Deindustrialisation & Reindustrialisation: The case of Bordeaux & Nantes

Hubert Bonin, professor in economic history at the Institute of Political Sciences of Bordeaux (Bordeaux 4 University), & Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, professor in economic history at the University of Bretagne-Sud (Lorient)
[text presented at the Terni conference of the Ebha in 1999]

The main objectives of that business history development consist with a study of the link between harbour economies and industrialisation, and with a scrutiny of the rhythms of that industrialisation, as a cycle of industrialisation, deindustrialisation and reindustrialisation is supposed to take shape through out the 20th century. The destiny of Bordeaux and Nantes harbours is somewhat similar as they had known a huge expansion owing to African and transatlantic trade flows in the 17th & 18th centuries, some kind of a decline during the 1790s-1820s years, before a strong renewal of their commercial links and volumes in the 1830s-1860s years ; but, at that times, their industrialisation had been sparse, with irregular rhythms of diffusion, vast holes and disparities in its completion, and a feeble base of financial and productive capital in comparison with the strong areas of industrialisation of the first half of the 19th century. The Great Depression, the transition between First industrialisation and Second industrialisation, the crisis of several enterprises in these harbours because of gaps in their strategies of adaptation to fundamental industrial changes and in their managerial and familial tactics, all these were factors of a kind of a structural crisis of Bordeaux and Nantes industries. The heritage to the 20th century and to Second Industrialisation was however substantial, with strongholds in the transformation of agricultural, seafood and tropical products (sugar refineries, canned fish or food, oil refineries, etc.), with a tradition of skills too in shipbuilding, mechanics owing to numerous small and medium-sized societies, and last with a layer of workshops linked to shipping business and armament.

Happily, both harbours entertained a solid jump to industrialisation through Second Industrialisation during the 1880s-1950s years. But the 1950s-1970s paved the way to a strenuous crisis of the industries that had thus developed: time had come there of a radical questioning of the shape and model of industrialisation. Intense strategic and public arguments and reflections, dynamic initiatives of state, mixed-economic or private investment led to a new wave of industrialisation at the end of Second Industrialisation (1960s-1970s). But its results themselves have been confronted to hard times since the eclosion of the Grand Crisis (since 1974/1975): the reshaping of the industrial economy recently forged has led to a deep reassessment of its basis: deindustrialisation has threatened this very reindustrialisation itself! Our analysis will focus therefore on the successive waves of industrialisation, deindustrialisation, reindustrialisation, deindustrialisation, reindustrialisation and present wavering, in order to determine why Nantes and Bordeaux are not Rotterdam or Anvers: we shall ponder the strategies of firms, the strength of entrepreneurial initiatives among local bourgeoisies, the opportunities seized within the national and international workforce division (division internationale du travail). Our synthesis will of course be somewhat empirical, without any pretention of a definitive arguing accuracy: it will only pave the way for a debate and further comparative studies.

I. Before deindustrialisation: the tides of industrialisation and their heritage up to the 1950s-1960s 

1. A Bordeaux survey

At the turning point of the 19th century, at the junction time of First Industrialisation and Second Industrialisation, Bordeaux reached at last the stage of an industrialising growth.

A. Owing to the Bordeaux port: national or international market-oriented industries

First, a logic of "harbour development" was followed: several activities grew along the outlets of the port flows. The numerous small shipbuilding workshops and the little number of medium sized shipbuilding factories left room to a few large shipbuilding complexes; they were  controlled by nationally-wide investors (Dyle & Bacalan, with a Belgian participation, active up to 1927) and industrialists (Schneider, manager since 1882 of the Forges & chantiers de la Gironde), they gained orders by large navy companies and by the State (for military ship) and they acceded to the dimension of big business. A third company, the Ateliers & chantiers maritimes du Sud-Ouest, specialised in the interwar in oil-ship building. Like Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, Rouen and Le Havre, Marseille (with the shipyards at La Seyne) or Toulon (with the shipyards at La Ciotat), Bordeaux became a star of an industry of shipbuilding that was not only linked to State orders but to the diversity of the navy economy. Its market was local, national or international, through the networks entertained by the Paris bureaux. The workforce of Forges & chantiers de la Gironde reached 2,600 employees in 1920 (owing to war orders), that of Dyle & Bacalan 2,500, that of Ateliers & chantiers maritimes du Sud-Ouest 1,100; quite 5,000 employees were still active in that industry in 1933. Thus prospered for decades (from the 1880s to the 1960s) a tradition of mechanics, metal processing, motor engineering, etc. The Bordeaux genius of mechanics and metallurgy entertained by shipbuilding gathered more momentum during the First World War years (from 1914 up to 1919/1921) as it received huge State orders for munitions and armament : at that time, Bordeaux was rich with eight plants gathering more than 1,000 employees and this metallurgy and mechanics industry gathered 20,000 employees (a fifth of industrial workforce). « Vast rivermouth port, hub of large railways, Bordeaux did not suffer from its distance from French coal regions as it easily received huge imports of British coal » (Jean Dumas).

The contraction of State orders and an industrial over-equipment in every metallurgy and heavy mechanics spurred a temporary crisis in the midst of the 1920s; Forges & chantiers de la Gironde had to be restructured and refinanced in 1928, while Dyle & Bacalan disappeared in 1927, being divided into units bought by other firms. But shipbuilding and heavy mechanics regained prosperity thereafter. The strong metallurgic and mechanics tradition was reinforced in the interwar with the growth of a plant (with 2,500 employees at its maximal point in the 1950s) of the Lorraine steel firm Aciéries de Longwy which elaborated equipments and appendages for various metallurgy outlets and certainly for the shipyards too. 

The port economy opened the door to several other activities that were assumed generally by local bourgeoisies or by recently established entrepreneurs. Cod fishing explained the development of dozens of cod processing small and medium-sized societies; the import of Black Africa peanuts helped the growth of four big oil-mills. The requirements of ship fitting and the conquest of large outlets in harbours abroad, especially in South America and in Africa, sustained the strength of a dozen of medium sized fish and vegetables canning firms, that enlarged their range to every spice-products (mustard, condiments, etc.). The growth of these canning plants justified that of tin-plate factories : in the 1920-1940s, five plants elaborated tin can packing and were themselves supplied by a tin factory (with rolling equipments) established in 1924 by a national steel producer, Forges de la Marine & d'Homécourt. The markets for that activities were local and regional, semi-national (for cod, distributed in the Great South of France ; for oil products, too, up to the zone controlled by the competition of Marseille productions), or national and international (spice products, canned products). International or semi-national outlets caused too the reinforcement of spirits productions, as they gained markets abroad, in the colonies, along the Atlantic shores (for sailors), etc., but their size was rather small. Industrialist dynasties thus aroused from trade dynasties (for the oil mill Maurel & Prom & Maurel frères, for instance), from small industrialists families or from entrepreneurs coming from other French regions, from the Great South-West, especially, as Bordeaux offered a lot of opportunities to launch or develop an affair or to reap profits along regular annual sales. The strength of the banking place (with local banks or with branches of Parisian or English banks) and the social and intimate economic links between local bankers and local businessmen, the input of local capital or of Parisian capital, spurred the surge and the development of these industrial areas – whereas the local Bourse did not play a very significant part as a financial source to business, as it concentrated especially on tertiary and utilities firms. The density of roads, the efficiency of railway networks, the tradition of Atlantic coastal tramping, the relatively strong position of Bordeaux as a hub for colonial or transatlantic navy lines, sustained the growth of national or international markets.

Almost no national-levelled industry that was not linked to port flows could longly survive in Bordeaux. One tried to launch a steel mill downstream at Pauillac, which became in 1908 a subsidiary of a Nantes company (Société de la Basse-Loire), but it resisted only a few years (1901-1918), and its mother company itself collapsed in the 1920s. Car industry was tried too in Bordeaux, with hundreds of cars built by some mechanics firms (Motobloc, etc.) ; thousands of light cars were assembled by Ford in Bordeaux in the years 1917-1920s, but this bridgehead was abandoned, as it revealed that Bordeaux was too far from the mechanics and transport appendages traditions that had been entertained in the Paris or Lyon region, while no industrialist chose here to become a specialist of car building, like the Peugeots in the Center-East.

B. In search of regional or pluriregional markets: activities linked to the hinterland

In parallel, several activities mixed such engineering and mechanics skills and regional markets. Urbanisation and collective equipments opened several outlets to semi-heavy industries. The Compagnie du Midi, a south-western regional railway firm, entertained its own production factory since 1854 (with 700 employees in the 1960s); likewise, the Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Etat (with a network along the Atlantic coast from Bordeaux up to Brittanny) (with a mill established in 1875), and the Compagnie Paris-Orléans (with a network from Bordeaux to Paris) were equipped with their own plant too, while Dyle & Bacalan offered a branch of railway maintenance. Their outlets were thus strictly regional or pluriregional (the Grand Sud-Ouest), from Nantes to Marseille. But they represented a strong industrial basis: the Compagnie du Midi and the Compagnie Paris-Orléans (merged in 1934) plant gathered 1,400 employees in the 1930s ; that of Compagnie industrielle de matériel de transports (Cimt, which took over the Chemins de fer de l'Etat's plant in 1918) 1,000. A dozen of medium-sized enterprises manufactured railway equipments, motors, industrial or urban metallic buildings, heating, pumping, steaming or energy outfits.

Current life required :
- cement - thus explaining the existence of a few cement mills in the Bordeaux agglomeration ;
- wheat flour - thus the big flour-mill built at the beginning of the 1920s, Les Grands Moulins de Bordeaux;
- gas - with a factory transforming British coal into gas for the firm Régie du Gaz & et d'Electricité de Bordeaux (a city-controlled utilities firm) ;
- sugar - with three medium-sized factories ;
- oil - with the already quoted oil-mills - and soap ; paper and cardboard - with a few papermills in the agglomeration itself, owing to Massif central's wood ;
- chocolate - with two important mills ;
- biscuits - with one medium sized firm, Olibet, and several small ones ;
- and even shoes as a tradition had appeared in Bordeaux itself with a few shoe mills, perhaps linked to the import of leather through the port.

Their markets were local (gas), regional (cement mills, shoe mills) or pluriregional: the sugar-mills sold their products up to the line where they could resist to the competition of their Nantes or Marseille counterparts, while the oil-mills kept for themselves a large south-western market in front of Le Havre and once more Marseille competitors. A segment of activities aroused form rural economy: vineyards and agriculture required first mechanics equipments, second chemical products against parasites and fertilizers; thus aroused a chemical industry with several medium-sized factories (Compagnie bordelaise de produits chimiques, processing raw fertilizers imported from abroad, a plant of the Marseille firm Raffineries de soufre réunies, Cornubia, etc.). 

