National Industrial Power, the “Social Question”, and Workers’ Politics in the Ruhr and Nord/Pas-de-Calais

In the late nineteenth century, French industry fell behind in the second wave of European industrialization that transformed Germany into an industrial power. The French and German steel industries were by far the largest of continental Europe, but German steel produced roughly twice the volume of its French competitors.Footnote ¹⁰ French industries were still largely family-run enterprises, like the De Wendel steel company. In Germany, in contrast, by the early twentieth century, professional managers ran much of the day-to-day business operations of the Krupp and Thyssen steel conglomerates. German industrial families became closely entwined with the financial industry, opening up greater lines of credit for expansion.Footnote ¹¹ In 1926, four steel producers combined to form the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the largest of all businesses in Germany. This drive toward larger units experienced a certain degree of internationalization already in the interwar period, with the emergence of international steel cartels. These were built around “a notion of continental central-western European ‘core Europe’, comprised of Germany, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg”.Footnote ¹² At the same time, a national and geopolitical outlook continued to mark the industry, and despite French reacquisition of the iron-ore fields of Lorraine after World War I, the French government chafed under the perception of French industry’s subordinate status in these cartels. After World War II, it was determined to transform the balance of industrial power between Germany and France.

This imbalance was in large part due to differences between the two nation’s coal industries: French coal was more expensive, of lower quality, and less abundant than coal mined in the German Ruhr. This territory was one of the most concentrated industrial areas in Europe, possessing a strong vertical integration economy that bound together coal and steel with transport and manufacturing. Ruhr industry prospered from the district’s abundant reserves of bituminous coal that it processed into high quality coke. The Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Kohlen-Syndikat), founded in 1893, controlled nearly ninety per cent of total Ruhr coal production. Meanwhile, French coal mining was overwhelmingly concentrated in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments, although the Midi had a small number of mines and the southern industrial town Decazeville had a long-established coal mining operation as well. Under pressure from Ruhr coal exports, the Nord and Pas-de-Calais mining companies cartelized in 1891.Footnote ¹³ This cartel was much less effective than its Ruhr counterpart, in part due to squabbling with coal producers in other French regions.Footnote ¹⁴ The northern French mines fell further behind as a result of World War I, when the western front calcified for years across the northern French plain.

Coal mining was the heart of national industrial ambitions in both France and Germany, but it was also the most conspicuous incarnation of “the social question” that shaped political and social discussions in nineteenth-century Europe. German miners had enjoyed privileged status under Prussian laws inherited from the economic reforms under Frederick the Great (1712–1786) but, during the nineteenth century, the status of miners had very much deteriorated.Footnote ¹⁵ At the end of the century, the Wilhelmine state took steps to improve working conditions, setting up social and medical assistance programs. At the same time, French coal miners, who had launched their first strike in 1833, were symbols of working-class militancy with a place next to the Communards in French socialist iconography. The history of French mining is punctuated by the infamous repression of the 1891 Formies strike, popularized in Émile Zola’s novel Germinal, and by the 1906 disaster at the Courrières Mining Company, when over 1,000 workers died. Jean Jaurès, the SFIO’s first leader, represented the Southern mining town of Carmaux, which was rocked by a traumatic labor conflict in 1892. French mining companies pioneered paternalist patterns of social control, offering free housing, coal, and other benefits that they rescinded if a worker terminated employment.Footnote ¹⁶ Penalties, surveillance, privileges, and housing segregation between management, engineers and workers led to a segmented social system in mining regions largely based around class.Footnote ¹⁷

A particularly dense form of social cohesion developed among miners, their families, and the small shopkeepers who serviced a working-class clientele and generally shared its values. Working, family, and leisure lives in the northern coal regions revolved around mining, a situation embodied in the term “la corporation”, which originally referred to the world of craft guilds and was adopted for the mining communities at large. This cohesion facilitated the emergence of the Vieux Syndicat, the “Old Union”, that combined collective bargaining and political mobilization with mutual aid, pension, and associational activities. In 1908, it joined the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), France’s largest labor federation. Miners propelled the rise of Jules Guesdes’s Parti Ouvrier Français in the region, and other socialist groups as well.Footnote ¹⁸ Many of the preeminent names of the founding generation of French socialism came from the northern federations. When the factions united to form the SFIO in 1905, the Nord was the largest federation of the new party, and the Pas-de-Calais was among the largest as well. The new party demanded the nationalization of the coal fields, a long-standing demand of the mining unions.

After World War I, SFIO mayors governed major cities in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, as well as mining municipalities. Allied with the Vieux Syndicat, they implemented a reformist program that mediated between miners and employers.Footnote ¹⁹ In contrast to France, labor organization came relatively late to the Ruhr, in part because miners were overwhelmingly Catholic and suspicious of socialist and labor agitators. The Ruhr became the heart of the labor wing of the Catholic Center Party. Tensions ran high between the social democratic and Catholic trade unions. The German Revolution of 1918 marked a breakthrough for the SPD in the Ruhr. Franz Klupsch chaired the SPD’s western Westphalia section (Bezirk Westliches Westfalen) from his base in Dortmund, the most important city in the Ruhr. He and his deputy, Fritz Henssler, were closely allied with the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), the trade union federation aligned with the SPD. In January 1919, the moderate Majority Social Democratic Party (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – MSPD) won 41.3 per cent in the Ruhr-based South-Westphalia electoral district and 30.6 per cent in the more agrarian North-Westphalia district, while the radical Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – USPD) underperformed compared to its national average.Footnote ²⁰ The German Revolution resulted in a factory council law that granted miners a form of representation on corporate boards but, considering this insufficient, trade unionists demanded nationalization.

