France is expected to see massive May Day protests on Sunday as demonstrators on both sides of the political spectrum – but especially on the left – are expected to vent their anger over President Emmanuel Macron’s re-election. FRANCE 24 takes a look back at the history of May 1 as International Workers’ Day, a day of protests, parades and an annual challenge to the status quo.
Fresh off a presidential election and now headed into a legislative contest set for June, French politics finds itself in a paradoxical state. There is a certain public admiration for Emmanuel Macron, the centrist upstart who became France's youngest-ever president in 2017 and then shifted to the right along with the centre ground of the French electorate. Macron easily secured re-election by winning the first round of the vote, when the French had a wide variety of candidates to choose from (12 in this election), before comfortably beating nationalist Marine Le Pen in a late-April run-off.
Yet large swaths of the French population see Macron as embodying the stereotype of the haughty, callous technocrat. France’s diminished left concentrated its vote around far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon – helping him perform far better than expected in the first round – while Le Pen also surged, backed in part by working-class voters angry over a cost-of-living crisis.
Against this backdrop, France is expecting the largest and most raucous May Day rallies it has seen in decades. FRANCE 24 takes a closer look at this iconic public holiday, from its origins as a pagan festival to the Labour Day – or Fête du travail – of the present.
Violence in Chicago
May Day’s origins as a festival marking the beginning of summer go back to pagan antiquity. In Ancient Rome, May 1 marked the midpoint of the Floralia, a week-long holiday honouring Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers. Centuries after Christianity became hegemonic across Europe, May Day remained rooted in its pagan origins – a fact recognised by the Puritans who took over England after the end of the Civil War in 1649 and banned May Day festivities such as Morris dancing, garlanding a Maypole with ribbons and crowning a May queen.
May Day took on its current significance as a day for industrial action and union-backed protest starting in Paris in 1889, when a loose federation of socialist groups and trade unions from an array of countries founded the Second (or Socialist) International. The federation, which advocated for parliamentary democracy while affirming its belief in the Marxist idea of the inevitability of class struggle, decided to designate May 1 as International Workers’ Day.
The Second International chose the date, in part, to mark the start of the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago. On May 1 of that year, workers, unionists, socialists and anarchists gathered, making Chicago the epicentre of a movement calling for an eight-hour workday. An estimated 35,000 participants left work to attend meetings and parade through the streets.
On May 3, police fired on demonstrators, killing at least one. Another rally was called for May 4 that went on mostly peacefully until the end, when police attempted to disperse the demonstration. An unknown individual threw a bomb at police, who responded with random gunfire; seven police and at least four civilians were killed in the ensuing violence.
The US labour movement’s campaign for an eight-hour day burgeoned despite the violent end to the Haymarket movement. As labour historian William J. Adelman wrote: “No single event has influenced the history of labour in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair.”
Wartime boost
In the years that followed, rallies continued to be held on May 1 in many countries, adding to the pressure on governments to institute an eight-hour workday.
But it took the boost to workers’ bargaining power from World War I to prompt governments to introduce eight-hour days. In 1916, the US Adamson Act instituted an eight-hour day for railroad workers, the first US federal law limiting the number of hours private companies can make employees work. French labour unions won a comprehensive victory when then-prime minister Georges Clemenceau put in place a 40-hour week in 1919.
For French unions, May Day remained central to their struggles. But it was not until 1947, shortly after World War II, that May 1 became a public holiday in France.
While the annual protests were temporarily banned starting in 1954 due to the Algerian War, the demonstrations came to play a major role in the large-scale civil unrest of May 1968.
Cost-of-living crisis
Today, May Day rallies are still very much a part of the French political landscape – with violence sometimes directed at police, often by black-masked and -hooded anarchist or far-left disrupters known as the “black blocs”.
The protests are expected to be bigger and angrier than usual on Sunday as a cost-of-living crisis sweeps through France and beyond. Inflation has reached 4.8 percent, according to estimations released April 29 by the national statistics office – and analysts warn that Macron will have to appease economic discontent soon if he wants to avoid a repeat of the Yellow Vest crisis that shook his presidency in 2018, sparked by a rise in the fuel tax.
Philippe Martinez, the head of the hardline leftist CGT union, has been a regular feature of May Day rallies in the French capital for several years – and 2022 will be no exception.
"The May Day mobilisation must be as massive as possible," he told Le Parisien in an interview published Saturday. "Citizens, beyond the unions, must take to the streets so that social and environmental demands are made loud and clear."
