The Bourse du Travail (French for "labour exchanges"), a French form of the labour council, were working class organizations that encouraged mutual aid, education, and self-organization amongst their members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Role
Labour
Early Third Republic France was a time of dramatic social and economic change. With the tremendous growth of industrial capitalism in the last twenty years of the 19th century and the continued migration of workers to cities, the traditional system of meeting places for those seeking work was overtaxed. Skilled and unskilled trades alike had gradually developed systems to match those seeking work with employers, but the legalisation of trades unions in 1884, helped formalise these structures. Employers, too, were creating private labour placement offices.
The Republican government of Gambetta relied upon the support of working class voters, and so helped create the first Bourses du Travail under the control of newly legalised labour unions. Socialists and radicals, elected to city offices in some areas, made the funding of Bourses du Travail a priority. As the system expanded, radicals in local government extended aid. The loi du 14 mars 1904 mandated that every city of over ten thousand inhabitants had to create a bureau de placement, establishing job offices and undercutting employer run placement agencies. These government offices were usually placed in the local Bourses du Travail.
With government support came government regulation. While there was no legal obligation for the state or the municipality to put in place these buildings, their construction helped both the workers' movement and surveillance of its activities. Business interests and the police saw the formalisation of Bourses du Travail as a way to channel the labour movement away from revolutionary change or to keep an eye on those who promoted it.
Role in revolutionary ideology
The ideology behind the explosion in Bourses du Travail, popularized by revolutionary syndicalists like Fernand Pelloutier, intended to create in them the key organizational component of radical economic transformation. By acting as future co-ordinating bodies, facilitating communication between syndicates (unions), the Bourse du Travail would co-ordinate production and consumption in the absence of both the state and the private ownership of the means of production. These institutions were central to the notion of Revolutionary Syndicalism which dominated the Confédération Générale du Travail, France's largest labor federation in the first twenty years on the 20th century. Pelloutier and other revolutionary syndicalists argued that the Bourses—small scale, local, self made—were the guarantee that the CGT would remain both directly democratic and revolutionary. They saw labor organizations as interconnecting in three ways: a national federation uniting each specific union (traditional craft or trade unions); a national federation of all unions (in this case, the CGT); and all local workers, across union and political boundaries, united in the Bourse du travail. Supporters of the Bourse movement believed this structure last should become the most important form of workers' association.
Cultural
The other major change of this period was the Republican promulgation of Laic laws, taking education out of the hands of the Catholic church, and eventually taxing and regulating Church institutions. Bourses du Travail, like civil marriage or lay funerals, filled a communal role once played by local parishes.
Bourses du Travail were centres of working class culture. Almost every one contained lending libraries, classrooms, meeting halls, and theatres. Family and community celebrations took place here (away from the church), as did classes and political discussions, formal meetings and light entertainment. The Bourses du Travail buildings are still often the locations of theatres and concert venues.
History
Birth in the Third Republic
The idea of French labour exchanges far predates the institution. In 1790, at the height of the French Revolution, an abortive Bourse du Travail was established in Paris. The loi Le Chapelier of 1791 outlawed this and any other labour organisation, and despite the brief legalisation during the Second Republic, unions remained illegal until 1884. Adolphe Leullier presented in 1845 a similar project which he called the Bureau central des ouvriers.