The question was a very practical one. The government of Waldeck-Rousseau (22 June, 1899-6 June, 1902), in which the socialist, Millerand, was Minister of Commerce and Industry, outlined a number of labor laws which touched upon the most vital questions of the labor movement. The most important of these law-projects were on strikes and arbitration, on the composition of the superior Council of Labor, on the institution of Councils of Labor, and on the modification of the law of 1884.
The policy of the government in planning these laws was clear and expressly stated. It was the continuation and accentuation of the policy which had guided M. Waldeck-Rousseau in 1884 when he was Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet of Jules Ferry, and which had then found partial expression in the ministerial circular on the application of the new law on syndicats.
This "Circular," sent out to the Prefects August 25, 1884, pointed out to the Prefects that it was the duty of the State not merely to watch over the strict observation of the law, but "to favor the spirit of association" among the workingmen and "to stimulate" the latter to make use of the new right. In the conception of the government the syndicats were to be "less a weapon of struggle" than "an instrument of material, moral and intellectual progress." It was "the wish of the Government and of the Chambers to see the propagation, in the largest possible measure, of the trade associations and of the institutions which they were destined to engender" (such as old-age pension funds, mutual credit banks, libraries, co-operative societies, etc.) and the government expected the Prefects "to lend active assistance" in the organization of syndicats and in the creation of syndical institutions.[124]
[124] See the "Circulaire" in G. Severac, _Guide Pratique des Syndicats Professionnels_ (Paris, 1908), pp. 125-136.
The aim of Waldeck-Rousseau was to bring about the "alliance of the bourgeoisie and of the working-class"[125] which Gambetta and other republican statesmen had untiringly preached as the only condition of maintaining the Republic. In the period 1899-1902 this policy seemed still more indispensable. It was the time when the agitation caused by the Dreyfus affair assumed the character of a struggle between the republican and anti-republican forces of France. Republicans, Radicals, Socialists, and Anarchists were fighting hand in hand against Monarchists, Nationalists, Anti-Semites and Clericals. The cabinet of Waldeck-Rousseau constituted itself a "Cabinet of Republican Defense" and it sought to attain its end by securing the support of all republican elements of the country. This was the cause which prompted Waldeck-Rousseau to invite a socialist, Millerand, to enter his cabinet and to accentuate his policy of attaching the working-class to the Republic by a series of protective labor laws.