Rebel, activist, artistic, supportive and welcoming. In southern Finistère, the town of Douarnenez, Douarn for short, cultivates its uniqueness. So go and visit the crazy Gras carnival at the beginning of March to immerse yourself in the rock'n'roll atmosphere of this former working-class city which, despite the gentrification and mass tourism that are eating away at it, has managed to keep its strong identity. It owes this strong character to its maritime past and to the sardine fishing which made the fortune of the port, the world capital of canned fish at the end of the 19th century. But also and above all to the fight and the strike of its sardine boats, the centenary of which we are celebrating this year and which remains engraved in the DNA of the city.
So let's rewind to 1924. At the time, Douarnenez had around twenty sardine factories employing more than 2,000 employees, three quarters of whom were women. The men at sea, it was therefore up to their wives, their mothers or their daughters to clean the sardines, fry them in oil before canning them. A difficult job for these workers wearing headdresses and clogs, nicknamed the Penn Sardin (sardine head in Breton), who sometimes toiled for up to sixteen or eighteen hours straight in the middle of the fish bowels.
Terrible work and paid a pittance
“They had to work from a very young age, very often at night and until exhaustion,” relates Nina Montagné, director of the documentary. The song of the sardine boats which will be broadcast this Sunday noon on the France 3 program “Littoral”. “When the labor inspector arrived, the little girls, sometimes aged 10, had to hide,” she continues. This work in terrible conditions was also paid a pittance, 80 cents an hour. Too little for these penniless sardine fishermen who decided on November 21, 1924 to launch a strike.
The movement of discontent first started at the Carnaud metallurgical factory before quickly spreading to the city's canneries. Singing revolutionary songs, the sardine boats parade by the hundreds in clogs on the quays of Douarnenez with a slogan: “Pemp real a vo” (“five cents we will have!”), an increase of 45 cents per hour. “It was a poverty strike to escape from indignity,” underlines Françoise Pencalet, doctor of history.
Employers call on strikebreakers
Quite quickly, men, sailors and peasants, joined the movement which took on a national scale thanks to the support of personalities such as the communist activist Charles Tillon, future resistance fighter and minister, or Lucie Colliard, member of the PCF steering committee and feminist activist. “We can see it as a feminist strike today but at the time it was a movement led by women revolted by their conditions as exploited workers,” explains Françoise Pencalet.
As the mobilization continues, many believe that the fight is lost in advance. Because they are facing “an intransigent employers who did not hesitate to use violence by calling on strikebreakers to break up the movement,” says the doctor of history. After violent clashes on January 1, 1925 in a café in the city, where the mayor was seriously injured by gunfire, the factory bosses, under pressure, had to give in.
The song of the sardine boats continues to resonate
After six weeks of fighting, the sardine boats can claim victory with an agreement, signed on January 6, increasing their wages to one franc per hour with an increase in overtime and night hours. “They did not obtain as much as they wanted but they then showed the way to other workers on the Finistère coast,” salutes Françoise Pencalet.
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A century after this historic and victorious strike, recently described by the British newspaper The Times as “one of the most important events in the history of women's work in Europe”, the song of its sardine boats still continues to resonate in the three ports and the streets of Douarnenez. “It is part of our history, our intangible heritage and we must maintain this memory,” assures Françoise Pencalet, member of the “Pemp real a vo” collective which was set up last year to celebrate the centenary of the sardine boats.
