The 1947 strikes in France were a series of insurrectionary labor actions against post-war wage stagnation and Western capitalism. The strikes first emerged as a spontaneous wave in late April at the nation's largest Renault factory. When the French Communist Party (PCF) joined the strike, it led to the May crisis, which saw all communist officials expelled from the national government. The peak wave in September was more generalized and more directly associated with the Cominform, and it explicitly denounced the Marshall Plan. Soon, there were 3 million strikers; 23,371,000 working days were lost to strikes in 1947, against 374,000 in 1946, but the movement stayed less important in Italy, where the Communists were also excluded from the government. In May, the Communist ministers in effect left the government, which ended tripartisme, and at the end of the year, the CGT divided into a reformist minority and a pro-Atlantic Workers' Force (FO). Although they had been created in December 1944, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) had their first real mission of policing with the strikes of November–December 1947, all of which were under the leadership of Minister of the Interior Jules Moch (SFIO). Early strikes The strikes begin on 25 April 1947 at the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, which had been nationalised in 1946. The day before, the Ramadier cabinet had reduced the daily bread ration from 300 to 250 grams. The plant employed 30,000 men; the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) claimed 17,000 members. The strike was started, among other things, by the Trotskyist Pierre Bois, an activist of the communist union and a founder of Workers' Struggle, and the anarchists (Gil Devillard of the Anarchist Federation) and International Communist Party members (PCI, Trotskyist). The importance of the intervention of the PCI in the movement was clear in a magazine article (Cavalcades), No. 65 of 26 June 1947, "A teacher, an engineer, a journalist, leaders of the Fourth International, tomorrow could paralyze France.". The strike did not at first have the support of the French Communist Party (PCF) and the General Confederation of Labour (CGT). The PCF was indeed in the government as part of tripartisme. Plaisance, a secretary of the CGT, said outside the factory: "This morning, an anarcho-Hitlero-Trotskyists band wanted to blow up the factory". The CGT then claimed, "The strike arms the trusts". Despite the communist opposition, the strike quickly brought in more than 10,000