Daewoo, Thomson, and Privatization in Late-Twentieth-Century France

Abstract

The region of Lorraine in France witnessed the collapse of the steel industries in the late twentieth century, causing massive job losses and social devastation. Daewoo Electronics, a division of one of the great Korean conglomerates of the 1980s and 1990s, came to Lorraine in eastern France in 1987. It was lured there by generous French government subsidies and the chance to enter the European market. It opened three factories in consumer electronics and components, and also nearly acquired Thomson Multimédia, a state-owned consumer electronics factory, from the French government “for a single symbolic franc”. The resulting uproar, from political opponents and Thomson and Daewoo employees, ended the deal and soured its relationship with France. Daewoo employed just over a thousand people before it closed in 2003, a result of the collapse of the entire Daewoo Group. This article places this sequence of events, widely covered in the media, in the context of French anxiety about globalization, the loss of industrial substance, and France’s place in a changing world. It examines the process of privatization, and the ways in which it went so badly wrong in the Thomson case. This episode occurred at a critical juncture in the transformation of industrial capitalism into a service and digital economy.

1. Introduction

Dominique Manotti’s The Lorraine Connection (2009) is a near-perfect example of the contemporary French political thriller (polar), a type of noirish detective novel that grafts fictional characters onto well-known events and purports to tell the real story behind government cover-ups (Ross 2010). The scandal chosen by Manotti had erupted onto the political scene in late 1996. It involved the alleged corruption behind the privatization of the state-owned electronics giant, Thomson, and the South Korean firm Daewoo’s attempt to take over the Thomson television factory in Angers. The most arresting aspect of the book is its setting in one of the desolate new Daewoo factories in the Longwy basin of eastern France in Lorraine. “A strange place,” Manotti writes, “this hastily-erected sheet-metal cube on wasteland in the bottom of a valley overgrown with weeds and scrub. It stands on the site where, less than a generation ago, the Lorraine blast furnaces roared, one of the world’s most powerful iron and steel industries” (Manotti 2009, p. 12).

Daewoo Electronics, a division of one of the first great Korean conglomerates of the late 20th century, came to Lorraine in eastern France in 1987, lured there by generous French government subsidies and the chance to enter the European market. It opened its first factory, producing microwave ovens, in Villers-la-Montagne in 1989; its second, a television factory in Fameck, in 1993; and its third, a cathode tube factory in Mont-Saint-Martin, in 1995. It considered other potential factories as well, also in consumer electronics or components, and in 1996, it very nearly acquired Thomson Multimédia (TMM) with the blessings of the French government. It employed just over a thousand people before its closings in 2002 and 2003, a result of the collapse of the entire Daewoo Group.

Daewoo oddly found itself at the intersection of three economic and political developments in France in the 1980s and 1990s. First came the relatively sudden collapse of the traditional iron and steel factories in Lorraine. Second, and as a result, there was a creative attempt by the European Commission to boost economic development in the three bordering countries—France, Belgium, and Luxembourg—that had lost iron, steel, and mining jobs. Third, and on a larger scale, there was the process of privatization that preoccupied much of Europe in the late 20th century. In France, the most controversial of these efforts entangled Daewoo with Thomson, one of the “great Groups” that was marked for nationalization under Socialist President François Mitterand (1981–1995), and then for privatization again under President Jacques Chirac (1995–2007).

The Daewoo–Thomson episode illuminates many things, including French anxieties about globalization, factory closings, and France’s place in the world. This article will focus on two major issues. First, there was the curiously bungled process of the attempted Thomson privatization, which included cronyism, a lack of transparency, and perhaps most importantly, “inattentiveness”1 on the part of the conservative Chirac government, which was ready to give away a valuable civil and defense electronics firm for “a single symbolic franc”. Second, though not unique to the Thomson affair, was the rapid transformation of the economy as well as the working life and expectations of the middle and working classes in the late twentieth century. Bringing Daewoo to France as one of the solutions to a distressed region perhaps would have worked in the mid-twentieth century. It did not work by the beginning of the twenty-first.

2. Daewoo

Daewoo (meaning “Great Universe”) was one of the top chaebols in Korea, a group that includes such names as Hyundai, Samsung, and LG. Chaebols were family-owned-and-managed conglomerates, active in many fields of manufacturing, invested throughout the world, and with a certain glamor stemming from their sudden emergence that had turned South Korea into an economic powerhouse. They focused their efforts on export because their internal markets were small, and they began with relatively low-cost consumer goods, including textiles and small appliances (Frouville and Perrault 1986, p. 677). The Daewoo firm was started in 1967 on a shoestring by “Chairman Kim” Woo-choong, and over the course of 30 years, he had built, acquired, and diversified; just before the company’s collapse in 1999, according to The Economist, Kim had 200,000 employees throughout the world, and “the company made just about anything, anywhere: ships in South Korea, microwave ovens in France and fertilizer in Vietnam” (The Fall of the House that Kim Built 2000). The company made clothing as well: Kim recounted in his memoirs how, in the early 1970s, he had brought sample cases of shirts to the United States, waiting in receptionists’ offices at Sears for days until he finally spoke with a buyer; that was the beginning of a long relationship with Sears, before both companies collapsed.2

The reliance on the conquest of external markets was aided by chaebol monopolies of government-authorized General Trading Companies which, if successful in gaining contracts, increased the Groups’ access to loans.3 After Daewoo’s fall and the indictment of multiple executives including Kim himself, the Wall Street Journal described Daewoo as “the symbol of aggressive expansion on borrowed money” (South Korean Prosecutors Indict 34 2001). Subsequent investigation, by journalists and by the Korean government, revealed mismanagement and “opaque” accounting. In 2003, in an interview (while he was in hiding in southeast Asia), Kim admitted that he had frequently moved assets, including loans, among the various companies of his empire, falsifying the documents in attempts to keep each company solvent (Kraar 2003). He claimed that everyone did it.

