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The Ministry of Robotic Affairs (Ministère des Affaires Robotiques) of the French Third Republic, est. 1921, abolished 1935.
In 1908, the first commercially available robots shuddered to electrically-induced life in fluid-filled capsules on the assembly line of Rossum's Universal Robotics' factory in Prague, Austria-Hungary. Two years earlier, Rossum discovered a method to grow human-like flesh on a metal skeleton and sustain life through a mix of synthetic flesh and mechanical organs. An electrical turbine heart circulated a clear blood surrogate through their veins. When he perfected his robotic production methods, Rossum began selling his robots on the open market. Once assembled, they could be trained quickly to accomplish varied tasks, making them ideal replacements for human workers as long as they were regularly recharged with electric current. By 1914, the "universal appliance" was a fixture of industrial, agricultural, and domestic labor across the European continent and had been established around the world as well. Conditions for the robots were uniformly miserable. They were legally chattels, and most countries passed no laws to regulate their working hours, living spaces, or provisions, and owners could effectively treat their robots however they wished. The introduction of Rossum's robots was an incendiary political and social issue. Were robots too dangerous to tolerate? Was it wrong to create life on a factory floor? Did robots pose an existential threat to human laborers? Should their conditions be regulated to give human workers a fair chance? Did robots possess intrinsic rights, and, if so, which? Organizations like the League of Liberty and Equality, founded in Paris in 1910 by members of the French section of the Socialist International, took a radical line that robots should enjoy equal rights to humans. At that time, however, advocacy for robot emancipation was limited to coffee house debate rather than public policy. The coming of the Great War in 1914 shattered that status quo.
At first, the French Army refused to utilize robots as soldiers, mired as its strategists were in the traditionalism that produced statements like "le pantalon rouge, c'est la France." By the end of 1915, most factories in France (and in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the United Kingdom) relied almost exclusively on underpaid women and enslaved robots to maintain the necessary factory throughput to sustain crucial war industries. After Russia erupted into a revolution in 1917, the war was concentrated onto the remaining fronts. By 1917, all sides were experiencing severe manpower shortages. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians began committing robots to the front lines, and the French and British reciprocated to avoid conceding a numerical advantage to the Central Powers despite dire warnings about the possible consequences of arming maltreated chattels with twentieth-century weapons. By September, 1919, each side was overstretched. Inadequate supply shipments reached the fronts, strikes and shortages were commonplace, and everyone understood that no power could continue the war through the winter. The labor unrest gave the robot emancipation movement an opportunity to disseminate its message to the general population. Mutinies and military strikes broke out along the fronts as the European dignitaries negotiated a peace without victory at the Hague Peace Conference.
In 1919 and 1920, France experienced an economic depression and brutal rioting as soldiers returned from the front lines to find their jobs taken by robots and robots were decommissioned from the military to find whatever work they could. Robot emancipation was now broadly accepted and demanded by the political left as the only way to regularize labor relations and, hopefully, stave off revolution. In the summer of 1920, at the height of the rioting, there was open street fighting with weapons taken home from the Great War, such as machine guns and field artillery. Seeing no other options, a joint sitting of the Parliament agreed to bestow rights and duties equal to those of humans upon robots. Moreover, it would nationalize the factories that assembled robots and produced robot parts and would create a Ministry of Robotic Affairs, effective January 1, 1921. In return, the Assembly implored the French people-- human and robot alike-- to stop fighting each other. Despite some continued unrest in the early 1920s, which were generally brief and posed no serious threat to the Third Republic's stability, the situation improved as the French economy corrected itself and then ballooned. Upon its creation, the Ministry of Robotic Affairs paid compensation to former owners in return for their losses. The MAR's standard duties were to provide sustenance, temporary housing, maintenance, and education for the robots, on the condition that the temporary housing consisted of hastily constructed camps and repurposed army facilities in the countryside. The robot settlements were also foci of anti-robotic rhetoric and violence. By the end of the 1920s, the MAR camps were closed, the robots had been assimilated into the community, and they were a normalized part of French life. As citizens. The MAR continued to operate until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when it was shuttered for budgetary reasons. This coincided with a limited backlash against robot equality, which, along with the end of the MAR, is often blamed for the problems that still confront French R.U.R.-model robots.
