C-HIM: Conference on the Historical Use of Images

Brussels, March 10th-11th 2009

Visual documents, Virtual reality and the renewal of Labour history

Alain P. Michel

Abstract : 245 words

The Renault automobile firm has produced a wide range of images (cinema, photographs, and
industrial drawings) that renew the technological, social and cultural history of the companys
strain to organize and rationalize the production of cars. These visual documents are the bases
of the Virtual Factories ANR research program (2008-2012), which has started with the 3D
reconstruction of the C5 workshop in which the Renault Automobile Company introduced
the manual chassis assembly line in 1917 and made it evolve until the late 1920's. This study
is both a historical enquiry on industrial work, and an archaeological project aiming at the
virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges.
My main point concerns the way images are used to apprehend the reality of the work
they represent, not as visual evidence or simply illustrations for the historian, but as a first
hand source. It is an archivist approach of non-conventional historic documents. In this
perspective, I develop a methodological analysis of the images, evaluating the advantages and
limits of those visual sources to apprehend such a complex technological instrument as an
assembly line.
Beyond this study of the Renault's case, the idea is to overpass the classical
opposition between the formal prescriptions and the real practices to understand the way
the bureaus and the workshops participated together in the productive process. It is an
illustration of the way multimedia and computer techniques can produce a new type of
constructed historical documents that can be adapted to other historical investigations.

Paper : 7600 words

As a labour historian, my main interest is the development of assembly lines in the Renault
automobile factories (1917-1939)1. To revisit the firms effort to rationalize its production of
cars and apprehend the way workers actually worked, I use non-conventional i.e. non-written

Alain P. Michel, Travail la chane. Renault 1898-1947, Boulogne-Billancourt, ETAI, 2007, 192 p.

historic sources. This re-examination is possible because automobile firms have produced a
wide range of corporate images (cinema, photographs, and industrial drawings). In the first 50
years of its history, the Renault Company made 70,000 pictures, shot a few documentary films
adding up 210 minutes of industrial scenes and drew 45,000 implementation plans of its
Billancourt factory. These sources are distinct from the huge written archives of the direction,
and poles apart to the published literature on industrial management. Images show things that
no writing talks about. The stake is important because they present another point of view that
has never been systematically used by historians.
My utilization of images is unusual among labour historians and out of line with common
iconographic and visual studies. First, because my purpose is not the history of images, but a
proper historical use of visual documents in order to inform obscurities in the industrial past.
Consequently, I consider all sorts off images together rather than specializing in one specific
type (painting, photography, film, etc.) as most image experts do. Off course, this does not
mean that all images are similar. Each image is apprehended through its specificities, but
assembled in a corpus documenting a similar subject here Renaults C5 workshop - so as to
be compared and confronted one to another.
This instrumental and serial apprehension of images leads to the second peculiarity. I am
interested in all available images regardless of their artistic value. On such industrial topic as
the assembly line, most images are common, vulgar products of command. Most settings are
grey, many takes are blurred, editing are expected, striking productions only exceptional. With
such a research subject, it would be problematical to consider only works of art. The point is
not to pretend that all images are alike but to consider them according to their documentary
interest, regardless of aesthetic criteria. The idea is to apply to images the historical methods of
textual analysis, both because they can be apprehended as none verbal texts2, because they

D. F. MacKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, London, The British Library, 1985.

are part of a representational device which constructs a significant discourse3 and because
their materiality is essential to the understanding of their meaning4. The historic information is
both in and outside the image. Prosaically, concerning a specific subject (i.e. the introduction of
an assembly line in an automobile workshop), I assemble a systematic iconographic corpus of
all images and texts available. But, as images-texts are not similar to writings, the classical
historic methodology is not directly transposable to visual documents. The specific problem is
to exploit various information from a heterogeneous documentary corpus.
I will first present the way I handle still and motion pictures to apprehend the reality of the
work they represent - neither as visual evidence nor as simply illustrations for the historian -,
but as a first-hand source5. In this perspective, a second development suggests an investigation
procedure which apprehends images as historical records, in order to specify their capacity (and
limits) in documenting an otherwise unknown history. In a third step, I will show how this
constructed iconographic corpus can serve as the documentary data base of a virtual
reconstruction of an industrial building and of a working process. Digital technologies permit a
systematic cross examination of the multiple and fragmented information held by images, and
open a new approach in the micro-history of a specific workshop. Beyond the Renault case, my
main topic here is to show how images can remodel business and labour history.
I- Pragmatic approach of visual documents
A lone picture is historically mute. It affects the spectator but does not state what it means.
Most images have to be interpreted without the written, explicit records of their production.
Who is the author? When and why did he (or she) produce this specific image? What was
expected and how did viewers react? Off course, it is easier to analyze an image with this

Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988.
Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, History, Language, and Practices, Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997.
5
Joeri Januarius, Picturing the everyday Life of Limburg Miners: Photographs as a Historical Source , IRSH,
53, 2008, pp. 293-312.
4

contextual information. But my point is that when it cannot be found, the loss of a written
explanation does not compromise its informative potential. Without words, one has to look
closely at the image and exploit all the signs and clues that surround it6.
Beyond this study of Renault's case, one aim of this analysis of the visual representation of
the assembly line is to overpass the classical opposition between the formal prescriptions and
the real practices. Another track is to understand the way the bureaus and the factories
participated together in the productive process. The last point is to confront the rational
literature to the evidence of the workshop practice visible on images.
Images as equivocal evidence
A text will never sum up an image: the two media transmit different types of information that
should not be reduced or considered as secondary to the other. On the contrary, each
apprehends facts differently and permits the confrontation of complementary, irreducible
interpretation of the past. The combination of writings and images give a new lighting on our
historical knowledge. For example, most of what we know about the assembly line comes from
the firms written records, comments made by the press or union recrimination. But the
workers points-of-view are scarce, rarely formalized in verbal discourses. Yet many graphic
documents circulated in the workshops such as agency plans and maps and those papers are
combinations of drawings, none-verbal words and numbers. The shape of a machine is
documented with indications of length, date, nomenclatures of parts, etc. A photographic print
is often documented with a title, a serial number, a caption which cannot sum up the image
itself. Even silent films are crossed with words in subtitles which survive the voices and sounds
of the talkies. Posters intrinsically combine visuals and words and show how the two modes of
expression each sustain the other. The reading of a visual document has to be multidirectional.

Carlo Ginzburg, "Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d'un paradigme de l'indice" Le dbat, november 1980, n 6, pp. 3-44.

My use of images because they give a different vision of the workshops -, is an attempt to
reconsider the question of work and labour. I try to rebalance a view point that has mostly been
apprehended through the archives of management and organizations. But an image is never just
visual evidence. Like any other document it has to be criticized and confronted to other
sources. Films, photographs and industrial drawing are partial. Like most writings, they often
come from organizations archives. We cannot just believe the visual documents by arguing
that they would show the reality better than written sources. There is an intention behind those
documents. Their setting gives a limited view of the reality. For example, the movement, which
is being reproduced in a film, is not an accurate transposition of the working pace. Similarly,
photographs can give a view of a scene which is more a conventional posture than a
spontaneous print of the job. The same can be said about the mechanical drawings even if they
are considered by the workshop management as the ultimate authority in factory production.
This necessary precaution towards visual documents should not shift to a systematic distrust.
Even if they bias reality, industrial images give a technological and local view of the workshops
and make it possible to see new aspects of the agency of men and machines. For instance,
implantation plans and maps are indispensable to document both the evolution of the factory
and the place of each workshop in the global industrial process. They also help identify and
localize pictures or shots shown on images. Complementarity is a key to the understanding of
visual scenes.
Images as prescription and action
The Renault Company archives have preserved an important collection of plans, initially
produced by a specific engineering and design department in charge of the factory agency. This
bureau was called Tools & Maintenance Service (SOE for Service Outillage Entretien)7.

Alain P. Michel, Les plans d'une usine en expansion : Renault, 1898-1939. Ouverture sur les espaces de la production
industrielle, in Natacha Coquery, Liliane Hilaire-Prez, Line Sallmann, Catherine Verna (dir.), Artisans, industrie.

Between 1911 and 1939 the SOE produced a series of 45.000 implantation plans and
complementary graphic documents (drawings, tables, nomenclatures) which attest to the
companys ability to control and adjust its development. Concerning perennial objects
(buildings, machine-tools, etc.) and being the ultimate reference, these plans were preserved
whereas the texts of this service (notes, correspondences, reports, etc.) disappeared. The
superiority of words is not universal.
Some ties between the Maintenance Service and the workshops can be deduced from the study
of the SOE plans. The design department made technical projects to organize the practices of
production, but they were frequently amended on the spot and often modified because the
project could not be directly carried out as such. Multiple erasures, modifications and scrapes
testify of this confrontation to workshop reality. These changes were not just opposition from
the workshop to a bureaucratic normalization. They were integrated in the drawing process
itself. Plans were drawn, dated and signed with the systematic mention Rectified by (so and
so) and with the empty space for the date of the expected rectification. I see this progressive
elaboration as an argument to contest the idea that all power was taken away from the shop by
the administration, even in such a rationalized process as the assembly line. The instance that
formalizes and finalizes a project was not the only one to contribute to it. The "human factor"
was essential to the elaboration of the production installations, workshop know-how and team
work being taken into account. It is thus possible to see that the introduction of the assembly
line was not merely imposed upon from above. The industrial actors organized themselves to
make the assembly line function in a way that did not fit the model. These graphic
recordkeeping turn out to be important to understand the way the assembly line was introduced
in Billancourt during the First World War and how it never really became a "routine" in the
early 1920s and 1930s. They are a good indicator of the gap between prescription and action. In