The schism that took place between socialists and communists in 1919–1920 in Europe after the Russian Revolution also shaped the interwar politics and culture of French and German industrial regions. Relations between members of the competing parties were bitter and often violent. When Wolfgang Kapp attempted a right-wing coup in 1920 against the “Weimar coalition” government, the German Communist Party (KPD) was able to gain a foothold in the Ruhr by taking an active role in defeating the coup.Footnote ²¹ When communists then tried to seize power in the region, the social democrat Henssler demanded that soldiers crush this “terrorist minority” until “the last man of the red bands [is] disarmed”.Footnote ²² SPD leaders collaborated with Freikorps troops called in to suppress the revolt. They failed to restrain the mass executions that followed. This kind of “white terror” fell especially hard on miners and industrial workers in the Ruhr and support for the SPD among workers fell substantially in 1920–1921. Still reeling from the traumas of war, revolution, and counter-revolution, the region then experienced not only a political, but also a social calamity when French and Belgian soldiers invaded it in January 1923: Worst hit by the Ruhr occupation of 1923–1924 were the region’s industrial workers, who experienced sharply deteriorating working conditions under occupation and chronic shortages of food.Footnote ²³ The occupation upended local politics. The SPD emerged from the so-called “Ruhr crisis” a wounded party. Still a small minority force in 1922, the KPD came to present a formidable challenge to the SPD’s position in the Ruhr. In May 1924, the KPD won 29.4 per cent of the vote in Dortmund, becoming the strongest party, while the SPD only received a meager 16.2 per cent.Footnote ²⁴

French Socialists at first were able to better withstand the French Communist (PCF) offensive in the industrial areas of Nord and Pas-de-Calais in the early 1920s. Intense competition for miners’ support accelerated when the PCF-aligned union, the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU), launched a campaign in 1928 to wrest power from the CGT. This resulted in a climate of hostility, including physical violence.Footnote ²⁵ The Great Depression from 1929 on invigorated support for communists among miners because socialist mayors seemed incapable of stemming the mass layoffs and pit closures that hit the region. In Lens, an emblematic mining community, the communist vote in national elections increased from nine per cent in 1924 to 15.9 per cent in 1928 and to 28.9 per cent in 1936.Footnote ²⁶ The implementation of the hated Bédaux system to increase miners’ productivity by replacing payment by teamwork with individualized wage rates caused an upheaval of traditional working practices. The number of mining injuries nearly doubled from 1932 to 1935.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, the social composition of the SFIO leadership in the region was shifting from former miners to a younger, more radical, and more urban generation in which teachers predominated.

Though support for German communists in the Ruhr declined in 1925–1929, the KPD received new life during the early Great Depression. The communist Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts-Opposition) made substantial gains in Ruhr factories.Footnote ²⁸ In 1930, the Ruhr was the strongest area of KPD support in Germany. Workers increasingly supported National Socialists as well. In 1932, as the crisis of Weimar Germany had already become evident, the KPD surpassed both the Center Party and the SPD, becoming the largest party in the Ruhr territory for the first and only time in its history. Nazi repression then hit the Ruhr hard. The regime’s minister for labor affairs severely curtailed the rights of miners and granted comprehensive employer control over the workforce.Footnote ²⁹ Fritz Husemann, the mine trade union leader, was shot in a concentration camp in 1935.Footnote ³⁰ At the same time, employment in the Ruhr swelled and new workers were recruited as Germany’s economy recovered and the rearmament program directed national resources to heavy industry. The Ruhr became the center of the Nazi wartime economy. Forced labor from conquered countries toiled in the Ruhr, many dying in the factories of Krupp and other enterprises. Social democrats’ resistance to the National Socialist government in the Ruhr largely involved circulating pamphlets, while the communist underground organized more effectively, also engaging in acts of sabotage.Footnote ³¹ When Henssler returned to Dortmund in June 1945 after eight years in a concentration camp, he encountered a communist movement strengthened by the prestige it had earned among opponents of National Socialism and the war.

In France, communists played leading roles in the massive strikes that followed the Popular Front victory in the 1936 elections. The strikes won higher wages, the re-employment of laid-off workers and the abolition of the Bédaux system, an impressive accomplishment that brought almost the entire mining population into the trade unions. Employers struck back when the Popular Front fell in 1938, reintroducing the Bédaux system and prolonging work hours. The trade unions began to fall apart as relations between communists and socialists deteriorated. When war came in 1940, German occupiers detached the region from the rest of France.Footnote ³² Miners and steel workers felt abandoned by their countrymen and betrayed by their employers, managers, and trade union leaders, whom they believed to be collaborating with the occupiers. Communists were the driving force for resistance throughout the nation, particularly in this region and its mines. They helped spark the first mass strike against Nazi rule in the northern mine basin in May 1941. The strike resulted in better working conditions but came at enormous cost: hundreds of workers were deported to German factories and to concentration camps. Dozens were executed. Miners believed that their employers provided the name of strike leaders to German officials.Footnote ³³ A tense social climate continued for three more years of occupation and exploded with the liberation of France in 1944.

