C-HIM: Conference on the Historical Use of Images Brussels, March 10th-11th 2009

Visual documents, Virtual reality and the renewal of Labour history Alain P. Michel

Abstract : 245 words

The Renault automobile firm has produced a wide range of images (cinema, photographs, and industrial drawings) that renew the technological, social and cultural history of the company’s strain to organize and rationalize the production of cars. These visual documents are the bases of the “Virtual Factories” ANR research program (2008-2012), which has started with the 3D reconstruction of the C5 workshop in which the Renault Automobile Company introduced the manual chassis assembly line in 1917 and made it evolve until the late 1920's. This study is both a historical enquiry on industrial work, and an archaeological project aiming at the virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges.

My main point concerns the way images are used to apprehend the reality of the work they represent, not as visual evidence or simply illustrations for the historian, but as a first hand source. It is an archivist approach of non-conventional historic documents. In this perspective, I develop a methodological analysis of the images, evaluating the advantages and limits of those visual sources to apprehend such a complex technological instrument as an assembly line. Beyond this study of the Renault's case, the idea is to overpass the classical opposition between the formal prescriptions and the real practices – to understand the way the bureaus and the workshops participated together in the productive process. It is an illustration of the way multimedia and computer techniques can produce a new type of constructed historical documents that can be adapted to other historical investigations.

Paper : 7600 words

As a labour historian, my main interest is the development of assembly lines in the Renault

automobile factories (1917-1939)1. To revisit the firm’s effort to rationalize its production of

cars and apprehend the way workers actually worked, I use non-conventional i.e. non-written

1 Alain P. Michel, Travail à la chaîne. Renault 1898-1947, Boulogne-Billancourt, ETAI, 2007, 192 p.

historic sources. This re-examination is possible because automobile firms have produced a

wide range of corporate images (cinema, photographs, and industrial drawings). In the first 50

years of its history, the Renault Company made 70,000 pictures, shot a few documentary films

adding up 210 minutes of industrial scenes and drew 45,000 implementation plans of its

Billancourt factory. These sources are distinct from the huge written archives of the direction,

and poles apart to the published literature on industrial management. Images show things that

no writing talks about. The stake is important because they present another point of view that

has never been systematically used by historians.

My utilization of images is unusual among labour historians and out of line with common

iconographic and visual studies. First, because my purpose is not the history of images, but a

proper historical use of visual documents in order to inform obscurities in the industrial past.

Consequently, I consider all sorts off images together rather than specializing in one specific

type (painting, photography, film, etc.) as most image experts do. Off course, this does not

mean that all images are similar. Each image is apprehended through its specificities, but

assembled in a corpus documenting a similar subject – here Renault’s C5 workshop - so as to

be compared and confronted one to another.

This instrumental and serial apprehension of images leads to the second peculiarity. I am

interested in all available images regardless of their artistic value. On such industrial topic as

the assembly line, most images are common, vulgar products of command. Most settings are

grey, many takes are blurred, editing are expected, striking productions only exceptional. With

such a research subject, it would be problematical to consider only works of art. The point is

not to pretend that all images are alike but to consider them according to their documentary

interest, regardless of aesthetic criteria. The idea is to apply to images the historical methods of

textual analysis, both because they can be apprehended as “none verbal texts”2, because they

2 D. F. MacKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, London, The British Library, 1985.

are part of a “representational device” which constructs a significant discourse3 and because

their materiality is essential to the understanding of their meaning4. The historic information is

both in and outside the image. Prosaically, concerning a specific subject (i.e. the introduction of

an assembly line in an automobile workshop), I assemble a systematic iconographic corpus of

all images and texts available. But, as images-texts are not similar to writings, the classical

historic methodology is not directly transposable to visual documents. The specific problem is

to exploit various information from a heterogeneous documentary corpus.

I will first present the way I handle still and motion pictures to apprehend the reality of the

work they represent - neither as visual evidence nor as simply illustrations for the historian -,

but as a first-hand source5. In this perspective, a second development suggests an investigation

procedure which apprehends images as historical records, in order to specify their capacity (and

limits) in documenting an otherwise unknown history. In a third step, I will show how this

constructed iconographic corpus can serve as the documentary data base of a virtual

reconstruction of an industrial building and of a working process. Digital technologies permit a

systematic cross examination of the multiple and fragmented information held by images, and

open a new approach in the micro-history of a specific workshop. Beyond the Renault case, my

main topic here is to show how images can remodel business and labour history.

I- Pragmatic approach of visual documents

A lone picture is historically mute. It affects the spectator but does not state what it means.

Most images have to be interpreted without the written, explicit records of their production.