Nouvelles rvolutions du Moyen-Age nos jours, Cahiers dhistoire et de philosophie des sciences, n 52, novembre 2004,
pp. 93-102.

a micro based perspective, these visual and tangible documents are not just a complement to the
social and cultural representation of the assembly line. They help understand the way people
actually worked.
-Images as model and practice
Renault's case is also a good example to show that the mass production ideal did not do away
with other forms of fabrication. The American experiences were a model for the French
automobile industry. But the technologies that were transferred to France have more to do with
the French experience than with the American model. In the French industrial context, it was
better not to copy. Images often are the only surviving signs of this gap.
The Renault archives have kept many accounts and official reports of visits to foreign rival
factories, which are mostly non-American and relatively small units8. It is interesting to see that
those visitors were not only trying to copy an ideal. Indeed, they were fascinated by the biggest
and most modern factories, but their major quest was elsewhere. Their reports show that they
were mostly looking for ideas that could help solve specific problems in the organization of
their own factory. Renaults engineers were sent more as missionaries than as spies. They did
not try to discover unknown and radical inventions. They had trivial questions to ask, both
verbally by asking (and not being answered) or visually by looking, reporting and scratching.
Their initial hand-written reports are bristling with outlines that sum up graphically the
practical installation the visitor also describes with words.
These raw sketches and other deleted tracings from the SOE are different in nature from the
good looking public documents published in the rational literature. Presented as a recipe, a plan
just draws the outline of an abstraction but not the steps of its realization. Such an image is just
a representation dissimulating the reality it refers to.

Inspection and visit Reports (2 boxes), Archives of the Historical Society of the Renault Group (SHGR).

This published show-off explains why the American models, although known to all in the
1910's, were not really adapted in France before the late 1920's. My thesis is that this rational
project imposed cohesive restrictions to the workforce but that it was able to function
efficiently, not because it was the best way, but because compromises could be found in the
workshops in order for the vehicles to be complete at the end of the line. Along with the
technical choice, there is a social construction and a cultural acceptance that are essential to its
efficiency. Nevertheless, the rational ideal was stubborn. Its partial setbacks did not prevent it
from imposing pain to the workforce, which could escape by leaving the workshop or by
finding spaces of resistance.
In a history approach, a specific image has to be considered among the archives it comes from,
in order to understand the context of its production and of its perception9. Thus, my
apprehension of the assembly line through visual sources does not aim at a direct vision of the
material and actual process that was introduced in the Renault factories. Those documents deal
with the representation of the productive innovation. They produce a different kind of discourse
that tends to make it look as though the assembly line was actually implanted as it should be.
But images are intractable and often contradict, on their border, what there are expected to
express. They are a good means to spot gaps between a praised model and the shot of a real
installation. Yet the explanation of this noise requires a methodological approach of visual
sources.
II- Methodological approach of visual archives
An image gives an invaluable testimony of the difference between what it has mission of
illustrating and the share of the reality which appears on its margins. Even supervised, images

Alain P. Michel, Filmer le travail, les travailleuses et les travailleurs dans les usines Renault de l'entre-deux-guerres, in
Patrice Marcilloux (dir.), Le travail en reprsentations, Paris, ditions du CTHS, 2005, pp. 131-150. Also, Id., Corporate
Films of Industrial Work: Renault (1916-1939) , in Vinzenz Hedigue and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Cinematic Means,
Industrial Ends. The Work of the Industrial Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009, pp. 165-182
(forthcoming).

