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Enacting Cultural Identity: Risk and Ritual in the French Nuclear Workplace
Author(s): Gabrielle Hecht

Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 483-507
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? 1997SAGEPublications,
Journal
London,ThousandOaks,CAand
of Contemporary
History
Copyright
New Delhi,Vol32(4),483-507. [0022-0094(199710)32:4;
I-B]
GabrielleHecht
Enacting Cultural Identity: Risk and Ritual in

the French Nuclear Workplace
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
484
Joural of ContemporaryHistory
must find ways to transcend the opposition between experiential and linguistic
approaches that has been constructed in historiographical debates over
the past decade.' Focusing on language and culture rather than material
experience as the source of identity, some have argued, does not obviate the
need to examine experience: on the contrary, this approach enables us to
explore and explain experience, and the material world more generally, in
fresh ways.2 The linguistic approach need not 'imply an anti-materialist
position'; instead, it can show how the material world derives meaning from
culture.3 A substantial body of literature in the history and sociology of
technology also attempts to transcend stark oppositions between the material
and the cultural world. In this literature, technology and technological practices (forms of organized 'experience') constitute the material world. Scholars
have shown that technological change is shaped not by some mysterious
logic inherent in technology, but rather by social, cultural and political ideas,
choices and actions. Thus technical artifacts and technological practices, the
supposed epitomes of the material world, have been revealed as deeply social,
cultural and political phenomena.4 Such analyses need not deny the real existence of artifacts, but point rather to the impossibility of understanding
technology without understanding the cultural processes which make it and
through which it derives meaning.
One theoretical claim of this article is that rather than asking whether
experience is prior to culture or culture prior to experience, we should look for
1
I use the term 'constructed' deliberately, for while much of the difference between these two
approaches is real, one could certainly argue that much of it has been exaggerated for rhetorical
purposes.
2
See, for example, Donald Reid, 'Reflections on Labor History and Language' in L.R.
Berlanstein (ed.), Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana and
Chicago 1993), 39-54.
William H. Sewell, 'Toward a Post-materialist Rhetoric for Labor History' in L.R.
3
Berlanstein (ed.), Rethinking Labor History, op. cit., 15-38. Sewell lists several works that he sees
as implicitly adopting the post-materialist stance he advocates: Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing
Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago 1979); idem, The
Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (London 1985); Arlie
Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley 1983); William
Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750-1900
(Cambridge 1984); William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from
the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge 1980). A more recent book that could be included in this
category is Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor (Berkeley 1995).
4
This body of literature is too big to cite in its entirety. Examples that take a variety of
different approaches to these issues include: Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical
Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA 1990); David Noble, Forces of
Production (New York 1984); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA 1988); Thomas
P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore 1983);
Wiebe Bijker,Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological
Systems (Cambridge, MA 1987); and Trevor Pinch and John Law (eds), Shaping
Technology/Building Society (Cambridge, MA 1992); Judith McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine
(Princeton 1987); David Nye, Electrifying America: The Social Meanings of a New Technology
(Cambridge, MA 1990).
Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace
485
ways in which experience is cultural and culture is experiential. In other