In late 1997, the Asian Financial Crisis engulfed Korea, much of it driven by the problems of the chaebols and the merchant banks they controlled. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervened at the request of the South Korean government. The problems, described in a subsequent IMF conference, stemmed from several factors. First, there were “mismatched loans”, that is, short-term loans for long-term projects. Second, there was an expectation that the banks, perhaps under government pressure, would simply renew the loans because the chaebols were too big to fail. Typically, banks had lowered interest rates or rolled over the loans while the companies “reformed themselves”. By the late 1990s, even this weak course of action did not occur, not only because of the magnitude of the crisis but also because of the politics surrounding the upcoming presidential election. The third and most important problem, perhaps particularly with Daewoo, which continued to be run by its founder, was the lack of an adequate corporate governance structure. There was no division between ownership and management, a fact which often led to autocratic and ill-considered decisions. The Boards of Directors tended to be staffed by family members, leaving no opportunity to take advantage of outside shareholder expertise (Kihwan 2006).

The crisis crushed many smaller chaebols. Others restructured during the year 1998, focusing on their main activities and divesting themselves of “non-core” businesses (Hemmert and Kim 2021, p. 43; Leipziger 1999, pp. 1–18). Kim instead continued to expand in 1998, borrowing and acquiring 14 subsidiaries (added to his 275 existing companies) and adding 40% more debt, even as his group lost USD 458 million in the course of that year (The Death of Daewoo 1999). As Kim continued to buy, he further entangled his companies with promises of debt guarantees from one entity to another (Chang 2003, p. 154). Thus, the empire, 80 billion in debt, unable to obtain more loans or even a freeze on interest payments, collapsed all at once, in August 1999. Kim later mused that his downfall had been his attempt to build up Daewoo Motor too fast, and Daewoo Motor had taken down everything else (Kraar 2003; Lee 2004, p. 2400; The Fall of the House that Kim Built 2000). He was convicted in absentia of corruption and fraud (Ha and Lee 2007, p. 907). A General Motors executive, later commenting on why the on-again-off-again partnership with Daewoo had foundered, explained that “we wanted only to increase our market share in Korea. They wanted to conquer the world, and do it with debt” (Williamson et al. 1999).

3. The French Connection: The European Center of Development (Pôle Européen de Développement)

In its time of expansion in the late 1980s, Daewoo had seized upon an opportunity to establish itself in France. It seemed to be a perfect meeting of needs. After the Thirty Glorious Years of the postwar period, after the oil crises (1973–74, 1979), France began a decades-long period of high unemployment. In 1981, the first year of the Socialist President François Mitterand’s term, it rose to 7.1%. From then on, and up to the last available figure (2023, at 7.3%), the unemployment percentages never slipped below that number, even rising to 10.3 during three straight years of the Hollande presidency (see the unemployment figures on the Insee site) (Insee.fr 2024). As for Daewoo, it had turned to “delocalizing”, or the building of factories abroad, in order to have freer access to new markets (Savary and Shin 1989, pp. 931–32). These were often in the form of an “assembly factory”, or a “screwdriver factory” (l’usine tournevis) where unskilled workers assembled components manufactured elsewhere within the Group.4

Eastern France in particular had suffered massive job losses. In 1955, the iron mines of Lorraine had employed 25,000; in 1997, when it closed, the last Lorraine mine, Terres rouges, was down to 137 employees. The area around the small town of Longwy between 1974 and 1995 lost 22,000 jobs, or 93.5% of its total employment; the steel industry as a whole lost approximately 110,000 jobs, most of them in Lorraine.5 In February 1994, Gérard Longuet, Minister of Industry, met with the union leaders of the coal miners to tell them that their mines, too, which had already started to close, would all be gone by 2005, because they were losing money (Kahn 1994). France still made steel—the Dunkerque steel mill, one of the largest in Europe, had opened in 1963—but the mills in Lorraine were outdated and unprofitable.6

The loss of these industries and resources—which crossed national boundaries, into Belgium and Luxembourg—led to the creation of the first Pôle européen de développement (PED). The small transfrontalière area, anchored by Longwy (Meurthe-et-Moselle) in France, Athus in Belgium, and Pétange in Luxembourg, was founded in 1985 for a term of ten years (Légifrance 1985). The idea behind the effort was to “reinvigorate and diversify” the local economies, with the hope, at the same time—especially for Jacques Delors, who headed up the European Commission—to set up “the laboratory of Europe”, through the creation of genuine cross-border institutions (Delors 2023). The three regions would be supported by their own governments, both national and regional, as well as by European development funds (Fonds européen de développement économique et régional, or FEDER). The plans called for a multiyear project to clean up and transform the sites of old factories into attractive industrial parks for new businesses, to improve the transportation infrastructure, and to create services that would help entering industries with regulations, subcontractors, and the recruitment of workers. The whole would be organized and monitored by a joint management group among the three countries, and firms would be given generous subsidies of 30% or more of their investment to defray the cost of their establishments in the region.

In a 1995 interview, Sung Lee, president of Daewoo Electronics in France, stated that its strategy was “globalization and localization”. As of 1995, 20% of its products were produced outside of Korea; it wanted to reach 60% by 2000. It had chosen Lorraine for its available manpower, its centrality to the rest of the European market, and the aggressive generosity of the French government, though he declined to say how much in subsidies they had received (Nathalie Arnould noted that between funds from FEDER, the national government, and several types of regional grants, plus what they had been able to negotiate, it was nearly impossible to determine exactly how much money Daewoo had received for the duration of its relatively brief stay (Arnould 2008, pp. 7–10, 18)). It planned to expand Mont-Saint-Martin, since it was as yet only occupying a quarter of the large new building. It was also increasing its production elsewhere: Villers-la-Montagne had started with 100,000 microwaves per year; now it was up to 1.5 million units, and was producing for Daewoo’s entire European market. It was studying the feasibility of another television components factory in the region. It had recruited a French engineer who had worked in responsible positions for GM, Thomson, and Moulinex (Vernay 1995) as the director of production for the new Mont-Saint-Martin factory. It was, he suggested, firmly implanting itself in the terrain.

There were also some warning signs. Daewoo manufactured low-end appliances in its French establishments, but it had talked of a new refrigerator factory in Verdun, producing high-quality products that would rival Bosch. In February 1996 came the disquieting news of Daewoo’s new refrigerator factory, with an investment of 400 million francs, in the Basque region of Spain (Etcheleku 1996). Dr. Soon Hoon Bae, the head of European operations of Daewoo, had assured the president of the Lorraine Region, Gérard Longuet, that the Verdun project was merely delayed. Soon Lee, president of Daewoo Electronics France, was less definite: the Basque plant would produce 300,000 refrigerators annually, “and we are waiting to know the results on the European market, before launching the construction of the other factory at Verdun”. It also needed to take account of the economic crisis in Asia (Ambrosi and Etcheleku 1998; European Union 1999, p. L 292/9). By December 1997, the Verdun plans had been suspended—forever.

