Among the consequences of four decades of plant closures in metropolitan France, a process driven by the turn to cheaper, less strictly regulated labour markets abroad, is the heightened awareness of the disused quality of the country's industrial landscape. Forced inactivity brought about by global economic reorganisation and price fluctuations has pushed mills, foundries, dry docks, coal-fired plants, and a myriad other industrial structures across France to the brink of dereliction, often requiring their demolition outright. In this context, new forms of post-industrial affect have emerged, sustained by a renascent heritage tourism industry and particularly by documentary film-makers who serve as self-appointed custodians of working-class memory and as witnesses to a receding industrial past. These representations, which compensate locally – and in the national imaginary – for France's labour lost and for the concomitant corrosion of collective memory, are by no means free from nostalgia. They have the merit nonetheless of making deindustrialisation appear less irreversible or ineluctable, in retrospect, than the prevailing national sentiment of fatalism would suggest. We may thus appreciate not only the symptomatic, but the affirmative character of select attempts to restore lived historical content to France's topographies of disuse and to combat the forces of erasure and effacement.

There are words in every language that say more than they were meant to say. ‘Délocalisation’, the French euphemism for offshoring through relocation, is such a term. By a twist of the linguistic screw, ‘délocalisation’ evokes not only shuttered factories, dismissals, and packing up machines for reuse elsewhere; it spells too, through its privative prefix dé-, the negation of the spatially intensive character that characterised second-wave industrial production in the first place. Even as it cloaks crude realities in abstract language, ‘délocalisation’ betrays the violence enacted by international finance capital upon labourers for whom the industrial worksite was integral to social life, and not a source of alienation alone.

Initially, both nineteenth-century bourgeois paternalism and its critique by collective praxis (proto-syndicalism) were markedly local phenomena. Loathed and respected by turns, factory owners could stake a claim to notable status based on their proximity to the factory and on theatricalised acts of largesse meant to benefit the community, from workers’ education and health clinics to pageantry.