See online: Online journal of social history and criticism of the Mantois region and the Seine Valley https://danslouest.noblogs.org/lutte-des-memoires-dans-la-vallee-de-lautomobile/ 2018. Yellow Vest movement in Mantes-la-Jolie, about fifty kilometers west of Paris. Among the mobilized Yellow Vest comrades, few know the long history of resistance of Fabienne Lauret and Mohamed Hocine. She is a '68er, a feminist and revolutionary factory worker at the Renault plant in Flins. He, nicknamed Momo, was born in 1962, a robber and then a prisoner, who became an anti-prison activist as well as involved in the struggles of immigrants and the suburbs. Both share the experience of social struggle and the desire to pass on this history. Meeting [1].
Can you give us an idea of the atmosphere at the time when you started your activism?
Fabienne : We were coming out of May '68, an extraordinary movement whose hopes lasted for several years. Workplace engagement, strikes in companies, large and small, were central issues. So, with friends from Révolution!, a splinter group of the Communist League [2], we couldn't just hand out leaflets at factory gates: we had to be involved. In 1972, we set up shop at the Renault Flins plant, because the domination of the Communist Party (PC) and the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) over the workers was less strong there than at the Billancourt plant.
Our organization wanted to broaden the workers' struggle to include the issues of women, immigrants, and all those whose voices weren't being heard. But also to rethink all spheres of social life: education, housing, the environment, consumption, and leisure. In total, there were fifteen of us activists in Flins and the surrounding area: four workers, but also teachers, booksellers, a doctor... People thought that voluntarily working in a factory, as we did, was a sacrifice. But for us, it was fantastic! We were deeply inspired by the strikes that followed one after another in Flins from the 1960s onward, culminating in the factory occupation in May-June 1968 and its infamous clashes with the riot police.
Mohamed : In the 1980s and 1990s, in working-class neighborhoods, you'd find political activists who had offices, who were active in community life, who were committed... In 1983, the year of the March for Equality and Against Racism took place following numerous racist police killings in the suburbs. A national march set off from Marseille to Paris. It originated in working-class neighborhoods and was inspired by the nonviolent marches of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., with the support of the parish of Protestant Father Christian Delorme, whom I had the opportunity to meet in the 1990s. It was a powerful moment of political affirmation for young people from immigrant backgrounds. That said, even though I think he was sincere, Delorme's paternalistic and religious stance caused significant disagreements. Since I was in prison from 1983 to 1988, I only followed it on the radio, but I later met many former marchers when we launched Solact[contraction of "Active Solidarity"]in 1989 in Les Mureaux and then Résistance des banlieues (RDB) in 1990, on a larger scale.
Tell us a little about Solact and RDB...
Mohamed : Solact, founded in Les Mureaux with local youth and Jean-Christophe Berrier [3], an anarchist street educator, fought to prevent young people from falling into the trap of unemployment, delinquency, and prison. Because, when I got out of prison, I saw the extent of the decline in my neighborhood, Bizet, a housing project in Les Mureaux: the destruction of social ties and support networks, unemployment, rising violence, an increase in alcoholism and heroin addiction, and a scandalous rise in police repression and incarcerations. We organized homework help, theater workshops, housing renovation projects with the young people, and sports. And we confronted elected officials with their contradictions by displaying photos of the city's decay in our office...
RDB emerged from Solact's meetings with other groups in neighboring towns (a network that would later expand to encompass all of France), such as Mantes-la-Jolie, where, with about twenty people-former marchers and young activists from the Val-Fourré housing project-we organized a demonstration in 1990 towards the town hall behind a banner reading "17,000 young people, 17,000 forgotten, we refuse to be the city's outcasts." The idea behind RDB was precisely to break the isolation of the suburbs, to support each other in their activism, and thus to gain a stronger bargaining position with the town halls and prefectures.
How did you get involved in the struggle? Were you trained by previous generations?