Competition between Socialists and Communists in French and German Industry after World War II

After the war, working conditions in the principal industrial regions of France and Germany was closely interrelated with, first, the national program for economic reconstruction in France, and, second, with the Western Allied program for European reconstruction in non-Soviet occupied Germany. Local politicians in industrial regions, most prominently socialists and communists, had to come to terms with the complex interplay of local, national, and international pressures as well as the beginnings of the Cold War. European reconstruction required a rapid increase in production from the same industrial regions that experienced the fiercest competition between communists and socialists of any region of postwar France, and of the Western occupied zones of Germany, a competition that was intensely lived at the grass-roots level. An analysis of the experiences of regional political competition in the mines of France and in Ruhr heavy industry in 1945–1948 and of their divergent political outcomes is thus necessary to understand national SFIO and SPD debates on the Schuman Plan in 1950–1951.

National liberation in France and occupation in Germany created, of course, different contexts for the struggle between communists and socialists in these industrial regions. In the northern French mining basin, driving out the German troops had taken the form of a social revolution. French miners downed tools against the wishes of CGT leaders and refused to work for their former bosses, whom they accused of collaborating with the enemy.Footnote ³⁴ Purge commissions had difficulty proving miners’ accusations and, as happened as well in the Ruhr’s de-Nazification program, officials often found that purges and a rapid restoration of production were contradictory goals. In France, SFIO Industrial Minister Robert Lacoste decreed the nationalization of the mines in December 1944. He also set up comités d’entreprise, a form of worker participation in management throughout French industry. In the nationalized coal bodies, one-third of the seats on steering committees were now reserved for miners’ representatives. The French Assembly approved a new Miners’ Statute in June 1946, which satisfied demands mining unions had pursued for decades, like a retirement age of fifty-five and longer paid vacation. Lacoste raised miners’ salaries to among the highest in industry. And only five months later, two former miners, SFIO deputy Paul Sion and the Socialist leader of the Nord federation, Augustin Laurent, oversaw the approval of a law guaranteeing healthcare to miners.Footnote ³⁵

Ruhr industry faced an uncertain fate under occupation. The Allied governments needed Ruhr coal to sustain Germany’s population and to fuel European recovery; at the same time, they also prepared a dismantlement program for the region’s steel and manufacturing industries. Wartime damage to these industries was surprisingly small, while destruction in the coal mines was considerably greater. The number of miners in the Ruhr fell sharply with the release of foreign forced laborers.Footnote ³⁶ Extraction had almost ground to a halt in April 1945, yet priority accorded to the sector led to a partial recovery and increased employment by the beginning of 1946.Footnote ³⁷ In August 1945, British occupation authorities arrested 160 leaders of Ruhr industry, including industrial titans Alfried Krupp, Hugo Stinnes, Jr., Fritz Thyssen, and Walter Rohland, the director of Vereinigte Stahlwerke. Polls showed overwhelming support for socialization among miners, a demand backed by the coal union IG Bergbau and the region’s social democratic and communist parties.Footnote ³⁸ Industrialists soon re-organized to resist socialization and took the initiative to create a new employers’ association, out of which grew the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI).Footnote ³⁹

At the first conference of the British zone Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB), trade union delegates demanded co-determination (Mitbestimmmung) in all industries, a form of employee participation in management. Sensing an opportunity, industrialists in Duisburg, Oberhausen, and Essen offered the trade unions parity representation on corporate boards in January 1947 in a largely successful effort to build a collective front to save the factories from closure and dismantlement.Footnote ⁴⁰ In November, trade unionists also achieved equal representation with employers on the advisory trustee organization created by the British authorities to manage the coal industry. Meanwhile, the SPD threatened to pull its delegates from consultative assemblies in the Bizone (the occupation zone jointly administered by the UK and US) if the British authorities continued to delay socialization. In an act of intra-labor movement cooperation, social democrats and communists succeeded in passing a socialization law in the regional assembly in 1947, even gaining some Christian-democratic support, but US military officials scuttled the law. Hence, while French coal was nationalized in the Charbonnages de France, ownership of German coal and industry remained open and deeply contentious.

Nonetheless, there are clear parallels in the political situation of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and Ruhr in the initial postwar years. First, socialists confronted mass communist parties with strong support among miners and industrial workers. In early postwar elections, communists won approximately 20–25 per cent in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, about the national average, but also 20–25 per cent in the Ruhr, by far the highest in the western occupation zones of Germany.Footnote ⁴¹ French communists took control of the CGT miners’ union, the Syndicat CGT des mineurs, in December 1944 and reinforced their majority by expelling union leaders accused of collaboration. Socialists lost municipal elections in mining towns that had long been socialist fiefdoms, most glaringly when Auguste Lecoeur, a communist leader of the 1941 strikes, was elected mayor of Lens in 1945.Footnote ⁴² In Germany, communists had been operating illegally in the mines at the end of the war, and the British authorities mostly tolerated their activities when the region came under their control. The Ruhr communist party quickly recovered its support among industrial workers who had been party members in the early 1930s.Footnote ⁴³ In the September–October 1945 factory council elections, the KPD won a majority. A regional congress of the metal workers’ union elected a communist chair, Karl Küll, infuriating Walter Freitag, the social democratic leader of the national metal union (which in 1949 would become IG Metall).Footnote ⁴⁴ In IG Bergbau, the miners’ union, the communist Willi Agatz fell only thirteen votes short of election for chair of the miners’ union in 1946 against August Schmidt, the SPD candidate.Footnote ⁴⁵ Never before had communists had so much support in German industrial unions.

