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Access to the sea

It was on the night of 7-8 June 1936 that the Confédération Générale du Travail and the employers of the Confédération Générale de la production française1 signed an historic agreement with the government, the so-called Matignon Agreements, setting the working week at forty hours, raising wages, establishing trade union rights and giving employees paid leave. A month earlier, the electoral success of a coalition of left-wing parties, united under the banner of the 'Popular Front', had raised hopes for an improvement in working and living conditions. This aspiration triggered an unprecedented movement of strikes and factory occupations throughout France. One thousand two hundred picket lines sprang up, and it is estimated that two million workers walked out. Four days after this agreement, the General Secretary of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, declared that 'you have to be able to end a strike when you've got what you wanted'. On 20 June 1936, the Popular Front government announced that it would grant two weeks' paid vacation to all employees.

Workers would be able to 'get to the seaside' for a break. But the vast majority of workers obviously did not have the money to afford a vacation, or even to travel. At that time, a car was an almost unaffordable luxury - a means of transport primarily reserved for the upper and lower middle classes. Aware of this reality, the Undersecretary of State for the Organization of Leisure and Sports, Léo Lagrange, imposed reduced-price tickets on reluctant railway companies. Put on sale on 3 August 1936, the 'workers' tickets for paid vacations' allowed people to travel by train at a sixty per cent discount, provided they travelled at least 200 kilometres - a distance that was not chosen at random, since it opened the beaches of the English Channel to the working-class strongholds of the Paris region and the north of France. People immediately flocked to the railway stations. The atmosphere was joyful; the jubilation, the cheerfulness, the broad smiles would be abundantly immortalized by film-makers and photographers (Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson in particular). Access to the seaside, once the reserve of the privileged, marked a cultural shift.

Let us be clear, however, that these now iconic scenes are misleading. Contrary to such rose-tinted images, the Popular Front's measures did not trigger a rush to the seaside. In reality, it is estimated that, of the ten million French people now able to take two weeks' paid leave, barely five per cent were able to take a vacation.2 The new holidaymakers did not have the means to go very far, and most of them chose destinations very close to home. For example, those from the Île-de-France region around Paris went to the riverbanks of the Seine or the Marne. However, those who did decide to go beyond the 200 kilometres laid down by the so-called 'Léo Lagrange tickets' opted for the seaside. Workers went to the beaches of the English Channel, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Many of them had never seen the sea, so they logically headed for the fashionable resorts they had heard about, especially those with train stations. In a few days, middle-class holiday resorts - Cabourg, Deauville, Houlgate, Le Touquet, Dinard, and La Baule in the north, and Nice, Cannes, Arcachon, and Biarritz in the south - witnessed a population explosion.

The seaside, the swimming, the deep clear waters, the silvery reflections: they were all there. But so was social otherness. The eruption of the working classes into these places of bourgeois endogamy caused unprecedented tensions.

The massive arrival of the working classes in these small seaside resorts triggered a culture shock. For the first time, the rich would have to share their playgrounds. Picnics, pétanque, camping: the working-class lifestyle emerged in places that had always been governed by the norms and customs of the privileged. This enforced cohabitation triggered criticism of those who were contemptuously called 'paid holidaymakers', and whose bathing suits and vest tops were mocked.

The bourgeoisie was soon thinking about what to do next; a few years later they had reorganized their vacation spots. After the war, the seasonal provision of holiday places was segmented. Luxury villas for the middle classes, low-end rentals for low-income earners. In addition, the former were helped by elected officials, who authorized (or not) the installation of campsites in their municipalities. For their part, from the 1960s, the ultra-rich opted for a radical separation: they now holidayed on board yachts, the market for which exploded during the Trente Glorieuses,3 as a riposte to the advent of mass tourism.

If paid vacations were one of the great social achievements of the working classes, access to the sea took on a highly symbolic dimension and went far beyond the social question. Access to the coasts, and to other distant landscapes, changed the horizon of the most modest classes, which had hitherto been limited to the places where they lived: the neighbourhoods and municipalities of the big industrial conurbations for workers, the countryside for those who dwelt in areas not as yet called 'rural'. Thus, access to the sea was more than a social advance; it also represented a cultural advance. In the summer of 1936, the working classes reached the horizon, broadened their field of vision, and made themselves visible, not only as the essential cogs of the economy, but also as an unavoidable cultural group.

Back to square one

More than eighty years later, in 2022, the small village of Caurel in Côtes-d'Armor was the scene of an attack. A holiday home was set on fire. The house was completely burned, except for the walls. There were two stencilled inscriptions, making a political statement: 'FLB' - a reference to the Front de libération de la Bretagne (Front for the Liberation of Brittany)4 and the hundreds of attacks it had committed between 1966 and 2000. The local press was up in arms too: Le Télégramme asked: 'Should we fear a return of armed struggle in Brittany?'5

The newspaper noted that the threats had become increasingly overt over the last few months, in the form of damage and destruction, and an ultimatum signed 'FLB'. In January, another home in the same village, where sixty per cent of residences were holiday homes, was damaged - with the same graffiti.6

A few decades before, this type of action had been carried out in Corsica, when the FLNC7 dynamited villas belonging to mainlanders or foreigners. Though fewer in number these days, the attacks have not disappeared from the island. On 7 April 2022, in Ghisonaccia, a mainlander's secondary residence was targeted. A gas bottle connected to an explosive device was found on site. The day before, another secondary residence, also belonging to mainlanders, had been partially destroyed in Canale-di-Verde. In addition, the inscriptions 'IFF' ('I Francesi Fora', 'French Go Home') sprang up all over the place.

In Corsica, where one in three homes is a secondary residence (a national record),8 the proliferation of such residences is a very sensitive subject for locals, and one taken up in particular by nationalists. Mainland owners who stay for the holidays or rent out their property during the summer season, to the detriment of hoteliers, are in fact causing property prices to soar, often preventing young Corsican families from accessing housing.

This picture is the same across all the French coastlines. It raises a fundamental question, that of access to housing for young people and workers in these zones tendues (tense zones),9 and ultimately the matter of the right to work, live and therefore find accommodation 'in one's own part of the country'.

Violent actions are only the tip of the iceberg of a protest that is tending to become more widespread. All over the coastline, from Brittany to the Basque coast, there are increasing numbers of demonstrations. Groups and elected officials are mobilizing to find legal means to curb the proliferation of secondary residences and the 'Airbnb tsunami' that comes with it.10 While the walls in the Basque Country remind us that 'Euskal Herria Ez da Salgai' ('The Basque Country is not for sale'), it does not look as if the market mechanism is going to grind to a halt anytime soon: and that is because this shortage of housing supply is the direct consequence of a change in lifestyles, particularly those of the upper classes and wealthy retirees.

In Brittany as elsewhere, it is the bourgeoisie that is snapping up local real estate,11 and the impact of this land grab is already being felt locally. La Couarde-sur-Mer, a village on the Île-de-Ré on France's Atlantic seaboard, with 1,200 inhabitants, lost half of its workforce over the last twenty years or so, and is struggling to prevent the closure of its school. Patrick Rayton, the mayor, sounds the alarm: 'The phenomenon is similar everywhere on the island. We currently have more than a hundred families waiting for a year-round rental!'12 In Brittany, to limit the number of secondary residences, the...