ABSTRACT
The history of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT)2 was originally inscribed in the political history of revolutionary unionism, of the unionism of “class struggles.” The CGT as we know it today was born of a 1921 split, when it decided to break with reformists and to adopt the resolution of the congress of the first Red Trade Union International that was created by the Bolsheviks and recommended an organic relation between political parties and unions. The political and ideological “lines” that defined the CGT have been much transformed over time. The influence of the left, especially of the communist left, has drastically weakened. We are now confronted with what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) calls the “age of extremes,” that is to say, with a diminution, at the global level (and elsewhere), of traditions linked to socialism and Marxism.3
