Every Factory a Fortress

French trade unions played a historical role in the 1930s quite unlike that of any other labor movement. Against a backdrop of social unrest, parliamentary crisis, and impending world war, industrial unionists in the great metal-fabricating plants of the Paris Region carried out a series of street mobilizations, factory occupations, and general strikes that were virtually unique in Western history. The unionization of the metal industry, following a series of anti-fascist demonstrations and plant seizures, would constitute the defining episode in modern French labor history and one of the great chapters in European social history. Yet little is known of these extraordinary events.

Michael Torigian, an independent scholar residing in Alameda, California, spent nearly a decade in the American labor movement before studying history at the University of California and sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales