Life was hard for young workers in interwar France. Most left school at fourteen, beginning a life of exhausting, insecure and poorly paid industrial labour. Things weren’t much better at home: working-class housing was overcrowded, public services were scarce, and alcohol abuse was rife. Poverty bred disaffection, and disaffection bred radicalism. In 1925, an insurgent Communist Party performed startlingly well in municipal elections, surrounding Paris with a ‘red belt’ of industrialised suburbs. To many political observers, social upheaval seemed inevitable.
To the Catholic Church, this was an unmissable opportunity. Catholicism had long been on the defensive in France, its power chipped away by secular republican governments. In 1905, the Church was formally split from the state, triggering a dramatic loss of funding and influence. The renewal of religious faith during the First World War, however, allowed the Church to rebuild its standing in society, starting with the increasingly desperate working classes. In 1925, a Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn established the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC, or Young Christian Workers), a movement aimed at converting working-class men and women aged fourteen to twenty-five. The idea caught on quickly. In 1926, the first French JOC sections were founded in the ‘red belt’ district of Clichy. Over the next decade, the JOC became the largest working-class youth movement in France, numbering 270,000 members by 1939.
JOC membership involved a busy schedule of study groups, social activism, parades, pilgrimages and leisure activities – all designed to cultivate physical and moral health and guided by Catholic values. However, jocisme also contained a deeper purpose. As historian Susan B. Whitney comments, the life of young labourers in interwar France revolved primarily around work, which formed the lens through which they interpreted the world. To turn young workers into good Catholics, the JOC therefore needed to get them to rethink what it meant to be a worker. This would involve constructing a new vision of work: one that blended progressive and conservative elements within a uniquely Catholic model. The ramifications of this new model of labour would go beyond personal identity, leading young working-class men and women to question the very nature of the industrial economy.
Drawing on nineteenth-century Catholic social teaching, the JOC depicted the ideal young worker as a skilled, independent artisan – quite unlike the lived reality of most young workers, which involved ‘mechanical’ factory labour with little control over the conditions of their employment. JOC magazines explained that the secret to happiness lay in finding one’s métier, a vocational craft that could be perfected over time. As the front page of a JOC magazine quipped in 1931, ‘Trying to succeed in life without a profession [métier] is like trying to catch the moon with your teeth.’ JOC writers celebrated the mechanic, the stonemason and the baker as skilled craftspeople, while jociste choirs regaled public rallies with the song Sois fier, ouvrier! (‘Worker, be proud!’). The JOC also made use of religion to promote its image of the ideal worker, adapting Bible stories to emphasise the skilled, creative labour of their characters. Jocistes prayed to Christ l’ouvrier (‘Christ the worker’), emphasising his humble origins as ‘the carpenter of Nazareth’.
To conservative Catholics, this smacked dangerously of socialism. So too did the movement’s use of Marxist-sounding terminology to describe its mission, with leading jocistes calling for a ‘revolution’ to ‘save the working class of the world’. In practice, however, the JOC was far from socialistic. Cardijn criticised socialism alongside capitalism and fascism as shallow, materialistic ideologies. Instead, the JOC built its vision of work on the Catholic principle that each person holds inherent dignity because humans are rational beings, made in God’s image. As people cannot live alone, a good person is therefore one who uses their rationality to choose to contribute to the ‘common good’ of society, helping others to live as free, rational beings.
Cardijn and other socially-minded Catholics applied this principle to labour, arguing that a good worker was someone who elected to work for the benefit of others. This is where the artisanal ideal came in: an artisan was not just a worker, but someone whose skills gave them autonomy over their labour. Unlike the proletarian who took menial jobs to survive, the Catholic artisan could choose to contribute their labour to society, thereby dignifying the work they undertook.
