The Great Sardine Strike in Brittany in 1924 was a milestone for working women.

Hugging the bay at Finistère, where northern France juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, the port of Douarnenez does not look like an obvious hotbed of industrial rebellion, with its picturesque pastel houses lining the harbour. But the city’s narrow streets were once the scene of a movement that opened a new chapter in women’s labor rights.

A hundred years ago Douarnenez was a city on the move. Fishing had been the lifeblood of the fishery for centuries, but with the invention of canning, sardine catches were suddenly able to reach markets previously unimaginable.

The ports of Brittany became the heart of the French fishing industry, the main one being Douarnenez. In 50 years, its population grew from about 2,000 residents to more than 14,000, and dozens of new canneries attracted workers from the interior.

Most of these workers were women. While men and boys caught fish, women and girls were responsible for cleaning, frying and packing them. It was wet, noisy, smelly, grueling work that went on around the clock.

Listen to this story on the Spotlight on France podcast:

“There were no cold storage facilities like there are today, so when the sardines arrived, you had to get to work right away,” says Arlette Julien, head of the local history organization Mémoire de la Ville, whose grandmother Augustine worked in one of the canneries. .

During high season, this meant working 18-hour days straight. Augustine’s children remember seeing her stretched out in a chair between shifts. “She didn’t even take the time to change her clothes, she rested a little for two or three hours, and then there was a knock on the window glass to tell her it was time to come back,” Arlette says.

None of this was fairly compensated. Lacking the protection of unions or effective labor laws, women provided cheap labor for factory bosses, who were known to employ girls as young as nine and ten, as well as adults over eighty. Young and old, day and night, they all received the same pay: 80 centimes per hour, slightly less than the price of a liter of milk.

National support

City Penn Sardine – “Sardinian heads”, as they were called in Breton – had already had to fight for this.

In February 1905 they called one of the largest women’s strikes to date, demanding wages by the hour rather than per thousand tinned sardines. The cannery owners surrendered within days, and triumphant workers began laying the foundations of their first union.

Two decades later, their colleagues remembered this lesson as they pushed for higher wages.

What began as a demand in one cannery on November 20, 1924, was soon repeated in other factories and quickly escalated into a strike that brought hundreds of workers into the streets of Douarnenez in daily protests.

They found an ally in the city’s mayor, Daniel Le Flancheck, one of the first communist mayors in France and the second in Douarnenez. He and his supporters turned to national networks, and within a week, organizers from other parts of the country began arriving to help spur sardine workers.

Arlette remembers her grandmother telling her about one union representative in particular: Lucy Colliard, a former teacher who came to Douarnenez from Paris and later wrote a book about the events.

Arlette says she played an important role in helping women like Augustine see the broader dynamics of what was happening. “Colliard started explaining the economics, saying, ‘You make this and that, and the boss makes this much’—things she hadn’t realized before. So this was a chance to learn.”

Augustine, who was 38 at the time and a mother of four, in turn helped inform the older workers, who spoke only Breton and not French. She also joined a support committee, collecting food donations from local farms and distributing it to striking workers. Combined with funds sent by sympathizers from all over France and even abroad, these supplies helped the women survive for more than six weeks.

By December, they were joined by fishermen who refused to go to sea, recognizing the crucial role of canneries in getting their catch to market.

Accustomed to singing together in factories, the strikers took to the streets with a new song: Pemp is realin Breton “Five reals we will receive” – the equivalent of 1.25 francs per hour.

It wasn’t an outlandish demand—sardine workers were paid less even by the standards of the time—but the bosses refused to negotiate.

They called in strikebreakers, bringing the matter to a climax on January 1, 1925. As the mayor and others celebrated New Year’s at a local cafe, a fight broke out and several shots were fired. Le Flanchek was struck, and a rumor spread throughout the city that he had been killed on the orders of the factory owners.

In fact, he survived, but this was enough to start a short-lived riot and set up left-wing newspapers denouncing the “fascist” plot. Fearing the worst, the regional prefect ordered the factory owners to resort to mediation.

By January 6, they had reached an agreement: one franc an hour for sardine canners, extra pay for work after midnight, recognition of the right to unionize, and guarantees that strikers would not be fired in retaliation. Forty-six days after they first left, the women agreed to the deal.

Legacy of Resistance

“I think beyond the outcome – because they got a little raise, not everything they asked for, but a little – after the unions were formed and they got used to the idea of ​​saying to themselves, we can still do better,” Arlette said. . As an example of this newfound determination, she recalls that when Augustine’s husband, a World War I veteran, died a few years after the strike, she fought to receive the war widow’s pension she believed she was due.

“I always knew her as someone who spoke freely, had a desire for dignity, a desire to move forward, to follow the news, to form opinions, and so on… I heard my grandmother say: “We have learned that we are citizens.” ”

Another former striker, Josephine Pencale, stood in local council elections the following spring, becoming one of the first women in France to do so. However, although she was elected, she was disqualified a few months later – because, as the courts ruled, women could not vote or hold public office.

“But to say, ‘We’re going to take matters into our own hands,’” says Arlette, “it was still kind of empowering. This heritage became a source of pride not only for the descendants of the strikers, but also for the entire city of Douarnenez and Brittany as a whole.

As the area celebrates the strike’s centenary, Arlette says she’s encouraged that new generations are embracing it as a story of resistance. “There is still an attachment to the fact that at a certain point women took their destiny into their own hands.”