Opening on 1 May: €78,750, four years later

On 1 May 2021, May Day, three BO&MIE shops open their doors in Paris. Twenty-one employees are working there, all volunteers, on double pay. A labour inspector calls at rue de Turbigo that day and goes right through the shop and the registers.

How the fine adds up

A few months later, a letter sets the sum: seventy-eight thousand seven hundred and fifty euros. The calculation is mechanical — seven hundred and fifty euros per employee present, multiplied by twenty-one, then by five, the company being a legal entity. The Inspection du travail, the labour inspectorate, then offers a settlement at ten thousand euros, guaranteed to close the matter. It is refused.

Then nothing, for nearly four years. On 23 April 2025, Jean-François Bandet is summoned to a Paris police station. Le Parisien breaks the story the day before; within the day it is picked up by the daily press, by the trade press and on television sets.

What the rule says

1 May is the only public holiday in France that is a statutory day off. Bakers and florists — the two trades most closely associated with that date, of all things — do not fall within the exemptions provided by the code du travail, the labour code, whereas fast food, for its part, may open.

That is the point raised publicly: the rule does not distinguish by the nature of the work, nor by the consent or the pay of the employees, but by categories fixed elsewhere. An artisan bakery finds itself on the wrong side of the line.

This entry is not here to plead a case. A press review that kept only the flattering articles would not be worth reading: this one happened, it is dated, it is sourced.