Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2009
Summary
During the Armentières strike of 1903, Jean Jaurès came for a brief visit to boost the morale of his new allies and address the strikers. Despite a steady rain, thousands of them came to the railroad station to meet his train from Paris and lined the streets to cheer him as he proceeded in a carriage toward the square where he was to speak. On the way, he made a prearranged stop in a neighborhood full of tenements along the border between Armentières and Houplines. There the two socialist mayors escorted him into three different buildings so that he could inspect some working-class dwellings. In a speech in another town on the following day he described what he had seen. He saw:
poor households of weavers … poor apartments, narrow, minuscule, a few square meters, where miserable families with seven and eight children are piled up without air, without light, without furniture, without anything that gives human life some dignity, some price.
… in this town of Armentières, the queen of linen, we saw beds that had not a scrap of linen to cover the nudity and modesty of infants. The queen of linen could not spare abed sheet to cover these poor people.
The problem was laid directly on salary levels.
That is the crime … these salaries of 14 and 15 francs a week, these salaries of famine and misery, these households so poor lodged in apartments so small that mother, father, son, grandmother, young daughter and infants, that old age and puberty all lie down pêle-mêle in a miserable promiscuity where vice cannot help but germinate.
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- The Rise of Market CultureThe Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900, pp. 326 - 336Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1984