Nor had Daewoo “implanted” itself in the region by developing relations with local subcontractors. In 1996, at an enterprise fair held by government officials and business groups, the Fameck television factory revealed that only 4.5% of its purchases were from local suppliers. Hubert Ress, head of a maintenance firm with 30 employees, spoke for a number of small businesses when he stated that “les grands” often seemed to regard the locals as the “last recourse” (Robischon 1996). This lack of connection with the region was disappointing; in the same year, however, Daewoo had an unexpected chance to entrench itself in France by taking over Thomson Multimédia.

4. Nationalization and Privatization

Privatization—that is, the turning over of state-owned and managed concerns to the private sector—was a European and even global phenomenon of the late 20th century. The first wave in the 1980s was identified most strongly with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) of the United Kingdom. The greatest wave of privatization among EU countries (and some aspirants, such as Poland and Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991) occurred in the 1990s, as countries attempted to comply with the Maastricht rules for the coming adoption of the euro (Warner 2007, p. 86). For France, the order of business was, in contrast, the nationalization of industries.

The first of the nationalizations in France, the armaments industries and the railroads (SNCF), had occurred under the Popular Front government that came into office in 1936. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the French government had nationalized entities including banks and insurance companies, as well as the gas and electricity companies and coal, still an important source of energy (Borde and Eggleston 1982; Stoffaes 1983, pp. 579, 581, 584). Also included, as a sanction, were Renault and a few other firms for collaborating with the German Occupation government (Borde and Eggleston 1982, p. 422).

A new wave of nationalizations began with the 1981 election of François Mitterand of the Socialist Party. At that time, Presidents had a seven-year term, and the National Assembly a five-year term; Mitterand dissolved the National Assembly he had inherited and called for new elections, which provided him with an impressive majority. Under his first Prime Minister, Pierre Mauroy, he passed a sweeping nationalization law.7 The law targeted additional banks; two major banking and investment groups, Paribas and the Suez Company; and five great conglomerates, of which one was Thomson-Brandt, which had taken shape after a series of mergers in 1946. Thomson-Brandt was divided into systems electronics for the defense and aerospace industries (Thomson CSF) and consumer electronics (later Thomson Multimédia, or TMM).8 It employed 128,000 people, of whom 100,000 worked in France, and its research and development expenses were very high compared to those of other firms. Its orientation was towards “systems” rather than matériel, and it represented a part of the “knowledge economy” rather than the production of goods, though it did both.9 Partial nationalizations included Dassault Aviation (of which the state took 54% of the shares) and Matra (51%) (Mosley 1982, p. 419). Matra, or Matra-Hachette, was split at the time of privatization into the famous publishing house which the government, mindful of a free press, did not wish to control, and Matra (Mécanique Aviation Traction), a firm specializing in armaments and computer and satellite technologies (Borde and Eggleston 1982, p. 424). Matra would be involved in the subsequent Thomson privatization effort. Also taken under the state’s wing, in a less formal sense, were the ailing steel companies, Sacilor and Usinor.10

Nationalization, many believed, reinforced the power of the state and the unions, in contrast to the “autonomous” powers of big corporations “pursuing their own ends” (Stoffaes 1983, p. 577). The “directed” economy also allowed the government to put an emphasis on training as well as research and development (Di Méo 1984, p. 335). Additionally, for the French Communist Party, still tenuously allied with the Socialist Party, nationalization was a step on the way to the end of capitalism, though this was an extreme (and aging) view, increasingly giving way to the idea of gérer autrement, or “manage differently” (Stoffaes 1983, p. 608). The passage of the four Auroux Laws in 1982 gave workers a “new citizenship” on the factory floor through the establishment of regular “social dialogue” with their employers (Auroux 1981). One additional Mitterand campaign promise had to be deferred; there would be no 35-hour work week yet, but the 39-hour work week, with an additional fifth week of paid vacation, went into effect in 1982 (Askenazy 2015, p. 91).

There were also hopes, in regard to the five industrial conglomerates (some of which were obvious competitors to each other, especially in the defense and electronics industries) of rationalizing their organization and increasing productivity. In terms of the future TMM, nationalization was meant to allow the industry to develop new consumer products including the magnétoscope (soon to be known as the VCR), aimed at the entire European market, in the hope of stopping “the Japanese invasion” and becoming at least the second in Europe to Phillips (the Netherlands) (Stoffaes 1983, p. 607).

Socialist Party hopes for Mitterand’s term rested on taking advantage of the recovery, widely predicted to begin in 1982, both to nationalize and to increase the social safety net. The recovery failed to materialize; after plans for job creation and an increase in social spending, Mitterand’s government made the famous tournant de la rigueur in 1983, a “turn” to a more conservative policy that focused on the battle against inflation. The National Assembly elections in 1986 returned a conservative majority. Mitterrand declined to resign, which would have triggered a new presidential election, and he and Jacques Chirac as prime minister embarked on the first “cohabitation” in the Fifth Republic.

Chirac immediately made clear his determination to privatize, thus bringing France into accord with the most famously privatizing government at the time, that of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. According to Andrew Gamble, the Thatcher government’s chief ideological reasons for privatization centered on the belief that anything beyond a “minimal state” was a violation of individual rights, combined with an abiding faith that the free market would always do things more efficiently and effectively than the government (Gamble 1988, p. 5). One of the most popular ways to promote privatizing was the argument that it would open up competition and lower consumer prices. Thatcher privatization did not break up monopolies like British Telecom or British Gas, according to Gamble, and showed relatively little interest in providing opportunities for competitors. The emphasis, instead, was on increasing the number of shareholders in the firms as well as providing a windfall for the government as the shares were sold (Gamble 1988, p. 12).