Who is the author? When and why did he (or she) produce this specific image? What was

expected and how did viewers react? Off course, it is easier to analyze an image with this

3 Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988. 4 Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, History, Language, and Practices, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 5 Joeri Januarius, « Picturing the everyday Life of Limburg Miners: Photographs as a Historical Source », IRSH, 53, 2008, pp. 293-312.

contextual information. But my point is that when it cannot be found, the loss of a written

explanation does not compromise its informative potential. Without words, one has to look

closely at the image and exploit all the signs and clues that surround it6.

Beyond this study of Renault's case, one aim of this analysis of the visual representation of

the assembly line is to overpass the classical opposition between the formal prescriptions and

the real practices. Another track is to understand the way the bureaus and the factories

participated together in the productive process. The last point is to confront the rational

literature to the evidence of the workshop practice visible on images.

Images as equivocal evidence

A text will never sum up an image: the two media transmit different types of information that

should not be reduced or considered as secondary to the other. On the contrary, each

apprehends facts differently and permits the confrontation of complementary, irreducible

interpretation of the past. The combination of writings and images give a new lighting on our

historical knowledge. For example, most of what we know about the assembly line comes from

the firm’s written records, comments made by the press or union recrimination. But the

workers’ points-of-view are scarce, rarely formalized in verbal discourses. Yet many graphic

documents circulated in the workshops such as agency plans and maps and those papers are

combinations of drawings, none-verbal words and numbers. The shape of a machine is

documented with indications of length, date, nomenclatures of parts, etc. A photographic print

is often documented with a title, a serial number, a caption which cannot sum up the image

itself. Even silent films are crossed with words in subtitles which survive the voices and sounds

of the talkies. Posters intrinsically combine visuals and words and show how the two modes of

expression each sustain the other. The reading of a visual document has to be multidirectional.

6 Carlo Ginzburg, "Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d'un paradigme de l'indice" Le débat, november 1980, n° 6, pp. 3-44.

My use of images – because they give a different vision of the workshops -, is an attempt to

reconsider the question of work and labour. I try to rebalance a view point that has mostly been

apprehended through the archives of management and organizations. But an image is never just

visual evidence. Like any other document – it has to be criticized and confronted to other

sources. Films, photographs and industrial drawing are partial. Like most writings, they often

come from organizations’ archives. We cannot just believe the visual documents by arguing

that they would show the reality better than written sources. There is an intention behind those

documents. Their setting gives a limited view of the reality. For example, the movement, which

is being reproduced in a film, is not an accurate transposition of the working pace. Similarly,

photographs can give a view of a scene which is more a conventional posture than a

spontaneous print of the job. The same can be said about the mechanical drawings even if they

are considered by the workshop management as the ultimate authority in factory production.

This necessary precaution towards visual documents should not shift to a systematic distrust.

Even if they bias reality, industrial images give a technological and local view of the workshops

and make it possible to see new aspects of the agency of men and machines. For instance,

implantation plans and maps are indispensable to document both the evolution of the factory

and the place of each workshop in the global industrial process. They also help identify and

localize pictures or shots shown on images. Complementarity is a key to the understanding of

visual scenes.

Images as prescription and action

The Renault Company archives have preserved an important collection of plans, initially

produced by a specific engineering and design department in charge of the factory agency. This

bureau was called “Tools & Maintenance Service” (SOE for Service Outillage Entretien)7.

7 Alain P. Michel, «Les plans d'une usine en expansion : Renault, 1898-1939. Ouverture sur les espaces de la production industrielle», in Natacha Coquery, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, Line Sallmann, Catherine Verna (dir.), Artisans, industrie.

Between 1911 and 1939 the SOE produced a series of 45.000 implantation plans and

complementary graphic documents (drawings, tables, nomenclatures) which attest to the

company’s ability to control and adjust its development. Concerning perennial objects

(buildings, machine-tools, etc.) and being the ultimate reference, these plans were preserved

whereas the texts of this service (notes, correspondences, reports, etc.) disappeared. The

superiority of words is not universal.

