France

The first strike organised by French teachers took place in secondary schools in 1927. Admittedly the “baccalauréat” strike cannot be regarded legally as a true strike, but rather was a movement of collective abstention, at a time when secondary school teachers were not yet required to be members of the boards of examiners for the baccalauréat (an exam that is the prerequisite for higher education). This action, launched by the national union of secondary school teachers, is nonetheless surprising, since this union – as opposed to that of the SNI (which is the union of primary school teachers) – had refused to be part of the CGT (the French General Confederation of Workers). Indeed, secondary school teachers tend to regard themselves as members of the liberal professions. Consequently, historians describe the 1927 baccalauréat strike as a step towards greater collective consciousness among secondary schools teachers. The baccalauréat strike might be viewed as the beginning of a progressive social movement, foreshadowing future strikes, those of the 1930s and those that followed the Second World War. However, to understand the true meaning of that strike, one should, in fact, refer to previous attempts at raising salaries, and take into account rivalries between different categories of teachers. The baccalauréat strike was actually started by “agrégé” teachers (the only category of secondary school teachers entitled to be on the baccalauréat boards of examiners, along with holders of a doctorate degree), trying to prove their social clout, and to prevent the authorities from yielding to the demands of federations representing the largest categories of teachers. Their arm was both to avoid the levelling out of salaries and to force the authorities to push through the wage increase they had promised. If the strike is to be considered a success, it is less because it mobilised teachers to fight a right‐wing government than because it proved to secondary school teachers that they were able to stand up to the forces of the SNI. In addition, it is worth noting that this strike, staged by the elite against the masses, was backed by the most conservative union members. All the same, this reactionary strike outraged the bourgeois press, which took offence at the fact that the agrégés, those highly regarded teachers trained and selected to teach the social elite, should behave like the mass of workers. The French Education Minister, Édouard Herriot, himself an arts agrégé, who was shocked by the behaviour of his former colleagues, decided to give in to an old demand of high school instructors (holders of a Bachelor's degree) and allow them to become members of baccalauréat boards of examiners. This was to make future strikes even more complicated. In any case, the government issued a decree in 1928 making it compulsory for all secondary school teachers to be on baccalauréat boards of examiners. As a result, the 1927 baccalauréat strike was viewed with mixed feelings by those who originated it: although wage increases were pushed through, the pre‐eminence of agrégés in secondary education was dealt a blow. Thus it reopened the debate on whether agrégé teachers should really behave like ordinary workers

General strike · Meaning (existential · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Secondary education · Sociology · Education, sociology, and vocational training · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Psychology