Le Havre was founded in the early sixteenth century as Paris’ port at the mouth of the Seine and France’s port for colonial trade with the Americas and other territories around the globe. Originally it was also a naval port, but in 1823 the French navy opted for Cherbourg. At the end of the eighteenth century, Le Havre was the second port of France after Nantes. Today it still is, however after Marseille. John Barzman devoted his scholarly career to documenting and researching the history of the dockers in this important port, which resulted in a large number of publications. The book under review here can be considered as his magnum opus, summarizing decades of research. For this publication, Barzman received the 2025 Prix Pellecat of the Académie des sciences, des belles lettres et des arts de Rouen.

The book retraces the history of dockers in Le Havre’s port from the French Revolution to 2020. The French Revolution did away with corporations like the guilds, but in Le Havre the métiers of wheelbarrowers, porters and weighers, coopers, sail and rope makers, coal carriers, clerks and watermen remained the dominant way of organising port workers for half a century onward. These organisations comprised a couple of hundred men, who enjoyed a stable income and belonged to the elite of local workers. When there was more cargo to be loaded and unloaded than these workers could handle, other métiers and casual workers were employed.

After the middle of the nineteenth century port traffic increased and the number of casual port workers hired for one shift at a time exploded. They mostly belonged to the poorest of Le Havre’s proletariat and their employment started the period of the prototypical docker. From 1885 on cargo handling was more and more mechanised. At first cranes became more dominant, followed in the 1940s by pallets and forklifts and from the 1960s onward by containers. The complex routing of the containers has in recent decades been supported by informatisation.

From the late nineteenth century until 1928 there was a period where neither the dockers nor their employers were dominant in the struggle over working conditions in the port of Le Havre. But from the later date every docker had to belong to the syndicat, the local trade union of port workers. Until 1965 the high rate of unionization meant that it could exercise real power in the port and obtain substantial improvements in pay and working conditions. With the arrival of the container, the number of dockers fell, but pay rose, issuing in a prolonged »golden age of the docker«. Where in some other ports, like Liverpool, containers meant the end of the power of the dockers’ union, in Le Havre the dockers’ union continued as a force to be reckoned with.

In his conclusion Barzman juxtaposes three images of the Le Havre docker. One is that of the lazy uninterested worker, too fond of alcohol, who steals from the cargo whenever he can and whose faults are covered by his trade union. The second one sees this as how dockers were in the past, when dirty manual work was dominant and before the occupation became more professionalised with increasing mechanisation. Today dockers are qualified and serious workers, involved in their port’s competition with other Northwestern-European ports. The fact that a few bad apples exist and are integrated in the workforce is seen as proof of the humanity of the workforce as a whole. The third image shows the docker as an exemplary class-conscious militant with a penchant for equality and solidarity. Le Havre dockers for instance struck against the transport of weapons to Indochina in the 1950s.

Barzman does not attempt to choose between these conflicting images, even if it is clear to the reader that his feelings towards his subject are quite positive. What is more, for him the conflicting images apply to the havrais dockers specifically. The latter is his approach throughout the book. All the elements mentioned above can also be found in other ports. That is true for the long survival of guildlike organisations; for the existence of a period with less organisation and more casual workers; for the persistence of strong unions that were prone to unite and strike in solidarity with colleagues in their port, dockers elsewhere or other workers; for the fall in the number of dockers due to mechanization and containerization. They can be found elsewhere, but not everywhere, and the outcome may differ to a large degree, as we saw with the consequences of containerization in Liverpool and Le Havre. Barzman is well aware both of these similarities and the occasional differences between La Havre and other ports, and time and again informs the reader about them. But he does not systematically compare Le Havre with other ports to explain them, nor does he look for structural explanations of factors like the militancy of dockers (as for instance Marcel van der Linden does in the introduction to the book).

In the two and a quarter century treated in the book much changed, but as late as 1996 the syndicat managed to preserve the right of sons of dockers to be hired before other workers. Barzmans forte is the detailed description of this longue durée of dockers’ history in his port of choice. That results in both an engaging story and a Fundgrube of information on the port of Le Havre and its dockers.