The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920 [Hardcover]

In this seminal book, Christopher Johnson writes a full-scale study of the rise and decline of industrialization in the Bas-Languedoc region of France. Working within a broad 200-year frame, Johnson examines the process of how and why a successful industrial region transformed itself to agriculture. Johnson is primarily interested in de-industrialization, which sets him apart from previous historians who have studied regions only in terms of the growth toward industrialization.

Johnson is particularly vivid in describing the human costs when government and industry decided to tame the working class. He has done an extensive, thorough search of archival material, and is well versed in the secondary material. --CHOICE

The product of wide-ranging archival research and subperbly written, Johnson's is a brilliant book that deserves to become a classic account of the lives of workers caught up in the process of deindustrialization. --Labor History

Thought provoking, moving, and vitally important...a rchly evocative book, a major contribution to the economic, social, and political history of nineteenth-century France. --Journal of Social History

[His] thesis is supported by twenty years of solid research. He writes with the conviction of a scholar and a committed social historian, which is refreshing in these grey revisionist days. --Times Literary Supplement

An exhaustive regional study. --International Labor and Working-class History

Touches of autobiography, the fulid writing style, and the consistently argued political line give the book a rare quality and it would be equally suitable as holiday or library reading. --Economic History Review

The narrative is executed with the vigor and flourish of literary and stylistic genius. It is robust, impassioned, concrete, and sometimes evocatively metaphorical. Humor and even some good-natured snipil³Ñ