A moving documentary returns to the history of the professional practices of the textile in France, of the industrial revolution to their quasi-extinction against the competition.
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winds, carders, turmoil, spinning machines: the lexicon of textile trades is often feminine because, long time, girls have, from an early age, received an education where practical materials dominated, whose needlework . At the time of the French Industrial Revolution, from 1840, the seamstresses who made their job leave their rooms and respond to the calling of factories, to the working conditions yet.
This is the long history of these workers that the documentary comes from the seamstress, Jérôme Lambert and Philippe Picard, up to the current renewal in the field of quality and eco-friendly textile. However, a production that has nothing to do with that of the flourishing time that recalls older employees. Among them, the singer Isabelle Aubret, who was, at age 14, woundr in Saint-André-lez-Lille (north), and a centenary pimpant who tells the popular front and his reforms.
under the Poverty threshold
These reforms will bring full employment, financial independence and paid holidays. But at what cost ! “937 retirement euros for thirty-six years of work!”, Deplores one of these women, early unemployed, while Roubaix, the “city with a thousand chimneys”, which was a vibration textile center (multiplying, between 1850 and 1900, its population by ten), sees 43% of its current inhabitants live below the poverty line.
In the Vosges, another great textile industry region, are today abandoned factories, such as Marcel Boussac (1889-1980), one of these paternalistic patterns that provided quality housing and staff holiday colonies. But who instrumentalized this generosity in order to secure in return the fidelity of the employee (e) s.
Other bosses with the less social fiber will make alliance with the Church, organizing in the convents the forced and unpaid work of girls, under the leadership of sisters who were not always good. This is one of the most edifying passages of this long documentary richly illustrated with colorized archive images.
The purpose is particularly attached to the awareness of the injustice of their professional and social situation, compared to that of men, their union claims, the strikes they often made in a joyous camaraderie, magnifying the repertoire of workers’ songs. Not to mention the disappearance of “made in France”, too expensive, unemployment and the impossibility for a lot of reconverting.
This informative and moving film is “told” by Corinne Masiero, known for his incarnation of captain Marleau on television. The actress, who lives in Roubaix and does not hide his political commitment to the far left, puts the tone, although without excess, far from those voices off to the sanitized neutrality.