words, how do cultural frameworks, including political ideologies, become
part of the meanings that people give their workplace experience? And how
does work itself, and the actions in which workers engage, transform these
ideologies and meanings into material practices? In order to address these
questions, this article examines the complex interplay between one domain of
experience - technical practices - and cultural representations of that
experience. The actions taken by Saint-Laurent employees had practical
motives and value: they did clean and repair the reactor successfully. But the
significance of those actions transcended their practical value, and understanding that significance requires transcending oppositions between material
and cultural realms.
The clean-up of the Saint-Laurent reactor provides us with a particularly
interesting arena in which to examine how experience is cultural and culture
experiential because the process took on many of the qualities of a ritual. Here
lies this article's second theoretical claim. Anthropologists have defined ritual
in many different ways, and there is considerable debate in their ranks over
what does or does not count as ritual.5 Some who study modern science
and technology have used the notion to expose the cultural dimensions of
apparently technical events. In particular, Hugh Gusterson has analysed
nuclear weapons tests as elaborate rituals which serve weapons designers as
rites of initiation, legitimation of their authority and confirmation of their
mastery over nature: going through the 'practical experience of these rituals',
he argues, lends 'the incandescent quality of truth' to the ideologies that
sustain and legitimate the work of weapons design.6 Historians, meanwhile,
have borrowed the notion of ritual from anthropology in order to make sense
of the processes by which communities express and legitimate their coherence
and defend themselves against internal and external threats.7
In general, scholars seem at least to agree that, whatever their other
characteristics might be, rituals are events which define or express relationships between physical motions and language. In this article, a ritual is defined
5
In particular, there is considerable debate over whether non-religious events, or events that
only occur once, can count as 'rituals'. For a good summary of these debates, see Eileen M.
Mulhare, 'Rethinking Secular Ritual in the Workplace', Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Colgate University, typescript. Other works dealing with secular ritual include Sally
F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (eds), Secular Ritual (Amsterdam and Assen 1977); Barbara
Koenig, 'The Technological Imperative in Medical Practice' in Margaret Lock and Deborah
Gordon (eds), Biomedicine Examined (Dordrecht 1988), 465-96; Stephen R. Barley, 'The Social
Construction of a Machine: Ritual, Superstition, Magical Thinking and Other Pragmatic
Responses to Running a CT Scanner' in Lock and Gordon (eds), Biomedicine Examined, op. cit.,
497-539; Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture (Philadelphia 1992); Pearl Katz, 'Ritual in the
Operating Room', Ethnology, 20 (40), 335-50.
6
Hugh Gusterson, 'Testing Times: A Nuclear Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold
War', PhD dissertation, Stanford University 1991, 291.
7
For an analysis and critique of this use of ritual see Suzanne Desan, 'Crowds, Community,
and Ritual in the Work of E.P. Thompson and Natalie Davis' in L. Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural
History (Berkeley 1989), 47-71.
486
Journalof ContemporaryHistory
as a highly stylized and ordered event whose physical and linguistic practices
enable participants to assert and enact their belief systems and identities.8 The
Saint-Laurent clean-up operation was not a ritual per se. However, it did
share many of the characteristics of a ritual. It was, for example, an exceptional event, not part of the daily routine of work life; it involved careful
orchestration of precise actions and gestures, and it enabled workers to assert
their cultural identity in response to a series of threats. The analogy is heuristically useful because it enables the clean-up process to be seen as a coherent
mechanism through which actions and language together constructed a meaningful experience. I will return to this point in my description of the clean-up.
The core of this article examines the clean-up of the Saint-Laurent nuclear
reactor after the October 1969 accident. In order fully to apprehend the multifaceted nature of this process, however, we must first situate the ideological
underpinnings of the state institutions which ran the nuclear programme and
understand something about the historical relationships between those ideologies and workplace practices. The next section,9 therefore, provides an
8
This does not mean that rituals simply reflect those belief systems - rather, rituals can be
understood as performances which both express and constitute cosmologies. Form and structure
are important in this regard: rituals are carefully rehearsed and staged events, not spontaneous
outbursts; they are ordered processes frequently made up by repetitive actions which themselves
constitute and express that order; they are events that stand out (sometimes dramatically) in the
fabric of everyday life. This means that 'ritual is not a "free expression of emotions" but a
disciplined rehearsal of "right attitudes"'. Rituals tell us not what people really think or feel, but
how participants construe the correct way to participate in a particular cultural system. They produce and reproduce communities and express community values, but not unproblematically so.
They are orchestrated by certain people or institutions and not others; they allow certain actions
and not others; they provide room for the expression of certain sentiments and not others. They
give people a way to make order out of chaos, but that order is inevitably exclusionary. Thus the
ritual process performs cultural work for its participants. Quote from Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah,
Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, MA 1985),
citing Suzanne Langer, op. cit., 133.
9
The analysis in this section is developed in much greater detail in Gabrielle Hecht, 'Rebels
and Pioneers: Technocratic Ideologies and Social Identities in the French Nuclear Workplace,
1955-1969', Social Studies of Science (August 1996), 26(3), 483-530. It is based primarily on the
following sources: Georges Lamiral, Chronique de Trente Annees d'Equipement Nucleaire a
Electricite de France (Paris 1988); Marcoule et sa vocation dans le Languedoc-Rhodanien: document etabli en commun entre la Direction et les Organisations Syndicales du Centre de Marcoule:
CFDT, CGC, CGT, CGT-FO, SPAEN (October 1969); A. Ertaud and A. Pages, 'Le contr6oledes
reacteurs G2 et G3', Bulletin d'Informations Scientifiques et Techniques du CEA (henceforth
BIST), 20 (1958), 126-39; M. Lignieres, J. Bobigeat, and A. Darre, 'Installations electromecaniques', BIST, 20 (1958), 141-55; A. Ertaud and G. Derome, 'Chargement et dechargement',
BIST, 20 (1958), 86; J. Rodier, 'Evolution de la protection dans le Centre de Marcoule', BIST,
72-72 (1963), 5-10; J. Chassany, 'La radioprotection des piles Gl, G2, G3', BIST, 72-73 (1963),
11-17; J. Rodier, R. Estournel, H. Bouzigues, and J. Chassany, 'Le travail en milieu radioactif et
ses problemes', 1~nergieNucleaire, 5, 4 (juin 1963), 291-301; R. Vial, 'Protection des travailleurs
dans l'industrie nucleaire', Jnergie Nucleaire, 6, 5 (juil.-aofit 1964), 305-12; Rodier, Bouzigues
and Bouttot, 'Les problemes vestimentaires poses par l'exploitation des installations actives et
leurs solutions', tnergie Nucleaire, 4, 1 (jan-fev. 1962); J. Rodier, J. Castain, and C. Guerin,
'Information et education en matiere de radioprotection', BIST, 72-73 (1963); Rayonnement
(November 1959-February 1966); 'Rapport etabli en vue de la seance du 19.7.56. Projet d'Arrete
487
overview of the programme and offers a brief analysis of two nuclear workplaces in the 1960s: the gas-graphite reactors at the Commissariat a l'Energie
Atomique's Marcoule site, and those at Electricite de France's Chinon site. I
will argue that technological or economic imperatives alone cannot explain
the differences between work and risk practices at the two sites. Instead, these
differences must be viewed in terms of the technocratic ideologies of each
institution, the resulting work practices of each site, and the ways in which
workers and engineers constructed the relationships between work practices
and social identities. This overview helps us situate the cultural crisis caused
by the decision to discontinue the gas-graphite design and the accident because
it shows the tightly woven relationships between the ideologies of the nuclear
programme, the technological practices engaged in by its workers on a daily
basis, and the identities of those workers. The relationships that developed
at Chinon formed the basis for workplace practices at Saint-Laurent (EDF's
second nuclear site), while comparing these relationships with those that
emerged at Marcoule points to their contingent nature and highlights the
inseparability of the material and cultural realms. Against this background,
the main body of the article then examines the threats posed by the 1969
crisis and the ways in which Saint-Laurent employees dealt with those threats.
From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, France's nuclear power programme
consisted of nine gas-graphite reactors spread over four sites. All were run
primarily by two state institutions: the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique
(CEA), the atomic energy commission, and Electricite de France, the nationalized electric utility company. Each institution had different political, economic
and technological agendas. Communist labour leaders had played an important role in the creation of EDF, and for over two decades the utility continued
to symbolize a new social contract between the French worker and the French
portant declaration d'utilite publique des travaux de construction d'une centrale thermique
nucleaire a Avoine (Indre-et-Loire)', Affaire, no. 167 (Archives of the Ministry of Industry); R.
Fays and J. Pupponi, 'La conduite des centrales nucleaires de Chinon', tnergie Nucleaire, 5, 8
(dec. 1963), 562-72; Rapport de Sicurite EDF2 (1965); Dardare and Lyon, 'Contr6oleet commande de la centrale de Chinon', ?nergie Nucliaire, 4, 7 (dec. 1962), 582-8; Journal Officiel,
24.6.55; letter from Dr Aujaleu (Directeur de l'Hygiene Sociale) to the Direction du Gaz et de
l'Electricite (27.2.56), letter from the Secretaire d'Etat a la Sante Publique et a la Population to the
Secr6taire d'Etat a l'Industrie et au Commerce (Direction du Gaz et de l'Electricite, 20.5.57)
[Ministry of Industry archives]; P. Beau, A. Douilliard, and J.J. Martin, 'La radioprotection des
travailleurs dans les centrales nucleaires d'Electricite de France a la lumiere de huit annees d'exploitation', 13nergieNucleaire, 13, 5 (sept.-oct. 1971), 350-9; Ministry of Industry archives: questions ecrites: nos 15461 (24.7.65), 13982 (20.4.65); interviews with the following engineers and
workers of Chinon and Marcoule: Bienvenu (27/10/89); Bertron (12/1/90); Chabrillac (9/4/90);
Chassany (18/6/90); Cregut (18/6/90 and 20/6/90); Delarue (23/4/90); Delpla (15/3/90); Giraudel
(8/12/89); Heurteau (31/5/90); Joly (31/5/90); Laponche (28/3/90); Nau (22/2/90); Teste du Bailler
(28/11/89); Trelin (10/4/90); Zaleski (22/12/89); Zerbib (20/3/90); Bernard, Gallois, and Roger
(19/6/90).
488
state and to act as an embodiment of left-wing technocratic ideology. Its

nuclear division wanted to build civilian electricity-producing reactors and to
demonstrate that nationalized companies such as itself were best suited to lead
French industrial development. In contrast, the CEA purged its communist
membership in the early 1950s and came to embody a Gaullist version of
technocratic ideology. It became involved in building atomic bombs, and
therefore wanted reactors that would produce weapons-grade plutonium; it
also wanted to show that its methods of contracting with private industry,
radically different from EDF's, best promoted French industrial leadership.
The collaborative process of designing and building reactors therefore entailed
frequent negotiations and disputes, and the reactors that resulted from this
process were also political artifacts.'0
The differences in the social politics espoused by the two institutions were
also constructed in the workplace. Indeed, the organization and practices of
work and risk at the CEA'sMarcoule site and EDF's Chinon site were not just
about how best to run a reactor. They were also about how best to run a
nation and organize a society. The differences between the two sites rested
on distinct visions of the duties and make-up of the state, the social role of
technical experts, and the place that workers should have in postwar France.
According to the CEA, workers were cogs in a technocracy run by experts
for the greater glory of France. According to EDF, workers were motors in a
technocracy steered by nationalized institutions for the betterment of France.
By 1960, the CEA had three gas-graphite reactors operating at Marcoule, all
geared toward producing plutonium to fuel atomic bombs. The technical
requirements of plutonium production shaped certain aspects of reactor
operation (for example, how often the uranium in the reactor core was
replaced), but these requirements alone did not shape the organization and
practices of work. These also stemmed from the CEA's technocratic ideology
and from the strong influence of military values at Marcoule. From its inception and increasingly after the early 1950s, the CEA embodied Gaullist
technocracy by promoting a nationalist vision in which elite scientists and
engineers would have nearly exclusive leadership of French defence and industrial growth. The organization of work there formalized the authority of
expertise in a rigidly hierarchical manner. Reactor workers had little autonomy and no opportunity to take initiative. Their jobs consisted primarily of
following orders, and every act they performed was codified and supervised by
experts. Managers and engineers portrayed Marcoule as a pioneering step in
French research and development and a symbol of French national power. But
in the representational strategies used by the CEA, only highly-trained
scientists and engineers counted as pioneers; workers merely did their jobs.
The contrasting workplace organization of EDF's Chinon site also stemmed
from the social and political dimensions of its electricity-producing reactors.
10 Gabrielle Hecht, 'Political Designs: Nuclear Reactors and National Policy in Postwar
France', Technology and Culture (October 1994), 657-85.
489
The utility symbolized not nationalism but nationalization. Although its