Some ties between the Maintenance Service and the workshops can be deduced from the study

of the SOE plans. The design department made technical projects to organize the practices of

production, but they were frequently amended on the spot and often modified because the

project could not be directly carried out as such. Multiple erasures, modifications and scrapes

testify of this confrontation to workshop reality. These changes were not just opposition from

the workshop to a bureaucratic normalization. They were integrated in the drawing process

itself. Plans were drawn, dated and signed with the systematic mention “Rectified by (so and

so)” and with the empty space for the date of the expected rectification. I see this progressive

elaboration as an argument to contest the idea that all power was taken away from the shop by

the administration, even in such a rationalized process as the assembly line. The instance that

formalizes and finalizes a project was not the only one to contribute to it. The "human factor"

was essential to the elaboration of the production installations, workshop know-how and team

work being taken into account. It is thus possible to see that the introduction of the assembly

line was not merely imposed upon from above. The industrial actors organized themselves to

make the assembly line function in a way that did not fit the model. These graphic

recordkeeping turn out to be important to understand the way the assembly line was introduced

in Billancourt during the First World War and how it never really became a "routine" in the

early 1920s and 1930s. They are a good indicator of the gap between prescription and action. In

Nouvelles révolutions du Moyen-Age à nos jours, Cahiers d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, n° 52, novembre 2004, pp. 93-102.

a micro based perspective, these visual and tangible documents are not just a complement to the

social and cultural representation of the assembly line. They help understand the way people

actually worked.

-Images as model and practice

Renault's case is also a good example to show that the mass production ideal did not do away

with other forms of fabrication. The American experiences were a model for the French

automobile industry. But the technologies that were transferred to France have more to do with

the French experience than with the American model. In the French industrial context, it was

better not to copy. Images often are the only surviving signs of this gap.

The Renault archives have kept many accounts and official reports of visits to foreign rival

factories, which are mostly non-American and relatively small units8. It is interesting to see that

those visitors were not only trying to copy an ideal. Indeed, they were fascinated by the biggest

and most modern factories, but their major quest was elsewhere. Their reports show that they

were mostly looking for ideas that could help solve specific problems in the organization of

their own factory. Renault’s engineers were sent more as missionaries than as spies. They did

not try to discover unknown and radical inventions. They had trivial questions to ask, both

verbally by asking (and not being answered) or visually by looking, reporting and scratching.

Their initial hand-written reports are bristling with outlines that sum up graphically the

practical installation the visitor also describes with words.

These raw sketches and other deleted tracings from the SOE are different in nature from the

good looking public documents published in the rational literature. Presented as a recipe, a plan

just draws the outline of an abstraction but not the steps of its realization. Such an image is just

a representation dissimulating the reality it refers to.

8 Inspection and visit Reports (2 boxes), Archives of the Historical Society of the Renault Group (SHGR).

This published show-off explains why the American models, although known to all in the

1910's, were not really adapted in France before the late 1920's. My thesis is that this rational

project imposed cohesive restrictions to the workforce but that it was able to function

efficiently, not because it was the best way, but because compromises could be found in the

workshops in order for the vehicles to be complete at the end of the line. Along with the

technical choice, there is a social construction and a cultural acceptance that are essential to its

efficiency. Nevertheless, the rational ideal was stubborn. Its partial setbacks did not prevent it

from imposing pain to the workforce, which could escape by leaving the workshop or by

finding spaces of resistance.

In a history approach, a specific image has to be considered among the archives it comes from,

in order to understand the context of its production and of its perception9. Thus, my

apprehension of the assembly line through visual sources does not aim at a direct vision of the

material and actual process that was introduced in the Renault factories. Those documents deal

with the representation of the productive innovation. They produce a different kind of discourse

that tends to make it look as though the assembly line was actually implanted as it should be.

But images are intractable and often contradict, on their border, what there are expected to

express. They are a good means to spot gaps between a praised model and the shot of a real

installation. Yet the explanation of this “noise” requires a methodological approach of visual

sources.

II- Methodological approach of visual archives

An image gives an invaluable testimony of the difference between what it has mission of

illustrating and the share of the reality which appears on its margins. Even supervised, images

9 Alain P. Michel, «Filmer le travail, les travailleuses et les travailleurs dans les usines Renault de l'entre-deux-guerres», in Patrice Marcilloux (dir.), Le travail en représentations, Paris, Éditions du CTHS, 2005, pp. 131-150. Also, Id., «Corporate Films of Industrial Work: Renault (1916-1939) », in Vinzenz Hedigue and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Cinematic Means, Industrial Ends. The Work of the Industrial Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009, pp. 165-182 (forthcoming).

testify and show more than what their aim10. But this contradiction is not directly

understandable just by looking at the image. My point is that visual documents have to be

looked at carefully, but also apprehended both in documentary series and as informative

devices. They must be replaced in the archives they come from and in the context of their

order, production and diffusion. To satisfactorily document labour history, a random collection

of individual pictures showing the assembly line is insufficient.

Images in series: collection, compilation and corpus

An image is better analyzed when apprehended from its archive or within a series of

comparable documents. Getting up from an image to the last known source is a way of

protecting some of its outside information. As in an archeological excavation, the place is part

of the clue. But many images have been removed from their original archive and have to be

apprehended in other documentary devices. I distinguish three types: collection, compilation

and corpus.

