A Short History of Strikes in France
Why today's disturbances are totally predictable
The first shots of the revolt rang out on the Montée de la Grande-Côte in Lyon on 21 November 1831. Soldiers stationed at the bottom of the hill fired on silk workers who had marched down from the Croix-Rousse plateau.
Within hours, the silk workers – known as canuts – had barricaded the narrow streets, overturning carts and dragging timbers and rubble into place. When soldiers threatened to force their way in, the canuts escaped through the traboules, those hidden passageways that still connect the working-class neighborhood.
By nightfall they had taken control of bridges and squares and 48 hours later, they stormed the Place des Terreaux and invaded City Hall. For three days, a European city was ruled by its workers, not its monarchs.
The revolt began, as many do, over wages. Silk prices had collapsed, and the canuts wanted a guaranteed minimum price for their cloth. They reached an agreement with the manufacturers but the government, pressured by silk merchants, wouldn’t honor it so the workers walked out. Their looms fell silent and thousands marched down the Grande-Côte in what would become known as France’s first modern strike.
Today, you can stand at the top of the hill and review the battlefield in your imagination. The Montée de la Grande-Côte runs arrow-straight down to the Presqu’île, the seat of business and power. As you begin your descent, you’ll see tall buildings with wide windows which once housed the silk workshops; halfway down, the street widens, and workers in rebellion would have swarmed through in ever growing numbers; at the base of the hill is the Place des Terreaux, the square where the revolt reached its climax.
While the physical barricades are gone, their memory has never entirely vanished. From the Croix-Rousse in 1831 to today’s demonstrations in Paris or Marseille, work stoppages and street blockades remain a part of France’s public life. For those who wonder why the French strike so often, the answer partly lies in the canut rebellions.
Not the first…
I say rebellions because Lyon erupted a second time, in April 1834. The barricades across the Croix-Rousse went up again, and the silk workers fought block by block.
The revolts spread to Paris. On the rue Transnonain (now part of rue Beaubourg), sympathy protests turned bloody when soldiers stormed a building and massacred its residents. The painter Honoré Daumier immortalized the event in his lithograph of a dead worker sprawled on the floor in his nightshirt, a single image that captured the repression of an entire movement.
The revolts were crushed, but the canuts had set a precedent: French workers would return to the barricades again and again until the law recognized their right to organize.
🧲 The Canuts, France’s first modern strikers
The Lyon silk workers changed everything about how strikes worked. Workers had downed tools before the 1830s, but the Canut revolt of 1831 was different. Thousands of silk workers in Lyon acted together, demanding a guaranteed minimum price for their cloth. They marched under a black flag that read Vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en combattant (“Live working, or die fighting”), built barricades across Croix-Rousse hill, and for three days controlled the city.
It was the first time in France that a labor dispute had unfolded on such a scale, with collective demands: the canuts would be remembered as the first workers to turn a grievance into a citywide stoppage – in other words, they would become France’s first modern strikers and the ones to turn a strike into a political weapon.
The right to strike
The events in Lyon were dramatic, but they had plenty of historical precedents.
In 1372, ferrymen on the Seine in Paris refused to carry royal troops. In 1539, printers in Lyon launched what they called the Grand Tric, shutting down presses across the city until their demands for higher pay and relief from arbitrary fines were met. In 1548, coopers (wine barrel builders) and wine workers in Bordeaux stopped handling goods in protest against new taxes.
These early incidents weren’t really “strikes” as we understand them. They were stoppages or riots during which workers walked off, but without the legal right to strike. They couldn’t bargain as a group, and their rebellions weren’t against their employers but against the state.
Between Bordeaux in 1548 and Lyon’s silk worker rebellion in 1831, there would be a three-century gap. And while France saw plenty of unrest during those years, from bread riots to salt-tax revolts, there were almost no large-scale labor strikes. So what changed between these early worker protests and the “modern” strike in Lyon?
First, the guild system strictly organized and regulated craftsmen and trades, so any collective action would have to go through them.
Second, the monarchy’s authority meant work stoppages were considered riots, not labor disputes. While workers did sometimes walk out, their actions were brief and quickly suppressed.
