A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #359 - Battle of memories in the automotive valley (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

See online: Online journal of social history and criticism of the 
Mantois region and the Seine Valley 
https://danslouest.noblogs.org/lutte-des-memoires-dans-la-vallee-de-lautomobile/ 
2018. Yellow Vest movement in Mantes-la-Jolie, about fifty kilometers 
west of Paris. Among the mobilized Yellow Vest comrades, few know the 
long history of resistance of Fabienne Lauret and Mohamed Hocine. She is 
a '68er, a feminist and revolutionary factory worker at the Renault 
plant in Flins. He, nicknamed Momo, was born in 1962, a robber and then 
a prisoner, who became an anti-prison activist as well as involved in 
the struggles of immigrants and the suburbs. Both share the experience 
of social struggle and the desire to pass on this history. Meeting [1].

Can you give us an idea of ​​the atmosphere at the time when you started 
your activism?
Fabienne : We were coming out of May '68, an extraordinary movement 
whose hopes lasted for several years. Workplace engagement, strikes in 
companies, large and small, were central issues. So, with friends from 
Révolution!, a splinter group of the Communist League [2], we couldn't 
just hand out leaflets at factory gates: we had to be involved. In 1972, 
we set up shop at the Renault Flins plant, because the domination of the 
Communist Party (PC) and the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) over 
the workers was less strong there than at the Billancourt plant.

Our organization wanted to broaden the workers' struggle to include the 
issues of women, immigrants, and all those whose voices weren't being 
heard. But also to rethink all spheres of social life: education, 
housing, the environment, consumption, and leisure. In total, there were 
fifteen of us activists in Flins and the surrounding area: four workers, 
but also teachers, booksellers, a doctor... People thought that 
voluntarily working in a factory, as we did, was a sacrifice. But for 
us, it was fantastic! We were deeply inspired by the strikes that 
followed one after another in Flins from the 1960s onward, culminating 
in the factory occupation in May-June 1968 and its infamous clashes with 
the riot police.

Mohamed : In the 1980s and 1990s, in working-class neighborhoods, you'd 
find political activists who had offices, who were active in community 
life, who were committed... In 1983, the year of the March for Equality 
and Against Racism took place following numerous racist police killings 
in the suburbs. A national march set off from Marseille to Paris. It 
originated in working-class neighborhoods and was inspired by the 
nonviolent marches of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., with the 
support of the parish of Protestant Father Christian Delorme, whom I had 
the opportunity to meet in the 1990s. It was a powerful moment of 
political affirmation for young people from immigrant backgrounds. That 
said, even though I think he was sincere, Delorme's paternalistic and 
religious stance caused significant disagreements. Since I was in prison 
from 1983 to 1988, I only followed it on the radio, but I later met many 
former marchers when we launched Solact[contraction of "Active 
Solidarity"]in 1989 in Les Mureaux and then Résistance des banlieues 
(RDB) in 1990, on a larger scale.

Tell us a little about Solact and RDB...
Mohamed : Solact, founded in Les Mureaux with local youth and 
Jean-Christophe Berrier [3], an anarchist street educator, fought to 
prevent young people from falling into the trap of unemployment, 
delinquency, and prison. Because, when I got out of prison, I saw the 
extent of the decline in my neighborhood, Bizet, a housing project in 
Les Mureaux: the destruction of social ties and support networks, 
unemployment, rising violence, an increase in alcoholism and heroin 
addiction, and a scandalous rise in police repression and 
incarcerations. We organized homework help, theater workshops, housing 
renovation projects with the young people, and sports. And we confronted 
elected officials with their contradictions by displaying photos of the 
city's decay in our office...

RDB emerged from Solact's meetings with other groups in neighboring 
towns (a network that would later expand to encompass all of France), 
such as Mantes-la-Jolie, where, with about twenty people-former marchers 
and young activists from the Val-Fourré housing project-we organized a 
demonstration in 1990 towards the town hall behind a banner reading 
"17,000 young people, 17,000 forgotten, we refuse to be the city's 
outcasts." The idea behind RDB was precisely to break the isolation of 
the suburbs, to support each other in their activism, and thus to gain a 
stronger bargaining position with the town halls and prefectures.