C. A capitalist world and an industrial landscape

The capitalist world of these industries was mixed, with external investors (the national firm Say for sugar, Kuhlmann for chemics), regional and national investors (Grands Moulins de Bordeaux, Compagnie bordelaise de produits chimiques), pure local investors (often in engineering and mechanics, metallic building), with industrialist dynasties, generally on two or three generations, sometimes with only one generation. The 1930's crisis caused some mergers, the integration of some firms into nationally-wide societies, but the core of the industrial landscape shaped in the 1890s-1920s resisted to conjunctural events or war tempests. Geographically, as it appears on maps or on ancient photographs, this industrial landscape gives the impression of a very industrialised agglomeration (that is, Bordeaux itself, and the industrial cities around it: first, Bègles, Lormont, Floirac; second, Talence, Le Bouscat, etc.), among a wine and forest landscape. It is no industrial region, no "pays noir", but a deeply industrial agglomeration, rich with factory chimneys and industrial pollution. In these times, it offered vast spaces for the new buildings and yards, conquered against marsh zones all along the river Garonne and the quays. All these medium sized mills required important stock areas (for peanuts or wood, for instance) and warehouses, and some large factories (especially the shipbuildings) laid on very extended zones (Lormont, Bacalan). The work force came from a very large hinterland of rural areas, that traditionally exported their human surplus to Bordeaux, where they were joined by Spanish or Italian immigrants.

Globally, it appears as an efficient economic system: the international and national overture of the port spurred industrial activities that conquered credit, skills and outlets, which placed them inside the national and even the international production division (shipbuildings, canned food, oil products, spirits, etc.). In the meantime, pluriregional, regional and local outlets provided life to several industries, often owing to imported raw materials or commodities through the harbour. An harmonious balance seemed then to be reached in the 1950-1960s, as this harbour economy flourished somehow, even if Bordeaux was isolated from the large industrial national areas: it looked somehow like an industrial island surrounded by vineyards, forests and rural areas, thus isolating somehow in the same time its capitalist world from the core of the global French capitalist world and reinforcing the Bordeaux bourgeoisie. Contrarily to some legend, Bordeaux was truly an industrial area, but insulated within a vast underindustrialised or non-industrialised sousth-western area - except medium-sized cities lodging a single factory or small workshops specialised in some industry (shoes, etc.) With almost 90,000 employees in industry in 1968, it gathered more workers than Nantes-Saint-Nazaire (82,000), far more than Toulouse (55,000) - but of course far less than Lyon (204,000). Bordeaux mobilised however only 800 industrial units with more than ten employees (1,150 with building and public works) and no more than two dozens of units with more than 500 employees. Metallurgy and mechanics themselves gathered growing workforces (1948: 18, 000 employees, 1964: 19, 500, 1970: 24 ,000), thus proving the strength of industrialisation in that sector all along Second Industrialisation and still along its second stage in the 1945/1974 years.

Table 1. Industrial (with craftsmen and very small societies) workforce in 1968 (in thousands)
                                                        in Bordeaux        in Bordeaux agglomeration
metallurgy                                                 12                 14
building and public works                     14                 25
chemicals                                                     2                 7
food processing                                          6                 10
wood, paper                                                2                  5
shoes, textile and clothing                       6                 11
total                                                            49                  90 
    
2. A Nantes survey: The dream of a great industrial port (around 1880-1920)

A. The project and its origins

Industry is nothing new in Nantes. From the beginning, or almost, industrial and commercial activities were linked. The expansion of the great colonial commerce took place at the same time as the beginnings of sugar refining, during the last third of the 17th century. A little later, at the beginning of the 18th century, textile industry began seriously to develop. So, throughout the age of Enlightenment, Nantes became one of the most important French capitals for printed calico (along with Rouen and the East of France). This industrial activity was closely linked with sea trade: it supplied articles to be sold outside (printed calico and glass beads, for example, were essential for the slave trade) and it was used to process produce brought back from the colonies, as well as the needs of the marine and the colonies (ironwork for slave chains and ships, fabrication of machines for colonial plantations). Some merchant ship-owners invested in the manufacturing production and contributed to its expansion. But, for them, trade was the major activity Industry was only a side-line, which was useful but secondary. That is why an unequal industrialisation appeared - which was quite specialized, and very dependant of the international commercial climate. The Revolutionary wars and the Empire partly destroyed the manufacturing activity in the département. It was rebuilt, and new businesses and new entrepreneurs appeared during the 1840s. The textile industry began to lag, in Nantes as in other French ports, except Rouen. Food industry developed (concerning sugar notably, with Marseille being more individual with oil), while chemical and metallurgical industries became more important. But the great Nantes sugar cycle (around 1840 to 1863), or that of oil producing plants in Marseille (1841-1881) did not change things. Industrialisation in the port remained dependent and derived from trade. Real mutations did not appear until the end of the 19th century.

Until then, the majority of large French ports had known a more or less identical situation. The end of the 19th century is contemporary to what may be called the "revolution of heavy goods". Commercial changes (with the appearance of new colonial empires), the entry of "new countries", and the beginnings, in Europe, of the second industrialisation period, led to a spectacular increase in the tonnage of merchandise transported by sea. This was reserved before for quite valuable produce, due to the cost of travel. It then had to satisfy demand, ships began to specialize, to increase speed and stocking capacity, and to use new materials. All this allowed them to transport even greater quantities of heavy goods (notably raw materials) which weren't expensive. This revolution, affecting all the ports in the world, affected French ports in a different way. Some managed to develop considerably, like Le Havre and Marseille, both having benefited with the addition of capital and high-flying capitalists from outside the area, notably from Paris. Thanks to railways, and, for Marseille, the opening of the Suez canal (1869), their background and foregrounds expanded enormously. Other ports didn't have the same chance, notably those of the Atlantic coast. They were handicapped by trade that was still looking too much to the past, and by their distance from large areas of population and production in the country, as well as by the insufficient West-East railway system. Their sea trafic quickly faded. To catch up, they began speculating on industry. This brought them freight and raw materials to process in situ. A total reversal then took place. From being a subordinate auxiliary for reigning merchants, industry became the ideal way of allowing them to remain influential in their town. Compared to the past, the change was radical. But this evolution in attitude wasn't really natural. It was forced to be, through fear of decline and economic ruin.

B. A brilliant Nantes industrialisation success

In 1923, looking at things realized since the end of the 19th century, two experts in Nantes affaires, the geographer Abel Durand and the publicist Maurice Schwob, could not help exclaiming: « Nantes almost died through its exclusive dream of far-off business, paying with its own life for the solitary existence for which M. Chevalier repproached it, and Marseille. » The end of the slave trade, then of colonial sugar, and finally sailing vessels, the three pillars of Nantes' former prosperity, had shown the fragility of a sea commerce without backing on land, and the limits of a port « relying on nothing ». Using the words of the Belgian engineer Dufouray, they said that Nantes was now a working class port. Even better, they added that the banks of the Loire were « avenues of factories ».

Gross statistics available confirm these judgements. In 1900, there were 350 factories and 30,000 workers on both banks of the Loire, with 17 000 of these in the Nantes area, and 12,500 in Saint-Nazaire. Compared with 1878, when Nantes only had 9 400 workers, there was a clear progression. Certainly, it is much less if compared with level in 1789. While there were roughly 80,000 inhabitants in Nantes, the départment already counted 25,130 "workers". But realities shown by statistics taken from these two periods are not the same. The end of the Old Regime places modest craftsmen's workshops, often isolated, on the same level as large factories, whereas at the dawn of the 20th century the "worker" is essentially viewed as a factory worker. Hence a double mutation appeared, both quantitive and, above all, qualitative. Industry arrived, with its typical landscape and population. Being present in the heart of Nantes, it quickly expanded. Areas like Chantenay, Basse-Indre, Couëron, Indret or Montoir became extremely industrialised, and simultaneously, experience an important population increase. Between 1872 and 1911, the population in Nantes grew slowly, increasing from 118,000 to 132,000 inhabitants, partly thanks to the annexation of Chantenay and Doulon, in 1908. The agglomeration however increased from 150,000 in 1876, to 200,000 in 1911, which represent 30 per cent of the population in the département. During this period, the small town of Saint-Nazaire, on the estuary, became and industrialised town. And, at the same time, the port of Nantes increased its merchant traffic (from 3,6 per cent a year, on average, from 1869 to 1913, while that of Marseille increased "only" by 2,8 per cent. From being the 11th port in France in 1870, it became the 8th in 1869 and then 6th in 1903. And more: exterior trade in Nantes became diversified. It then imported chemicals, fertilizers, steel and cast iron, while exporting carved wood, fertilizers, chemicals, construction materials, tinned produce and biscuits.

These mutations are on account of two periods of industrialisation. The first was linked to the food sector. It had old roots (since the first sugar refineries in Nantes date back to the 1680's) which were totally reliant on an important sea trade. We must remember, for example, that a "bis-cuit" was a sort of pastry cooked twice (or even four times) to feed sailors. However, as has already been shown , this branch only knew a real take-off from the moment when it split from the world of trade. The germs of change, which appeared around 1825-1860, where more apparent at the time of the second industrialisation, around 1880-1914. Food industry, up until then considered only as an auxiliary to trade, began to take up importance. It began to act as a driving force in Nantes industry, bringing in its wake a large part of the Breton coast.

Lefèvre-Utile (which explains the further trade-mark LU) began his biscuit industry in 1886, and in 1896 the BN (Biscuiterie nantaise) was founded. Canning industry brought Arsène Saupiquet success, while refining and oil industries seriously progressed although less spectacularly. Internationally known industries took off, making Nantes the capital of French food industry. All that was due to "new coming men", either originally from other areas of France (notably the North and the East) or from social circles outside that of trade. Being pushed by entrepreneurship and almost always specialists of the domains in which they invested, they banked on the most modern means of production and used publicity to conquer the growing virtually mass-consumer markets.

The second wave of industrialisation was almost contemporary to the first. It was that of shipbuilding, a domain in which Nantes had had a solid experience for a long time : 135 395 tons were built during the second half of the 18th century, which places it in the first league of French shipyards, just ahead of Bordeaux. This sector, which was still largely dependent on the needs of sea trade, had known the same periods of growth and difficulties as the sea trade itself. This important irregularity had often resulted in the slow growth of technological progress, which was amplified by traditional culture. Hence a prolonged marasm, when a more liberal legislation in the 1860s made this industry deal with international competition. Between 1881 and 1893, laws gained through the hard smuggle of French maritime lobbies, provoked a total reversal. The State began to help shipyards directly, and granted ship owners bonuses in function of the distance covered by their vessels. The owners, who were then guaranteed a profit, multiplied orders for new boats. This favoured the beginning of a horizontal concentration at the heart of the sector, as well as the reappearance of powerful shipyards. 

Compared with food industry, the great difference is that it was in the shipbuilding sector that the former trade families played the leading role and not "new" men. But a part of the former élite knew how to accommodate new techniques. It was the case of Eugène Guillet de la Brosse (1857-1939), one of the greatest Nantes capitalists at the beginning of the 20th century. He came from a family "born" from ship owning, whose fortunes were made from slave trade and sugar. He entered Ecole polytechnique in 1876, then the National School of Mining Engineering, and gratuated as an engineer in 1881. Along with the engineer Edmond Fouché, his friend, collaborater and relation, he took over various shipyards to create the Chantiers et Ateliers de Bretagne, in 1909, which was one of the most important naval construction yards in France. Under their impetus, the power was given to technicians - to the engineer Auguste Tessier and above all Auguste Rateau, the inventor of a turbine which was at the origin of modern machines. The transition with the industrial technology of the 20th century had thus begun, in a France which had just gave from « a technology of processes » to that of « applied science », to coin a phrase used by François Caron . 

