World Wars of the Twentieth Century 321time armaments industry. Women, children, foreigners, prisoners of
war, and mutilated veterans, together with the soldiers assigned to
duty in armaments plants, far outnumbered civilian male workers.^32
Such a work force was more pliable than its German or British coun
terparts, among whom socialist traditions, shop rules of long standing,
and traditional skills all stood in the way of the sort of radical re
structuring of work procedures that prevailed in France.
Two other factors also helped. From the political side, the first
minister of munitions, Albert Thomas, was a socialist politician and
graduate of the Ecole Normale of Paris. He surrounded himself with
fellow normaliens whose technocratic bent and socialist leanings were
like his own. Such managers were more adept at keeping industrialists
and workers smoothly in harness than were the haughty army officers
who played the parallel role in Germany.^33
Most important of all was the fact that the French war economy did
not depend wholly on its own resources. Large amounts of coal and
metal had to be imported from England to replace what had been lost
behind German lines. Whenever other critical items ran short, they
could be purchased abroad, either in England or in the United
States—at least to begin with. But when first the English (in 1915) and
then the American (in 1917) markets became overloaded with orders,
so that serious delays in delivery multiplied, new means for concerting
inter-Allied war production became necessary. Reorganization even
tually established an international division of labor, planned at inter-
Allied conferences and implemented by international administrative
agencies the most important of which was the Allied Maritime Trans
port Council.
French dependence on Britain and America for fuel, raw materials,
and increasingly also for food^34 was registered by mounting war debts
that bedeviled postwar international relations. But during the war
itself, overseas purchases allowed the French to concentrate their re-
- Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1977), p. 86, gives the following summary of workers in French arms plants in
November 1918: 497,000 soldiers; 430,000 women; 425,000 male civilian Frenchmen;
169,000 foreigners and colonials; 137,000 youths below draft age; 40,000 POWs; 13,000
mutilated veterans; making a total of 1,711,000. - The biography by B. W. Schaper, Albert Thomas: Trente ans de réformisme sociale
(Assen, 1959) is apologetic in tone but very informative. - In 1917 the French grain harvest dropped from its 1909—13 average of 8.5
million tons to a mere 3.1 million. At one time the food situation became so critical that
the army had only a two-day supply of grain in stock; but disaster was forestalled by
allocating shipping to bring supplies from overseas. Accordingly, American grain
flooded in and food stocks were again adequate early in 1918. See Clémentel, La France
et la politique économique interalliée, p. 233.