Introduction

A few years after World War II the collected writings on La Condition Ouvrière (‘The Condition of the Worker’) by French philosopher Simone Weil were published (Weil, 1951/2002). Although the author herself had died in exile in southern England in 1943, her ideas concerning overcoming worker alienation strongly influenced not only Italian entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti and Italian writer Ottiero Ottieri, as we saw in the previous chapter, but also French authors of post-war industrial novels. In France, the genre of the naturalist or realist industrial novel had been known for quite a long time since Emile Zola's seminal industrial novel Germinal, written in the 1880s. And as in the United States and Weimar Germany, there were also some workers themselves who published novels or poems. Industrial sociologist Georges Friedmann mentions in his Traité de Sociologie du Travail the following authors and books: G. Navel, Travaux (1945); D. Mothé, Journal d’un Ouvrier 1956–1958 (1958), and A. Andrieux & J. Lignon, L’Ouvrier d’Aujourd’hui (1960) (Friedmann & Naville, 1962, pp. 384, 423, 425, vol. 2). Other notable proletarian writers include Eugene Dabit, Henry Polaile, André Philippe, Maurice Lime, and Jean Pallu (Friedmann, 1947, p. 90).

It is in particular Georges Navel's novel that may be considered among the first post-war neo-realist French industrial novels. As Simone Weil did in a more analytical and philosophical way in La Condition Ouvrière, Navel expressed in his novel Travaux his personal experiences as a worker. It is remarkable that in France the genre of the Modernist industrial novel remained popular in the decades thereafter.