A column of French Renault tanks moving to the front in a stereo card. The Renault tanks were used by both French and American forces. © By the Keystone View Company
How France aided her fighters—Renault tanks going to the front.
"— The 13th [May, 1918]. The strike in the Renault factory is being kept dark. The workers are not asking for any increase of pay. They are merely protesting against being put back into the army, against the use of foreigners to fill their places, against the refusal of the peace offers last year, and against a harsh war-policy. Finally, they insist on publication of our war-aims.— Since the evening of the 14th, the strike movement has calmed down. The newspapers are still silent about it. It is a silence truly symbolic of the ignorance imposed on public opinion. A hundred thousand men have left factories at the very gates of Paris, but Paris knows nothing about it."
Entries for May 13 and (likely) 15, 1918, from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government writing in Paris. The Renault company manufactured the Renault tank, used by the French and American armies. The Bolshevik Revolution in November, 1917, the armistice and subsequent peace negotiations between Russia and the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, peace initiatives in December by Pope Benedict XV, American President Woodrow Wilson, and by Germany had raised hopes for peace across Europe.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 344, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1918-05-13, 1918, May, Renault, strike, Renault strike, Paris