testify and show more than what their aim10. But this contradiction is not directly
understandable just by looking at the image. My point is that visual documents have to be
looked at carefully, but also apprehended both in documentary series and as informative
devices. They must be replaced in the archives they come from and in the context of their
order, production and diffusion. To satisfactorily document labour history, a random collection
of individual pictures showing the assembly line is insufficient.
Images in series: collection, compilation and corpus
An image is better analyzed when apprehended from its archive or within a series of
comparable documents. Getting up from an image to the last known source is a way of
protecting some of its outside information. As in an archeological excavation, the place is part
of the clue. But many images have been removed from their original archive and have to be
apprehended in other documentary devices. I distinguish three types: collection, compilation
and corpus.
A collection (fonds in French) is the direct result of a continuous and coherent production of
images. For example, the Renault archives have preserved the 70,000 glass negatives made by
the internal photographic service and the corresponding printings assembled in 192
photographic albums11. We know very little about this photographic service. It was integrated
in 1911 into the Renault factories. Since 1917, the head of the photo department was assisted
of a draughtsman, an employee, two archivists and a variable number of photographers (18
known names). In 1930, the 7 photographers had a monthly salary, like employees and unlike
workers paid every two weeks. None of those anonymous operators have gained notoriety,
except Robert Doisneau who stated his career at Renault. It was recruited in June 1934 and
10

- The expression comes from Marc Ferro, "Le film, une contre-analyse de la socit", Annales E.S.C., janvier-fvrier
1973, pp. 109-124.
11

- For a complet analysis of this photographic collection, see Alain P. Michel, Images du travail la chane. Le cas
Renault (1917-1939), tudes photographiques, n 13, juillet 2003, pp. 86-109.

worked until May 10, 1939, when he was fired for repeated delays and for cheating on clocking
out. Each day, the team of photographers was gathered and each photographer was given a task
and made a daily coverage of his mission. Robert Doisneau has evoked this experience. After
the morning call, came the work distribution. Each one was in charge of a mission for the day
and had to go to a workshop, to the forging mills, the park of scrap and so on. We had to take
pictures of a manufacture detail, a new installation or a new machine. Most of the time it was
just an ordinary report with little thrill12. Apart from Doisneaus late reminiscences only the
final result these daily missions is left, i.e. the printings stuck in the albums with the number of
the corresponding negative. All the other written records of the photographic department are
lost, but my point is that the collection itself is a significant representation device, liable to
explain part of the images it contains.
Apart from this collection the Renault photographic archives also have some compilations
of images (collections in French) which are the result of selective picture regrouping. It is the
case for promotional photographic albums, or photographic press surveys which select pictures
for visitors to admire or newspapers to edit. The question is to know why such images were
retained to understand the role which was allotted to them. The confrontation with the
complete collection allows a survey of the images that, among complete coverage, were pushed
aside. The Henry Ford Museum also keeps huge photographic series which are assembled in
thematic folders documenting the most often asked pictures. My point is that this gathering
is a compilation and not a collection as above defined. This selection documents the tastes
of the secondary users of the photo archives (historical archivists and patrons) but not the task
of the contemporary photographs who shot them and of the primary archivist who classified

12

Robert Doisneau, Renault. In the Thirties, London, Nishen-Michael Koetzle ed., 1990, 97 p.

the negatives. The two processes are interesting but different. The comparison with the global
inventories of the negatives would give clues of this difference13.
In many circumstances, images cannot be replaced in their own documentary device. For
example, the Renault Company ordered corporate films but did not keep cinematographic
archives in the inter-war period. As these films were made by outside producers, the films shot
in the factories of Billancourt had to be found in various archives (Path, Gaumont, etc.) and
gathered together. I call this historical aimed combination of images a corpus.
Images in a device
In their series, images are often identified in order to be used. They may be associated with a
caption and a number. In the Renault photographic collection, the prints were classified in
precise ways which changed during the inter-war period. At first there were only three types of
album. First the retrospective albums with all photographs from before 1911, numbered 1 and
up in an approximate order, according to their recovering. Second the contemporary albums
with the new daily mission in chronological order numbered 1000 and up. Last and starting
number 2000, the reproduction albums assembling all the second hand documents the
photographic service had to copy. In 1920, a new type of building and workshop album was
introduced. These specific coverage were caused by the systematic inventory of Louis
Renaults industrial patrimony 14 just before the shift of the company from a private property
to a limited company in 1922. All those albums had the same numerical reference system and
the initial gaps turned out to be insufficient each album type catching up with the next, causing
confusion. In 1927, the photographic service decided to specify 7 types of albums introducing

13

Photo Logs, HFM&GV Historical Archives, Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village Dearborn,
USA.
14
Plousey Inventory, 1922, Archives of the Historical Society of the Renault Group (SHGR).