A “collection” (fonds in French) is the direct result of a continuous and coherent production of

images. For example, the Renault archives have preserved the 70,000 glass negatives made by

the internal photographic service and the corresponding printings assembled in 192

photographic albums11. We know very little about this photographic service. It was integrated

in 1911 into the Renault factories. Since 1917, the head of the photo department was assisted

of a draughtsman, an employee, two archivists and a variable number of photographers (18

known names). In 1930, the 7 photographers had a monthly salary, like employees and unlike

workers paid every two weeks. None of those anonymous operators have gained notoriety,

except Robert Doisneau who stated his career at Renault. It was recruited in June 1934 and

10 - The expression comes from Marc Ferro, "Le film, une contre-analyse de la société", Annales E.S.C., janvier-février 1973, pp. 109-124. 11 - For a complet analysis of this photographic collection, see Alain P. Michel, «Images du travail à la chaîne. Le cas Renault (1917-1939)», Études photographiques, n° 13, juillet 2003, pp. 86-109.

worked until May 10, 1939, when he was fired for repeated delays and for cheating on clocking

out. Each day, the team of photographers was gathered and each photographer was given a task

and made a daily coverage of his mission. Robert Doisneau has evoked this experience. “After

the morning call, came the work distribution. Each one was in charge of a mission for the day

and had to go to a workshop, to the forging mills, the park of scrap and so on. We had to take

pictures of a manufacture detail, a new installation or a new machine. Most of the time it was

just an ordinary report with little thrill”12. Apart from Doisneau’s late reminiscences only the

final result these daily missions is left, i.e. the printings stuck in the albums with the number of

the corresponding negative. All the other written records of the photographic department are

lost, but my point is that the collection itself is a significant representation device, liable to

explain part of the images it contains.

Apart from this “collection” the Renault photographic archives also have some “compilations”

of images (collections in French) which are the result of selective picture regrouping. It is the

case for promotional photographic albums, or photographic press surveys which select pictures

for visitors to admire or newspapers to edit. The question is to know why such images were

retained to understand the role which was allotted to them. The confrontation with the

complete collection allows a survey of the images that, among complete coverage, were pushed

aside. The Henry Ford Museum also keeps huge photographic series which are assembled in

thematic folders documenting “the most often asked pictures”. My point is that this gathering

is a “compilation” and not a “collection” as above defined. This selection documents the tastes

of the secondary users of the photo archives (historical archivists and patrons) but not the task

of the contemporary photographs who shot them and of the primary archivist who classified

12 Robert Doisneau, Renault. In the Thirties, London, Nishen-Michael Koetzle ed., 1990, 97 p.

the negatives. The two processes are interesting but different. The comparison with the global

inventories of the negatives would give clues of this difference13.

In many circumstances, images cannot be replaced in their own documentary device. For

example, the Renault Company ordered corporate films but did not keep cinematographic

archives in the inter-war period. As these films were made by outside producers, the films shot

in the factories of Billancourt had to be found in various archives (Pathé, Gaumont, etc.) and

gathered together. I call this historical aimed combination of images a “corpus”.

Images in a device

In their series, images are often identified in order to be used. They may be associated with a

caption and a number. In the Renault photographic collection, the prints were classified in

precise ways which changed during the inter-war period. At first there were only three types of

album. First the retrospective albums with all photographs from before 1911, numbered 1 and

up in an approximate order, according to their recovering. Second the contemporary albums

with the new daily mission in chronological order numbered 1000 and up. Last and starting

number 2000, the reproduction albums assembling all the second hand documents the

photographic service had to copy. In 1920, a new type of building and workshop album was

introduced. These specific coverage were caused by the systematic inventory of Louis

Renault’s industrial patrimony14 just before the shift of the company from a private property

to a limited company in 1922. All those albums had the same numerical reference system and

the initial gaps turned out to be insufficient each album type catching up with the next, causing

confusion. In 1927, the photographic service decided to specify 7 types of albums introducing

13 Photo Logs, HFM&GV Historical Archives, Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village Dearborn, USA. 14 Plousey Inventory, 1922, Archives of the Historical Society of the Renault Group (SHGR).

big numerical gaps that made improbable any over passing. But in 1934, this classification was

replaced by an alphabetical system with some twenty types. For instance, this classification

system shows the relatively small place of industrial images. The Renault photographic service

rarely took pictures of the assembly lines and did so in specific circumstances. Out of 70000

negatives made by the company's photographic service in the interwar period, 2500 show the

production process which means that only 3,5 % of the pictures of the automobile manufacturer

were shot inside the workshops.

