Sabotage

As you may see for yourself,

Sabotage, Alfred Hitchcock’s English thriller from the 1930s, opens with a close-up on a dictionary and a spotlight on the definition of the title word of the film: “Wilful destruction of buildings or machinery with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring uneasiness.”  This is not exactly how most people would define “sabotage,” which is rather malicious damage to machinery or a slow-down in labor, committed perhaps by workers going on strike or by enemy agents in a munitions plant, and its point is more to slow or halt production than to spread terror.  The plot of Hitchcock’s film, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s turn-of-the-century novel The Secret Agent, involves a foreign agent and the bomb with which he intends to blow up a power plant.  The device explodes prematurely on a London bus, causing terror, and that may explain why the director uses the definition he does.  Why not just call the film Secret Agent?  Because Hitchcock had already used that title for another 1930s thriller, this one adapting Somerset Maugham’s spy novel Ashenden.  A few years later, during World War II, Hitchcock returned to the enemy-agent theme with Saboteur, exactly the right title this time because his film opens with an arson fire in a defense plant.

“Sabotage” is a surprisingly recent word in English, first entering the language (according to the OED) in a 1910 article in the Church Times.  There the word is italicized as if still considered a foreign importation, which it was.  “Sabotage” derives from the French verb saboter, which in turn comes from sabots, the clumsy one-piece wooden shoes often worn by peasants or factory laborers.  You can see sabots being worn by prison laborers, and hear their loud clumping sound, in a sequence from René Clair’s great comedy A nous la liberté, another film of the 1930s:

So far so good, but what exactly is the connection between sabots and damaging a factory?  Some have speculated, ingeniously, that the first saboteurs were artisans who threw their wooden shoes into the workings of mills or steam engines in order to damage the machinery, which was threatening to take away their livelihood.  A simpler explanation seems more likely, however.  To French ears the word sabot conveys the idea of something working clumsily or slowly.  “To work like a sabot” means to work badly; “to dance like a sabot” means, as we would say, to dance with two left feet.  A sabot is a clog on efficiency, and sometimes a clog on any movement at all.  In French, a “Denver boot,” that contraption you find clutching the tire of your illegally parked car, is a sabot de Denver.

As for what wooden shoes had to do with clumsiness or inefficiency, that must have involved old-fashioned class prejudice.  “They’re laborers, aren’t they?  They must be slow-moving, and slow-witted too.  And those ugly wooden sabots they wear . . . !”  I suspect that the laborers themselves had a different attitude, accepting their wooden shoes for their practical advantages (cheapness, durability, keeping the feet dry) while also wearing them with a certain pride, as a badge of class.  That is how comparable footwear in England, the wooden-soled clog, used to be worn.  In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century laborers in the north of the country wore clogs to the mills (and also danced in them, on special occasions).  The clogs’ clattering on pavements as workers went off to the dark Satanic mills of cities like Manchester or Bolton must have become utterly familiar, the sound of the Industrial Revolution itself.  That is how George Orwell writes about them in The Road to Wigan Pier, his pioneering book of reportage, which appeared one year after Hitchcock’s Sabotage.  Striving to give the reader the immediate sense of being immersed in a working-class world, Orwell’s book opens with “The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.”