Entrepreneur Pierre Schmitt in a flax mill, in Hirsingue, November 8, 2021 (AFP / Archives / SEBASTIEN BOZON)
The lack of masks at the start of the health crisis, in 2020, revealed the extent of the relocation of entire sections of French industry. Just like textile production, whose return to France can be observed, however, but in small steps, still very far from its former levels.
“There is no fatality, you have to dream”, assures AFP Pierre Schmitt, who saved from liquidation in 2013 an Alsatian textile company which made people talk about it seven years later by producing urgently masks in the Mulhouse region, then hit hard by the coronavirus.
While this question of “Made in France” is one of the dominant themes of the presidential campaign, the CEO of Velcorex went further by relaunching a flax mill in eastern France, a country which has let its textile industry spin off. in Asia and elsewhere for over 20 years.
After having saved a spinning machine promised to be scrapped in Hungary, Mr. Schmitt brought out of peaceful retirement former employees of the Schlumberger machine manufacturer to find their know-how, long relocated to China.
“We found a second machine in Switzerland, and today we have a complete and operational textile sector after 20 years of the disappearance of the sector from French soil,” he said of his Mulhouse spinning mill.
“We manage to make linen thread without a single drop of water,” he says. Flax sent dry to Chinese factories must be moistened to it on arrival.
Presidential 2022: the decline of industry in France (AFP / Kenan AUGEARD)
Since the closure of French spinning mills, 80% of the flax harvested in France goes to China and 20% to eastern Europe. It returns as the latest trendy tee shirt. Almost nothing is valued in France, where two thirds of the world’s textile flax are produced, mainly in Normandy and in the North.
The other secret is the tight mesh necessary to set up a profitable sector, from the producers of Terre de Lin in Normandy to the engineering schools of Mulhouse, including the local chemical industry.
“This is what makes Italians secret, their wool industry for example, they are local ecosystems, where machine builders work with users, it was like that in Mulhouse in the 19th century”, adds Mr. Schmitt.
– “A chance” –
Textiles are not, however, close to catching up to their former levels. The number of jobs has fallen from 600,000 to 60,000 in 20 years. Each year, 88 million jeans are sold in France, of which “barely 100,000 are made there”, notes Fabienne Delahaye, founder of the “Made in France” show.
On a home appliance assembly line in a Brandt factory, in Orléans, November 15, 2021 (AFP / Archives / GUILLAUME SOUVANT)
Despite public money from stimulus and investment plans, for the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, reindustrialisation does not mean “repatriation to French territory of all basic products”. “We would not be competitive”, he first said in October, before announcing last week that it would be necessary “to continue to lower the taxes of production and the charges on the wages higher than 2.5 times the minimum wage “to reindustrialize France during the next five-year term.
If he admits a high added value linked to French know-how, technicality or design in textiles or small household appliances, he says “does not believe in the idea of relocating all textile production to France”.
Because “to produce in France remains three times more expensive than to produce in China”, notes Sandrine Conseiller, the patron saint of Eagle.
This French group has nevertheless succeeded in relocating part of its Asian production of rubber boots to Vienne.
“If you buy a boot made in France, you reduce your carbon footprint by 50%,” says Ms. Conseiller.
On a Naval Group site, in Lorient, December 16, 2021 (AFP / Archives / Sebastien SALOM-GOMIS)
The energy and environmental transition is also seen as an “opportunity”, both by Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the Minister for Industry, and by Barbara Pompili, for the ecological transition.
“It is the industry and its engineers who innovate and find solutions” for new recyclable materials, lighter for airplanes, more insulating for housing, and electric batteries for cars, they say.
In traditional sectors, reindustrializing also means modernizing and robotizing the automobile, aeronautics, agri-food or even nuclear industry and their subcontractors, who need heavy investments to remove greenhouse gases from their processes. and their products while remaining competitive.
© 2022 AFP
Did you like this article ? Share it with your friends with the buttons below.
