cooperation over competition and thus rule out violent revolutionary change (an approach later embraced by an important 5. Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: Univer¬ sity of California Press, 1986), 199—200. 6. Charles Fourier, Oeuvres completes de Charles Fourier, vol. 1, Theorie des quatre mouvements et des destiniesjyenerales (Paris: Librairie Societaire, 1846), 244—266. 7. Fourier, Oeuvres completes, vols. 2-5, Theorie de Vunite universelle, 205.

Prologue to Consumer Cooperation

19

segment of the consumer cooperative movement). By the mid-i830S, then, there were three overlapping meanings of association in worker discourse: worker corporations, producer cooperatives, and the blend¬ ings of these two into notions of a larger association of workers.8 In this manner, the strategy of cooperation became an important component of the politics of labor. Because the struggles of the period were primarily rooted in issues of labor, the earliest expressions of the cooperative movement emphasized production. Workers of the same trade formed producer cooperative associations characterized by collective ownership. A proponent of producer cooperatives, Joseph-Philippe Buchez outlined the essential aspects of producer associations in the early 1830s in his paper L’Europeen. Buchez argued for “common social capital,” which would be “social, inalienable, and indissoluble” and thus the property of the association rather than of the individual members. The cooperative could admit new members, and profits and dues would continue to expand the social capital. Associationists hoped that this process would eventually result in the collective ownership of the trade by the workers themselves. In this manner workers countered the problems in their trades “at the source,” and the capitalists (or, as they called them, the “parasites”) would disappear. Because of the relatively small scale of production at that time, pro¬ ducer cooperatives were a feasible strategy. But one major obstacle would continue to plague both producer and consumer cooperatives throughout the century: credit. How would it be possible to obtain enough initial capital from the meager monetary resources of workers? Buchez’s response was to combine workers’ money with state aid, to stress the tactical usefulness of a Republic as the scale and implementa¬ tion of capitalist techniques increased.9 These programs, advocated by Louis Blanc in his 1840 Organisation du Travail and the monthly L’Ate8. William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 210-211. Sewell writes of the last type of association that “only the development of this third meaning of association authorized us to speak of‘class consciousness’ in the 1830s, for it was as an ‘association’ of workers in different trades that French workers first conceived of them¬ selves as a united class.” 9. J.-Ph. Buchez, “Moyen d’ameliorer la condition des salaries des villes f Journal des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 7 December 1831. This article is reprinted in Henri Desroche, Solidarity ouvrteres, vol. 1, Societaires et compagnons dans les associations cooperatives, 18311900 (Paris: Les Editions Ouvrieres, 1981), 31—36.

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

20

Her; located in the Democratic and Social Republic both credit and

contracts for trade associations in order to transform the economy and replace capitalist competition and the wage system. Republicans gave this program an even broader base of support when it was adopted in the 1840s as a major social policy of republicanism. Consumer cooperation was part of the discourse of associationism. It served both as a critical counterpart to the commercial competition of the period and as a formulation of the connection between production and consumption. Like Fourier, workers bitterly castigated merchants who contributed no labor but organized the sale and distribution of the products of the labor of others. If there was to be a just and moral economy, they reasoned, all factors related to labor and production must be included in both the critique of capitalism and the associationist alternative. To correct the inequitable distribution processes of an individualist,

capitalist marketplace, disciples of Saint-Simon and Fourier founded one of the earliest consumer cooperative associations in Lyons in 1835. Michel Derrion, a follower of Fourier and son of a silk wholesale merchant, first proposed a consumer association after the bloody Lyons uprising of April 1834. In a series of articles in the Saint-Simonian and mutualist UIndicateur and a pamphlet entided Constitution de Vindustrie et organization pacifique du commerce et du travail, Derrion set forth his plan to “diminish the evil effects of competition, to bring about a more equitable distribution of the wealth produced by workers, and to begin a progressive transformation of commerce and industry in the interests of society in general, and of the workers in particular.”10 In advocating a consumer association, Derrion used language and arguments that lo¬ cated the theoretical center of the new project in issues of labor and, hence, production, because he saw commerce and consumption as the distribution of the products of labor. Noting the essential interweaving of issues of production and distribution, Derrion continued the analogy to the workers themselves: Workers: What is the function that you fulfill in the social mechanism? The name under which you normally designate yourselves indicates it 10. Jean Gaumont, Histoire generate de la cooperation en France (Paris: Federation Nationale des Cooperatives de Consommation, 1924), 1:128,148—149- See also George J. Sheridan, Jr., “The Lyon Cooperative Movement as Ideology, 1830-1870” (Abstract), Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History (Law¬ rence: University of Kansas, 1984), 354— 355-

Prologue to Consumer Cooperation

21

sufficiently: when one considers you in an industrial sense, you are producers. But are you only this? Do you not participate in another manner equally essential, in the commercial movement? Are you not also consumers? As limited and constrained as is your individual consump¬ tion, does not the class in which you take part as workers, by the innumerable multitude of which it is composed, form the primary ele¬ ment of consumption? ... As consumers you possess the lever that Archimedes asked for to raise the world.11

To counter commercial exploitation, Derrion offered the vente sociale d’epicerie, or collective grocery store. The goal of the store was to use a portion of the profits to form producer associations. These would, in turn, undersell other industrial ventures and establish a monopoly on local commerce and industry. The volume of production would be related to the needs of the consumers. Derrion labeled this a “new commercial system of truthful and social commerce” (Commerce Veridique et Social). The title revealed the intentions of the founders— truthful commerce, as opposed to the falsified weights, measures, and additives of regular commerce; and social commerce, as opposed to commerce in search of individual profits.12 Propagated through the worker press and local associations, Demon’s appeal was effective. Over two hundred workers subscribed shares in the new consumer associa¬ tion.13 From the beginnings of cooperation in the 1830s, women were active in the movement. They purchased shares in the cooperatives and were on administrative councils. Two prominent women on the administra¬ tive council of the Commerce Veridique in Lyons were Mme Debelle and Mme Eugenie Soudet, both Saint-Simonians.14 Women in the early 11. Desroche, Solidarity ouvneres, 27. 12. These sentiments reflect Fourier’s influence; the founders of the Commerce Veri¬ dique belonged to the Fourierist society L’Union Ftarmonienne in Lyons. Gaumont, Histoire generate, 1: 139. 13. Mary Lynn McDougall, “Experiments in Organization, Workers’ Societies in Lyon, 1835—1848,” Proceedings ofthe Eighth Annual Meeting ofthe Western Society for French History (Las Cruces: New Mexico State University Press, 1981), 346—354. McDougall suggests that because twenty subscribers were either members of the Mutualist Society active in the insurrection of 1834 or tried as insurgents, these militants may have used the legal consumer cooperative as a front for political meetings during the reactionary period after 1834. This use of consumer cooperatives became common during the latter part of the century. 14. Gaumont, Histoire generate, 1:158. Claire Moses has argued that “by 1832, feminism was the central concern of Saint-Simonianism.” See Claire Moses, “Saint-Simonian Men/ Saint-Simonian Women: The Transformation of Feminist Thought in 1830s France,” Journal of Modem History 54 (June 1982): 240—267. Moses reprints part of a letter from

22

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

cooperatives drew on traditions of activism in matters of consumption, from leadership in the bread riots of the Revolution to their long¬ standing role as “spenders” in the family economy. The participation of women in cooperatives was also in keeping with the vision of the har¬ monious complementarity of opposites embodied in Saint-Simonian and Fourierist ideology and of the movement’s general commitment to sexual equality. In these early associations there were relatively few gender distinctions: women were at the same time producers, con¬ sumers, responsible activists, and administrators. The Commerce Veridique opened in July 1835 at 6, rue de la Grand Cote in the Croix-Rousse section of Lyons, a worker neighborhood that was one of the principal sites of the insurrections of 1832 and 1834.15 By 1837 the store had seven branches where consumers could buy groceries, flour, bread, and coal at fixed prices and without credit. The members elected a surveillance committee, although Derrion func¬ tioned as a manager. Profits from the store were divided according to the Fourierist categories of capital, labor, and talent: reserves and provi¬ dent fund (prevoyance), director and employees, and the final part to consumers in proportion to purchase.16 This cooperative lasted until the summer of 1838. Derrion attributed its failure to the fact that it had “declared war on deceitful commerce and affronted the noble corps of grocers.” The store also suffered from the lack of favorable legislation, suspicion by the local government, a difficult commercial crisis, and overextension with its numerous stores.17 The Revolution of 1848 offered workers the political space for protec¬ tion and growth of associations in the context of a Democratic and Social Republic. The producer and consumer associations founded in the early Second Republic were squarely rooted in traditions of associationism and attempted to negate competition, provide security of em¬ ployment, and begin to build a social order based on fraternal harmony. Because of the centrality of labor in workers’ discourse in 1848, the Eugenie Soudet, a eulogy for another Saint-Simonian woman, in her French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 78. 15. The major account of this store is Jean Gaumont, Le Commerce Veridie/ue et Social (183S-1838) et son fondateur Michel Derrion (1803-1850) (Amiens: Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1935). This monograph, in abbreviated form, is reprinted in Gaumont\ Histoiregenerede, 1:123—163. 16. Louis Reynard, Le mouvement cooperatif de consommation en France (Besan^on: Imprimerie Cooperative, n.d.), 18. 17. Gaumont, Histotre jyenerale, 1:161—162.

Prologue to Consumer Cooperation

23

consumer associations were not as prevalent as producer associations and reconstituted worker corporations. Still, the associationists con¬ tinued to view issues of production and consumption theoretically as mutually dependent. Textile workers in Lille (Nord) founded a consumer association, the Humanite, in the early months of the Revolution of 1848.18 The cooper¬ ative’s statutes stated that the cooperative hoped “to transform society in 1848 by developing the principle of Association which gave it birth, and above all to sustain the creation of worker organizations managed by themselves and united in the strongest bonds of fraternity.”19 Specifi¬ cally, the Humanite fostered workers’ concerns by providing work for the unemployed, a placement bureau, and a location for the exchange of goods and services. The cooperative did not simply sell products and redistribute profits. Instead, since producers brought their goods to be purchased or traded with other producers, the roles of producer and consumer folded into each other, blending possible oppositions of interests. This reinforced in practice the theoretical positions of the mutual and complementary nature of production and consumption. One member noted: “What is remarkable in our enterprise is that tailors work for shoemakers and vice versa. It is the same for the cabinetmakers, who, like the spinners and weavers, furnish their products and recover the products of others.”20 The Humanite further recast mutualist tra¬ ditions in a cooperative setting by advocating retirement facilities for older and ill members. As a consumer cooperative, the store provided “steady and abundant nourishment” and stipulated in its statutes that all branches of the cooperative were to provide a dining room to allow members “to have meals as one family, with our wives and children.” Profits, rather than being distributed to individuals, were used for social ends, to “reclaim man’s proper dignity.” By 1851 the Humanite com¬ prised 1,500 families and had its own bakery and butcher shop and two branch stores.21 18. For information on the Humanite, see August Devaux, Les societes cooperatives de consommation dans le Nord et principalement dans Varrondissement de Lille (Lille: Imprimerie Le Bigot, 1907). Jean Gaumont noted, in his Histoire generate, 1:338, that the archives of this cooperative, seized by the police in 1851, remained in the Lille municipal archives until fire destroyed them during the First World War. 19. Devaux, Societes cooperatives, 9. 20. Gaumont, Histoire generate, 1:332. This strategy was similar to that of the National Equitable Labour Exchange founded by Robert Owen in London in 1832. 21. Ibid., and Devaux, Societes cooperatives, 32.

24

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

The defeat of the Democratic and Social Republic in June 1848 was not the end of cooperative associations. The government favorably viewed their emphasis on pacific and gradual change and deemed worker associations malleable enough for a strategy of manipulation rather than outright repression. In this spirit, on 5 July 1848 the new assembly ratified a 3-million-franc credit to associations. The loans from this credit were bounded by restrictive conditions: because the capital was provided by the state, it was to remain inalienable since it would be intolerable for the workers to be able to divide it among themselves; the associations were to admit auxiliary wage earners as well as associated members (a stipulation to undermine democratic and collective owner¬ ship); and the monies were lent only to carefully selected associations.22

Within this guarded but relatively sympathetic climate, workers sought avenues to implement their democratic and social vision. There was, however, one crucial difference: henceforth they would attempt to build associations outside of the repressive Republic of the bourgeoi¬ sie.23 In August 1849, Jeanne Deroin (1805-1894) proposed a “fraternal and interdependent association of all associations” to organize credit and exchange among all worker associations. Deroin, a former seam¬ stress turned teacher, was a militant activist for the rights of women as well as workers. She was influenced by the visionary works of SaintSimon, Fourier, and Cabet, but it was the bloody repression of June 1848 that convinced her that street violence was futile for lasting social change. Instead, she turned to associations as a pacific way to escape exploitation. By October 1849, delegates from 104 worker associations approved her project for a large cross-trade worker association. Called the Union des Associations des Travailleurs, it was administered by five commissions: production, consumption, finances, education, and arbi¬ tration. Workers recognized that they must implement the democratic and social practices of producer and consumer associations in a larger association that could unify isolated efforts. Not only would an encom¬ passing association complete visions of total social reorganization, but increases in the scale of capitalist organizations mandated a parallel 22. There were thirty-seven recipients in Paris, twenty-nine in the provinces. See Bernard H. Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers, 1830-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 43- See also Remi Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris: L’organisation, 1848—i8si (La Roche-sur-Yon: Imprimerie Centrale de TOuest, 1967). 23. Sewell, Work and Revolution, 275.

Prologue to Consumer Cooperation

25

growth in the scale of workers’ associations. The newspaper Le Nouveau Monde reflected these sentiments when it noted that “from all the isolated associations it is necessary to make a single homogenous one, one organized body, since there are currently many hundreds of com¬ mercial establishments in full activity of which the collective value already surpasses several millions.”24 The Union des Associations des Travailleurs in many ways illustrates the apex of associationism in the early period of the Second Republic. Grouped by trades into large multi-trade associations, the Union des Associations sought peaceful and gradual change. Deroin advocated a credit fund through which nonproductive consumers would be able to demonstrate their sympathy for associations by coming to their aid with advances made on labor. They would receive vouchers from producers reimbursable in the products of the association. This plan retained the contemporary estimation of the worth of labor by recognizing as value only the labor embodied in a product. The principles of the association rested on the three rights of consumption, labor, and sovereignty. Deroin defined these in a very specific manner. She interpreted the right of consumption “by means of the distribution of the products of labor, according to the needs and professional necessities of each.” The right to labor would be realized through “access to work and to materials for production, according to the needs of the profession and to the needs of consumption.” The right of sovereignty would be gained with “equal access, without distinction of sex, to the election of officers of the association, the elaboration of rules, and votes on the division of instru ¬ ments and products of labor.” Deroin further argued that the associa¬ tion demanded the “self-sacrifice of all, in the name of fraternity, of each for all and all for each.” The association assumed collective respon¬ sibility for all of its members since it operated on the assumption that all in the association were “une immense famille.” Members sponsored adoption and apprenticeship for children and bread and shelter for the aged and invalid. In contrast to the lack of solidarity of contemporary society, the association would “assure to all the right to live a complete life, morally, intellectually, and physically, and the means to live from the product of their labor.” To assure these goals, the association rested on two basic principles: first, the equitable division of products of labor; second, the necessary equilibrium between production and consump24. Desroche, Solidarity ouvrieres, 57-70, and Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris, 345-351.

26

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

tion, such that production is regulated following the needs ofconsumption.25 Deroin did not seriously challenge the view that labor was a locus for value and economic organization, and she built on the insights of early political economists such as Jean-Baptiste Say (1767—1832) and }. C. L. Sismonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) when she emphasized the inter¬ dependency of production and consumption for the generation of wealth. She differed from these and other political economists, how¬ ever, in her argument that consumption itself was the determinant of the demand for labor.26 The strategic focus was therefore not simply issues of labor and the trade but a much broader valuation of produc¬ tion and consumption as mutually dependent. The policies of Napoleon III sought to destroy associationist institu¬ tions and the Democratic and Social Republic. The government or¬ dered the overwhelming majority of producer and consumer coopera¬ tives closed and their materials sold. In May 1850, police invaded the offices of the Union des Associations des Travailleurs, arrested thirty of its members, and condemned Jeanne Deroin to six months in prison. At the Humanite in Lille, the government seized administrative papers and arrested four directors; by January 1852, it ordered the society closed.27

25. Desroche, Solidarites ouvrieres, 66—67 (emphasis mine). 26. Jean-Baptiste Say and other classical political economists recognized the inter¬ dependence of supply and demand. In general, however, their theories analyzed capital¬ ist production and the origins and disposition of social surplus, which was considered the source of new capital. Say contributed to these discussions with “Say’s Law ol markets, which noted that supply creates its own demand, or, as he noted in A Treatise oh Political Economy, or the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth, trans. from the 4th ed. by C. R. Prinset (Philadelphia: John Grigg, 1830), 84: “The products created give rise to various degrees of demand, according to the wants, the manners, and the comparative capital, industry, and natural resources of each country. Say argued also that “the creation of a new product is the opening of a new vent [market] for other products, the consumption or destruction of a product is the stoppage of a vent tor them.” Say thus believed that overproduction was theoretically impossible since demand increased at the same rate as goods purchased. Sismondi, on the other hand, viewed overproduction as one of many problems of the factory system and argued that aggregate demand was an important factor for solving overproduction. (In this sense he was an early underconsumptionist theorist.) He proposed raising the purchasing power of consumers. Both of these theorists continued to stress the importance of production and the supply of goods over consumption and the demand for goods. See Vivian Walsh and Harvey Gram, Classical and Neoclassical Theories of General Equilibrium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10, and Henry William Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), 304. 27. Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 1:344. Mutualism was likewise suspect, and a decree of 26 March 1852 stipulated that mutual aid societies could be created only under the auspices of the mayor and the cure.

Prologue to Consumer Cooperation

27

This overt and official repression was the final stroke against worker associations already weakened by selective and parsimonious govern¬ mental aid and plagued by internal administrative problems. Of the forty-nine associations begun in 1848, only twenty-six were left by 1851.28 From Napoleon IIFs coup through the 1850s, the regime arrested most of the leaders of cooperatives and considered the mere existence of an association a hostile act. The repression and subsequent fragmentation of associationism did not entirely suppress hopes for a democratic and social ordering of society. Issues of collective ownership and social sensibility, themselves embedded in the ambiguities of republican notions of fraternity and equality, were to be taken up and reformulated by a later generation of militants. Cooperation, which emerged within the associationists’ cri¬ tique of capitalism and their formulation of an alternative society, re¬ mained a vital means for implementing democratic and social values and aspirations. Because the first half of the nineteenth century was a period of contests over control of production and discussions of the value and rights of labor, producer cooperatives were the dominant form of cooperative associations. Consumer cooperatives were always present and part of the discourse of associationism. Yet because of the pre¬ eminence of labor and production, associationists conceptualized con¬ sumer associations in relation to the distribution and utilization of the products of labor. With the fragmentation of the associationist vision after the Second Republic, producer cooperatives became less the domi¬ nant form for social reorganization than one of several paths to the emancipation of the trades from the wage system. Furthermore, pro¬ ducer cooperatives became less feasible as the scale of production in¬ creased and as workers no longer looked to the state to finance and protect producer associations. Still, cooperation in general maintained its symbolic and practical value as a counter to industrial and com¬ mercial capitalism. As later militants experimented with political orga¬ nizations that were not occupationally based, they rediscovered the 28. Moss, Origins, 46. Some cooperatives, such as the consumer cooperative Esperance in Roubaix (Nord), founded in 1848 and closed 2 December 1851, re-formed themselves clandestinely and stayed underground until the liberalizing period of the 1860s. See John M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1841-1851 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), for how the revolutionary ideas and activities of the Democratic and Social Republic stimulated extensive politicization. Merriman argues that the rebellion and repression were so great that they bequeathed a police state to modern France.

28

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

consumer cooperative as a long-standing and respected institution em¬ bodying political and economic dissent as well as a democratic and social heritage. The cooperative strategy conceived within associationism would survive the Second Republic, but the end of the Second Republic was coterminous with the fragmentation of the organic and harmonious associationist vision.

2

Competing Strands: Individualism versus Collectivism, i8si-i88s

The cooperative system, founded first as an organizational and theoreti¬ cal counter to capitalist production, developed in two different direc¬ tions after mid-century. As dramatic changes transformed the structures of retailing, the consumer cooperative was one of many forms adapted for specific ideological and practical purposes. Indeed, it is in the con¬ text of a general experimentation with department stores, chain stores, and other kinds of commercial consumer establishments that consumer cooperatives evolved. All these commercial forms were vehicles for social values. Although most consumer cooperatives shared certain formal aspects, such as the return of profits in proportion to consump¬ tion rather than to capital investment, consumer cooperatives devel¬ oped two distinct traditions: one was bourgeois and paternalistic and fostered individual social and economic mobility; the other was radical and politically militant and offered a democratic, social, and anticapital¬ ist critique of prevailing patterns of distribution and consumption.

Commercial Concentration and Capitalist Individualism

The 1850s and 1860s were characterized by economic growth and an expansion of credit and capital. In this context, the economic impor29

30

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

tance of retailing establishments increased as well. Department stores were the most visible examples of the economic strength of consump¬ tion and were a major innovation in retailing structures. Prior to the French Revolution, retailers had been part of the guild system. Master grocers sold either a single product or a very limited assortment and frequently crafted their goods—grocers made their own jams or pates and roasted their own coffees.1 Even after the commercial liberalization of the French Revolution, the system continued to encourage stability, discourage competition, and maintain the commercial status quo. Shop¬ keepers resisted advertising and negotiated prices with customers.2 Although small shopkeeping retained a strong place in French retailing throughout the century, discernible changes in the 1830s and 1840s foreshadowed the development of department stores. Dry goods stores (magasins de nouveautes) altered traditional commercial practices with high turnover, goods grouped in departments, fixed and marked prices, free entry, and some advertising. These practices were limited to a few Parisian stores. The largest was the Ville de Paris, which in the mid-i840s had a workforce of 150 and a yearly sales volume of 10—12 million francs.3 By the 1860s, entrepreneurs took advantage of innovations across economic sectors and creatively constructed dynamic areas within dis¬ tribution and retailing. The completion of the first stage of the French railroad network facilitated the flow of goods to markets, and the increase in turn stimulated the growth of the urban centers that concen1. Michel David, “Devolution des formes d’exploitation,” in Histoire du Commerce, ed. Jacques Lacour-Gayet (Paris: Editions SPID, 1950), 1:253. These artisanal practices, of course, survived the ancien regime, yet became increasingly less evident. 2. Roger Picard, Formes et methodes nouvelles des entreprises commerciales (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1936), 11. 3. Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 22-25. Fran^oise Parent-Lardeur argues that the magasins de nouveautes emerged in the 1830s and 1840s when the sewing machine (patented in 1831) reorganized clothing production. With the practice of confec¬ tion, the price of clothing decreased, and stores began to stock items of ready-made clothing alongside bolts of fabric. This diversified sales, enlarged stores, and contributed to the conceptualization of department stores. Parent-Lardeur, “La vendeuse de grand magasin,” in Madame ou Mademoiselle? Itineraries de la solitude feminine, i8e-2oe siecle, ed. Arlette Farge and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Paris: Montalba, 1984), 98-99- See also Philip G. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 60-99, for an excellent discussion of the evolution of department stores and their relationship to small commerce; and Leora Auslander, “The Creation of Value and the Production of Good Taste: The Social Life of Furniture in Paris, 18601914” (Ph.D. diss.. Brown University, 1988), for a detailed discussion of the production, distribution, and consumption of furniture.

Competing Strands

3i

trated those markets. A crucial element fostering capital accumulation for both production and commerce was the creation of new devices for obtaining credit. These innovations required a retail system that was more uniform, flexible, and efficient than had been possible with the system of isolated small shopkeepers. Furthermore, the acceleration of retail techniques increased the volume of production. By the late 1870s, even after the onset of a general economic depression, sales volume at the Bon Marche department store reached 73 million francs a year.4 Clearly, the creation of large amounts of capital was a distinct reality in enterprises of consumption. Department stores were capitalist enterprises, in which economic growth depended on specialization, a rationalized and hierarchical man¬ agement structure, paternalistic labor relations, a high volume of capital circulation, and a small number of shareholders. Like the reorganization of production, structural changes in the organization of consumption associated with capitalist concentration relied on integration and spe¬ cialization. An important retailing innovation was the collection of many diverse items for sale under one roof. Department stores in the nineteenth century generally carried such items as fabric by the bolt, ready-made clothing, home furnishings, traditional mercerie items (such as hair brushes, scarves, and ribbons), perfume, fancy leather goods, stationery, household wares, and toys.5 But in departure from tradi¬ tional merchandising techniques, where goods were stored haphazardly in poorly lighted areas or hidden behind wooden counters, depart¬ ment stores grouped goods in specialized, accessible sections that were brighdy lighted.6 These sections (rayons) gave rise to bureaucratic and rationalized management strategies. A department head managed each section, and each section had its own budget, purchasing agents, and hierarchical relations with other sections. Whereas a small shopkeeper manufactured and managed all the shop’s operations, department stores divided operations among multiple bureaucracies: selling, delivery, ac¬ counting, cashiers, mail-order clerks, laborers, and various management layers, to name a few.7 Department stores also influenced labor practices. Entrepreneurs frequently reinterpreted older paternalistic traditions in dealing with 4. 5. 6. 7.