big numerical gaps that made improbable any over passing. But in 1934, this classification was
replaced by an alphabetical system with some twenty types. For instance, this classification
system shows the relatively small place of industrial images. The Renault photographic service
rarely took pictures of the assembly lines and did so in specific circumstances. Out of 70000
negatives made by the company's photographic service in the interwar period, 2500 show the
production process which means that only 3,5 % of the pictures of the automobile manufacturer
were shot inside the workshops.
The representation of the way automobiles were made was just a detail of the companys
activity. These industrial pictures were made to promote the company's image, but their
analysis in the light of the entire photographic collection reveals "black holes" (routine work,
personal portraits, social movements, etc.) and singles out different periods of concern for
productive conditions. Working situations interested the photographic service in certain periods
and not in others. Many pictures were taken in the beginning of the 1930s when the new plant
of the Seguin Island was launched. Louis Renault used his new modern factory as a promotion
argument at a time when his company seemed to resist the crash that affected the American
industry. But in the 1936, with the coming of the left wing Popular Front and the occupation of
his plants by the workers, the photographic department was more discrete.
These modifications were not made at random. Changing subjects reflect the companys various
preoccupations. Classification changes inform us on the evolving representation the
photographic department had of the factory. No written document explains this evolution. The
only trace left of this activity is its result, i.e. the pictures stuck in the albums and the negatives
they correspond to. Only a meticulous analysis of the collection of images can follow the
preoccupation of the photographic missions and explain the changing representation of the

factory constructed by the department. My point is that this non-verbal classification system
is a significant element of what the images were meant to mean15.
The objective of this serialization is to allow the recontextualization of the photographic
document i.e. to understand the conditions of its diffusion and its reception at a given time. Of
course this interpretation of the message of the image comes from a confrontation with other
types of documents, revisit of the traditional (written) files and the comparison with the
comparable visual sources (the cinema, the technical drawing, painting, etc). Archeological
traces are also an important supplier of information for the study of the assembly line. The
specificity of the product (automobile) is essential in the understanding of the industrial
process.
Larger comparisons are also instructive. For example, Renaults photographic collection can be
compared with the Henry Ford Museum photographic compilations. A comparison with the
Ford Motor Company (FMC) is also fruitful for the moving images16. The FMC internalized a
huge film production while the French automobile producer only ordered circumstantial
promotional documentaries17. In fact, the Ford case is an exception among automobile firms.
The study of the FMC film collection in the National Archives in College Park makes it
possible to point out the limits of the scarce corpus of Renault films which I reconstructed from
exterior archives (Gaumont, Path). I also have compared the way the "routine" pictures were
produced in the respective companies and point out the differences with the images of

15
16

Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Alain P. Michel, Les images du travail la chane dans les usines Renault de Boulogne-Billancourt (1917-1939). Une
analyse des sources visuelles : cinma, photographies, plans d'implantation, 2001, History of Technology Thesis, EHESS,
pp. 204-245.
17
David L. Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford. An American Folk Hero and his Company, Wayne State
University Press, Detroit, 1976, 598 p.

independent artists (such as Diego Rivera, Charles Sheeler and W. J. Stettler the Ford Motor
Company photographer) 18.
Images in investigation
An image is a representation that never comes alone. According to a traditional dichotomy
studied by Louis Marin19, the concept of representation is linked to two families of apparently
contradictory meanings that have to be understood together. The image is at the same time the
stylized trace of an absence (what is represented) and the public exhibition of a presence (the
representative). When an image is apprehended as part of a visual device produced with a
specific aim, the disposal itself becomes a major key for the understanding of the view.
I propose a methodology for the historical utilization of visual documents that combines the
attention to their original archives, develops a critical analysis of the representation they
produce (which is not a reality they refer to) and proposes a contextual understanding of their
visual discourse. This method can be summarized in the following table.
Alain P. Michel

Investigation table
Scale of device

Deapth of analysis

Situation

Functioning

Reading

ARCHIVES
(Production)

Inventary

Techniques

Message

VISUAL DOCUMENT
indice

Icone

TRACES

SIGNS

REPRESENTATIONS

CONTEXT
symbol

(Reception)

Exposition

Story

History

49

18

The Rouge. The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera, Detroit, The Detroit Institute of
Arts, 1978, 96 p.
19

Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1981. Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de limage.
Glose, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1993.

