La peine des hommes. I. Marée fraîche
The Toil of Men. I. Fresh Catch
Pierre Hamp
THIRD CAHIER OF THE TENTH SERIES
In memory of little Jean Francois Desjardins
Here is the first of a series of inquiries into labor.
Nothing is banal. One finds as much fatigue and heroism in a penny’s worth of bread as in a stone of the Pyramids. We live from the suffering of others.
Every man is executioner of men. Let us try to esteem those who toil for us. How many earn their living by pleasure? All live in discomfort, often in torture. Happiness is to love one’s trade, but where are the lovable trades?
Under the hardness of labor, revolt becomes the dream of men, and idleness their pursuit.
The workplace where one no longer sings is becoming a great work of human brutalization. The worker no longer loves his trade, and that shakes the world.
The boats lie bow to shore; the stern, free on the cable, swings in the wind. Against the quay, on a floating dock, fishwives arrange baskets of herring and mackerel. The harbor smells of brine, tar, and the sharp cold of an autumn dawn on the Channel coast.
On the slimy decks, the sailors walked barefoot, their feet hardened against the cold and the fish scales. The trawlers came in one after another with the tide, heavy with their catch, listing under the weight of ice and fish piled in the hold.
When the skipper is kind to the poor, the crew may eat its fill of the catch before selling. The sea feeds many folk: from the mussel-gatherer on the rocks to the owner of the fleet who never goes to sea. Between them, a whole chain of labor stretches — the fishermen who brave the storms, the women who gut and pack, the railwaymen who rush the fresh catch to the cities, the porters at Les Halles who carry the crates at dawn.
This cahier follows the journey of the fresh catch from the fishing boats of Boulogne-sur-Mer to the tables of Paris, documenting every stage of labor along the way — the fishermen at sea, the auction at the quayside, the packing in ice, the express trains through the night, and the market workers at Les Halles. It is a portrait of working people rendered with the precision of a naturalist and the compassion of a poet.
The full French text is available at the Archive.org link above.