In the years before World War I, Leon Jouhaux, radical young secretary general of France's labor federation (C.G.T.), raised the hair of his countrymen by plunging Paris into darkness, freezing the railroads and docks, introducing the quickie strike (grève éclair) and the slowdown (grève perlée). A red-hot anarcho-syndicalist risen from the factories, Jouhaux liked to boast that if war came, labor in all Europe would quench it by a general strike. But when war came, Jouhaux was a Frenchman after all. ("Heinous traitor," shrieked Lenin.)
After the war, Jouhaux helped found the International Labor Organization at the Paris peace conference....
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