Social and Political Roots to 1980

This chapter provides an overview of French management and employment relations before 1980. The aim is to offer a reasoned explanation of the processes behind the transformation of France from a network of predominantly agricultural and artisanal regional economies in which employment relations in the modem sense barely existed, to the complex industrial society that is the focus of this book. It argues that conditions were broadly favourable to the domination of state-structured varieties of economic and political liberalism up until the 1930s. Under the banners of égalité and fraternite the workers’ movement of France’s ‘long’ nineteenth century was strong enough to stage major rebellions against authoritarian liberalism in 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1906, but was too weak to sustain them. The subsequent emergence of a more homogeneous working class, the military and political defeats of first economic liberalism and then authoritarian capitalism in 1940 and 1944, the following 30 years of nearly full employment and the explosion of 1968, however, forged a new relationship between capital, labour and the state.