Globally, food industry and ship building was doubly successful at the beginning of the 20th century. First from moving from a more or less craftsman status to that of a large industry, and second to have a place in the sun of a national level. With this, the two industrial sectors stimulate the whole economic fibre. 35 per cent of the industrial workforce on the lower Loire was employed in shipbuilding alone around 1900. This brought in its wake a good part of the steel and mechanical industry, for whom the railways, the army and public works were not yet essential markets. In 1914, 12,000 people thus worked in the steel industry in the Nantes region. The biscuit industry favoured sugar and phosphate imports, for agriculture - Nantes was the first port for phosphate imports in France at the beginning of the 1920s - as well as flour production. Fertilizers opened the door for chemical industry, whilst food industry in general linked up with cold storage and its annexes. Finally, canning industry favoured a whole series of activities, such as the steel industry and metal stamping. J.-J. Carnaud, who was born in 1840, near Lille, associated with the Société des Forges de Basse-Indre, in 1902, with a financial input of 6,600,000 francs in the new company. Since he had his own source of raw materials, he was at the origin of one of the most important tin factories in France. His son-in-law gave it international renown in 1911. A double phenomenon of synergy took place around the food industry and shipbuilding, both of which were real driving forces at the beginning of a new model of economic development for the lower Loire.

C. The limits of Nantes industrialisation model

The speed and size of progress shouldn't hide certain nuances and limits. One of them is the importance of the past. On the one hand, the past is useful and largely positive. The two driving forces of Nantes industrialisation are in fact from former activities to which a new impetus had been brought, either through new blood and modern techniques (food industry), or through the favourable economic climate skilfully used by old families who had known how to incorporate new processes (shipbuilding). And it was because it used former experiences that Nantes brilliantly advanced to important industry. It also took advantage of an extremely favourable context: the beginnings of the second industrialisation, which was a time when nothing of yet had been established and it was easier to branch out into new key sectors (such as the different metal industries, the growth of consumer markets from the food industry). In counting on its experiences and knowing how to add a touch of modernity, Nantes was able to succeed more easily and quickly than by other means. In this way, the turning point seems less "revolutionary" than might be first thought. Even though the change was decisive, it couldn't erase the past. It took its shape but dressed differently. Basically, a corrective must be brought to the flattering portrayal by Durand and Schwob in 1923. The industrial areas in the Nantes agglomeration were separated and surrounded by fields. The lower Loire was not an « avenue of factories » but a chain of industrial isles. These isles were raised by tradition and new ideas. But, they lacked solid finance and energy funding. Right at the beginning of the 20th century, Nantes only had a few banks. The Banque de France was represented by a branch , while others had only one office: Société générale, Comptoir national d'escompte de Paris, Crédit lyonnais and Crédit foncier. There were private and individual banks (Brousset Fils, Gaillard, Métairaux et Aymon, Jules Rousselot & Co), but the intermediate size, that of powerful regional banks, was still practically inexistant. As well as investing in the offices of national banks, local capitalism used to live as in the past, using its own capital, and that one the extended family.

About energy supplies, local resources were not totally inexistant. But these still being used at the beginning of the century appeared as the remains of a world fast disappearing. The mines in Languin, which were exploited even before the French Revolution, were abandoned in 1863. At the end of the 19th century, these in Les Touches were unsuccessfully reopened. Only those of Montrelais-Mouzeil were left. Its production, wich rose to 14,232 tonnes in 1896, was largely threatened by imports of English coal, and was used in line ovens in the area. As far as iron was concerned, two or three mines, around Châteaubriant, produced 1,500 to 2,000 tonnes, largely used in the furnaces in Trignac. This energy handicap was not as important as the financial one, as imports (British coal or iron from Lorraine) largely compensate.

However, in the same way as for the construction and mechanical industries, to principal factories were of the "assembly" type. The overall cost of transporting the necessary raw materials was strained by that of labour. Therefore, Nantes industry was dependent on the tariff policy of railways companies and the good will of the mining and steel bosses in the North and in the East of France. It was not by chance then, that these same directors were the ones to take control of local industry, by taking advantage of the financial insufficiencies of local capitalism. The Société des mines de fer de l'Anjou, founded in 1879, and the Forges de Trignac became the Société anonyme des usines métallurgiques de la Basse Loire in 1907, before merging with the group of Forges et Aciéries du Nord et de l'Est, in 1921. Other local industries followed, in other sectors, and sometimes to the benefit of Parisian capitalists. All bear witness to one thing: before the actual international industrial redeployment, following the acceleration of the world market, inside the national sector, an important economic de-regionalisation took place. Local capitalism collapsed, or simply lost control of factories, to the benefit of capitalists from other regions. The case is particularly obvious in Nantes and in Western France. This struggle between regional and national capitalism has been as yet insufficiently studied. It is worth studying, and we hope to stimulate vocations here.  Until then, how economic élites were essential must be shown. It was these élites who, through their mentality, their strategy and their action, made the different elements of the "system" of the model Nantes development come to play. But these élites are not similar. The osmosis between old trade families and new businessmen from elsewhere, especially in the food industry, was not totally realized in 1914.

Some of the new élite managed to make a name. Between 1887 and 1900, out of seven nominations to the management committee of the Nantes branch of the Banque de France, there was a man from canning industry, one from refining, one from metal industry, one from fertilizing industry, one from the chemical side. Between 1900 and 1920, Lefèvre-Utile (biscuit industry), Francis Merlant (leather), Adolphe Jollan de Clerville (rice), Emile Bris and Adolphe Cormerais (mechanical constructions) were also nominated. Closer links (commercial unions or marriages) were often made in the same sectors - canning factory owners and those in tin industry for example. These new élite showed a solidarity that was lacking in order to affront those who were older or who were already in business. The influence of a former local tradition, and a badly realized osmosis between the old and the new, showed the Nantes élite to be badly armed, at the dawn of the 20th century, to be able to resist the onslaught of a capitalism which was becoming more and more financial.

II. Tides of deindustrialisation

1. Bordeaux' industrial basis loosened 

After the first wave of "decline" that struck Bordeaux during the 1790s-1820s because of the slump of overseas trade, a second wave overcame the city in the 1950s-1960s and shook its industrial roots themselves.

A. The fall of industries linked to the harbour and national- or international-levelled

What is surprising in Bordeaux is the relatively rapid destruction of several industrial layers that represented strong traditions and skills.

a. The collapse of shipbuilding

The national division of production forces led to the condemnation of ship-building : recently included in a subsidiary of Schneider that linked factories in Bordeaux and Dunkerque (a northern port on the Manche coast), the Lormont shipyards of the ex-Chantiers & forges de la Gironde closed their doors in 1968. The Schneider group favoured first the Dunkerque site, where investments were concentrated. But the Bordeaux site was condemned several years before, as the French State has decided to exclude Bordeaux from the priorities of the national plan for shipbuilding modernisation through intense subsidies. In the second half of the 1850s, Bordeaux lost the competition to lodge the new and huge slip-dock that could have allowed it to build and launch greater ship ; in that mixed economy organizing shipbuilding in France, Dunkerque, Nantes-Saint-Nazaire and La Ciotat (on the Mediterranean side, near Marseille) were considered apt to resist the new international competition entertained by Asian shipyards, while Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulon-La Seyne left abandoned to rapid closure (Rouen) or incertitude : their owners had to decide to specialize them into niches of shipbuilding or to close them once their non-rentability had been definitely proved. An industrial cathedral thus disappeared at the very centre of the Bordeaux harbour, with its only buildings or flat areas remaining through a redeployment towards warehouses and dockyards.

One might think that the Bordeaux shipyards suffered certainly from their distance from steel or heavy metal elements producers, but their Nantes-Saint-Nazaire counterparts were truly in the same situation ; in fact, the main cause lies evidently in the accumulating process of underinvestment in the Bordeaux shipyard, as it has been decided early by the State and the executive power of the Schneider group that Bordeaux had no great future for shipbuilding on a large scale, thus condemning it to become a national residual activity, before its closure itself. That disappearance was indeed of utmost importance as it shattered a whole industrial chain : numerous foundry, mechanics and engineering small and medium-sized societies, subcontractors providing metallurgic and mechanics appendages et equipments, that lived in the wake of shipbuilding, lost determinant outlets.

b. The quite collapse of food processing

A second aspect of this national aggiornamento of production forces consisted with the progressive elimination of almost every firm linked to food sectors. As they depended on more and more concentrated and rationalized enterprises and sectors, firms involved in food processing were led to the closure of their Girondine factories. Three of the four oil-mills were shut down in the 1960s (Huilerie franco-coloniale, bought by Unilever in 1951 and closed in 1969; Calvé-Delft, of Unilever group; Grande Huilerie bordelaise, merged into Unipol in 1962, then in Lesieur in 1969, and then closed), the only one resisting (Maurel & Prom & Maurel frères) being integrated in a national firm, Lesieur (then Eridiana-Béghin-Say), and losing the majority of its workforce. Bordeaux was no more a stronghold of peanuts processing: first, it lost its force on the French and European commodities market for peanuts and oil products trade, as its trade firms lost themselves their strength in Black Africa when the oil-products collect fell in the State's hands in every country; they could not reach the strategic way that could had transformed them into international commodities trade specialists, and they disappeared in the 1960s... Parallely, such national groups like Unipol (a Marseille group, then merged with Lesieur), Lesieur (except for the sole plant at Bordeaux-Bacalan) and the French subsidiary of Unilever didn't choose Bordeaux as a location for their further deployment. Marseille for a while, Dunkerque (the original location of the Lesieur family) and more and more the African oil mills themselves (as soon as the 1940s) replaced Bordeaux as a key location of that activity.

c. The collapse of food-canning

Lastly, every food-canning plant and firm disappeared from Bordeaux in the 1930s-1960s - and reindustrialisation in that sector was then due to arouse in the rural areas of Aquitaine, owing to local agricultural productions. Bordeaux lost indeed its markets abroad, as South American productions were developed, while several African countries (Marocco) succeeded in building such an industry too. In the meanwhile, the merger process and the europeanisation of agrobusiness and brand names led to a severe reappraisal of plants' location: having lost its abroad outlets and its function of providing ship with canned-food, Bordeaux was found isolated from production areas and from consumption areas, while no manager emerged there to become a federator of such a national or European industry. Therefore, local firms were sooner or later bought by French or European companies, that longed in fact towards their market shares and their brand names : this explains that today some of these latter are still nationally used, but without any industrial link with Bordeaux...

Those three industrial activities (shipbuilding, oil-processing, food canning), deeply linked with the harbour flows and traditions, were thus swept from the Bordeaux landscape, as victims from the new rationality presiding to the localisation of production in France for shipbuilding and for food processing. It is not a question of entrepreneurial punch, of bourgeois spirit: the very development of national and international productive forces led to the elimination of Bordeaux. Although the tradition of the harbour was glorious, it presented by itself no specific strength in order to be a pole for these international-levelled industries. One can imagine that a huge oil mill or more credibly a huge shipyard could had been created downstream Bordeaux, on a larger area, more adapted to the launching of long vessels : but Nantes-Saint-Nazaire had been chosen since the mid-1950s as the main location of such an equipment, with Dunkerque and La Ciotat as "deputies" units. Bordeaux could not thus be allowed to play the new card of specialized ship, like gas-transporters, as this specialisation was devoted to Saint-Nazaire and La Ciotat.