Then came the French Revolution. In 1791, a law banned guilds and outlawed any kind of worker organization. In a strange interpretation of liberty and free enterprise, the Revolution made strikes illegal, a ban that would last until the mid-19th century. What we now call a strike was simply considered a rebellion.
Industrialization changed everything by concentrating workers in major manufacturing or transportation centers like Lyon and Saint-Étienne, the coal basin of the north, and the ports of Marseille and Le Havre. That concentration meant that for the first time, stopping work could bring production to a halt, as the canuts did in Lyon.
By the late 1860s, using strikes as a weapon had spread across France. In La Ricamarie, a mining town near Saint-Étienne, workers walked out in June 1869 to protest wage cuts. Their families joined them in a peaceful march, women and children walking at the front of the group. Suddenly, troops opened fire into the unarmed crowd. Fourteen people were killed, including several children. Newspapers across France carried the story, and the massacre became a rallying cry for the young labor movement.
By the late 1880s, the labor movement worldwide was campaigning for the eight-hour workday and a global coalition had declared 1 May the annual day of protest for this cause.
In the small industrial town of Fourmies in northern France, spring was in full swing and workers staged a protest for the eight-hour workday. Their families turned the protest into a Sunday outing, with children dressed in their best clothes carrying sprigs of lily of the valley. Suddenly they were facing the army: soldiers fired into the crowd at close range, killing nine people, including two children.
The “massacre of Fourmies” shocked the nation. It fixed May 1st as France’s official Labor Day, a date now marked each year by strikes and parades. From that moment on, May Day in France would be both a celebration of labor and a reminder of its hard-won cost.
🧲 What is a “grève”?
The word “grève”, or strike, came from the Place de Grève in Paris, in front of City Hall, where unemployed men once gathered for casual labor – and where executions also took place. To “être en grève” meant standing to wait for work. In the early nineteenth century, the phrase shifted and “faire grève” (go on strike) would mean a collective stoppage.
From the canuts to today
The law eventually began to catch up to this new reality. In 1864, the Ollivier Law legalized the right to strike, but with tight restrictions. Twenty years later, the Waldeck-Rousseau Law recognized trade unions for the first time. But it would take until 1946 for the right to strike to be written into the French Constitution, and until 2000 for it to be enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Strikes in France have always been about more than just money – they’re also about respect and dignity. The canuts asked for fair prices; the miners of La Ricamarie asked for decent wages; the marchers in Fourmies asked for reasonable working hours.
The strike remains part of France’s civic calendar, as we know from the gilets jaunes protests of 2018-2019 or the fall of 2025 labor unrest. Some see this as a sign of instability; others, as proof that the right to strike is alive and well.
What is certain is that strikes in France are not occasional events but a recurring practice, a way for citizens to negotiate with the state and employers, and to be heard. Born in the silk workshops of Lyon and shaped in mining villages and industrial towns, strikes continue to this day as a central feature of French political life. People don’t like them, but they tolerate the disruption, understanding the grievances behind them.
Over time, rights won by strikers eventually become rights for all. For example, the general strike of June 1936 brought France paid holidays and collective bargaining; later movements won the eight-hour day and strengthened social protections – not just for strikers but for all French workers. Strikes have also defended democracy itself, as in the February 1934 strike against fascism. Today, you’ll see strikes by doctors, nurses, truck drivers, journalists, taxi operators, or students voting to boycott classes. The list appears endless but they all have something in common: they use collective action to press their claims and capture the attention of the political classes by disrupting everyday life. Would anyone listen otherwise?
From the blog
The Famous Secret Traboules of Lyon
Croix-Rousse: In The Footsteps Of The City's Silk Heritage
10 Startling Facts You Need To Know About The French Revolution
Enjoying your read? Please invite a friend to subscribe!
Planning a trip to France? Visit my blog at OffbeatFrance.com and explore France’s lesser known corners – without skipping the places you’ve always dreamed of seeing, of course. Practical, curious, and a little unexpected.
References
Olivier Favier, “Petite histoire de la grève,” RFI (12 April 2023).
“Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville - esplanade de la Libération.” Wikipédia (France).
William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People. Penguin, 2015.