During the brief Chirac prime ministership from 1986–1988, the French government privatized eleven firms, four of which had just been nationalized, and including the oil and petroleum giant Elf-Aquitaine, marking the beginning of a lengthy scandal-ridden course of events. The new law also created an independent body, the Privatization Commission (Commission de Privatisation), that would approve the terms of all such proposals.11 The presidential election of 1988 returned Mitterand to the presidency, on a promise that he would not renationalize any of those newly privatized industries, nor would he attempt to nationalize new industries. He dissolved the National Assembly (thus ending Chirac’s prime ministership) and oversaw the election of a narrow Socialist Party victory in the National Assembly with Michel Rocard as his prime minister. The National Assembly elections of 1993 brought in a new conservative majority. Chirac, preparing to run for the presidency at the end of Mitterand’s second term in 1995, declined to cohabit, and Mitterand’s second conservative prime minister, from 1993 to 1995, was Édouard Balladur (formerly Minister of the Economy during Chirac’s prime ministership). In 1995, Chirac was elected president, with a conservative majority; he selected Alain Juppé as his prime minister, and they prepared further privatizations, the most notorious of which was Thomson.

5. The Privatization of Thomson, 1996

The decision to privatize Thomson was justified by a government report by Senator Jean Arthuis, a brief but pragmatic analysis of the incompatibility of the government’s role as shareholder (seeking profits) and as guardian of the country’s industrial and technological base.12 The privatizing was to be done by an off-market sale. Two French electronics firms soon made known their interest and presented their plans and bids: Alcatel (primarily telecommunications) and Matra, which had become part of the Lagardère Group (defense). Juppé asked Bernard Ducamin, who had recently retired from the Conseil d’État, to evaluate the offers, even though that was the responsibility of the Privatization Commission.13 On 16 October 1996, Juppé suddenly announced publicly that the winner was Matra/Lagardère, basing his decision on the report by Ducamin. He explained, in a contentious National Assembly session, that the choice had been made with the objective of creating a large, world-class defense industry with a strong export potential. Matra had made it very clear, he added, that they wanted to spin off Thomson Multimédia (TMM) to Daewoo, “which had very important industrial establishments” in Lorraine, adding, “We will then have on our territory the world leader of consumer electronics”. There would be no windfall to the Treasury. Juppé noted that since Thomson’s nationalization in 1982, the firm had not received the necessary funds for investment and modernization, and that it “was time to pay the bill”; thus, the state, or taxpayers, would recapitalize the firm, for about 11 billion francs before handing it over, along with some very generous tax breaks (Juppé 1996). In exchange, Matra and Daewoo would each pay “one symbolic franc”, Juppé stated, for taking the debt-ridden enterprises off the government’s hands (according to Le Monde, in their offers, both Matra and Alcatel had evaluated Thomson as having a negative value, and both had insisted that the state “recapitalize” the enterprise (Le Coeur 1996d)). Matra and Daewoo would also pay off the debts of the company, but the details of that part of the deal were and remained unclear. The Privatization Commission, which had to approve, had just received the dossier, but Juppé apparently assumed that they would follow his stated “preference”.

L’Express featured a detailed accounting of the extensive personal lobbying of Chirac by Jean-Luc Lagardère for Matra (Gibier 1996), but also, along with L’Usine nouvelle, tried to explain the rationale for choosing his firm. Thomson had two main divisions: Thomson CSF, with a focus on defense electronics, and Thomson Multimédia (TMM), which featured products in the very fast-changing consumer electronics field, of which the flagship was the television factory in Angers. The two proposals were described differently, but each envisioned a sort of conglomerate with separate divisions, each with its own sectoral partner and a strong focus on defense. L’Usine nouvelle ventured the suggestion that the two organizational plans were not, in reality, all that different, with the one major exception that Matra did not want to integrate TMM into its conglomerate. Alcatel did, with the argument that there were significant crossovers between the development of commercial and defense electronics uses (Gibier 1996; Deux conceptions des alliances industrielles pour Thomson 1996). Nevertheless, it was Matra that got the nod, on the grounds that this takeover would allow the combined firms to become a single full-service weapons supplier, second in the world only to Lockheed Martin (Gibier 1996).

The Juppé government seemed unaware of some of the red flags around Daewoo, though they should have been. A Fortune and CNN article that appeared in May 1996—only a few months before the decision—was friendly, but raised issues about the wisdom of some of the choices made by the Daewoo Group. The reporter had followed Chairman Kim to Poland to look over his latest purchase, the Soviet-era FSO car factory, established in 1948. Kim had won out over GM by promising to invest 1.1 billion dollars into the firm, and by agreeing to maintain the 21,000-strong workforce without layoffs for at least three years, a jaw-dropping concession (and a problem later, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 1999, suggesting that the “bloated workforce” led to “inefficiency” (Williamson et al. 1999)). He had just purchased a truck factory in Lublin (for 340 million), where the workers were already assembling vehicles from “kits of components” being shipped at “no charge” (sic) from Korea. He had also recently purchased a television factory in Poland (Kraar 1996). He seemed to be making Poland, rather than France, his headquarters in Europe, with the plans for the building of the 42-story Warsaw Trade Tower, for which he put up one-third of the USD 120 million (Williamson et al. 1999). Or perhaps Daewoo’s European seat would be Francfort, as Libération reported in early 1996 (Daewoo devrait créer 560 emplois à Longwy 1996).

After Juppé’s announcement, there were many specific questions which the government was apparently not prepared to answer. Henri Gibier, long-time editorial director of the financial newspaper Les Echos, published a deep dive into some troubling issues in l’Express, a little over a week after the choice was announced (Gibier 1996). Lagardère’s holdings were all integrated into a société en commandité, run by Lagardère Capital et Management—that is to say, in reality, by Jean-Luc Lagardère, who essentially made all the decisions, with no serious check by investors14—a structure like nothing so much as the fifteenth century Medici Bank.15 Considering this form of organization, would the French government have a “golden share” in the group, which would give them input into the major strategic decision-making by the company—for example, to prevent a move to a foreign country? The answer to that was yes; the government had demanded a golden share as part of the deal.16 Would Thomson be restructured and embedded within Matra? When the government recapitalized Thomson for 11 billion francs, how much of that would go to Daewoo, a foreign entity (9.9 billion, as it was finally revealed (Légifrance 1996a, pp. 17748–49))?

