Does industrial patriotism exist? “We created 1 million businesses in France last year, according to Jean Viard, we closed 53,000, you have to look at both figures”

Industrial patriotism does not exist, this is what the hundred employees of the Poulain chocolate factory in Blois conclude with great bitterness. Since their factory has to close, it is planned, they are opposed to it, they demonstrated against it yesterday.

Industrial patriotism doesn’t exist, say the hundred employees of the Poulain chocolate factory, a factory which is due to close. Decision to which they oppose. A social question that we decipher with sociologist Jean Viard.

What about industrial patriotism, when precisely a chocolate factory founded in 1848, whose production volumes are falling, but the site remains profitable, explain the unions, when is it when a site like this must close.

franceinfo: This fight by employees is very important for their jobs, is it also very symbolic today?

Jean Viard: Yes, then these are major brands constituting French identity. There are remarkable works of Raphaël LLorca which says: basically, today, the France brand is more supported by large industrial groups – we tell you French meat, for example – than by politicians who no longer have national narratives. So I think that the role of brands in building national belonging is essential. Poulain is absolutely one of them. The second thing is that chocolate is disappearing on the planet. We have a huge problem with chocolate production with global warming. It’s completely antagonistic.

Prices are going up, therefore…

Prices are going up, so maybe we could plant chocolate elsewhere, I’m not a farmer but at the moment we can’t. So we are in a resource blockage. On the other hand, indeed, we are in another blockage, which is that many people pay attention to their size, their weight, and therefore everything that is sweet declines. All of this is included in the file, because I do not want to intervene in the society itself which is clearly unable to re-stabilize itself.

Volumes are falling, the unions admit this, but in fact, apparently, the site remains profitable. This is what defends him…

Afterwards, when people give me big speeches on industrial patriotism, I have an old sociologist’s technique: I always go to the parking lot, and I look at where the cars come from. I like people to talk to me about industrial patriotism, but are the cars made in France or in Europe? Often this is not the case. I ask this question because we can defend causes, but we must also live them. Do brands exist? Yes, I think they exist, yes, brands send an image that is not necessarily national, which is perhaps also an image of a social group.

Look at the image that Italian cars had for example, we always said they are not very solid, but they are so nice… And each was in its own cultural caricature. So brands contribute to national identities, of course, I took the example of the car because that’s what everyone knows. I think Poulain is the same thing. Afterwards, what is happening today is that in reality, most companies, we do not know who they belong to, if they belong to shares, it is globalized. And so the truth is that the brand can remain French and the company not be French-owned.

In this case, Poulain now belongs to an investment fund, but it remains a French brand. Does industrial patriotism start from the consumer? For chocolate, for Duralex glasses too, we know that at the Duralex glassworks in Orléans, there is this fight, it was last week too, between the big brands which speak to all French people. It’s up to the French to buy French in these cases, if they want to?

Let’s say it’s one of the elements, I think it plays a bit at the margins. If we know that a chocolate is French, that they have communicated well on this, perhaps before the Easter holidays, they can gain some market share, but I think that it is only a criterion among others. I would just like to give a number. We created 1 million businesses in France last year. We closed 53,000. You have to see both numbers.

So why ? Because we are multiplying individual businesses, of course. But the movement is not a movement of loss of businesses at the moment, and that’s why I had fun putting these two figures side by side. That is to say that they are creating a lot of businesses in new sectors, they are closing them in sectors in crisis, in particular everything related to the automobile, since we are moving towards the car electric, and then towards food because we eat differently.

On the other hand, beer goes up for example, and wine goes down, red wine is a lively market. I am especially sensitive to the workers, to the people who work in these companies. That’s a real subject. Afterwards, as the company moves through globalization, I don’t think there’s much we can do about it.

In fact, we heard these employees yesterday in the reports, some have spent their entire lives at Poulain, they demonstrate their attachment to an institution, a place, a factory, a brand which ultimately passes from hand to hand. Is there a real paradox there, in the attachment we can have to something, which ultimately evaporates over time?

We are in a society of discontinuity. The problem is that we want to choose them, the discontinuities. And when they are imposed on us, if the company decides to move to a country where labor is cheaper, it is a very violent attack. And so indeed, it is a great pain. So these people deserve to be supported, obviously, but we are in this world of discontinuity, and I don’t think we’re going to get out of it.