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20 Outlandish Historical Facts That Actually Exist

Khalid Elhassan August 12, 2019 25 min

Polar bear - Bears — Vacationing German couple in during the polar bear craze. The Guardian

17. The Great French Mustache Strike

The stock image that comes to many people’s minds when picturing 19^th and early 20^th century Frenchmen usually involves a mustache. However, one group of Frenchmen that went smooth-shaven during that era were domestic servants and waiters. For whatever reason, the French bourgeoisie and upper classes of the day wanted to mark off those “menials”, and so deprived them, as a condition of employment, of the right to sport a mustache. “Sentenced to forced shaving“, was how a contemporary newspaper put it.

That came to be seen as degrading and intolerable by the ‘stache-less, so, being French, they went on strike. In 1907, high-end waiters in Paris and the rest of France went on strike to demand higher wages, fewer working hours, and the right to grow a mustache just like other Frenchmen. The strike captivated the country, and forced a reckoning with the classist injustice under its nose. After two weeks, the strikers finally prevailed, and French waiters won the right to a mustache.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.