Second, the SPD and SFIO shared a prevailing view that communist success in industrial areas resulted from miserable working and living conditions. The KPD gained its largest proportion of votes (thirty-two per cent) in the 1947 elections in Bochum, a city that had, with a calculated daily average of only 629 calories per person, the worst nutritional situation of the US–British Bizone. Conditions for Ruhr workers were indeed dismal: Wartime bombing had a disproportionate impact on urban areas. In many Ruhr cities, half of prewar housing lay in ruins.Footnote ⁴⁶ Heating, coal, and electrical shortages made for dark and cold winters. Food shortages were ubiquitous and rations fell to life-threatening levels. In addition, occupation authorities lowered wages and stripped Ruhr miners of their special health benefits and accident insurance.Footnote ⁴⁷ Miners and industrial workers often arrived to work exhausted from long commutes. Factory reports depict hungry workforces prone to apathy and gallows’ humor and workplaces marked by shouting matches and outbreaks of violence.Footnote ⁴⁸

Meanwhile, in France, communist leaders announced a “battle for coal” in the aftermath of the war and exhorted miners with Stakhanovite imagery to produce more in the interests of the nation. PCF leader Maurice Thorez told a Nord mining audience in July 1945 that, “it is your duty as Frenchmen” to raise production and “miners must love the mine”.Footnote ⁴⁹ Communists took leading administrative positions in nationalized coal. The CGT and PCF forcefully suppressed a strike that broke out in September 1945, reminding workers that nationalization “did not yet mean [that] the mine [belonged] to the miners”.Footnote ⁵⁰ Workers generally greeted the “battle for coal” with a mix of sarcasm, bitterness, and resignation.Footnote ⁵¹ The campaign met the large quotas demanded by the government at the expense of miners’ health. The rate of injuries doubled and free health care was of little use, as doctors often saw hundreds of patients a day and did not have the training in some cases to address illnesses that plagued mining communities.Footnote ⁵² A technological innovation in drilling resulted in workers swallowing large quantities of dust, which later resulted in increased rates of black lung disease (silicosis).

Finally, the Ruhr SPD and the SFIO in Nord/Pas-de-Calais were among the most anti-communist of their parties’ regional chapters and forcefully rejected postwar efforts to unify the two workers’ parties. Laurent, leader of the Nord-SFIO, and Henssler in the Ruhr worked tirelessly to sabotage unification. Guy Mollet, leader of the Pas-de-Calais federation and then SFIO secretary general, supported unification, but he faced resistance in his region’s mining areas, where bitter memories of interwar animosities predominated. Regardless of differences in their stances on unity efforts with communists, both parties vigorously competed for the support of miners and industrial workers in 1945–1946. Competition with communists thus affected socialist leaders’ calculations of how to face the harrowing social and political problems in mining and industry after the war. For instance, SFIO leaders sought to take advantage of the unpopularity of the PCF coal campaign, with the local socialist press writing that, “soon [the communists] are going to make the worker sleep in the mine”.Footnote ⁵³ Force Ouvrière (FO), a socialist minority faction in the CGT created in 1947, channeled workers’ discontent and condemned the “battle for coal”.Footnote ⁵⁴ This tactic yielded isolated victories: The socialist Sion defeated Lecoeur, who was then a communist undersecretary of state for the mines, in a 1946 election in Lens.Footnote ⁵⁵

Mass Strikes and the Divergent Politics of Miners and Industrial Workers in Northern France and the German Ruhr

The parties responded rather differently when huge strikes broke out in French and German industrial regions in 1947–1948. In Germany, protests began in Essen in February 1947; by March, tens of thousands of workers were demonstrating in all major Ruhr cities. Over 300,000 miners went on strike in April.Footnote ⁵⁶ These were spontaneous, grassroots strikes driven by food shortages – as is evident in the image in Figure 1 – and punctuated with demands for socialization and co-determination. SPD leaders recognized that hunger was at the root of the protests, but they also interpreted them within the context of their anti-communist tradition and the escalating Cold War. The local SPD press suspected that a “communist orchestra director” was provoking the strikes to promote the KPD’s political schemes. It was true that communists often spearheaded wildcat strikes at the time; yet, more often than not they did so on their own initiative, not under orders from their leadership. In April, Agatz advocated a one day miners’ strike, a proposal approved by the miners’ union against the objections of August Schmidt, its social democratic chair. In response to the protests, the region’s SPD Economic Minister, Erik Nölting, introduced a point-rationing system for coal miners that assured them a far higher ration than the rest of the population. Reforms succeeded in quieting the protests, but they broke out again in January 1948 as the Ruhr food supply reached its nadir. This time the impetus came from metal workers, rather than miners. The DGB and SPD leaderships, while split over whether to support the 1947 strikes, were overwhelmingly hostile to their repetition in 1948 and worked to hasten their end.

Figure 1 In 1947 and 1948, a series of massive hunger demonstrations and strikes broke out in the Ruhr area. Here a protester holds a sign demanding coal and bread. Source: Archiv für soziale Bewegungen, Bochum. Used with permission.