Miller, Bon Marche, 33-39, 43. Miller, Bon Marche, 50—52. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers, 73—74. Picard, Formes et methodes nouvelles, 16.

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

32

their employees. The directors of the Bon Marche in Paris used a provident fund, a pension fund, employee housing, programs for edu¬ cation and leisure, medical care, and dowries for women employees to encourage thrift, structure leisure, and manage many aspects of em¬ ployees’ lives, thereby ensuring control over their employees.8 Such stores were involved in production as well since they utilized techniques of “putting out,” notably piecework involving hand sewing and furni¬ ture making. They also hired in-store artisans; for example, by 1872 the Belle Jardiniere in Paris employed 150 tailors.9 The overriding goal of department stores, through high volume sales, quick turnover, and efficient management, was profit. The directors of the Bon Marche generally reinvested profits in the store itself or dis¬ tributed them to shareholders for a high volume of internal capital circulation. The small group of Bon Marche owners structured the store to maintain maximum control and allow for capitalization by constitut¬ ing the store as a societe en commandite (a partnership in which the directors had full, rather than limited, liability). There were 400 shares at fifty thousand francs each, and the store’s founding family retained 250 shares and distributed the remainder among employees and one family friend. Only those who held 4 or more shares could participate in general assemblies.10 The ideology that legitimized and ratified large capitalistic enterprises such as the department store was the notion of individual acquisition, a “culture of consumption” in which objects became symbols of status and achievement. Department stores created and disseminated to the provinces images of a proper bourgeois style of life. By lowering prices, department stores made the items associated with the Parisian upper middle class available to middle-class society in general. As such, “bour¬ geois culture became a purchasable commodity. ... In Bon Marche pictures and on Bon Marche counters the concept of a proper house¬ hold or proper dress or being a leisure class were transformed into so many linens, so many dresses, and so many sporting goods.”11 The /

8. Miller, Bon Marche, 99—107; Etienne Thil, Les inventeurs du commerce modeme (Paris: Arthaud, 1966), 35. 9. A. Montet, “Le mouvement ouvrier a Paris du lendemain de la commune au premier congres syndical en 1876,” LeMouvement Social 58 (January-March 1967): 5. See also Francois Faraut, Histoire de la Belle Jardiniere (Paris, 1986). 10. Miller, Bon Marche, 45,118—119, 13111. Miller, Bon Marche, 183—185. Some department stores developed forms of credit aimed at working-class consumers. For discussions of Georges Dufayel and the Dufayel department store, see Lenard R. Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914

Competing Strands

33

stores fostered the perception that as a consumer, through individual acquisition, a person could identify with or be identified with a certain class and style of life. This attention to individuals and their desires for material possessions raised questions about the economic power of consumption and de¬ mand. The increasing preeminence of consumption, evidenced by de¬ partment stores and glorified by the world’s fairs, gave rise to a discus¬ sion of consumption itself and to attempts to define and come to terms with its meanings and uses.12 The subsequent realignment of major tenets in economic theory and the positions taken by social theorists reinforced and ratified emerging patterns of capitalist retailing. An important realignment in economic theory occurred within politi¬ cal economy. The classical political economy of Adam Smith, David Ri¬ cardo, Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Frederic Bastiat shared assumptions based on the labor theory of value, Malthus’s population paradigm, and the wages fund theory. The 1850s and 1860s were a time of the articulation of themes that ultimately undermined some of the tenets of classical political economy. During this reevaluation, economists focused more extensively on issues of consumption. Classical econo¬ mists argued that the functions of private ownership and natural har¬ mony of an unfettered economic system offset and made unnecessary the interference of national governments. Furthermore, given free markets, general laissez-faire, and a rapid interest rate, prolonged unemployment would be impossible. Thus, the writings of political economists “scien¬ tifically” justified industrial capitalism through their demonstration of society’s “natural” economic laws and explained social problems in terms of violation of these laws.13 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 49; Theodore Zeldin, France, 184SI94S, vol. 2, Politics and Anger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 2:628; Nord, Paris Shopkeepers, 163-164; and Marjorie Beale, “Mort a Credit: The Credit Department Store and the Parisian Lower Classes, 1856-1920” (unpublished B.A. thesis, Harvard College, 1982). 12. World’s fairs gathered the forces of nation-states and commerce to extoll the virtues of consumer goods. Richard Mandell argues that these fairs were “manifestations of the positivists’ faith in material and scientific progress as panaceas for all man’s ills.” See Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), x. There was an evolution in the focus of world’s fairs from industrial machinery to consumer goods. The fair of 1855 at Paris was one of the first to have a category of “products destined for the ordinary needs of life,” such as foodstuffs (canned vegetables, fruits, and meats), furniture, and household appliances. See Guidepractique et complet a Vexposition universelle de i8ss (Paris: Perrotin, 1855). 13. Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 181S-1848. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 161.

34

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

Strong critiques of classical political economy had been advanced since the early nineteenth century. Nationalists, conservatives, and so¬ cialists shared opposition to the idea of natural economic harmony and pointed to the creation of a dehumanized proletariat and periodic economic crises as consequences of laissez-faire. The economic, social, and political realities of the entanglement of governments in the econ¬ omy, growth of such countervailing forces to the “free” market as labor unions and monopolies, and the related nagging consequences of indus¬ trial and market competition—unemployment, periodic oversupply, and economic depression—forced a reevaluation of classical political economy. In addition, the accepted tenet of the labor theory of value was clearly in need of revision in light of the enormous amount of capital generated by new banking and retailing establishments. In France, Leon Walras (1834-1910) exemplified those who accepted certain residual assumptions of classical political economy yet funda¬ mentally transformed and altered economic theory. Walras, along with Alfred Marshall, W. S. Jevons, and Carl Menger, was a pioneer of “neoclassical” economy embodied in theories of marginal utility.14 Wal¬ ras is known in the history of economic thought primarily for his “general equilibrium analysis,” put forward in the early 1870s in his Elements d’economie politique (1874 and 1877). Unlike classical political economy’s emphasis on production and supply, equilibrium theory argued that every act of exchange influenced the values of all the goods in the economic system and, more broadly, argued for the interdepen¬ dence of production and consumption. Walras joined other neoclassi¬ cists in what has been termed the “marginal revolution,” a reevalua¬ tion in economic thought that redefined the labor theory of value to include valuation not directly influenced by labor but derived from the product itself. Walras and the neoclassicists also formulated principles that emphasized the economic importance of consumers, households, and firms. They placed less emphasis on economic growth than did the classical economists and more on allocation of resources in a pure exchange model.15 14. Leon Walras was born in Normandy, son of economist Auguste Walras. During the 1860s Leon Walras dropped out of the Ecole des Mines and tried to establish himself

in literature, in journalism, as a railroad clerk, and as a director of a bank for cooperatives. In 1870, at the age of thirty-six, he was appointed Professor of Political Economy at the Academy (later University) of Lausanne, where he taught until 1892. 15. Ibid., 505, and Vivian Walsh and Harvey Gram, Classical and Neoclassical Theories of

Competing Strands

35

The neoclassical and classical economists shared assumptions that took the individual as the unit of analysis. They differed with the earlier theorists in their shift to an emphasis on human subjectivity (in terms of demand). Smith and his successors assumed demand and concentrated on supply; the neoclassicists emphasized demand and assumed supply as given, or at least determined by demand. Consumer demand had played a relatively minor role in classical economic theory. Consumer demand was extremely important, on the other hand, in neoclassical theory. Theories of demand focused on the ways in which subjectivity and scarcity determined an individual consumer’s choices and, hence, created value. Walsh and Gram argue that consumers’ choices “are so basic to the interpretation of neoclassical theory that the phrase ‘con¬ sumer sovereignty’ is used to emphasize their central role.”16 The assumptions of the neoclassicists, like those of the classical politi¬ cal economists, had resonance in the political arena. General equi¬ librium theory obviated a serious critique of capitalism by its attempt to incorporate newer elements of consumption into a theory with the underlying assumption that capitalism was not chaotic but equilibrat¬ ing. Marginal utility and subjective value theories were also alternatives to Marxist economics and were designed to counter challenges posed by an increasingly vocal and organized leftist anticapitalist critique. For Walras and the French neoclassicists, this theory posed an alternative to policies such as those embodied in the Liberal Empire of Napoleon III, since they continued the classical political economist’s mistrust of the political state. A second set of discussions likewise focused on individualism and implicidy justified capitalist retailing practices. While some economists concentrated on the dynamic between individual demand and eco¬ nomic growth and continued to assume that consumers chose goods rationally, others questioned the nature and implications of subjective demand and argued that individuals’ dreams, passions, and sensations guided their purchases. Emile Durkheim (1858—1917) cast his discussion

General Equilibrium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 123. See also William Jaffe, “Leon Walras’s Role in the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s,” in R. D. Collison Black, A. W. Coats, and Crawford D. W. Goodwin, The Marginal Revolution in Economics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973). 16. Joseph Finkelstein and Alfred L. Thimm, Economists and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 159, and Walsh and Gram, Classical and Neoclassical Theories, 123, 265.

36

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

of consumption within his analysis of anomie, a “state of social disequi¬ librium in which the hierarchy of values disintegrates.”17 Like Walras, Durkheim was concerned with equilibrium, with finding a balance among conflicting forces. For Durkheim, social conflict was rooted in moral crisis and related to the disparity between individual happiness and increased material prosperity.18 He isolated a source of the problem in unrestrained desires for consumer goods that seemed to call forth further desires. The power of the imagination was such that what individuals considered unattainable luxury in one generation was con¬ sidered necessary in another. Durkheim advocated social discipline exercised by occupational groups to constrain individual desire and therefore ease anomie. Durkheim feared the power of unrestrained imagination which he felt was implicit in the proliferation of consumer goods, but he did not directly address how these desires were created in the first place. Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) explored the psychological realm of consumption and argued that an individual’s consumer behavior was guided by rational and irrational (subconscious) desires to imitate styles of life. He stated that “everything, even progress towards equality, is brought about through imitation, and the imitation of superior classes.”19 As this imitative cycle of repetition of needs and desires widened to include workers and peasants, a democratization of taste would result. Tarde criticized the potential for passivity and homogeneity implicit in this pattern, in which “the same kind of comfort in food, in dwellings, and in clothing, the same kind of luxury, the same forms of politeness bid to win their way through the whole of Europe and America and the rest of the world.”20 Although both Durkheim and Tarde criticized various aspects of consumer culture, neither seriously criticized the economic system that fostered the aspects they described. Their concern was to right the abuses of capitalist retailing and, by implication, industrial capitalism, not to abolish the system itself. Tarde stated that without imitative

17. Cited in H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York: Vintage, 1961), 282-283. 18. An excellent discussion of Durkheim and Tarde is in Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century Trance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 322—38419. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), 230. 20. Ibid., 323.

Competing Strands

37

consumer behavior “our immense industrial wealth would be impossi¬ ble” and that “the widespread propagation of the same numbers of wants and tastes, of the same individual usages, is the first and prelimi¬ nary condition of great wealth and a great industrial system as well as of great art.”21 Durkheim and Tarde reinforced the importance of individ¬ ual choice as the determinant of value and further embedded consump¬ tion within theories of the capitalist economic system.

Bourgeois Individualism through Consumer Cooperation

The growth of department stores, which exemplified the increasing economic strength of consumption and exchange during the Second Empire, did not suppress other forms of retailing. Indeed, it stimulated an economic contest lasting throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Older small shops and newer consumer cooperatives became the two most visible and vocal commercial contenders among numerous models for retailing. During this period of commercial inno¬ vation, there was extensive improvisation and borrowing of forms among these contenders as they conceived, formulated, and advocated structures and ideologies.22 The acquisitive and materialist values and individualist ideology that the department stores espoused and that were theoretically ratified by liberal economists and social theorists informed techniques and mentalities in other emerging structures of consumption. Forms of consumption became vehicles for both compet¬ ing and complementary visions and ideologies. The cooperative move¬ ment was one contender in the multiplication of models and overlap of commercial strategies and ideologies of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Despite cooperation’s origins and its ideological placement in the 1840s as a democratic and social alternative to capitalist society, its anticapitalist aspects were challenged as competing groups utilized con¬ sumer cooperation for different ideological and economic ends. If department stores were a mirror of bourgeois culture, bourgeoisinspired cooperatives for workers projected idealized bourgeois values 21. Tard c. Laws of Imitation, 323,333. 22. Philip Nord has recendy argued, for example, that competition from the new department stores likely stimulated, rather than hindered, the growth and economic development of small commerce. See Nord, Paris Shopkeepers, 82-99.

38

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

of thrift, self-restraint, “morality,” and upward mobility through sav¬ ings and individual effort into workers’ lives. Municipalities and factory owners encouraged consumer cooperatives in order to forestall worker radicalism. They deemed cooperatives a peaceful means for individual workers to effect small savings on everyday expenses, become small capitalists,” and leave the wage-earning class. In an overt attempt at moralization, the town of Grenoble founded the Association Alimentaire de Grenoble in 1851.23 In 1850, the members of the city council became aware of an association alimentaire (coopera¬ tive restaurant) in Geneva, named a study commission, and sent the mayor, Frederic Taulier, to view the experiment firsthand. Taulier en¬ thusiastically recommended its implementation in Grenoble. The city then arranged a location, bought the necessary utensils, and convoked all the presidents of mutual aid societies. The first meeting resulted in over eight hundred subscriptions, and the cooperative restaurant opened in January 1851.24 The cooperative operated with its own inter¬ nal currency of leather tokens that carried the arms of the town, stating symbolically the power of the government over the transactions of consumption. Tokens corresponding to different types of food were presented in exchange for the appropriate cooked dishes. The coopera¬ tive restaurant also provided space for a communal kitchen where members could prepare food to eat on or off the premises. There were two dining areas, one for “women who wish to be alone and for families, the other for “those who wish to mingle.” A commission of fifteen members chosen in general assembly and a committee of a hundred administered the cooperative.25 The first committee, elected in 1851, was composed of bourgeois and artisans, with the former pre¬ dominating. The interior rules reveal the control imposed by the city and the administrators. These rules included stipulations that no one is able to drink more than one-half a litre of wine per meal. . . . All members who trouble the order of the society will be immediately 23. An old administrative center, in 1851 Grenoble had a population ol 31,340 and was a stronghold of the mutualist tradition. Glovemakers founded, in 1803, one of the first mutual aid societies in France. Pierre Barral, Le departement de I’Isere sous la Troisieme Republique, 1870-1940 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1962), 49,59f ,, 24. Association Aliment awe de la Ville de Grenoble, Documents complets (Grenoble. Dauphin et Dupone, 1878), BMG 0.1599125. Association Alimentaire de la Ville de Grenoble (Grenoble: Maisonville et Fils, 1864), BMG 0.15991-

Competing Strands

39

excluded. ... It is absolutely forbidden to smoke, even in the court¬ yard.”26 Notwithstanding these rules, Taulier described a cooperative as a vast household, a grand family... a source of well-being, dignity, and of morality.” Other municipalities were interested in this merger of city beneficence and social control. Taulier estimated in 1855 that there had been over three thousand visitors, although he was only aware of one actual copy in Bourg (Ain). Taulier noted that the lack of imitators was perhaps due to the fact that “many people who must live life inexpen¬ sively do not wish to receive a handout at any price.”27 Industrialists also utilized cooperatives as part of paternalistic strate¬ gies, in the same way department store owners adapted updated ver¬ sions of paternalism. The textile-dominated area of the Nord around Lille and Roubaix was one of the earliest regions where industrialists sponsored consumer cooperatives. August Lepoutre, a wealthy Nord industrialist, was struck by the success of consumer cooperatives on a business trip to England in 1865. On his return to France, Lepoutre enlisted ninety workers through meetings at the Roubaix city hall, and on 22 October 1865 they constituted the Societe Cooperative de Consommation of Roubaix.28 The cooperative appears to have been rela¬ tively successful, and by 1867 it had assets of 52,280.25 francs and liabili¬ ties of 49,692.55 francs, for a yearly profit of 2,587.70 francs.29 Lepoutre’s action occurred during a time of economic contraction in the textile industry. This crisis was primarily due to the American Civil War, which deprived the French textile industry of its main source of cotton. It was also related to the ill effects of the commercial treaty of i860 with England and compounded by the difficulties of a bad harvest and continued economic stagnation in 1866. Furthermore, the possibility of organized worker protest was more likely after Napoleon Ill’s decree of Association Alimentaire de la Ville de Grenoble, Reglement interieur (Grenoble: N. Maisonville, 1851), BMG O.15991. Of ninety-five members of the administrative committee listing occupations, fifty-eight were bourgeois and forty-seven were artisans. It is likely that the artisanal members were leaders of mutual aid societies of their trade, since with a few exceptions there is one representative per trade, unlike some bourgeois categories—for example, negotiant, which contained nine people. By 1890, the Associa¬ tion had its administrative council composed entirely of haute bourgeoisie, including a senator from the Isere and the president of the Court of Grenoble. Association Alimentaire de la ville de Grenoble, Proces-verbal de lAssemblee Generale du 8 decembre 1890, BMG 26.

O. 15991. 27. 28. 29.

Letter of Taulier to the editor, Courrier de VIsere, Gaumont, Histoiregenerale, 1:511. AD Nord M456, doss. 41, “Roubaix.”

21

April

18,

BMG

O.15991.

40

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

1864 legalizing unions and strikes (two of which erupted in 1867 in the Nord—Roubaix in 1867 and Lille in 1868).30 The growth of worker anticlericalism was also a sign of discontent; the first civil internment was that of a Lille upholsterer on 10 January 1866. It was precisely the menace of collective action that industrialists sought to counter. In order to blunt working-class protest, industrialists implemented consumer cooperatives as one form of labor management. Management initiatives included housing, welfare funds, leisure associations, and cooperatives (which began to replace company stores).31 Implicit in all of these initiatives was the appeal to the psychology of individual interest, and it was precisely this individualism that the dividend on purchases from the cooperative rewarded. Still, industrialists utilized aspects of cooperation only selectively. Company cooperatives were essentially company stores: companies retained dominant ownership and wrote statutes, and there were always more company officials than workers on administrative councils. One of the oldest and most prosperous company cooperatives was the Cooperative des Mineurs de la Compagnie d’Anzin. During the Second Empire, the Anzin mining company (a multiple-family partnership founded in 1757 and nationalized after World War II) was the beneficiary of full prosperity and high coal prices.32 In 1864, Auguste CasimirPerier, son of the former first minister of Louis Philippe, banker, econo¬ mist, and part-owner of the Anzin mines, published a pamphlet entitled Les societes de cooperation, which favorably discussed associations such as consumer cooperatives. The first company cooperative opened in Feb¬ ruary 1865 at Saint-Waast, near Valenciennes (Nord). Charles Courtin, secretary-general of the Anzin company, and fifty-one miners estab¬ lished the cooperative. Eight miners and eight employees of the com¬ pany composed the commission of control of the cooperative, a clear subversion of the cooperative tradition of democratic control.33 A former mine foreman directed the society, which began by the sale of 30. Pierre Pierrard^Histoire du Nord (Paris: Hachette, 1976), 305—306. The classic work on the French textile industry in the period is Claude Fohlen, LHndustrie textile uu temps du Second Empire (Paris: Plon, 1956). 31. In the company stores, industrialists would buy in gross and resell to workers, often on credit or directly deducted from their paychecks. For a discussion of forms of labor management, see Michelle Perrot, “The Three Ages of Industrial Discipline in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Consciousness cmd Cluss Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. John M. Merriman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), 149-168. 32. Marc Simard, “Le reformisme des mineurs d’Anzin, 1860—1894” (M.A. thesis, University of Laval, 1979), 29. 33. AD Nord M456, doss. 1, “Anzin.”

Competing Strands

4i

shares at twenty-five francs, with each member having no more than five shares. Dividends were accorded in proportion to consumption.34 A high-dividend strategy encouraged workers to come to the store. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, high divi¬ dends were characteristic of company cooperatives. At Anzin the co¬ operative dividend profits as follows: 90 percent to cooperators, 8 percent to the reserve fund, Zi percent to the commission of control, and 1/2 percent to the personnel. No profit was utilized in a social, rather than an individualistic, manner. Sales volume at Anzin was high, and prices were often lower than in local commerce.35 By March 1866, the coopera¬ tive had grown to 357 members and had a sales volume of close to twenty thousand francs per month with sales of groceries, bread, and meat. Another mining company took up the cooperative formula shortly afterward and founded the Cooperative des Mineurs de Billy-Montignv in 1866.36 The company cooperative at Trith-Saint-Leger, located in the Anzin basin between Valenciennes and Denain in the Nord, was also founded as a company-dominated enterprise in 1884. It extended credit to local metallurgical workers and their families either directly through the company or through the store and thus continued company policies of labor management through control of workers’ daily consumption needs. The store sold cloth, ready-made clothes, headgear, shoes, house¬ hold items, and groceries. In a report prepared for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the cooperative detailed its commercial practices (which were almost identical to the nearby Anzin company’s) and included photographs that depict a brick building, totally utilitarian and devoid of ornamentation, with bars on the windows and an interior dominated by the cashier’s area. The contrast between these stark build¬ ings and the glitter of department stores could not be more striking.37 The manner in which interested bourgeois advocated consumer co34- Gaumont, Histoire generate, 1:510.

35. AD Nord M456, doss. 1, “Anzin.” 36. Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 1:510, and Amiable Toulouse, Les societes cooperatives de consommation dans la region miniere du nord de la France (Lille: Imprimerie Liegeois-six, 1909), 3- Donald Reid has studied the company “cooperative” in Decazeville (La Fraternelle) and noted its use by mine owners and managers as a form of labor control in his The Miners of Decazeville: A Genealogy of Deindustrialization (Cambridge: Harvard Uni¬ versity Press, 1985), 81-85. 37- France, Ministere du Commerce, de 1 Industrie et des Colonies, Exposition Uni¬ verselle Internationale de 1889, Economic Sociale—Section 9, Notice sur la Societe de Consommation des Ouvriers des Forges etAcieres de Trith-Saint-Leger (Nord) (Valenciennes-

Seulin et Dehon, 1889).

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

42

operatives was not limited strictly to company cooperatives. Bourgeois ideals of thrift, self-restraint, and “morality” were spread through spon¬ sorship of regular consumer cooperatives and blended with the older associationist theme of class conciliation on the terrain of consumption. One pamphlet by Charles Loyer, Am; ouvriers de Cholet, reflects many of these themes. Loyer noted that the goals of cooperation were to furnish products of high quality and accurate weights and to reduce consumer expenses. As cooperators, workers would be able to accumulate savings from dividends received from the cooperative. Loyer stated that the ultimate goal of cooperatives was “to render the worker owner of capital, and to transform the proletarian into a small capitalist. 38 He argued that the “most enlightened workers” (foremen and small mer¬ chants) should administer and direct the cooperatives since they would have commercial knowledge. He hailed cooperatives in general as a vital element of commercial liberty, and he interpreted liberty as the “soul of commerce and industry.” By utilizing cooperatives as an exercise of commercial liberty, workers as “the grand army of consumers would not need to protest, and therefore change would be peaceful. Chailes Poujade utilized Loyer’s pamphlet the next year as a model for his Aux ouvriers de Carpentras.39 Poujade was more explicit than Loyer regard ing cooperation’s link to associationism. He appropriated and reinter¬ preted associationism as a solution to misery and as the “organic law of humanity.” Workers needed to associate to counter the “egoism and lack of solidarity of individual life.” Company and bourgeois-inspired co¬ operatives attested both to the flexibility of the worker-inspired cooper¬ ative system and to bourgeois attempts to frame and order working class experiences through prescriptions of savings, economic liberty, and peaceful change—in short, to encourage workers to hold up bour¬ geois ideals as standards for working-class behavior and goals. Liberal economists in the 1860s and 1870s approved of and encour¬ aged this confluence of cooperation with individual self-improvement and peaceful social change. Leon Walras and other economists such as Leon Say, Jules Simon, and Auguste Casimir-Perier wrote favorably of consumer cooperatives. They reasoned that cooperatives posed a mid¬ dle ground between the static policies of Napoleon III and the radical 38. Charles Loyer, Aux ouvriers de Cholet: Les societes cooperatives de consommation (Cholet: H. Farre, 1867), 339. C. Poujade,.Am# ouvriers de Carpentras: Projet d’une societe cooperative de Carpentras (Nimes: Clavel Ballivet, 1868).

