Christian Chevandier's Cheminots en Greve is a social, political, and institutional history of railroad workers in France from 1848 to 2001. It is told from the standpoint of the role of strikes in forming the occupational identity of these workers, known in France as cheminots (Chevandier finds the earliest use of the expression dating back to 1898; by the 1930s the Academie Francaise officially recognized it as a French word). Cheminots belong to various crafts and trades. They drive the trains, repair locomotives and rolling stock in shops and factories, sell tickets in stations and collect them in trains. Although the book is largely structured around a chronological account of railway strikes, Chevandier looks beyond the strike for sources of cheminot identity. These include the evolving structure of the French railroad system from private companies to state ownership, the role of skill and technological change, and especially union strategies, structures, and above all divisions. Along the way he revisits earlier treatments of French labor and railworker history, and takes up old historiographical controversies debating, confirming, and refuting well-known scholars from Annie Kriegel to historians of a younger generation like George Ribeill and Atsushi Fukasawa.

Cheminots have a reputation in France as militant workers and Chevandier offers iconographical evidence to this reputation, including discussions of films like La Bete Humaine featuring Jean Gabin as a steam locomotive engineer, La Bataille du Rail, and the more recent Nadia et les Hippotames. However, the reader gets little sense of how they compared in strike behavior to other French workers. Although a reference to Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly's Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (1974) is the first of the book's hundreds of footnotes, the author missed an opportunity to place the cheminots in a broader context by systematically drawing from this or other quantitative studies of French strikes. Nonetheless, Chevandier draws from a vast amount of primary and secondary sources and the results are impressive.

Chevandier, who teaches at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, is well positioned to write such an ambitious book. He is the author of numerous articles on railway workers, a contributor to the vast Jean Maitron biographical collection of French worker activists, and author of Cheminots en usine, a book based on his 1025-page dissertation on workers in the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranean (PLM) locomotive shops in Oullins, an industrial suburb of Lyon. There too, Chevandier focused on identity. The Oullins workers worked in a factory at traditional metal working trades. Nevertheless, their employment in a PLM shop helped foster a corporative identity as railway workers.

In this latest, nationwide look at cheminots, Chevandier sees the source of cheminot identity as a mélange of cultures including those of skilled worker, public sector worker, and part of a corporation seen as vital to the nation. All of this came together in strikes. By the beginning of the Third Republic the cheminots have the “consciousness of belonging to a distinct social group even when they work in factories” and other industrial sites (40).

The first general rail strike is in 1910. The frightened government of Aristide Briand considered it a “purely insurrectional” strike and took the extraordinary step of militarizing the lines, thus putting the cheminots under military authority and discipline. Although no more than a third of the workforce of any rail line actually struck, Chevandier considers this strike of the utmost importance for the formation of cheminot identity. Indeed he calls it the first cheminot strike because, “beyond craft particularities, the proletarian world of the workers in the depots and shops and the skilled world of conductors and engineers ( . . . ) united in one sole corporation in struggle” (77).

Chevandier offers a sustained discussion of the fateful 1920 rail strike. That strike was brutally crushed by a conservative government fearing the Russian-style revolutionary situation that seemed to be developing from Italy to Seattle. Some union leaders were jailed while hundreds of others were fired and blacklisted for years. The experience chilled cheminot protest impulses to such a degree that no significant strike occurred on French railroads throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including the May-June 1936 strikes—France's largest ever until 1968. It is also been an ongoing source of debate amongst historians and labor militants ever since.

The strike was at the center of Annie Kriegel's famous dissertation and later book Aux origines du Communisme Français whose main thesis is that communism was foreign to the traditions of the French labor movement and was artificially grafted onto it. Chevandier credits Kriegel with developing pioneering quantitative research methods of analyzing strikes (which were based on archival evidence since destroyed during the renovation of the Gare de Lyon) but sees methodological problems flowing from her short-term vision of the strike (strange in Chevandier's eyes, as Kriegel wrote her dissertation under the direction of Ernest Labrousse, a proponent of the “longue duree”). He also sees the conditions and period under which she wrote Aux origines to have had a detrimental effect on her analyses. When Kreigel began her dissertation in 1955 she was a full-time Parti Communiste Français (PCF) official. The next year she left the party in protest of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. By the time she published an updated version of the portions of her work dealing with the strike of 1920 against the background of the 1986 transportation strikes, she had become a journalist for the conservative daily, Le Figaro. Chevandier finds these vantage points problematic because they prevented her from grasping the “emancipatory” antihierarchical sentiments of the cheminots expressed “from below.”

A central theme of this book is the divisions within the French labor movement and their effects on the trade unions. Division in the French labor movement was often directly a reflection of the clash of the political forces allayed with each union confederation.

Early divisions included struggles between “revolutionaries” and “reformists,” centralizers and federalists, anarchists who insisted on strict working-class independence from all politicians and socialists like Jules Guesde who viewed unions as subordinate to working-class political parties. Later, many revolutionary syndicalists joined forces with the pro-PCF split off from the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) in 1921, the CGTU. But many of those later left. In the 1930s the CGT and CGTU fused into a larger, PCF-controlled CGT. By 1938 seventy percent of all railworkers were CGT members. But in later years the CGT had to compete with other union federations like the CFDT, CFTC, and FO.

Communist trade unionists benefited at times from the prestige that the Soviet Union enjoyed in the eyes of many workers in France in the 1920s and 1930s. But at other times these same connections put Communist union officials in impossible positions. For example, while the Stalin-Hitler pact was widely denounced as a betrayal in labor circles, PCF trade unionists defended it. Such support led immediately to the end of Pierre Semard's leadership of the CGT rail union. In 1947 the PCF and CGT opposed popular strikes because the PCF was in the government. In fact, they even initiated a Stakhanovist-like productivist program by which the PCF and the CGT encouraged increased production and discouraged strikes. The appointment of PCF leader Charles Fiterman as transportation minister under Mitterand in the 1980s led to the same contradictions. CGT and PCF support for the crackdown against Solidarnosc in Poland in 1981 was also difficult to explain. In each of these circumstances, union membership declined.

After 1968 new phenomena began to emerge in the French labor movement. While earlier tensions led to the replacement of one set of leaders by another and the occasional formation of rival unions, all established union structures were now under attack. By the 1980s strike committees and coordinations were formed outside of what was perceived as the antidemocratic, bureaucratic leadership of the main unions. Chevandier explains these developments in French labor in part as the delayed effects of the May 1968 strikes and student demonstrations as well as the increasing educational levels of French workers. In spite of the efforts of union bureaucrats to isolate Trostksyists and Maoist revolutionaries from young workers in May 1968, these workers did come into contact with and imbibe some of the militant, antibureaucratic values these political currents incarnated. During the postal and rail strikes in these sectors in the mid-1990s these workers founded new, more militant and democratic unions in the rail and postal sectors called the SUD.

The author concludes his book by characterizing a century and a half of cheminot strikes as continuity within change. Christian Chevandier has indeed made the case that while the forms of the debates within rail unions and nation-wide debates on the character of public service at the dawn of the twenty-first century may look original, most do have deep roots. Plus ça change ( . . . ).