One hundred years ago this month, women working in fish canning factories on France’s north-west coast held a strike that has gone down in history as one of the earliest examples of women successfully mobilising to demand working rights.
Hugging a bay in Finistère, where northern France juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, the port of Douarnenez doesn’t look like an obvious hotbed of industrial revolt, with its picturesque pastel-coloured houses lining the harbour. But the town's narrow alleyways were once the scene of a movement that opened a new chapter in women's working rights.
A hundred years ago, Douarnenez was a town in flux. Fishing had been its lifeblood for centuries, but with the invention of canning, suddenly its sardine catches could reach markets previously unimaginable.
The ports of Brittany became the beating heart of France’s tinned fish industry, Douarnenez chief among them. In the space of 50 years its population soared from around 2,000 inhabitants to more than 14,000, with dozens of new canneries drawing in labourers from inland.
Most of these workers were women. While men and boys caught the fish, women and girls were responsible for cleaning, frying and packing it. It was wet, noisy, smelly, back-breaking work, and it continued around the clock.
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“There was no refrigerated storage like we have today, so when the sardines arrived you had to get to work right away,” says Arlette Julien, the head of local history organisation Mémoire de la Ville, whose grandmother Augustine was employed in one of the canneries.
In high season that meant 18-hour workdays, back to back. Augustine’s children remember seeing her sprawled on a chair between shifts. “She wouldn’t even take the time to change, she’d rest a little for two or three hours and then there would be a knock on the windowpane to tell her it was time to go back,” says Arlette.
None of this was fairly compensated. Lacking the protection of unions or effective labour laws, women were a cheap workforce for factory bosses – who were known to employ girls as young as nine or ten as well as adults in their eighties. Young or old, day or night, they all got the same pay: 80 centimes an hour, a little less than the price of a litre of milk.
National support
The town’s Penn Sardin – “sardine heads”, as they were known in Breton – had already had to fight for that much.
In February 1905, they launched one of the largest women’s strikes to date to demand payment by the hour rather than per thousand sardines tinned. Cannery owners gave in within days, and the triumphant workers began laying the foundations of their first union.
Two decades later, their colleagues remembered that lesson when seeking a higher wage.
What began as a demand at one cannery on 20 November, 1924 was soon repeated at other factories and quickly became a strike, which brought hundreds of workers on to the streets of Douarnenez in daily protests.
They found an ally in the town’s mayor, Daniel Le Flanchec, one of the first Communist mayors in France and the second in Douarnenez. He and his supporters reached out to national networks and, within a week, organisers from other parts of the country began arriving to help spur the sardine workers on.
Arlette remembers her grandmother telling her about one union representative in particular: Lucie Colliard, a former teacher who travelled to Douarnenez from Paris and later wrote a book about the events.
She was influential in helping women like Augustine see the larger dynamics at play, Arlette says. "Colliard began to explain the economic aspect, to say ‘you earn such and such, while the boss makes this much’ – things she hadn’t necessarily realised before. So it was a chance to learn."
Augustine, 38 at the time and mother to four children, in turn helped inform older workers who only spoke Breton, not French. She also joined the support committee, gathering donations of food from local farms and distributing it among the striking workers. Combined with funds sent by sympathisers from all over France and even abroad, these supplies helped the women hold out for more than six weeks.
By December they had been joined by fishermen, who refused to go out to sea in recognition of the canners’ crucial role in getting their catch to market.
Used to singing together in the factories, the strikers took a new song on to the streets: Pemp real a vo, Breton for “Five reals we’ll get” – the equivalent of 1.25 francs an hour.
This was not an outlandish demand – sardine workers were underpaid even by the standards of the day – but bosses refused to negotiate.
They called in strikebreakers, bringing matters to a head on 1 January, 1925. As the mayor and others celebrated the new year in a local café, a brawl broke out and several shots were fired. Le Flanchec was hit and the rumour tore through town that he’d been assassinated on the factory owners’ orders.
In fact he survived, but it was enough to start a short-lived riot and set left-wing newspapers denouncing a “fascist” plot. Fearing worse, the regional prefect ordered the factory owners to enter mediation.
By 6 January, they had reached a deal: one franc per hour for the sardine canners, extra pay for working past midnight, recognition of the right to unionise, and an assurance that the strikers wouldn’t be fired in retribution. Forty-six days after they first walked out, the women agreed the deal.
A legacy of resistance
“I think aside from the result – because they got a small raise, not everything they asked for, but a bit – afterwards the unions were established, and they got used to the idea of saying to themselves, we can still do better," said Arlette. As an example of this newfound determination, she recounts that when Augustine's husband, a First World War veteran, died a few years after the strike, she fought to obtain the war widow’s pension she believed she was owed.
“I always knew her as someone who spoke freely, who had a desire for dignity, a desire to move forward, to follow the news, form opinions and so on... I heard my grandma say, ‘we learned we were citizens’.”
Another former striker, Joséphine Pencalet, went on to stand 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 – since women could not vote, the courts ruled, nor could they hold public office.
“But it was still a kind of empowerment, to say: ‘we’re going to take things into our own hands’,” Arlette believes. This legacy has become a point of pride not just for descendants of the strikers, but the whole town of Douarnenez and Brittany more broadly.
As the area celebrates the centenary of the strike, Arlette says she’s heartened to see new generations embracing it as a story of resistance. “There’s still this attachment to the fact that at a certain point, women took their own destiny in hand.”