Competing Strands

43

alternatives of trade unions and the First International.40 The disaffec¬ tion of many bourgeois with the Second Empire became evident in the general elections of 1863, when votes cast for the opposition doubled.41 Economists and politicians such as Walras, Say, Simon, and CasimirPerier, many of whom were Orleanists, began to show a new concern for the working class. This was a double-edged concern that would both forge a political alliance against Napoleon III and blunt the appeal of socialism and trade unionism through concrete programs such as co¬ operatives. In this context Walras published Les associations populaires de consommation, de production, et de credit. Here he advocated consumer coopera¬ tives for the “creation of capital,” which would in turn “function to the advantage of the associates, who, simple workers that they are, will become capitalists.” Walras urged interested bourgeois to monitor this process. He warned: “As the workers march together in the conquest of capital, we must put ourselves at their head and guide them.”42 In an explicit statement of political objectives in 1864, Casimir-Perier stated that cooperatives were “against the errors and perils of socialism, the most sure and generous of remedies.”43 Another liberal economist, Ernest Brelay, approved of the cooperative Union Economique of Bordeaux, founded in 1875 by Paul DuPuis, a professor on the faculty of medicine at Bordeaux and author of La question sociale en France. Brelay noted that the cooperative was directed “on the road of progress and kept aloof from all socialism. . . . Capital is not considered a tyrant.”44 Thus, these bourgeois economists saw cooperatives as avenues for indi¬ vidual self-emancipation, as opposed to emancipation by either the state or trade unions. They deftly redefined the associationists’ collective meanings into a notion of cooperation as an association of individuals for self-improvement. Workers who prospered by savings (in the form of dividends) would become small capitalists and thus would find state 40. See, for example, Casimir-Perier’s Les societes de cooperation (Paris, 1864). Gaumont, in Histoire generate, 1:468, 470, 475, 502, 510, 559-560, discusses the cooperative activities of Leon Say, Simon, and Casimir-Perier. He notes, for example, that Simon journeyed to England in 1865 to visit the Rochdale Pioneers (470). 41. Theodore Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III (New York: Norton, 1971), 117. 42. Leon Walras, Les associations populaires de consommation, de production, et de credit (Paris: Dentu, 1865), 5, 12, 31. 43- Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 1:468. 44- Ernest Brelay, Les associations populaires de consommation et de credit mutuel en 1882 (Paris: Imprimerie Chaix, 1883), 59.

44

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

aid, revolutions, and trade unions unnecessary. Walras, Casimir Perier, and others emphasized issues of consumption and stressed the desir¬ ability and inherent appropriateness of capitalism for all groups in society. The involvement of bourgeois industrialists and liberal econo¬ mists thus appropriated older notions of class conciliation and sub¬ verted the potential collectivist thrust of cooperation toward individual moralization and self-improvement. Consumer cooperatives were not, however, at the center of their analysis. Rather, cooperatives served as one area of interest in a broader set of concerns related to the restructur¬ ing of classical political economy around issues of value and demand. Two crucial components remained in place: the stress on the individual and the continued justification of the inherent viability of industrial capitalism. Cooperation, on these terms, became one more buttress for the capitalist system. Even so, the growth and expansion of the cooperatives were ham¬ pered by their legal ambiguity. From the early 1860s onward, various government officials, economists, and cooperators agitated tor a clarifi¬ cation of the legal status of cooperatives since they had no existence under commercial law. In response, the French government promul¬ gated the first law on cooperatives in 1867. The government of Napoleon III was at that time granting limited concessions to workers to gain support for the regime and to offset alliances between dissident republi¬ cans, Orleanists, and workers.45 Ten hearings were conducted from December 1865 through February 1866 on the feasibility of a special law for cooperative societies.46 In public discussions prior to the hearings 45. The government sent working-class delegates to the London Exposition in 1862, granted the right to strike in 1864, and permitted, but did not legalize, the formation of unions in 1868. 46. Cooperatives were only one area of concern in a broader legal adjustment culmi¬ nating in the 1867 commercial legislation. This legislation was the framework for the creation of the modern business corporation in France. Charles E. Freedman, in JointStock Enterprise in France, 1807-1867: From Privileged Company to Modem Corporation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), details the intersections of law, politics, and economics that culminated in the “triumph of free incorporation in 1867. Prior to this, the Code de Commerce of 1808 had reorganized three business forms. (1) the societe en nom collectif (a general partnership; unlimited liability); (2) the societe en com¬ mandite (small and medium-size enterprises; unlimited liability for administrators, lim¬ ited for shareholders, although the latter did not participate in management); (3) the societe anonyme (a large enterprise that could be formed only with the permission of the government; limited liability for stockholders). The societe en commandite, with its minimal legal formalities, was the most prevalent form of business enterprise until mid¬ century. With the rapid growth of railroads, insurance, banking, and other sectors ol high-volume capital, the need emerged for a more flexible legal instrument. One option

Competing Strands

45

for the law, bourgeois reformers argued that cooperation was a means to ameliorate the abuses of capitalism and forestall worker radicalism. In a series of public lectures in Paris in early 1865, Leon Walras continued to praise various financial and organizational aspects of cooperative so¬ cieties. His lectures, which stressed the need for the inclusion of co¬ operatives under French commercial law, reiterated the major themes of conservative reformists in favor of cooperatives. First, he argued that the return of dividends by cooperatives was a basis for working-class sav¬ ings. By saving their dividends, workers “living exclusively on their wages” could accumulate capital. This process was, he pointed out, “favorable for order and progress.” Second, since dividends served as a basis for the accumulation of small amounts of capital, Walras and other reformers hailed cooperation as “the counterweight to all socialist goals.”47 At the hearings in 1865-1866, Jules Simon argued in favor of cooperation as a means whereby the workers, without exterior help, created capital to assure security and an exit from the wage-earning class.48 M. Cochin, a member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and director of the consumer cooperative of the glass company of Saint-Gobain, added that cooperatives grouped, in “per¬ fect agreement,” the company’s directors, foremen, and “better work¬ ers” and made them invulnerable to “dangerous doctrines.” Coopera¬ tives encouraged “liberty, economy, morality, and permanence.”49 Most bourgeois supporters and economists thus favored maximizing the po¬ tential business strength of cooperatives. In the end, the government promulgated a special compromise law. Cooperatives fell under Tide III of the 1867 law and were deemed societes was a societe civil, but here again shareholders were subject to unlimited liability. In 1863 the government authorized a new form, the societe a responsabilite limitee (SARL). The French SARL was an attempt at a limited-liability company that would gain the advan¬ tages of a societe anonyme and overcome the need for government authorization. Yet the SARL had a maximum 20-million-franc capital limit. The SARL was only a precursor to the 1867 legislation, which suppressed the SARL, made government authorization of anonymes unnecessary, and introduced the new form of the cooperative. On legal aspects of cooperation, see Lucien Coutant, L’Evolution du droit cooperative de ses oripines d 19S0 (Reims: Matot-Braine, 1950). 47- Leon Walras to Charles Auguste Desire Filon, 12 November 1864, “Note sur les associations populaires de credit, de production et de consommation,” in Correspondence of Leon Walras and Related Papers, ed. William Jaffe (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1965), 1:144-14548. Ministere de l’Agriculture, du Commerce et des Travaux Publics, Enquete sur les societes de cooperation (Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale, 1866), 12. 49- Ibid., 133.

46

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

anonymes a capital variable. The government reserved the right to forbid the holding of special meetings for cooperatives to propagate their views or recruit members. Cooperative societies weie also required to deposit their statutes with a justice of the peace and at the Tribunal of Commerce, as well as to place a notice in the press of their choice. These restrictions were not popular with many working-class cooperators. Bourgeois supporters were satisfied by the aspects that allowed cooper¬ atives certain advantages shared by the revamped societe anonyme, nota¬ bly incorporation without government authorization and limited lia bility for shareholders. Shares were set at a 50-franc minimum value and could be purchased in installments, which made shareholding more accessible to workers. Unlike societes anonymes, which, as joint-stock companies, were associations of capital, cooperatives were associations of persons. Capital in a cooperative was variable, as opposed to fixed, in the sense that the cooperative was required to keep its doors open to all those who wished to enter or leaver hence, the number of shares could increase or diminish at any time. Cooperatives placing themselves under this legislation would sell to the public. Partly to pacify workers, co¬ operatives were given the option of placing themselves under the re¬ gime of the civil code rather than under commercial statutes. Although cooperatives with civil status did not enjoy limited liability, they sold products only to members and had a council of administration, instead of a paid manager, that directed the cooperative. The 1867 law on cooperatives was a delicate compromise that facilitated the cooperative projects of certain influential economists and industrialists. This legis¬ lation incorporated cooperatives within a definitional structure that labeled them commercial enterprises and mandated organizational as¬ pects similar to those of capitalist corporations. Furthermore, by defin¬ ing legality for worker cooperatives, the government could more pre¬ cisely define illegality as well.

Socialist Consumer Cooperation

Workers also took part in the discussions of consumption and in the elaboration of forms of retailing in the 1860s and 1870s. In contrast to bourgeois-inspired cooperatives that stressed individual profit and selfimprovement, worker-constructed consumer cooperatives expressed a vision of consumption and distribution that served collective, often

Competing Strands

47

socialist political ends. These cooperatives combined older associationist themes with the newer strategies of the English “Rochdale Pioneers” to construct democratic and social commercial institutions. In the dis¬ entanglement of the organic associationist vision after 1848, coopera¬ tion was not at the center of anticapitalist critiques. Its radical aspects were becoming tactical rather than integral to a vision of total societal reorganization. Producer cooperatives, the centerpiece of that vision, receded as a major political goal for a variety of economic and political reasons. Rather than advocating “trade socialism,” workers of the 1860s and 1870s envisioned class emancipation through alternative organiza¬ tions blending production, consumption, and credit in critical counter¬ part to the increasing sophistication of capitalist industry, commerce, and banking. The visions of 1848 narrowed as notions of harmonious collaboration of classes eroded. Yet threads of associationism remained in the militant labor movement that emerged in its wake. Workers shaped institutions and ideologies in retailing and consumption that retained important elements of a democratic and social perspective. Crucial for the clarification of a set of practices that supported collec¬ tive, democratic, and social values was the English strategy and tech¬ nique known as the Rochdale system. In 1844, twenty-four English weavers in Rochdale, a woolen-weaving district in Manchester, founded a consumer cooperative, the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society.50 Their system offered techniques different from those of capitalist retail¬ ing in terms of organization and ideological assumptions. The store began very modestly, selling butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal, and candles at night after the end of the workday. The initial objective of the enterprise was to operate the store “for the pecuniary benefit and improvement of the society and its members” and to raise capital for housing, manufac¬ turing, and agricultural enterprises.51 The society’s rules and methods 50. There were Owenist-inspired cooperatives in England prior to the 1840s. How¬ ever, the Rochdale cooperative founded in 1844 served as the model for subsequent consumer cooperatives. The British cooperative movement has been the subject of extensive investigation. Major studies include G. D. H. Cole,vl Century of Cooperation (1945), Beatrice Webb, The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain (1891), Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Consumer's Cooperative Movement (1930), George Jacob Holyoake, The History of Co-operation (1875-1879), R. G. Garnett, Cooperation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1824-184S (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), and Stephen Yeo, ed., New Views on Co-operation (New York: Roudedge, 1988). 51. F. Hall and W. P. Watkins, Cooperation: A Survey of the History, Principles, and Organisation of the Cooperative Movement in Great Britain and Ireland (Manchester: Co¬ operative Union, 1937), 86.

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

48

were important for the subsequent development of the French move¬ ment. The Rochdale Pioneers insisted on cash sales of goods at current neighborhood prices. Members received the profits in proportion to purchases after deductions for operating costs. This practice was revolu¬ tionary in that it assumed that profit should be returned to those from whom it was taken. In essence, they argued, this eliminated profit altogether. The Pioneers further stipulated that membership involved the purchase of one share and that the cooperative’s administration was to be democratic. Each member had one vote in decision making. The Pioneers stressed just weights and pure goods, and in 1853 they inserted a clause that allocated 2/2 percent of the profits for educational purposes. Legally, ideologically, and strategically the Rochdale system opposed traditional and capitalistic distributive institutions. The system returned profits in proportion to consumption rather than to shares or capital, institutionalized democratic governance, insisted on cash rather than credit, and ensured commercial honesty rather than caveat emptor. Furthermore, the Rochdale Pioneers embodied a transition within la¬ bor politics from a theoretical and practical focus on production to an emphasis on consumption for worker emancipation. The Rochdale Pioneers, like the French associationists of the 1830s and 1840s, initially sought, as workers and producers, to liberate themselves from non¬ producers (middlemen, employers, propertied classes). The cooperative store was intended as a means to generate money for worker-controlled manufacturing enterprises. But via the implementation of a dividend system based on consumption, the consumer’s interest gained an im¬ portant opening.52 In 1862 the newspaper Projyres de Lyon serialized a French translation of George Jacob Holyoake’s History of the Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale, and the Rochdale model entered the discourse and strategies of the French working-class movement. The Rochdale system oftered the possibility for standardization of practices in French consumer coopera¬ tives. In 1864, a group of delegates to the commissions of the Credit au Travail, a credit bank that sheltered working economic experiments by loaning money to producer and consumer cooperatives, published an “expose of motives” prior to founding a Rochdalian consumer coopera¬ tive in Paris. The cooperative reflected the political and tactical ambigu¬ ities of the period. Since many of the authors were Fourierist, some of 52. Hall and Watkins, Cooperation, 307.

Competing Strands

49

their motives echoed “moral economy” themes of the 1848 period—the insufficiency of wages for purchase of food, the inferior quality of food, and the raising of prices by intermediaries between producers and consumers. Yet whereas in 1848 the solution would have been sought from either state credit or wealthy philanthropists, this manifesto drew on experiences of English proletarians and the Rochdale Pioneers. By belonging to a producer society marketing products at a consumer society, the workers will work for themselves and detach themselves from the miseries of the proletariat by becoming their own patrons and wage-earners.” They envisioned the distribution of profits as 60 percent to consumers, 33 percent to capital, and 7 percent to “solidarity” (nurs¬ eries, education, and homes for the sick and aged).53 Shortly thereafter, in November 1864, this group founded the first Rochdalian society in Paris, the Association Generale d’Approvisionnement et Consommation Poindron et Compagnie (Ernest Poindron, a chemist and member of a producer association, was the director). This cooperative, a blend of older associationist visions and newer Rochdalian strategies, grew rapidly. It opened in Passy near large facto¬ ries, in 1865 had a branch in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and in 1866 merged with a bakery to form the Sincerite. Sincerite, like others of the period, offers evidence of the pioneering role played by consumer cooperation in initiating new forms of retailing. The practice of form¬ ing branch stores was an early form of concentration similar to practices chain stores later employed. Cooperatives such as the Sincerite tried to forge an alternative market system. Rather than utilizing intermedi¬ aries, the cooperatives obtained certain products by barter with other cooperatives. For example, some Parisian societies received products from a cooperative in Algiers (founded in 1864 after a visit by Alfred Cobden, the representative from Rochdale in the British Parliament) in return for articles of Parisian manufacture. In Saint-Etienne, the con¬ sumer cooperative with a bakery and store bought its flour and cloth from the society in Beauregard, which had set up a mill and cloth factory.54 Many of these initiatives remained relatively undeveloped and de¬ pended on the Credit au Travail for financial support. This credit bank

53- Gaumont^ Histoire generate, 1:487.

54. P. Hubert-Valleroux, Les associations cooperatives en France et a I’etranger (Paris: Guillaumin, 1884), 304.

50

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

was important to the subsequent history of the cooperative movement for several reasons. First, the credit bank, in a general sense, reinvigo¬ rated cooperation following its decline after 1848 by offering financial aid and legal advice and disseminating information on cooperation through a monthly bulletin, L'Association, and various almanacs. Sec¬ ond, the credit bank revived several themes of the 1830s and 1840s, notably cross-class collaboration.55 A diverse group of people founded the credit bank in 1863, among them J. P. Beluze (Cabet s son-in-law, former director of the Icarian offices in Pans and a cabinetmaker), Arthur de Bonnard (doctor and Fourierist), four bourgeois sympa¬ thizers (a piano maker, a writer, a doctor, and an accountant), members of the liberal opposition, such as Casimir-Perier, and assorted others, such as Georges Clemenceau (then a medical student) and Mikhail Bukunin.56 The credit bank recruited “all those of good faith, with no exclusivity of any type, and accept[ed] as allies all those who wish the liberation of the workers.”57 Third, the credit banks policies rested on independence from the state. This policy was part of a strategy of some liberal bourgeois supporters of the enterprise to enlist workingclass support in their opposition to Napoleon III. For workers who accepted the aid of the credit bank, the bank represented a disillusion¬ ment with state aid. \et these economic and political arrangements raised their own problems. Cross-class tensions were evident at a con¬ gress of French cooperatives organized by the credit bank in July 1866. Workers stressed the need to prohibit the operation of credit societies for the benefit of the middle class and small commerce, and they insisted that the Rochdalian formula of one vote per member in cooperatives be maintained to avoid the danger of absorption by capitalists. Shortly after the congress, the momentum of the credit bank declined, and toward the end of 1868 the bank failed when it overextended its credit. This failure led in turn to a series of failures of cooperatives. The failure of the credit bank had far-ranging strategic implications. For militant workers, it discredited strategies for obtaining working55. One contemporary observer, Claudio Jannet, wrote in 1866 that “cooperation is only a new form of association.” De Vetat present et de I’avenir des associations cooperatives (Aix: Remonet-Aubin, 1866), 22. By the end of 1865, LAssociation had become a weekly, and in 1866, after the government forbade an article, the editorial board voluntarily disbanded the journal and reformed it as La Cooperation in 1866. Abel Davoud, a thirtyeight-year-old member of the bronzeworkers’ association and founder of the credit bank, edited the paper. 56. Jean Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 1:466. 57. Paul Blanc, “Les origines de la cooperation? Almanach de la Cooperation pour 1867.

Competing Strands

5i

class objectives with the aid of middle-class supporters. Working-class militants increasingly defined cooperation as a class-based strategy inde¬ pendent of both the state and the bourgeoisie. This more independent strategy occurred in a climate of increasing militancy, especially after the legalization of strikes in 1864, which ushered in an era of “massive strikes, the first important wave of the Second Empire, strikes of a scale and sophistication never before seen in France.”58 From 1867 to 1870, major strikes took place in the Nord, Marseilles, Fyons, Saint-Etienne, Roanne, and Aubin. The trade societies that emerged from this strike wave took form as societies of mutual credit or as trade unions. These in turn sought both immediate improvements and emancipation of the trade through association.59 This trade movement appropriated associationism even before the fall of the credit bank. The theoretical idiom of this emerging movement was that of the International Workingmen’s Association, or the First International, founded in 1864. The First Inter¬ national insisted, in contradiction to notions of cross-class collabora¬ tion, that the emancipation of the workers must be by the workers themselves. For members of the First International, cooperatives were not the focus of social and economic reorganization. Rather, consumer co¬ operatives served three tactical purposes. First, they generated monies for political activism—notably strikes. Second, they provided a legal base for propaganda and political activity. Third, they were a concrete manifestation of democratic, egalitarian, worker-controlled commerce. These themes are evident in both tactical and theoretical discussions at the congresses of the First International and in actual practice. Cooperatives were a major topic of discussion at the first congress of the International held at Geneva in September 1866. Here Karl Marx noted his approval of the cooperative movement and stated that cooper¬ atives were “one of the transformative forces of present society.” Yet, unlike an earlier generation of militants, Marx noted that cooperation was incapable of total societal transformation. Cooperatives, he argued, were instead an especially useful source of funds both for propaganda and for aiding the formation of new cooperatives.60 At the congress 58. Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century: 1830—1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 19. 59- Moss, Origins, 53. 60. Premier congres ouvrier de lAssociation Internationale des Travailleurs (Geneva: Imprimerie J. C. Ducommon et G. Oettinger, 1866), 19. See also T. Lowitt, “Marx et le mouvement cooperatif,” Cahiers de IT.S.EA., no. 129 (1962).

52

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

held in 1867, the delegate from the section of Ville-Franche (Rhone) noted that the cooperatives of consumption and production were ccthe surest means for the extinction of exploitation and misery .” Yet mem¬ bers of the International expressed disaffection with producer coopera¬ tives and were especially concerned about the growing practice in producer cooperatives of utilizing “auxiliaries,” or salaried workers. They argued that this practice resulted in distinctions between privi¬ leged and unprivileged workers.61 At the same time, workers in Puteaux (Seine) demonstrated the tacti¬ cal advantages of using profits from consumption to finance workingclass militancy and strikes. They utilized both the recently gained right to strike (1864) and the right to form cooperatives (1867) for their own purposes. Puteaux, a suburb of nine thousand people on the west of Paris, was a rapidly industrializing city containing several dye works. In June 1866, dye workers struck to obtain a five-centime wage increase to forty centimes an hour. Benoit Malon, then a twenty-five-year-old dye worker and an activist in the Parisian section of the International, led the strike.62 The workers lost the strike and returned to work without concessions. Following their defeat, Malon and other dye workers decided to form a mutual credit society to raise money for both a consumer cooperative and a producer cooperative. By 1867 the mutual credit society had enough money to transform itself into a consumer cooperative. La Revendication de Puteaux, Suresnes, Clichy et Courbevoie. Despite a 1,300-franc debt from the strike, the 322-member cooper¬ ative made good its commitment to labor militancy by voting to give 200 francs to the striking bronze workers in 1867. Malon declared at a general assembly of the cooperative in October of 1867: “The time for lack of solidarity has passed and the union of workers will transform the world. Workers are no longer men who search for a master to follow but are new combatants.”63 The success of the bronzeworkers’ strike of 1867 61. Deuxieme congres de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs (Chaux-de-fonds: Imprimerie de la Voix de l’Avenir, 1867), 37, 77- At this congress the French delegation also revised its previous negative position on strikes. 62. Jean Gaumont, Les mouvements de la cooperation ouvriere dans les banlieues parisiennes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1932), I—I3- In his Le socialisme integral (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1894), Benoit Malon stated that this strike caused him to become a socialist and that socialism later became “the religion of my life” (2:30). Malon (18411893) was a son of day laborers. After his arrival in the Paris region in 1863, he became very active in the labor movement and was a founder of the French International and a member of the Commune. He later became a journalist and founded La Revue Socialiste. 63. Gaumont, Les mouvements, i4—15-

Competing Strands

53

was a turning point for the radicalization of the politics of the First International. The support given to the strike by the International was also one reason the government condemned and dissolved the Parisian section and several provincial ones in 1867. It is no accident that after government repression of the First Inter¬ national, its militants sought safer terrain. Consumer cooperatives were a legal base for organization and propaganda by members of the Inter¬ national. Following the seizure on 30 December 1867 of the papers of the International’s Parisian bureau, Eugene Varlin, “who had wanted for a long time to have a permanent place to escape police surveillance,” decided the moment had come to create a consumer cooperative.64 Six bookbinders, an engraver, one copying clerk, and one scabbard maker founded the Marmite, a cooperative restaurant. The founders were all members of the International.65 The first organizational meeting of the Marmite convened on 19 January 1868 and called the first general assem¬ bly for 22 March 1868.66 The founders legally constituted the coopera¬ tive as a civil rather than a commercial society, a decision reflecting their political views. As a civil society that would sell only to members, the cooperative could restrict its membership and maintain democratic control rather than hire a paid manager. The Marmite was a concrete manifestation of how cooperation could work for practical militancy and sociability. It opened in 1868 on the rue Mazarin in Paris. By 1870, the cooperative had created eleven restaurants with around eight thousand members. All were named the Marmite, and card-holding members could eat at any of them, although each was organizationally autonomous. The founders cast the restaurant in Fourierist terms as a place where households could collectively obtain advantages not available to single, isolated individuals: “Cooks can prepare food as quickly for fifty as for two or three, thus obtaining economy of time. One also obtains better food with a trained cook 64. La Vie Ouvriere, 5 May 1913. This number of La Vie Ouvriere was devoted to Varlin (1839-1871). Varlin was a bookbinder from a peasant family in the Seine-et-Marne. He was part of the worker delegation to the International Exposition in London in 1862 and an officer and activist in the First International and the strike movement of the 1860s. He met with Marx in London in 1865. Varlin was a member of the Paris Commune of 1871 and was killed in the Commune’s final week. 65. Aux ouvriers! Aux ouvrieres! Aux consommateurs! Appel pour la formation d’une cuisine cooperative, n.d., IFHS. All of the founders were male except for one female bookbinder, Natalie Le Mel. 66. La Marmite, Societe Civile dAlimentation (Siege social provisoire, 33 rue Dauphine, chez M. Varlin), 15 March 1868, IFHS. Jean Gaumont, Histoiregenerale, 1:545.

Oriffins of Consumer Cooperation

54

than a housewife without culinary instruction who is often pressed for time.”67 From its inception, the Marmite affiliated with the First Inter¬ national. One eyewitness reflected later on its political spirit:

One ate modest but well-appointed meals there, and joviality reigned around the tables. Each person went to the kitchen for food and there received a voucher for payment. Generally people didn’t linger and, to vacate the place for someone else, left after eating. Sometimes some comrades who were close friends would stay longer and discuss various issues. People sang as well. The good baritone Alphonse Delacour sang of Pierre Dupont, the Worker’s Song, the Locomotive, etc. The citoyenne Natalie Le Mel did not sing; she argued philosophy and resolved grand problems with an extraordinary simplicity and facility.68 The Marmites of Varlin, Le Mel, and other Parisian militants were not the only consumer cooperatives affiliated with the First International. Antoine Limousin, a prominent member of the International, founded a Rochdalian cooperative in 1867 in Belleville. At Neuville-sur-Saone (Rhone), the local section of the International founded a consumer cooperative. Among the officers were Paul Lafargue and Karl Marx, who served as corresponding secretaries for Spain and Germany, respec¬ tively.69 Cooperatives such as the Marmite were not only legal centers of propaganda and sociability for militants. They also sought to exemplify democratic and egalitarian worker-controlled commerce, in opposition to “parasitic” bourgeois commerce. One manifesto of the Marmite illustrates this juxtaposition: “Isolated workers are forced to submit to the exigencies and frauds of commerce, to accept foodstuffs that are often adulterated and almost always of inferior quality. Reunited by cooperation, the workers will find in their establishment healthy nour¬ ishment, of known origin, to be divided among all at cost.”70 The statutes of the Marmites further implemented democratic and egali¬ tarian principles. All members were equal in rights, and the cooperative would not admit honorary members “under any pretext.” In order not 67. La Marmite, Rapport de commission d’initiative, 1894, MS; Aux ouvriers! 68. Charles Keller, “Un souvenir de la Marmite,” La Vie Ouvriere, 5 May 1913- Natalie Le Mel (1827-1921) was a member of the First International since 1865 and was an active Communard. She was deported to New Caledonia in 1871, returned to France in 1879, and worked thereafter as a journalist. 69. Jean Gaumont, Histoire generate, 1:499,53°70. La Marmite, 15 March 1868.

