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Marches and muguet: Why May Day is so important in France

May Day is celebrated around the world, but it has particular significance in France.

Published: 23 April 2019 17:36 CEST
Updated: 1 May 2022 09:51 CEST

Marches and muguet: Why May Day is so important in France

Photos: AFP

First and foremost, it’s a day off work, except if it happens to fall on a weekend, in which case it’s not compensated for by a free day on the following Monday.

Unfortunately that is the case this year, when May 1st falls on a Sunday.

Marches

But there are many French who take a much more active approach to May Day, which in France is a designated day of action.

Trade unions hold traditional parades on May Day and there are frequently also demonstrations on particular issues.

Flowers

May Day isn’t all about protests and demonstrations, it’s also about flowers.

On the first of May in 1561, France’s King Charles IX was given a muguet, or lily-of-the-valley in English, as a lucky charm and liked it so much that he decided to offer them each year to the ladies of the court.

These days, the flowers are sold in bouquets on the street around France and people offer them to friends or family members for good luck.

As well as in supermarkets and florists, the flowers are often sold on the street by union activists, with funds going into the union coffers.

Far right events

France’s extreme-right party, the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, for decades held a May Day march from the statue of Joan of Arc at Place des Pyramides in the first arrondissement of Paris.

Femen protestors disrupted the Front National’s traditional May Day march in Paris in 2015. Photo: AFP

Current leader leader Marine Le Pen has in recent years broken with this tradition and held a “patriotic banquet” for up to 2,000 people in another part of Paris.

A tradition borrowed from the Americans

So how did May 1st become such an important day for workers’ rights in France anyway?

Surely there’s nothing more French than protests and demonstrations, but this day of action actually has its origins in a huge strike in Chicago in 1886.

On May 1st, 35,000 workers walked out of their jobs, joined by tens of thousands more in the next couple days, leading a national movement for an eight-hour work day.

Three years later, France decided to establish an “International Workers’ Day” with the same goal, but it didn’t officially become a paid day off until 1941 under the Vichy regime.

In the US and Canada, Labor Day is held on the first Monday in September.

A red triangle on the lapel

In 1890, May Day protesters started adorning their lapels with a red triangle, with the three sides representing the division of the ideal day in three equal parts: work, leisure, and sleep.

For those protesters who still wear pins on their lapels on May 1st, the triangle has since been replaced by a small bouquet of the lily of the valley flower tied with a red ribbon.

Return of les beaux jours

The May 1st holiday can actually be traced back to pagan rituals. For the Celtic people, this day marked the passage from the dark winter months to the return of les beaux jours, or the beautiful, sunny days of spring and summer.

The druids would light bonfires to symbolically protect their livestock from diseases.

May Day events hark back to pagan rituals to mark spring. Photo: AFP

In northeastern France, they called the last night of April the “night of sorcerers”. Children would patrol the villages and gardens, gathering objects that they would then place in the centre of the village, giving the sense of a supernatural intervention.

These days, the last traces of these Celtic rituals only exist in certain parts of France that still practice the tradition of the “tree of May”.

The tree of May

This rather quirky May Day tradition that has mostly fallen out of practice involves young men in some parts of France cutting down a tree during the night between the 30th of April and May 1st and then replanting it by the door of the woman they hoped to marry.

It was a sign of honour and also a celebration of the arrival of May: the month of trees, water, and nature.

Other versions of this tradition saw this May tree placed in front of a church or at the home of a newlywed couple.

Fête de la Terre

During medieval France, this time was a celebration of the season rather than ‘work’, as it was to become. It was named “Fête de la Terre”.

A feast would be hosted for three days in celebration, during which time musical parades would take place with people dancing and riding mules adorned with ribbons through the villages, to an enormous banquet.

This tradition is best preserved in rural areas of France, such as the mountainous department of Isère, or the south west region of Cahors, where the weekend surrounding the 1st is usually one of celebration, using it as an excuse to come together and enjoy the good weather, with parades and markets of regional products.

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Azerbaijan vehemently rejects the accusation it bears responsibility for the riots that have led to the deaths of five people and rattled the Paris government.

But it is just the latest in a litany of tensions between Paris and Baku and not the first time France has accused Azerbaijan of being behind an alleged disinformation campaign.

The riots in New Caledonia, a French territory lying between Australia and Fiji, were sparked by moves to agree a new voting law that supporters of independence from France say discriminates against the indigenous Kanak population.

Paris points to the sudden emergence of Azerbaijani flags alongside Kanak symbols in the protests, while a group linked to the Baku authorities is openly backing separatists while condemning Paris.

“This isn’t a fantasy. It’s a reality,” interior minister Gérald Darmanin told television channel France 2 when asked if Azerbaijan, China and Russia were interfering in New Caledonia.

“I regret that some of the Caledonian pro-independence leaders have made a deal with Azerbaijan. It’s indisputable,” he alleged.

But he added: “Even if there are attempts at interference… France is sovereign on its own territory, and so much the better”.

“We completely reject the baseless accusations,” Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry spokesman Ayhan Hajizadeh said.

“We refute any connection between the leaders of the struggle for freedom in Caledonia and Azerbaijan.”

In images widely shared on social media, a reportage broadcast Wednesday on the French channel TF1 showed some pro-independence supporters wearing T-shirts adorned with the Azerbaijani flag.

Tensions between Paris and Baku have grown in the wake of the 2020 war and 2023 lightning offensive that Azerbaijan waged to regain control of its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian separatists.

France is a traditional ally of Christian Armenia, Azerbaijan’s neighbour and historic rival, and is also home to a large Armenian diaspora.

Darmanin said Azerbaijan – led since 2003 by President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar – was a “dictatorship”.

On Wednesday, the Paris government also banned social network TikTok from operating in New Caledonia.

Tiktok, whose parent company is Chinese, has been widely used by protesters. Critics fear it is being employed to spread disinformation coming from foreign countries.

Azerbaijan invited separatists from the French territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia to Baku for a conference in July 2023.

The meeting saw the creation of the “Baku Initiative Group”, whose stated aim is to support “French liberation and anti-colonialist movements”.

The group published a statement this week condemning the French parliament’s proposed change to New Caledonia’s constitution, which would allow outsiders who moved to the territory at least 10 years ago the right to vote in its elections.

Pro-independence forces say that would dilute the vote of Kanaks, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

“We stand in solidarity with our Kanak friends and support their fair struggle,” the Baku Initiative Group said.

Raphael Glucksmann, the lawmaker heading the list for the French Socialists in June’s European Parliament elections, told Public Senat television that Azerbaijan had made “attempts to interfere… for months”.

He said the underlying problem behind the unrest was a domestic dispute over election reform, not agitation fomented by “foreign actors”.

But he accused Azerbaijan of “seizing on internal problems.”

A French government source, who asked not to be named, said pro-Azerbaijani social media accounts had on Wednesday posted an edited montage purporting to show two white police officers with rifles aimed at dead Kanaks.

“It’s a pretty massive campaign, with around 4,000 posts generated by (these) accounts,” the source told AFP.

“They are reusing techniques already used during a previous smear campaign called Olympia.”

In November, France had already accused actors linked to Azerbaijan of carrying out a disinformation campaign aimed at damaging its reputation over its ability to host the Olympic Games in Paris. Baku also rejected these accusations.