The investigation table is a cross examination process combining three scales of documentary
devices (columns) and three depths of analysis (lines). The first scale is the archive the image
comes from. It documents its origin, i.e. the conditions of production and of conservation. The
second scale of analysis concerns the document itself both in it materiality and through the
representation it constructs which is not the reality it refers to. The third scale is the context
of reception the image was used in. It is what Marc Ferro called the "areas of reality"20 which
is out of scope of the image itself, but documents its contemporary understanding.
Concomitantly the investigation can be conducted in successive depths of analysis. As Pierre
Sorlin suggested 21 this procedure first evaluates the situation, then it determines the
functioning and at last it proposes the reading of an image. The first level is an inventory of
visible elements. The second consists in pointing out the ties between them. The third is a
quest of their meaning.
The aim of this investigation table is to show how much a precise analysis of an image reveals
noises in the transmission of visual information. Looking at a lone image is insufficient to
provide an explanation to its dissonances22. The interpretation of the visual noises must be
analyzed within the framework of the documentary series from which it results and by
confrontation with the context of which it is the echo. If the photography of an assembly line
attests the presence of a manufacture apparatus different from the model which it is supposed
to illustrate, this image does certainly not account by itself for the execution of the assembly
line work.
III- Virtual approach. Images a corpus
20

- Marc Ferro, "Le film, une contre-analyse de la socit ?" (1971) in Marc Ferro, Cinma et histoire, Paris,
Gallimard, 1993, p. 49.
21
- Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinma : Ouverture pour l'histoire de demain, Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1977,
319 p.
22

- Carlo Ginzburg, "Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d'un paradigme de l'indice" Le dbat, novembre 1980, numro 6, pp.
3-44.

Even when it is methodologically analysed, a selective corpus of numerous corporate images is

difficult to exploit as a historical source. Information is spread apart and enigmatic.
Incongruities are plenty while clues often scarce. Computer data processing and virtual
technology are a solution to over-pass this difficulty to deal with massive and incomplete signs.
In this perspective the archaeological approach teaches how to deal with subtle indications and
signs when there is no written evidence. They help question these acknowledged discourses
with the perception of what was actually taking place in the workshops. The digital means help
utilize informal evidence, in order to renew our knowledge of people who did not leave
classical historical archives.
For this purpose the History Department of the University of Evry (UEVE, France) has
launched a four years pluri-disciplinary research program (2008-2012) called Virtual
Factories (Usines 3D) 23. This program is supported by the French National Research Agency
(ANR) and it is developed along with two CNRS teams specialized in digital humanities24. Its
purpose is to reconstitute a virtual image of significant industrial plants such as the Renault
automobile factory of Boulogne-Billancourt located in the close suburbs of Paris and recently
demolished. It is a both a study in industrial history of the assembly lines, and an
archaeological project aiming at the virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges. The idea is
not to make up for this industrial disappearance, but to create a new means of informing the
relatively unknown history of workers and workshops. Beyond the virtual representation of a
building or of machines and conveyors, the aim of the program is to exploit the original
information brought by series of visual documents. This study consists in the gathering of the
complete documentary records of a few specific buildings. Some workshops are known through
The history research laboratory of the UEVE is called LEHST (Laboratoire dhistoire conomique, sociale et des
techniques).
24 The CAK-CRHST (Centre Alexandre Koyr-Centre de recherche en histoire des sciences et des techniques) is the
research center affiliated to the CNRS & Cit des sciences et de lindustrie (UMR 8560). The data base is made by
Stphane Pouyllau, Shadia Kilouchi and Delphine Uzal. Archovision part of the Institut Ausonius affiliated to the
CNRS & the University of Bordeaux 3 (UMR 5607). The digital model is developed by Robert Vergnieux, Loc
Lespinasse and Pascal Mora.
23

descriptions, pictures, implementation drawings and films that show the structure of the
building (envelope), the agency of the installations (machinery) the variety and the evolution of
the job being done (work). An iconographic corpus was assembled for a specific workshop,
making an inventory of the different documents concerning it.
-Visual corpus of the C5 workshop
The first case study of the U3D program concerns the virtual reconstruction of the C5
workshop, built in 1906 to produce the chassis of a small car and in which the Renault
Automobile Company introduced the manual chassis assembly line in 1917 and made it evolve
until the late 1920's. The original Renault-Billancourt plant was located in the close suburbs of
Paris25. Car production stopped in 1992 and the industrial site is now being transformed into a
high value cultural, residential and mixed activity zone.
Before 1914 the Renault factory was among the first to experience interchangeability and series
production. The introduction of Taylors method of time study caused a major strike against the
chronometer (1913), but did not stop the rationalization process. The massive war demand
introduced big scale production and mechanical conveyors for shells, tanks, trucks and
automobiles. As Louis Renault said, "those four years have taught us the benefits of workorganization, the methods which allow the most delicate productions without a specialized
workforce26. By 1917, Renault had a staff of competent employees capable of making a
rudimentary assembly line work.
In the post war period, Renault continued to install small manual conveyors but did not
consider them as American assembly lines because they were not consistent with the Ford
model and had nothing to do with the huge American plants of that time (River Rouge, Flint,
25

Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault, t I . Naissance de la grande entreprise, 1898-1939, Paris, Le
Seuil, 1998 (1st edition 1972), 359 p.
26

