Popular Front and the Matignon Accords
French employers and unions signed an agreement at the Hôtel Matignon on the night of 7 June 1936 that transformed working conditions in France. The context was an occupation. The Popular Front — a coalition of Socialists, Radicals and Communists formed against the far-right leagues after the riots of February 1934 — had won the elections that May, and before Léon Blum could take office some two million workers occupied their factories in a spontaneous wave of sit-down strikes. The strikes were festive rather than violent, with accordions and dancing on the shop floor, and they were not called by the union federations, which were as surprised as the employers. Blum brought both sides to his official residence and settled it in a night. The accords granted immediate wage rises of seven to fifteen per cent, the legal right to belong to a union and to elect shop stewards, collective bargaining across whole industries, and an undertaking of no reprisals. Legislation the same month added the forty-hour week and two weeks of paid holiday. The paid holiday is the part that entered French memory. Working families took trains to the sea for the first time, and the photographs of 1936 on the beaches are the images the Popular Front is remembered by. The forty-hour week was blamed for holding down armaments production and was suspended before the war. Blum's government fell in 1937, and Vichy dissolved the unions in 1940. The accords are the foundation of French labour law. The Popular Front also declined to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, which its own supporters never forgave.
- Year: 1936 CE
- Category: Political