Competing Strands

55

to reward capital, the shares did not receive interest. In Rochdalian form, workers divided profits “proportionate to their consumption,” each member was to have only one vote, and the general assembly was “sovereign on all questions of interest to the society.”71 Another manifesto linked control by workers of their consumption to a larger struggle over labor and wages. Noting that workers had made great efforts to obtain augmentation of wages (through strikes), the manifesto accused “speculators” of “taking their revenge by making workers pay for their aspirations by raising prices on objects of primary necessity, especially food. They have proclaimed the liberty of com¬ merce and use speculation to exploit us.” The founders of the Marmite contrasted “liberty5 with association. They argued that associations of workers allowed the “liberation from intermediary parasites who enrich themselves at the expense of workers5 money.” They noted that workers were exploited not only by “incessant labor” but further when they ate in places with adulterated food. A consumer cooperative would rem¬ edy this situation. Building on a traditional anti-luxe argument within French socialism and republicanism, cooperators insisted that their establishment would be comfortable and economical without “luxury or guilded features.” The text urged workers: “Let’s associate, then, not only to defend our salary, but especially for the defense of our daily nourishment.”72 To the Internationalists, the consumer cooperatives were strategically important: they combined the tactical advantages of legal and worker-controlled political spaces for working class militancy, and they offered fairly priced food that bypassed “parasitic” commerce (another reference to Fourierist ideology). Instead of viewing coopera¬ tives as places where working- and middle-class people could come together, the militants of the First International who built the coopera¬ tives saw worker-defined and worker-controlled consumer cooperatives as healthy and honest and capitalist commerce as unhealthy and dishon¬ est. By the time of the Commune, a tradition of consumer cooperation that encompassed notions of worker solidarity, financial aid for mili¬ tancy, and worker-directed cooperative commerce had become a welldefined strand of the movement.73 7i- La Marmite, Statuts, 1870, MS.

72. Aux ouvriers! 73- With the coming to power of the Paris Commune, many working-class leaders, such as Varlin and Le Mel, were in positions of power. The government of the Commune aided in the establishment of forty-three producer cooperatives with public credit and

56

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

Yet, paradoxically, even the radical potential of consumer cooperation was called into question. Cooperatives became, increasingly, one means of working-class emancipation rather than a central component of a broader organic alternative to capitalism. In particular, the harmonious and complementary visions of the associationists in the 1830s and 1840s had included a critique of gender dominance and hierarchy. As this vision receded into a less interrelated set of anticapitalist strategies, some cooperators rejected the radical interpretation of gender politics as well. In 1867, the woodworker Eugene Tartaret captured the tensions in gender relations when he reported conversations between himself and a married couple who were his neighbors. The woman in his dialogue argued that cooperatives were made for men, with nothing in them for women, and that male cooperators had forbidden women to speak in assemblies or serve on administrative councils. Her husband re¬ sponded: “The assemblies are already difficult enough with the exagger¬ ated pretensions of members who do not know the rules; what would it be like if women had the right of discussion?” The woman replied that “perhaps it would not be such a bad thing.” The man then argued that husbands safeguarded and represented women’s interests and that men and women had “intimate meetings” for items of discussion. Women, he argued, knew too little to participate in public meetings. His wife responded: “If I know nothing, it is not my fault.” She noted that she had worked at home caring for young children while her husband was an officer in a mutual aid society. Yet even when meetings were held in her home, she noted, “I said nothing, but I listened.” As far as coopera¬ tives were concerned, the man argued that it was unclear whether women could legally hold shares or serve as officers, an argument the woman dismissed. Drawing on a higher authority, she responded: “What women want, God wants as well.”74 This text records tension in

contracts. Consumer cooperatives did not fare as well because ofvasdy diminished lood supplies, the creation of municipal grocery stores, governmental control of some butcher shops, and ration cards. The Marmites of Varlin and Le Mel disappeared during the first siege of Paris, and only six Parisian consumer cooperatives survived the war and the Commune. Jean Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 2:14, 24-25. Interest in consumer coopera¬ tives was still evident, however. One letter from a stonecarver to the Commune argues that consumer cooperatives would sell products of producer cooperatives and “be run by men or women citizens of the International.” Stewart Edwards, ed., The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 123. 74. Eugene Tartaret, “Les femmes et les societes cooperatives,” Almanack pour 1867, 179—188.

Competing Strands

57

die movement about women’s participation in the governance of co¬ operatives and suggests that some men perceived women as outside the cooperative enterprise. This transition in gender relations within worker organizations was not limited to cooperation but was part of a larger reevaluation of the proper roles of women and men that took place in the 1860s and 1870s. “Politics” was seen by many as a male pre¬ rogative, especially given anticlerical male republicans’ fear that women were allied with Catholicism.75 Because movement activists defined consumer cooperation as a “political” strategy, some male cooperators resisted the inclusion of women in positions of power, such as share ownership and administration. Yet this text and the continued participation by women in the First International also suggest that there were some women who, as wives, consumers, and political activists, did not see these roles as mutually exclusive. Many of those in the First International continued to adhere to more radical interpretations that rejected gender dominance and hierarchy. For example, prior to the creation of the Marmite consumer cooperative, members of the mutual aid society that preceded the co¬ operative insisted on placing an article in its statutes for equality be¬ tween the sexes “in rights and responsibilities.” This article was in direct contradiction to legal and social exclusion of women from mutual aid societies.76 Cooperatives continued to be a locus for women’s political activism on issues of consumption. Three prominent women in the First International, Natalie Le Mel, Victorine Brocher, and Marguerite Tinayre, were active in the founding of consumer cooperatives in the late 1860s—Brocher of a cooperative bakery in the La Chapelle section of Paris; Le Mel, of the Marmite; and Tinayre, of the Societe des Equitables de Paris. Each of these women were officers of the coopera¬ tives, and all of the cooperatives were members of the International.77 75- As Jules Simon wrote: “What is man’s vocation? To be a good citizen. And

woman’s? To be a good wife and good mother. One is in some way called to the outside world. The other is retained for the interior.” Cited in James F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870-1940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 12. 76. La Vie Ouvriere, 5 May 1913. Natalie Le Mel was on the administrative council of the bookbinders’ mutual aid society. In a decree of 26 March 1852, most mutual aid societies rejected the inclusion of women and children in their societies, citing their “delicate health” and fears that women would feign illness, collect money, and remain home to perform household tasks. Hence developed a strong tradition in France of women’s mutual aid groups. See J. C. Paul Rougier, Les associations ouvrieres: Etudes sur leurpasse, leurpresent, leurs conditions de progres (Paris: Guillaumin, 1864), 237. 77- Maite Abistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du feminisme franpais (Paris: Edi-

58

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

By the 1870s, cooperation was not at the center of an organic anti¬ capitalist critique. Although the basic elements remained in place, the working-class movement of the 1870s reshuffled the importance of strat¬ egies for change, further eroding the organic moral economy of the pre-1848 period. A series of structural and political factors in the Pari¬ sian economy and society led to an emphasis on trade unions and diminished support for producer cooperatives. The labor movement’s struggles regarding issues of production henceforth focused more on trade unions and strikes than on producer associations. Any strategy of protest was bounded by the political imperatives of a declared state of siege that lasted until 1876 and by those government policies that arbi¬ trarily persecuted dissidence by suspending presses and dissolving as¬ semblies. In 1872, the government outlawed the International in France and required that the prefect of police approve meetings. The govern¬ ment did, however, tolerate unions. A leader in the revival of the working-class movement in 1870 was Joseph Barberet, a former baker who in the 1870s was a journalist for the radical press Le Rappel Barbaret and others of the ecole cooperative syndicate of the 1870s argued that the trade union was the most effective form of worker organization. Unions would draw up wage scales, monitor apprenticeship contracts, form libraries, conduct courses on technical education, and set up employ¬ ment bureaus.78 In October 1872, there were forty-five associations in Paris, of which thirty-five were trade unions, many restarted by their pre-Commune leadership. By 1876, there were eighty-six trade unions and fourteen other trade societies.79 This momentum, combined with

tions des Femmes, 1977), 2:483-484. Victorine Brocher (1838-1921) wrote in her mem¬ oirs of attending small, clandestine meetings of the International in the 1860s. In these meetings the focus was on “practical means’7 to educate workers “to count only on themselves for their emancipation.” As such, her section ol the International founded the cooperative bakery in November 1867 with twenty francs from each member, payable in fractions. The cooperative divided profits three ways: members, reserve fund, and a fund to found other cooperatives. See Victorine B. (Brocher), “Un cooperative sous le second Empire,” inMemoires de femmes, memoire dupeuple, ed. Louis Constant (Paris: Maspero, 1979), 46-57.

78. Maxwell Kelso, “The Inception of the Modern French Labor Movement (18711879): A Reappraisal,” Journal of Modem History 8 (1936): 173—193. An article by Robert Tombs, “Harbingers or Entrepreneurs? A Workers’ Cooperative During the Paris Com¬ mune,” Historical Journal 27, no. 4 (1984): 969-977, argues that even by the Commune, workers were disenchanted with producer cooperatives and recognized that social and economic organizations of workers were likely to be futile without the securing of political power. 79. A. Montet, “Le mouvement ouvrier,” 65.

Competing Strands

59

the political victory of the republicans in February 1876, paved the way for the national labor congress held in Paris in October 1876. Analyses of the three labor congresses of Paris (1876), Lyons (1878), and Marseilles (1879) traditionally trace from the proceedings of a trajectory whereby militants approved of a cooperative strategy in 1876 and rejected and replaced cooperation with revolutionary socialism in 1879.80 Reasons given for this shift have included, variously, the failure of cooperatives, the growth of heavy industry, the political consolida¬ tion of the Republic in 1879, and a combination of all of these issues, but all share as evidence the adoption of a Guesdist-inspired platform at Marseilles advocating revolutionary collectivism.81 It is possible to view the shift in emphasis as more nuanced than an outright rejection of cooperation, however. The statements of 1879 signal instead a theoret¬ ical and tactical shift that finally relegated producer cooperatives from the center to the periphery of the strategy for working-class emancipation. The call for a party of class was compelling, and for the post-Commune generation of militants of the late 1870s it was to become a more dominant thread in the politics of labor. Yet the emphases on both a class-based political party and trade unions did not preclude the de¬ velopment of consumer cooperatives. Indeed, the number of consumer cooperatives accelerated rather than declined after the 1870s. If the advent of Guesdism signaled the decline of all forms of cooperation, how can one explain that Jules Guesde himself was involved with a consumer cooperative, the Paix of Roubaix, and that the Guesdist strongholds of the Nord were centers for socialist consumer coopera¬ tion? The decisions of the 1879 congress did signal the continued ero¬ sion of the 1848 associationist vision that had been embodied in producer cooperatives. The 1879 congress indicated the disentanglement of that vision into what would mature by the turn of the century into the “three pillars of socialism”: political socialism, trade unionism, and consumer cooperation. With the unraveling of the associationist vision, socialism, trade unionism, and consumer cooperation began their interrelated but also separate historical trajectories. Cooperation was a dominant theme of the labor congresses of the late 80. The clearest statements of this thesis are Moss, Origins, and Pilhes, “Socialisme et cooperation.” 81. Moss’s interpretation implies a bifurcation of socialists and republicans that is problematic given the continued support of a republican ideal by the majority of French socialists.

6o

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

1870s. At the 1876 congress it was the only item on the agenda to which two complete sessions were devoted. The final report of the congress continued to label producer cooperatives as transformative instruments for worker emancipation. There was only one voice against all forms of cooperation, that of the house painter Isidore Finance, who argued that cooperation did not have the potential for practical success necessary to justify the enormous activity generated on its behalf. He also stated that cooperation had become essentially bourgeois and conservative. The locksmith Ni^aise responded that cooperation was a valid means for the emancipation of labor. He added that producer cooperatives should remain under democratic control and employ no paid labor. Ni^aise also argued for expanded roles for consumer cooperatives. Consumer cooperatives were important as a source of capital for producer cooper¬ atives and as a locus for worker education in administrative skills. The difference between these positions and those of militants of the 1860s was the stress on trade unions and their role as organizers of coopera¬ tives. One resolution stated: “The congress invites the trade unions to instigate the formation of credit, consumer, and producer coopera¬ tives.” The congress of 1878 reinforced the basic strategy of cooperation and restated that “the trade unions are the point of departure for all other organizations.” Resolutions reaffirmed producer cooperatives as a strategy for workers to gain possession of the means of production, and consumer cooperatives as a means to “procure a more inexpensive existence” and “suppress monopolies and parasitic intermediaries.”82 The 1879 congress is generally considered a turning point in the history of French labor, the “triumph” of the revolutionary principle in which “the political struggle was given its lettres de noblesse by condemn¬ ing economic organizations accused of petit-bourgeois reformism or compromised with capitalism.... Before 1879 the labor movement went toward cooperation. Beginning in 1879 it was toward socialism.”83 Yet how can one explain the voice of the stonecutter Auguste Chartier of Nimes, who noted at this congress: “When one speaks of consumer cooperatives, one says socialism”?84 A final resolution repeated the call for the creation of a labor party, founded the Federation du Parti des Travailleurs Socialistes de France, and based the party on federations of 82. Congres ouvrier de France, session de 1876 (Paris: Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1877), 368— 369; and Congres ouvrier de France, session de 1878 (Lyons: Jules Trichot, 1878). Cited in Desroche, Solidarites ouvrieres, 115—119, and Jean Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 2:47—61. 83. Pilhes, “Socialisme et cooperation,” 50, 52. 84. Cited by Pilhes, “Socialisme et cooperation,” 46.

Competing Strands

61

trade unions, cooperatives, and socialist clubs. The resolution stated that producer or consumer cooperatives “should not be considered a strong enough means to emancipate the proletariat.” The next sentence of this resolution, however, noted the propaganda value of cooperatives and argued that “they ought to be accepted at the same level of other genres of associations in the single goal of arriving as quickly as possible at the solution of the social problem, by the most active revolutionary agitation.”85 In 1879, workers deemed cooperation one means of class emancipation, along with trade unions and a class-based political party. Producer cooperatives were no longer to be the foundation of a non¬ capitalist economy and society.86 These resolutions reflected various economic realities. Labor mili¬ tants acknowledged the limitations of producer cooperatives. For exam¬ ple, the tailors’ union of Paris earnestly attempted to implement the emancipation of the Parisian trade through cooperative association. Through the purchase of 55-franc shares, it formed a producer coopera¬ tive. By 1880, the union admitted defeat. They decided that 200 million francs, rather than the estimated 1 million francs, were necessary to emancipate the trade, a sum far too grand to be realized through the savings of workers and the profits of cooperatives.87 The changes in size, scale, and organization of production of many older artisanal trades such as tailoring made associated cooperative control over these trades increasingly formidable. Consumer cooperatives, however, retained their attraction as demo85. Congres ouvrier socialise de France, session de 1879 (Marseille: Imprimerie J. Doucet, 1880). Cited in Desroche, Solidarites ouvrieres, 121. 86. Disillusionment with producer cooperatives was a much-discussed issue by the late nineteenth century in other countries besides France. Marx explained their frequent ‘"degeneration” into profit-making enterprises by stating that although producer cooper¬ atives represented “within the old form the first sprouts of the new,” they “naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organization all the short¬ comings of the present system.” The English cooperator George Jacob Holyoake argued instead that the problems within producer cooperatives were not inevitable but were related to the tendency to use hired labor. In this situation, “labour is still dependent, without dignity because without rights.” The American democratic socialist Laurence Gronlund argued that producer cooperatives were characterized by individualist mo¬ tives, that they were “brilliant examples of workingmen raising themselves out of their class, not raising their class. They are not truly cooperative, but virtually joint-stock companies” since they “hire and fleece laborers after the approved fashion of the age.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), i:43L George Jacob Holyoake, The History of Co-operation (New York: Dutton, 1906), 2:339; Laurence Gronlund, The Cooperative Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 57. 87. Kelso, “Modern French Labor Movement,” 187, and Moss, Origins, 69.

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

62

cratic and social alternatives to capitalist retailing. It is emblematic that the head of the tailors’ union, Julien Dupire, and a seamstress and militant of the Syndicat des Femmes Ouvrieres, Josephine Andre, were founders in the first months of 1874 of a consumer cooperative, the Fourmi. Consumer cooperation found renewed favor with labor mili¬ tants in the 1870s and 1880s. Cooperators founded 6 to 8 consumer cooperatives in the Parisian region in 1871-1872 and 17 more in 18731876, and by 1878 there were 23 consumer (and 22 producer) coopera¬ tives in Paris. One estimate of growth of French consumer cooperatives from 1855 to 1889 is 37 between 1855 and 1869,50 between 1870 and 1879, and 191 between 1880 and 1889.88 Skilled artisans founded socialist consumer cooperatives in the 1870s and 1880s. Founders of Parisian cooperatives were trade union activists, involved in electoral action for radical candidates and opposed to the government. Among those who founded the Avenir de Plaisance in 1873 were Charles Riffay, secretary of the leather and hide workers’ union, and Leon Delhomme, conseiller prud’homme of the sculptors’ and marble cutters’ union and member of the producer cooperative Union des Marbriers. A. P. Murat, a mechanic who had signed the Manifesto of the Sixty and a founder of the French section of the International and of the mechanics’ trade union, was a founder of the Egalitaire in 1876. The nine founders of the Perseverante in 1873 included a cabinetmaker, an optician, a turner, a shoemaker, a guilder, a locksmith, two machinists, and an employee.89 These artisans continued radical political traditions in consumer cooperatives as cooperatives became forums for political ideas and activities. For example, a police report from 1872 noted: [The Economic Ouvriere] has always been animated by a very bad political spirit. . . . The largest part of its members were partisans of the Commune. The society has been the site of clandestine political meetings. A majority of its members are affiliated with the International, and it is possible that meetings of the International are held there. Meetings of a small committee take place several nights a week. The participants pre88.

From the Rapport du delegue sur les associations cooperatives de consommation et de production de Paris, cited in Gaumont, Histoire generate, 2:53; Louis Paoli, “Notes sur le mouvement cooperatif en France,” La Revue Socialiste 136 (April 1896): 407 443 Any numerical data on consumer cooperatives is very problematic prior to systematic com¬ pilation in the 1890s. 89. Jean Gaumont, Lessocietes de consommation a Paris: XJn demi-siecle d}action socialepar la cooperation (Paris: Federation des Cooperatives de la region parisienne, n.d.), 5, 31—33; APP, B/A 1549, doss. 5347—

-

Competing Strands

63

tend to be members of the administrative committee of the cooperative, but as they leave, one hears these individuals speaking only of politics.90

These artisan cooperators aligned their cooperative activities within the republican tradition that envisioned a Democratic and Social Re¬ public. At the Societe dAlimentation, de Consommation, et de Secours in the Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret, one speaker in May 1882 noted that the revolutions of 1780, 1848, and 1871 were accomplished only with the aid of the workers. The next month, a speaker recalled the revolutions at Lyons in 1831 and Paris in 1848 and 1871 and noted that “repression remains.” At another meeting in March of 1883, a member stated that the Great Revolution had granted civil equality and the Second Republic political equality, and it remained for the Third Re¬ public to guarantee social equality. Yet in what terms did these people discuss repression and inequality? Speakers at the consumer cooperative in Levallois-Perret perceived repression and inequality in terms of both labor and commerce. One discussion in June of 1882 criticized the large capitalist industries, railroads, and mines, where the labor of workers served only to enrich the patrons. Immediately after this statement, the speaker linked the exploitation of labor to capitalist commercial prac¬ tices. He charged that these same capitalists sustained a commercial system that adulterated food and “killed proletarians.” In order to prevent the exploitation of workers by capitalist commerce, workers were encouraged to join and support the cooperative. Another discus¬ sion, in October of 1882, again implicated capitalist exploitation in both labor and commerce in a talk entitled “The Rapacious Bourgeoisie.” The content of the talk included the origins of capital, the perverse politics of Gambetta, and the adulteration of food, and the talk ended with the exclamation that “it is by union only that we will be able to fight the capitalists successfully.”91 Cooperatives were an important means for workers to exert control over their consumption, an especially important consideration since consumption represented, in part, the value of their wages. Consumer cooperatives were also a concrete manifestation of democratic and social commerce. The Bellevilloise consumer cooperative illustrates many of

/

90. APP, B/A 1549, doss. 5449- Founded in 1870, the Economie Ouvriere had 1,400 members and one branch store. It was dissolved in August 1872. 91. APP, B/A 1549, doss. 4833.

64

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

these themes. It was founded in 1877 by twenty workers—eighteen machinists employed at the Cornelet et Barriquand shops and two shoemakers. The first store was in the heart of Belleville at 16, rue HenriChevreau, and from its founding in the 1870s until its demise in the 1930s the cooperative reflected and contributed not only to the politics and culture of the working-class quarter of Belleville but to the French labor movement as a whole. In part, this was because residents of Belleville belonged to a long tradition of worker solidarity. Belleville had the highest proportion of people born in the capital, and family bonds were close. The majority of people living in Belleville were skilled craftspeople and workers—74 percent of the inhabitants in 1886. Of the male popula¬ tion, machinists were the second largest occupational group (15.27 per¬ cent), following building workers (21.39 percent).92 Annexed into Paris in i860, Belleville was the site of working-class militancy and insurrec¬ tions from 1848 until the bloody end of the Commune in 1871. Despite military occupation, which lasted until 1876, Belleville continued to be the “nightmare of the rich bourgeoisie and of the 'friends of order.’ ”93 The Bellevilloise cooperative began very modestly. It was initially open only in the evening after the working day because there was not enough money to pay an employee. At the beginning the store sold only oil, dried beans, pasta, sausage, rice, ham, wine, candles, and soap. The society published statutes and became legal in 1878. In the same year, the cooperative sent two delegates to the worker congress at Lyons. By 1884, it had extended its operation to two branch stores and sold a wider variety of goods, including bread and coal. The Bellevilloise, along with many other cooperatives in the 1870s and 1880s, adopted the Rochdale system. The Bellevilloise’s statutes stated that “the monetary excess remaining after general costs and losses will be divided in proportion to the consumption of each member.” The Bellevilloise also stipulated that each member could purchase only one share and that members were admitted “without distinction of sex.” Only cash purchases were al¬ lowed; there was no credit. Like other cooperatives during this period, 92. Louis Helies, La Bellevilloise, 1887-1912: Son historique (Paris: L’Emancipatrice, 1912), 3—4; Gerard Jacquemet, “Belleville ouvrier a la Belle Epoque,” LeMouvement Social (January-March 1982): 61-77; and Michel Offerle, “Les socialistes et Paris, 1881-1890: Des communards aux conseillers municipaux” (Ph.D. diss., University of Paris 1,1970), 78. The best work on Belleville is Jacquemet’s Belleville au dix-neuvieme siecle: Du faubourg a la ville (Paris: Editions des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1984). 93. Clement Lepidis and Emmanuel Jacomin, Belleville (Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1975), 237, 272.

Competing Strands

65

the Bellevilloise maintained democratic decision making as part of its commitment to common control and participation. The presidency revolved in alphabetical order from the roll. Cooperators elected admin¬ istrators for one-year terms (always revokable by the members) and held general assemblies three times a year, with “all members encouraged to attend.”94 The participatory and democratic ownership and administra¬ tion of the Bellevilloise reflects a set of ideological assumptions different from the ownership and administrative practices of department stores of the same period, although the differences were in part related to size and scale. Likewise, the social concerns of consumer cooperatives reveal dif¬ ferent values. Workers established collective concerns in consumer co¬ operatives of this period in clear opposition to the individualism of department stores and bourgeois cooperatives. To be a shareholder at the consumer cooperative in Levallois-Perret, it was necessary “to live from the fruits of your labor.” Furthermore, only those persons “too aged to work” were to be employed in the store. The cooperative also sponsored a day-care facility where members’ children were cared for from the end of school until their parents got out of work. The statutes at Levallois-Perret provided a doctor and a pharmacy for members and guaranteed members two francs a day plus food when ill. The coopera¬ tive also paid three hundred francs to the surviving spouse for burial costs and covered the costs of burial for children.95 Unlike the first half of the nineteenth century, when early industrial capitalism generated contests over control of production and the rights of labor, the second half of the century witnessed the implementation of capitalist forms of consumption. The subsequent growth of the eco¬ nomic and cultural strength of consumption gave rise to contests over the meaning and usages of consumption. In this process, multiple forms of retailing evolved as notions of consumption were debated and con¬ structed. These consumer institutions became arenas for competing commercial and social ideologies. Consumer cooperatives, which began as part of an organic, anticapitalist critique, became by the 1860s carriers of differing ideologies despite certain shared legal aspects and structural similarities, such as their small size and relative isolation. By the 1880s, two threads were emerging from within consumer cooperation: reform94- La Bellevilloise, Livret-statuts, 1883, BHVP. 95- APP, B/A 1549, doss. 4833.