B. The fall of Bordeaux industries with pluriregional, regional or local markets

In the meanwhile, Bordeaux lost most of its competitiveness on the national level, or more precisely on the pluriregional level, as most of its traditional local, regional or pluriregional industries had to recognize the strength of national-sized firms that outruled them. It was the normal ("natural" or darwinian) process of post-war French capitalism: a wave of interregional (and then intraEuropean) competition shook the respective market positions of every industry. The upsurge of new producers, of a new generation of managers, the development of practices prone to liberalize cartellised markets, the move towards national-levelled concentration, with mergers and rationalisation of productive structures, were various factors that explained the questioning of Bordeaux industrial abilities and competitiveness. 

Of course, some Bordeaux managers appeared to be adept of strategic moves : the managers of the Olibet biscuits firm tried thus to reach a national-size owing to the acquisition of plants in other regions (in Lorraine and Burgundy); some others, deeply convinced of the necessity to react actively against economic predeterminism - generally thanks to collective mentalities acquired in innovative Christian managers' circles at the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s, that entertained the idea that volontarism could overturn regional competitive gaps -, showed an effective dynamism to inject managerial and technological renewal in their firms, especially in mechanics, engineering and metallic building (Sarthoulet, Desse, for instance). These experiments fell apart however due to lacks of managerial skills among some of these men (Olibet, that failed during the first half of the 1970s, Desse, etc.) ; or to failures in reaching a capitalistic large enough to balance needs of current capital, which led to a growth overstepping the financial abilities of several firms (becoming then overburdened with banking debts). More generally, one can pretend that the main markets for mechanics, engineering, energy, metallic building firms were not to be found in underpopulated and underindustrialised south-western regions. That led, as one can perceive it, to some under competitiveness in comparison with firms located in more densely populated, urbanised and industrialised regions (globally the area north of a line Le Havre-Lyon), as they benefited with larger outlets and therefore of "scale economies". Undoubtedly, despite managerial and strategic efforts of some firms, the majority of Bordeaux societies of these industries lost their competitive edge in the 1960s and their life ended in the 1970s.

In every sector linked with a local, a regional or a pluriregional market, almost all firms were swept by competition. Most of them simply disappeared ; someothers lost their independance and entered national-sized groups that often chose to close the Bordeaux plant : that was the case for the various mills in the sectors like sugar (Say), biscuit, canned food, brewery, milk processing (regional plants near Toulouse and Pau being favored against Bordeaux), mechanics and engineering, tin-can, railway waggons and equipments, foundry, cement production, etc.

The case of railway equipments symbolises that Bordeaux decline : « The leading part played by the old Compagnie du Midi disappeared completely. Integrated within a national production system, the Sncf [that had inherited with the Compagnie du Midi and Compagnie Paris-Orléans plant when French railways were merged into Sncf in 1937] didn't use necessarily local subcontractors as its decisions depended on a national system for its supplies » (J. Dumas). This led to a contraction of intimate links with local supplies, more and more placed in competition on the national market : in that sector too, the trend from a regional level to a national level led to the insertion within a rationalisation game that played against the Bordeaux plants, specialised (Cimt, Satm) or not (Motobloc, etc.), successively closed. The Sncf Bordeaux plant was the only remaining unit of that sector, specialised in regional maintenance (with 900 employees in the 1950s-1970s). In parallel, tin-can industry left Bordeaux as it was concentrating more and more in Lorraine : two firms (from national origin) and plants subsisted in Bordeaux, that bought the others firms and plants and closed them in the 1950s-1960s, but themselves had to shut down their Bordeaux mills in the 1970s.

C. The results of Bordeaux deindustrialisation

Pluriregional and national productive rationalisation, a new way of national production division, led to the deindustrialisation of Bordeaux. Bordeaux had quite missed First Industrialisation; but, in the 1960s-1970s, the industrial landscape forged throughout the first stage of the Second industrialisation (in the 1880s-1930s) more or less disappeared in the 1960s-1970s.  

Table 2. Some closures of large societies and plants:
1954/1958: tin plant of Forges d'Homécourt-Sidelor (Floirac)
1950s: steel equipments plant of Aciéries de Longwy. Only a foundry subsisted: Forges & aciéries du Sud-Ouest (Faso), with 500 employees in 1955 and 120 in 1970
1952/1957: Louit (food industry)
1961: Motobloc (mechanics)(500 employees)
1961: Biscuits Brun (Lormont, 150 employees)
1967: the Bordeaux Cimt plant (railway equipments)
1968: Satm (railway equipments)
1968: Forges & chantiers de la Gironde (shipyards)
1969: Huilerie franco-coloniale (oil mill)
1970: the tin plant Carnaud
1972: Forges & aciéries du Sud-Ouest (Faso)
1974/1977: Olibet (biscuits), etc.

2. Nantes deindustrialisation: from one crisis to another (from the 1930s to the 1970s)

Between 1880 and 1920, the industrial take-off in Nantes was spectacular. But its foundations appeared relatively fragile. The heritage of the past, the disagreements between the élites the energy and financial bases which were too modest meant that the whole process finally came down to a few men. These were new men (for a certain number) and enterprising men. But they weren't protected from the differences in the economic climate and to the ravage of time and changes in international capitalism. All through the 20th century, crises in various sectors and general economic depression gradually exposed the weaknesses in local capitalism. In accentuating structural weaknesses and the consequences of the "actors" ageing, local industries were made to adapt in order to survive. Some fared better than others. We must analyse their evolution in branches. But one particular period seems over at the end of its revolution ; that of a great industrial port with huge factories. The sole metallurgy lost 4,600 workposts in 1948-1961 and 6,500 in 1961-1972, as classic sectors were stricken by rationalisation and concentration. The archives of the regional bank, the Société bordelaise de Cic (a subsidiary of the national banking group Cic), are thus rich with files of its legal branch specialized in contentious matters, as dozens of its customers failed precisely between 1965 and the deep recession 1974/1975, up to the beginning of the 1980s : it constituted therefore a basic archivistic source to study the Bordeaux economic structures of that times, but it reflects too the reality of the Bordeaux deindustrialisation or even industrial "decline".

A. The giants in food industry in Nantes: tribulations and adaptations

In food industry, difficulties began to appear at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The industries hit the quickest were those who were the oldest (notably refining, whose production dropped by 6,6 per cent in 1912) and these who were linked closest to colonial trade (like oil-refining, threatened by that in Marseille). Nantes paid for the hazards of the colonial system and its difficulties to enter the economy of a new empire founded at the beginning of the Third Republic. More recent, canning industry was affected in the 1880s, when fish numbers began to decline. Competition from Spain and Portugal led to real stagnation on the local and national levels in the 1920s. The biscuit industry was the only one still to survive. But LU, who knew how to use advertising to attract middle-class customers, and who created the fashion of its well known product Petit-Beurre, hesitated to go further. Each massive increase in production was seen as a sign of a decrease in quality. In 1918, its refusal to finance a campaign for advertisements made a project of extension to the US fell through. The same attitude closed the doors to French-speaking Africa. With various modalities according to the sectors, it was food industry which wavered. Everywhere, there were the same reasons: men ageing, a prolonged increase that had reinforced certitudes and retarded necessary evolutions, insufficient capital in the societies which remained family businesses for too long. And to add to this, a climate of economic difficulties and new competition. Some businessmen realized that there were problems. Some didn't. The canning factories diversified their product (fish, but also meat and vegetables). One of these businessmen, Saupiquet, was particularly active. He opened up factories abroad (Spain, Portugal, Algeria), whilst combining with a vertical concentration in France. He needed funds, which made the factory accept capital from outside entrepreneurs. And it managed to brace the crisis in the 1930s a little better than others. This exemplary case is more so by its individuality than by its iniquity.

Generally speaking, the years from 1914 to 1950 corresponded to a time of more or less studied adaptation. After 1950, European integration and world wide trade urged more significative evolutions. Everywhere, the social capital of businesses had to progress, through mergers and concentrations in large family-run businesses. From the 1960s on, the giants in food industry in Nantes became a little more dependant on large national or international groups. Canning factory owner Amieux was taken over by Buitoni France in 1973. Saupiquet swallowed the majority of other local businesses in that branch, then merged with Cassegrain-Cinal in 1970, before becoming part of the financial holding Compagnie de navigation mixte, and being reoriented to tuna, leaving vegetables to Bonduelle. The American firm General Mills acquired 60 % of the capital of BN (Biscuterie nantaise) in 1968 and reached 95 per cent in 1975 ; the plant then became part of Psi (Pepsico Foods International) ; taking the initiative, LU contributed in the 1970s to the formation of General Biscuits, the most important continental European group in its sector at that time ; then, in 1986, Bsn (now Danone), the number one in French food industry, took control of this group. In sugar-refining, Say merged with Béghin in 1973 and created the first French group in the branch. In order to survive, the important elements in Nantes food industry had to lose a large part in the decision stakes. Those who had taken the initiative had a greater experience and a better image (which is essential in the modern strategies of winning markets), managed to keep or their registered office, or a certain independance or a logo. But in the sector of heavy-weight companies, the independence in the Nantes food industry is only a memory.

B. The slow death of Nantes shipbuilding industry      

Shipbuilding, which was the other partner in the Nantes industrialisation process knew more ups and downs than food industry. What's certain is that concentration is not new in this sector. From as far as 1799 to 1806 the Crucy brothers did not hesitate in regrouping in Nantes some local shipyards (Basse-Indre, Indret, Paimboeuf), a Breton one (Lorient), and one in Rochefort. Later on, in the 1850s, the Nantes shipyards tried to link their hull construction to machine production. From the 1880s and the 1890s on, the process continued, with a renewal. Structurally, two points remained stable: the family aspect of these businesses and the dependence as far as the State was concerned. From Colbert's days to nowadays, passing by the Matignon agreements in 1936, the same problem has been affecting French naval construction, which is its lack of competitiveness on an international level, whoever competitor (the Dutch in the 17th century, the English at the beginning of the 18th century, British and American in the 19th, and the Far East today). Three things would have been needed to solve the problem: internal structural reforms, a new relationship between private shipyards and State arsenals, the establishing of new links between shipbuilders and ship-owners. Through not having sufficiently worked at these points, Nantes shipbuilding industry (and the French one) was constantly in an awkward situation: it has always needed the financial support of the State, so as to bear the difficult economic climate and new competitors, through allowing itself to be carried along in periods of maritime traffic, both on a national and an international level. From 1881 to 1918, this intervention was in direct aid in shipbuilding and fitting-out. Between the two world wars, bonuses took the place of maritime credit, founded on mortgages, relatively unsuccessfully for the largely too humdrum professionals. From 1945 on, the State participated financially in the reconstruction and modernisation of the shipyards, to whom it gave the responsibility to renewing the French commercial fleet, up to 1953. The "Defferre law", in 1951, which was to minimize the excessive cost of French shipbuilding compared to that of abroad, equally brought financial compensation, so that, from 1953 to 1959, 32 pr cent of the total money used by the shipyards came directly from State funds.