How did you get involved in the struggle? Were you trained by previous 
generations?
Mohamed : It was in prison that I started campaigning for prisoners' 
rights. I learned to be an activist on my own; it was in my blood. 
During exercise time, I would talk with my fellow inmates: "We have to 
fight for our rights. We have to stop giving up on solitary confinement! 
It's the disciplinary unit, but it's a cell like any other. If you're 
afraid of it, we won't do anything." On blank sheets of paper in books 
borrowed from the prison library, I would write: "Join the coordination 
of prisoners in struggle. To get information, listen to this radio 
station, on these days, from this time to that time." I read the books 
too! Proletarian, anti-capitalist, class struggle-I had heard these 
words from leftists when I went to the Fête de l'Humanité (Humanity 
Festival), or with the Trotskyists in my neighborhood. But I only 
understood them in prison, by reading Marx or Wilhelm Reich.

Inmates like myself, second-generation immigrants, also became much more 
politically engaged due to the surge in support for the National Front 
among prison guards starting in 1983, who were beating immigrants. As a 
result, the march outside the prison that same year took on a very 
particular significance.

But where I learned the most was where I suffered the most: in the 
isolation units [4]. There I met Basque and Corsican independence 
activists and revolutionary activists like Jean-Marc Rouillan and Régis 
Schleicher [5]. Even though talking was forbidden, we managed to 
exchange a little by emptying the water from the toilet pipes.

When I got out, I met the people who ran Parloir Libre , broadcast on 
Fréquence Montmartre , which I listened to in prison. It was an 
anti-prison radio program broadcast in the Paris region, designed to 
allow people on the outside to learn about prison life, support the 
struggles inside, read prisoners' letters on air, and help facilitate 
communication between prisons. With them, many of whom were independent 
political activists, we fought against the existence of solitary 
confinement units.

Fabienne : My parents were members of the Communist Party (PC), even 
though my father was more of a libertarian. My parents left the party, 
traumatized by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. My father 
participated in May '68 by going on strike. But despite the general 
excitement, he didn't talk to me about it much. On the other hand, for 
me, May '68 changed everything. I wasn't even 18 yet; I was at the Lycée 
Hélène Boucher in Paris (20th arrondissement), a school known for being 
very strict. When the movement started, I got lots of other girls 
involved. It was my first activism.

When I joined the far-left organization Révolution!, we met for at least 
a month every summer for political and theoretical training (Marxism, 
current affairs debates). I learned a tremendous amount. At the time, 
revolutionaries weren't trained by previous generations at the factory. 
When we arrived at Renault Flins in 1972-1973, the Maoists, who had been 
there before us, had almost all left. They were too radical: they yelled 
at everyone, charged headlong into confrontations with management. They 
didn't have the mindset to integrate. So we learned on the job. In the 
workshop where I was assigned, sewing seats (like the vast majority of 
women), I learned the basic work of a union representative: developing 
demands with the female workers through regular research and observation 
in the field.

Occupation of the Renault factory in Flins by workers in 1968
All of this gives the impression of a period of intense political 
activity compared to today... What has changed since then?
Fabienne : We need to understand the impact the automotive industry 
(Renault Flins, Simca Poissy, but also all the subcontractors) had on 
the region (see map). In 1969, when Flins switched to alternating 
2x8-hour shifts, the workforce nearly doubled, reaching 22,000 
employees. Dozens of buses chartered by the company waited every morning 
for the workers from Val-Fourré or the housing projects in Les Mureaux 
built by Renault. The company massively recruited immigrant workers, 
mostly from North Africa, believing them to be docile because they were 
often illiterate. The "Renault octopus," as the local press called it, 
which arrived in the region in 1952, transformed transport, 
infrastructure, housing, demographics, and the culture of the region, 
and spread a spirit of loyalty to the company: "the diamond in place of 
the heart," in reference to the brand's logo.

Now the large corporations have disappeared, and with them the working 
class. Its codes, its solidarity, its organizations (unions and the 
Communist Party). At the Renault Flins plant, in the 2000s, there were 
only about 7,000 employees left [6]. Little by little, the factory is 
unraveling. Production is moving to other countries where labor is 
cheaper, where unions are repressed. Renault is then gradually 
abandoning its sports and cultural activities, and then its right to 
reserve housing in the town for Flins workers. Community organizations 
have dissolved, and the unions have lost their influence. In the 1980s, 
unemployment was twice as high in Les Mureaux as in the rest of the 
country, and residents of the public housing projects had more 
precarious jobs than average. The youngest children are growing up in a 
world radically different from that of their parents.

Furthermore, capitalists have figured out how to reduce strikes; they're 
very good at it. In factories, workers are increasingly temporary. These 
are people who can't really go on strike, or even knock on the door of 
the nearest union, for fear of losing their jobs. I've seen the change 
in the workforce. Temporary workers used to come just to earn a living 
and then go home. Between the 1970s and 2000, the working class was 
dismantled: there was nothing we could do.

