But Coco had another worry aside from competition from Schiap. The political situation in France had changed drastically. In April 1936 a Jewish socialist, Léon Blum, was elected premier (prime minister). Coco and her elitist, anti-Semitic peers feared having a Jewish premier. Blum’s left-wing government represented the working class and sought reforms such as paid vacations and unemployment insurance. Wealthy conservatives like Coco were terrified about how their businesses selling luxury goods would be affected by the promised changes. If they were forced to pay higher wages to their workers, they, the owners, would make less money. And if factories that produced fabrics stopped production during strikes, Coco would not have the materials necessary for making clothing.
Textile manufacturers did go on strike. Other strikers included railway workers, waiters in restaurants, bakers, and salespeople in department stores. The country was in turmoil. Demonstrators marched in the streets. Throughout France, thousands of workers went on strike to protect the new benefits enacted by Blum’s government.
On June 2, 1936, Coco’s entire staff at rue Cambon walked out. They demanded shorter hours and higher wages in the form of weekly salaries instead of payment for piecework. Coco’s loyal private accountant, Madame Renard, slipped away to the Ritz and told her boss what had happened. She urged Coco to leave Paris for her own safety.
Coco wondered if her workers had gone crazy. “I decided to go and talk to the rebels,” she said. Dressed in a navy blue suit and her real pearls, a visual contrast to her workers’ condition, she hurried over to rue Cambon. But the workers barred the entrance and wouldn’t let her in. The sight of them enraged Coco. They argued. Coco refused to negotiate. “I detest giving in, bending over, humiliating myself,” she told a friend.
Workers prepare the 1931 fall/winter collection in one of Chanel’s tailoring workshops
From her point of view, her employees owed her nothing but gratitude. She maintained that she gave them “perfectly proper” wages. “My staff are always better paid than anyone else’s,” she said, “because I know what work is.” She even provided vacations for certain employees. Every year she sent her “most delicate apprentices” to stay at a “workers’ holiday camp” she had built in Mimizan in the Landes, a resort area on the Atlantic coast of France. Manon Ligeour, one of her top seamstresses, had gone there and appreciated the trip. Manon said, “The first time I saw the sea was at Mimizan.”
Chanel workers on strike, June 1936
Nevertheless, the three hundred strikers held fast. Most of them were not rewarded with trips to the seaside. They expected increased wages and paid vacations. Coco immediately fired all of them. But they stayed and organized a sit-in with music and dancing in the workrooms.
Later Coco reinvented the episode as “cheerful and delightful. The accordion could be heard playing all over the house,” she recalled. According to her story, she asked the strikers what they wanted, and they replied, “We don’t see enough of Mademoiselle. Only the models see her.”
“It was a strike for love,” she lied, “a strike of the yearning heart.”
In reality, she denounced her employees and said, “Imagine women . . . staging a sit-down strike. . . . Very pretty. What idiots those girls were!”
Finally, Coco proposed selling her business to the workers, and they could pay themselves whatever they wished. She would remain as a consultant. Of course, the workers couldn’t afford to buy her out, and after three more weeks on strike they settled with her. She agreed to some of their demands, although she really wanted to fire them all. But she couldn’t shut down production any longer. Her lawyer and financial directors advised her to reach a solution by the end of June or she would be unable to present her fall collection. That would mean leaving the field wide open to her competitor, Elsa Schiaparelli, whose employees had never gone on strike because she had paid them well. The event left Coco’s staff tense and resentful. They never forgot her indifference to their struggles despite their having helped make her one of the richest women in the world.