Giving TMM to Daewoo, a foreign company, also seemed to violate a long-standing French policy of not allowing foreign takeovers of existing French firms. This understanding had developed in the 1960s and 1970s, when the French feared “Americanization” and instead promoted mergers among French companies to develop French “national champions” (Maclean 2002, p. 83). President Georges Pompidou, speaking in New York in 1970, outlined the sensibilities that continued to prevail: “We will not accept being considered only as a ‘consumer market’. This leads us to desire ‘production’, that is, the establishment of factories. That is why we are entirely open to the implantation in France of American corporations, but we adopt a selective attitude towards the takeover of French enterprises by foreign groups of whatever nature” (Torem and Craig 1971, pp. 316–17). All such attempts, in fact, required approval by the Minister of Finance, a policy first carried out under Finance Minister (later President) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing during the Charles De Gaulle administration in the 1960s (Gillespie 1972, p. 407). This more restrictive policy, later on, would also be affected by the need for European Commission (EC) approval of new investment; the EC study of the Basque refrigerator plant, for example, included a rather extensive survey of the refrigerator market in Europe—which it concluded was stagnant (European Union 1999). And finally, a reporter asked Minister of the Economy Jean Arthuis why Daewoo’s heavy debt burden had not stopped the approval. Arthuis, who was rumored to have favored Alcatel, had avoided a direct answer.17

The attacks on the deal largely centered on Daewoo. Laurent Carroué, a geographer specializing in globalization and the economy, published a particularly savage takedown in Le Monde diplomatique shortly after Juppé’s announcement. Daewoo, he said, made cheap, low-end products with simple technology; it did not innovate, but was an expert in collecting subsidies. It was heavily burdened with debt. This deal would give Daewoo access to new markets as well as “technological capital [from Thomson] of the highest level”. He also suggested that the conditions of the privatization—”secret, opaque, and authoritarian”—suggested that the sale should be stopped (Carroué 1996).

The inscrutable nature of the deal led some to suspect corruption. As Carolyn M. Warner has noted, corruption was always seen to follow nationalized firms. The slush funds of Elf-Aquitaine, used for various purposes by both political parties, became notorious, including the outright bribery of political figures, the wiping of electronic communications, and so on; some of this was known or suspected throughout the 1990s.18 Thomson itself had been a part of a questionable episode in 1991, when they allegedly bribed the Taiwanese government to buy several frigates from the firm; thirty years later, in 2011, the French government and Thomson (now Thales) were jointly assessed a fine of 630 million euros (France and Thales to pay record bribes fine 2011; Van Ruymbeke 2022, pp. 155–96; Robert 2002; 2006 (L’enquête); Heilbrunn 2005, pp. 288–90) French justice can move very slowly.

Privatization had been seen as the cure for these excesses, and even for the non-criminal aspects of nationalized firms—most notably, a padded workforce and a lack of innovation because they did not need to compete. By the late 1990s, the verdict on privatization was less optimistic, perhaps, than it had been in the 1980s under Thatcher, largely because of the mixed results in the former Warsaw Pact nations. The situation in the former Soviet Union was tarnished by the application in the 1990s of “shock therapy”—a rapid transformation of the state-run economy into a free-market economy by selling off state-owned enterprises before the regulatory and legal framework was in place.19

France, of course, provided a very different set of circumstances, including a strong legal and regulatory framework. Unfortunately, Juppé’s conduct of the Thomson privatization had been inept. He apparently attempted to bypass the Privatization Commission with his own (admittedly distinguished) reviewer, Bernard Ducamin. He had not updated the National Assembly, many of whose constituents would be affected, before he abruptly announced his final decision. He had bypassed the EU as well; European Commissioner Karel Van Miert announced in December 1996 that the EU would open an investigation to determine whether the planned recapitalization of Thomson violated the regulations on economic competition (Le Coeur 1996a, 1996b). Focused almost entirely on the defense industry part of the deal, he had failed to do due diligence on Daewoo, though the warning signs of indebtedness and overextension were out in public. Finally, Juppé had insulted the company, stating in a television interview that Thomson had to be recapitalized because, in its current state, it was “worth nothing”.20 The government, it seemed, was determined to make the deal go through.

The Privatization Commission brought forward its report in early December 1996. Its decision was negative. The problem was Daewoo. All of Daewoo’s statements, in regard to its own financing and its promises of job creation, had a “unilateral character” with no “judicial obligation” toward the state. Lagardère had promised to serve as their guarantor, but his Group had no power to enforce or sanction. Since Lagardère’s offer was linked with Daewoo, the commission had to reject the entire bid (Légifrance 1996a, pp. 17748–49). Minister of the Economy Jean Arthuis explained the decision further: “The commission observed that there [would be] a transfer of technology in digital sectors, flat screens, [and] decoders, that this technology is the fruit of research which has been largely financed by public funds and that, unquestionably, the conditions of this transfer in legal terms do not give sufficient guarantees of a perennial establishment on the national territory”. Arthuis stated that the government had chosen Daewoo because of its belief that it would be able to create jobs. He acknowledged that there was no proof that Daewoo would create as many jobs as it promised, and that firm commitments were needed (Légifrance 1996b). The government stopped the deal.

The New York Times reported the cancellation with disapproval, even suggesting that racism might have been a factor. France, they said, would have created a “world class defense-electronics firm” from the union of Matra/Lagardère and Thomson, “while salvaging Thomson Multimédia, a heavily subsidized television manufacturer”. They added that “Daewoo was—and remains—the only obvious solution”. The Morgan Stanley office in Seoul issued a statement that it would be necessary to invest about USD 1 billion into TMM over the next five years, asking, “Who else can do that?” (Fitchett 1996) (Not Daewoo, as it turned out.). The issue of racism was also raised in a subsequent analysis that suggested that Daewoo would have been a good fit for TMM, given the former’s experience with rehabilitating old firms; it pointed to some of the unfortunate rhetoric and images used against the firm (for example, in Angers, the signs and images of the “Korean dragon getting its claws into Thomson”).21

6. The Workers

Immediately after Juppé’s announcement in October, the Thomson workers of the Angers television factory had protested, on the grounds both of national interest and skepticism about Daewoo’s motives in the deal. At issue were the 1400 people working at the Angers factory, and an additional 2500 workers who were subcontractors. The CEO of Daewoo Electronics, Soon-Hoon Bae, did not reassure them: “I would like to be able to restore Thomson Multimédia without suppressing jobs in France” (Vincens 1996). Michel Bouyer, local head of the labor union Confédération française démocratique du Travail (CFDT) at Thomson-Angers, stated that it was obvious why Daewoo wanted the company: it would allow them to take over the reputable brand names held by Thomson (RCA, for example) as well as their extensive Research and Development program (D’autres choix que la privatisation 1996). The visit of Daewoo executives to the Angers plant before the announcement had been less than reassuring; union leaders had been unable to arrange a meeting with them (Vincens 1996). One CFDT union member was quoted as saying that the workers objected neither to privatization nor to creating a big defense firm in France, but that “it should have been done around Thomson. Instead of that, we’re being sold off to a group [Lagardère] that is only a conglomerate of joint ventures”.22 An unnamed worker at TMM complained that Daewoo “had never invested in research” (Thomson: La contestation se cristallise sur le multimédia et Daewoo 1996). They resented the implication made by Juppé that Thomson was worth only “a single symbolic franc”, seeing this as both a “provocation” and an insult (Thomson: La contestation se cristallise sur le multimédia et Daewoo 1996). There was also resentment at the Lagardère Group’s public scorn for their “outdated” production facilities (Le Coeur 1996c; Gasquet 1996). With Juppé’s statement that TMM was “worth nothing”, Alain Prestat, CEO of Thomson Multimédia, began to defend the firm in public. He acknowledged that TMM had been “practically given up for dead” in 1991–1992 because of its acquisition, in 1987, of the consumer electronics division of GE/RCA. It had gone into debt. Since then, however, it had built back up, had not asked for taxpayer money since 1992, and was number 1 in the American marketplace with 20%, number 2 in Europe with 12%. He refused to comment on the deal with Daewoo; he simply wanted to establish the truth about the firm (Le Coeur 1996d).

Union leaders at the three existing Daewoo plants in Lorraine also protested, using the episode to bring attention to their own conditions. There were, to be sure, some cultural clashes. A 27-year-old worker at Daewoo-Orion hated the job, because “they treat us like dogs. The Koreans provoke us, they stand behind us and demand that we speed up. I often want to punch them but like the others, I hold myself back” (Daewoo Christophe Herbelet, 27 ans, opérateur 1999). Even a Le Monde reporter acknowledged that some of the management techniques “are in fact astonishing”. In June 1999, just before the collapse of the entire Group, there were reports that the managers at Daewoo-Orion, the most troubled of the three, berated the workers for not having “team spirit”, quoting a worker as saying that “success, according to them, comes from the abnegation of the individual” (Grève chez Daewoo 1999; Raux 1999).

The pay at these factories was minimum wage with no training or incentives, according to CFDT representative Jean-Bruno Cordier at Daewoo-Orion in Mont-Saint-Martin. Morale was low, and turnover in that first year, Cordier said, had amounted to about 50%. Minor infractions were punished with week-long janitorial duties. Most troubling were the safety violations—they stood at the assembly line with no breaks, people worked with paints and acids without masks, and a visiting Korean engineer had been “caught up” in one of the machines and killed (he was decapitated) (Broute 1996).

The death of the engineer led to a fine of FRF 400,000. The factory was put under judicial supervision for two years as they developed a safety plan; safety inspectors had already sent multiple warnings to the plant. Daewoo planned to appeal, its lawyer noting that it was one of the largest foreign investors in France, and that the French government should “show confidence” in it as it worked to correct the “weak points”, noting that 3000 jobs (about 2000 of these merely projected for the future) were at stake as well as 3 billion francs in future investments (also a projection, not yet a reality) (Une filiale lorraine de Daewoo placée sous surveillance judiciaire 1997). By the time of this court case in the spring of 1997, the relationship between Daewoo and the French government was already irrevocably broken.

In the summer of 1999, the Daewoo Group went into bankruptcy and liquidation. Interim managers were sent to take over each of the three Lorraine factories, but they seemed unable or unwilling to discuss what would come next. Morale for the next two years was very low, as everyone awaited word.

Villers-la-Montagne was gone by the end of November 2002. The local CFDT union representative, Barbara Giagnorio, was not surprised. In 1989, she said, when the factory had been opened, microwaves were a luxury item; now they were not. They were, besides, producing only low-end products, and had been told that their product line could be produced more cheaply in China (Latrive 2002; L’usine Daewoo Electronics de Fameck est liquidée 2003). During the three weeks when the plant was closed during the summer, the firm had dismantled four of the five production lines. A brochure had been passed around, according to Giagnorio, of Chinese “hyper-sophisticated” machines, such that they all had the impression that “the Koreans” had allowed the factory to decline into obsolescence. All she wanted now, she said, was a definitive closing date and a “social plan”, or severance agreement (Raux 2002).

In December 2002, the headquarters in South Korea messaged the director of the Fameck television factory that no further orders would be coming in. The closing was soon made official, and 13 December was set as the date for the announcement of the severance terms for the 170 current employees. Fameck had once projected the production of 4–5000 televisions per day; by 2002, it was producing 800, and 100 jobs had already been eliminated. For the social plan, it was reported that they had received payouts a bit higher than the required legal minimum (Zagroun 2002; L’usine Daewoo Electronics de Fameck est liquidée 2003).

Daewoo-Orion, the maker of cathode tubes, the last and the largest of the factories, had felt the most vulnerable to closing, but continued to receive no official word. The factory had been beset with labor troubles and wildcat strikes. On 3 January 2003, about 30 workers blocked the entrances of the factory to prevent dangerous chemicals from coming in or out, and also threatened to throw the chemicals into the nearby Chiers River (Une usine Daewoo ôtage de ses salariés 2003; Cellatex, Daewoo, Sony… Quand les conflits sociaux se radicalisent 2009). On 23 January 2003, the Mont-Saint-Martin factory burned to the ground; the size of the blaze, and the dangerous chemical explosions inside, required the calling of firefighters from Luxembourg and Belgium as well as France. The entire stock of cathode tubes was destroyed. Two of the fired workers were arrested, but the small political party Lutte ouvrière questioned the charges, noting that the workers had considered the tubes as a “war chest”, as a means of pressuring Daewoo to put in place a severance package for the 550 workers faced with termination. On 23 January, the LO noted, the factory had been “abandoned to its fate”—the lack of supplies meant that there was no work, and the managers had taken no action to secure the site. Four workers were arrested for arson, on the basis of the confession of a co-defendant while he was in custody. In the end, Kamel Belkadi, the on-site leader of the Confédération générale du Travail union (CGT), was sentenced to three years of prison (half of it suspended), and a 30,000-euro fine. In March 2005 he was still going through appeals (Daewoo Longwy: Patrons voyous, ouvriers en prison 2003; Daewoo: Justice pour Kamel 2005).