leaders did not hesitate to glorify things French, they were more concerned
with redefining what 'French' should be. EDF's version of technocracy
envisioned state-owned institutions steering industrial development, with
private enterprises following in their wake. From its creation in 1946, the
utility intended to direct social progress as well: by formally involving workers
in the decision-making processes of the company, nationalized institutions like
itself could make the French worker part of the French state. As Robert Frost
argues, the political relationship between labour and management had
changed by 1970, but 'a strong mythology of high technology' continued to
bind the two together." At Chinon, this meant that engineers, technicians and
workers could all be pioneers in the adventure of nuclear power. While reactor
work was still hierarchically organized, the structure of technical and social
authority was much less rigid than at Marcoule. Workers had far more control
over their workplace decisions. They had frequent opportunities to propose
operational guidelines and procedures, for example, while their CEA counterparts did not. Furthermore, workers at Chinon held a very different institutional identity from those at Marcoule: whereas Marcoule workers were
virtually the only blue-collar technical workers in the CEA, EDF had hundreds
of blue-collar workers at other, non-nuclear power plant sites. Chinon's
workers formed an elite within the utility, while Marcoule's formed a kind of
underclass within the CEA.
These differences between the social and political meanings of work at
Marcoule and Chinon were perpetuated, reinforced and enacted by the
practices each site developed to handle the risk of radioactive contamination.
At Marcoule, managers created a body of experts known as 'radiation protection agents' who defined and enforced the rules that governed radiation
protection. These experts maintained close surveillance over the workers to
ensure that they followed carefully programmed safety procedures (such as
wearing protective clothing and radiation detectors). Here, as in other
domains of their workplace experience, workers were expected to follow
orders. EDF, however, had a policy it called 'autoprotection'. This meant that
each worker was taught set definitions of dangerous, risky and safe practices,
and each had primary responsibility for his own safety. Each shift had a
'radiation protection technician', but several workers on each team had the
training needed for this job, and the responsibility devolved to a different
person each time a team went on duty. Thus, radiation protection was not the
sole domain of a fixed group of experts, and workers had a greater say in
establishing and controlling safety procedures.
The material practices of work and risk at Marcoule and Chinon therefore
both embodied and constituted the ideologies of the nuclear programme.
'Embodied', because at one level the physical organization of work and the
11 Robert Frost, Alternating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946-1970
1991), 247.
(Ithaca
490
technical practices of handling risk derived largely from institutional ideologies. 'Constituted', because it was through those practices that these ideologies came to acquire meaning for the workers, and through those practices
that workers were able to engage with, enact and give their own meaning to
these ideologies.
Looking at how employees interpreted and responded to the rules of
radiation protection clarifies this point. At both sites, employees at all levels
routinely violated codified safety regulations. The most common violation
involved removing one's radiation detector before entering a potentially
radioactive workspace, thereby making it impossible to keep track of how
much radiation one had been exposed to. The meanings of such an action,
however, varied tremendously. A Marcoule engineer who removed his
radiation detector did so in full view, overriding the authority of the site's
radiation protection experts in order to deal with an exceptional problem in
the operation of a reactor; ultimately, his was a sacrificial act for the greater
glory of France. A Marcoule worker who removed his detector did so behind
the expert's back; for him, this was an act of rebellion against an authoritarian
technocracy that excluded him from power and erased his historical importance. At Chinon, taking off a detector was part of a heroic deed in the name
of French nuclear power for both engineers and workers; by doing so, both
types of employees expressed their willing participation in a more inclusive
vision of French technological society. Thus the meaning of a single action or
experience - the removal of a detector - must be understood in terms of how
that action fitted into a complex cultural and material matrix.
Practices of work and risk defined not only what a worker should do but
also who he should be.12The culturally constructed practices of the workplace
became the means by which workers acted out social and political ideologies,
and many workers clearly understood their experience in the workplace in
these cultural terms. Unionized workers at Marcoule explicitly related their
dissatisfactions to the site's military atmosphere and to the CEA's conviction
that its expertise and mission exempted it from all accountability. Meanwhile,
workers at Chinon embraced EDF's 'autoprotection' policy and agreed with
their institution's assertion that cases of exposure to radiation (which, it
seemed, happened only to non-EDF workers) did not reflect flaws in the policy
but problems in how non-nationalized institutions trained and treated their
workers. Marcoule workers who removed their badges rebelled against a
system that constrained them at every turn. Chinon workers who did the same
felt like pioneers in a grand technological adventure. Thoroughly embedded in
the social and political construction of the workplace, the meanings of risk at
each institution offered workers a set of cultural identities. Protesting against
or accepting risk practices gave workers a way to protest against or accept
these identities.
12 The workers of the nuclear programme in this time period were all men. Interviewees offered
various explanations for the exclusion of women, ranging from laws which prohibited women
from working the night shift to the misogyny of both EDF and the CEA.
491
Chinon was EDF's first nuclear site; Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux was its second.
Although the site was different, many of the engineers and workers employed
at Saint-Laurent had previously worked at Chinon, and they carried to the
new site their sense of pride and ownership in France's nuclear programme.
For them, and for many utility managers, Saint-Laurent's first gas-graphite
reactor (dubbed Saint-Laurent 1) represented the culmination of nearly 15
years of civilian nuclear development. All the history, politics and culture of
Chinon - and hence of EDF's nuclear programme more generally - were at
stake in the success of Saint-Laurent 1. Its designers proudly called it the
most elegant and efficient of all French reactors. They argued that the exceptionally well-planned and efficiently executed construction phase showed that
nationalized companies should indeed lead France's technological effort.13
Even more proudly, they noted that - with an expected output of 480 MW of
electricity - Saint-Laurent 1 was one of the most powerful reactors in the
world when it went on line in March 1969.
In the first few months of operation, workplace practices at Saint-Laurent
- and their meanings - closely paralleled those at Chinon. Engineers and
workers naturally based the organization of work and the handling of
risk at Saint-Laurent on their experiences at Chinon. With the transfer of
technological practices came the ideologies and identities bound up in those
practices. But site employees - especially managers and engineers - also
worked hard to establish a distinctive identity for themselves and for their
new reactor, one that built upon the Chinon tradition yet also elevated
Saint-Laurent above previous EDF achievements. This distinction revolved
around Saint-Laurent 1's technical accomplishments. Like the designers, the
operators took pride in the reactor's elegance, efficiency and size.
Furthermore, they felt responsible for proving to the world that France could
produce commercially viable nuclear electricity. While the three reactors at
Chinon did produce electricity, the research and construction costs had been
so high that the price of their electric power far exceeded that of conventional
power plants. Indeed, many studies showed that France's nuclear electricity
was more expensive than that of the USA which used a different reactor
design, or even than that of British nuclear power, which used a similar
design.'4 Saint-Laurent provided the opportunity to prove these studies wrong
and to show that France's gas-graphite design could compete not only with
conventional plants, but also with nuclear power in other nations. Finally,
Saint-Laurent employees, proud of the nationalized status of their utility,
also felt that they were competing with the private companies in charge of
American nuclear power. Thus the ideological issues (technological prowess,
nationalized industry, the creation of a new society, etc.) that had given
13 'Filiere graphite-gaz, Probleme de repartition des commandes', 19.10.65 and EDF, REN2,
'La Politique Industrielle d'EDF', 25.11.65 (both in personal papers of Claude Bienvenu).
14 See Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, The Failed Promise of Nuclear Power: The Story
of Light Water (New York 1978) and Frost, Alternating Currents, op. cit., for a discussion of
debates in the 1960s about the economic merits of different reactor designs.
492
shape and meaning to Chinon's material operation had even more salience at
Saint-Laurent.
The sense of mission that enveloped Saint-Laurent and its staff had
developed in a variety of ways. By March 1969, many employees had been
there several years. They had closely followed the reactor's construction and
participated in innumerable training sessions together. Early that year, the
management began publishing a newsletter to report on monthly activities on
the site and elsewhere in the nuclear industry. Initially, the Journal de SaintLaurent-des-Eaux contained pieces written by the director and other
engineers; soon workers began to contribute articles as well. The newsletter
thus served both as a place where managers and engineers could issue rallyingcries to their workers and as a place where workers could place announcements for events or write about issues of importance to them. The Journal also
contained information about births, weddings and deaths, as well as the scores
of sports games played by Saint-Laurent teams. It did not serve as a forum
for workers to express themselves freely. Rather, it acted as one of several
mechanisms by which engineers, managers and some workers constructed a
sense of community and coherence - a place where they articulated and
elaborated a workplace culture.
The language that contributors to the Journal used to talk about the site's
activities in these early months therefore gives a sense of how employees were
encouraged to think about their work and what values were supposed to bind
the community together. Writing about the reactor's start-up phase, the site
director enthused that 'foremen have finally experienced the sensation of controlling and domesticating an enormous power'.15Hooking the reactor up to
the national power network was 'a great event'.16Referring to debates about
whether France should stick with its gas-graphite design, one editorial noted
that
... the gas-graphite design is healthy at Saint-Laurent since, at the end of the month of June,
three months after going on line, we reached a cumulated output of half a billion kilowatthours. A quick look at what has been accomplished by [other] European nuclear plants,
including Great Britain, as well as by conventional French power plants, indicates that no
one is doing better.'7
The competition between Saint-Laurent and other plants was analogous to a

