The Worker Gardens Movement: Proposals for Social Reform in France, 1896-1928

Tens of thousands of working-class families living in the industrial cities of early twentieth-century France raised their own crops for their daily nutrition. In the gardens attached to their small houses and in allotment gardens at the cities' edge, parents and children tended lots and watered a variety of crops, which guaranteed that there would be something to eat on the table every day. This was a development begun with local priests, charitable people, and professionals founding small allotment gardens in industrializing northern France. However, urban workers' involvement in subsistence agriculture was not an exceptionally French experience. A number of countries in northern Europe and cities and companies in the United States created such gardens for the urban poor at the turn of the century. Historians, however, have rarely discussed the importance of this form of self-sustained nutrition during the Second Industrial Revolution. This is in part because these gardens were so ordinary that they did not attract scholarly attention and also in part because historians have prioritized the interpretation of discourse and ideologies over construing the significance of the everyday practice of gardening. This dissertation attempts to provide a possible answer for the popularity of these gardens at the turn of the century by closely studying the French allotment garden association, La ligue francaise du coin de terre et du foyer (hereafter the League).;The dissertation looks into the history behind seemingly mundane vegetable gardens by exploring the discourses, actions, and daily engagement of local notables and workers in the realization of the gardens. It not only uncovers patterns of changing concerns, anxiety, and desires in a modernizing world, but also presents a social effort to adapt to this new world by implanting an old technology of living, agriculture, into urban life for the working population. This adaptation created a hybrid culture and a new kind of identity among the working classes in modern France by giving them a sense of pride in being producers and helped to create a collective identity among gardening workers, who shared the pleasure of self-sufficiency in a mass consumption society.