Mohamed : It was in prison that I started campaigning for prisoners' rights. I learned to be an activist on my own; it was in my blood. During exercise time, I would talk with my fellow inmates: "We have to fight for our rights. We have to stop giving up on solitary confinement! It's the disciplinary unit, but it's a cell like any other. If you're afraid of it, we won't do anything." On blank sheets of paper in books borrowed from the prison library, I would write: "Join the coordination of prisoners in struggle. To get information, listen to this radio station, on these days, from this time to that time." I read the books too! Proletarian, anti-capitalist, class struggle-I had heard these words from leftists when I went to the Fête de l'Humanité (Humanity Festival), or with the Trotskyists in my neighborhood. But I only understood them in prison, by reading Marx or Wilhelm Reich.
Inmates like myself, second-generation immigrants, also became much more politically engaged due to the surge in support for the National Front among prison guards starting in 1983, who were beating immigrants. As a result, the march outside the prison that same year took on a very particular significance.
But where I learned the most was where I suffered the most: in the isolation units [4]. There I met Basque and Corsican independence activists and revolutionary activists like Jean-Marc Rouillan and Régis Schleicher [5]. Even though talking was forbidden, we managed to exchange a little by emptying the water from the toilet pipes.
When I got out, I met the people who ran Parloir Libre , broadcast on Fréquence Montmartre , which I listened to in prison. It was an anti-prison radio program broadcast in the Paris region, designed to allow people on the outside to learn about prison life, support the struggles inside, read prisoners' letters on air, and help facilitate communication between prisons. With them, many of whom were independent political activists, we fought against the existence of solitary confinement units.
Fabienne : My parents were members of the Communist Party (PC), even though my father was more of a libertarian. My parents left the party, traumatized by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. My father participated in May '68 by going on strike. But despite the general excitement, he didn't talk to me about it much. On the other hand, for me, May '68 changed everything. I wasn't even 18 yet; I was at the Lycée Hélène Boucher in Paris (20th arrondissement), a school known for being very strict. When the movement started, I got lots of other girls involved. It was my first activism.
When I joined the far-left organization Révolution!, we met for at least a month every summer for political and theoretical training (Marxism, current affairs debates). I learned a tremendous amount. At the time, revolutionaries weren't trained by previous generations at the factory. When we arrived at Renault Flins in 1972-1973, the Maoists, who had been there before us, had almost all left. They were too radical: they yelled at everyone, charged headlong into confrontations with management. They didn't have the mindset to integrate. So we learned on the job. In the workshop where I was assigned, sewing seats (like the vast majority of women), I learned the basic work of a union representative: developing demands with the female workers through regular research and observation in the field.
Occupation of the Renault factory in Flins by workers in 1968
All of this gives the impression of a period of intense political activity compared to today... What has changed since then?
Fabienne : We need to understand the impact the automotive industry (Renault Flins, Simca Poissy, but also all the subcontractors) had on the region (see map). In 1969, when Flins switched to alternating 2x8-hour shifts, the workforce nearly doubled, reaching 22,000 employees. Dozens of buses chartered by the company waited every morning for the workers from Val-Fourré or the housing projects in Les Mureaux built by Renault. The company massively recruited immigrant workers, mostly from North Africa, believing them to be docile because they were often illiterate. The "Renault octopus," as the local press called it, which arrived in the region in 1952, transformed transport, infrastructure, housing, demographics, and the culture of the region, and spread a spirit of loyalty to the company: "the diamond in place of the heart," in reference to the brand's logo.
Now the large corporations have disappeared, and with them the working class. Its codes, its solidarity, its organizations (unions and the Communist Party). At the Renault Flins plant, in the 2000s, there were only about 7,000 employees left [6]. Little by little, the factory is unraveling. Production is moving to other countries where labor is cheaper, where unions are repressed. Renault is then gradually abandoning its sports and cultural activities, and then its right to reserve housing in the town for Flins workers. Community organizations have dissolved, and the unions have lost their influence. In the 1980s, unemployment was twice as high in Les Mureaux as in the rest of the country, and residents of the public housing projects had more precarious jobs than average. The youngest children are growing up in a world radically different from that of their parents.
Furthermore, capitalists have figured out how to reduce strikes; they're very good at it. In factories, workers are increasingly temporary. These are people who can't really go on strike, or even knock on the door of the nearest union, for fear of losing their jobs. I've seen the change in the workforce. Temporary workers used to come just to earn a living and then go home. Between the 1970s and 2000, the working class was dismantled: there was nothing we could do.
