Organise a l'aube du taylorisme: La pratique d'Ernest Mattern chez Peugeot, 1906-1919 (review)

Ernest Mattern was a French automobile engineer who worked for the Peugeot company from 1906 to 1922, then moved to Citroën, and finally came back to Peugeot in 1928, where he stayed until his retirement in 1943. This monograph traces his early career with Peugeot, closely examining his efforts to reorganize production to reduce costs. Yves Cohen first treated Mattern in a thèse in 1981. That effort has been completely revised and expanded in the present work.

Cohen frequently asks how much Mattern's initiatives were related to American production techniques, specifically the ideas and achievements of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford. He bases his account on Mattern's own writings, published and unpublished, on the recent studies by Aimée Moutet, who has closely examined Taylorism and rationalization in early-twentieth-century French industry, and on a very wide range of studies in French and English dealing with business organization.

Cohen finds that Mattern was a very practical man, not given to abstract theory, but always concerned to cut costs. He learned something about American methods early in his career when he worked for a short time at the Westinghouse plant in Le Havre, but in his writings he never admitted studying Taylor's works or accounts of Ford's system. Very proud of his accomplishments, Mattern was loath to give credit to others. At his various posts in the Peugeot organization, he always worked to increase the interchangeability of parts, to reduce the manual handling of materials, and to reduce the amount of skilled labor incorporated in automobile or munitions production. He wanted to share the increased earnings with labor.

Some of this already had been going on in French metalworking before 1914, but it was sporadic and hardly general. One of the merits of Cohen's book is his emphasis on how World War I accelerated these trends. The war required the French metalworking industry to produce very long runs of shells, trucks, and aviation engines. This was done; France even outproduced Germany in the latter two items, and French firms did this with a much reduced staff of skilled workers and many unskilled operatives, very often women.

André Citroën's achievement in mass producing shells using female workers is well known. Mattern did the same on a smaller scale at the Peugeot factory in Audincourt. In 1917 Robert Peugeot recognized his accomplishments and named Mattern technical director of three Peugeot factories in the Montbeliard region of eastern France. Cohen follows the engineer through his difficulties in organizing these establishments into a coherent production machine. He also shows Mattern thinking and acting to organize production for the postwar economy, including a women-operated assembly line for bicycles in 1919 and a line for cars in 1922, neither of which seems to have been moving. Mattern left Peugeot for Citroën when his insistence on quantity production of a very limited range of models was rejected by the firm's commercial director and by Robert Peugeot.

Cohen does not treat Mattern's experience at Citroën or at Peugeot when he returned there a few years later. But he shows that there was a considerable amount of Americanization in French auto factories during the war, including elements of both Taylorism and Fordism. One impediment to the historical analysis of this was the practice by French labor leaders and intellectuals of labeling almost any effort to cut costs, whatever its source, as "Taylorism."

Although Cohen seems to have looked diligently, he has found almost no third-party judgments of Mattern, either contemporary or in memoirs. He is careful not to accept Mattern's boasting blindly, but he is convinced of his subject's intellectual strength, extreme diligence, and clear foresight. He does not judge Mattern as either...