Aimée Moutet, Les logiques de l'entreprise: La rationalisation dans l'industrie française de l'entre-deux-guerres. Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1997. 495 pp. 250 F paper.

Abstract

The industrial and labor history of France in the interwar years is legitimately the stuff of Marxist romanticism. You have the transformation of France from an artisanal to an industrial economy; the introduction of Fordism, Taylorism, and scientific management; the concomitant sweating and deskilling of the labor force; and a crisis in accumulation that culminates in the rise of a job-control-conscious proletariat in the Popular Front. Das Kapital never played out so tidily anywhere else.