sports match, and it was up to the site's employees to 'defend the colours of
gas-graphite' - colours which, by June 1969, faced political jeopardy.18In
countless ways, in the pages of this newsletter, employees were rallied around
the cause, with words like: 'Everyone will have a role to play in this work and
should consider himself necessary, even if he doesn't feel he possesses all the
15 Centrale de Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux, Journal de Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux, 2 (fevrier 1969), 2
(henceforth JSL).
16 JSL, 3 (mars 1969), 1.
17 JSL, 6 (juin 1969), 1.
18 JSL, 6 (juin 1969), 2.
493
elements with which to judge the efficiency of his activities. We will succeed
only by uniting our efforts."' Such language conveyed a message of kindly
paternalism: while only managers or engineers might have the necessary
knowledge or perspective to judge the overall achievement of the site, every
worker should think of himself as indispensable.
Interviews I conducted 20 years after the reactor first came on line indicate
that workers did participate willingly in constructing both the heroic image of
their work and the benevolent paternalistic atmosphere in which that image
was couched. Of course, a handful of interviews conducted after an interval of
two decades cannot really capture how workers thought and talked about
their jobs at the time. Nonetheless, the fact that, even after 20 years, those
workers who have remained on the site paint a glowing picture of their work
during the 1960s and reconstruct that time as the good old days does indicate
that attempts to invest employees with a sense of mission met with some
success. One worker remembered hearing in August 1969 that his reactor produced electricity 'for the entire Parisian region .... That stayed with me, it
really hit me . . . [it was] a matter of pride, of vanity [de fierte, d'orgueil].'
Others talked about the excitement of those early years. Time, said one man,
did not count: he once worked 36 hours in a row without sleeping just to get a
job done, and remembered his boss coming by at 2 am to bring his shift 'a
snack and a pat on the shoulder and say how you guys doing? [ca va les
gars?]'. The work atmosphere was 'very friendly, very convivial. We worked
hard, but for love, eh?' They also recalled the site director with great fondness:
'He was very paternalistic, he was the daddy of the whole place. There were
very good relationships [between people], regardless of hierarchy.' Perhaps
because 20 years had gone by and the late 1960s had become 'the good old
days', workers appeared to view this paternalism favourably: in contrast to
their present work environment, it had helped to create an atmosphere of
closeness, of companionship and of familiarity. They also remembered how
special being in the nuclear division of EDF had made them feel. Saint-Laurent
in particular had access to 'the cutting edge of technology in France . . . the
first numerical calculator ... the first numerical voltmeters ....
It was the
biggest electricity production site in France.' This aura of exclusivity extended
to their social status as well: Saint-Laurent workers got a tremendous kick out
of being singled out and admired in EDF-wide training courses as the 'slightly
crazy ... nuclear guys'.20
The ways in which employees represented their work, their reactor, and
19 JSL, 7 (aoit 1969), 1.
20 Copyright protection laws prevent me from citing the precise source of specific interview
quotations. I can, however, list the interviews from which the quotes in this paper are drawn. All
these interviews were conducted with workers who had been working on the Saint-Laurent site
since the construction period in 1965-9 (all interviews conducted on the site; interview date in
parentheses): Serge Roullier and Jean-Claude Godineau (18/1/90); Serge Roullier, Felix Mazier
and Jean-Claude Contois (18/1/90); M. Delarue (23/4/90); MM. Mureau, Marlet, and Occhipenti
(23/4/90).
494
their sense of community help to explain the devastation inflicted by the visit
of Marcel Boiteux, the president of EDF, on 16 October 1969. Saint-Laurent
employees had assumed that his press conference on their site would be
devoted to praising their achievements. Laud their work he did, but he also
made an extremely unwelcome announcement that completely overshadowed
- indeed, appeared to invalidate - his praise: EDF had decided to stop building gas-graphite reactors altogether, and would instead begin searching for
another type of design that might prove more commercially viable. The new
reactor model would almost certainly come from the USA.21The debate over
the commercial viability of the French design had been raging for several
years, and in recent months those in favour of discontinuing it had gained
ground. The decision did not surprise Saint-Laurent employees, therefore, but
the place and way in which Boiteux made his announcement did shock them.
In the words of one worker, 'it was a stab in the back'.22For 15 years, the
leaders of the nuclear programme had argued that nuclear power could give
France an independent energy source, and EDF workers had taken pride in
their contribution to French independence. Fiercely loyal to their design, SaintLaurent employees had not yet had the time, in the few months their reactor
had been operating, to show how it could help achieve this independence. The
decision to abandon the gas-graphite design belied programme rhetoric and
betrayed the cause for which they had worked.
The materialities of their working lives were at least as important to SaintLaurent employees as the social and political dimensions. Human interactions
occurred in a very specific setting - a nuclear reactor - and the uniqueness of
that setting helped to shape the contours of their social lives within it. Further,
it was because these men worked in a reactor, not a coal plant or a hydroelectric dam, that they experienced their work partly as a national mission. In
order to understand the material side of the world in which Saint-Laurent
employees lived and the damage the accident did to that world, therefore, we
must also learn a bit about the reactor itself.
The core of Saint-Laurent I was made up of nearly 3,000 vertical channels,
each of which contained 15 uranium rods. Each rod was encased in a metal
shield and surrounded by a graphite shell. The fission reaction thus took place
inside the core, producing a great deal of heat. Carbon dioxide cooling gas
flowed through the channels in the core and absorbed this heat. The hot gas
then flowed into the heat exchangers, where it converted water into steam; the
steam powered the turbines, thereby producing electricity.
The entire reactor was encased in a concrete pressure vessel. On top of that
21 Therewas considerabledisputeat the time over whethergas-graphitereactorswere indeed
the commercialfailuresthat Boiteuxand other EDF managersclaimedthey were: for example,
proponentsof the designwithin both EDF and the CEA arguedthat the cost calculationswere
false. Such disagreementsled many CEAengineersand some workersto go on strikein protest
againstEDF'sdecision.See Frost,AlternatingCurrents,op. cit., and Buppand Derian,The Failed
Promise of Nuclear Power, op. cit.
22 Interview.
495
vessel sat the loading machine. Reactor operators used this machine in order
to remove spent fuel from the core and load new fuel into it. The machine was
guided by remote control with the aid of a huge calculator. Operators fed the
calculator perforated paper control tapes which contained coded instructions
that told the machine which channel to load (or unload) and how many
fuel rods to load it with. The machine then executed these instructions automatically.
On 17 October 1969, loading machine operators began testing a new
control tape. As far as they knew, the loading machine contained five uranium
fuel rods which it was about to load into an empty channel. In fact, however,
the machine contained five, slightly thicker rods filled with solid graphite.
Everything went smoothly until 6.32 am, when the last rod from the loading
machine began sliding into place. Operators were puzzled when this rod protruded from the top of the channel. They thought that the problem might lie
with the automatic control system, which had been acting up a little recently.
They decided to override the automatic mechanisms manually, and by
6.58 am, they had managed to cram the recalcitrant rod all the way into the
channel.
At 7.08 am, the terrifying siren of the reactor's alarm system blared. Because
graphite rods were slightly thicker than uranium fuel rods, that last graphite
rod had blocked the flow of cooling gas in the channel. The graphite rods had
been loaded on top of several uranium fuel rods, which were fissioning away
in the lower part of the channel. In the absence of cooling gas, the uranium
rods had begun to overheat. The uranium melted the metal cladding around
the rods, which then fused together. The excess heat had thus caused a meltdown in that channel. Fortunately for them, the operators soon realized that
something had gone amiss. By shutting down the reactor quickly enough, they
managed to avoid an accident on the scale of the one at Chernobyl 17 years
later.
Nonetheless, considerable damage was inflicted on the reactor. After the fuel
rods fused together, the fused metals had been projected out of the channel by
pressurized cooling gas that suddenly burst into the channel. In addition to the
disaster caused by a melted channel, therefore, over 100 kilograms of contaminated debris had burst out on to the structure that supported the reactor
core. Furthermore, the pipes which contained the cooling gas had been
exposed to radiation. Before Saint-Laurent could go back on line, the contaminated debris had to be cleaned up and the damage repaired.3
Saint-Laurent thus faced multiple threats in October 1969. Site employees
routinely used the word 'pollution' to describe the radioactive contamination
of their reactor; on the most obvious material level, this pollution threatened
23 This account of the accident and the extent of the damage is based on the following
sources: Centrale de St Laurent des Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Pollution du reacteur,
analyse des signaux DRG', Depannage du reacteur SL1, rapport no. 1; Georges Lamiral,
Chronique de Trente Annees d'Equipement Nucleaire, op. cit., 2: 109-12.
496
the integrity and proper functioning of the reactor.24The pollution also posed
a threat to a fundamental basis upon which Saint-Laurent employees constructed their identities as nuclear workers, engineers and managers: it cast
doubt on their ability to control, let alone operate, the reactor. Meanwhile, the
decision to discontinue the gas-graphite design threatened their place in the
great story of French technological glory: if the gas-graphite programme no
longer constituted the forefront of the French nuclear programme, then they
were no longer at the forefront of high technology work, and therefore no
longer pioneers. Finally, the simultaneous occurrence of the accident and
Boiteux's announcement reinforced all of these threats, for the accident
seemed to prove that top-level EDF managers had been correct to judge the
gas-graphite programme unsuitable for further development.
The technological and cultural aspects of these threats were inextricable. The
same event that materially polluted the reactor also tainted the social identities
of those who worked there. The putatively economic decision to discontinue
the gas-graphite programme (itself the outcome of political debates, though
space prevents me from analysing that decision here) threatened the self-image
of Saint-Laurent employees. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the
technological process of cleaning the reactor was a cultural process as well.25
Cleaning the debris under the core posed a particularly thorny problem for
the engineers in charge of designing the clean-up operation, because the
mezzanine was completely inaccessible by any sort of passageway. Initially,
they thought about building a special remote control device that they could
lower into the mezzanine through the damaged channel.26After considerable
debate, however, they decided that such a device would cost too much and
take too long to build. Instead, they chose to adopt the 'solution of direct
clean-up by access through the mezzanine'.27In other words, they decided to
send people directly into the space under the reactor core to clear the debris
24 The use of 'pollution' occurs in virtually all reports of the accident and its clean-up. For
example: Centrale de St Laurent des Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPTC), 'Pollution du reacteur,
analyse des signaux DRG', Depannage du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 1; Centrale de St Laurent des
Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Mesures de pollution', Depannage du reacteur SL1,
Rapport no. 4 (27-1-70). Anthropologist Franqoise Zonabend gives a fascinating analysis of the
varying cultural meanings of words such as 'pollution' and 'contamination' in the contemporary
nuclear industry in her La presqu'ile au nucleaire (Paris 1989).
25 As is usually the case when people with distinct areas of expertise attempt to solve a problem
together, everyone had a different idea about how to proceed with the clean-up. Indeed, someone
interested in scientific controversies could write an entire paper on the social and political dimensions of repair choices.
26 Centrale de St Laurent des Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Pollution du reacteur,
analyse des signaux DRG', Depannage du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 1; Centrale de St Laurent des
Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Etat d'avancement des etudes et des travaux au 17.12.69',
Depannage du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 2.
27 Centrale de St Laurent des Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Choix fondamentaux pour
la suite des operations de depannage', Depannage du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 3.
497
and the contamination. They estimated that the radiation level in the mezzanine would range from 15 to 30 rem/hour. Legally, the maximum allowable
radioactive dose which nuclear workers could receive was 5 rem/year. One
hour in the mezzanine, therefore, would expose workers to between three and
six times as much radiation as they were normally allowed in one year. Under
'exceptional circumstances', regulations permitted the industry to expose
workers to a one-time dose of 12 rems.28A worker who received such a dose,
however, would have to wait a long time before being allowed in a regulated
zone again. Wanting to ensure that their men could work in the reactor after
the repairs were completed, engineers and managers decided that no single
employee should spend more than 12 minutes in the contaminated zone (and
that many should spend less time than that). This limit, coupled with the
extremely dangerous conditions of the work space, meant that every man's
movement would have to be meticulously planned.
Clearly, material considerations shaped the design of the clean-up operation.
Certain tasks needed accomplishing, and the physical conditions under
which the work had to be done presented a real and extreme danger of
radioactive exposure and contamination to the workers. But the significance
of this process was only partly shaped by its material dimensions. A close
examination of the form of this operation and the language that Saint-Laurent
employees used to discuss it shows that this process also had characteristics
commonly associated with ritual activities.
As noted in the introduction, I am comparing the clean-up to a ritual
because it was a highly stylized and ordered event whose physical and
linguistic practices enabled its participants to assert and enact their belief
systems and identities. As we shall see, the clean-up shared numerous features
of rituals: it took place in a specially prepared space, it had to be choreographed and rehearsed, it required special clothing, and the community values
that it expressed were specified and sanctioned ahead of time. These characteristics alone, however, would not justify an analogy with ritual activities.
What makes this analogy analytically useful is the meaning and function that
the clean-up had as an event for those who engaged in it, coupled with the
ways in which language and physical practices acted together to produce
meaning and function.29
Indeed, comparing the clean-up process to a ritual helps us to transcend
analytic oppositions between material and cultural realms. On one level, the
process functioned as did many cleansing or healing rituals: it removed the
pollution that filled the reactor; it repaired the damage (healed the illness) that
28 Ibid. Clearly, an analysis of the cultural and political construction of 'acceptable' radiation
doses would be fascinating; unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this article. A not very satisfying (from a cultural point of view) discussion of how international radiation exposure norms were
set can be found in George Mazuzan and Samuel Walker, Controlling the Atom (Berkeley 1984).
29 I deliberately combine an analysis of function and meaning, because there is no question that
had the accident not occurred, there would have been no clean-up or equivalent at Saint-Laurent.
But this functionality does not mean that the process had no further meaning.
498
prevented it from operating normally.30The reactor, moreover, was not just in