The representation of the way automobiles were made was just a detail of the company’s

activity. These industrial pictures were made to promote the company's image, but their

analysis in the light of the entire photographic collection reveals "black holes" (routine work,

personal portraits, social movements, etc.) and singles out different periods of concern for

productive conditions. Working situations interested the photographic service in certain periods

and not in others. Many pictures were taken in the beginning of the 1930’s when the new plant

of the Seguin Island was launched. Louis Renault used his new modern factory as a promotion

argument at a time when his company seemed to resist the crash that affected the American

industry. But in the 1936, with the coming of the left wing Popular Front and the occupation of

his plants by the workers, the photographic department was more discrete.

These modifications were not made at random. Changing subjects reflect the company’s various

preoccupations. Classification changes inform us on the evolving representation the

photographic department had of the factory. No written document explains this evolution. The

only trace left of this activity is its result, i.e. the pictures stuck in the albums and the negatives

they correspond to. Only a meticulous analysis of the collection of images can follow the

preoccupation of the photographic missions and explain the changing representation of the

factory constructed by the department. My point is that this non-verbal classification system

is a significant element of what the images were meant to mean15.

The objective of this serialization is to allow the recontextualization of the photographic

document i.e. to understand the conditions of its diffusion and its reception at a given time. Of

course this interpretation of the message of the image comes from a confrontation with other

types of documents, revisit of the traditional (written) files and the comparison with the

comparable visual sources (the cinema, the technical drawing, painting, etc). Archeological

traces are also an important supplier of information for the study of the assembly line. The

specificity of the product (automobile) is essential in the understanding of the industrial

process.

Larger comparisons are also instructive. For example, Renault’s photographic collection can be

compared with the Henry Ford Museum photographic compilations. A comparison with the

Ford Motor Company (FMC) is also fruitful for the moving images16. The FMC internalized a

huge film production while the French automobile producer only ordered circumstantial

promotional documentaries17. In fact, the Ford case is an exception among automobile firms.

The study of the FMC film collection in the National Archives in College Park makes it

possible to point out the limits of the scarce corpus of Renault films which I reconstructed from

exterior archives (Gaumont, Pathé). I also have compared the way the "routine" pictures were

produced in the respective companies and point out the differences with the images of

15 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977. 16 Alain P. Michel, Les images du travail à la chaîne dans les usines Renault de Boulogne-Billancourt (1917-1939). Une analyse des sources visuelles : cinéma, photographies, plans d'implantation, 2001, History of Technology Thesis, EHESS, pp. 204-245. 17 David L. Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford. An American Folk Hero and his Company, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1976, 598 p.

independent artists (such as Diego Rivera, Charles Sheeler and W. J. Stettler – the Ford Motor

Company photographer) 18.

Images in investigation

An image is a representation that never comes alone. According to a traditional dichotomy

studied by Louis Marin19, the concept of representation is linked to two families of apparently

contradictory meanings that have to be understood together. The image is at the same time the

stylized trace of an absence (what is represented) and the public exhibition of a presence (the

representative). When an image is apprehended as part of a visual device produced with a

specific aim, the disposal itself becomes a major key for the understanding of the view.

I propose a methodology for the historical utilization of visual documents that combines the

attention to their original archives, develops a critical analysis of the representation they

produce (which is not a reality they refer to) and proposes a contextual understanding of their

visual discourse. This method can be summarized in the following table.

49

Investigation table

ARCHIVES CONTEXT

(Production) indice Icone symbol (Reception)

Situation

Functioning

Reading

VISUAL DOCUMENT Scale of device

Deapth of analysis

TRACES

SIGNS

REPRESENTATIONS

Inventary

Techniques

Message

Exposition

Story

History

Alain P. Michel

18 The Rouge. The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera, Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978, 96 p. 19 Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1981. Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image. Glose, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1993.

The investigation table is a cross examination process combining three scales of documentary

devices (columns) and three depths of analysis (lines). The first scale is the archive the image

comes from. It documents its origin, i.e. the conditions of production and of conservation. The

second scale of analysis concerns the document itself both in it materiality and through the

representation it constructs which is not the reality it refers to. The third scale is the context

of reception the image was used in. It is what Marc Ferro called the "areas of reality"20 which

is out of scope of the image itself, but documents its contemporary understanding.

Concomitantly the investigation can be conducted in successive depths of analysis. As Pierre

Sorlin suggested 21 this procedure first evaluates the situation, then it determines the

functioning and at last it proposes the reading of an image. The first level is an inventory of

visible elements. The second consists in pointing out the ties between them. The third is a

quest of their meaning.