In the years from 1950 to the first oil crisis in 1973, various data modify the context of shipbuilding: the take-off of maritime traffic, the increase in the size of the ships and their sophistication (more rapid, more specialized, more automatic and therefore more profitable), international competitors, joining the Eec – with a reduction in State financial help. French shipyards who were numerous and scattered over France and no able to produce modern specimens at a competitive price, were quickly shaken by these transformations. The help of public powers only led to the artificial survival for some of them and so the State decided to modify its policy. In the general context of a drop in public-spending in 1960, it reduced and limited the number of shipyards that could benefit from State help, and therefore encouraged shipyards to merge. Some shipyards were closed and the rationalisation move meant a very clear decrease in the workforce employed in Nantes shipyards. In 1960, construction capacity in Nantes shipyards was only 8 per cent of that in the country; eight years on, Nantes had only one big shipyard. The financial groups that had invested in companies in financial difficulties played an important part in the reorientations, accentuated by the drop in orders for vessels on a world-wide scale, following the oil crisis. The bank and finance group Paribas, influent among the Parisian company Alsthom that got control of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire shipyards, favoured the transfer of shipyards from Chantenay to those at the Prairie-au-Duc in 1971. As a way of imposing itself on a local level against the Suez group (which was influent in the Penhoët firm, at Saint-Nazaire), it wished to stimulate the take-off of a modern industrial area in the lower Loire. To achieve its aim, it backed the merger between Penhoët and others shipyards into Chantiers de l'Atlantique (under the control of Alsthom group, then Gec Alsthom, and now Alstom) and favoured more strongly the mechanical side than the construction side. The Alsthom group no longer wished to keep two shipyards - one in Nantes, the other in Saint-Nazaire (the Chantiers de l'Atlantique) and shipbuilding in Nantes ceased to exist. In 1985 the Bougainville, a naval vessel, was the last to be launched there. The site now had only one mechanical, naval and industrial sector.

Table 3. Nantes shipyards workforce:
1954      20,004                7,605
1957      31,173                  7,086
1964      30,599                5,278
1970      30,681                 2,400
               deliveries                number of
     in gross tonnage             workers

C. The end of a Nantes industrialisation model?

The destiny of important food firms as that of important naval shipyards shows the evidence of a failing project, created at the turning point of the century: that of large-scale industrialisation, autonomous at the local level and in the service of interests in the port. Some consolation can be gained by saying that it was far from being totally implemented, and by looking at the limits of other projects nearer to us (like those of important industrial ports in the 1970s including Fos-Marseille and Dunkerque). These examples show that the Nantes case is not the only one and that a way of industrial development had perhaps reached its limits: that of being based on the take-off of one or several driving forces, each based on large scale units of production.

III. The paths towards reindustrialisation

1. Bordeaux confronted with reindustrialisation along with deindustrialisation

Regional and national leaders got conscious very soon of the risk of deindustrialisation. In the wake of national studies about French modernisation (especially through the preparation of the Second Plan of modernisation and equipment), think tanks began to ponder over the destiny of regional economies: would they resist the overture of European tariffs frontiers? of the end of regional economic strongholds as interregional integration was scheduled to regain momentum with the return to growth after the years of depression, war and reconstruction ? The main interrogation was turned precisely towards that very point: one questioned more and more the ability of every region to keep such large ranges of productions as the size reached by the new industrial equipments and mills grew sensibly owing to the modernisation of industrial process, to automation. Scales economies were everywhere at stake. This explained the launching of debates among regional economists and politicians about the future of Aquitaine and, for our present study, of Bordeaux, both debates being intimately mixed as Jacques Chaban-Delmas, mayor of Bordeaux (1947-1995), member of Parliament, several time minister through the IVth Republic, president of Parliament (1958-1969) and Prime Minister (1969-1972) during the Vth Republic, was the leader of political elites in Aquitaine - even considered as a new duc d'Aquitaine... With the concurse of University researchers, syndicalists and managers, he created in 1954 the Comité d'expansion Bordeaux-Sud-Ouest, that organised a lot of studies about the redeployment of Aquitaine and Bordeaux's economy. On the national level, the Commissariat général au Plan and several entities among which the last was, since 1963, the Datar (Délégation à l'aménagement du territoire & à l'action régionale) concurred to the perception of deindustrialisation risks and to the necessity of gathering industrialising forces in order to ignite development business forces, especially along the Atlantic regions, which became a priority for the national industrial relocation policy. The authorities imagined a new policy, as a strategy of stimulating the creation of new mills and equipment in the French provinces, as expansion offered many opportunities to industrial locations outside the well developed Parisian region; they favoured too the decentralisation if industries from Paris and its suburbs, through rules imposing the opening of provincial plants to counterbalance the Paris developments.

A. A wave of reindustrialisation within mixed economy planning: Bordeaux as a key part of national production forces

This policy took shape along with military developments. Bordeaux laid indeed far away from the traditional contemporary (real or supposed to be) military fields (against Germany or Eastern forces). As soon as First World War, some aeronautics firms (Blériot, Nieuport, Bréguet, Farman) had established (very small) plants in Bordeaux, and some of these units had subsisted in the interwar, through various capitalistic structures. They were nationalised in 1936, merged into Sncaso (Société nationale de constructions aéronautiques du Sud-Ouest), lodged principally in Bordeaux suburbs (Talence and Mérignac, that town being the location of the small airport built by the Chamber of commerce in the 1930s): six plants with 3,000 employees were then active in 1936-1940, one of which a small private unit launched by Marcel Bloch as a subcontractor. Although the main industrial area for aeronautics laid in the Paris region, Bordeaux, as Nantes, Marseille or Toulouse, received some aeronautic plants as they were supposed to escape German bombing in case of war. These projects were suspended by the Nazi Occupation. After Second World War anyway, they regained momentum owing to the "strategy of arsenal" imagined by the State, desirous of a policy of military greatness able to assert French geostrategic autonomy. A dual program appeared thus. First, the State-owned Sncaso (then Sud Aviation, then in 1970 Snias, up to the present Aérospatiale) located in Bordeaux some of its mills, for military purposes. Bordeaux sheltered too the plant of a subsidiary, Sferma (then, up to now, Sogerma), specialized in the repairing and remodelling of civilian planes, while a State-owned entity opened in 1935, A.I.A. (Ateliers industriels aéronautiques), likewise located in Bordeaux agglomeration, lodged the repair of military airplanes'engines. This State-led strategy became a key factor of Bordeaux reindustrialisation or, rather, new industrialisation : Bordeaux was sacred as a high place of aeronautics, along with Toulouse, Marseille (helicopters) and even Nantes. This explains the growth of its employees: 1949: 1,600; 1959: 3,000; 1966: 4,600; 1970:  4,800. In parallel, a privately owned firm, Avions Marcel Dassault, benefited with a magnificent business history as it became the leading builder of French military airplanes. While its main research centres were located in the Paris region, it chose Bordeaux to lodge its plants: Talence reopened its doors at the end of the 1940s, and was followed by a second unit in Mérignac, before the transferring of the Talence one to new and large facilities in Martignas.

Moreover, the emergence of the French atomic strategy led to the installation in the Bordeaux area of units testing and building parts of the rockets and their engines that were intended to launch atomic bombs somewhere and to create a civil spatial economic industry. Several entities, with frequent restructuring, were thus built, especially since the end of the 1950s, with a rationalisation towards half a dozen entities: State firms - Aérospatiale, Snecma, Snpe, Sep (which builds now the propulsion systems of the Ariane rocket, with a plan of 1 400 employees), Sextant Avionique (which builds now planes'functions systems, with a plant of 800 employees) (now Thales) –, one State economic and industrial entity, Délégation générale à l'armement. This new industrialising track was helped by the vast spaces of forest that allowed military isolation, experimentation areas, etc. It paved the way for a third activity, around military aerospace productions (missiles) and, at the end of the 1960s, around space projects (with the conception and building of spatial rockets' engines). Thus emerged an aeronautic and spatial complex (rich with 8,500 employees in 1970), mixing a State strategy and business strategies: Bordeaux then found itself intertwined in a national-levelled development. It became a key part of a national division of production forces in that sector. State-owned firms and private Dassault built a real industrial stronghold around Bordeaux. Of course, Bordeaux itself was deeply linked to other locations: in the region itself, with subcontractors or a specialized Dassault plant in the Pays basque ; or outside, with permanent flows of sections of planes, missiles, rockets, etc. between a huge system linking every plant and public or private firm, from Paris and Normandy, through Nantes (the Aérospatiale plant of Bouguenais), to Toulouse or/and Bordeaux. Business history was rich with businessmen, like Dassault and its teams, like Great South-West subcontractors (Latécoère, Turboméca, etc., but largely too with State-educated and -minded engineers, leading State firms and entertaining the French areospace complex. Bordeaux benefited largely with the implants of such engineers, researchers, high level technicians and employees. It offset largely the decline of mechanics, shipbuilding and metal engineering for the opportunities of high level jobs. But it had nothing to do with the port itself! Quite nothing coming out or in these aeronautic or aerospace plants used the port, except for some huge rocket parts sailed to the Guyanese Kourou base in South America or of the naval transport of some Dassault military planes abroad... Railway, truck, airplane transports were the main tools for the insertion of these Bordeaux industries into the vast national exchange flows. The same point could be aroused about the State mill producing State money coins in Bordeaux-Pessac (and recently euro coins), which had been decentralised from the Monnaie de Paris.

B. The prospects of an insertion of Bordeaux into national or international production schemes

If the State could somehow easily decreed that Bordeaux had to become a stronghold for that State or mixed-economy military and airspace strategy, against any economic logics, as quite no tradition had constituted in that area, one can question the ability of Bordeaux to play some role in the spontaneous national or international division of production : what comparative advantages was it able to offer to large firms in search of industrial locations to develop their national or international deployment? Did private societies choose Bordeaux as a target for their national or international business plans? Such a privately-based system of decision is vain however as every European country launched a policy of luring plants in its underindustrialised areas or in its areas enduring deindustrialisation... Policies of national territory management aroused in France along with those of Italy or the United Kingdom, which removed some of its spontaneity to firms' strategy as they joined on the balance the chances for subsidies that could be reached by the State or local authorities... Bordeaux, like Nantes, belonged to the Western area of France that the State intended to sustain against underindustrialisation : subsidies favoured new locations in that area since the midst of the 1950s, before European aid programs were drawn too in the 1980s. Each European region dressed up then to entice business investors. Bordeaux' advantages were : a) space available, in vast "industrial zones" that were established all around its suburbs in the 1960s-1970s, either against Garonne's small affluent moors or against semi-forested areas ; b) large female workforces, provided by rural areas (wine-workers' wives, for instance, young rural maids coming out of "rural exodus", etc.) or by urban zones, as metallurgical, mechanics, engineering and even aerospace industries were mainly men-oriented ones ; c) large male workforces as more and more rural areas were rich with moving workers as wine, forest and breeding activities needed less and less workforces, or as traditional industries were declining, thus launching recycling workers on the market.

The misfits were however numerou: Bordeaux was far from the densely inhabited or industrialised markets, and its transport system had to be seriously improved, through investments like bridges - there was a sole bridge on the Garonne up the end of the 1960s !... -, road transports hubs, freight zones and rail-road exchange units. As every piece of the traditional transport system had been established in the port or around the port circulation axis, a very revolution in the transports space had to be completed by the authorities - despite initial some resistance among the port business world, as the tradition of Bordeaux as a vast international port had to be shaken: the myth of a Bordeaux grandeur linked only to its harbour's future had to be destroyed ! But one must recognise that, owing to some broad-minded managers, the Chamber of commerce & industry, an institution that federates the various business sectors of every large French and is entitled by the State with general interest investments, chose more and more to sustain the new wave of economic civilisation organised around road truck hubs.

a) National or international-levelled reindustrialisation through the port?

