Bourse du Travail
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The Bourse de Travail or "labour exchanges", is a form of French labour council, were working class organizations in that encouraged mutual aid, education, and self-organization amongst their members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Popularized largely through the efforts of revolutionary syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier, the labour exchanges were intended as a key organizational component in radical social transformation by acting as co-ordinating bodies facilitating communication between sydicates thus co-ordinating production and consumption in the absence of the state or the private ownership of the means of production. There was no legal obligation for the state or the municipality to put in place these buildings, but they helped both the workers' movement itself and surveillance of its activities.
The Fédération des Bourses de travail (Federation of Workers' Councils) was created in 1892 at the Congress of Saint-Etienne by Fernand Pelloutier to federate each city's workers' organization. It was first led by Bernard Resset (1892), then Rieu Cordier, then Fernand Pelloutier (1895) and from 1901 to 1918 by Georges Yvetot. The Federation of Workers' Council merged in 1895 with the Fédération nationale des syndicats (National Federation of Trade-Unions), which had been created in 1886, giving rise to the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), which was dominated by anarcho-syndicalists until 1921.
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