L'industrie textile à Reims. Une reconversion

In the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as late as World War II, Reims was a predominantly textile town. Specialising in the manufacture of wool and of flannel materials, the town knew prosperity, which reached its height in 1878. Beginning with competition and strikes, and aggravated by World War I, the slump, which was inseparable from the difficulties of the whole French textile industry, had severe and lasting effects at Reims. It was from 1950 to 1964 that the last phase of deterioration in the wool industry at Reims made itself felt, bringing about the closure of twenty-four premises. Reims then found herself compelled to create new industrial sectors in order to employ a large labour force, made available by the closure of her mills, and to put right the state of crisis which threatened her very existence and future. The industrial changes have had many consequences for the town herself ; the reconversion has taken place more particularly within the compass of industrial decentralization. In spite of the slump and the reconversion, the textile industry has not entirely disappeared from Reims, but it has had to adapt itself to a new situation and has consequently undergone profound upheavals. It employs about three thousand wage-earners. There remain a cloth mill, a spinning mill and a dye-works and a few small workshops. Ready-to-wear manufacturing has developed, and an important hosiery industry has been created. The labour is female, mobile and insufficiently skilled. Thus the textile industry will appear from now onwards a commonplace activity in a large town rather than the sequal of a rich heritage.