1936 Communist leaflet against "Monsieur Longeot" at the Citroën-Lecourbe workshop

In this document

This leaflet from the Citroën-Lecourbe communist cell (French Communist Party S.F.I.C., Paris-City Region) opens with a header where the Citroën logo is subverted, adorned with a hammer and sickle drawn in the centre of the chevrons p. 1.

Challenging "Monsieur Longeot"

The text takes up a controversy already launched in a previous issue of the cell's "Journal", reproaching "Monsieur Longeot" for having provided "no argument" to defend himself p. 2-3. It questions him on several points: the transport of materials (sand, cement, plaster) by a truck driver from "transports Languet", nicknamed "Gueule d'Empeigne" p. 2-3; the advantageous salary of a car washer who "does the garden and waxes the floor" for Longeot p. 2-3; and the tone deemed disrespectful of this "department head" towards the delegates, whom he called "ganaches" (blockheads) according to the leaflet p. 2-3.

Workshop reorganization

A section entitled "Let's reduce times", signed "The supervisor", details a numerical evolution of the workforce at the Lecourbe workshop: six months earlier, 80 "productive" companions against 16 "unproductive" ones; "at the present time", 65 productive against 27 unproductive p. 2-3. The leaflet attributes this result to "the experience of the Longeot and Magès Planning", estimating that the workshop delegates had anticipated this degradation because "in repair, you don't get hours out of companions with kgs [...] or with catalogues" p. 2-3.

Other sections

A section "Authorized scrounging" wonders about a car (No. 1471-Wl, shell EZ 076, engine PV-00823) "affixed to the Lecourbe workshops without repair No.", which the leaflet assumes to be that of Mr. Longeot p. 2-3. Another section, "In the O.K. team", criticizes a group leader who is not very available to his companions p. 2-3. The text ends, unfinished, with an evocation of "Monsieur Michelin" p. 2-3. Pink/red handwritten lines underline the paragraph on the Longeot-Magès Planning in the margin p. 2-3.

Context

Paul Magès, who joined Citroën in August 1925 at 17 and a half and was a self-taught man who became a technical writer then assistant manager of the Super-Control (autobiographical notes), held positions in the 1930s related to the organization of production and repair, before joining the design office at the end of the decade and becoming the inventor of the hydropneumatic suspension. The rue Lecourbe workshop in Paris was one of the Citroën sites dedicated to car repair.

The year 1936 corresponds to a period of strong social unrest in France, marked by the Popular Front strikes and intense union and political activity in the factories, particularly at Citroën where communist cells regularly distributed leaflets challenging work organization and hierarchical practices.

Archivist's perspective

This leaflet is precious because it shows, seen from the workshop and under a resolutely militant pen, the reception given to a planning reorganization specifically associating Longeot and Magès p. 2-3. It testifies to a climate of tension between management and repair workers, in a context of workforce restructuring.

It seems that Magès is only associated with the contested device—the leaflet targets Longeot above all—but this piece probably sheds light on the resistance encountered by the rationalization methods he was able to implement very early in his career, when he was not yet twenty-eight and several years before his first hydropneumatic suspension plans of 1944. The two successive states of the same text (a cut version then a complete one, p. 2 and p. 3) suggest a working document or a proof corrected before distribution.