Death of an old-style entrepreneur
Pierre Jallatte, 88 years old, shot himself last Friday. 60 years ago he created a company up in the hills behind Nimes to manufacture safety boots. The firm had done well, and was the principal employer in that difficult region, the Cevennes. Later it had been sold to an Italian company, who, as I understand it, then sold the majority shares to American investors. Three weeks ago the Italian parent company began saying that since business was now so bad, they were going to have to move the manufacturing side to Tunisia. They would close the factory in the Cevennes as well as two others elsewhere in France – 285 jobs out of 360 would be lost. The day M. Jallatte shot himself was in fact the day of a meeting between the prefect of the region, members of the national, regional and local governments, representatives of the company and the Italian owners to find a way forward – that is to say, a way to keep the jobs in France. They were apparently successful – but it was too late for M. Jallate – he was already dead when they made their announcement.
He was not of course directly concerned – he had retired years ago. But he had problems letting go, the company his creation after al, and he still kept in touch with some of the employees, particularly in the local, Cevennol plant. According to neighbours, though, he had rarely been seen during the preceding months – they described him as fatigué, a polite way of saying depressed. Winding down, a little bitter. Neither surprising nor rare in a man of his age.
Whatever the real reason for his suicide, the people working up in the hills are making a lot of publicity by linking his death with the still-possible death of the company. In other words, the suicide of a depressed man of nearly 90 is blamed on globalisation in general and off-shoring in particular, those two great terrors in France. Or turned round, they are saying he is a martyr to the cause of keeping French jobs in France. The Italian bosses (and behind them the American investors) are being portrayed in the media as heartless villains who ride rough-shod first over human problems and now human lives.
It is of course ridiculous to stigmatise a group of unknown people as villains in that simplistic way. It is equally naive to imagine that anyone is going to put his or her money into an enterprise and stand by silently while that money goes down the drain. Would you do that? Again if shareholders are French they are presented in the media as nice ordinary French citizens, simply trying to save their hard-won earnings – we hear that each time Eurotunnel slides into debt, the French press leap to the defence of the innocent victims of wicked and inefficient capitalist management. Yet if those shareholders are American they are large investment companies, immoral bastards who think only of profit (filthy word which apparently never occurs to the French shareholder). Nor has anybody yet asked the rhetorical question: what would have happened to Pierre Jallatte’s boot company if those American investors had not invested in it in the first place? The answer, as everyone knows, is that the employees currently facing the boot would have been kicked out five or ten years’ earlier.
Pierre Jallate is described as an old-style boss: tough when he had to be, but a keen sense of responsibility towards “his” employees. A novelist could take a man like that and make him an allegory for much that is out of kilter with current French thinking about globalisation and indeed industry: when Jallatte created his company, France had a large empire. Bien Dien Phu was 7 years in the future, the idea of an independent Algeria would have been risible. France was emerging from the war, with all those conflicting feelings of guilt, pride, regret, sorrow raging through everybody’s head. Everyone had a story they didn’t want to talk about, and everyone knew that everyone else had a story they didn’t want to talk about too. What they saw was private - the thought of communicating on the web with persons unknown would have horrified them. It was an utterly different world, even though there must have been the same excitement as there is today under Sarkozy that they were experiencing a new beginning. There was young Jalatte, or his fictional counterpart like a character out of Balzac, 27 years old, at the heart of a great empire that was France, creating a company that soon employed hundreds of people. Almost all his working life took place during what are now called the 30 glorieuses – 30 years of almost unparalleled growth and enrichment. His retirement must have coincided with the end of that period. Quite naturally he assumed he personally was responsible for the success of his company, not knowing that he happened to have ridden the crest of a wave. Later, in his retirement, he could not understand why the company was going downhill – he could only imagine that the new managers were not as good as him. He failed to see that everything had changed, we are not playing the same game any more: it would be like a tennis player from that period, dressed in his white flannels, going out on the court to play Federer or Nadal. Even assuming he was a young man he wouldn’t even see the ball, let alone get his racquet to it. He wouldn’t understand that Federer, Nadal and the others play for enormous, unthinkable sums of money, that money rules the game, not personal honour or the simple joy of “taking part”. How quaint, those post-war players at Wimbledon; how quaint those bosses who saw competition coming from perhaps Montpellier, or at most the north of France. Competition from India or China was outside his wildest imagination. He would be as anachronistic as a knight in armour against a man with a gun: except the enormous changes M. Jallatte (or his fictional counterpart) face have all happened within one working lifetime. The flick of a finger. It took M. Jallatte’s flick of a finger on the trigger of his shot-gun to make that obvious. It’s not globalisation, capitalism or even ultra-liberalism that are the problem but our deeply limited imaginations.
June 14th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
where our French imaginations are concerned, don’t you think the local Cevenol people should be encouraged by their Conseil de Région to remember what skills they have and put them to good use to manufacture high quality goods which should remain a European area of excellence. It’s a big word but isn’t it time to counter consumerism by offering goods that last.
June 15th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Wow. What a great post. It drives me nuts when I hear the politicians bleat on about how the French need or want to “be protected”, especially since the rhetoric does not address the (legitimate) role of the state in protecting its citizens from physical threats (terrorism, crime, etc.) but is focused on ‘protecting’ French citizens and enterprises from competition - a sure route to mediocrity and failure. Coupled with the latent hypocrisy and contradiction embedded in the discussion of profits (which you so eloquently smoke out), the politicians (and media) end up painting a picture of a France of incompetent, frightened, spoiled and entitled victims. Of course the truth is nothing of the sort, but even the most self-confident person will waver if told repeatedly that they are not up to the competition and that somehow the playing field is always tilted against them. Sometime it seems as if some macabre co-dependency is played out between the French political class and the viewing public. It drives me nuts because France has everything it needs to compete - talent, human capital, creativity, reputation, etc. - and has no reason to fear change. Rather France and French ingenuity should be leading change and embracing the new digital paradigm, embracing globalisation as the opportunity it is and stop wasting so much psychic energy trying to preserve an increasingly irrelevant past. Perhaps if the politicians showed some leadership on this front, the incredible talents and capital available in the diaspora might consider coming home. That really would be something worth imagining.