7. Two Conclusions

Two major lessons can be drawn from this series of events. First, for the French, who had maintained a dirigiste central planning mentality for much of their recent history, the late 1980s and 1990s saw the first shocks of globalization, for which they (like most nations) were ill-prepared. They responded in ways that were harmful to their workers, and were often in violation of the spirit of l’État providence, the postwar belief in a state that takes care of its people, embodied in France in numerous social welfare interventions. Second, the Daewoo solution was a desperate, backward-looking, and costly attempt to solve the problems of Lorraine. There were other directions that the government might more profitably have been taken, but they were longer-term solutions, and the loss of jobs in Lorraine was immediate.

In regard to globalization, the first major French government policy study to focus explicitly on “delocalisation” (the moving of factories elsewhere) and “deindustrialization” (the loss of industrial capacity in particular sectors) was issued in 1993 by Mayenne Senator Jean Arthuis, a centrist and Minister of Economics and Finance during the Thomson privatization attempt (Arthuis 1992). The hollowing out of some traditional French industries started first in factories that had been banalisé, by which he meant industries that required some skill, perhaps, but were “old”, no longer places of innovation or technological advances: textiles and clothing, shoes, toys. “The emergence of Asia”, predicted for many years, “is today before our eyes”, he wrote. The competition, moreover, was no longer a matter of cheap unskilled labor, but increasingly involved technology-based products and skilled workers, who worked more cheaply than the French could. “Our businesses are condemned to close or to delocalize in their turn in an attempt to survive. We are at an historic turning point. In the best of cases, we watch it, passive, unable to control it, and in the worst, we prefer to ignore it, to avoid having to confront it. But”—and this was his most concerning insight—”the progression of unemployment will soon threaten social cohesion” (Arthuis 1992, pp. 13, 14 (quotation), 15).

Economist Elie Cohen, research director at the CNRS and member of the Conseil d’analyse économique (CAE), wrote in 1997 that globalization had revealed the inequalities not only between industrialized and developing countries, but also within “advanced” countries: “The mechanism is simple: on one side, the unskilled workers of developed countries are in competition with those of underdeveloped countries, [and] they have the choice, if one dares to say it, between unemployment and wages of misery. On the other hand, [there are] the qualified workers of developed countries who benefit from the effects of the opening [of markets] to sell their intellectual services, in finance, marketing, advanced technologies” (Cohen 1997, p. 21).

Cohen also noted the growing tendency to turn factory closings into fodder for human interest stories, “the daily news about the closing of obsolete factories or the eruption of Asian products in the big box stores” (Cohen 1997, p. 21). The media, especially the visual media, made celebrities out of strikers, and substituted personal stories for the hard economic analysis of what was really going on. At the same time, the closing of factories was genuinely painful, and represented not merely the loss of a job. Jackie Clarke, who has conducted extensive research on the long-established French firm Moulinex, has discussed its persistence in public narratives even after it was forced into receivership in 2001. The memories of the (mostly female) workers had kept them connected long after they had ceased to work side by side, but there was a tendency among society at large to dismiss their concerns as mere sentimentalism (Clarke 2011, pp. 443–58) François Bon, author of Daewoo, did much to enlarge the meaning of factory closings, centering them on the people who lost their livelihoods—and their circle of companions, and their daily routine, and their sense of self. In an interview with l’Humanité, Bon stated that “I didn’t know, before coming there, the violence of this process [of closing down the factories]. The Korean group [Daewoo] had carefully packed up its archives and its computers. But in Lorraine, a land which has been based for so many centuries on the mines and iron, a land of so many former immigrations—all of the women and men who were questioned spoke in political terms and remembered the struggles” (Lebrun 2004).

States began to change their own laws to suit globalized companies, whatever the effect on the workers’ well-being. Philippe Frémeaux, in reviewing Anton Brender’s L’Impératif de solidarité, summed up the book’s message: “[Globalization] reduces the power of States and harms social cohesion. In the face of this challenge, we must not fall into the [neo]liberal trap and seek out competitiveness by the exacerbation of competition between individuals” (Frémeaux 1998). States, however, had done precisely that.

Sociologist Neil Brenner has noted, for example, that states have been actively engaged in dismantling the “postwar Fordist-Keynesian regulatory order (e.g., national welfare regimes, nationally organized collective bargaining arrangements), which are increasingly viewed as a hindrance to global economic competitiveness … [thus changing their laws to] encourage flexibility and technological innovation” (Brenner 1999, p. 65). In addition, the “neoliberal project of deregulation and liberalization, which has been pursued since the 1980s” was the response to the globalization process (Brenner 1999, p. 65).

By the turn of the century, “flexibility” had become central to future reforms of the labor market, not only in France but in Europe as a whole. Cheap hourly labor became less important, as automation replaced assemblage by humans, cheaper even when the humans were paid low salaries (Frouville and Perrault 1986, p. 683). As Arthuis defined flexibility abroad, it referred to “manpower rendered extremely available by intensive hours (Saturday-Sunday work–Tunisia) and sometimes the ‘quasi-nonexistence’ of social legislation (Thailand and other countries)” (Arthuis 1992, pp. 26–27). Flexibility in France was brought about by the Aubry laws of 1998 and 2000 defined within the limits of a 39-hour work week, and then, with the Aubry laws of 1998 and 2000, as a 35-hour week; however, this apparent cut (in work hours but not in pay) was not entirely desirable. Philippe Askenazy has shown that the Aubry II law (January 200.0) “annualized” the 35-hour work week to 1600 hours per year, with the actual schedules to be determined by “social dialogue”, or structured and regular discussions between workers and bosses. The companies were compensated for their assumed losses by a cut in their social security taxes; these cuts were focused on minimum wage workers, thus incentivizing the hiring of the unskilled at low wages (Askenazy 2013, pp. 323–47, table p. 325).