The ephemere renewal of reindustrialisation linked with harbour flows: the case of petroleum processing. Large hopes were entertained as it was supposed that Bordeaux would become a huge petroleum platform like other harbours (Marseille, Le Havre, Dunkerque, for instance, Rotterdam, Anvers, etc.). Oil refineries had been established all over the country in order to provide regional needs, as oil products' consumption was highly rising. Bordeaux was included within oil firms' strategies to conquer market segments owing to easy and cheap delivery facilities. This competition had already paved the way to the creation of refineries as soon as the end of the 19th century, but these units were very small... One of them (Jupiter) led to the Shell refinery in Pauillac (in 1930) ; the 1914/1918 war, the developments of oil outlets in the interwar and after the 1945 explain the choice of the Bec d'Ambès, that is the confluent of Dordogne and Garonne at the opening of Gironde, as the key location of new refineries: Esso (in 1959), and Caltex (in 1929/1932) (merged into Elf in the 1960s), opened thus their plants and distributed their products all over Grand Sud-Ouest; the borders of their market was limited by the marketing area of the others regions' refineries: one in Nantes, one in Sète (in Languedoc) and several one in Marseille. Typically like the sugar refineries or some of the oil mills beforehand, these refineries linked the importing functions of the harbour and (like the Grands Moulins de Bordeaux for flour too) the distributing functions of an economic capital of Grand Sud-Ouest ; refineries and warehouses gathered thus 1,500 employees in 1970. But this business expansion collapsed into business history as soon as the 1970s: the containment of oil consumption through engines' and domestic life's economies and intense rationalisation throughout heavy industry explained the closure of every four oil refineries of Gironde between 1982 and 1986... The Bec d'Ambès became as for now a site for oil docks, importing refined oil products from other regions (Nantes, where the refinery has resisted up to now, Le Havre, Dunkerque or even further, like Anvers, as a flow of tramping ship distribute oil products all along the Atlantic coast...). The vocation of Bec d'Ambès as an oil processing location failed some years after its destiny of a petrochemicals site had vanished... And several firms that has developed in order to provide these refineries with industrial and services supplies had to close or to leave Bordeaux. In the petroleum sector, reindustrialisation was thus quickly followed by deindustrialisation...

The failure of a harbour-oriented industrialising chain
Despite local élites' hopes, the Bordeaux port was not intended in fact to become the key to a national or international industrial future! Contrarily to Marseille (with the new western area of Fos), Dunkerque, Le Havre (the three leading industrial areas in France deeply linked to a port development scheme), and of course to Genoa, Rotterdam or Anvers, Bordeaux was not chosen by the State or by national or multinational firms to become the heart of heavy industries able to provide the entire national market or international markets with raw products or semi-elaborated productions. It could not become such a steel area as, not so far, Spain (Bilbao) was already a stronghold for that kind of activity; it was not chosen as a location for a entire petroleum chain, from refinery to chemicals as no firm chose Bordeaux to launch a basic petrochemical unit (a "steam-cracking" mill, providing every basic materials to chemical industries) able to entertain then vast chemicals mills. Such hopes took shape however at the end of the 1950s and thereafter when the Lacq gas bed reached its maximal production : one imagined then that this largely available energy source would lure numerous industrial investments in the South-West and especially in Bordeaux - and a huge steam power plant using Lacq gas was established along the Gironde (Bec d'Ambès).

Two causes can explain the rapid closure of these projects. First, the State and the firms could not scatter huge basic investments all over the country, and they had to choose a few locations as priorities ; contrarily to Marseille (for steel, non-iron heavy metal industries and petrochemicals, along the Berre lake or at the Fos site -, Le Havre (for petrochemicals only) and Dunkerque (steel, petrochemicals), Bordeaux was not one of them - neither Nantes, in parallel -, despite the hopes entertained by local elites up to the midst of the 1970s... Second, up to the end of the 1960s, nobody in Bordeaux could imagine that the Bordeaux harbour could leave the very heart of Bordeaux itself (called the Port de la Lune, because of the semi-circular form of the Garonne through the Bordeaux agglomeration). The Port Authority (intimately linked to the Chamber of commerce & industry, but controlled by the State, which provides its managers since the 1920s) had for decades concentrated their investments on quays and dockyards established all along the Garonne in the core of the town itself or somehow further downstream at Bassens (firstly launched to supply American troops in 1917/1918) where deeper quays and more accessible warehouses were available. If a small port had been established downstream along the Gironde at Pauillac, it was only to supply the Shell oil refinery - quite bordering high level vineyards... -, and if a harbour site had been launched in 1929 at Le Verdon, at the mouth of Gironde, it was only intended to allow passengers to reach quicker (through railway) the transatlantic lines coming from north-west France and Europa, and this site had been destroyed by German bombing during the war. Bordeaux élites and the Paris State rejected clearly the perspective of creating a large downstream port at Le Verdon, as the Bordeaux site seemed relevant to traffics of that time and as Le Havre and Dunkerque were presented as the key accesses to north-western and Parisian industrialised areas ; moreover, with their direct access to open sea, they were joined rapidly by ship, thus justifying their equipment with large quay facilities.

No national or local strategy appeared to spur a program of transferring the future of Bordeaux harbour downwards from Bordeaux centre to Le Verdon. This hindered clearly the insertion of Bordeaux in the international sea flows that took form in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s. It suffered the common crisis of any seamouth harbour (like Glasgow, Bremen, Bristol or Hamburg), somehow underequipped to welcome large and high modern ship, requiring a quick turnover around Europe and the world. When the Verdon advanced-harbour (with a 15 meters deepness, in front of 10 meters for the inside Bordeaux-Bassens modern port) was finally launched by Bordeaux Port, it was too late (in 1970/1976): the Great Crisis that occurred then prevented the creation of new European sites for heavy industries; moreover, this harbour had been kept since that time in a relatively isolated area, as railway and truck roads are not adapted to intense traffic. One may thus consider that Bordeaux missed history : the building of Verdon downstream harbour was a question of timing and the delay impoed to it caused the failure to seize national or international opportunities to get involved in Europe-levelled sea flows. But we can ponder too whether the availability of that Verdon port could have saved Bordeaux from industrial decline as this virtual Bordeaux globalised port would have endured difficulties to find a substantial hinterland on a south-western European scale in order to sustain high range sea and commercial flows, with large outlets all over Europe. Anyway, the downstream Verdon harbour and its upstream Bordeaux-Bassens had become only platforms for transEuropean tramping, with "feeder sealines" joining Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre, Felisstowe and Zeebrugge, that is a mere point for the collect or the deposit of containers that northern ports insert on transoceanic lines, collect or redistribute within Europe...

Tourism and shipbuilding
The harbour secreted a type of naval industry that has emerged as a "niche". The tradition of ship building and repair has been preserved through small units working case by case : for instance, for the building of a petroleum off-shore platform for Congo, in 1998, but the local equipments are rented and subcontractors are mobilised just for that operation, the Bordeaux site being entered on the international market only along casual needs. But a key sector seems to become shipbuilding for high level leasure boats ; if Bordeaux, that had invented some light plastic sailboats in the 1950s, could'nt resist competition in that area of relatively mass production, it could gain some room on the market of expensive boats (Constructions navales de Bordeaux, created in the 1980s).

b) National or international-levelled reindustrialisation without the port

These considerations help to understand why the Bordeaux national or international-levelled reindustrialisation did not proceed from the Bordeaux port traditions. The comparative advantages did not really include port facilities: even the new Ford plants which will be studied just downwards are customers of Le Havre and Anvers ports as they provide them with direct sealines to North America... Thus Bordeaux was chosen by national or multinational firms as a location for some important investments, especially because of large areas available to develop plants requiring vast ground facilities and able to welcome some chemicals or raw materials units in areas where pollution through fumes or scents was not an impediment. Both causes explain for instance the choice of Bordeaux by Norsk Hydro, against a similar project in Nantes, and by Eka-Nobel, against Dunkerque : hard competition is played between industrial sites!

Table 4. New plants symbolising Bordeaux reindustrialisation:
- 1950: Saft (industrial batteries) (1,100 employees);
- 1964: Michelin: a plant providing the group with a material used in the building of tyres;
- 1967: Labaz: creates its Bordeaux-Ambarès plant (pharmaceutics);
- 1967/1968: Chambourcy (then Nestlé) (milk food processing);
- 1968: Bsn (now Danone): a plant supplying bottles;
- 1970/1979: Ford: two successive plants (1970/1973 and 1976/1979) building automotive components for the European and American plants of the group (4,000 employees);
- 1970: Siemens: a plant building electronic components for European plants of the group (1,800 employees);
- 1970: Ibm: a plant building electronic components for the building of computers in the French plants (Corbeil, Montpellier) of the group (3,000 employees);
- 1974: Bsn (now Danone): the Cestas plant for LU biscuits (600 employees in 1997);
- 1990: Norsk-Hydro: raw chemical materials for South-West France and Spain markets;
- 1992: Eka-Nobel: a chemical plant (raw materials for the paper pulp producers).

In parallel, some local firms emerged with business entrepreneurship in pharmaceutics : because of a solid medical university tradition, some researchers launched their own firm in the 1950s and they benefited with the upsurge of health markets. A workforce of 2,600 employees was thus constituted rapidly, up from the sole 400 employees of 1960. But the main entities had once to be integrated in national or international groups : Labaz (1,300 employees in 1970) became a subsidiary of Elf-Sanofi, Sarget (540 employees) one of a German group, Asta Medica-Veba - while another German group, Boehginger Ingelheim, controlled Labso Chimie fine, an industrial entity conceiving chemical raw materials for pharmaceutics and cosmetology. The development of their Bordeaux plant was thus inscribed in the future of these groups.

C. The fragility of reindustrialisation through national or international-levelled strategies

Uncertain conclusions may be drawn about that move of reindustrialisation. First, generally speaking, a very few workers of the closed plants get recruited in the new factories. Indeed very different skills were confronted, as the people of shipyards or mechanics units had begun as young people around the Second World war had lacked the renewal capacity necessary to a personal redeployment in the 1960s or 1970s. Workers used to types of hard and somewhat rude work in metal processing, foundry, forgeing, etc. found themselves unfit to somehow common types of work in mainly automated workshops or to jobs of mere survey of processes. Problems of technological and educational hindered people to reassert their abilities, while their very vitality got severe shocks as longworking employees were wiped out in short times and relented to reinvent their professional careers. Reindustrialisation didn't thus gather a lot of people victims of deindustrialisation. Second, the numerous plants launched in Bordeaux or its outskirts in various sectors (electronics components, automotive equipments, pharmaceutic drugs, chemical products) joined the plants of other sectors which had been already included in such national or international groups' strategy, especially the food products sector (with the plant of the Bsn then Danone group, manufacturing some LU trade-mark biscuits at the Bordeaux-Cestas plant). Each of these plants were henceforth inserted in the geo-economic and strategic choices of these firms : its very future laid, as commonly for every such plant in the world, in the hands of these firms' managers, which explained and explains now hard struggles to preserve their comparative advantages. Groups ponder almost every year the future of their France or world plants along criteria of rentability, outlets, innovation, quality of the workforce and of the products, etc. It's a permanent darwinian challenge, where each plant has always to prove its reasons for life...

