The strike is today, with the demonstration, the highest degree of social protest in a democratic framework. Its history is however several thousand years old and has taken on many meanings. A harbinger of real or imagined revolutions, it has long been banned in France, like any form of gathering of workers.
The first strike of which we have a trace in history dates back to year 29 of the reign of Ramses III, in other words around 1166 BC. The pharaoh wanted an excessive tomb, but he could not afford it. of his ambitions, and the craftsmen of Déir el-Medina, near Thebes, on the edge of the Upper Nile Valley, no longer receive the provisions which constitute their salary. At 18e day, the scribe Amenakht tells us on the so-called “strike papyrus” kept in the Turin museum, they stop working. After several weeks of opposition to power, despite threats of repression, they won their case.
As far as ancient Rome is concerned, we often go back to the first secession of the plebs in 494 BC. The time of the monarchy has just ended, giving way to an oligarchic system from which only a privileged few benefit: the patricians. These can sell their debtors as slaves or condemn them to death. In protest, the plebs withdrew to the Aventine. They thus obtain some rights, such as that of having their own representatives, the tribunes of the plebs.
Former workers from Douarnenez sing “Greet rich happy”, song of the Penn Sardin strike in 1924, at the microphone of Zoé Varier, Over there if I am there, France Inter, 1993.
Report by Zoé Varier
Estudents and workers on strike in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance
This memory is still a reference for the rebels of the XIXe century, as for the anti-fascist political opposition which boycotted the Italian Chamber of Deputies after the assassination of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924. But this new retreat on the Aventine will this time have the opposite of the expected effect, leaving Benito Mussolini free rein. If the strikers sometimes get it right, the absentees are always wrong, the saying goes.
Paris has fond memories of the student strike of 1229. The day aftera brawl in THE Saint Marcel district, between the current 5th and 13th arrondissements, where students celebrating Mardi Gras are beaten by a disgruntled innkeeper, a riot breaks out. The students come under the ecclesiastical justice, but in front of its clemency, the regent brings in the guard of Paris and several students are killed, whose innocence is proclaimed. The university goes on strike, to the great benefit of the English universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
In 1539, the seneschal – representative of the King of France François Ier – banned the strike following the great trick* printers of Lyon, the prestigious ccompagnons typographers considering themselves insufficiently paid for their fifteen hours of daily work. The prohibition of any form of work organization will be reiterated across the kingdom in the Villers-Cotterêts ordinance in August of the same year. The Allarde decree and the Le Chapelier law at the start of the French Revolution in 1791 reiterated the prohibition of any professional association.
May 68 and work
A Grand Reportage by Claires Fages broadcast on 02/05/2008 on RFI
The conquest of the right to strike: a recent history
The strike has only been called this in France since the beginning of the 19th century, the police registers noting their surprise at this worker’s neologism. Strike is etymologically the name given to a flat land formed of sand and gravel at the edge of the sea or a watercourse. This is the name given, in Paris, to the current Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, which not only served as a place of execution, the famous Place de Grève immortalized among others by Victor Hugo in Notre Dame de Parisbut also a place to unload goods, the port of the capital somehow.
This is where the workers gathered when they were looking for work. We began to say that they were doing strike. By extension, the term came to refer to a coalition of workers who refuse to work until they are granted certain conditions they demand. Proof is given that gatherings of workers, whatever the reasons, lead sooner or later to a common consciousness.
During the 19th century, the prohibition of the right to strike was reiterated in 1810 and included in the Penal Code. The offense of coalition was then repealed in 1864 under the Second Empire by the Ollivier law. In 1884, during the Third Republic, the Waldeck-Rousseau law abolished the Le Chapelier law and authorized trade unions. It was not until the Fourth Republic in 1946 that the right to strike was included in the preamble to the Constitution. Since 2000, it has been part of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
The strike: tour of Europe in 1998. Excerpt from the program Accents d’Europe, Frédérique Lebel for RFI.
Accents of Europe, Frédérique Lebel RFI
The strike: a French myth more than a reality
“ France tops European statisticsnotes Laure Machu, lecturer in contemporary history, specialist in labor law and social movements, but that does not mean that relations are more conflictual there. This is all the more true as statistical tools differ from one country to another, making any comparative approach complex.
“ In Franceshe continues, strikes are marked by the massive participation of public sector employees. In England or Germany, the right to strike is more restrictive. But in the first case, conflictuality is on the rise in the private sector. In Germany, you cannot go on strike for the entire period of validity of the collective agreement. As a result, strikes are rarer, but longer. »
Towards At the end and at the end of the First World War, the generalized strikes were accompanied by revolutionary perspectives, whether these were crowned with success like in Russia or doomed to failure like in Germany, or still too indecisive to truly incarnate like in Italy. In the latter case, they mainly led to the militarized organization of reaction around fascism.
Demand song by Francis Nugent during the 2017 mobilization in Guyana.
“A singer, taken in chorus! at the microphone of Pierre Olivier, for RFI.
From the Popular Front to May-68: the Strike at the Center of the Labor Movement
With the Popular Front in France in 1936, the great strikes were part of a reformist perspective, yet entering into the legend of the country’s working-class history. The strikes of May-68 revived the revolutionary mythology, however leaving behind insurrectional violence and any concrete prospect of overthrowing power. The strike today is fundamentally part of a highly codified social conflict.
“ The myth of the general strike lives on, because it provides a horizon », comments Laure Machu. Despite a decline in conflict since the 1980s in France, three more people have died in protest clashes since 2015. The number of seriously injured is, for its part, increasing sharply with the development of repressive weapons, the use of which is arousing debate.
If there is one record to remember within the European Union, it is perhaps this one, symptom of a deep crisis of the French law enforcement modelwhich has not overlooked an arsenal capable of inflicting disabling injuries and sometimes proves to be lethal.
*Name close to English “strike” to designate what we now call the strike.