While Ruhr miners faced occupation authorities, the 1947 strikes in France pitted many Nord and Pas-de-Calais workers against a socialist-led government. National politics in France had transformed after communist ministers left the cabinet in May 1947. As the Cold War gathered pace, the SFIO Minister of Industry, Robert Lacoste, sharply cut CGT representation on the coal boards, scaling back the say in management miners had only recently acquired. Strikes broke out at Renault in April 1947 when the government announced lower food rations. They quickly spread throughout French industry and the mines, rising and subsiding through the year until they culminated in a mass railway and mining strike in November. The government forcefully suppressed the strike in a dark climate that also included a mysterious train derailment. Then, in 1948, the government issued decrees cracking down on absenteeism in the mines, forcing workers with “black lung” to return to work, and limiting medical and retirement benefits. An enormous miners’ strike called by the CGT to protest the decrees shook France in October–December 1948.Footnote ⁵⁷ The strikes were responses to poor social conditions but, like in the Ruhr, they had clear political implications. The workers’ claims struck at core government priorities. Demands for wage increases for miners threatened to nullify the economic centerpiece of the socialists in government: the control of prices and wages to prevent inflation. They also threatened to deepen coal shortages and damage French industry. The government decided to crush the strike. Lacoste laid off ten per cent of miners, cracked down on chronic absenteeism, and ended subsidies for the coal industry. SFIO Interior Minister Jules Moch sent in the national police to conquer the mines one by one.Footnote ⁵⁸ Skirmishes, sabotage, and shootings turned the region into a veritable battleground, a glimpse of which is captured in Figure 2. Some workers rebelled against the CGT, the leading union federation at the time, and tried to reopen the mines. The FO called for a return to work and split from the CGT, forming a new union federation informally aligned with the SFIO. It supported the SFIO’s policy on wages, as did Laurent, the leader of the Nord-SFIO and a former miner.Footnote ⁵⁹ In December, the CGT surrendered, and those defeated miners who had not been dismissed returned to work.

Figure 2 Demonstrators scuffle with police during the 1948 miners’s strike in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais. Source: MaxPPP/Voix du Nord. Used with permission.

The strikes of 1947 set off completely different political dynamics in the two countries, dynamics that also reflected the different contexts of state-led reconstruction in France and reconstruction under military occupation in postwar Germany. French miners and industrial unions, lionized as heroes in the initial postwar period, increasingly felt alienated from the state. The bitter outcome of the strike renewed support for the communist party among many industrial workers, who felt betrayed by socialists in government. After 1948, the Nord federation of the SFIO lost a high proportion of its dues-paying members, and votes for socialists in the mining areas of the Pas-de-Calais fell by over twenty thousand votes from the legislative elections of 1946 to 1951, while votes for communists rose by over ten thousand. The SFIO federations experienced less of a decline in the northern regions than elsewhere in France, but this was primarily due to their strength outside of mining areas, where communists consolidated their gains.Footnote ⁶⁰ The FO, the union federation now aligned with the SFIO, remained weak in industry and strong among public servants, the latter of whom made up much of the SFIO electoral base as well. The March 1948 comités d’entreprise elections in the Nord confirmed the FO’s weakness: the CGT won over fifty per cent of the vote; the FO received a disappointing fourteen per cent. Steel workers overwhelmingly preferred the CGT to the FO as well.Footnote ⁶¹ The miners’ and metal workers’ unions became solid communist strongholds at a time when an acceleration of Cold War tensions encouraged socialist leaders to view their domestic dispute with the PCF through an international lens of threat and confrontation. Workers’ sense of alienation from both the socialists and the government had implications for how they viewed proposals for European unity: in November 1948, forty-two per cent of CGT members supported a European economic union and forty per cent opposed it, whereas eight-seven per cent of FO members favored economic union and ten per cent were against. Eleven months earlier, a poll had support among communists for a European federation at over sixty per cent, not far short of the seventy per cent of socialists who expressed a favorable opinion, the most supportive among all party memberships.Footnote ⁶² The polls were not longitudinal or consistent in the question or groups measured. Still, the impact a year of transformative events in industrial relations and politics had on the sociological base of support for European unity, now clearly understood as Western European unity, is evident.

In Germany, on the other hand, the trade unions and SPD made a concerted effort in 1948–1951 to win the allegiance of Ruhr workers and succeeded in significantly reducing communist party influence in the Ruhr. The Ruhr factory councils were the largest bastion of KPD power in postwar western Germany and had acted as a counterweight to the DGB’s efforts to end the strikes. The Ruhr SPD thus intensified its campaign to defeat communists in the mines and factories.Footnote ⁶³ Henssler wrote Schumacher that the SPD must “activate our factory council groups to resolve the situation” because “the trade unions themselves unfortunately do not seem to clearly see the danger”.Footnote ⁶⁴ Further, communists came under increasing pressure after the Berlin blockade began in June 1948. The eastern German ruling party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), began exercising greater financial and political control of the western KPD. It forced through a policy of denouncing the official union leaderships, distributing eastern German propaganda in the factories, and pressuring the factory councils to take a pro-Soviet stance in the Cold War. This policy turned out to be increasingly self-defeating, and many communist trade union officials began distancing themselves from the KPD. In March 1950, DGB leader Hans Böckler called for a “purge” of communists, and communists lost most of their remaining seats on the factory councils, most dramatically in Essen.Footnote ⁶⁵ While the metal and mining unions expelled officials who refused to sign loyalty pledges or who publicly took pro-communist positions, they otherwise exercised a skillful policy of integrating communist officials and union members. Votes for KPD candidates in North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest region in which the Ruhr district is located, had already collapsed by half between October 1948 and August 1949. The KPD membership in the region fell by almost half from 1949 to 1953.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1949–1950, the SPD cemented its role as the hegemonic party in the industrial Ruhr, a position it has held for decades since.