66

Origins of Consumer Cooperation

ist and radical. Reformist cooperatives, often founded by paternalistic bourgeois or factory owners, encouraged workers to adopt bourgeois values of self-improvement, saving, and peaceful social change. For company cooperatives, an important goal was to contain and control a stable labor force. For cooperatives encouraged by paternalistic bour¬ geois, a goal was to portray cooperatives as one avenue for individual social mobility. Reformist cooperatives cast consumption of commodi¬ ties in terms of individual acquisition and either social stability or mobil¬ ity, as did department stores. Radical cooperatives, founded by militant workers, reinforced traditional artisanal values of collective economic and social emancipation through democratic ownership and decision making, as well as social obligations. Radical cooperators viewed com¬ modities socially and politically, as products of labor and as mediators for just social relationships and commercial integrity. The actions of radical cooperators refute Gabriel Tarde’s assertion that nonelite con¬ sumers were simply imitators of elite lifestyles. Instead, democratic and social consumer cooperatives reflected workers’ commitment to con¬ structing their own vision of fair and just economic and social relation¬ ships.

3 The “Retailing Revolution”: Consumer Cooperatives and Chain Stores

Commercial concentration in France—and elsewhere—was part of a retailing revolution” that involved the transformation of a system of small, independent retailers and larger wholesalers into a set of commer¬ cial institutions characterized by some or all of the following: an increasingly bureaucratic and hierarchical management structure, a greater diversity of goods sold within a single establishment, bulk purchases direcdy from producers or wholesale establishments, and an overall increase in the size and scale of establishments. Commercial concentra¬ tion in France took place in three discernible phases that involved significant innovations. Department stores characterized the first phase of commercial concentration, which took place in the mid-nineteenth century. Chain stores (muisons pt succursules multiples) and consumer cooperatives characterized the second phase of commercial concentra¬ tion, which lasted from the 1880s to the 1920s.1 Dime stores (magasins a prix uniques) signaled the onset of the third phase, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is to the second phase, which involved the dynamic development of chain stores and consumer cooperatives, that we now turn. 1. Michel Coquery elaborated the scheme of phases of commercial concentration in his Mutations et structures du commerce de detail en France (Clergy: Le Signe, 1977). An earlier work suggesting the same typology is Evariste Curtil, Des maisons franpatses d}alimentation a succursales multiples (Dijon: J. Belvet, 1933). 69

70

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

Because of their dispersal over all parts of the country, chain stores played a crucial role in the retailing revolution that forged patterns and ideologies of “mass” consumption. Unlike department stores, which were confined to a single site (usually Paris), chain stores concentrated ownership and purchases in a central establishment but decentralized sales through multiple and dispersed branches. The chain store form combined moderate size with the concentration and unity of depart¬ ment stores, a strategy that one contemporary deemed the “gilt of ubiquity.”2 In constructing chain stores, retailers also drew on the striking success of succursalisme in the banking industry, which had earlier achieved financial concentration and growth with central bank¬ ing establishments and multiple-branch banks.3 Chain stores were especially successful in the late nineteenth century because they offered a wider array of goods than traditional small shopkeepers offered. There were generally two types of chain stores: those that sold a variety of goods and those that concentrated on a single product. The former predominated in France during this period; the latter, notably shoe stores, were more common in Great Britain, although there were specialty chains in France such as the Vigneronne, which was founded in 1894 and sold wine.4 Before the First World War, then, chains in France sold foodstuffs (which often included bakery goods and fresh vegetables, fruits, and meats); wine and spirits, coal, haberdashery; sewing items, such as fabric, buttons, and scissors, small scale household goods, such as buckets, mops, soap, candles, and pots and pans (articles de menage}', hardware (quincaillerie), ready-made clothing, shoes, and hats; and various other items, such as toys, per¬ fume, and paper goods.5 Relations between production and consump 2. Curtil, Des maisons fmnfaises, 24. . 3. On succursalisme in general and banking’s influence in particular, see Pierre Moride, Les maisons a succursales multiples en France et a Vetranger (Paris. Felix Alcan, 1913), 82. Chain stores did not necessarily lead to the creation ol a mass market, but they did provide an institutional infrastructure for the sale of products both within regional districts and through a national market. For the argument that department stores and the railroad system helped preserve, rather than homogenize, customized products and regional markets, see Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past and Present 108 (August 1985): 166. 4. Gilles Normand, Legrand commerce de detail (Paris: Perrin, 1920), 85—86.^ 5. Paul Gemahling, “La concentration commerciale sans grands magasins,” Revue d’Economie Politique 26 (March-Apnl 1912), 181; Pierre Francois, Pour une politique de Valimentation (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1928), 204-206; Curtil, Des maisons franfaises, 44, 61; Gilles Normand, Histoire des magasins a succursales en France (Paris: Edition de l’Union des Entreprises Modernes, 1936), 14-

The Retailing Revolution33

71

tion of goods became increasingly distant. Consequently, structures that provided low-cost commodities through direct relations between producers and consumers stood the best chance of success. Chain stores experimented with early forms of vertical integration to close the gap between producers and consumers: they established their own whole¬ sale apparatus, purchased goods directly from producers, or, in some limited cases, produced products under their own label. In essence, chain stores collapsed the previously distinct spheres of wholesaling and retailing and realized extensive economies of scale through bulk pur¬ chasing.6 Some studies have depicted consumer cooperatives as simply one type of chain store because individual cooperatives often had branch stores.7 Cooperatives and capitalist chain stores did share certain characteristics. Whereas at first many cooperatives and chain stores concentrated their efforts on foodstuffs, wine, and bakery items, both expanded the range of their inventories prior to the First World War. Commercial con¬ centration within the cooperative movement took place through the formation of national organizations, regional groups, and wholesale operations. Nonetheless, their commercial practices and ideological assumptions differed from those of the chain stores. To characterize co¬ operatives and capitalist chain stores as variants of the same commercial form mutes the intensity of the struggles between the two forms over the strategies, purposes, and meanings of consumption.8 The different origins of consumer cooperation and capitalist chain stores in France provide one reason for their subsequent divergence in structures and ideologies. Workers and artisans founded the consumer 6. The economic strength of wholesalers had become increasingly important over the nineteenth century. Their roles expanded in the context of concentration and special¬ ization of production and retailers’ needs for small amounts of diverse articles. Whole¬ salers became the necessary intermediary as it became less feasible for small retailers to address themselves to all producers. Wholesalers also obtained economic strength since they often organized both credit and transportation for goods. All of these services, of course, increased the cost of goods to the consumer. Michel David, “Devolution des formes d exploitation,’ in Jacques Lacour-Gayet, Histoire du commerce (Paris: Editions SPID, 1950), 1:279-284; and Pierre Francois, “Pour une organization rationnelle et scientifique de la distribution alimentaire,” in Distribution et consommation (Paris: Edi¬ tions de la SAPE, 1927), 24. 7- Anthropologist Jack Goody, for example, suggests that the Rochdale Pioneers were the first successful utilizers of the branch store or “multiple shop” structure when they opened the first of many branches in 1856. Goody, in his Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 168. 8. The discussion that follows does not include company “cooperatives” founded by factory owners or isolated bourgeois-inspired paternalistic cooperatives.

72

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

cooperative movement as part of the associationist movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Wholesalers founded the first capitalist chain store at Reims (Marne) in 1885. The impetus for founding the Reims establish¬ ment was a grocery store and bakery founded by the city s mutual aid society in 1866. By 1878 the society had eight branches, and it had expanded to thirty in 1888. Because of its policy of sale at the lowest price possible, both the local small shopkeepers and their wholesalers saw their sales volume and profits suffer. Local wholesalers responded to this threat by founding the Docks Remois in 1885, properly the first instance of the capitalist chain store form in France. The Docks grew rapidly, and by 1913 it had approximately 500 stores. The capitalist chain store form was then adopted in Amiens (Somme), Troyes (Aube), Saint-Etienne (Loire), and Grenoble (Isere). Entrepreneurs within the grocery trade also founded chain stores. In 1898 the owner of a medium-sized grocery store in Saint-Etienne, M. Guichard-Perrachin, turned his enterprise into a limited liability company called “Casino.”9 Consumer cooperatives and capitalist chain stores also differed in terms of profits, share ownership, and management. WBereas the Roch¬ dale Pioneers returned profits in proportion to consumption, capitalist chain stores, like department stores, returned profits in proportion to shares. These profits were, in turn, divided among a small number of people owning multiple shares.10 In place of the democratic ownership and management of cooperatives by members, or the individual and private ownership of traditional small shopkeepers, chain stores utilized a general administrative council and, in each branch store, a salaried manager who was paid a percentage of the store’s profits. These man¬ agers generally deposited a sum of money with the parent establishment (maison mere) prior to assuming responsibility for the store. Paid in specie, the sum was destined to cover any possible deficit in operations. Thus the ultimate responsibility for the financial success or failure of each branch store rested with the manager, who had only the ap¬ pearance of liberty.” Many managers were former owners of small shops that had been bought out by the chain. As a result, managers were often

9. Normand, Histoire des magasins, 1—13; Gemahling, “La concentration commerciale,” 173—176; Moride, Les maisons d succursales, 106; and Curtil, Des maisons franfaises, 59-6°.

. 10. Chain stores generally divided profits as follows: 5 percent interest on shares, 65 percent to shareholders proportioned by amount ol shares owned, 25 percent to the administration, and 10 percent to the personnel. Curtil, Des maisons franfaises, 68, 70.

The “Retailing Revolution”

73

reduced to being employees in stores they had formerly owned. Chain stores paid branch managers approximately five percent of the store’s profits, rather than a fixed salary.11 Chain stores embodied the same implicit individualist values that department stores did and carried these values to the French provinces. A central strategy was die presentation of goods in such a way as to create desire for the commodities, a technique adopted from depart¬ ment stores. Chain store windows displayed elegant arrangements of good formerly associated with wealth but made increasingly less expen¬ sive by changes in production. Contemporaries noted of the chain store: “The store is often installed with great luxuriousness. The co¬ operatives, to the contrary, are very simple. Chain stores influence the psychology of the buyer, they attract and fascinate.”12 In addition to a purposely seductive physical appearance, the stores pioneered other technologies of temptation. One of the most successful was the system of rewarding individual purchases with small stamps redeemable for objects chosen in the store or from a catalogue. One contemporary noted: This system suggests characteristics of unheard-of luxuries. Each of the larger chains possesses a store in an elegant neighborhood . . . where one can redeem the stamps and obtain dishes, lingerie, silver plate, jewelry, artistic bronzes, furniture, even a piano! . . . Illustrated catalogues spread temptation through the countryside. One can imagine how this luxu¬ rious display affects the workers, since all these objects seem freely obtain¬ able. ... I have heard of working women allowing themselves to be carried away by the most thoughtless and superfluous purchases in order to gain enough stamps for the prize of their dreams.13

All of these developments fostered the perception of commodities as indices of individual welfare and status, the “celebration of the ob¬ ject.”14 Another strategy to create desire for goods was to encourage consumer identification with specific goods and with the stores. Chain stores considered distinctive packaging of goods as a form of advertis11. Curtil, Des maisons fmnpaises, 103-108, 25. Because the managers were responsible for all merchandise, even if it arrived damaged, they preferred the new style of pre¬ packaged merchandise, which likewise benefited the parent organization’s goals of standardization. Gemahling, “La concentration commerciale,” 185. 12. Moride, Les maisons a succursales, 140. 13. Gemahling, “La concentration commerciale,” 182. 14• This is the terminology utilized by Jean Baudrillard in La societe de consommation.

74

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

ing. The Felix Potin concession, for example, manufactured soap, wine, and other goods, packaged them with its own label, and distributed the goods to the chain stores. Furthermore, each of the branch stores within a chain adopted a uniform appearance.15 In the contest over forms and ideologies of commerce, consumer cooperation continued to represent itself as different from capitalist retailing. What chains and cooperatives sold was less at issue than the values and ideologies conveyed by their commercial structures and their sales strategies. The types of goods available in both chains and cooper¬ atives generally reflected what working people considered necessities and what they could afford. Well into the early twentieth century, both workers and artisans continued to spend the majority of their income on food.16 As one historian has succinctly stated, “The incomplete victory over poverty realized in the four decades before the Great War was not conducive to altering consumer habits as far as the mass of workers was concerned. Spending was, for the most part, a matter of necessities—or choosing which necessities to purchase and which to forgo.”17 Whereas an emergent consumer culture was becoming a reality for many middleclass people in France, for workers and artisans the commodities and leisure patterns associated with this culture were more visible than attainable. Working-class people might acquire extra clothing, a watch, perhaps an inexpensive bibelot or print, but in general they simply did not experience the significant increase in disposable income necessary for accessing the full range of available consumer goods and leisure activities. Nonetheless, chain stores and cooperatives did initiate new

15. Moride, Les maisons a succursales, 143; Curtil, Des maisons franfaises, 94- It was not until the 1920s that cooperatives implemented the strategy of uniform store exteriors. Felix Potin (1820-1871) was a pioneer retailer. His first store, founded in the late 1840s m Paris sold goods almost at cost. By the 1850s he had founded several branches and begun manufacturing many of his own goods. By 1887 the Potin concession, a family-owned business, had a sales volume of around 45 million francs. Georges d Avenel Le mechanisme de la vie moderne: Les magasins d’alimentation,” Revue des DeuxMondes 29 (1895). 5i6. In one study of the family of a worker in a cardboard-making factory, for example, the family’s income was 3,854 francs a year, of which 2,828 francs (73%) were spent on food. In J. Bailhache, “Un type d’ouvrier anarchiste: Monographic dune iamille d’ouvriers parisiens,” La Science Sociale, May 1905,419-420. One of the best government studies of budgets is the Statistique generate de la France, Salaires et cout de l existence a diverses epoques, jusqu’en 1910 (Paris, 1911) • . . . f 17. Berlanstein, Working People, 46. For a stimulating critique ot the notion ot “needs,” see William Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problem of Needs and Commodities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976).

The “Retailing Revolution”

75

experiments and ways of thinking about the organization of retailing and the politics of consumption. By comparing these two forms of commerce, rather than the items sold, one can decipher cooperation’s characterization of itself as an alternative to capitalist retailing. Cooperators viewed retailers’ creation of need as artificial, conspira¬ torial, and simply a search for profit. They saw commodities as media¬ tors for just social relationships and commercial integrity. Consumer cooperation offered the only collectivized perspective among the vari¬ ous new forms of retailing associated with the retailing revolution. Cooperators not only conceptualized retailing as an arena for an alterna¬ tive to capitalist commerce and for popular control over markets, but they also viewed consumption as a vital avenue for molding an alterna¬ tive social and economic order. Yet how would this alternative order be defined? For “reformist” cooperators, cooperation was to be the foun¬ dation of a Cooperative Republic, neither capitalist nor socialist, where production would be ordered according to the needs of the collectivity of consumers. For “radical” cooperators, cooperation was a vital means of worker solidarity, financial aid for militancy, and education for ad¬ ministrators and consumers in an alternative mode of commerce for the future socialist order. In the contests over the meanings and usages of consumption, each retailing form was a contested terrain (as in the case of reformist and radical cooperatives), as were different forms of retail¬ ing that competed with each other (such as consumer cooperatives and chain stores). Although both consumer cooperatives and capitalist chain stores grew rapidly during this period, initially the cooperatives were more prevalent than chain stores. Numerical information on consumer co¬ operatives prior to governmental tabulation in the 1890s is problematic, as is analysis of the commercial geography of chain stores. Estimates, however, provide important insights into the relative strengths of the two commercial forms.18 One estimate stated that in 1906 there were twenty-two chains with 1,792 stores. In 1906—1907, there were more consumer cooperatives (2,166 or 2,301) than capitalist chain stores (1,792)

18. An exception is the careful analysis by Abel Chatelain, “Geographic commerciale et sociologique du commerce de detail en France: Un example caracteristique, l’epicerie (alimentation generak)T Revue de Geographic de Lyon, 33, no. 3 (1958): 293-310. Unfortu¬ nately, Chatelain’s regional comparison of the various strengths of capitalist chains, consumer cooperatives, and small shopkeepers used commercial data only from the 1950s.

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

76

Table i

French consumer cooperatives, 1869-1907 Year

Cooperatives

1869 1893 1895 1897 1900 1905 1907

104 (estimated) 979/1,001 1,217/1,221 1,351 1,490/1,559 1,989 2,166/2,301

Members

359,928 454,719 641,549/705,185

Note: Sources: Tabular information derived from Pierre Brizon and Ernest Poisson, La cooperation (Paris. Aristide Quillet, 1913), 135; Almanach de la Cooperation Franfaise, Suisse, et Canadienne (1906), 94—95; France, Annuaire statistique (1895—96,1907); and FNCC, Annuaire de la cooper¬ ation (1930), 432. Because several of these sources dis¬ agree, both low and high estimates are given for a number of cooperatives.

in France.19 The number of French consumer cooperatives had grown dramatically from the movement’s resurgence in the 1860s to 1905.20 In the twenty-nine years from 1855 to 1884, approximately 156 consumer 19. Evariste Curtil, Des maisons franfaises, 58 (Curtil utilized the figures given at the first International Congress of Chain Stores, held in July 1931) > France, Direction de Travail, Annuairestatistique (1907) (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1908), 125. This number does not include the branch stores of individual cooperatives. 20. Figures given in the table do include company stores that took the legal form of the cooperative. While it is impossible to say with exact precision what proportion of these cooperatives were disguised company stores, it is likely that the number is rather small. For example, the two major works on cooperatives in the Nord, Devaux’s Les societes cooperatives, and Gustave Marliere’s La cooperation dans le Nord et le Pas-de-Calais (Ph.D. diss., University of Lille, 1933), repeatedly note only six cooperatives founded by factory owners: the cooperative at Fives-Lille, the Anzin Miners Cooperative, the coop¬ erative at Trith-Saint-Leger, the Prevoyante at Loos, the Independante in Lille, and the Union in Roubaix. There were approximately 272 cooperatives in the Nord in 1910, Thus, even in a heavily industrialized department such as the Nord, the number of company cooperatives was probably very small, a supposition reinforced by the naming pattern of Nord cooperatives (such as the Justice, the Fraternelle, and the Proletarienne)^ These numbers underrepresent the number of cooperatives, since the branch stores of individual cooperatives were not included. The number of members is also very unrepre¬ sentative of the number of cooperators in France, since the common practice was for only one member of a family to join the cooperative. More likely, using the conservative estimate of a four-person family, there were approximately 1,439,712 in 1895 and 2,566,196 people provisioned by cooperatives in 1895 and 1907- Theodore Zeldin s statement that “only about half a million people showed an interest in cooperation before the war” is in error. In Zeldin, France, 1848-ms: Politics and Anger, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 300.

The “Retailing Revolution”

77

cooperatives were founded in France. In contrast, in the nine years from 1883 to the first three months of 1894,21 during the period of expansion, 227 cooperatives were founded. Most areas of cooperative growth were either older artisanal centers (Lyons, Paris, Grenoble) or newly indus¬ trialized regions (Saone-et-Loire, Nord). Few French departments re¬ mained untouched by the expansion of consumer cooperation in con¬ trast to the dispersal of consumer cooperatives in 1867. One early report based on a questionnaire sent out to all cooperatives listed in the 1890 Almanach de la cooperation franpaise noted that there were approximately 1,100 consumer cooperatives in France and that the largest, the Moisonneuse, in Paris, had 14,199 members.22 Despite the initially stronger position of consumer cooperation dur¬ ing this period, by the First World War capitalist chain stores had overtaken consumer cooperatives in number. In 1913, there were 47 chains uniting 6,446 branches. In the same period, 1913-1914, there were 3,250 consumer cooperatives in France (excluding the 11 coopera¬ tives in Corsica, Algeria, and New Caledonia). These 3,250 cooperatives had 716 branch stores among them, for a total number of 3,966 coopera¬ tive stores.23 The inability of cooperative retailing to surpass capitalist chain stores was due in large part to the cooperative movement’s divi¬ sion within itself over the appropriate roles and visions of consumer cooperation, divisions that impeded commercial consolidation and in¬ novation. The traditional divisions within consumer cooperation be21. Paoli, “Notes,” 412-413. 22. The report also estimated that there were approximately 104 producer coopera¬ tives, 22 credit societies, 5 cooperative construction organizations, and 39 agricultural syndicates, illustrating the definite reversal of strength favoring consumer cooperatives over producer cooperatives. Exposition Universelle Internationale de Lyon, Associations cooperatives et syndicats professionnels (Lyons: Imprimerie Alexandre Rey, 1896), 17. The Union Cooperative (1885—1912) kept the most complete records of the numbers and locations of French consumer cooperatives. For examples, see the “Liste des societes cooperatives fran^aises de consommation,” in their Almanach de la Cooperation Franpaise (1897, 114-141; 1904, 72—135; 1908, 108—150). These lists generally included the location, name, address, date of foundation, number of members, business volume, type of merchandise, and officers of a cooperative. All cooperatives were grouped by depart¬ ment. The Bourse des Cooperatives Socialistes (1895-1912) published similar lists in their Almanach de la Cooperation Socialiste, although these lists generally included onlv mem¬ bers of the BCS. 23. Most cooperatives had either no branches or one or two small branches. Some of the largest cooperatives, such as the Bellevilloise (Paris) or the Union de Limoges had numerous branches. The Bellevilloise, with 8,700 members, had twelve branches. The Union de Limoges had 10,621 members and 15 branches. Curtil, Des maisonsfranpaises, 58, and the Annuaire de la cooperation illustre, 1914 (Paris: L’Emancipatrice, 1914).

?8

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

tween reformist and radical cooperatives became exacerbated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as cooperation itself became a contested terrain. The contest was rooted in the relationship between democratic and social commerce and national politics. In this process the two threads of consumer cooperation widened as each group be¬ came aligned with different political perspectives.

4 Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”: The Union Cooperative

In 1885, cooperators founded a national organization, the Union Co¬ operative.1 Although the Union Cooperative (UC) presented itself as a blend of cooperation’s reformist and radical elements, close examina¬ tion demonstrates that the UC was the institutionalized fulfillment of the historically reformist ideology within consumer cooperation. In both theory and practice, the UC attempted to forge a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. This “third way” retained some as¬ pects of associationism and continued a critique of capitalist commerce. Yet in the political world of late nineteenth-century France, the UC’s tenets from its associationist heritage, such as class conciliation and peaceful social change, were moderate political positions. Furthermore, although a central tenet of the program of the UC was “political neu¬ trality,” when examined closely it was politically entangled with republi¬ can solidarism. In the context of the instability of the Third Republic, solidarism was an important attempt to fuse a republican synthesis that extended institutionally to many aspects of French life. The UC was precisely one of those institutions. The symbolic discourse of consumer cooperation within the UC further reinforced moderate republicanism, 1. The original name of the national organization was the Federation Nationale des Societes Cooperatives de Consommation. The name was changed to the Union Cooper¬ ative in 1891.

79

80

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

and it was this moderation that allowed for much of the appeal to the petit bourgeoisie and for the movement’s growth. Still, a socialist critique within the movement, weak commercial structures, and harass ment by shopkeepers undermined the continued growth of even this form of cooperation.

Founding Theories of the Union Cooperative

From its beginnings, the organized consumer cooperative movement was aligned with the reformist rather than the radical thread of con¬ sumer cooperation. The initiative lor the founding congress in 1885 did not come from grass-roots organizing. Instead, two nimois, Auguste Fabre (1833-1922) and Edouard de Boyve (1840-1923), called the meet¬ ing. Nimes, an old textile center in the Gard department with a popula¬ tion of approximately sixty thousand, had only a few small cooperatives in the early 1880s. The region was not an active center of cooperation and was, according to one inhabitant, “absolutely indifferent to all types of social preoccupation.” Yet these men, the cooperatives they repre¬ sented, and the organization they founded embodied the prevalent ideas of reformist cooperation in the 1880s. Auguste Fabre was originally from Uzes, where he was the owner of a small silk mill. Another native of Uzes, the cooperator Charles Gide, wrote of Fabre: “Although he belonged to the bourgeois, he had none of the bourgeois spirit and even had a disdain for it. Fie was an eccen¬ tric, curious about all that was different. FFe was passionate about America and immersed himself in the works of the socialist Charles Fourier.” Following these convictions, Fabre lived for two years at the Familistere at Guise, a Fourierist-inspired community. After the 1870 war, he abandoned Uzes for Nimes, where he established himself as a mechanic. In 1878 Fabre organized Solidarite, a club of some twenty artisans. This group, later renamed Societe ^Emancipation Populaire, discussed a wide variety of subjects, including apprenticeship, aban¬ doned children, prison work, strikes, and cooperatives. The group then established a small consumer cooperative and bakery called the Renais¬ sance.2 2. Charles Gide, L’Ecole de Nimes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), 1922. Fabre, to Gide’s disdain, also communed through a medium with spirits, recording the conversations in notebooks—eight large volumes of them. See also Gide, “La societe

Consumer Cooperation as the c(Third Way ”

81

/

Edouard de Boyve was a wealthy Protestant who lived in Nimes on his rentes. De Boyve’s mother was English, and, hence, he was fluent in the language. According to Gide, although de Boyve “had the manners of a perfect English gendeman,” he also could “speak with workers as if he were one of them. . . . He created an atmosphere of good will and cordiality which disarmed the most rebellious hearts.” De Boyve was active in local philanthropic activities and also corresponded with Vansittart Neale, an eminent British Christian socialist and secretary of the British cooperative movement. In 1883, inspired by the British example, he founded the Abeille Nimois, a consumer cooperative that merged with the cooperative of Fabre. Following visits by de Boyve to Parisian cooperatives and to a national congress of British cooperators, the nimois cooperators decided to issue an appeal throughout France for a national congress.* * 3 Even launching this initial circular was difficult since no one knew how many cooperatives there were in France or even where they were located. Fabre and de Boyve sent their circular to French mayors and asked that it be included in local newspapers. Issued in May 1885, the circular stressed the need for a national congress and suggested that the congress address the creation of a wholesale society, an administrative group, and a nonpolitical propaganda journal.4 Of the ninety-two respondents, representatives of eighty-five societies attended the first meeting, as did visitors from Belgium, Switzerland, and England. At this first meeting discord and political tensions be¬ tween reformists and radicals erupted into animosities that continued to trouble the organization. At the opening session there was “an inde¬ scribable uproar” over the election of a president for the session. In contest were de Boyve and Simon Deynaud, an active socialist and a former editor ofZ^ Proletaire, organ of the Parti Ouvrier. The majority of the large Parisian cooperatives at the 1885 congress (the Avenir de Plaisance, the Bellevillois, the Concorde, the Moissonneuse, and others) were directed by members of the Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Revolution-

d’economie populaire de Nimes,” Almanack de la Cooperation Fran^aise (1898), 14,41—46. On the Familistere at Guise, see G. Delabre and J. M. Gautier, “La regeneration de Putopie socialiste: Godin et le Familistere de Guise” (Ph.D. diss., University of Paris I,

).