This tendency had been made worse by the shift away from industrial capital to financial capital. Financialization, a phenomenon of the late twentieth century, had presided over the virtual disappearance of the large factory and workforce that promised stable employment, even across generations, and had led to the outsourcing of many functions that had once been performed in-house (Davis and Kim 2015, p. 104). Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2007 to 2011, a member of the Socialist Party, and thought to be a likely future president of France,23 explained in clear terms the change in the nature of capitalism itself. The first stage of capitalism had been industrial, its investments concentrated on the “internal” building of both the product and the company over the course of decades. The owner and manager of the company might well be on-site and know the workers by name. In the late twentieth century, that model had rapidly crumbled; industrial capitalism had turned into financial capitalism, a matter of mergers and takeovers, and what mattered was keeping the markets and stockholders happy: “The model of internal growth, incapable of furnishing the required [stockholder] yields, retreated simultaneously [with the growth of financial capitalism]. The creation of value proceeds from this point on by the buying up of companies and outward growth. Profits are made by rationalization (and thus the destruction of jobs) rather than by growth (and thus the creation of jobs)”.24 Companies, or parent “groups”, did not invest in the long-term growth of their firms or in workers’ wages, instead using their profits for stock buybacks, dividends for shareholders, compensation for executives, and the acquisition of other firms. This new form of finance capitalism, argued Strauss-Kahn, was based on “short-termism” in the planning process and “nomadism” in practice: “Capital, having become extremely mobile, can ebb as quickly as it was invested” (Strauss-Kahn 2007, pp. 7–8).

To these immediate problems, Daewoo and the other companies that had briefly settled in Lorraine had been a part of a well-meaning but backward-looking solution. Those who launched the PED had set an ambitious goal. Their plan was to create “8000 high-value-added [skilled] industrial jobs”—1000 for Luxembourg, 1500 for Belgium, and 5500 for France. In 1995, the record showed that Luxembourg had slightly overperformed, Belgium had just barely missed its mark, and France, at 2526 jobs, had created less than half of their target number (Arnould 2008, p. 14). Subsequent evaluations found a number of reasons for this. France had been the hardest hit by the loss of the mining and steel industries. France, in its urgent need to provide immediate employment, had fallen victim to subsidy hunters (chasseurs de primes), whose interest in the area waned when the subsidies were used up. Luxembourg, with an international airport and lower taxes, was more attractive to international investors, for whom it also became a financial center (Oumeziane 2000, p. 74).

The Japanese company JVC, which manufactured compact disc players, had arrived at the same time as Daewoo in 198725 and left in 1996. Jean-Luc Deshayes’s study of JVC revealed that it had invested 80 million francs into the region, obtaining a subsidy of 37.5% of its investment. It had been able to take over an unoccupied factory (of Thomson, as it happened) for “a symbolic 1 franc”. In the summer of 1996, JVC announced that it was closing, effective immediately, with pay for the 243 workers until the end of the year. It had lived up to its obligations, it said; it had invested, and it had employed roughly 250 people and had pumped money, through wages and taxes, into the local economy for seven years. Its product line was now obsolete (Deshayes 2020, p. 25). These sorts of “localizations” were merely “implantations of projects which can be at any moment revoked when they are no longer profitable or when they have been maximized” (Liogier 2007, pp. 98–99).

Two alternative pathways were available for thinking through the difficulties of future employment. In 1978, Simon Nora and Alain Minc were asked to produce a government report on the meaning of the new digital economy; it was translated into English and published (unusually for a French government report) as The Computerization of Society. The study considered the economy in full, including the problems of the trade balance and unemployment, the growth of new industries, and the challenges posed to government regulation by the new and increasing connectivity. They did not provide an immediate and obvious roadmap for those grappling with current unemployment. They suggested, however, in the first of their tentative hypotheses, that the digitized future would disrupt relationships of work and sociability. There would still be large factories and service industries; but most importantly for the future, connectivity would enable high-performing “small units”, either independent businesses or affiliates of Groups, that would lead to innovation, creativity, and new products (Nora and Minc 1978, p. 115). The creation of such groups would require a long-term government investment in education and training. The small enclaved factories that had been recruited to the PED, set up to manufacture products destined for obsolescence, with no research and development, and with untrained, unskilled minimum wage workers, did not fit that description.

Another possible path was suggested by Patrick Abate, the Communist mayor of Talange (Moselle) and the leader of the Communist group in the Lorraine Regional Council. Interviewed in 2000 by l’Humanité, he argued for more local control over the dispersal of public funds; he suggested a broader consultation, including administrators but also professionals, unions, and local governments. He further said that the subsidies should go to small businesses (petites et moyennes entreprises, or PMEs) who had already chosen to establish themselves in the region, rather than to multinationals.26

Gérard Longuet, Minister of Industry under the Balladur government, Senator, and president of the Lorraine Regional Council, had worked hard to bring these industries to Lorraine, and he expressed his sorrow when Daewoo closed. He noted that Daewoo was “the last one standing” in the field of home appliances; Grundig, JVC, Moulinex, and Brandt had already closed. At the same time, he believed that Lorraine was no longer competitive in the field of low-tech consumer products. New competitors were appearing, and “I’m not only talking about Turkey or the old eastern [European] countries”. He suggested that Lorraine might take up new services offered to businesses, like logistics, or perhaps people could work in customer service, in the new call centers (Getto 2003).

Thomson survived, and it was recapitalized at the end of 1997 by 1680 billion euros, or 11 billion francs, by the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. (Chirac had called a snap election in 1997, losing his majority and gaining a cohabitation with the Gauche plurielle for the next five years.) By 2001, TMM had fully recovered and was posting record profits, even as it positioned itself as a leader in digital audio and visual technology. In 2003, with a second Chirac victory in the presidency and in the National Assembly, conservative Minister of the Economy Francis Mer put the state’s shares on the market, having created (after consultation with the Privatization Commission) a guaranteed pool of French and foreign investors. Mer’s reasons, as he explained, were that the government should stay out of the business of competitive enterprises that are not strategic in nature. Thomson was competitive, and was going in a direction that the state did not consider strategic. At the time of sale, and after its investments, the government posted a net gain of two billion euros from the sale—considerably more, as few failed to point out, than the single symbolic franc of seven years earlier (Mabille 2003).

The Thomson factory in Angers closed in 2012, and on the tenth anniversary, the newspaper Ouest-France interviewed a number of its former employees. One was the CFDT labor leader Michel Bouyer, who had led the fight against the Daewoo takeover in 1996. As someone who was disabled as a result of childhood polio, he had lived in “hospitals and centers” until he obtained his Thomson job, along with a sense of community. He had worked at the factory from 1973 until just before its closure in 2012. His happiest memories were of strikes: “Human relations are totally different in a conflict; there’s no more hierarchy”. On one occasion, they had pitched tents in front of the factory. “We called each other to come see this one, that one; we had to taste what this one had prepared to eat. (sic) These are the good times. Very good” (Nicoleau 2022).