The social democrats’ push to stamp out communism in the Ruhr coincided with a French diplomatic offensive to gain control of the Ruhr’s industrial development. The June 1948 Allied London Accords promised the French government an International Authority for the Ruhr (IAR) in exchange for French agreement to the creation of a West German state. There was substantial support for this agreement in the SPD national executive.Footnote ⁶⁷ Henssler, however, labeled the IAR a “colonial statute” that would ensure French industries cheap coal while burdening German industry with production quotas and dismantlements.Footnote ⁶⁸ With coal prices subject to Allied approval, over seventy per cent of Ruhr coal mines were operating at a loss, and there seemed little prospect of wage increases for miners under an international management dedicated to ensuring low prices for coal exports. Further, French oversight of Ruhr industry raised frightful memories of the political and social damage wrought by the interwar Ruhr occupation. The Ruhr SPD and SPD regional ministers in North-Rhine-Westphalia used their powerful positions to pressure the national party to oppose the IAR. It was their influence, to date largely overlooked in the literature, that set the national party’s intransigent line on French proposals for the Ruhr. Henssler in particular – pictured giving a speech in Dortmund in 1948 in Figure 3 – was responsible for a hardening of SPD attitudes over the following year.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such proposals threatened to undermine the progress social democrats had made against communists in the region. In a March 1949 article entitled “Ruhr Statute and Peace Settlement”, Schumacher explicitly linked the SPD’s position to its competition against the communists in the Ruhr: “The communists see here a chance for their politics. And they are saying that ‘The Ruhr must remain German!’.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 3 Fritz Henssler speech in 1948 in Hansaplatz, Dortmund’s central square. Source: Stadtarchiv Dortmund. Used with permission.

French Socialists and the Politics of Coal: From the “Monnet” to the “Schuman” Plan

Ruhr coal and coke, meanwhile, were essential for the success of France’s program for postwar economic reconstruction. The postwar planning commission, led by Jean Monnet, intended to modernize the French economy by increasing the competitiveness of French manufacturing and capturing a larger share of global trade for French industrial exports. By 1950, however, the success of the “Monnet Plan” seemed highly endangered: Indifference by the other Western Allies and subversion by German industry and by the government of the newly established Federal Republic of Germany had paralyzed the IAR, which was designed to attain the lower energy costs required by the plan. German coal companies practiced “double-pricing”, a policy by which they exported coal at higher prices than they sold it on the domestic market. These higher coal prices raised costs for French industry. The Schuman Plan was an attempt by the French government to save its postwar economic program by offering the West German government an international framework it could accept. Jean Monnet’s idea was to create a European common market for coal and steel that would allow French manufacturing to compete on the world market on an equal footing with German industry. The modernization program required lower coal prices – if need be at the expense of the French coal industry and French miners. French communists had supported this policy until they left government in 1947. As the Cold War bolted the door behind them, the CGT and PCF fell back on a sectoral defense of industries where they had strong support from workers.

French socialists retained governmental responsibilities after the communists left office. When SFIO ministers harshly suppressed the 1947–1948 strikes, coal and steel workers saddled them with much of the blame. This brought recriminations within the party but not a change in party policy. Although members of the SFIO parliamentary group condemned Lacoste’s “anti-worker” positions, they did so behind closed doors.Footnote ⁷¹ Lacoste replied that French coal costs had to come down to compete with the lower price of foreign coal. At a 1949 party congress, the SFIO secretary general Mollet said that “especially in the mines […] a demagogic campaign against us has borne fruits”. After he noted that, “[w]e have lost many thousands of votes on the name of Lacoste”, an audience member shouted “Bravo!” Mollet icily replied, “No, not bravo, it is unfortunate, it is terribly unjust”.Footnote ⁷² In 1949, less productive mines in northern France began to close down, and the planning commission lowered the targets for domestic coal production. These pressures reflected themselves within the SFIO, where leading representatives disputed with one another whether miners’ wages could rise without increasing coal prices.Footnote ⁷³ Meanwhile, socialists were especially attentive in this period to the growing concerns of French manufacturers. The business historian Matthias Kipping demonstrates how representatives of this diverse sector influenced economic policy in 1949–1950.Footnote ⁷⁴ They became forceful advocates for the Schuman Plan, which was designed to decrease their production costs by lowering the prices of coal and steel. This was also the goal of SFIO economist André Philip (1902–1970), who told the 1949 congress that after the liberation it had been necessary to invest in French coal and steel, but new investments henceforth had to be shifted toward manufacturing. He was among the first to advocate a coal and steel common market in 1949.

The Schuman Plan thus grew out of a French domestic policy rationale of forcing its own nationalized coal industry to attain coal and steel prices in France at the levels of those prevailing in Germany. It sought to Europeanize the Monnet Plan and aid French manufacturing by extending its reach as purchasers to Ruhr coal. It was clear that competition within a coal and steel common market threatened to bring more layoffs of miners and perhaps of steel workers in France. The northern French mines had higher wages, poorer resources, and lower productivity than the Ruhr mines. An official of the French Planning Commission told the National Assembly’s Economics Commission that, “because of unequal productivity, there are at the moment clear differences in the conditions of coal production in Germany and in France”. These differences, he said, “may lead to a displacement of production, which means that German coal will take the place of French coal in certain markets”.Footnote ⁷⁵ André Philip was willing to accept this sacrifice because, as he and others noted, French manufacturing employed more workers than the coal industry. He concluded that it “seems necessary to close businesses that are not able to adapt to the new conditions […]”.Footnote ⁷⁶ Philip was often an isolated figure within the party but his view was also that of most SFIO ministers in government in 1947–1950, who accepted the possibility of mine closures in hopes of economic gains elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁷

The CGT immediately denounced the Schuman Plan employing a Cold War rhetoric: the common market was part of a US plan to rearm Germany and use Ruhr resources to launch a war against the Soviet Union. French communists also claimed that the planned coal and steel community would de-industrialize France and cause the “deportation” of French workers to the Ruhr, pictured as a kind of industrial Moloch. French industry would have to align salaries with the low wages of West Germany and even then it would probably not be able to compete.Footnote ⁷⁸ Many in the French steel industry had concerns as well. For instance, steel industrialist Humbert de Wendel thought that French steel could not compete with German industry.Footnote ⁷⁹ Georges Villiers, the head of France’s umbrella employers’ association (Conseil national du patronat français – CNPF), however, supported French manufacturing interests and endorsed the plan against the wishes of the French steel industry.Footnote ⁸⁰ The European Industrial Council, in turn (and with Villiers as president), criticized the terms of the emerging Paris treaty for granting to the community’s executive body, the High Authority, power it believed should be the prerogative of employers.Footnote ⁸¹ The French business community was divided by competing interests and, on the eve of the ECSC ratification, the CNPF urged the vote be delayed.Footnote ⁸² (The nationalized coal industry, as an arm of the government, had no independent say in these inter-industry debates.)

In this clash of interests, the French Socialist Party chose to support manufacturing over the interests of French miners. That it could do so without a public clash was due to the positive attitude adopted by the SFIO federations that represented the Nord and Pas-de-Calais. Augustin Laurent, chair of the SFIO Nord federation, supported the Schuman Plan even though experts expected it would lead to layoffs and closures in the mining regions. Had he opposed the plan, he surely would have caught the party leadership’s attention like Henssler did in Germany. Mollet, for his part, had an iron grip over the Pas-de-Calais federation. As party leader, he was focused more on national than regional issues. With their constituencies shifting from mining areas to towns, the northern federations did not face the same pressures as the Ruhr SPD to defend the interests of miners. When the SFIO parliamentary group met to discuss the pending ratification of the ECSC on 11 December 1951, Guy Desson, who represented a mining district in the Ardennes, voiced miners’ concern that, “[t]he repercussions are going to be considerable for a great number of businesses, the ratification of the treaty will lead to an acceleration in the process of liquidation of unequipped businesses […] and it is the workers who are going to suffer”. He continued that, “we are going to plunge these regions into unemployment”. Another socialist, Jean Le Bail, replied that he could “not follow Desson’s argumentation for a very simple practical reason: we are going to ratify the Schuman Plan”. Despite his own “reservations about the Schuman Plan”, he said that, “it is not a good idea to make the mistake of giving reasons against” the plan that would assist its opponents “after having pushed the idea and in the end voting for it”.Footnote ⁸³ Paul Ramadier, who represented the southern industrial town of Decazeville and had been SFIO Prime Minister in 1947, was also reluctant but in the end voted for the ECSC.Footnote ⁸⁴ Without support from the powerful Nord and Pas-de-Calais party federations or from Ramadier, the dissident Desson was isolated. A few days later, he was the only French socialist in the National Assembly to vote against the ratification of the ECSC.

Defenders of the Ruhr: German Social Democrats, the Schuman Plan, and Disagreements among German Trade Unions

In Germany, SPD leaders were at first unsure what to make of the Schuman Plan. Kurt Schumacher welcomed it in May 1950 but called it “a frame” without a “picture”.Footnote ⁸⁵ The SPD, he said, would not define a position until it had more information about the community’s design and its impact on German coal and steel industries. The DGB was silent for ten days but then applauded the plan.Footnote ⁸⁶ A small team of trade unionists from the DGB executive and the miners’ union attended the Schuman plan negotiations in Paris as part of the German delegation. Hans vom Hoff, who led the DGB delegation, praised the atmosphere at the Paris negotiations and expressed optimism about its outcome to the DGB executive in July.Footnote ⁸⁷ Officials in the IG Metall union were less enthusiastic. Their exclusion from the ECSC delegation fomented suspicion that the DGB executive would not adequately defend their members’ interests, concerns that they passed on to the SPD leadership.Footnote ⁸⁸ Gustav Henle, a steel industrialist and a Christian democratic (CDU) deputy close to Germany’s CDU chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was enthusiastic about the plan. Most steel industrialists were skeptical though. They were pleased that the executive powers envisioned for the High Authority were reduced over the course of 1950 but were unhappy about plans to permanently sever the steel industry’s traditional links with coal mining.Footnote ⁸⁹ The SPD also fervently supported maintaining the Ruhr’s vertical integration economy.

The negotiations took a decisive turn when Monnet, heading the French delegation, suddenly insisted in September 1950 that the community’s High Authority be invested with legal powers to dissolve cartels, a power that would imperil not only the Ruhr’s vertical integration economy, but its coal sales syndicate as well. There was revulsion in German industry and in the unions against the new set of French demands. Henssler considered the sales cartel essential for the coal industry’s stability and for preserving jobs in less productive mines. SPD leaders also opposed ending the double-pricing of German coal, a policy that allowed the party and unions to push for wage increases for miners through higher export prices without damaging employment in other German industries by raising domestic coal prices. The SPD leadership thus came out in October 1950 against the coal and steel community, reviving its critique from 1948 against the IAR that French proposals intended to colonize the Ruhr by exploiting its raw materials while stifling German industry. The SPD’s position matched the increasingly critical view in IG Metall. Freitag, the metal workers’ chair and a SPD member of the Bundestag, said that “under no circumstance can we approve the Schuman Plan”. The ECSC, he claimed, was a “reparation to France”, because it would build up the French steel industry using German coal at the expense of German steel.Footnote ⁹⁰ The specter of a communist resurgence in the Ruhr drove the party’s opposition to the ECSC. In May 1951, a month after the Treaty of Paris was signed, Schumacher told a SPD conference:

