What would be more intractable to the public mind in general than a wine strike in France? I think that it trumps by far a yellow cab strike in NYC (or anywhere), a beef strike in Buenos Aires, and maybe even a rice strike in Tokyo. It seems unthinkable.
But this fabulous image shows the event in full force, with "Marcelin Albert, the Napoleon of the South" up to his elbows in a sea of French wine producers and suppliers, drawing the group together in a very solid and unified strike front, demanding more of the French government back there in 1907. Albert is administering an oath of allegiance to the Wine-Growers' Federation at Montpell, the listeners' outstretched arms showing their acceptance of whatever it was Albert was preaching. The picture was printed in London by the Illustrated London News on June 22, 1907, months into the wine-grower's striking reign. M. Albert certainly had the attention of the French legislature at this time, speaking in small towns and cities across the breadth of the south of the country, getting huge crowds--at the fabulous Medieval fortress city of Carcassonne, for example, which had a population of about 30,000, more than 200,000 people came ro support the strike. Albert (b. 1851 and looking a little like a thin Castro) is shown speaking to a part of a dense crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands; the crowds of growers (labeled "agitators") in front of raised ALber to a person of high importance in France. I have no idea how the idea of a wine strike was tolerated by the people of France, in general.
Note: Marcelin Albert led campaigns for the defense of vine growers in 1900, 1903 and 1905. He headed an association of Languedoc vine growers in the great agitation of 1907 (against restrictions on home distillers, taxes on sugar, etc) that led to his distinctions and high social position as representative of hundreds of thousands of working Frenchmen.
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