Opening the Gates by Donald Reid

Author:Donald Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.

Michel Rocard

If business modernizers and the CFDT saw resolution of the Lip Affair as a way of showing that they were prepared to deal with the unexpected in the post-1968 world, Rocard saw it as a means of making the PSU relevant following its disappointing showing in the March 1973 legislative elections. For Rocard, Lip was, in the words of his biographer, “the Holy Grail” of the “osmosis” between political and social activism.67 He had come out of the Christian left and been an ardent opponent of the Algerian War and a founding member of the PSU born of this opposition. The PSU was the electoral party most associated with the new left and currents of May 1968 thought. Although the CFDT-Lip leaders were PSU militants, Rocard had different plans for the PSU than they espoused. To be more than a laboratory of radical ideas, the PSU needed a place in the government in order to implement them. An inspecteur des finances, Rocard was by profession an elite technocrat, and he believed that for the left to be an alternative and not simply the voice of opposition, it had to prove its mastery of the economy. The PSU had spoken of the nationalization of Lip under worker control, but Rocard came to seek a solution elsewhere.

Rocard framed Lip as a matter of rectifying the effects of poor management, not of dealing with laid-off workers. He argued that Giraud realized that the final plan he had offered was not economically feasible and wanted to withdraw it, or, better yet, have the workers do this for him; workers rejected Giraud’s plan because the firm it produced was doomed in the marketplace. Les Lip were fighting for the “economic revival of a viable enterprise.” The demand to rehire all Lip employees was secondary to this goal; these workers were necessary to operate a successful business.68 Settlement of the Lip conflict could secure Rocard a reputation as a responsible and effective leader, necessary for the positions espoused by the PSU to find a place in mainstream French politics.69 As was the case for Riboud, the very difficulties that the Lip Affair presented to the establishment made it an opportunity for those on the outside to secure their credentials with the establishment.

Rocard worked closely with the capitalist “modernizers.” He knew Bidegain well from their time together in the Club Jean Moulin,70 and developed a strong affection for Antoine Riboud, who, he said, “did not tolerate workers being punished on the pretext that they lacked a suitable boss.”71 He believed that Bidegain’s resolution of the Salamander conflict was an event that “opens new perspectives on the evolution of French capitalism. The state … lets the transformation of economic structures take place in the framework of an employers’ solidarity fixing the blunders” which accompany national economic expansion.72 In November 1973, Rocard explained to the national council of the PSU his support for the efforts of the capitalists engaged in resurrecting Lip, arguing that they sought good relations with unions rather than archaic confrontations.

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