After the SPD began its campaign against the community, the DGB leadership decided to take advantage of the controversy over the plan to demand concessions on co-determination from the German government.Footnote ⁹² By 1948–1949, co-determination was the norm in Ruhr mining and industry but business leaders were working to prevent its spread to other industries and to reduce labor’s representation on company boards. In November 1950, ninety-eight per cent of IG Metall members voted to go on strike if the German parliament did not approve a co-determination law and in January 1951 ninety-three per cent of IG Bergbau members followed suit.Footnote ⁹³ Under pressure, Adenauer conceded and the German parliament passed a co-determination bill in April 1951, the same month that six governments signed the Treaty of Paris to create the ECSC. The passage of the co-determination bill strengthened the hand of the pro-ECSC faction within the DGB. On 7 May, the DGB federal committee expressed approval for the Schuman Plan, though with a series of reservations that included the maintenance of the Ruhr coal sales cartel.Footnote ⁹⁴ The DGB executive thus broke with the SPD, a situation which created considerable unrest in the unions. Riding a wave of discontent at the DGB congress the next year, Freitag defeated the pro-ECSC union leadership and became chair of the trade union federation. After years of unease and conflict that had begun with a split over the French plans on the IAR in 1949, social democrats were firmly back in charge in the DGB. From then on, the SPD and the unions would coordinate their approach in the new common market for coal and steel to defend the interests of Ruhr industry and its workers.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Labor Perspective: European Integration, Socialist Parties, and Political Competition in Former Industrial Regions

Scholars have often explained the SPD’s decision to oppose the ECSC as resulting from the “nationalism” of party leader Kurt Schumacher,Footnote ⁹⁶ but German social democrats did not oppose the Schuman Plan because they were against “European unity”. They opposed it because they thought that it would damage their working-class constituency in the Ruhr that was increasingly turning their backs on the communists in this period in favor of social democrats. In 1945–1949, French socialists and German social democrats engaged in intense competition, particularly on a grass-roots level, with communists for power in the factories and mines of industrial areas rich with historic and symbolic importance. As this article has highlighted, SPD intransigence toward French policies and its opposition to the Schuman Plan were in large part an effort to thwart a communist revival in the Ruhr. Opposition to ECSC, in this context, should therefore be read less as a kind of “anti-European” stance than as the result of the party’s anti-communist policy. In France, on the other hand, the socialist party had lost its battle with communists for the support of a majority of miners in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and was willing to sacrifice French coal to attain broader economic goals. Divergent postwar political outcomes in the central industrial regions of France and Germany therefore contributed to the SPD’s rejection of the Schuman Plan, and the SFIO’s decision to accept it.

Fixated on politics at the national level, scholars have overlooked how regional influences and labor politics affected national party policies on European integration. For over half a century now, the Ruhr has been a SPD stronghold. The political dominance of social democrats in the Ruhr was, to a high degree, an accomplishment of Fritz Henssler, who denounced the Schuman Plan due to the impact he foresaw it would have on Ruhr workers. The SPD responded to these concerns by naming Henssler as one of the party’s delegates to the emerging ECSC Common Assembly, the quasi-parliamentary body which opened in 1952. He died in 1953 after a long illness, and the defense of Ruhr workers in the community passed to other SPD officials. In the end, his fears of French exploitation of the Ruhr would not bear out. A tacit “grand coalition” of German industry, trade unions, social democrats and Christian democrats defeated the 1951 French vision of a coal and steel community free of cartels. By 1954, the SPD had made its peace with a community it had so doggedly opposed.

That same year, many French socialist supporters of the ECSC voted against the European Defense Community (EDC), a treaty for another supranational European community that failed to pass the French National Assembly in August 1954. Most French socialists who opposed the EDC were not against the idea of “European integration”, which was a novel and amorphous concept at the time, any more than were German social democratic opponents of the ECSC.Footnote ⁹⁷ Rather, they voted against German rearmament and for negotiations to peacefully end the Cold War. Here again, it seems less that those French miners who believed that their jobs were on the line when the Schuman Plan came to a vote were driven by “anti-European” feelings or were explicitly opposed to supranational forms of international cooperation. In the 1950s, CGT leaders denounced the initial steps of European integration using two levels of analysis: a geopolitical frame of Cold War aggression against the Soviet Union and a national-economic claim that the government and the Socialist Party did not care about workers’ problems. SFIO leaders, for their part, insisted that the forces that we today label as “globalization” required economic modernization, the reconversion of declining industries, and the retraining of their workers to other occupations. After the ECSC opened, the High Authority and later the European Commission made halting efforts to mitigate the protracted crisis of de-industrialization that hit Western Europe’s miners in the 1960s, and then its steel workers in the 1970–1980s.Footnote ⁹⁸ More recently, the far right has gained substantial support in former industrial areas with its anti-EU message, especially in the areas of northern France discussed in this article, where the socialist party is currently in crisis. It is worthwhile reflecting more deeply on why workers at times have opposed European integration – including, as discussed in this article, why a fair number opposed it before it even began.