The Great French Mustache Strike of 1907(atlasobscura.com)

  “He’s in trouble already,” Evan said.
  
  “How?”
  
  “They’re changing the management,” Evan said. “The new
   owners want to have a different clientele that will spend
  some money and they are going to put in an American bar.
  The waiters are going to be in white jackets, Hem, and
  they have been ordered to be ready to shave off their
  mustaches.”
  
  “They can’t do that to André and Jean.”
  
  “They shouldn’t be able to, but they will.”
  
  “Jean has had a mustache all his life. That’s a dragoon’s
  mustache. He served in a cavalry regiment.”
  
  “He’s going to have to cut it off.”
  
  I drank the last of the whisky.
  
  “Another whisky, Monsieur?” Jean asked. “A whisky, 
 Monsieur Shipman?” His heavy drooping mustache was a part
  of his thin, kind face, and the bald top of his head
  glistened under the strands of hair that were slicked
  across it.
  
  “Don’t do it, Jean,” I said. “Don’t take a chance.”
  
  “There is no chance,” he said, softly to us. “There is
  much confusion. Many are leaving. Entendu, Messieurs,” he
  said aloud. He went into the café and came out carrying
  the bottle of whisky, two large glasses, two ten-franc
  gold-rimmed saucers and a seltzer bottle.
  
  “No, Jean,” I said.
  
  He put the glasses down on the saucers and filled them
  almost to the brim with whisky and took the remains of the
  bottle back into the café. Evan and I squirted a little
  seltzer into the glasses.
  
  “It was a good thing Dostoyevsky didn’t know Jean,” Evan
  said. “He might have died of drink.”
  
  “What are we going to do with these?”
  
  “Drink them,” Evan said. “It’s a protest. It’s direct action.”
  
  On the following Monday when I went to the Lilas to work
  in the morning, André served me a bovril, which is a cup
  of beef extract and water. He was short and blond and
  where his stubby mustache had been, his lip was as bare as
  a priest’s. He was wearing a white American barman’s coat.