The aim of this investigation table is to show how much a precise analysis of an image reveals

“noises” in the transmission of visual information. Looking at a lone image is insufficient to

provide an explanation to its dissonances22. The interpretation of the visual “noises” must be

analyzed within the framework of the documentary series from which it results and by

confrontation with the context of which it is the echo. If the photography of an assembly line

attests the presence of a manufacture apparatus different from the model which it is supposed

to illustrate, this image does certainly not account by itself for the execution of the assembly

line work.

III- Virtual approach. Images a corpus 20- Marc Ferro, "Le film, une contre-analyse de la société ?" (1971) in Marc Ferro, Cinéma et histoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1993, p. 49. 21 - Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinéma : Ouverture pour l'histoire de demain, Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1977, 319 p. 22 - Carlo Ginzburg, "Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d'un paradigme de l'indice" Le débat, novembre 1980, numéro 6, pp. 3-44.

Even when it is methodologically analysed, a selective corpus of numerous corporate images is

difficult to exploit as a historical source. Information is spread apart and enigmatic.

Incongruities are plenty while clues often scarce. Computer data processing and virtual

technology are a solution to over-pass this difficulty to deal with massive and incomplete signs.

In this perspective the archaeological approach teaches how to deal with subtle indications and

signs when there is no written evidence. They help question these acknowledged discourses

with the perception of what was actually taking place in the workshops. The digital means help

utilize informal evidence, in order to renew our knowledge of people who did not leave

classical historical archives.

For this purpose the History Department of the University of Evry (UEVE, France) has

launched a four years pluri-disciplinary research program (2008-2012) called “Virtual

Factories” (Usines 3D) 23. This program is supported by the French National Research Agency

(ANR) and it is developed along with two CNRS teams specialized in digital humanities24. Its

purpose is to reconstitute a virtual image of significant industrial plants such as the Renault

automobile factory of Boulogne-Billancourt located in the close suburbs of Paris and recently

demolished. It is a both a study in industrial history of the assembly lines, and an

archaeological project aiming at the virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges. The idea is

not to make up for this industrial disappearance, but to create a new means of informing the

relatively unknown history of workers and workshops. Beyond the virtual representation of a

building or of machines and conveyors, the aim of the program is to exploit the original

information brought by series of visual documents. This study consists in the gathering of the

complete documentary records of a few specific buildings. Some workshops are known through

23 The history research laboratory of the UEVE is called LEHST (Laboratoire d’histoire économique, sociale et des techniques). 24 The CAK-CRHST (Centre Alexandre Koyré-Centre de recherche en histoire des sciences et des techniques) is the research center affiliated to the CNRS & Cité des sciences et de l’industrie (UMR 8560). The data base is made by Stéphane Pouyllau, Shadia Kilouchi and Delphine Uzal. Archéovision part of the Institut Ausonius affiliated to the CNRS & the University of Bordeaux 3 (UMR 5607). The digital model is developed by Robert Vergnieux, Loïc Lespinasse and Pascal Mora.

descriptions, pictures, implementation drawings and films that show the structure of the

building (envelope), the agency of the installations (machinery) the variety and the evolution of

the job being done (work). An iconographic corpus was assembled for a specific workshop,

making an inventory of the different documents concerning it.

-Visual corpus of the C5 workshop

The first case study of the U3D program concerns the virtual reconstruction of the C5

workshop, built in 1906 to produce the chassis of a small car and in which the Renault

Automobile Company introduced the manual chassis assembly line in 1917 and made it evolve

until the late 1920's. The original Renault-Billancourt plant was located in the close suburbs of

Paris25. Car production stopped in 1992 and the industrial site is now being transformed into a

high value cultural, residential and mixed activity zone.

Before 1914 the Renault factory was among the first to experience interchangeability and series

production. The introduction of Taylor’s method of time study caused a major strike against the

chronometer (1913), but did not stop the rationalization process. The massive war demand

introduced big scale production and mechanical conveyors for shells, tanks, trucks and

automobiles. As Louis Renault said, "those four years have taught us the benefits of work-

organization, the methods which allow the most delicate productions without a specialized

workforce”26. By 1917, Renault had a staff of competent employees capable of making a

rudimentary assembly line work.

