Enacting Cultural Identity: Risk and Ritual in the French Nuclear Workplace

Abstract

On 16 October 1969, Marcel Boiteux, the president of Electricite de France (EDF), visited his company's Saint-Laurent nuclear site. He announced that the national electric utility would stop building the gas-graphite reactors which had until then constituted the core of France's nuclear programme and served as one of the most prominent technological embodiments of French national grandeur. The very next day, in a dramatic coincidence of time and place, one of the most serious accidents the nuclear industry had seen so far caused a partial meltdown of Saint-Laurent 1, the newest and most powerful of these reactors. This double blow threatened not only the ideological underpinnings of the French nuclear programme, but also the cultural identities of those who worked in its power plants. Workers spent a full year cleaning and repairing the reactor, often working in a highly radioactive environment. This clean-up operation became a pivotal moment in their working lives. Even though the announcement and the accident together signalled the end of their gas-graphite programme as a statesanctioned symbol of French technological grandeur, cleaning Saint-Laurent 1 made the men who engaged in this process see themselves as heroes. This article argues that the technological and cultural aspects of the operation were inseparable: in cleaning and repairing the reactor, nuclear workers healed the harm that the events of October 1969 had inflicted upon their self-image, cemented their loyalty toward each other and toward the gas-graphite programme, and affirmed and redefined their role in the story of French technological grandeur. This analysis provides an insight into how the language, artifacts, gestures and practices that together form workplace experience constitute a mechanism by which workers both shape and enact one aspect of their cultural identity. It also sheds light on a sorely neglected aspect of postsecond world war history: namely, how the ideologies of high technology come to have meaning for those who work in large-scale technological systems. Part of this argument rests upon a theoretical framework that meshes historiographical insights from two domains of scholarship: the cultural history of labour and the history and sociology of technology. Although these two bodies of scholarship almost never cite one another, they make similar types of arguments about the cultural construction of the material world. Recently, for example, cultural historians of labour have argued that scholars