danger, but also defiled by the implication that it could not perform its
electricity-production duties effectively; the clean-up restored its functionality
and its reputation. On another level, the process functioned psychologically,
providing a means for employees to deal with the anxieties produced by
the events of October 1969. The accident had thrown their skills as reactor
operators into question; putting the reactor back on line could redeem their
qualifications. Finally, the clean-up became an event that reaffirmed the meaning of individual and community identity. Both the accident and Boiteux's
announcement had stained their community identity at Saint-Laurent; by the
time the clean-up ended, they had reaffirmed their solidarity as nuclear
employees. The discontinuation of their reactor's design had undermined their
identities as pioneers. Undertaking the most challenging clean-up operation in
the history of nuclear power ended up restoring that identity and making sense
of it in a world with no gas-graphite reactors in its future. These functions and
meanings, as we shall see, came from the inseparability of the material and cultural dimensions of the clean-up. If, for example, workers had failed to repair
the reactor, or had done so poorly or with many casualties, then the clean-up
would not have helped them confront threats to their cultural identities.
Three elements were essential in defining the ritualized form of the clean-up:
dress, motion and space. As noted earlier, the area which men had to penetrate
in order to clean was polluted with extremely high levels of radioactive contamination - more so, probably, than anything nuclear workers had ever
encountered. Just as participants in cleansing rituals must often wear special
garments to avoid personal contamination, so, too, the Saint-Laurent workers
required special clothing and equipment in order to enter the contaminated
area. In this case, dressing properly involved donning multiple layers of
shining white garments, putting radiation detectors on every part of the body,
and hooking up breathing and communication apparatus.31
Even wearing all this equipment, men could not expect to stay in the work
space for longer than a few minutes. And much needed to be done while they
were there. They had to remove the arm of a remote control device that had
fallen to the bottom of the channel during a previous rescue attempt, clear and
30 Here I would also argue that the dangers faced by the reactors were as real to the culture in
which it lived as pollution and illness are to the cultures which perform what anthropologists label
cleansing or healing rituals. In other words, just because the technological culture of the reactor
happens to be one we share - just because, for example, we consider the danger posed by radiation 'real', the measures taken to deal with that danger 'truly effective', and the clean-up operation
in general one to be of 'practical' value - does not mean that we cannot use analytic techniques
usually reserved for the study of other cultures to understand the multiple dimensions of the cleanup; after all, pollution is real and cleansing or healing rituals are effective and practical for most of
those who engage in them. For an extended treatment of pollution and rituals, see Mary Douglas,
Purity and Danger (Routledge 1966); Zonabend, in La presqu'ile au nucleaire, applies some of
these ideas to her treatment of France's nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in La Hague.
31 Centrale de St Laurent des Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Mesures de pollution',
Depannage du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 4 (27-1-70).
499
scrub the flooring and structure upon which the reactor core rested, scrub the
cells around the melted channel, and more.32The large amount of work combined with the extreme conditions had two implications: workers from outside
the plant were needed to participate in the operation since Saint-Laurent did
not have enough workers to carry out the enormous task, and the motions that
each individual made while inside the reactor had to be carefully choreographed and rehearsed.33In order to enable all workers to practise the motions
needed to accomplish the tasks at hand, a scale model was built of the area in
which the 'intervention' (as the mezzanine operation soon came to be called)
would take place. As in many other forms of ritualized activity, the right
motions were essential for the success of the clean-up. Each worker had to
practise his assigned set of motions on the model. No one would be allowed
inside the reactor until he had thoroughly rehearsed every movement and
gesture he needed to make.34
Finally, much as a stage must be set for ritual performances, the space in
which the intervention would occur required preparation. The mezzanine and
the underbelly of the reactor was not a space that people normally occupied,
and in order to give men access to this space a tunnel had to be built. This was
no simple task. It meant dismantling the cell underneath the channel and clearing three tons of graphite and one ton of steel out of the way. Furthermore, the
passageway had to become fit for human use. This required the installation of
ventilation, lighting, signals, intercoms and television monitoring cameras.
The work space at the end of the tunnel where much of the scrubbing and dismantling would take place required similar equipment. Finally, workers built
an airtight work zone made of canvas and vinyl at the entrance of the tunnel,
where they would change into the special outfits that would allow them to
work in a contaminated zone. Setting the stage alone took 1,335 man-hours of
work. These arrangements notwithstanding, the conditions in this space
remained extremely harsh: in addition to high radiation levels, the temperature
stayed at around 35? to 40?C (95?-104?F) with very poor air circulation.35
By April 1970, the dress, motions and space which would lend the clean-up
the shape of a ritualized event were prepared, and the time to begin cleaning
had arrived. The space at the entrance to the tunnel where workers prepared
to go into the contaminated area was carefully compartmentalized. In the first
32 Centrale de St Laurent des Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Choix fondamentaux pour
la suite du depannage, edition revue et corrigee du rapport no. 3', Depannage du reacteur SL1,
Rapport no. 5 and 'Programme du depannage et de la remise en service de la tranche', Depannage
du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 7.
33 M.J. Grand and M.J. Hurtiger, 'Aspect de radioprotection pendant les interventions de SaintLaurent-des-Eaux', Bulletin de l'Association Technique pour la production et l'utilisation de
l'Energie Nucleaire, 91 (1971), 48.
34 Centrale de St Laurent des Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Etat d'avancement des
etudes et travaux, planning au 1" juin '70', Depannage du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 13.
35 Grand and Hurtiger, 'Aspect de radioprotection', op. cit., and Centrale de St Laurent des
Eaux (Electricite de France, GRPT C), 'Etat d'avancement des etudes et travaux, planning au 1er
juin '70', Depannage du reacteur SL1, Rapport no. 13.
500
zone, someone monitored entrances into and exits from the reactor. Workers
arrived in their standard work outfits: T-shirt, jacket, pants, socks and tennis
shoes, all made of white cotton. Here they donned additional clothing: two
pairs of cotton overshoes, a pair of long-sleeved cotton gloves, a pair of longsleeved vinyl gloves, and a pair of vinyl leg-coverings that came up to their
knees. They picked up two kinds of radiation detectors (dosimeters and film
badges) and proceeded to the next zone. There, each worker received a mask
with a filter hooked up to an air supply and equipped with a microphone and
a tiny speaker to allow him to communicate with the men watching him
through the TV monitors. He then fitted a white cowl over his mask and
added a white overcoat with a hood that fitted over the cowl and mask. A
team of dressers sealed the seams of his outfit with adhesive tape and stuck
radiation detectors all over his body: two on his head, one on his chest, one on
his wrist, one on his crotch, and an additional detector somewhere else on his
body which would sound an alarm if it registered a radiation dose over 2.5
rems.36Thus equipped, the worker then entered a lock chamber where he was
pressurized (the reactor vessel was not at atmospheric pressure). Off to the
side of the lock chamber was another set of spaces through which the equipment that the worker needed entered the chamber (and through which the
contaminated debris that he removed left the reactor).
In order to gain access to the work space from the lock chamber, the
worker then needed to crawl up through the vertical tunnel using mountain
climbing pitons and other equipment. Once at his workplace, he spent
roughly ten minutes performing the motions that he had rehearsed so carefully
in the model. These might involve removing a chunk of debris, scrubbing a
surface, or any number of other small tasks. His time up, he then towed whatever debris he had removed back down the tunnel with him, dropped it off in its
designated spot, and removed the several kilos of clothes and equipment from
his body. Once he had left the tunnel, the next worker could enter to perform
his tasks, often repeating the motions engaged in by his predecessor. In this
fashion, workers succeeded one another for 'interventions' which lasted two or
three hours each. Each working day consisted of two such interventions; the
entire operation took three weeks. Approximately 300 people participated in
the operation in some capacity; around 100 actually entered the reactor.37
This description of the movements and practices involved in this part of the
clean-up operation already provides some sense of its ritualized qualities.
Participants wore white outfits designed and commissioned specially for the
event. During a normal workday, each worker had responsibility for a distinct
set of tasks involving his own particular skills; during the clean-up, the men
who entered the tunnel had essentially similar tasks to perform. These tasks
were choreographed and rehearsed ahead of time, and involved many of the
same motions. Each task was bounded by the same actions: it began with
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
501
dressing and entry into the tunnel, and ended with exit from the tunnel and
undressing.
Although these motions and their physical context may have lent a surreal
or other-worldly quality to the clean-up process, they did not in and of themselves impart meaning to the clean-up. In order to understand that dimension
of the process, we must examine how those who orchestrated and performed
those motions narrated their experience. These narratives were not just mere
descriptions: the language they used was vital in constructing the ritualized
nature and cultural meanings of the experience. Let us begin with the most
extensive and coherent narrative, produced by a participant for the Journal de
Saint-Laurent and written while the intervention was going on. Entitled 'Great
Spring-Cleaning' (itself a reference to a common ritual), the piece is well worth
quoting in full:
This is truly a rescue [mission], and doubtless this is why those involved in the cleaning of the
support structure work with a zeal and courage worthy of admiration.
On one side, there are those who 'dress up to go'; on the other, those who stay to help and
monitor.
In the dressing-room, the latter fuss over the former, turning a clasp that was pointing in
the wrong direction, adjusting a wayward buckle on one of many tubes, checking everything
scrupulously. It's a moving moment. Through the masks and the cowls, one can detect a
certain apprehension, fleeting but nonetheless real and quite understandable.
The operation itself begins. A lapse of time that seems very long goes by before a sound
link, then a television link is established.
This is where the essence of the operation lies:
On the one hand, the main actor, looking like an astronaut, who has just played mountain
climber to hoist himself on to the support structure and who now crawls as best he can, like
a potholer! On the other hand, those in charge of monitoring, who follow the operation
extremely attentively, offering advice and recommendations.
It is difficult to explain what stands out in this spectacle, because it is always difficult to
translate how looks, gestures and words contain sympathy and kindness.
This teamwork, accomplished with so much enthusiasm and great complicity, can only
end in complete success, which everyone hopes will come soon.38
The metaphors used to describe the workers who enter the tunnel - astronauts, mountain climbers and potholers - present a striking contrast to the
metaphor used in the title of the piece - 'great spring-cleaning'. Springcleaning epitomizes feminine work. The phrase immediately conjures up an
image of a housewife, hair bound in a scarf, throwing her windows wide open
and scrubbing her home. The astronaut metaphor, on the other hand, evoked
the ultimate male pioneer (particularly in the late 1960s, before women astronauts became heroines): the man who entered a space not made for men, who
crossed a frontier previously thought unassailable, who stood as a shining
symbol for the whole world of what other men could accomplish. Mountain
climbers and potholers were also respectably male heroes. They too performed
difficult physical feats under extreme conditions, and they did so with
38
JSL, no. 17 (May 1970).
502
'courage'. The gendered contrast between these metaphors represents a fundamental tension in the meanings of the clean-up process. Cleaning and repairing
a reactor was definitely less heroic than running it in the first place, and the
political context of accident only further eroded the valour of the process.
Comparing the process to a feminized ritual may have both expressed the
anxiety posed by this challenge to heroic identities and made light of it.
Equating the nuclear workers with symbols of heroic masculinity simultaneously reasserted and constructed the pioneering nature of nuclear work.
The event itself was construed as a 'spectacle', an enthralling performance
that captivated performers and spectators alike. The 'main actor' stood at the
centre of the show. His actions propelled the plot forward, and his predicament generated the emotional tension. The supporting characters fussed over
him and sustained him in his trial. The emotion conveyed by the performance
was subtle, elusive, contained in 'gestures' and 'looks'. But the message was
clear enough: community and solidarity. The participants were bound to each
other by 'sympathy', 'kindness' and 'complicity'. They formed a team, and
belonging to a community involved in a common project filled them with
'enthusiasm' and 'zeal'. The enormity of their task might cause 'fleeting apprehension', but solidarity made them fearless.
In this manner, the cleaning of the reactor was transformed from a collection of technical manoeuvres into a coherent set of culturally meaningful
actions. It became a way to deal not only with radioactive threat, but with
cultural threat. By participating in the clean-up, workers could not only
restore but also recreate their bruised identities. They could affirm their sense
of community and enact the values that held them together.
In part, the communications devices that enabled workers to keep track of
each other during the operation physically represented and constituted this
sense of community. Reporting on the clean-up in an industry journal, two site
managers noted:
Wearing a mask posed a problem of communication between the workers, who needed to be
able to talk with each other, with their foreman, and also with . . . [people] outside the
pressure vessel for technical, psychological and safety reasons. The psychological aspect was
very important for the mezzanine work, where the worker was alone in a hostile environment; particularly in this case, we wanted to reinforce the worker's impression of safety and
solidarity by installing a television link that enabled [us] to follow all his movements.3
In this passage, the authors underplayed the technical work performed by