1978

3. Gide, UEcole, 17—19, 23—24. Also Premier conp/res des societes cooperatives de consommation de France (1885), 1. 4. This circular is printed in “The Co-Operatives Congress of Consumer Societies— Held at Paris, July 1885,” The Co-Operative News (Manchester, England), October 3,1885.

82

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

naire (possibilists).5 After the dust had settled, de Boyve was elected President. English visitors assured him that their first meeting was also tumultuous: “We had among us the Chartists who played the role of your collectivists.”6 The outcome of this initial power struggle was indicative of the relative future strength within the Union Cooperative of bourgeois reformers and socialists. On the national level, the congress voted to create separate adminis¬ trative and commercial organs. A permanent administrative committee, the chambre consultative, would coordinate activities, obtain statutes of all societies, keep archives, and so forth. The commercial committee, the chambre commercial, would research price and quality information and group purchases and serve as a clearinghouse for commercial informa¬ tion. The congress also decided to hold annual congresses composed of delegates elected by local cooperatives, levied ten centimes per member per year to support these organizations, and stipulated that only con¬ sumer cooperatives would have a deliberative vote.7 Although the na¬ tional organization offered a standardized cooperative ideology and practices, there was no mechanism for their enforcement in local co¬ operatives. The congress’s election of Auguste Fougerousse as general secretary of both committees was an indication of the strength of conservatism in the new organization. Fougerousse was the author of numerous studies on the “social question,” in which he advocated institutions such as savings banks and mutual credit societies. A Catholic, he had collabo¬ rated with Le Play on La Reforme Sociale and with the doctrinaire liberal economists on L’Economiste Franpaise. Fougerousse was in many ways quite reactionary. He envisioned a strictly hierarchical society in which “social inequalities have a role in the social order and one of these roles is that the strong sustain the weak and the intelligent direct the sight¬ less. ... The workplace should be the center and the patron the initiator of productive practices of savings, labor, and social progress.”8 Fouge¬ rousse was able to maintain his power in part because several of the large socialist cooperatives in Paris refused to join the new organization. One reason for their abstention was political: many Parisian cooperatives 5. Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 2:100—101. 6. Premier conjjres, 10-11. 7. Federation des Societes Cooperatives de Consommation, Compte rendu, 20 De¬ cember 1885. AFNCC. 8. Gaumont, Histoiregenerate, 2:110.

Consumer Cooperation as the ccThird Way ”

83

such as the Egalitaire had a long tradition of involvement in the labor movement and socialism.9 These cooperatives did not want to collabo¬ rate with the Union Cooperative, since it contained such cooperatives as the Societe Civile Cooperative de Consommation du Dix-huitieme Arrondissement, a conservative cooperative presided over by Felix Fitsch, a railroad employee and supporter of Fougerousse.10 Another reason was economic. These cooperatives were in strong positions and collaborated among themselves in a purchasing group, the Syndicat des Societes de Consommation. Commercially, Parisian socialist coopera¬ tives saw nothing to gain from the new organization. This situation was not to last, however, and the power balance shifted by the end of the 1880s. The ascendency of Charles Gide and his followers, who advo¬ cated a “Cooperative Republic,” forced a change in direction. This group was termed the “Nimes School” because cooperative theorists such as Gide, de Boyve, and Fabre were nimois and because their press, ^Emancipation, was located in Nimes.11 In theory and in practice, the Union Cooperative defined coopera¬ tion as an economic and social “Third Way,” an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. Movement theorists and activists fused Rochdalian strategies and older notions of French associationism into the Nimes School, the dominant ideology of the Union Cooperative. The three major positions of this school were these: a theoretical focus on consumption as the vehicle for correcting the worst abuses of capitalism and achieving certain goals of socialism; advocacy of a “Cooperative Republic” as an inherendy superior critical counterpoint to capitalist commerce; and strict political neutrality. Charles Gide (1847-1932) was the major theorist of the Nimes School. Born in Uzes of an old Protestant family, he received his doctorate in law in 1872. He taught law at Bordeaux and Montpellier before setding in Paris in 1898 to occupy the chair of comparative social economy estab¬ lished by the comte de Chambrun at the University of Paris. Fasci¬ nated by Fourier, Gide created a sensation in 1884 with the publication 9. The cooperative organized a fund for Jules Guesde and other socialists when they were arrested in 1878. Delegates from the cooperative participated in the worker con¬ gresses of the late 1870s, and in 1879 the cooperative sent aid to the strikers of Vienne. Collaboration with the Union Cooperative was considered “class treason.” 10. Societe civile cooperative de consommation du dix-huitieme arrondissement de Paris, Assembleegenerate du 31 mars 1901, Musee Social, Paris. 11. Gide stated that Ernest Brelay, the liberal economist, first baptized the group the Nimes School to ridicule the group’s provincial origin. Gide, L’Ecole, 85.

84

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

of his unorthodox Principes d’economic politique. This work foreshad¬ owed Gide’s later theoretical positions within the cooperative move¬ ment. In this work, he argued against the individualism of liberal economy, embraced concepts of marginal utility, and also discussed economic aspects of socialism with some sympathy. However, Gide’s professional career was profoundly affected by these still-unorthodox theoretical positions. To attack classical liberalism in this period was essentially to attack an institutional phalanx that revolved around the Institut de France, the Societe d’Economie Politique, the two reviews L’Economiste Franpaise and the Journal des Economistes, and the faculties of prestigious universities. Ostracized by the academic power structure and attacked by prominent people such as Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Gide founded his own journal, the Revue d’Economie Politique, in 1887 and sought refuge as an activist and theorist of the cooperative movement.12 Gide knew both Fabre and de Boyve and wrote to de Boyve follow¬ ing the 1885 congress to offer his aid to the new cooperative organiza¬ tion. De Boyve responded enthusiastically and invited Gide to be the honorary president and deliver the opening address at the second co¬ operative congress. Here Gide shocked the paternalistic supporters of Fougerousse by noting that cooperation was “socialist in the true sense of the word, because of its historical tradition within Fourierism, and that organized consumers could bring about the emancipation of labor through the suppression of capitalist profit.13 Gide drew support from 12. Andre Hirschfeld, “Charles Gide, l’Uzetien,” and Marc Penin, “Charles Gide, economiste, Revue des Etudes Cooperatives 209 (1982); 6—16,17—43. The economic theo¬ ries of Gide and Walras overlapped in some areas, and Walras was a contributor to the Revue d’Economie Politique. The two differed as well, notably on methodology (Walras was much more mathematical) and on social and political issues. See Christian Montet, Le role de Charles Gide dans le developpement de la pensee walrasienne en France,” Revue des Etudes Cooperatives 209 (1982): 44—62. Charles Gide was an important figure in French economics, Protestantism, and other areas of French life, and a tireless worker. His articles, book reviews, speeches, and books from 1869 to 1931 have been catalogued by Jacqueline Burolla in her “Livre des publications de Charles Gide” (unpublished manu¬ script), which is 150 pages long. Major works on Gide include Henri Desroche, Charles Gide, 1847-1932: Trois etapes d’une creativite: Cooperative, sociale, universitaire (Paris: Co¬ operative d’Information et d’Edition Mutualiste, 1982); A. Lavondes, Charles Gide: Un apotre de la cooperation (Uzes: La CapiteUe, 1953); and T. Miyajima, Souvenirs sur Charles Gide (Pans: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1933). Gide’s brother Paul was the father of Andre Gide. 13. Gide, L’Ecole, 66-67; and Deuxieme congres des societes cooperatives de consommation en France (1886), 3—18. See the article by Daude-Bancel that warmly describes Charles Gide: “Memories of Charles Gide,” in Co-Operation and Charles Gide, ed. Karl Walter (London: P.S. King and Son, 1933), 63-77.

Consumer Cooperation as the iCThird Way”

85

Fabre and de Boyve, who through their power base at Nimes published the movement’s journal UEmancipation (from 1887 on), organized the national congresses, and prepared the almanacs. Gide was also linked to the “invasion of the young neophytes” into the UC’s administrative committee, notably Achille Daude-Bancel, a former anarchist who met Gide while a pharmacy student at Montpellier.14 By 1889 there was enough support that following Gide’s speech oudining the principles of the Nimes School and of the Cooperative Republic, a motion insured a victory for the Nimes School over the paternalist conservatives.15 This victory was complete when Gide assumed direction of the Central Committee (successor to the chambre consultative in 1891), first as a committee member in 1898 and later as president of the UC in 1902. With Gide and the nimois in power, the ideology of cooperation as the “third way” became the dominant position of the UC. Gide’s speech at the World’s Fair of 1889 in Paris most clearly stated the vision of the Nimes School and oudined its major themes.16 Before an audience of seven hundred at the Trocadero, Gide opened his speech with an appropriation of French revolutionary discourse. He para¬ phrased the Abbe Sieyes of 1789 when he asked: “What is the consumer? Nothing. What ought he to be? Everything.” Gide forcefully defined consumption as the vehicle for correcting capitalist abuses and achieving socialist goals. He argued that the capitalist economic system was in a state of anarchy when production techniques displaced workers by machines. Like the earlier associationists, Gide sought a regulated dy¬ namic between production and consumption. Yet whereas associationism had conceptualized equilibrium in terms of labor and production, Gide insisted that rectification of disorder could best be effected through associations of consumers. As an economist aware of the economic strength of consumption in the late nineteenth century, Gide argued that imbalance between production and consumption was endemic to capitalist society. He believed that people could consolidate their eco¬ nomic strength as consumers to implement justice, fairness, and har¬ mony in all aspects of production as well as distribution, since “the stomach is served by the arms.” Gide offered a “moral” organization that served the collective welfare, to replace the antisocial organization of /

14- Gide, L’Ecole, 66-67. 15. Quatrieme congees des societes cooperatives de consommation (1889). The resignation of Fougerousse, also in 1889, expedited their success. 16. Congres international des societes cooperatives de consommation (1889).

86

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

modern capitalism tiiat sought only individual profit. Far from elevating the disinherited, Gide called for a total and peaceful social and economic transformation subordinating production to consumer needs. His plan was to “completely overturn” the current economic order and install a system where overproduction, industrial crises, and unemployment would not exist since consumers would produce only what was neces¬ sary in exact proportion to their needs. All conflict would then dis¬ appear: “We are all consumers, we will henceforth be our own sellers, bankers, entrepreneurs. The working class will have realized its goal of acquiring ownership of the means of production, stores, machines, factories, the land, and the mines.”17 Indeed, the universalization of cooperation was to be the realization of a classless society. To achieve this vision, Gide set forth a plan of three successive stages. First, local consumer cooperatives would band together, establish ware¬ houses, and use their combined purchasing power for bulk purchases. Second, with the capital constituted in this process, the wholesale organizations would undertake direct production for all needs of mem¬ bers: food products, clothes, furniture, and so on. Third, the combined cooperatives would acquire land and mines for all necessary agricultural products and minerals. In short, organized consumers would effect the successive conquest of commerce, industry, and agriculture.18 These stages would be accomplished through the free choices of associated individuals who would recognize the inherent superiority of the co¬ operative system. The final culmination of these stages would be the Cooperative Republic. Gide argued that the Cooperative Republic would rectify the anarchy and abuses of capitalism and arrive peacefully at many of the goals of socialism. The themes of this speech—the universality of the consumer, the de¬ termination of production by consumption, and a harmonious, conflictfree solution to the “social question” through the Cooperative Repub¬ lic —were not unique to Gide but were echoed throughout the national movement’s press, official platforms, and congresses and in discussions within local cooperatives. Certainly the theme of the primacy of the consumer was implicit in Rochdalian theory. What the French move¬ ment did was wed Rochdale to the existing discourses of the French associationist movement. Cooperators also incorporated traditions of

17. Conjures international (1889), 6-7. 18. This program is also printed in Gide, L’Ecole, 83-84.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

87

mi pmt DTJN?AUVR£ ..C0N6QMMfflEDE 'i>URCHARrf?AR

LEDfXMi £T£CRASE?AR

IEGROS Figure i. (a) 1789—“Let’s hope that this game will end soon” (French Revolution collection, Cornell University Library), (b) 1889—“Have pity on a poor consumer, overcharged by retailers and crushed by wholesalers” (Union Cooperative, Septieme conpres, 1893).

republicanism. One article noted that as the economic groundwork was laid prior to the victory of the Third Estate, so cooperators must cultivate the strength of local cooperatives in preparation for the Co¬ operative Republic.19 Cooperators frequently linked the plight of con¬ sumers to that of the Third Estate prior to the French Revolution. This analogy between economic oppression by the aristocrats and the clergy ol the bourgeoisie in 1789 and oppression by parasitic commerce of consumers in 1889 was made particularly explicit in a graphic of 1893. Here the weight of wholesalers and retailers was portrayed as robbing and crushing the consumer (see Figure 1; note hands in pockets). The notion of the Cooperative Republic also turned the Democratic and Social Republic, the vision of the association movement of 1848, on its head. Rather than serving as the political expression of organized pro¬ ducers, the Cooperative Republic represented the aspirations of orga¬ nized consumers who would, in turn, organize production. The goal of ✓

19-

Edouard de Boyve, “Catechisme de la cooperation,” Almanack de la Cooperation Frangaise (1898), 33.

88

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

the 1848 producer associations had been “to progressively and pacifically eliminate management and put the instruments of production in the hands of the workers.” By the late nineteenth century, cooperators believed in the economic power of consumers to impose their needs on the market. Although consumer cooperatives also sought the “progres¬ sive and pacific ownership of all capital and land in the hands of the associated workers,” the key was association of consumers, because “pro¬ duction has for an end consumption and not the inverse.” Cooperative activists of this period thus acknowledged the increasing importance of consumer demand in determining the subjects and volume of produc¬ tion. Because of the economic power of consumption, cooperators argued that they did “not seek the solution to the social question in production but in consumption.”20 Gide insisted that the goals of cooperation and socialism were the same and that only the means differed. The Cooperative Republic would abolish the wage-earning class and institute collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. The “cooperative regime will be the product of liberty, freely chosen because of the advantages it procures” and not “imposed by a coup d’etat.” Cooperation was thus at the same time the fulfillment of socialism and “an economic system destined to supersede capital¬ ism.”21 The official program of the Union Cooperative codified the goals of the Cooperative Republic, whose inherent superiority to capitalist com¬ merce was die second major theme of the Nimes School. The opening paragraph stated that “the goal of cooperation is to replace the current state of competition by a regime of free association that will regulate, in an equitable manner, the distribution of society’s economic, intellec¬ tual, and moral wealth.”22 The key words of this statement—free asso¬ ciation, equitable, and distribution—signify the movement’s heritage and foci. The document used the term association to highlight the movement’s contrast with the competition of contemporary capitalism. The notion of “free” association transformed the movement’s pre-1848 affinity for state aid into a strategy of allied consumers. Cooperators’ use of the adjectives “equitable” and “moral” not only reflected the Equita¬ ble Pioneers of Rochdale but also contrasted cooperative commerce 20. LAssociation Cooperative, 1 April 1902. 21. “Cooperation et le collectivismc,” Almanack de la Cooperation Franfaise (1902). 22. “Le programme du Comite Central de PUnion Cooperative de Consommation,” L’Union Cooperative, 15 December 1904.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

89

with “unjust’1 and “immoral” capitalist commerce. The stress on dis¬ tribution indicated the decisive shift from production to consumption and exchange as the focus for the cooperative movement. Movement theorists also continued to advocate other portions of Fourierist associationism when they stressed class conciliation and, hence, refuted class struggle. Cooperators argued that cooperatives were perfect examples of the benefits of different classes working to¬ gether for the achievement of common goals, since they grouped “all those who wish to diminish misery and augment the well-being of mankind, all men of good will, without political or religious distinction. The cooperative is a neutral territory.”23 A cover of UEmancipation illustrated notions of class conciliation by having the figure of a woman as “social justice” distributing wheat equally between two (male) work¬ ers—one urban, the other rural (see Figure 2). This graphic drew on a rich emblematic tradition in French society in which democracy was represented by food, or “what is necessary for the subsistence of the people.”24 Furthermore, it signified the Nimes School’s deft reinter¬ pretation of the associationist vision of harmonious class conciliation into a vision where social conciliation would come through people’s common roles as consumers. Cooperative activists argued that conflict was rooted primarily in the inequality of distribution and that resolving the inequality would therefore lessen social antagonisms. In an article in UEmancipation Charles Gide noted of the cover illustration: “We seek in men not differences in fortune, birth, or education ... but common and permanent characteristics that neither reform nor revolution can abol¬ ish. . . . We search in all social relations, cooperatives, mutuality, syndi¬ cate, for toi and moi to become nousC Cooperatives were to be the antidote to class struggle, for “among us class struggle is unknown, in our associations classes no longer exist.”25 23. F. V. [Falcoz-Vigne], “Les societes cooperatives de consommation: Leurs advan¬ tages et advantages particuliers presentes par La Menagere” (1891), BMG O.15978. It could be argued that Gide’s Protestantism influenced movement ideology. He was, however, open to Catholic involvement in cooperation, notably the movement for social Catholicism known as the Sillon. On this relationship see Marie-Rose Mayeux, “Catholicisme et cooperation: L’image de la cooperation, son ambiguite et sa polyvalence, dans la doctrine sociale de FEglise Catholique,” Archives Internationale de Sociolofjie de la Coopera¬ tion 33 (January-June 1973): 52-83. The 10 December 1909 issue of Le Sillon discusses its cooperative activities. 24. Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 12. 25. Gide, UEmancipation, 15 October 1903; “Les douze ennemies de la cooperation,”

17* Ann6e.

Tous pour Chacun, Chacun pour Tous.

Decembre 1903

D1RECTEUR : DE BOYVE, 2, Esplanade, Nimes BRIXCH'A I X ('01.1.A BORA TERRS : ' I/ Charles Gide, cli argil du emirs dVconomie soeinle n r University tie Baris, pres. du J Comity central dr billion des See. coup, de France. — Benoit-Germain, Prds. lion, dn Conseil des _/ Prud'liommes et de la Soc. coop. L'A hr me X'moise. — J. Cernesson, Biof.de mathdma t. el Pres. hon. de la Soc.eoop.de Sens. — L.Comte,Seer.de la l.iguede la Morality pub et Direct.du Rclcccmeiti Social. M.Crouzet,Prof. de rhetorique a Toulouse. A. Fabre, du Connie central de I’l.'mou des Soc. coop, do France. — J. Gaufres.anc. Consei 11. Manic, de Paris, mem 1>. du lions, su p. de I'Assist. pu bl. — Cl Gignoux, Ijirecl. de I’lnip.ouv.id Lahorieusc a Nimes. — Gu£bin, 1 use. pr i uc. de IV nseigii. da dess in de la Villa de Bans. — Humbert, Prof, an lyceo de Toulouse. —E Petit, lnsp. gen. de I’instruct. pub., V.-Pros. de la L.igue de ITlnseieu. — L. Planchon, prof, de IT'niversd.6 de Montpellier. — Rauh. Muitre de conf. a ITlcole Normale super. — Ch. Rist, Prof, a la Faculty de Droit de Montpellier. — Leon de Seilhac, Delegue au service indust, et ouvrier au Musce Social, Seer, de BAUiance Cooperative Internationale.

Alcide PICARD & KAAN, editeurs, 11, rue Soufflot, Paris. 2. Cover of the monthly organ of the Union Cooperative, December 1903. The image signifies the positive social and economic conciliations, and their interdependen¬ cies, offered by the movement—urban/rural, worker/peasant, factory/farm. Figure

Consumer Cooperation as the C(Third Way ”

9i

QUAmUGFEVniVJSE OUWERS FT PATRONS cmmmusTRiE, ncommerce sin vont. Worker: “Long live the strike.” Employer: “I have closed the factory” The lines beneath the figures say “When strikes divide workers and employers, capital, industry, and commerce flee.” The cartoon illustrates the negative attitude of the UC leadership toward worker militancy. Figure 3.

Cooperative ideology, with its stress on class conciliation, considered strikes to be dangerously devisive, if occasionally necessary. Here posi¬ tions varied among movement activists. De Boyve had a horror of strikes and class struggle and stated of Sorel’s general strike: “What insanity.... It would be the ruin of French industry to the profit of foreigners.”26 De Boyve’s position was evident in a cartoon printed on the front page of VEmancipation of 15 April 1906 (see Figure 3). Gide was more moderate. Almanack) de la Cooperation Franpaise (1900). Gide’s interpretation of consumption and “classlessness” as linked to a political sensibility of collective responsibility calls into question current analyses of the “classless” aspect of a consumer society. Gide linked the strength of consumption to control of production and to social concerns. Contemporary theorists such as Jean Baudrillard argue that consumer society is necessarily fragmenting and individualistic, that commodities are bundles of signifiers that are constandy re¬ arranged, and that an individual’s identity becomes bound up in goods. Rosalind Williams has noted that the growth of a consumer society entailed the presumption that all individuals could acquire “fashionable” commodities. This suggests an image of classlessness that, as Rachel Bowlby has noted, leaves the “individual as the only signifi¬ cant social category.” The result of these discussions is the suggestion that fragmentation and individualism is somehow inevitable in a consumer society. Gide’s position—and that of the cooperative movement in general—is a reminder that discussions and prac¬ tices that relate classlessness and consumption did not always imply fragmented individ¬ ualism. See Baudrillard, La societe\ Williams, Dream Worlds; and Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking, 68. 26. De Boyve, L’Emancipation, 15 August 1908.

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

92

He stated that strikes were often a necessary evil “to combat another evil, which is a wage-earning class,” but pointed to the basic ambiguity that higher wages might hurt consumers through higher prices.27 Move¬ ment spokespeople argued that cooperation, rather than labor activism, would rectify the abuses, since cooperation was “socialist in the true sense of the word,” heir to the Fourierist tradition.28 This notion of cooperation and the Cooperative Republic as the an¬ tithesis to the conflict inherent in capitalism further located cooperation as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. By the late nineteenth century, both capitalist and socialist ideologies were grounded in no¬ tions of conflict—the former in positions of laissez-faire that embraced popular Darwinism, and the latter in dialectical logic grounded in class conflict. Cooperative ideology staked out a position that differed from both socialism and capitalism because it denied the inevitability of conflict. Cooperative theorists did incorporate certain aspects of popu¬ lar Darwinism. Specifically, cooperative theorists argued that “in the social world, as in the world of nature, the imperfect organisms are incessantly eliminated by more perfect organisms.”29 As such, smallscale enterprises had become ineffective for successful competition; they were “an anachronism.” But these processes were rooted in an unnatural antagonism, and a major goal of cooperation was the amelioration of antagonism through the reconciliation of seemingly opposing forces. One tract advocated the abolition of conflict and stated that the “world we live in is a theater of incessant conflict which derives . . . from economic organization.” In capitalist society, patron and worker, debtor and creditor, merchant and client battled constandy. The inherendy superior Cooperative Republic, with its large-scale cooperative enter¬ prises, would reconcile these artificially antagonistic factions and end the conflict: “By producer associations the worker becomes his own patron, by credit associations the borrower his own lender, and by consumer associations the consumer his own furnisher.”30 Furthermore, move¬ ment theorists such as Gide stressed that the economic stages that would culminate in the Cooperative Republic would be “rigorously scientific,” as well as inevitable. These characterizations of cooperation’s inherent superiority and the inevitability of its progressive march toward eco/

27. 28. 29. 30.

Gide, L’Ecole, 108. Deuxieme congres (1886), 8. Deuxieme congres (1886), 10,13. Brizon and Poisson, La cooperation, 23.