AN 94 AP 80, January 15 1915 (more probably 1920), L. Renault, Speech at the Chambre Syndicale du Cycle de
l'Automobile. For the context of rationalization in France, see Aime Moutet, Les logiques de l'entreprise. La

rationalisation dans l'industrie franaise de l'entre-deux-guerres, Paris, ditions de l'cole des hautes tudes en
sciences sociales, 1997, 495 p.

etc.). Aiming at efficiency and profit, these discrete devices were not backward compare to his
French competitors27. Renaults chain work (the French term for assembly line) was first
publicly presented in a 1922 article. It focused on the hand pushed chassis assembly line which
was not very different from what it was 5 years before. The press gives a warp vision of
industrial action. In 1929, this chassis assembly line was transferred to the new factory in the
Seguin Island just across the Seine River.
In this study of the C5 workshop, different types of images are combined as they present
different types of information. The moving images are relatively scarce but very informative.
Only few films show the inside of the workshops and suggest gestures that no other document
can restore. For example a 12 second sequence shot in the C5 workshop in 1920.
Some twenty workers fidget along two manual assembly lines of chassis. During the scene,
men cross the picture area but no vehicle moves, which suggests that no work is actually
being done. Only 2 or 3 workers are acting as though they were working while a group of five
ends up posing as for a picture. The fact is that cinema only exceptionally came inside the
workshop and when it did, it created the event. Taken by itself, a documentary scene gives a
partial and conventional vision of the industrial activity28.
Our visual corpus of the C5 workshop is documented by Renault's important photographic
collection. Without explicit captions, it is often difficult to identify the job presented in a
picture, to localize the workshop and to know the exact date of the take. Information has to be
reconstituted from the confrontation of hints from various photographs. For an undated print,
its position in the photographic album gives a clue as it can be figured out from adjacent
pictures with date indications. The model being produced or the type of engine being
assembled, are indications of the time period in which the picture was taken. Similarities in

27
28

See Alain P. Michel, Travail la chane, op. cit.

Nicolas Hatzfeld, Gwenale Rot, Alain P. Michel (Nigwal group), Filming Work on Behalf of the Automobile Firm : the
Renault case (1950-2002), in Vinzenz Hedigue and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Cinematic Means, Industrial Ends. The Work
of the Industrial Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009 (forthcoming).

tools or implementation lead to gatherings of pictures which show different points of view of
what can be support to be the same workshop. But to conduct this cross examination, a
precise rebuild of the building is essential.
This acquaintance with the implementation of building, the agency of the working process
and the evolution of the factory is possible thanks to a collection of 45000 implementation
drawings. These plans not only give the exact outlines of a specific workshop: they also make
it possible to follow the growth of the factory and the frequent reorganization of the work
process. They are the basis of the virtual reconstruction of the C5 workshop because they also
identify it among all the other.
The iconographic corpus informs the structure of the building (envelope), the agency of the
installations (machinery) the variety and the evolution of the job being done (work). I believe
that this cross examination of various images gives the documentary tools of a global microhistoric study of a located workshop. The point is not only to start a new set of industrial
monographic studies, but to position a working place inside the production process it is a part
of. The idea is to navigate from the scale, scope and dimension of an image to its
surroundings29. Digital means are essential to this project.
-Virtual reconstruction of the C5 workshop
Once the corpus of documents has been assembled and analyzed, the second step is the
development of data bases that tie the documents to their original archives and help challenge
and confront the information they hold. Indexed in a data base they inform the virtual
reconstruction of a workshop and equipment. This construction leads to the last step i.e. the
development of a computer model that makes it virtually possible to move along the building
and see the assembly line function. This visualization gives a radically new documented
interpretation of the industrial past, producing unedited information from scattered and often
29

Jacques Revel (ed.), Jeux d'chelle. La micro-analyse l'exprience, Paris, Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1996, 252 p.
Bernard Lepetit, Les formes de l'exprience. Une autre histoire sociale, Paris, Albin Michel, 1995, 337 p.