the television cameras in favour of their psychological function. In this construction, the cameras were important not because they allowed engineers to
monitor events inside the reactor, but because they established a feeling of
'solidarity'.
Even before the intervention in the mezzanine took place, the discourse produced in the pages of the Journal de Saint-Laurent attempted to prescribe the
39
Grand and Hurtiger, 'Aspect de radioprotection', op. cit., 50.
503
meanings of the clean-up and restore a sense of pride and community to the
site. When reporting the speech which Boiteux made the day before the accident, the engineer-editor did not refer explicitly to the decision to discontinue
the gas-graphite design. Instead, he quoted the part of Boiteux's speech that
praised the work done at the site. From this statement, the editor concluded
that 'our feeling of pride in the success of Saint-Laurent I was therefore justified'.40He continued in this reassuring vein:
The incident of October 17 ... does not cast doubt on the [operational] principle of our
reactors, but it does show that industrial certainty does not exist. There was much talk after
the visit of our Directeur General [Boiteux] and the break-down of the reactor. Terms like
design competitiveness, national independence and foreign offensive were abundantly used.
It is normal that each of us should express himself freely about in-house projects or plans,
but this should be done without passion, for nothing is certain in technological or economic
[matters]. At Saint-Laurent, the time has arrived for repairs, and we will be judged according
to the role that we have to play there. The endeavour is sizeable, but it will be useful to all
regardless of which 'nuclear system' is chosen.4
Clearly, the editor was trying to minimize the damage caused in mid-October.
The accident did not threaten the working principles of their reactor.
Employees should temper the rage they felt about the discontinuation of their
design: rage served no purpose, and now only their success in repairing the
reactor mattered.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the editor had begun to redefine the
significance of their work. In previous editions of the Journal, work at SaintLaurent was significant (and pioneering) because it would prove the commercial viability of French gas-graphite reactors. With that design gone, their
work needed a new purpose (beyond merely operating Saint-Laurent 1) - one
that would once again place them at the frontier of French technological
endeavours. The editor wanted to reassure his readers that even if France
ended up with an American design, the Saint-Laurent clean-up would contribute to general nuclear knowledge and achievement. At the same time, he
reaffirmed the commercial identity of Saint-Laurent. In his subsequent discussion of the various clean-up solutions under consideration, he asserted
somewhat defensively that 'it is quite certain that only industrial solutions will
be adopted, for Saint-Laurent is not an experimental tool'.42Unlike Marcoule
and even Chinon, the reactor at Saint-Laurent would still produce commercially viable nuclear electricity. The ultimate achievement of its employees,
in other words, would remain unsullied. He closed his discussion of the accident by asserting the communal spirit of the site employees: 'The devotion of
Plant employees, and the collaboration ... of other organizations ... are the
best assurances for a speedy start-up.'43Who, after such an affirmation of
solidarity, could possibly withold his 'devotion'?
40
41
42
43
JSL, no. 10-11 (October-November 1969), 1.

Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 5.
504
In the following issue, the editor also began, somewhat slyly, to prepare his
readers for the actions they would soon undertake:
The level of radiation measured under the reactor is less than that predicted by calculations.
Given the problems involved in observing and repairing by remote control, we might ask
ourselves whether in the end it might not be better to go there [under the reactor] to carry out
short but more efficient repairs.44
Two issues later, spring had arrived, workers were busy rehearsing their
motions for the interventions, and the work space inside the reactor was being
set up. The appearance of the sun sparked optimism in the heart of our editor,
who enthused: 'I hope that the personal satisfaction that we derive from these
happier days will help us better . . . fulfil the hopes that we share of putting
Saint-Laurent 1, of which we were so proud last October, back on its feet.'45
Tirelessly asserting the common hope that should bind all site employees
together, this passage also presented an image of the reactor as a sick patient,
whom everyone would work together to heal.
A few pages later in the same issue, a description of the actions undertaken
by employees in preparation for the main intervention presaged the ritualistic
aspects of this event:
Everyone is making a profound effort to precisely define the gestures that need to be made in
this confined and unsanitary work site. The best example is doubtless the work accomplished
by machinists on the [scale] model. A detailed study of tool supplies, scaffolding, general
cleanliness and personnel safety has helped them to programme the intervention ... with the
greatest chance of success. This grand premiere of 'nuclear potholing' will debut at the end of
April.46
Even before the intervention began, the language used to describe it prescribed
its meanings. Right away, it became a pioneering act of 'potholing'. Already
defined as a spectacle, this event would have a 'premiere' like any other show.
From the start, then, the intervention was construed as redemption, as an
event in which participants would redeem their identities as skilled nuclear
workers and as pioneers. Its spectacular nature would make these meanings
clear not only to those putting on the performance, but also to those viewing it
from afar. (Though the Journal de Saint-Laurent was primarily for site
employees, it was also distributed to a select group of highly-placed engineers
engaged in nuclear work elsewhere in EDF.) The collective character of the
endeavour came to represent the familial nature of site relationships and
helped to recreate a sense of community. Further, the intervention would give
gas-graphite employees a way of adjusting to a world in which theirs would no
longer be the cutting-edge technology: even though some other reactor design
would take precedence, the work they did would still be avant-garde, would
44
45
46
JSL, no. 12-13 (December 1969-January 1970), 2.

