The Eight-Hour Day Campaign

The struggle for the eight-hour workday became the focal point of international labor organizing in the late 19th century. French workers, inspired by the Chicago Haymarket martyrs and the American Federation of Labor's campaign, made this demand central to their activities. The choice of May 1st as International Workers' Day, commemorating the 1886 Haymarket affair, linked French workers to global struggles.

The 1906 campaign for the eight-hour day demonstrated both the power and limitations of French labor movements. The CGT called for a general strike on May 1st, with workers simply leaving after eight hours regardless of employer demands. The government responded by deploying 60,000 troops in Paris alone. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, despite his Radical Republican credentials, declared himself "France's first cop" and ordered harsh repression.

The strikes spread unevenly across industries and regions. In the northern mines, solidarity was nearly complete, with entire communities supporting striking workers. In Paris, divisions between skilled and unskilled workers, between French-born and immigrant laborers, weakened the movement. The failure to achieve the eight-hour day through direct action led to debates about strategy that would shape French unionism for decades.

Yet the campaign achieved cultural victories that mattered as much as legislative defeats. It established May Day as a sacred date in French labor culture, a day when workers asserted their collective power through marches, demonstrations, and strikes. It popularized the slogan "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will"—a vision of balanced life that challenged capitalist productivity demands.