discredited historical sources. We have produced an interactive multimedia research model that
helps re-question the traditional sources and apprehend visual documents better. This virtual
reconstruction is a both a study in industrial history of the assembly lines, and an
archaeological project aiming at the virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges.
We have started the reconstruction of the C5 workshop with the comparison and computer
treatment of two series of images documenting the 1922 assembly line of the 10 HP Renault
car. This installation was promoted by an article edited in September 1922 and illustrated with
12 gravures showing the 12 operations of the assembly line. I have shown that these
drawings were inspired from a photographic coverage made on February 27th of the same year
which explicitly shows that they were 13 stations at that time30.
From this series of photographs, which have been used as drawings 7 month later in the
article, it is possible to rebuild a first virtual reconstruction of this manual assembly line that
questions the classical interpretation already made. It will also be possible to compare the
February 1922 situation to another (unpublished at that time) coverage made in July 1924 on
the same assembly line, and a third series from autumn 1924 on another line.
This type of coverage is rather exceptional in the Renault Photo archives. Those three series
of photographs were made in the beginning of the 1920's when it was still possible to
discern a small number of productive tasks in the assembly of a car produced in relative
large number. The vanishing of this type of image does not mean the disappearance of the
productive process itself, but signifies a change in its apprehension. To document the
precedent and following situations, we will have to look differently through different
images. It will be possible here because the Renault Company Archives have kept
documents that will inform the restitution of most of the industrial buildings. This precise,
situated procedure will adaptable to other examples. Through a change in scope we are able

30

Alain P. Michel, Travail la chane. , op. cit.

to look at what might have happened behind the pillars of a the C5 workshop, to an
apprehension of the hole factory. The aim is to navigate from small details to the global
productive process. For example in the Renault factory, after the assembly line was
introduced (1917), the way serial cars were produced changed. Looking at the 3 major parts
of the car - the motor, the frame chassis and the body - we can single out 3 different periods
in the general organization of the process.
In a first period (1917-1929), the motor was brought to the frame and the frame to the body.
During the whole interwar period, the motor was assembled in B3 workshop, next to C5
where it was added to the frame. The "automobile" was then driven, on mile away to the
"Usine O" where it received its body.
After the construction of the Seguin Island plant (1930-1934) a second spatial organization
was set up. The frame assembly was transferred to the new plant and the C5 building
became a tool workshop. The motor had to be carried from B3 across the bridge. So was it
for the body, still assembled in Usine O, but added to the chassis on the Seguin Island.
The situation changed in 1934 when the body production was transferred in another building
on the Seguin Island. In this third spatial organization (1935-1939), the motor was still driven
from the B3 building to the Seguin Island. The frame and the body were assembled in
adjacent buildings so that the body could now be brought with conveyers to the frame on the
main assembly line.
The digital tools of our program are essential as they give the possibility of confronting a large
number of informal, unwritten records, in order to renew our knowledge on the technological
and social history of people who did not leave classical historical traces. In this perspective
the archaeological approach teaches how to deal with subtle indications and signs when there
is no written evidence. They help question these acknowledged discourses with the
perception of what was actually taking place in the workshops.

Conclusion
Most of what happened in the factory is now lost, which of course is the case with the largest
part of past experiences. Rather than waiting for the discovery of some improbable new
absolute documents which would lighten the shades of labour history, I suggest to work with
the left-over, to read differently what has been kept but not always looked at and combined.
Images are an essential element of this reconsideration. With different questions, aims and
methods, new historical sources can be invented and new documentary tools, such as digital
models can be constructed.
The virtual C5 workshop resituates the space in which part of the production process was
organized in relation to the extension and various restructuring of the edifice. The digital
reinstallation of the different shifts in the line, with the corresponding stocks nearby, makes it
possible to determine the materiality of the implementations and to identify the transformations
in the working process. Last, the images of workers on some shifts permit a partial
decomposition of their job that can be shown in action. It is an illustration of the way
multimedia and computer techniques can produce a new type of constructed historical
documents.
Beyond this study of the Renault's case and beyond the virtual representation of a building, of
machines and conveyors, the aim of the research program is to exploit with computer
technologies the original information brought by visual documents. It is a way to experiment a
methodological investigation of images, the means to conceive computer tools that deal with a
great variety of heterogeneous information.
The problem is that workers points of view - their "reminiscences" are scarce. This
methodological and virtual use of the visual industrial sources is an attempt to reconsider the
question and rebalance a view point that has mostly been apprehended only through archives of
commandment. The films, photographs and plans give a more technical and local vision of the

question and reveal aspects that are rarely formalized. Thus, mute hints and traces of an
industrial activity become historical evidences. The idea is to overpass the classical opposition
between the formal prescriptions and the real practices to understand the way the bureaus and
the workshops participated together in the productive process.
The digital means make it possible to confront a large number of informal, unwritten records
and offer new means to document the relatively unknown history of workers and workshops. It
is an illustration of the way multimedia and computer techniques can produce a new type of
constructed historical documents. The research tool experimented on the Renault factory will
be available for other cases in France, Europe and elsewhere, within our partners or beyond. A
lighter version of this model will be accessible to a larger audience on the Internet or for
museums.