JSL, no. 16 (April 1970), 1.
Ibid., 3-4.
505
still contribute to the great march of French nuclear progress. As every gesture,
every look, every piece of equipment was ascribed significance, the ritualized
practices of the clean-up gave these ideological constructs physical manifestation and became a means by which to constitute and act out these cultural
meanings.
Twenty years later, the ways in which workers talked about the clean-up
shows the uniqueness of this experience for them and how deeply that
experience etched some of these meanings on their minds. The associations
between the accident and the abandonment of the gas-graphite reactor
remained clear for all of them; as one man put it succinctly, the accident came
at a 'politically unfortunate' time.47But these narratives also reveal something
else. They give us a glimpse of what was not allowed in the ritualization of and
discourse about the clean-up: fear, panic, and isolation. Let us examine two
such accounts:
We had a camera, we could see the [guy] who went in just before us. So this guy had sawed
[something], he had screwed a bolt in, he had put the saw here, another thing there. And then
we had to go in, we knew where to find [stuff], and tac! we took the saw, we sawed, for three
minutes, eh? And ... then clac! [the buzzer] rang, and we had to go back down .... And
then we knew that we had gotten three rems. Well there I was scared, eh, there I was scared.
Because you were all alone, eh? You had to go, and you were all alone.48
In the vessel, with the mask and everything ... I saw some come out ... who had puked
in [their suits]. Whew! . .. As long as you don't panic, it's fine. It's when you panic, then
you're screwed [alors la c'est foutu]. The problem was that ... the only air flow came from
a faucet [in the masks] and the air used for breathing also served to cool you down ... it was
40 degrees [celsius], eh? so, well ... you climbed the ladder all along the heat exchanger [for]
eighteen metres, and there was no room [to manoeuvre] .... It's a little bit like diving, or
potholing, it's like potholing .... It's pretty stressful, even with all that equipment.49
These did not appear to be unpleasant memories. These men told their war
stories with great relish (to their young female interviewer). The worker who
got three rems spoke of them as if they were a badge of honour. He carried
them with dignity and pride, much the way a war hero might wear a permanent injury. At the same time, however, these memories stress a different
dimension of heroism: not the noble goals or the moving moments, but the
fear, the panic, the sense of isolation, and the tremendous physical and mental
effort required to perform such a task. These narrative elements reinforce
another aspect of ritualized activity. Rituals are not spontaneous reactions but
orchestrated, choreographed events; they are filled not with raw emotion but
with institutionally sanctioned feelings. Similarly, examining the ritualized
aspects of the clean-up tells us how institutionally-produced ideologies became
embedded in and constituted by the practices and language of the participants.
It does not tell us anything about who rejected those ideologies or what else
those practices may have meant to those who took part in the clean-up. The
47
48
49
Interview.
Interview.
Interview.
506
raw emotions came through not in the contemporary, sanctioned descriptions

of the clean-up, but in interviews conducted 20 years later. And even these
interviews tell us little about alternative meanings, conducted as they were
with men who still work at Saint-Laurent and who therefore presumably still
have a stake in this story.
These limitations notwithstanding, we have learned a great deal by
examining the Saint-Laurent clean-up as a ritualized event. We have seen how
the language with which workers and engineers discussed their activities gave
meaning to their experience. Employees used words to make themselves into
pioneers, heroes, and men. But words alone did not accomplish this feat. The
practices in which they engaged, and which derived meaning from this
language, also fixed that meaning. The motions they performed - the
experience of climbing a dark tunnel, of working in a radioactive space reified the cultural significance of their work. Their success in repairing the
damage ensured their identities as heroes. Their ritualized actions worked
together with the discourse of the Journal de Saint-Laurent to reconstitute a
sense of community and a language of solidarity.
Today in the Loire Valley, alongside the chateaux that stand as monuments to
the glory of medieval France, nuclear reactors tower into the sky. Such juxtapositions of French culture, state power and technological prowess have provided the French nuclear industry with potent symbolism. Key-rings offered to
visitors at the site of Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux in the late 1980s, for example,
featured the Chateau de Chambord in the background and the four SaintLaurent reactors in the foreground. Such representational strategies permeate
the nuclear programme and date back to its earliest years, when its promoters
portrayed it as the redeemer of the glory that France lost during the second
world war and the purveyor of the nation's future political and industrial
power.50 In the mid-1950s, reactors at Marcoule were described as large
enough to house several Arcs de Triomphe. In the early 1960s, wine labels
from the vineyards of Chinon and Chusclan portrayed nuclear reactors nestled
comfortably amid the vines. Throughout the history of the nuclear programme, this kind of imagery served to recreate and strengthen a French
tradition of equating national grandeur and technological prowess.51
At first glance, images such as those on the Saint-Laurent key-rings seem
kitschy, absurd. They appear no more than simplistic strategies to promote a
problematic technology. In fact, these strategies seem so transparent that we
may suspect that no one, including (and perhaps especially) their proponents,
could possibly take them seriously. A historical examination of such represen50 See Hecht, 'Political Designs', op. cit., idem, 'Living with large-scale technology', Techniques
et culture, 19 (1992); idem, 'Peasants, Engineers, and Nuclear Cathedrals: Narrating
Modernization in Postwar Provincial France', French Historical Studies (Summer 1997).
51 For more on this tradition, see Cecil O. Smith, 'The Longest Run: Public Engineers and
Planning in France', American Historical Review (June 1990).
507
tations, however, shows that they formed part of a complex ideological system
whose components extended well beyond the surface of a key-ring or a wine
label. These images, designed for public consumption, had counterparts within the nuclear programme. Many members of the nuclear programme did
equate technological prowess and French grandeur. But this equation was
more subtle, more pervasive and ultimately more powerful than any key-ring
could ever be. As we have seen, the ideologies neatly summarized by these
images were embedded in the technologies and practices of the French nuclear
programme and in the identities of many of its members.
We have learned, indeed, something about how the ideologies and practices
of the French nuclear programme became entwined. The symbolism evoked by
placing reactors next to chateaux and in vineyards, on key-rings and wine
labels, ran deep in the nuclear programme. The heroic, grandiose rhetoric used
to promote the programme was far more than rhetoric: it formed part of a
complex ideological system not only composed of words and images but also
embedded in and constituted by the practices of those who worked for the
programme.
This ideological system laid out a story of French technological prowess. In
EDF's version of the story, the plot centred round a nationalized company that
would build the best and most efficient nuclear reactors in the world; the
heroes were the employees of that company. The events of October 1969
belied this story, threatened its validity. To deal with this threat, Saint-Laurent
employees linked the cultural and material dimensions of nuclear work even
more tightly. The ritualization of the clean-up enabled both dimensions to
survive and adapt to a changing context. Through processes such as this one,
in which technologies, gestures, practices and experiences become permeated
with meaning, the heroic saga of French nuclear achievement, and technological progress more generally, has continued to live, change and thrive.
Gabrielle Hecht
is an assistant professor in the history department at Stanford
University. She is the author of several articles on the French nuclear
programme and of The Radiance of France: Nuclear Technology
and National Identity after World War II (forthcoming). She is
currently researching how technological ideas and artifacts mediate
the relationship between France and its overseas territories and
former colonies in the postwar period.

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

Author(s): Gabrielle Hecht

Enacting Cultural Identity: Risk and Ritual in

On 16 October 1969, Marcel Boiteux, the president of Electricite de France

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

ways in which experience is cultural and culture is experiential. In other

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

state and to act as an embodiment of left-wing technocratic ideology. Its

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

The utility symbolized not nationalism but nationalization. Although its

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

The competition between Saint-Laurent and other plants was analogous to a

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

prevented it from operating normally.30The reactor, moreover, was not just in

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

JSL, no. 17 (May 1970).

In this passage, the authors underplayed the technical work performed by

Grand and Hurtiger, 'Aspect de radioprotection', op. cit., 50.

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

JSL, no. 10-11 (October-November 1969), 1.

JSL, no. 12-13 (December 1969-January 1970), 2.

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

raw emotions came through not in the contemporary, sanctioned descriptions

Hecht:Riskand Ritualin the FrenchNuclearWorkplace

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