ABSTRACT
Historians have published fewer direct scholarly studies of Havrais dockers. They have approached them obliquely from the point of view of the history of Le Havre, an antiquarian interest in old trades and ships, heritage, and the history of mutual aid societies and urban unions. Many disciplines have contributed to the study of French dock labour either in the framework of the country as a whole or in that of individual ports. The central state intervened in dock labour affairs in different capacities at different times. Dockers' drinking habits belong in both the rubrics on working conditions and on community culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockers had a reputation as heavy drinkers. In the artisanal phase, a widow sometimes inherited the trade membership in the barrowmen's corporation of her deceased husband and either replaced him, with the help of journeymen, or sold his share.
