6533b824fe1ef96bd12810b6

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The French Communist Party and the CGTU in the department of Pas-de-Calais during the interwar period

subject

description

Rural department, bordered by a coastline, formerly industrialized and urbanized, the department of Pas-de-Calais was a bastion of the Socialist Party and the trade union movement before the First World War. The birth of the SFIC Communist Party in December 1920 and the union split that affected the CGT divided the labor movement. Our work is interested in the construction, the evolutions and the anchoring in a territory of an original political movement and its union relays during the years of the interwar period.It is about questioning the specificity of a political party and a trade union organization, about the links they have established between them, about the margin of autonomy they have within the communist movement, about the men who militate there and the crises that have gone through them. PCF and CGTU are thus at the heart of a communist galaxy which experienced significant changes during the period studied, in connection with the strategic changes driven by the USSR and by the Center, but in the center-periphery relationship which knotted between Moscow, Paris and the local communist militants, the latter have room for manoeuvre : they are the heirs of local political traditions, in particular those of the world of minors from which Maurice Thorez comes.Far from forming a distinct counter-society, the Communists and the Unitarians were integrated into the society of their time and developed forms of sociability which bore the mark of the territory in which they were active, whether it be workers' sport, show or cinema. Marked by immigration, particularly from Poland, the department of Pas-de-Calais suffered the economic crisis of the 1930s. The PCF and the CGTU strive to organize the unemployed and immigrants and fully commit themselves to the new anti-fascist line implemented by the Communist International. On the eve of the Second World War, despite relations which remained conflictual with the socialist rival, the PCF, strong with thousands of members, its municipal establishments, its associations and its influence acquired in the CGT reunified at the following the strikes of 1936, became a major political force.