May 1936: more than 2 million workers, employees and even executives go on strike and occupy their workplaces throughout France. The Popular Front, which brings together the three main left-wing parties, has just won the legislative elections, led by the socialist Léon Blum who will not take office until a month later, in June 1936.
After the great crisis of 1929 and the strong mobilization to counter the rise of the extreme right, the workers demanded better working conditions and put pressure on the newly elected government. Negotiations with the employers lead in June 1936 to the signing of the Matignon agreements which grant unprecedented social advances. A euphoric period when the Spanish Civil War broke out and the beginnings of the Second World War were there. Photographer Willy Ronis immortalized these workers’ battles. Immersed in his pictures of the great strikes of 1936 and 1938, with the historian Tangui Perron who publishes the incredible story of a photograph with the Atelier editions: “Rose Zehner and Willy Ronis, birth of an image”.
Guest: Tangui Perron, sspecialist in the relationship between labor movement and cinema, associate researcher at the Center for Social History and Contemporary Worlds (Paris I and CNRS)
INA radio archives
Excerpts from the documentary “Un voyage de Rose”, by Patrick Barbéris (1982).