Such a debate led for instance to the departure of Ibm from Bordeaux in 1992, as its industrial strategy favoured "externalisation" of some products ranges: it sold the plant to Solectron, an international firm working as subcontractor for electronic companies; happily, it has kept since then a workforce of 800 fixed employees and around 300/400 mobile employees. In parallel, Ford chose to maintain its trust towards its two Bordeaux plants (3 500 employees in 1998), and to launch new programs of investments in order to reach the required world levels of productivity and quality. This way of reindustrialisation is therefore fragile, as it depends on the firms' strategic and managerial choices. The future of the Sanofi pharmaceutics Bordeaux mill (700 employees in 1998) depends thus on the very future of this company as the Elf group, from which it's a subsidiary, is supposed to quit soon pharmaceutics... Likewise, Nestlé decided to close its Bordeaux milk-processing plant in 1997, and it could survive only through a local buyer that transformed it into a subcontractor for large distribution firms. Like most of European regions, the Aquitaine region was rich with such plants, especially in food processing, wood pulp, paper or cardboard, electronics, and Bordeaux did not escape to that darwinian rule in business histor: the fate of each plant had become rather stamped with uncertainty! The fate of mixed-economy aeronautics and aerospace industries depended intensely upon State and European consortiums' strategies: the recent contraction of defence expenditures, and the move towards European alliances between firms threatened the perennity of most of plants and workforce in Aquitaine and Bordeaux agglomeration. Each plant had already begun a trimming of its workforce since the end of the 1980s, especially for both Dassault Bordeaux plants (with 1,600 employees in 1998). Each plant had to defend its ability to gain some room in the new transEuropean programs, as each one had become only a part of very integrated and complementary production systems.

D. Bordeaux reindustrialisation through regional strategies

Such an uncertainty prevails too about another way of reindustrialisation, that follows a path oriented towards the satisfaction of regional needs: plants have been established in order to provide the south-western area (Grand Sud-Ouest) with industrial products consumed locally : Bordeaux has welcomed thus plants that were intended to provide Grand Sud-Ouest with some of its basic materials, within the frame of firms' strategies considering parts of French outlets. This explains that several sectors and companies did choose the Bordeaux agglomeration as the location of these mills. While Grands Moulins de Bordeaux have kept their Bordeaux plant (with only 160 employees) in order to provide South-West bakeries and pastry plants with wheat flour, a sector emerged that used port flows to sustain its activities : a new type of oil mills appeared with the import of oil-cake process. Imports of South and North American oil products were spurred by the development of oil-cakes consumption by cattle in Western Europe; and Bordeaux was chosen as the location for a plant transforming such oleaginous products into oil-cake for pluriregional needs (Grand Sud-Ouest). It was quite the sole industrial activity that kept a link with port flows; but it has developed too the processing of regional products (colza, sunflower). Several other plants have been established by large national or international firms in the Bordeaux agglomeration in order to satisfy regional needs: a building-materials one, etc. But this trend lacks any originality as such plants have been opened too in some other areas of Gironde and Aquitaine, like in other regions.

E. A regional reindustrialisation in search of regional industrialists ?

The key question about the successive waves of Bordeaux reindustrialisation deals with the perennial debate about Bordeaux or south-western entrepreneurship or esprit d'entreprise: did Bordeaux élites manage to participate to reindustrialisation ? Large arguments were developed among business, university and politics elites in the 1950-1960s about the necessity of an economic redeployment of Bordeaux industry. Several decades later, the balance is somehow disappointing: we have already discussed about the failure endured by numerous local firms that tried to redeploy and modernize themselves ; some others appeared in new sectors (pharmaceutics) but were later included into national or national firms.

a. Industrialists of the 1960s-1970s

An more detailed question could ponder why any of the firms specialised in metal processing, foundry, mechanics or electromechanics for shipyards, railway building or else succeeded in redeploying towards mechanics processes linked to papermill technologies (for the Landes forested area) or petroleum or petrochemicals processes (for the Lacq region or Bordeaux Bec d'Ambès), both being strongly developed in Aquitaine ? North-European and German firms hold in fact both of them, and the sole society emerging in Bordeaux, Amri, which grew as a subcontractor for Bec d'Ambès plants, was quickly bought by an American group and transferred in a rural area north of Bordeaux, without any more links with Bordeaux reindustrialisation, as it became a unit of a globalised group, that sustained it with overseas outlets. What Bordeaux deeply lacked in order to secret new layers of entrepreneurs was a true entrepreneurship culture. Contrarily to some European regions, no upsurge of junior industrialists aroused in the in the 1960s-1970s. Workers in shipyards had been trained within their enterprise and no one was able, as it seems, to launch its own small firm in order to capitalize on his skills. Moreover, the paradox is that medium-sized firms already existing in the background of shipyards or metal-processing plants didn't succeed in redeploying their outlets, their activities portfolio, their skills, and were gradually wiped out in the 1960s-1970s. Was it due to a low level of professional or technical initial training, owing to the gap in technical and professional school organization in the area - contrarily to Alsace, German, Swiss, Bolognese or Austrian industrial areas? Was it due to a demise of industrialist culture in Bordeaux, as a large majority of Bordeaux business elites were more linked to trade than to industry? as industrialist elites often depended upon large firms as subcontractors and suppliers, and were not used to develop independent strategies, research units, autonomous technological renewals? These questions indeed can't yet get solid answers.  A single firm has reached perennity and some significant size: Lectra Systems was launched in the 1970s to provide textile industry with laser-cutting machines ; but its two founders (the Etchepare brothers) and its key initial researcher have since left the company, as it endured severe difficulties ; it had to be bought by to financial investors (Harari), and this mixed Paris and Bordeaux profile provides the real unique case of a new firm that has conquered national and international markets from a Bordeaux origin and through a Bordeaux location. This feeling of failure or disappointment explains the recurrent worries of State, business and politics elites about the supposed Bordeaux entrepreneurial gap! A mobilisation of financial means was however undertaken : a special institution was launched in order to sustain capital requirements of small and medium sized companies: a Society for regional development, Expanso, that provided dozens of firms with capital-development participations, long term loans and building-leasing credits. But many of its industrial customers in the key industrial sectors were submerged by economic history or acquired by national (or international) companies. Banks themselves were more and more active and various, and they diversified their range of credits, offered long or medium term credits and more and more capital-developments operations.

b. Industrialists of the 1980s-1990s

Industrial fundamental trends, such as those evoked on previous sections of that study, explained this relative failure of an industrial redeployment or renewal. Is it that businessmen have disappeared from Bordeaux? that business minds there aren't turned to industry? Such a point of view would forget the vitality of several industrialists that acted as subcontractors to large plants established throughout the Bordeaux agglomeration and even Aquitaine! Aeronautics and space activities, automotive or electronics components needed suppliers with parts, systems, etc, and numerous of such smf emerged and prospered up to now. This explains too the relative technological crucible that has been entertained by large industries in their growth wake: in the 1990s, firms like COM ONE (created in 1987), that provides modems and communication systems to electronics industries, or like Composites Aquitaine, that produces since 1985 special very resisting plastics owing to links with space industries, are symbols of what is called somehow pretentiously « the Aquitaine valley » (alongside the Silicon valley...).

Such a high tech trend symbolises the quest for a link between the intellectual forces secreted by Bordeaux universities, rich with solid departments in sciences, and supported by a few specialised technology and science schools (grandes écoles) (Ecole nationale supérieure de chimie & de physique de Bordeaux, Ecole nationale supérieure d'électronique et de radioélectricité de Bordeaux, Institut du bois, etc.). Like in every fastgrowing region and country, interactive effects between academic research and industry are promoted by the State and local institutions, by businessmen's organisations, etc. A diverse range of financements has been built, etc. Seeds of innovative think tanks are thus spread in the 1980s and the 1990s, but their true consequences on reindustrialisation are still to much thin to allow a strong flow of jobs creations, even if a few dozens firms have emerged in that time. Despite its richness in sunny shores and vast forests, the « Aquitaine valley » hasn't yet given birth to some kind of Silicone valley or else! Last, it must be said that industry is perhaps not the sole way to growth... Industry provides numerous opportunities to tertiary businessmen to launch and develop their firm (truck transports, warehouse facilities, etc.), and, in that way, a real entrepreneurship has been proved in Bordeaux (with for instance GT, a medium-size transport company). And of course, but it isn't the vocation of that study, trade firms linked to wine and spirits have succeeded in entertaining capitalist spirit in the 1950-1970s (up to a hard crisis in the midst of the 1970s, that opened the door to national or international groups) and more recently in the 1980-1990s, with the upsurge of a new layer of local trade businessmen. Services sectors sustained thus business spirit all along the cycles of deindustrialisation or reindustrialisation.

2. Nantes: the reconstruction of a new industrial landscape (since the 1960s and 1970s)

What is taking place now in Italy and elsewhere (a regrouping on the same site of small scale factories, who complement each other and who worked in synergy) shows that other ideas could be just as feasable, and at least better adapted to the actual economic context. The new industrial landscape in Nantes has been rebuilt over the last two or three decades precisely due to a system partially similar to this, based on smaller units than in the past.

Table 5. Industrial Loire-Atlantique firms in 1996:
sector                                                    number    percentage out   number of firms  having    
                                                                                       all the firms   less than 20  between 20 and 200   more than 200 employees
food                                    1,336          29,1%            925                 58                 13
consumer goods (1)        1,045          22,7%            453                 94                  7
industrial plants (2)       1,063          23,1%            477               120                 19
intermediate goods (3)  1,095          23,8%            451               145                  16
cars                                          49          1,06%              25                 6                   3
total                                   4,588                                2,331              423              58 
(source: Insee-National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies)
(1) This group includes : clothing, leather, printing (8 per cent of the firms in the department), pharmaceuticals, maintenance, household goods (about 9 per cent of the firms)
(2) The trio shipbuilding, aeronautical and railway industries dominate here (5 out of 19 firms of more than 200 employees). The mechanical industry (around 14 per cent of the firms and 10 out of the ones employing 200 or more staff), the electrical and electronic industry.
(3) Mineral produce, textiles, wood, paper, chemicals, rubber, plastic, electronic and electrical composants, metallurgical industry, and metal transformation (9,1 per cent of firms and 7 of the 16 who employed 200 or more people).

A. An industrial diversification continuing to use past heritage

Another source of information completes this chart. In 1995, 1, 228 industrial firms in the Loire-Atlantique département employed more than ten people. They brought in an added value total of twenty thousand million francs. Three quarters of these value added francs was produced by six essentials branches (and not seven, as the first of the list is not "industrial"), that are mixing diversification and industrial regional heritage: 
- Building industry, agricultural and civil engineering: 16,3;
- Shipbuilding, aeronautics (the building of Airbus and Hermes planes): 13,6% (16% of the employees in the industrial sector of the département in 1994);
- Electrical, electronic and electro-mechanical assembly, telephone (Alcatel), various industrial goods: 11,8%;
- Mechanical construction: 11,1%;
- Food industry: 10,3% (and 14% of industrial employees in 1994);
- Smelting works and metal works: 7,5% (8,9% of salaried workers in industry in 1994);
- Wood furnishings and various industry: 4,7%.

