Heavy industry, company paternalism, and political culture in the Saar, 1889-1914.

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between factory work and public life in the heavy industrial Saar valley of southwest Germany over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It stresses the need to examine the role of culture and politics in the formation of work relations and in the modalities of labor conflict. In this way, it addresses two main themes in German historiography: the debate over the alleged "backwardness" of the German bourgeoisie and the interest in the growth of organized labor. The chronological focus of this study is on the years from 1889 to 1914, when the structures of large-scale industry became fully consolidated and the contours of mass politics emerged in the Saar. Chapter one traces the development of the Saar paternalist factory regime over the last third of the nineteenth century and emphasizes its gendered structures of discipline and control and its embeddedness in the public life of the wider industrial community. Chapter two assesses the first major challenge to the paternalist regime in the Saar--the mass miners' strikes during the years between 1889-1893--and the relationship between worker opposition and state intervention in the affairs of heavy industry. It demonstrates that the attempt to regulate working conditions via state mediation inadvertently authorized worker protest against employers. The remaining chapters explore the consequences of worker militance for social and political relations in the region in the decades before 1914. Chapter three examines the growing popularity of a moralizing reform discourse, particularly in its gendered dimensions, and the role of confessional associations in spreading the message of social reform. This theme is developed further in chapter four which traces the destabilizing effects of the growing public debate over social reform on the paternalist factory regime. Chapter five examines the growth of trade unions and employer combinations after 1900 as products of a public debate over the legal and civil rights of workers. Finally, chapters six and seven explore the emergence of a new corporatist discourse that structured and gave meaning to industrial work and politics in the Saar after 1900.