Consumer Cooperation as the ((Third Way”

93

nomic hegemony situate cooperative ideology within a broader ten¬ dency of the period to claim “scientific” status and, hence, legitimacy for an ideological perspective. The third central tenet of the Nimes School was that of political neutrality, which further situated cooperation as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. An opening statement of the program of the UC declared: “Consumer cooperation does not intend to be the exclu¬ sive agent of a political party, a church, or a social class, but of all those who wish to work for the cooperative ideal.”31 The Union Cooperative as an organization never officially endorsed any alliance with a political, religious, or economic interest group; indeed, any overt alliance would have negated the core theoretical position of reconciliation of groups and individuals. Yet the actions of cooperators in the administration of the UC were actually quite partisan. For example, the UC’s central committee sharply rebuked local cooperatives for contributing to elec¬ toral campaigns, an action which continued the official muting of co¬ operation’s radical past.32 Indeed, when examined closely, the issue of political neutrality was most often invoked against labor militancy. One article admonished administrative councils of cooperatives to “resist the revolutionary tendencies” of their members as part of the councils’ official duties.33 During the heated discussions in 1895—1896 that took place around the founding of the Verrerie Ouvriere d’Albi (VO), a producer cooperative founded by striking Carmaux glassworkers, the Central Committee of the Union Cooperative cautiously condoned their efforts. Given the cooperative form the VO adopted, it would have been difficult for the committee to do otherwise. The committee’s official policy stated that the UC “always endorses relations between consumer and producer cooperatives” and urged consumer coopera¬ tives to use bottles from the new glassworks. Yet because of the associa¬ tion of the new glassworks with socialist labor militancy, the Central Committee voted not to subscribe shares and extended their disappro¬ bation to subscriptions by individual members of the Central Commit¬ tee.34 Despite the official insistence on political neutrality, the theoretical precepts and practices of the UC and certain local cooperatives folded 31. 32. 33. 34.

L’Union Cooperative, 15 December 1904. See, for example, Comite Central, Proces-verbaux, 9 February 1896, AFNCC. “L’administration cooperative,” Almanach de la Cooperation Franfaise (1906). Comite Central, Proces-verbaux, 5 January 1896, AFNCC.

94

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

neatly into the general outlines of the contemporary political movement known as solidarism. In this sense, the appeal of cooperation was part of the attempt to construct a broader and politically acceptable economic and political consensus—what one historian has described as the re¬ publicans’ “search for social peace.”35 Solidarism has been termed “the official social philosophy of the French Third Republic.”36 Solidarism emphasized human interdepen¬ dence rather than hostility. In the 1890s the Radicals and RadicalSocialists adopted solidarism as a political platform to fill a vacuum resulting from the decline of conservative clericalism and to stem the electoral challenge of socialism. The task at hand, after the firm estab¬ lishment of the Republic with the election of 1893, was to continue consolidation of the regime. This task became even more urgent follow¬ ing the social divisions accentuated by the first trial of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. Moderates sought political consolidation on social and economic terrains, fulfilling the traditional republican image of concern for de¬ mocracy and the well-being of the popular classes. The government of Leon Bourgeois (1895-1896), the first government of the Third Re¬ public to be composed exclusively from the left of the Chamber of Deputies, attempted to implement solidarist measures. Leon Bourgeois’s work, Solidarity served as the theoretical guide both for this particular government and for solidarism in general.37 Bourgeois argued that the keys for a solution to social problems were to be found in “science” and in nature: “Economic and social phenomena obey... inescapable laws.... Social laws are only the manifestation, to a higher degree, of physical, biological, and psychic laws.”38 To achieve social equilibrium, it was necessary to realign society with people’s innate tendencies. Like cooperative theorists, solidarists accepted popu¬ lar Darwinism only in part; struggle and competition certainly existed 35. Judith F. Stone, The Search for Social Peace: Reform Legislation in France, 1890-1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). 36. J. E. S. Hayward, “The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic: Leon Bourgeois and Solidarism,” International Review of Social History 6 (1961): 19-48. See also Theodore Zeldin’s chapter on solidarism in his France, 1848-194S, vol. 2, Politics and Anger, 276-318; Stone’s discussion on solidarism in Social Peace, 25-38; and Sanford Elwitt’s analysis in The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, 1880—1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 170—216. 37. Leon Bourgeois, Solidarity, 2d edition (Paris: Armand Colin, 1897). Bourgeois (1851-1925) was a prefect, minister, prime minister, senator, foreign minister, and minis¬ ter of labor. In 1920 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hayward, “Philosophy,” 21. 38. Bourgeois, Solidarity, 26—27.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

95

but were only manifestations of a society caught in an unnatural dis¬ equilibrium. The natural state of society was one of human interdepen¬ dence rather than hostility, of association rather than competition. Solidarists stressed reciprocity and mutual dependence and argued that society progressed not through struggle or survival of the fittest but through “the association of individual strengths, and their harmonious coordination.”39 Through reciprocal and coordinated efforts, the de¬ velopment of each individual would then foster the progress of the society as a whole. The political perspective claimed by the solidarists was “between classical political economy and socialist systems” and “superior” to both.40 Solidarists rejected the conflict-based assumptions of both clas¬ sical political economy and socialism, and posited instead that “science” demonstrated that the natural order was based on association rather than conflict. As such, “free and conscious” individuals should acknowl¬ edge their mutual responsibilities and their individual debts to society. Specifically, solidarists stressed that the middle class must share its social and material privileges and that the government should ensure equal access to education, sponsor programs of social insurance, and facilitate a more equitable distribution of wealth through progressive income and inheritance taxes. Reform of taxation was intended less to level income than to redistribute wealth and provide a common fund for social programs. In contrast to the ideologies and practices of laissezfaire, the goals of solidarism were to be achieved in part by government aid and in part through myriad associations and institutions that would overlap and form a web of voluntary solidarity. Efforts to encourage a supporting ideological and institutional network coalesced around the activities of the Musee Social, founded in 1894. The Musee sponsored studies and conferences, collected data on the “social question,” and encouraged social conciliation through profit sharing, mutual aid and friendly societies, public health, education, worker housing, and coop¬ erative societies.41 Many cooperatives, and certainly the national leadership of the Union Cooperative, shared and endorsed the general precepts of solidarism.42 39- Ibid., 59.

40. Ibid., 12. 41. Sanford Elwitt, “Social Reform and Social Order in Late Nineteenth-Century France: The Musee Social and Its Friends,” French Historical Studies 11 (Spring 1980): 433. 42. Elwitt has argued persuasively for close links between national leaders of the UC

96

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

Movement literature was filled with characterizations of cooperatives as “primary schools of solidarity,” in the sense that all classes of people, as practicing cooperators, “have another conception of their rights and responsibilities toward one another than those who live by the rules of commercial and industrial struggle.”43 Local cooperatives stressed the importance of internal solidarity among cooperative societies. At the Econome de Sens (Yonne), under the banner “All for one and one for all,” an editorial stated that the cooperative was “a school of solidarity where the working class learns to direct its own interests. . . . Coopera¬ tive solidarity does not reside only among members of a particular society; it extends to all societies, even beyond the borders of France.”44 Announcements of lectures in L Association Cooperative were grouped under the heading “Solidarist Propaganda.” The “Song of the Cooper¬ ators” contained numerous signifiers of conciliation, such as when it stated that cooperation was “the dreamed union of strengths and hearts ... the emancipation of each good citizen ... the creed of love of the true trade unionist... work liberated from the capitalist yoke, happy labor accomplished without pain.” The lyrics further stressed that “all men are brothers” and that cooperation would be “the downfall of selfishness.” The song ended by urging people to “love the motto of Solidarity, which places all humanity in a single heart.”45 The 1898 Almanach showed the movement’s advocacy of collaboration between capital and labor: “solidarity” existed among “all those men who wish a and prominent solidarist social reformers in his Third Republic Defended, especially on pages 185-203. However, I disagree with his statement on page 201 that “consumers’ cooperatives and those organized by farmers generally exhibited no political coloration. The nearly 1500 consumers’ cooperatives operating at the turn of the century were practical organizations. It is doubtful that members had any sense of participating in an ambitious enterprise for social reconstruction.” Cooperative literature on both the na¬ tional and local levels demonstrates political engagement and a sense of participation in a wider movement. Indeed, the constant exhortations of the leadership of the UC for local cooperatives to remain politically neutral suggests that they were often partisan. Cer¬ tainly the socialist cooperatives were overtly and self-consciously political. Also, local cooperative presses, such as the Bulletin Mensuel at the Alliance des Travailleurs in Levallois-Perret, constantly reprint articles from the national press of the UC, report elections of delegates to the fetes in other cooperatives, urge the purchase of lottery tickets from other cooperatives, and send delegates to various regional, national, and even international cooperative activities. See, for example, Bulletin Mensuel. . . LevalloisPerret, January 1899. 43- L’Emancipation, 15 July 1903. 44- Le Cooperateur Senonaise, January 1896. 45- The lyrics by Edouard Vibert and score by Leon Villars are printed in the Almanack de la Cooperation Franfaise (1909), 66—69.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

97

better society”; it was not applied exclusively to any social group. Cooperation was no longer seen, as it had been by the radical workers of the 1860s, as a working-class effort to achieve autonomous economic control, but as a means for working with the bourgeoisie “to facilitate social progress” through consumer cooperatives. Annual congresses of the Union Cooperative were held at the Musee Social, and leaders such as Charles Gide and Charles Robert served on major committees of the Musee Social.46 The links between the Union Cooperative, solidarism, and the Republic were explicitly stated in the opening address of the 1890 congress of the Union Cooperative: “The Republic will be cooper¬ ative or it will not be, because cooperation is solidarity, the form par excellence of the republican idea.”47 In short, theorists and practitioners of cooperation and solidarism shared several basic assumptions: both movements viewed themselves as alternatives to liberal economy and to socialism; both invoked the authority of “science” to justify their social visions of conciliation rather than conflict; and both argued that the most effective solution to social and economic problems was through a network of associations that maximized individual growth while ac¬ knowledging collective responsibilities.

Commercial Practices

Just as cooperators in the UC constructed an ideological “third way” between capitalism and socialism, cooperative stores attempted to prac¬ tice an alternative commerce, neither “capitalist” nor “socialist” but with aspects of both for a specific “cooperative” commerce. In this sense, the UC was the sole carrier of a democratic and social perspective in retailing and distribution during the second phase of commercial concentration. Democratic and social cooperative commerce was to be evident in each individual cooperative as well as in the actions and ideology of the central committee. As such, movement literature characterized local cooperatives as “small Republics,” active counterexamples to capitalist commerce. Cooperatives were to be social rather than individualist institutions, with commercial aspects that were focused on human concerns as opposed to the deceptive materialism of capitalist retailing. 46. Almanach de la Cooperation Franfaise (1898), 13, 78. 47- Police report, 25 October 1890, AN F7 13936, doss. 1, “Congres cooperatifs.”

98

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

One local editorial in Levallois-Perret (Seine) noted wryly that commer¬ cialization had extended to the point that future generations would passively worship “Caesar, Jesus, Auguste Comte, and Felix Potin.” Cooperators wished to institute instead a regime where a worker “takes consciousness of his social role, knows he is a necessary agent, and feels his responsibility. . . . Cooperation is economic democracy.”48 The cooperative movement as fostered by the UC differed from other forms of commerce (especially capitalist chains) in five major areas: insistence on “honest” and “moral” commerce, rejection of luxury, renunciation of profit, limitations on capital accumulation, and democratic administra¬ tion. Many cooperatives also fostered a vibrant commercial culture that was attuned to working-class cultural and leisure patterns. In contrast to what they deemed fraudulent and deceptive capitalist commerce, UC cooperatives stressed honest and moral commerce. The demand by consumers for unadulterated food at honest weights and measures reflected very real problems of commercial fraud. It was widely acknowledged that foodstuffs such as flour and wine were adulterated, and consumers would find that their ground coffee contained roots and fruit pits. Bakers were especially notorious both for adulteration and for short weights, although grocers in general were frequently dishonest when weighing goods.49 In a popular tract of movement propaganda, “Five Reasons for Joining a Cooperative,” a fictive worker explained why he favored cooperation as a “new form of commerce”: “I want no more adulteration or deception, or that which is part of the pursuit of profits. When I am my own merchant I will not seek to deceive myself. I want just prices and measures in the store so that justice and truth will be first realized in small things prior to being realized in larger things.”50 Cooperators characterized fraud as a deceitful pursuit of profits: “The genre of commerce that we repudiate is that which has no other goal than the realization of large profits; it manipulates and falsifies products necessary for life, caring little for the health of the consumer.” Coopera48. Bulletin Mensuel. . . Levallois-Perret, January 1902. 49. D’Avenel, “Mechanisme . . . les magasins,” 808-809, 814. 50. “Five Reasons for Joining a Cooperative,” printed in Brizon and Poisson, La cooperation, 20—22. This tract was originally from the British cooperative movement. Similar sentiments were printed in “Les douze ennemies de la cooperation,” Almanach de la Cooperation Franfaise (1900). One of the twelve enemies was fraud: “Nothing should pass through the stomach of poor workers that would trouble the digestion of a wealthy person” (12).

Consumer Cooperation as the (CThird Way”

99

tives, in contrast, had “healthful and natural products.”51 In general, all cooperatives sought direct relations between producers and consumers, not only to cut costs but also to avoid adulteration. For example, a large cooperative in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris rented its own coal yard and made purchases from the mines, since capitalist whole¬ salers “mix articles in the coal.” Likewise, the Economic Sociale in Clichy installed its own butcher shop, since “no item lends itself so easily to fraud and adulteration. In preparing meats ourselves we can be certain of consuming healthy products, exempt from the mixtures of doubtful origins and suspicious composition.”52 Cooperatives also placed their operations in critical counterpoint to another form of deceit—that of false luxury and seduction. While department stores and chain stores were experimenting with advertis¬ ing strategies, concentrating on making stores appear as luxurious as possible, and tempting customers with stamps to reward purchases, cooperatives were consciously rejecting all of these techniques. Cooper¬ atives overtly eschewed advertising and castigated commercial practices that sought “only to please, to flatter by luxury in all its forms.”53 Whereas department and chain stores located stores on busy streets and had brighdy lit and decorative store windows, cooperatives rejected both practices. One contemporary description of Parisian cooperatives noted: “Cooperatives whiten their store windows, [and] certainly no laws oblige them to do this; the custom has spread rapidly and few cooperatives escape this bias.” Another contemporary, Joseph Cernesson, noted that cooperatives were generally located on back streets. With an “affectation of austere purity,” they often had unpolished glass to inhibit the curiosity of passers-by. Yet inside a store there was a bustling vibrancy, as if the cooperative had barricaded itself from the larger world and allowed only members of its community to participate. Fie described the interior of a Parisian cooperative in the eighteenth arrondissement as bright and pleasant and decorated with placards about meetings. Prints hung on the walls, among them the “communist cellar” ofMaraussan and characters from Zola’s novels. Also prominent were a bust of the Republic, Marianne, and a medallion of the poet and 51. Congres international (1889), 6—8. 52. Societe civile cooperative de consommation du dix-huitieme arrondissement, Paris (Paris: Le Papier, 1903), 17; L’Economie Sociale de Clichy, Assemblee generale de 1897. MS. 53. Union Cooperative, Dixieme congres (1900), 17.

IOO

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

Communard Jean-Baptiste Clement. Cernesson concluded that cooper¬ atives offered a “strange detachment” from prevailing retailing prac¬ tices.54 The commercial assumptions of cooperation also diverged from those of capitalist department and chain stores on the issue of profit. Profit was returned to consumers in proportion to consumption rather than in proportion to share capital. Gide stated that this practice was nothing less than the destruction of capital, or at least its reduction to a mere factor of production; it amounts, in fact, to a decision that all the profit which capital has regarded as its legitimate share should be restored to those from whom it was taken, and that share capital should be reduced to the position of debenture stock, with a rate of interest fixed at the minimum at which its services can be hired. .. . The transfer of profits from the capitalist to the consumer is actually the abolition of profits, because to say that profits shall be returned from whom they were taken is obviously abolishing them.55 Cooperatives used the term trop-pergu (overcharge) for the dividend and repartition (distribution) rather than sale. Cooperatives sought, instead of profit, the fulfillment of the needs of both the individual member and the association as a whole. Profits remaining after payment of the overcharge were used for various “social works.” These generally in¬ cluded payments to members on events such as births or deaths, for social activities, or, most often, for education. The latter was broadly interpreted, from lecture series to libraries for cooperatives. The issue of capital remained ambiguous in the UC, although cooper¬ atives in general approached capital in a manner different from that of other retailers. As stipulated in the 1867 law, cooperators could purchase shares in small installments, a practice whereby people who did not possess large amounts of start-up capital could found small coopera¬ tives. All cooperatives acquired capital by subscription of shares, and total available shares in the cooperative, unlike capitalist organizations, was unlimited. Many cooperatives, however, limited the number of shares per person to one; others allowed as many as five, in clear contrast to the capitalist preference for ownership of the largest amount of shares 54. Helies, La Bellevilloise, 10; Joseph Cernesson, “Les societies cooperatives de consommation,” Revue des Deux Mondes 5 (15 October 1908): 899-907. 55. Charles Gide, Consumers’ Cooperative Societies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 778.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

! 01

financially possible. To maintain broad-based and democratic owner¬ ship, the majority of cooperatives advocated the ownership of one share per member. Still, despite the administrative preference for the “wise policy of one share per member, shares at the Alenajyere in Grenoble were apportioned as follows.56 Members

54 20

128 2,348 2,550

Shares per Member

Total Shares

4 3

216 60 256 2,348 2,880

2 1

Cooperatives in the UC adhered to the democratic practice that each member had one vote in the general assemblies regardless of the number of shares.57 Cooperatives also resisted the increasing tendency of capitalist chain stores to hire professional managers. Instead, committees of members, elected democratically, managed cooperatives. Most cooperatives had a general administrative council and a supervisory commission for over¬ seeing commercial activities, and thus the ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the store rested with the members. There was also a certain amount of rationalization. At the Menage re the coopera¬ tive grew to the point that the administrative council divided into six groups, each corresponding to a sales division: groceries, wine, house¬ hold items, butcher shop, bakery, and fabrics and clothing.58 Finally, cooperatives were often the locus for a culture that extended beyond commercial activities per se. They functioned as neighborhood centers for mutual aid activities and leisure. One of the first additions to a growing cooperative was often a restaurant-bar (buvette) or a cafe, and as cooperatives expanded and built their own buildings, they invariably

56. Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere (Grenoble), 1 July 1900. 57. Most cooperatives in the Union Cooperative paid 5 percent interest on share capital, arguing that it was the fruit of work and savings and should be remunerated. Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere, 1 July 1900,115. The model statutes distributed by the UC stipulated (article 4) that shares received an interest of 5 percent following full payment of shares. This article also urged no more than two shares per member. Frederic Clavel, Modele de statuts pour la formation d’un societe cooperative civile (Paris: Siege du Comitd Central, 1895), 5-6. 58. Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere, July and September 1895.

102

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

included an auditorium (salle des fetes). Small cooperatives, such as the Utilite Sociale, which in 1908 had around 900 members in the Parisian thirteenth arrondissement, contained a buvette which was “almost as vast” as the store. Cernesson noted in 1908 that when he entered at four in die afternoon, there were workers, hats on their heads, seated around massive tables drinking and talking boisterously. Cernesson also de¬ scribed the interior of the Avenir de Plaisance, a larger cooperative with 5,500 members located in the fourteendi arrondissement. In a large room, women with baskets over their arms and children in tow shopped in various sales areas separated by low partitions. Glass-windowed kiosks containing shoes made by shoemaker cooperatives divided the hall. A gallery surrounded the second level with doors that opened into rooms for the administrative council, the various control commissions, the library, accounting offices, and the buvette. From this gallery a passageway led to the salle des fetes, “almost as large as the sales area, and one is surprised to discover that is a veritable theatre, with a coquettish stage and an attractively painted ceiling.”59 There were frequent lec¬ tures, fetes, concerts, and theatrical performances at cooperatives, and family fetes were especially popular. At the Alliance des Travailleurs in Levallois-Perret (Seine), for example, there was a “Fete Famille et Enfantine” in December 1900 that lasted two days and was attended by over 1,500 people (the cooperative had close to 3,000 members at this time). The fete started on a Saturday evening with a performance by the chorus of the cooperative; then at midnight a “grand bal de nuit” began that lasted until 6:30 am., “when the musicians refused to play any longer.” The next day was the children’s fete, with plays, musical perfor¬ mances by member’s children, food, and storytelling.60 Unlike chain stores, cooperatives were more than places to shop. They were impor¬ tant centers for entertainment, education, and sociability for workingclass families.

Organization and Membership

The institutionalization of the cooperative movement within the UC both retained and transformed aspects of the movement’s democratic 59. Cernesson, “Les societies cooperatives,” 900-903. 60. Bulletin Mensuel . . . Levallois-Perret, December 1900. Fetes at Levallois-Perret were generally held several times a year, and concerts and plays were quite frequent. However, the level of leisure and sociability activities increased in socialist cooperatives.

Consumer Cooperation as the (CThird Way”

103

and social heritage. The UC represented, in the contest between forms of retailing, the continuation of the “third way” as an anticapitalist critique. The UC also advocated and helped standardize retailing prac¬ tices that socialized ownership, profits, and management. This program was attractive to large numbers of people in the late nineteendi and early twentieth centuries. What kinds of people belonged to cooperatives within the UC? What did they find appealing about the UC’s ideology and practices? The cooperative movement in general continued to attract its tradi¬ tional working-class and artisanal constituency, as well as an expanding group of employees. Many of the cooperatives of a working-class com¬ position, especially those of a socialist political persuasion, did not join the UC. The strongholds of the UC were generally small and medium¬ sized cities such as Grenoble. Membership in the UC maintained a steady, though slow, growth. The Union Cooperative had 53 member societies in 1886, 59 in 1890, 158 in 1894, 307 in 1900, and 328 in 1905.61 Two of the largest cooperatives in the UC were the Union de Limoges and the Menagere in Grenoble. Limoges was a rapidly growing indus¬ trial city and the center of a prosperous porcelain industry in the nine¬ teenth century.62 A stronghold of mutualism, Limoges had also con¬ tained several producer cooperatives in 1848. In the early 1880s, the local press printed discussions of consumer cooperation, and the porcelain owners founded company cooperatives. In 1881, workers of the Delotte porcelain factory transformed their company cooperative into a workercontrolled cooperative, the Economic Menagere, and fused with the existing Epargne Cooperative to form the Union, with forty-five mem¬ bers. By 1900 the cooperative had 8,758 member families and was an important UC cooperative.63 The cooperatives in Grenoble were more typical of cooperatives within the UC because of their cross-class membership profile. In part this mixed membership reflects Grenoble’s character as an administra¬ tive and artisanal center rather than an industrializing one. Grenoble was a growing city of 77,438 in 1911, the chef-lieu of the department of

61. Union Cooperative, Douzieme congres (1908), 1; and Union cooperative des societes franpaises de consommation (Paris: Le Papier, 1906), 5, AN AP 94 341: Papers of AJbert Thomas. 62. See John Merriman, The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century (New York. Oxford University Press, 1985), for a detailed analysis of Limoges. 63. J.-M.-A. Paroutaud, Une cooperative de consommation: L’Union de Limoges (Li¬ moges: Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1944), 40-58.