In the post war period, Renault continued to install small manual conveyors but did not

consider them as American assembly lines because they were not consistent with the Ford

model and had nothing to do with the huge American plants of that time (River Rouge, Flint,

25 Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault, t I . Naissance de la grande entreprise, 1898-1939, Paris, Le Seuil, 1998 (1st edition 1972), 359 p. 26 AN 94 AP 80, January 15 1915 (more probably 1920), L. Renault, Speech at the Chambre Syndicale du Cycle de l'Automobile. For the context of rationalization in France, see Aimée Moutet, Les logiques de l'entreprise. La rationalisation dans l'industrie française de l'entre-deux-guerres, Paris, Éditions de l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1997, 495 p.

etc.). Aiming at efficiency and profit, these discrete devices were not backward compare to his

French competitors27. Renault’s “chain work” (the French term for assembly line) was first

publicly presented in a 1922 article. It focused on the hand pushed chassis assembly line which

was not very different from what it was 5 years before. The press gives a warp vision of

industrial action. In 1929, this chassis assembly line was transferred to the new factory in the

Seguin Island just across the Seine River.

In this study of the C5 workshop, different types of images are combined as they present

different types of information. The moving images are relatively scarce but very informative.

Only few films show the inside of the workshops and suggest gestures that no other document

can restore. For example a 12 second sequence shot in the C5 workshop in 1920.

Some twenty workers fidget along two manual assembly lines of chassis. During the scene,

men cross the picture area but no vehicle moves, which suggests that no work is actually

being done. Only 2 or 3 workers are acting as though they were working while a group of five

ends up posing as for a picture. The fact is that cinema only exceptionally came inside the

workshop and when it did, it created the event. Taken by itself, a documentary scene gives a

partial and conventional vision of the industrial activity28.

Our visual corpus of the C5 workshop is documented by Renault's important photographic

collection. Without explicit captions, it is often difficult to identify the job presented in a

picture, to localize the workshop and to know the exact date of the take. Information has to be

reconstituted from the confrontation of hints from various photographs. For an undated print,

its position in the photographic album gives a clue as it can be figured out from adjacent

pictures with date indications. The model being produced or the type of engine being

assembled, are indications of the time period in which the picture was taken. Similarities in

27 See Alain P. Michel, Travail à la chaîne…, op. cit. 28 Nicolas Hatzfeld, Gwenaële Rot, Alain P. Michel (Nigwal group), « Filming Work on Behalf of the Automobile Firm : the Renault case (1950-2002)», in Vinzenz Hedigue and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Cinematic Means, Industrial Ends. The Work of the Industrial Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009 (forthcoming).

tools or implementation lead to gatherings of pictures which show different points of view of

what can be support to be the same workshop. But to conduct this cross examination, a

precise rebuild of the building is essential.

This acquaintance with the implementation of building, the agency of the working process

and the evolution of the factory is possible thanks to a collection of 45000 implementation

drawings. These plans not only give the exact outlines of a specific workshop: they also make

it possible to follow the growth of the factory and the frequent reorganization of the work

process. They are the basis of the virtual reconstruction of the C5 workshop because they also

identify it among all the other.

The iconographic corpus informs the structure of the building (envelope), the agency of the

installations (machinery) the variety and the evolution of the job being done (work). I believe

that this cross examination of various images gives the documentary tools of a global micro-

historic study of a located workshop. The point is not only to start a new set of industrial

monographic studies, but to position a working place inside the production process it is a part

of. The idea is to navigate from the scale, scope and dimension of an image to its

surroundings29. Digital means are essential to this project.

-Virtual reconstruction of the C5 workshop

Once the corpus of documents has been assembled and analyzed, the second step is the

development of data bases that tie the documents to their original archives and help challenge

and confront the information they hold. Indexed in a data base they inform the virtual

reconstruction of a workshop and equipment. This construction leads to the last step i.e. the

development of a computer model that makes it virtually possible to move along the building

and see the assembly line function. This visualization gives a radically new documented

interpretation of the industrial past, producing unedited information from scattered and often

29 Jacques Revel (ed.), Jeux d'échelle. La micro-analyse à l'expérience, Paris, Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1996, 252 p. Bernard Lepetit, Les formes de l'expérience. Une autre histoire sociale, Paris, Albin Michel, 1995, 337 p.

discredited historical sources. We have produced an interactive multimedia research model that

helps re-question the traditional sources and apprehend visual documents better. This virtual

reconstruction is a both a study in industrial history of the assembly lines, and an

archaeological project aiming at the virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges.

We have started the reconstruction of the C5 workshop with the comparison and computer

treatment of two series of images documenting the 1922 assembly line of the 10 HP Renault

car. This installation was promoted by an article edited in September 1922 and illustrated with

12 gravures showing the 12 “operations” of the assembly line. I have shown that these

drawings were inspired from a photographic coverage made on February 27th of the same year

which explicitly shows that they were 13 stations at that time30.