Mohamed : Immigrant and suburban activists have faced very strong 
repression, for example, due to the double penalty. For convicted 
foreigners, this means prison plus deportation. Against this unjust 
measure, I participated in a hunger strike in prison, initiated by two 
activists from the Association of Young Arabs of Lyon and its Suburbs, 
in 1986, when I was incarcerated. But some activists became 
institutionalized and ended up adopting a much less radical discourse 
than we had, particularly regarding the repressive role of the police.

There's also the issue of co-optation: when the left created SOS 
Racisme, in opposition to the 1983 March for Equality and Against 
Racism, the Socialist Party (PS) sent all its activists to infiltrate 
the March's collectives. They skillfully manipulated these autonomous 
grassroots movements and their legacy to break them up and co-opt them. 
Finally, Muslim associations gained prominence; many people in the 
neighborhoods no longer wanted to march except for the sake of Islam.

Poster for the "What is Youssef's life worth?" campaign conducted by the 
MIB in 2001
Do some of the local young people you know about this story?
Mohamed : After 2000, it was a new generation. In 2001, the "What is 
Youssef's Life Worth?" mobilization took place, led by the Immigration 
and Suburbs Movement (MIB), a movement created in the wake of RDB by 
people who had suffered double punishment, which fought against police 
killings in the suburbs, without compromise towards the institutions 
[7]. In 1991, Youssef Khaïf, an activist from Val-Fourré, was murdered 
in Mantes-la-Jolie by the police officer Hiblot. The trial took place 10 
years later. We organized assemblies, demonstrations, and held numerous 
debates throughout the trial at the Versailles courthouse, in front of 
which we set up two large tents. At that time, in Val-Fourré, we managed 
to mobilize people. Then, as the years went by, people stopped caring. 
And when, in 2005, the suburbs erupted in flames after the assassination 
of Zyed and Bouna in Clichy-sous-Bois , the MIB no longer existed.

Fabienne : In the 2000s, something shifted. Some of the immigrant 
workers we knew from the factory, who lived in hostels or elsewhere, 
became homeowners. Those who bought houses, we didn't see them anymore. 
It was the continuation of a process that began in the 1980s and 1990s, 
initiated by the families from the first factory hires, who were more 
affluent.

In Les Mureaux, a few years ago, I met a whole group of young people in 
their thirties, living in social housing estates, children of immigrant 
workers from the Renault Flins plant, who told us: "We don't want to be 
like our parents. We want to forget that, we're going to do something 
else, other jobs, get training." That really struck me. I thought to 
myself: "Damn, we aspired to the exact opposite!"

They didn't want cultural transmission, but rather to climb the social 
ladder. The fathers didn't want their sons to work in factories either, 
but rather to get degrees and pursue other careers. Yet, at home, the 
older generation rarely spoke about their lives in the factory, even 
though they suffered because of it. The social status of the worker and 
working-class culture were devalued, even though most of these young 
people were themselves factory workers or precarious employees.

Would you say that local authorities are trying to erase the memory of 
workers' struggles?
Fabienne : In Les Mureaux, it's radical. The mayor, François Garay, a 
Socialist Party representative[elected since 2001]who leans towards 
Macron, wants to get rid of working-class history by wiping the slate 
clean. When you arrive at the entrance to the town on the A13 motorway, 
there's an Ariane rocket, which the town hall had installed in 2018 to 
promote the Ariane Group factory in Les Mureaux. For the town hall, 
which wants to gentrify the town, this company, with all its engineers, 
is much more marketable than the immigrant workers in the car factories! 
When I saw that, it made me sick. Historically, Les Mureaux is a 
working-class town, structured around the automotive industry. The 
municipality no longer wants this heritage.

Mohamed : With housing allocations and the hiring of certain segments of 
the population as local government employees at the expense of others, 
some local mayors with clientelistic politics are trying to buy off a 
portion of the electorate. A while ago, in Val-Fourré, I met up with 
those with whom we had fought up until the 2000s with RDB, at MIB... 
They told me: "It's over, Momo! Now there's no more movement, 'Uncle 
Pierre'[Bédier][8]came and swallowed everyone whole. All the important 
communities in the area are with him: the Turks, the Senegalese, etc." 
That dampens people's enthusiasm for organizing and fighting back.

