Communism in Rural France: French Agricultural Workers and the Popular Front Book

* Tables and Illustrations
• Introduction
• The Legacy of pre-1914 French Socialism
• The emergence of the ‘peasant question’
• Socialist agrarianism
• The French agricultural worker in the early twentieth century
• Socialists and the agricultural strike movement
• Communist agrarianism, 1921-28
• The Comintern and the agricultural proletariat
• The Marseille thesis: ‘nothing has changed’
• Post-war agricultural workers’ unionism
• The ‘absurdity’ of the class struggle in the countryside
• ‘Class against Class’ in the countryside, 1928-34
• The agricultural proletariat at the centre of agrarian strategy
• The FUA during the ‘class against class’ period (1928-32)
• Winter 1932/3: a new orientation
• Communists and the agricultural labour force, 1933-35
• ‘A rural proletariat comparable to the industrial proletariat’
• Building the FUA in the Calais region
• Vive Marcel Cachin!’, ‘Vive Monsieur Béhin!’
• Agricultural workers’ unionism and the immigrant worker
• The Peasant Popular Front
• Rebellion in the fields, 1936-37
• ‘We will no longer be common bastards’
• The communists and the Calais strike movement
• Who led the farm strikes?
• An agricultural Matignon?
• The 20 July ‘general strike’
• The Battle of Arras
• The FNTA in face of a counter-offensive
• 1937: Radicalisation and defeat
• Characteristics of the farm strikes
• The farm strikes as community struggles * Farm occupations
• Immigrant workers: the ‘spearhead of the movement’?
• The farm strikes and the policy of 'peasant unity'
• Waldeck Rochet and the strike movement
• The strikes and the ‘small and middling’ farmers
• Uniting workers and farmers in the Cantal
• A ‘fascist provocation’ in the Calvados
• Two ideas on ‘peasant unity’
• Conclusion
• Sources
• Bibliography *