"Who killed French industry?", on France 5: a look back at fifty years of decline

FRANCE 5 – SUNDAY, MAY 25 AT 9 PM – DOCUMENTARY

In fifty years, France has lost half of its industries, becoming a country incapable of producing what it consumes, including vital goods like medicines. This reality emerged abruptly with the Covid-19 pandemic. As industrial sovereignty returns to the heart of national concerns, journalist Ella Cerfontaine investigated.

Director of Autopsy of a Political Scandal, the Ecotax (2017) and co-director of Re/Making Masks, a Sector, an Industry (2021), she has sufficient mastery of her subject to identify the culprits – industrialists, financiers, politicians from both the right and the left – of this deindustrialization.

The first is a duo: President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, elected in 1974, a year after the first oil crisis, and his Prime Minister Raymond Barre. A year earlier, industry employed 29% of the working population; two years later, France had lost 33,000 businesses.

The second culprit is François Mitterrand. Elected in 1981 (industry then represented 22% of the economy) on the promise of job recovery, it was during his first seven-year term that the steel industry, in crisis, was virtually dismantled. Usinor closed in 1988 in Denain (Nord). The workers felt betrayed.

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