From this series of photographs, which have been used as drawings 7 month later in the

article, it is possible to rebuild a first virtual reconstruction of this manual assembly line that

questions the classical interpretation already made. It will also be possible to compare the

February 1922 situation to another (unpublished at that time) coverage made in July 1924 on

the same assembly line, and a third series from autumn 1924 on another line.

This type of coverage is rather exceptional in the Renault Photo archives. Those three series

of photographs were made in the beginning of the 1920's when it was still possible to

discern a small number of productive tasks in the assembly of a car produced in relative

large number. The vanishing of this type of image does not mean the disappearance of the

productive process itself, but signifies a change in its apprehension. To document the

precedent and following situations, we will have to look differently through different

images. It will be possible here because the Renault Company Archives have kept

documents that will inform the restitution of most of the industrial buildings. This precise,

situated procedure will adaptable to other examples. Through a change in scope we are able

30 Alain P. Michel, Travail à la chaîne. …, op. cit.

to look at what might have happened behind the pillars of a the C5 workshop, to an

apprehension of the hole factory. The aim is to navigate from small details to the global

productive process. For example in the Renault factory, after the assembly line was

introduced (1917), the way serial cars were produced changed. Looking at the 3 major parts

of the car - the motor, the frame chassis and the body - we can single out 3 different periods

in the general organization of the process.

In a first period (1917-1929), the motor was brought to the frame and the frame to the body.

During the whole interwar period, the motor was assembled in B3 workshop, next to C5

where it was added to the frame. The "automobile" was then driven, on mile away to the

"Usine O" where it received its body.

After the construction of the Seguin Island plant (1930-1934) a second spatial organization

was set up. The frame assembly was transferred to the new plant and the C5 building

became a tool workshop. The motor had to be carried from B3 across the bridge. So was it

for the body, still assembled in Usine O, but added to the chassis on the Seguin Island.

The situation changed in 1934 when the body production was transferred in another building

on the Seguin Island. In this third spatial organization (1935-1939), the motor was still driven

from the B3 building to the Seguin Island. The frame and the body were assembled in

adjacent buildings so that the body could now be brought with conveyers to the frame on the

main assembly line.

The digital tools of our program are essential as they give the possibility of confronting a large

number of informal, unwritten records, in order to renew our knowledge on the technological

and social history of people who did not leave classical historical traces. In this perspective

the archaeological approach teaches how to deal with subtle indications and signs when there

is no written evidence. They help question these acknowledged discourses with the

perception of what was actually taking place in the workshops.

Conclusion

Most of what happened in the factory is now lost, which of course is the case with the largest

part of past experiences. Rather than waiting for the discovery of some improbable new

absolute documents which would lighten the shades of labour history, I suggest to work with

the left-over, to read differently what has been kept but not always looked at and combined.

Images are an essential element of this reconsideration. With different questions, aims and

methods, new historical sources can be invented and new documentary tools, such as digital

models can be constructed.

The virtual C5 workshop resituates the space in which part of the production process was

organized in relation to the extension and various restructuring of the edifice. The digital

reinstallation of the different shifts in the line, with the corresponding stocks nearby, makes it

possible to determine the materiality of the implementations and to identify the transformations

in the working process. Last, the images of workers on some shifts permit a partial

decomposition of their job that can be shown in action. It is an illustration of the way

multimedia and computer techniques can produce a new type of constructed historical

documents.

Beyond this study of the Renault's case and beyond the virtual representation of a building, of

machines and conveyors, the aim of the research program is to exploit with computer

technologies the original information brought by visual documents. It is a way to experiment a

methodological investigation of images, the means to conceive computer tools that deal with a

great variety of heterogeneous information.

The problem is that workers’ points of view - their "reminiscences" – are scarce. This

methodological and virtual use of the visual industrial sources is an attempt to reconsider the

question and rebalance a view point that has mostly been apprehended only through archives of

commandment. The films, photographs and plans give a more technical and local vision of the

question and reveal aspects that are rarely formalized. Thus, mute hints and traces of an

industrial activity become historical evidences. The idea is to overpass the classical opposition

between the formal prescriptions and the real practices – to understand the way the bureaus and

the workshops participated together in the productive process.

The digital means make it possible to confront a large number of informal, unwritten records

and offer new means to document the relatively unknown history of workers and workshops. It

is an illustration of the way multimedia and computer techniques can produce a new type of

constructed historical documents. The research tool experimented on the Renault factory will

be available for other cases in France, Europe and elsewhere, within our partners or beyond. A

lighter version of this model will be accessible to a larger audience on the Internet or for

museums.