Fixing this required the formation of a new, collaborative economic model that would transcend class difference, rather than encouraging class conflict – an ideological difference between social Catholicism and Marxism that manifested in street fights between jocistes and Jeunesse communiste militants. Drawing on medieval guilds, the JOC taught that workers should be organised into hierarchical organisations defined by métier. These guilds would train workers to become skilled artisans and facilitate negotiation between different actors within the economy. A JOC illustration from 1937 epitomised this idea, showing workers, engineers and managers linked by a chain symbolising their collaborative effort. The foundation of such negotiations would be the shared belief in the dignity of skilled people and their willing contribution to production.
This ideal posed a radical – albeit non-Marxist – alternative to the capitalist industrial economy of the 1920s-30s. France’s manufacturing economy worked because industrialists had access to huge numbers of cheap, unskilled workers with little control over their employment. This resulted in high profits for business owners at a high cost to workers’ well-being. A 1939 report from a JOC section in Lille describes the young working-class men encountered outside factories as ‘phantoms’ and ‘poor, lamentable wrecks’, their bodies and souls ravaged by tiring and meaningless work.
This corporatist vision had a strongly gendered quality, grounded in a nineteenth-century model of the nuclear family. The interwar JOC was split internally between its male division and the female Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne feminine (JOCF). JOCF campaigners believed that young women should remain in employment only until they were ready to start the ‘true’ feminine métier of motherhood. Under the spirited leadership of former typist Jeanne Aubert, JOCF members would learn ‘the twenty or so trades that a mother of a family ought to know’, such as childcare and cookery. While the JOCF campaigned hard on women’s workplace issues, such as providing separate changing rooms and ending sexual harassment, motherhood remained the idealised vocation for jociste women.
Although officially apolitical, the JOC energetically evangelised its economic vision in factories and tenements, portraying social Catholicism as the ‘human’ alternative to capitalism, communism and fascism. This position would be tested by the Second World War. The movement was initially cautiously supportive of Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime, which took power following France’s defeat to Nazi Germany in 1940. The JOC leadership hoped that the Vichy government, with its motto of ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ (‘Work, Family, Fatherland’), might be amenable to social Catholic ideas. As Vichy fell increasingly into lockstep with the Nazi policy, however, many jocistes became disillusioned. The turning point came with the introduction of the Service du travail obligatoire (‘Compulsory Labour Service’) in 1943, whereby young French workers were sent to Germany for forced labour. Some jocistes joined Resistance groups, while others continued to evangelise within the labour camps. Numerous jocistes were imprisoned. Some were shot.
This political shift proved beneficial to the JOC. Social Catholic networks held firm despite wartime repression, and when liberation came in 1944, jocistes led nationwide housing and social welfare programmes for displaced people. Many joined the burgeoning Christian democratic party, the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), which became a major force in post-war elections. Given access to political power for the first time, former jocistes now found that their social Catholic ideals chimed well with the welfare-based consensus that characterised post-war Western Europe.
One example is Paul Bacon (1907-1999), a former jociste and Resistance member. As an MRP politician, Bacon was Minister for Labour for most of 1950-1962, during which time he introduced France’s first minimum wage, providing workers with insulation against the exploitation he had witnessed in the 1930s. A minimum wage allowed workers to cover their basic needs, reducing their desperation and thus their capacity to be exploited. For Bacon, this represented the start of a more dignified and human economic order.
The JOC’s influence waned over time, its post-war decline mirroring that of French industry. Nonetheless, the ideas that animated French jocistes during the 1920s-30s still hold relevance. On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in which he reflected on the risk posed to human labour by artificial intelligence:
“[W]ork is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment.”
This pronouncement echoes Catholic social thought. Pope Leo took his name from his predecessor Leo XIII, author of the foundational social Catholic text Rerum Novarum (1891) and one of Cardijn’s inspirations. Like the interwar JOC, Magnifica Humanitas suggests adapting the productive technology of capitalism to a Catholic economic vision. It argues that AI, rather than eliminating skilled jobs and eroding worker control, should instead become a tool for workers to hone their métiers and thereby better contribute to humanity’s common good. One hundred years after the foundation of the French JOC, its successors are still fighting for the soul of the global economy.