104

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

Isere, a garrison city, and the site of a growing university. Grenoble had been a major glovemaking city since the fourteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, gloves crafted in Grenoble were sold all over the world. Despite this expansion, glovemaking remained a craft industry, with only one of many cutting processes done by machine. Skilled glovemakers often owned their tools and controlled die pace and loca¬ tion of their work. Glovemakers, though paid by the piece, were none¬ theless highly paid. One observer noted that in Grenoble before World War I “the best dressed people in town were the glovemakers and the university students.”64 In the late 1880s and early 1900s four cooperatives were founded in Grenoble. The two worker cooperatives, the Solidarite and the Economie, never achieved much success. The Solidarite, founded in 1881, was an outgrowth of the trade union movement in Grenoble. The statutes of the cooperative stipulated that only members of the local general trades union council would be admitted to membership and that the trade unions would submit all lists for candidates for the cooperative’s admin¬ istrative positions. Officers at the Solidarite were all workers, primarily mechanics and leather dressers (megissiers). The cooperative was in serious financial trouble by 1884 and dissolved in the 1890s.65 Four workers founded another cooperative, the Economic, in 1890. With only a table, a pair of scales, and some boxes, they established a store, and three months later the cooperative had 30 members. By statutory stipu¬ lation, only “manual laborers” could join. By 1893 the cooperative had 208 members and sales of three thousand francs a year. Cooperators at the Economic focused their efforts toward the goal of creating a pro¬ ducer cooperative, to realize “true cooperative principles.” The Econo¬ mic was not successful, and it dissolved by 1895.66 In contrast, the two other cooperatives with mixed class, predomi¬ nantly petit bourgeois compositions founded in this period grew and prospered. Eighteen workers founded the Menagere in 1888. In 1893, the cooperative had almost 2,000 member families, and in 1908 there were 64. Barral, LI sere, 49; Leon Cote, LHndustne gantiere et Vouvrier gantier d Grenoble (Paris: Societe Nouvelle, 1903); Ernest de Toytot, “Gantier de Grenoble,” Les ouvriers des deux mondes (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1887); and “La main du gantier,” MUS: Journal dActivites du Musee Dauphinois, 1984. 65. La Solidarite, Statuts (1881) and “Conseil d’administration et commission de sur¬ veillance nomme dans la reunion du 8 janvier 1881,” BMG O.5982 and U.9388. 66. Societe cooperative de consommation, PEconomie, AD Isere, 160 M 2; Union Coopera¬ tive, Septieme congres (1893), 154.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

105

3,460 member families. One factor in the Menagere’s success was its policy of cross-class membership. The administrators of the cooperative were drawn from skilled artisans and the petit bourgeois and bourgeois sectors of Grenoble’s population. Over a third of the candidates for administrative positions at the Menagere were employed in the glove¬ making trade in the 1890s and early 1900s. Analysis of the electoral lists of the cooperatives reveals that 61 percent of the candidates were petit bourgeois (employees, civil servants, teachers), 28 percent were skilled artisans (mostly glovemakers), and 11 percent were bourgeois.67 The cooperative’s press and pamphlet literature frequently stressed that, although the cooperative had been founded by “intelligent workers,” “hand in hand, workers, civil servants, and those with private incomes (rentiers) worked for the success of the cooperative.6^ The Adenagere’s members were also drawn from the military population of Grenoble, for whom the clothing department of the cooperative (which employed tailors and seamstresses) offered military uniforms at a discount.69 The Menagere was structurally a Rochdalian cooperative, although its ac¬ tions and underlying assumptions muted democratic and social aspects. Profits at the Menagere were apportioned as follows: 20 percent to a reserve and materials fund, 65 percent to members in proportion to purchases, and 15 percent to employees and administrators.70 The high percentage of profits allocated to members was related to the Menagere’s stress on individual rather than social aspects of cooperation. Unlike many cooperatives of the period, the Menagere did not allocate a por¬ tion of its profits for social concerns. Rather, the cooperative stressed 67. There were sixty-four candidates for these elections. These data were compiled from the election lists of the Menagere, printed in the Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere, 21 July 1895 and 1 June 1907, and from F.V., “Les societes cooperatives de consommation.” 68. Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere, 1 December 1894 and 1 April 1895; Almanach de la Cooperation Franyaise (1908), 100. By 1902, the history of the Menagere’s founding had been reinterpreted by its press, with “a small number of citizens” substituted for “eigh¬ teen intelligent workers.” Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere, 1 October 1902. 69. Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere, 1 January 1896. In a polemical protest against the cooperative, local merchants leveled an accusation that a mess officer from the garrison who was a member of the cooperative was provisioning the officer’s mess through the cooperative. This action would have been in complete contravention to the Menagere’s statutes and to cooperation in general. See “Declaration contre la cooperative laMenagere,” 13 December 1899, AD Isere, 160 M 2. 70. La Menagere, Statuts et reglement general, March 1893, BMG O.15981. These statutes were revised slighdy in 1898, 1909, and 1923. The 15 percent of the profits apportioned to employees and administrators was in line with the UC’s advocacy of profit sharing. Socialists at this time, of course, were strongly opposed to profit sharing.

106

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

“ameliorating material conditions” for individual members and their families. The cooperative did sponsor a few group endeavors, such as dances, fetes, and mutual aid activities. Still, a credit fund, a vacation retreat, and a “Cooperative Chalet” in the Alps were activities that reinforced the cooperative’s individualist focus.71 Also, cooperators at the Menagere echoed the UC’s position of “strict political neutrality.” The few extracooperative pronouncements and articles in the press of the Menagere clearly reinforced moderate or conservative values and political perspectives. One article on depopulation, for example, argued that France’s continued national prosperity depended on a large popula¬ tion and urged cooperators “to extoll constandy the nation and love of the family.... To remain unmarried or to have only one child is to betray one’s country.”72 The conservative politics of the Menagere were eclipsed, however, by those of the fourth cooperative founded in Grenoble during this period. Railroad employees formed the Societe Cooperative de Consommation des Employees des Chemins de Fer P.-L.-M. in 1888. The cooperative had 582 members in the late 1880s, 706 in 1893, and 900 in 1904. Railroad employees and their widows were members of the cooperative. The PLM cooperative was part of a larger federation of cooperatives for employees of the PLM railroad (one of several lines in the French railroad system until their merger into the SNCF in the 1930s). The PLM federation was formed in 1889, member cooperatives joined the UC in the 1890s, and by 1895 the presence of railroad cooperatives within the UC was strong enough to elect Casimir Chiousse, president of the Grenoble railroad cooperative, to the UC’s central committee. In essence, these railroad cooperatives functioned as purchasing agencies to centralize and group orders. Also, the railroads allowed these cooper¬ atives reduced rates for transporting goods on the railroads. In Gren¬ oble, the PLM cooperative was on good terms with the Menagere. The employees of railroad companies utilized cooperation within a closed corporate strategy that promoted solely material interests. The conceptualization of the PLM cooperative’s participation in “social” concerns extended only as far as retirement funds and mutual aid among members. The political concerns of the PLM cooperative and its mem¬ bers echoed the political “neutrality” of both the UC and the Menagere.

71. Bulletin Officiel de la Menagere, 1 September 1895 and 1 October 1906. 72. Ibid., October 1898.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

107

Police reports on Casimir Chiousse noted that he was “not active in politics, although his opinions are favorable to our institutions,” and characterized the secretary of the PLM cooperative as “likewise not politically active, although he is a republican.” Despite these descrip¬ tions of political neutrality, the actions of the cooperative and its leaders aligned them politically with the republican government and with “au¬ thority” in general. During the massive railroad strike of 1910, only around twenty-five members of PLM federation cooperatives were fired because of participation in the strike. Chiousse, in a speech at the PLM federation congress in 1911, stated that members of the railroad coopera¬ tives always had “respect for the authority of their superiors, a love of work and of religion.” During the strike “members of our cooperatives, except in isolated areas or where they misunderstood the issues, had entire confidence in the Company and continue to be characterized by their devotion and loyalty.”73 Although the railroad cooperatives were always the most conserva¬ tive group within the UC, the two successful cooperatives in Grenoble embodied, on a local level, the ideology and practices advocated by the UC. As a group with increased discretionary income, petit bourgeois cooperators found cooperative practices of redistribution of profits according to individual consumption rather than possession of capi¬ tal especially appealing. Grenoble cooperators also embraced notions of cross-class collaboration for a harmonious, conflict-free solution to economic and social issues and advocated political “neutrality.” Affinity with the tenets of the UC was not the only reason people may have found cooperation appealing. It is very difficult, because extant documents contain few testimonials, to be absolutely precise about why people chose to become cooperators. The quality of the goods, the convenience and location of stores, and the quarterly or biannual divi¬ dends may have been attractions. Price was not likely to be a consider¬ ation since cooperatives generally sold goods at prices current in the neighborhood (a fundamental Rochdalian tenet). Cooperatives did not extend credit, so those people who relied on credit for consumer pur¬ chases (a practice accepted by small shopkeepers but discouraged by 73- Union Cooperative, Septieme congres (1893), 151-152; Federation des Societes Coopera¬ tives, P.-L.-M., Est, etDiverses, Onzieme congres (1899), 29,108; AD Isere, 160 M 2, police report of April 1904; and Gaumont, Histoire generate, 2:485—486. See “La Federation des Societes Cooperatives de Consommation des Employees P.-L.-M.” Ouvriers de Deux Mondes, 1 September 1898.

io8

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

chain stores) probably did not shop at consumer cooperatives. People may have initially joined cooperatives because of a friend or spouse—as did movement historian Jean Gaumont, who first joined a cooperative at his wife’s urging—or because of colleagues at work or in a trade organization or political party. (The latter was more common in social¬ ist cooperatives.) Certainly, letters to cooperative newspapers reflect a commitment to cooperative principles either independently or in com¬ bination with other political beliefs. Finally, cooperatives appealed to people through their libraries, fetes, musical and discussion groups, buvettes and cafes, monetary gifts at births, wedding, and deaths and during periods of unemployment or illness, and other aspects that fostered shared values, leisure, sociability, and mutual aid.

Limits to Growth

It was precisely this combination of a central organization, a moderate political position, and commercial practices favoring petit bourgeois and working-class shareholders that contributed the significant expan¬ sion of consumer cooperation from the 1880s. Yet there were three limits to the continued edge of cooperation’s growth over that of capitalist chain stores. These limits were the division of the cooperative move¬ ment into rival “neutral” and socialist factions; weak commercial struc¬ tures and skills within the UC; and mobilization by other retailers against consumer cooperatives. The UC had from its inception been an “umbrella” organization, one in which radicals and reformers collaborated in an uneasy tension. The national leadership of the UC, the Central Committee, was predomi¬ nantly bourgeois and reformist. One police report described delegates to the 1890 congress as “elderly gentlemen with a cultured appearance— professors, employees, industrialists, or property owners.”74 With the acceleration of working-class radicalism in the 1890s and early 1900s, socialist cooperators challenged the reformist vision of cooperation and created their own national organization in 1895. As socialists, they rejected the notion of cooperation as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Instead, socialist cooperators sought the replacement of the capitalist economy with a socialist one by means of a direct, revolu74. Police report, 25 October 1890. AN F7 13936, doss. 1.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way ”

109

tionary class confrontation. Socialist cooperators rejected the cross-class solidarity and collaboration of the UC and substituted working-class solidarity and worker-derived action. The conflicts between local social¬ ist cooperatives (in Paris) and the reformist central committee crystal¬ lized from 1893 to 1895 around several issues, notably the founding of the cooperative glassworks at Albi. On 1 December 1895 socialist coopera¬ tives, primarily in Paris and surrounding areas, withdrew from the UC and adopted statutes for a new organization, the Bourse des Coopera¬ tives Socialistes de France. From 1895 until the union of the two wings of the cooperative movement in 1912, the growth of the French coopera¬ tive movement was beset with this internal divisiveness. A second factor militating against sustained growth of cooperation was the movement’s commercial weakness. Not only did the lack of a nationally orchestrated commercial structure inhibit the Union Cooper¬ ative’s attractiveness to local cooperatives; it also limited the commercial strength of the cooperative movement in comparison with that of chain stores. A major strength of capitalist chain stores was the increased efficiency of either bulking purchases at wholesale prices or combining production with an effective warehousing apparatus. There were, in general, three levels of concentration for purchasing at this time: an agency that communicated prices from wholesalers and then transmit¬ ted orders to them; a syndicate that bulked orders from wholesalers; and a wholesale society (magasin de gros) that bought and manufactured necessary goods, often warehoused them, and sold at wholesale to societies.75 The chambre economique established at the 1885 congress of the Union Cooperative was essentially an agency. The second congress voted for the establishment of a true wholesale society with regional purchasing organizations. In February 1887 statutes were drawn up for the Magasin Cooperative de Gros as a societe cooperative a personnel et capi¬ tal variable, with cooperative societies as shareholders. By 1892 the oper¬ ation was located at its general warehouse in Charenton with 151 member societies and an annual turnover of around 2/2 million francs. The organization continued to be plagued by the boycott of the larger co¬ operatives, such as the Bellevilloise and the Avenir de Plaisance (Paris), that bought their goods direcdy from producers.76 It was also vic¬ timized by a lack of skilled administrators adept in commercial trans75- Gide, Cooperative Societies, 161—166. 76. Jean Gaumont, Histoire du magasin de gros des cooperatives de France, 1906-1931 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1932), 21—45.

iio

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

actions. In 1893 the director was fired for incompetence, and by 18941895 sales had fallen drastically. Correspondant banks refused credit, and the organization was liquidated.77 Recognizing that an effective whole¬ sale society was a crucial “nerve of war” in the struggle of cooperative versus capitalist commerce, an Office d’Achats, or purchasing agency, was revived in 1900 with Achille Daude-Bancel as its permanent secre¬ tary.78 This office coordinated and grouped purchases of regional co¬ operatives and distributed the products “at wholesale prices and without any commercial spirit.” Still, although the number of member societies grew slowly, from 28 in 1900 to 256 in 1905, sales volume did not attain a million francs per year. Its one commercially innovative act, in line with similar actions by chain stores, was to place on orders a new cooperative trademark.79 This trademark consisted of the portraits of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier and symbolized cooperators1 identification with a democratic and social tradition. Persistent questions about administrative competence and honesty within individual cooperatives also contributed to the commercial weakness of the movement. Unlike chain stores, which were each man¬ aged by an individual “responsible manager” (or a married couple), cooperatives had a three-tiered administrative structure: administrative council, surveillance (or control) committee, and general assembly.80 The administrative council held the major responsibilities for managing the commercial aspects of a cooperative. It was in charge of buying and selling goods, hiring and firing employees, renting or buying buildings and materials for the cooperative, and directing inventories and ac¬ counting procedures. The administrative council was elected by the Comite CentralProces-verbaux, 1 September 1895. AFNCC. 78. Ibid., 4 May 1902; Gaumont, Magasin degros, 73. 79. Office cooperative de renseipjnements commerciaux et d’achats en commun. AFNCC. 80. The discussion of the administrative structure of cooperatives is derived from extant statutes of cooperatives found in the archives of the FNCC. When a cooperative joined the Union Cooperative, it would send a copy of its statutes for approval, and the administrators of the UC would review them for commercial legality and attention to the principles of cooperation as interpreted by the UC. They were not then completely standardized, but it was necessary to conform to certain principles before gaining admittance to the UC. For the purposes of this discussion, I have drawn on the following representative statutes: Aiodele de statuts pour la formation d’une societe civile cooperative de consommation (1895) (these statutes were published and disseminated by the UC Central Committee); ^Association d’Alimentation La Fraternelle de Saint-Claude, Statuts (1896); Aux Quatre Fils Aymon, Societe Cooperative de Chateau-Regnault-Bogny, Statuts (1908); Prosperite a Joigny (Ardennes), Statuts (1910); Societe Cooperative de Consommation L’Avenir-Morteau (Doubs), Statuts (1917)77.

Consumer Cooperation as the ccThird Way”

iii

general assembly of the cooperative, and, because of the level of respon¬ sibility involved, councillorship was often a paid position. Administra¬ tive councils generally chose from within their numbers a president, secretary, and treasurer. The size of the administrative council varied with the size of the cooperative, although the model statutes of the Union Cooperative recommended eleven members. Members were usually eligible for reelection, although this was not uniformly the case. The surveillance committee, also elected by the general assembly, was a smaller group and might contain an accountant from outside the co¬ operative. This committee was essentially an oversight group, charged with making sure that the accounts of the society were in good order and that the actions of the administrative council ran smoothly. The committee was also responsible for reporting to the general assembly on the activities of the administrative committee and conveying, after ensuring its regularity, the yearly or biannual budget of the cooperative. The general assembly of the cooperative voted all administrative re¬ ports, chose committee members, voted on memberships, debated and approved revisions of the statutes, and discussed general affairs of the society. Therefore, the administrative and financial affairs of coopera¬ tives were somewhat diffused but focused primarily on the administra¬ tive council and the surveillance committee. These administrative organs of local cooperatives were responsible for relatively large amounts of money, especially as cooperatives grew and prospered. Indeed, beginning in the late nineteenth century, co¬ operatives were the wealthiest working-class institutions in France. For example, in 1908 the Laborieuse in Troyes (Aube) had an annual budget of 1,720,000 francs, the Menagere in Grenoble (Isere) 1,500,000 francs, the Fraternelle in Cherbourg (Manche) 1,700,000 francs, the Bellevilloise 3,800,000 francs, and the Union in Limoges (Vienne), one of the most prosperous cooperatives in the UC, 4,200,000 francs. Of course, there were numerous small cooperatives in France, such as the Econome in Sens (Sonne), with its annual budget of 500,000 francs for its 980 families.81 Members of governing councils of cooperatives were drawn from the membership and were not likely to have had much experience handling the large amounts of money many cooperatives generated. By the mid“Liste des cooperatives franpises de consommation classees par departement,” Almanack de la Cooperation Franfaise (1908), 75—150. 81.

112

Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

1890s, there was a series of spectacular cases of embezzlement and commercial incompetence in local cooperatives that can be associated with a crisis of rapid growth in the movement as sales volumes and membership increased rapidly. Some cases of financial irregularity, such as the one at die Alliance des Travailleurs in Levallois-Perret, involved loans for purchasing new and elaborate buildings. In the case of the cooperative in Levallois, voting on the loan revealed that previous budgets were inaccurate, and members of the cooperative accused the administrative council of theft. After a tremendous uproar in several general assemblies, the cooperative hired an outside accountant who confirmed the errors, and the entire administrative council and surveil¬ lance council resigned.82 At the Picpus, a small cooperative in the twelfth arrondissement in Paris, the administrative council refused to re¬ sign when confronted with an accusation of embezzlement of 12,590.57 francs by a newly elected surveillance committee. Instead, the council declared that the people on the surveillance committee were no longer members of the cooperative. At this point the general assembly stated that there had been “diminutions of the price of absinthe sold to certain clients, members of the council,” and that both the provident and reserve funds of the cooperative had completely disappeared. The gen¬ eral assembly then demanded the immediate replacement of the admin¬ istrative council in order to “defend true cooperative principles, which are the base of the social system of the future, against individual inter¬ ests.”83 The financial problems of the Moissonneuse—and the cooperative’s eventual demise—were perhaps the most shocking to cooperators and led directly to internal reforms in the movement as a whole. Founded in 1874, by the mid-1800s the Moissonneuse was the largest and strongest cooperative in France. In 1888 the cooperative had around eleven thou¬ sand members and nine stores, sold groceries, dry goods, small house¬ hold items, clothing, shoes, coal, and bread, and dominated local com¬ merce in the eleventh arrondissement. By 1900 it had its own bimonthly press and musical group. Already, however, the financial accounts of the society were so “muddled and incomprehensible” that the cooperative had to hire an outside accountant to straighten them out. While hostile Bulletin Mensuel. . . Levallois-Perret, March and May 1900. 83. “Societe cooperative La Picpus—plainte de la commission de control: Malversa¬ tion de fonds” and “Assemblee generale du 21 Octobre 1900: Rapport de la Commission de Control aux Societaires de la Picpus,” AN BB18 2196, doss. 1455 AOi. 82.

Consumer Cooperation as the “Third Way”

113

local merchants grouped themselves into a “Ligue de Defense des Interets Commerciaux,” disaffected cooperators broke with the Moissonneuse to form the Societe Nouvelle in 1890. Troubles persisted, and in 1898 a cashier stole 4,328 francs and administrators were accused of falsifying the accounts by inflating the value of stocks to maintain a policy of high dividends. By 1901 the situation had become critical. There was a deficit of 15,000 francs, and over nine thousand members had resigned. The cooperative made last-ditch efforts that included a thorough administrative reorganization, sales of lands and stocks, and appeals to other cooperatives for financial aid. There was a clear cry of alarm in the national cooperative press, with subscriptions designed to save the Moissonneuse. However, by 1904 the situation was hopeless and the society was liquidated.84 The demise of the Moissonneuse was an enormous moral blow to other cooperatives and inspired those in financial trouble to remedy their own financial situations. By early 1900, for example, the Belle villoise was in financial difficulties and losing membership because of administrative incompetence. The accounts of the cooperative were disorderly, there were numerous problems with purchasing, and money and goods were simply unaccounted for (a phenomenon called “pot-devin” by cooperators).85 However, members of the Bellevilloise not only remedied the financial chaos and dishonesty but also steered the cooper¬ ative into a period of extensive growth and prosperity. This momentum came from the newly created Cercle des Cooperators du Vingtieme pour la Creation d’Oeuvres Sociales, a group of members from the Bellevilloise who also belonged to socialist parties or trade unions. The Circle of Cooperators originated at the Semaille Popular University and was originally created in 1899 in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. One of the activities of this Circle was to offer public lectures on economic issues, and consumer cooperation was a prominent topic. The Circle quickly attained a membership of three hundred people, and on 27 April 1902 at general assembly the Circle spearheaded a campaign to expose Gaumont, Les societes de consommation d Paris: Un demi-siecle Paction sociale par la cooperation (Paris: Federation des Cooperatives de la Region Parisienne, 1921), 15-23; Charles Gide, “Sauvons la Moissonneuse,” L Association Cooperative, 5 July 1902. Albert Lebrun, the worker profiled by the Le Playist La Science Sociale in May 1905, noted that financial problems at his cooperative, the Egalitaire, and the fall of the Moissonneuse destroyed his illusions about cooperation. He remained a member of the Egalitaire only “because it was easy for him” (431—432). 85. Cernesson, “Les societes cooperatives,” 905. 84.

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Consumer Cooperation and Commercial Concentration

the corruption of the administrative council and secure their resigna¬ tions. The Circle was successful, and the general assembly elected a new council. From this point on, the Circle was deeply involved in the cooperative’s commercial reorganization; as one contemporary put it, “the new administrators were under the influence of the Circle of Cooperators.”86 The cooperative sent delegates to Manchester to study English cooperation, created a new commission to oversee finances, en¬ trusted the monies of the cooperative to a regular bank rather than keep¬ ing them at the cooperative, and instituted legal proceedings against the former administrators. In order to show their satisfaction with the new administration, the employees staged a reception for the new admin¬ istration and the Circle. In the burette of the cooperative, they hung large red flags imprinted with the names of the pioneers of cooperation. The bakers of the cooperative then brought forth a large cake they had made in the shape of the Bastille. The gateau-Bastille was then smashed by the head cashier “to show that the dishonorable yoke had been abolished.”87 Following their success at the Bellevilloise, cooperators created Circles at other cooperatives as well. These Circles were impor¬ tant vehicles for commercial rejuvenation following periods in incom¬ petent and dishonest administration. And they were vehicles for the political transformation of many cooperatives from the political “neu¬ trality” of the UC to a socialist party stance.88 The third factor inhibiting strong and continued growth of consumer cooperation was shopkeepers’ harassment of the movement. Despite the atrophy of the Union Cooperative’s wholesaling efforts, the cooper¬ ative movement remained a strong contender in the struggle among commercial forms. By the 1890s, small shopkeepers were alarmed by the growth of cooperatives. One tract by G. Durand summarized many of the shopkeeper’s concerns. Durand argued that “where consumer co¬ operatives are founded and developed, small commerce shrinks, de-

86. Helies, La Bellevilloise, 21. 87. Helies, La Bellevilloise, 17—19. 88. Circles in cooperatives often became quite powerful in terms of putting forth slates of candidates for elections and in formulating policies for cooperatives. At the Egalitaire (in Paris), for example, the cooperative was also in financial trouble, and the Circle was the agent for a thorough administrative housecleaning. The Circle also encouraged significant commercial expansion, including the founding of two more stores and adoption of a responsible administrator (following the form of chain stores) , purchasing by a single administrator, and the contracting of a loan from the Credit Foncier to liberate the cooperative’s debt. Gaumont, Les societes de consommation, 9—10.

Consumer Cooperation as the (cThird Way”

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dines, and seems to head toward its ruination.”**9 He cited the case of the Moissonneuse in Paris, which “entirely ruined the commerce of the eleventh arrondissement. Posing small commerce as a “conserver of the family” and an avenue for social mobility, Durand told of a shoemaker who “by intelligence and labor” had become a property holder. He bought a small shop, married and had a family, and prospered until a cooperative moved across the street. After two years he was forced to close his shop. In short, the cooperative “had forced him back into the wage-earning class. Durand s tract continued to inveigh against co¬ operatives, denouncing them in language typical of small shopkeepers: cooperatives were responsible for the “most profound misery” among workers since they did not sell on credit; they maintained unfair fiscal advantages over small shops since most cooperatives escaped commer¬ cial taxation; cooperatives aided the growth of socialism by financing strikes and “preaching class struggle”; and they undermined the moral fabric of France by selling cheap alcohol. Small shopkeepers deemed cooperatives “a true danger for order and public peace.”90 The tactics of shopkeepers to resist and contain the cooperative movement were extensive. These tactics ranged from local isolated actions to the formation of national organizations that demanded legis¬ lation against cooperatives. Locally, some shopkeepers utilized various forms of harassment. One tactic was to urge employers not to employ known cooperators. Workers were fired from jobs, pressured, and in¬ timidated because they belonged to cooperatives. Another form of harassment was to pressure wholesalers that furnished cooperatives. Some shopkeepers organized boycotts of wholesalers. In Series, a small town in Loir-et-Cher, a wholesaler who furnished cooperatives sus¬ tained the pillage and burning of his warehouse. Leaders and coopera¬ tive militants were special targets, and one, Casimir Chiousse, president of the PLM cooperative in Grenoble, stated he had received death threats.91 Local shopkeepers did not limit themselves to harassment but also used positive inducements to consumers and began to form local asso89. G. Durand, Lepetit commerce et les societes cooperatives de consommation (Paris: Jules Rousset, 1901), 1. 90. Ibid., 19, 25-26, 31-36, 48-51, 67. 9i- For these incidents, see Bulletin Adensuel . . . Levallois-Perret, December 1900: David Sapos, The Labor Movement in Post-War France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 204-205; LAssociation Cooperative, 26 April 1902; Federation des Societes Cooperatives P.-L.-M., Est, et Diverses, Cinquieme congres (1893), 3.

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ciations. Shopkeepers continued their practice of providing credit to consumers and in this strategy posed themselves as the protector of the family. One noted: “Without the credit provided by the shopkeeper, how many families would have been reduced to death by hunger?” The most effective tactic by shopkeepers was to form organizations to coor¬ dinate their efforts. These began locally, as in Montpellier (Herault), where, following the foundation of a cooperative, the shopkeepers and butchers collaborated to found a small newspaper and pay “a distin¬ guished lawyer from Paris” to come and lecture on the evils of coopera¬ tives. In Grenoble, the growth of the two large cooperatives, the Menagere and the PLM, prompted shopkeepers in 1892 to organize the Union des Commer