Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 19681981

(Hardback)

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In the Summer of 1973, workers occupied the Lip watch and clock factory, sparking a national cause and controversy. The Lip occupation and self-management experience captured the imagination of the Left in France and internationally, as a living example of the spirit of May '68. In Opening the Gates, Donald Reid chronicles the history of this struggle. Beginning with the early stirrings of worker radicalism in 1968, Reids meticulously researched narrative details the nationally publicised conflict of 1973, the second bankruptcy and occupation of 1976 and the conversion of Lip into a group of cooperatives operating into the 1980s.

Reviews

A must read for historians, Reid's study will also open up for general readers the atmosphere of a time so far in the past that it is forgotten, yet so near that history has yet to remember it. -- William M. Reddy, William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

Author Bio

Donald Reid is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work focuses on French labour history and the history of collective memory in modern France.