Four of these sectors, often largely modernized, have their heritage in the past : shipbuilding and armaments (the two having been linked for a long time), mechanical construction, metal work and the food industry. One (electro-mechanical construction) is linked to the formers. Another is the fruit of the sometimes forced delocalisation dictated by national and regional development (electrical and electronic material). The last one, wood and its derived industry, isn't really a newcomer. Nantes has imported exotic wood since the beginning of the 18th century at least. Moreover, numerous small firms situated in the south of the département near to the Sèvre and Maine rivers, have continued a "tradition" known since the 18th century: that of small and isolated factories. All this is to say that it would be a mistake to show too negative an image of the different economic cycles in the past. Each brought its own contribution to the industrial landscape of today, by replacing each other, by adding to each other as in geological strata, and in intersecting each other. It's thanks to these traditions, constantly being remodelled, that the lower Loire remains one of the rare industrial areas in Western France to have a multiple vocation. And it is how it shows its specificity compared with Brittany, whose industrial centres appear both disorganized and specialized.

Table 6. The port of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire in 1995: the domination of agricultural produce and of energy
Entered: 19,435,300 tons. Left: 4,364,500 tons. Total: almost 24 millions tons (fourth port in France)
- Entering, six products represent 82,7% of total imports: crude oil 8,762,700 tons (from primarily the United Kingdom, Iran and Norway), méthane 3, 886,600 t. (Algeria), soya cattle-cake 1,325,700 t., coal 908,500 t. (US), seasand 877,300 t. (France), wood and by-products 324,400 t.
- Leaving, five products represent 99% of exports: refined oil produce 2,629,000 tonnes (879,000 t. of which is petrol, essentially for the home-market), light domestic oil 528,200 t. (for Italy), naphta 439,400 t. (for Belgium and the US), wheat 466,500 t. (for Portugal), transport and agricultural material 258,700 t. (for Spain) (source: Insee).

B. A mixed image of Nantes reindustrialisation: branches of large firms and active small businesses

According to statistics from 1976, there were in the département still quite numerous firms who had more than 1,000 employees. In shipyards, the mechanical construction was added (Acb section in Nantes with 1 735 employees was the 21st in the region Pays de la Loire; Brissoneau & Lotz marine, from the Jeumont-Schneider group 1,132 employees; Creusot-Loire (boilermaking mechanical industry) 1,073 employees), aeronautics (Snias Saint-Nazaire 2,961 employees, Snias Nantes-Bouguenais 2,722 employees), agricultural machines (Huard Ucf in Châteaubriant 1,225), ironworks in Basse-Indre (1,950), rubber (Nantes 1,114) and the oil refinery in Donges (Antar-Pétroles de l'Atlantique 1,022). In all, almost 31,000 people were employed in a dozen or so firms, which was almost 34 per cent of the total of employees who in the Pays de la Loire (five départements) worked in firms employing more than 1,000 people. Suffice to say that our source took all firms into account, whatever the sector (administration, agricultural cooperatives...) which well shows the importance of large industrial firms from Nantes in the region. Since then, a large number of these firms have endured serious difficulties. What is new and essential is that the branches of large restructured firms (seen in shipbuilding and in food industry) and a whole host of recent and particularly active smaller firms have been updated. Therefore in just food industry sector, there were 1 068 factories employing 11 124 people in 1992. Amongst these, a large majority have appeared or have developed since the 1960s: That's the case for Tipiak, formed in 1967 through the merger of two specialized firms in food-packaging: it was the leader in Europe for tapioca in 1976, entered the sector of frozen dinners and then became interested in dried groceries in the North-American market. In 1988, 60 per cent firms in all sectors in the department were less than twenty years old. 

Today, Nantes is really no longer the important industrial port that it used to be for four or five decades, and its activities are no longer dependent on sea trade. The proof is in the produce imported (essentially hydrocarbons, raw materials and wood) and the produce exported (energy produce, wheat and agricultural materials). This allows it to supply a large part of Western France in oil-derived produce. But apart from oil-refining and shipbuilding (in Saint-Nazaire), a large section of the industry of the department no longer concerns directly the sea. However, with 82,856 employees in industry in 1989, and 77,206 in 1994 (20 per cent of people employed in the département), Loire-Atlantique has a good national average (21,3 per cent). This preservation, despite the crisis, and the absence of a real deindustrialisation in spite of the difficulties met by numerous large firms, can be explained by two factors: the multiplicity of a constantly remodelled heritage and the liveliness of a mixed industrial structure, combining new small firms and updated branches of large industrial groups. 

Conclusion

Ports and industrialisation
Bordeaux and Nantes Industrialisation had been sustained by the growth of local maritime companies that required large suppliers for the needs of their fleets as both ports entertained important naval companies. This maritime tradition had been flourishing for several half-centuries, all the more than Nantes and Bordeaux provided other ports overseas with current life products, thus explaining the thousands of jobs created in canned food, biscuits, spirits, rums, etc. Deindustrialisation occurred as each country could not bear anymore several large ports as relays for international flows; Bordeaux and Nantes international transoceanic fleets disappeared in the 1960s-1970s as their ports were more and more confined to a regional-levelled redistribution task. Quite all these industries were wiped out in the same time - except if they succeeded in changing their part within national or international work division and only one branch won that challenge in both towns, biscuits... Industries linked to the function of harbours as a door for imports had grown in parallel: Bordeaux and Nantes played a high role within national division of work as they were the key import ports that provided a large pluriregional area with overseas products. About six or eight ports reached that level, and Bordeaux and Nantes were two of them, which explained the growth of plants proceeding raw materials flowing to the ports (rum, peanuts oil, fish, cod fish, sugar). But a new national or international work division pushed these industries to a demise, because of the growth of overseas productions (oil, fish), because of the strength of competitors in other regions (Le Havre, for rum, northern regions for sugar). A wave of reindustrialisation got momentum through petroleum: both ports hoped in the 1960s-1970s that petroleum refineries would prop up a new industrialising chain, with petrochemical and fine chemicals plants. These hopes were deceived in the 1970s and condemned in the 1980s, as the key basis of petrochemical industrialisation failed to appear in both ports: steam-cracking units were achieved only in Marseille and Le Havre, and Dunkerque was the ultimate State choice for such a unit just before the burst of se so-called petroleum shock... The national and even European reshaping of petroleum processing led to the whole closure of Bordeaux refineries, while Nantes kept one of its two units for pluriregional needs; Bordeaux was limited to redistribute petroleum products transported through tramping all along the North-Sea-Channel and Atlantic coasts. Shipbuilding industrialisation, core port industrial skills, was developed owing to local entrepreneurship and traditional know-hows in wood and metal processing, or they reached a large scale owing to strong investments by national companies, either steel and mechanics (Schneider in Bordeaux) firms or naval companies (Compagnie générale transatlantique in Nantes). Deindustrialisation was the result of national and international move towards concentration, with the growth of ships' tonnage, the low workforce and steel costs in emerging countries and the development of overseas-located fleets (due to low social costs). The French State chose to promote first only Nantes, Dunkerque and Marseille, then only Nantes, but this latter shipyard survived only because of numerous grants that helped it to reach competitive prices in front of Asian shipyards, and because of a specialisation toward touristic shipbuilding for cruise fleets.

A paradox takes shape as both Bordeaux and Nantes harbours functions have not provoked reindustrialisation (except for a while through oil refining). They have become ports quite without industries linked to port functions - besides Nantes ultimate shipyards and single petroluem refinery. The State and French firms' strategies, national and international work division did condemn there paths of industrialisation limited to port functions, as Marseille, Le Havre and Dunkerque had become the key basis of such industries - like Anvers or Rotterdam. They didn't become therefore new platforms for industries selling their products all around France or western or Mediterranean Europe. In Bordeaux and Nantes, the port was not a key to reindustrialisation. Even a symbol of reindustrialisation like the Ford plants in Bordeaux use Le Havre and Anvers ports to export some of their automotive equipments to the United States... Both ports have become in fact second-rank ports, as they have been excluded from the networks of international container sealines which cross the world by joining only key ports in Europe. Bordeaux and Nantes became thus only linked to intraEuropean tramping lines along the western coast from Vigo/Bilbao up to Rotterdam and feeding the globalised ports. They got limited to a function of local and regional ports, satisfying regional needs. Contrarily to Le Havre, Dunkerque or even Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes have failed to use their port as a leverage for reindustrialisation because of specific mentalities, that perhaps enticed local leaders to rely to heavily and to longly on traditional harbour functions and locations (upstream the Loire and Garonne mouth), thus preventing their port to reach the key function of a national or European platform for reindustrialisation.

Reindustrialisation without ports?
Bordeaux and Nantes had therefore to get involved in State or firms' strategies in order to be chosen as industry bases. The State decided in the 1930s, just for rearmament purposes, and especially after Second World War to launch solid industries in western areas, as they seemed protected by their geographical location from invaders and warriors' intrusion, and because these regions offered a tradition of mechanic and metal-processing skills. Bordeaux region was more over rich with vast forest (and sea) areas, able to lodge large plants and secretive research centers. Nantes and Bordeaux, with more emphasis in that latter, benefited with several aeronautics, space and military entities. Chemical, food-processing and automotive equipment firms chose too Nantes or Bordeaux for some of their plants, that were involved into global strategies covering entire France or western or south-western Europe. Such plants were deeply specialised within the industrial portfolio of each company. Nantes and Bordeaux biscuits tradition could resist deindustrialisation only through such an involvement, committed itself to competitiveness and specialisation, each town lodging for instance a LU plant for different ranges of biscuits. Ford chose Bordeaux for its two automotive equipments plants as it was perfectly located at the hub of four flows oriented towards its car building plants in Spain, Germany, England and the United States. This very "globalization" required in fact a permanent struggle for productivity and efficiency, which explained the departure of Ibm from its Bordeaux plant, replaced by an overspecialised subcontracting electronic multinational firm, Solectron, which means that its Bordeaux plant would be recurrently gauged along rentability factors against the other Solectron plants in Ireland, for instance. Most industrialists' dynasties of ancient industries ad vanished since a long time and those that succeeded and resisted the demise of harbour industries or subcontracting industries were wiped out by the collapse or pluriregional or national-levelled industries in both ports. One might pretend that, in the 1930s, almost every industrial familial firm hade disappeared there. The key question was therefore the part played by a new generation of industrialists in the process of reindustrialisation. By chance, a new kind of industries paved the way to numerous subcontracting individual then familial firms. But their fate itself has been fragilised by the dwindling size of some recent industries (armaments) or by highly selective policies imposed by multinational plants to their local suppliers. Thus, like everywhere, Bordeaux and Nantes reindustrialisation depends more and more, at the end of the 20th century, upon cross-fertilizations between university laboratories, engineers' skills and small and medium-sized enterprises, launched by engineers, investors or various entrepreneurs. But every European city does entertain such hopes, and such a wave of reindustrialisation remains volatile. If we except in Bordeaux Lectra Systems, a laser technology firm which did succeed to become a worldwide medium-sized company, the ultimate conclusion would insist on the still meager effects of that wave of high tech reindustrialisation, pending the reinforcement of small firms recently emerging.

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