The sun didn’t shine for bourgeois France in summer 1936. Posh society ladies whined that the invading hordes of proles were taking up too much space on their favored beaches; restaurateurs on the Côte d’Azur even worried whether the factory workers arriving in their resorts would know how to use a knife and fork. In June, the Socialist-led government had guaranteed every worker two weeks’ paid vacation, making the summer holiday a reality for millions. Now, workers could stop making bicycles and baguettes for a fortnight and start building sandcastles — and their bosses had to pay them for it.

The law that gave workers holiday time was passed by Jewish socialist prime minister Léon Blum, who had been elected that May. Yet the change was most of all owed to the powerful strike movement that followed his election. Across the world, labor unions had long resisted the domination of life by work: the general strike that began in Chicago on May Day 1886 demanded “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” After the achievement of legal limits on working hours, and then the invention of weekends, in the twentieth century, labor’s crusade for free time took up the fight for paid holidays.

Having first sunk roots in France, paid vacation time was soon achieved elsewhere, in many cases complemented by rights like sick pay and maternity leave. But the fight for holidays wasn’t just about giving workers one fortnight of freedom a year, only then to trudge back to the shop floor. Driven by a new mass culture, the fight to expand the realm of leisure was also about democratizing the societies in which we live. French workers not only won the right to vacations but built the hostels, campsites, and social clubs through which they could spend their time better — and spend it together.