This study explores the interaction of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) with the French public sphere, between 1900 and 1920. The CGT supported federalist worker control of industry, and, by World War I, had developed a distinctively productivist discourse, emphasizing increased material output through direction of the economy. Kenneth Tucker examines the triumph of this productivism in contrast with other visions of society and the future, while giving a Habermasian twist to the recent linguistic turn in labor history.