Broch is of two minds about the community of workers that she studies. For much of Broch’s book, railwaymen, or cheminots, are presented as a conservative, hierarchical-minded bunch, loath to strike and protective of the tools of their trade, from the mighty locomotive on down. Yet, by the time her story draws to a conclusion, sometime in the late 1940s, cheminots have become involved in Resistance sabotage and a rash of occasionally violent postwar work stoppages. The two views are not incompatible; it is interesting to note how Broch fits them together.
The argument for cheminot conservatism hinges on two points. A great strike wave welcomed the arrival of Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in 1936, but railwaymen did not take part. During the war, France’s national rail service, the sncf, helped to ship Jews from internment to transit camps within France and then to camps in the...