Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968–1981 by Donald Reid (review)

Donald Reid's definitive account of the 'Affaire Lip' is an extraordinarily compelling narrative. In 1973, faced with a restructuration plan that threatened their company's existence, workers at the Lip timepiece company in Besançon not only occupied their factory, but proceeded to manufacture and market watches, pay themselves salaries, and run the business, transforming the independent left's idea of 'self-management' overnight into a plausible reality. Reid's long history of the strike—from the labour unrest of the late 1960s to the company's long, drawn-out demise—places it at the centre of the cross-currents reshaping French society in the 1970s. First, the Lip strike introduced the emancipatory spirit of May '68 into the realm of labour. Les Lips (as the striking workers were dubbed) challenged the top-down structure of post-war industrial relations, which subordinated local initiatives to the priorities of mass labour confederations. Instead, the Lip workers created a 'culture of participatory democracy on the shopfloor', sought to unleash the 'creativity hidden in the world of work', and provided (as one observer put it) a 'vacation from alienated life' (pp. 93, 77, 129). This unique blend of imagination and empowerment was evident in tactics such as 'the serpent', a queue of strikers that snaked playfully through the factory, urging resistant colleagues to join them. Second, the Lip Affair drew deeply from more traditional forms of working-class solidarity, making it 'the last national expression of workers as the creators of a new world' (p. 11). Reid emphasizes the strikers' ties to Catholic labour activism and its ideals of community and altruism. The appeal of the strike's leading figure, Charles Piaget, lay in the fact that, according to one participant, he 'forgot himself totally' (p. 108). Finally, the Lip strike was an early battle over the new economic order emerging in the 1970s, which would result in decades of mass unemployment. Yet this is not simply narrative history for its own sake. As Reid makes clear, it was the compelling nature of the story itself—workers resisting management by demonstrating they could run a factory on their own—that explains the strike's ability to change lives and stimulate collective action, as well its lasting place in the French social imagination. An intriguing aspect of Reid's account is the attention he gives to the many retellings of the Lip story: a long list of novels, memoirs, films, plays, and commemorative events, followed more recently by dissertations, scholarly studies, and even graphic novels. The book's title refers to this dimension of the strike: les Lips decided to open the factory's gates to outsiders, so that they could witness the experiment first hand and find ways to make its tale their own. Reid acknowledges that many of the workers' dreams came to nought. But through his admirable history of the strike and the narratives it spawned, Reid plays his part in keeping the Lip story alive, at a time when the sense of possibility it awakened is sorely missed.