How did you resist - and do you still resist - this erasure of the 
memory of the struggles?
Mohamed : At the MIB, we organized internal seminars on a national 
scale, to train us in the organization of a meeting, in writing 
leaflets, in distributing them in train stations... Me, at Solact, I set 
aside time for discussion in our room: to talk and pass on to the 
younger ones, over a tea, a little joint.

In prison, the best way to instill a fighting spirit is to make sure 
your fellow inmates don't just see you talking and theorizing. For 
example, by requesting a meeting with the prison administration to 
demand that some of our rights be respected, like access to a lawyer 
rather than solitary confinement, or by enforcing labor laws for inmates 
working for outside companies from within the prison. Then, the other 
inmates listen to your message because they see how it translates into 
action.

I quickly wanted to share a fragment of what we were experiencing by 
starting to write a prison journal about my struggles from the very 
beginning of my sentence. One day, they transferred me to solitary 
confinement. They searched my cell and stole my journal. When I got out, 
I immediately decided to continue, to recount what I did in prison but 
also on the outside. A book and a documentary are in the works, for 
activists and for young people in the neighborhoods, so they know what 
we were able to accomplish. And so they can do the same.

At MIB, we said loud and clear that it was up to those directly affected 
to write and pass on what they had experienced. Sometimes it works. For 
example, in Les Mureaux, many people who created gyms or associations 
told me: "Momo, it's thanks to you, to Solact, and to the discussions we 
had, that we got started. I'm getting involved politically, I'm going 
all the way with what you wanted," for example, the association Tendre 
la main (Reaching Out) which, since 2014, has been offering free escorts 
to the visiting rooms of prisoners in the Île-de-France prisons, which 
are often very poorly served by public transport.

Fabienne : I wrote a book, *L'Envers de Flins  *[9], and co-wrote a 
graphic novel, *Une féministe révolutionnaire à l'atelier  *[10], which 
is very popular with young people, especially girls. Despite this sign 
of interest, in the groups I'm involved in, I sometimes feel isolated 
because the memory of the major local workers' movements has practically 
disappeared (the strikes by immigrant auto workers in the 1970s and 80s, 
for example). There are young people, but for them, it's as if we old 
activists are ancient history. Work is no longer as central to their 
activism. Either because they can't find jobs, or because they're 
constantly changing jobs, or because they don't see the jobs they have 
as a space for struggle. They mobilize for other, legitimate causes, 
like Palestine, but geographically more distant ones.

Mohamed : There's a void. The work of remembrance still needs to be 
done: educating people, whether they're activists or not. There's 
nothing left to do but get on with it!

Interview by Dan Lhoest, Winter 2025-2026

This article originally appeared in issue 20 of "  Chiffon, independent 
newspaper of Paris and its suburbs  ", which we warmly invite you to read!

Notes
[1] Article which is part of a long-term project, published by the 
online journal of social history and criticism of the Mantois and the 
Seine Valley: (Once upon a time...) In the West .

[2] French Trotskyist party which became the Revolutionary Communist 
League in 1974 and then the New Anticapitalist Party in 2009. The group 
Révolution! became the Communist Workers' Organization (OCT) in 1976

[3] On Solact and Jean-Christophe Berrier, see Jean-Christophe's 
interviews on danslouest.noblogs.org

[4] Isolation, which prisoners consider torture, is a prison regime 
designed to isolate a detainee from the rest of the prison population, 
or to protect them from other detainees. It has been the subject of 
numerous struggles for its abolition, until its reform, without any real 
difference, by Robert Badinter.

[5] Jean-Marc Rouillan and Régis Schleicher, far-left activists in the 
organization Action directe, which carried out several attacks against 
business owners and political figures or their premises in the 1980s. 
See, by Rouillan, Dix ans d'Action directe, Agone, 2018

[6] Production of the Zoe, the last electric car produced at Renault 
Flins, stopped in 2024. At the same time, production at the Stellantis 
(formerly PSA, Simca, Talbot) plant in Poissy is threatened in the short 
term.

[7] On the MIB, as well as for a chronology of racist police killings in 
Mantes, see danslouest.noblogs.org

[8] Pierre Bédier, the local baron, among other mandates, president (The 
Republicans) of the Yvelines departmental council (from 2005 to 2009, 
then again since 2014) and former mayor of Mantes-la-Jolie (1995-2005). 
On the "Bédier system," see "In the Yvelines, clientelism on a daily 
basis," Le Monde Diplomatique , February 2017.

[9] Syllepses, 2018

[10] The Bubble Box, 2022

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4691
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