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 O n the morning of August 3, 1918, a delegation from the Fédération Nationale des Instituteurs (FNSI) congregated in Paris for the annual meeting and was met with a rude surprise. The meeting was to take place at the headquarters of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), located at the Maison des Syndicats on the rue de la Grange-aux-Belles.1 When the delegates turned onto the impasse Chausson to get to the main entrance of the building, a blockade of police was there to meet them. The CGT members who were with the teachers, including the secretary general, Léon Jouhaux, would be permitted to enter, but the FNSI members were restricted. The government’s maneuver was unexpected. Although the wartime congresses of 1916 and 1917 had been conducted under heavy surveillance, the radical teachers had not received any notice that this year’s congress would be outlawed. The attendees scattered and reconvened at the restaurant Combes on the rue de la Bretagne, several blocks south of their arranged meeting place. According to a police report , ten minutes after the teachers’ arrival at the restaurant, the famous (or, from the perspective of the political regime, notorious) pacifist institutrice Hél ène Brion left with one of her comrades to meet with Fernand Loriot, treasurer of the FNSI throughout the war years.2 About an hour later, the teachers reconvened at the Chamber of Deputies, where Jean-Pierre Raffin-Dugens, a socialist sympathizer in the parliament and former instituteur, welcomed them.3 RaffinDugens offered the teachers a room to hold their congress and officially made them his guests. For the remainder of the afternoon, teachers came and left the assembly hall, meeting with one another and other Parisian militants. With help from its political allies, the FNSI salvaged their rendezvous and reasserted their Selective Engagement and Teachers’ Politics in France, 1887–1950 5 96 The Politics of Selective Engagement opposition to the war, the necessity of class conflict, and support for the recent Bolshevik Revolution. Thirty years later, with two world wars behind them, the French teachers met in congress to vote on whether to remain affiliated with the CGT. Although the teachers’ unions had long been established by this time, the question of their relationship to the broader labor movement remained an open one. During most of the 1930s, all except the most radical teachers’ organizations were affiliated with the CGT, but World War II broke these alignments. In March 1948, representatives of the 160,000 teachers—primary, secondary, and higher education—in the Fédération de l’Éducation Nationale (FEN) voted by a huge majority to remain independent of the CGT. More than ever before, the CGT’s internal ruptures were costing it prestige and support from within and without its ranks, while the FEN drew most of the teachers’ organizations under the same umbrella.4 This was also a more strident teachers’ corps than the teachers of the post–World War I period. The instituteurs of the Seine had struck for three weeks in the autumn of 1947 without suffering any sanctions from the central government.5 The FEN that emerged in the postwar period was a centrally organized trade union. By 1950, the central government had officially legalized public-sector worker organizations, as well as the right to strike. The FEN would become one of the largest trade unions in France until it fragmented in 1992. Selective engagement politics account for the ultimate success of teacher mobilization during the first half of the early twentieth century. By the time France went to war in 1914, a number of socially recognized differences had congealed into distinguishable cleavages within the teachers’ corps, and no cleavage was more politically significant than that between moderates and radicals. Beginning with the 1903 split within the teachers’ movement, the French government began selectively engaging with the teachers’ associations, dealing with the moderate amicales in an attempt to marginalize the radical syndicats. Over the course of the next two decades, the French state sought to keep the teachers divided, not only in terms of radicalism but also with regard to gender and professional differences. Now, however, the teachers were organized , politically assertive, and seeking alliances in the broader labor movement . By the end of the Third Republic, the French state had all but ceased to repress teachers’ public claim-making activities, and when the teachers’ unions returned to public politics after the war, the state...

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