Revolutionaries are like rockets. Some blow up with a bang and destroy the property and people around them. Others go off to where they can view the wider world in perspective. But a few are like two-stage rockets which, already in orbit, are ready to take off again to explore new levels of experience. Such a man was Maurice Mercier, the French textile workers’ leader.
Mercier was born in 1907 and brought up by his grandparents in a village near Lyon. After a limited schooling he went to work in a local textile factory, where trade unions were unpopular. When elected branch secretary at 20 he knew of the risk to his livelihood.
1930 an economic crisis hit France. There was a succession of wage-cuts and strikes. Mercier was sacked and remained unemployed for 18 months. He studied Marx and was trained by the Communist Party in the tactics of united industrial and political action which were to bring about the social reforms of 1936. The unions won the promise of a 40-hour week, collective contracts and holidays with pay. Maurice became a full time official with the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), representing the textile workers of the Paris region.
Mercier was a short, sturdily built man with a ruddy complexion. In conversation his voice was remarkably quiet. But in public he could rouse an audience with his fiery intensity. He was very well informed through extensive reading and a skilled negotiator.
When war came the Communist Party was split by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Mercier joined the Resistance. In a train in 1941 he read that 22 of his friends and colleagues had been shot. It was a terrible moment. Should be get out of the Resistance; was he willing to give his life? ‘The train was unheated; I was hungry. I was cold. . . . Then I found a place of silence in my heart and all at once I decided that I would fight on whatever happened. I knew immediately it was the right decision - I was warm. I wasn't hungry any longer and my morale was like iron. That was when I discovered that there really is a higher force which comes into play when you give yourself to the greater good of mankind.’
One night, finding himself in the midst of police patrols searching for an escaped prisoner. He strolled calmly past and got away. As on each dangerous occasion this supposedly convinced atheist, admitted years later, ‘As a normal reflex action I thought of God and my mother, l made a rapid examination of my conscience. In such moments dialectic is deaf.'
Before the Liberation came, Mercier was given the job of re-forming the French trade unions and became General Secretary of the textile federation. But peace also brought disillusionment. ln place of the war-time loyalty there were petty jealousies and selfish interests. He was deeply disturbed by Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. This was not what he had risked his life for. Mercier left the Communist Party and the CGT to build up the break-away Socialist Force Ouvriere where he was leader of the textile workers.
In 1960 Mercier blasted off again into a new and largely uncharted revolutionary orbit. Some textile employers from Northern France had suggested they discuss their national wage agreement in Caux, the Swiss conference centre for Moral Re-Armament.
Mercier was fascinated to see several hundred people there living with a common aim and without strife. Some were employers who were rethinking their outdated attitudes as employers and as men.
Robert Carmichael, head of the French jute industry, stated his new convictions. ‘We need a complete revolution in industry, and this implies a fundamental change in our aims. lt is no longer enough for us in management to work only for our profits, nor for the workers to aim only at earning their wages. We must combine our strengths to meet the needs of all men and rebuild the world.’
Mercier saw the significance of this for his troubled industry. The following summer he brought over 80 textile delegations of management, workers and union officials to the Caux conferences. An atmosphere of trust was created which made possible the historic agreement of 1953. 'The textile industry', it began, 'intends to make an economic and social experiment in the interests of the nation, in a spirit of service, with a social objectively.' Ten years later, Mercier reported, ’This experiment has given at least an 8% wage increase per year to the half million men and women in the industry, a third week of paid holiday and additional retirement pensions. And the textile industry had had the fewest recorded strikes.’
But it wasn't all plain sailing. By the end of 1953 inflation was rising steeply and strikes spread across the country. Prime Minister Antoine Pinay asked the textile industry to help. The employers agreed to freeze prices and the unions settled for an 8% increase.
Mainly described their response in Le Figaro as, ‘one of the first solid achievements on the road of change which is essential to the economic survival of the country.'
lt was a great vindication of Mercier's policy of building trust through honest negotiation that during the industrial and street violence which hit France in 1968, the textile industry was scarcely affected. In fact the workers in other industries were then given some of the benefits which textile workers had enjoyed for 15 years.
ln 1971, Maurice Mercier, now a sick man, was awarded the Legion of Honour in recognition of his services to France, ‘as a Resistance leader, as a militant trade unionist and as a man’. A few months before he died he called together a group of his trade union friends from six European countries to talk about the future. There was one big question on his mind, ‘How should man live in a world of plenty?’ 'Just as a future of abundance and freedom is opening up,’ he said, ‘we see the collapse of the values on which our industrial countries were built. Class war today means one half of humanity against the other, each possessing a powerful arsenal of destruction . The choice for each of us is to create a revolution through our faith and our conscience or to suffer a revolution imposed by force. lf we want the men of today and the men of tomorrow to continue the forward march of civilisation, we must call on a higher power.'
Then Mercier gave a thoughtful assessment of Moral Re-Armament. ‘Just as in the last century men's genius gave birth to economic reforms, so in this century, MRA will still lead us to the great moral and ideological reforms and to the creation of unity. Not one cry of hatred, not one hour of work lost, not one drop of blood shed – that is the revolution to which MRA calls bosses and workers. You do not realise the great potential for revolution that you have.' He then talked about ‘the compelling need for man's spirit to venture forth beyond human thought and perception.’
Could it be that he was thinking of a ‘third-stage?’
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