Mohamed : Immigrant and suburban activists have faced very strong repression, for example, due to the double penalty. For convicted foreigners, this means prison plus deportation. Against this unjust measure, I participated in a hunger strike in prison, initiated by two activists from the Association of Young Arabs of Lyon and its Suburbs, in 1986, when I was incarcerated. But some activists became institutionalized and ended up adopting a much less radical discourse than we had, particularly regarding the repressive role of the police.
There's also the issue of co-optation: when the left created SOS Racisme, in opposition to the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, the Socialist Party (PS) sent all its activists to infiltrate the March's collectives. They skillfully manipulated these autonomous grassroots movements and their legacy to break them up and co-opt them. Finally, Muslim associations gained prominence; many people in the neighborhoods no longer wanted to march except for the sake of Islam.
Poster for the "What is Youssef's life worth?" campaign conducted by the MIB in 2001
Do some of the local young people you know about this story?
Mohamed : After 2000, it was a new generation. In 2001, the "What is Youssef's Life Worth?" mobilization took place, led by the Immigration and Suburbs Movement (MIB), a movement created in the wake of RDB by people who had suffered double punishment, which fought against police killings in the suburbs, without compromise towards the institutions [7]. In 1991, Youssef Khaïf, an activist from Val-Fourré, was murdered in Mantes-la-Jolie by the police officer Hiblot. The trial took place 10 years later. We organized assemblies, demonstrations, and held numerous debates throughout the trial at the Versailles courthouse, in front of which we set up two large tents. At that time, in Val-Fourré, we managed to mobilize people. Then, as the years went by, people stopped caring. And when, in 2005, the suburbs erupted in flames after the assassination of Zyed and Bouna in Clichy-sous-Bois , the MIB no longer existed.
Fabienne : In the 2000s, something shifted. Some of the immigrant workers we knew from the factory, who lived in hostels or elsewhere, became homeowners. Those who bought houses, we didn't see them anymore. It was the continuation of a process that began in the 1980s and 1990s, initiated by the families from the first factory hires, who were more affluent.
In Les Mureaux, a few years ago, I met a whole group of young people in their thirties, living in social housing estates, children of immigrant workers from the Renault Flins plant, who told us: "We don't want to be like our parents. We want to forget that, we're going to do something else, other jobs, get training." That really struck me. I thought to myself: "Damn, we aspired to the exact opposite!"
They didn't want cultural transmission, but rather to climb the social ladder. The fathers didn't want their sons to work in factories either, but rather to get degrees and pursue other careers. Yet, at home, the older generation rarely spoke about their lives in the factory, even though they suffered because of it. The social status of the worker and working-class culture were devalued, even though most of these young people were themselves factory workers or precarious employees.
Would you say that local authorities are trying to erase the memory of workers' struggles?
Fabienne : In Les Mureaux, it's radical. The mayor, François Garay, a Socialist Party representative[elected since 2001]who leans towards Macron, wants to get rid of working-class history by wiping the slate clean. When you arrive at the entrance to the town on the A13 motorway, there's an Ariane rocket, which the town hall had installed in 2018 to promote the Ariane Group factory in Les Mureaux. For the town hall, which wants to gentrify the town, this company, with all its engineers, is much more marketable than the immigrant workers in the car factories! When I saw that, it made me sick. Historically, Les Mureaux is a working-class town, structured around the automotive industry. The municipality no longer wants this heritage.
Mohamed : With housing allocations and the hiring of certain segments of the population as local government employees at the expense of others, some local mayors with clientelistic politics are trying to buy off a portion of the electorate. A while ago, in Val-Fourré, I met up with those with whom we had fought up until the 2000s with RDB, at MIB... They told me: "It's over, Momo! Now there's no more movement, 'Uncle Pierre'[Bédier][8]came and swallowed everyone whole. All the important communities in the area are with him: the Turks, the Senegalese, etc." That dampens people's enthusiasm for organizing and fighting back.
How did you resist - and do you still resist - this erasure of the memory of the struggles?
