Confédération générale du travail unitaire
French labor federation
The Confédération générale du travail unitaire, or CGTU (English: United General Confederation of Labor), was a trade union confederation in France that at first included anarcho-syndicalists and soon became aligned with the French Communist Party. It was founded in 1922 as a confederation of radical unions that had left the socialist-dominated General Confederation of Labour (CGT), and in 1936 merged back into the CGT.
Foundation
The CGTU emerged from a split in the General Confederation of Labour (CGT: Confédération générale du travail), which had been torn by confrontations between socialist members of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO: Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière) and the more radical anarcho-syndicalists and members of the French Communist Party (PCF: Parti communiste français).
The CGTU took the majority of the CGT with it.
Initially the syndicalists and anarchists outnumbered the communists.
Joseph Tommasi, a member of the PCF executive committee, attended the congress in Saint-Étienne on 25 June – 1 July 1922 at which the syndicates, unions and federations that had been excluded from the CGT founded the CGTU.
The dynamic new organization was attached to peace and to the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle.
As a member of the anarcho-syndicalist minority of the CGT, Gaston Monmousseau became General Secretary of the CGTU, a position he held until 1933.
History
Over the first two or three years many of the syndicalists joined the communist movement, including leaders such as Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte.
Later the syndicalists became disillusioned with the control exerted by Moscow over the party, and the Trotskyite purges.
Marie Guillot founded a new "unitary" confederation of teachers, with its first confederal Congress held at Saint-Étienne in June 1922.
Marie Guillot took an intermediate position in the continuum of revolutionary syndicalism, while recognizing the merits of the Soviet Revolution.
The public source identifies “Confédération générale du travail unitaire” as french labor federation. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Confédération, générale and travail.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2992762. VIAF identifies the subject as 143987753. The Library of Congress control number is n89612344. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1936 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Confédération générale du travail unitaire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.