Mohamed : At the MIB, we organized internal seminars on a national scale, to train us in the organization of a meeting, in writing leaflets, in distributing them in train stations... Me, at Solact, I set aside time for discussion in our room: to talk and pass on to the younger ones, over a tea, a little joint.
In prison, the best way to instill a fighting spirit is to make sure your fellow inmates don't just see you talking and theorizing. For example, by requesting a meeting with the prison administration to demand that some of our rights be respected, like access to a lawyer rather than solitary confinement, or by enforcing labor laws for inmates working for outside companies from within the prison. Then, the other inmates listen to your message because they see how it translates into action.
I quickly wanted to share a fragment of what we were experiencing by starting to write a prison journal about my struggles from the very beginning of my sentence. One day, they transferred me to solitary confinement. They searched my cell and stole my journal. When I got out, I immediately decided to continue, to recount what I did in prison but also on the outside. A book and a documentary are in the works, for activists and for young people in the neighborhoods, so they know what we were able to accomplish. And so they can do the same.
At MIB, we said loud and clear that it was up to those directly affected to write and pass on what they had experienced. Sometimes it works. For example, in Les Mureaux, many people who created gyms or associations told me: "Momo, it's thanks to you, to Solact, and to the discussions we had, that we got started. I'm getting involved politically, I'm going all the way with what you wanted," for example, the association Tendre la main (Reaching Out) which, since 2014, has been offering free escorts to the visiting rooms of prisoners in the Île-de-France prisons, which are often very poorly served by public transport.
Fabienne : I wrote a book, *L'Envers de Flins *[9], and co-wrote a graphic novel, *Une féministe révolutionnaire à l'atelier *[10], which is very popular with young people, especially girls. Despite this sign of interest, in the groups I'm involved in, I sometimes feel isolated because the memory of the major local workers' movements has practically disappeared (the strikes by immigrant auto workers in the 1970s and 80s, for example). There are young people, but for them, it's as if we old activists are ancient history. Work is no longer as central to their activism. Either because they can't find jobs, or because they're constantly changing jobs, or because they don't see the jobs they have as a space for struggle. They mobilize for other, legitimate causes, like Palestine, but geographically more distant ones.
Mohamed : There's a void. The work of remembrance still needs to be done: educating people, whether they're activists or not. There's nothing left to do but get on with it!
Interview by Dan Lhoest, Winter 2025-2026
This article originally appeared in issue 20 of " Chiffon, independent newspaper of Paris and its suburbs ", which we warmly invite you to read!
Notes
[1] Article which is part of a long-term project, published by the online journal of social history and criticism of the Mantois and the Seine Valley: (Once upon a time...) In the West .
[2] French Trotskyist party which became the Revolutionary Communist League in 1974 and then the New Anticapitalist Party in 2009. The group Révolution! became the Communist Workers' Organization (OCT) in 1976
[3] On Solact and Jean-Christophe Berrier, see Jean-Christophe's interviews on danslouest.noblogs.org
[4] Isolation, which prisoners consider torture, is a prison regime designed to isolate a detainee from the rest of the prison population, or to protect them from other detainees. It has been the subject of numerous struggles for its abolition, until its reform, without any real difference, by Robert Badinter.
[5] Jean-Marc Rouillan and Régis Schleicher, far-left activists in the organization Action directe, which carried out several attacks against business owners and political figures or their premises in the 1980s. See, by Rouillan, Dix ans d'Action directe, Agone, 2018
[6] Production of the Zoe, the last electric car produced at Renault Flins, stopped in 2024. At the same time, production at the Stellantis (formerly PSA, Simca, Talbot) plant in Poissy is threatened in the short term.
[7] On the MIB, as well as for a chronology of racist police killings in Mantes, see danslouest.noblogs.org
[8] Pierre Bédier, the local baron, among other mandates, president (The Republicans) of the Yvelines departmental council (from 2005 to 2009, then again since 2014) and former mayor of Mantes-la-Jolie (1995-2005). On the "Bédier system," see "In the Yvelines, clientelism on a daily basis," Le Monde Diplomatique , February 2017.
[9] Syllepses, 2018
[10] The Bubble Box, 2022
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4691
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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