• 1 Regional public institutions which provide services to companies, support businesses in their crea (...)

2In order to analyse this transcendence of economic authority, it is necessary to examine, in context, these economic agents’ discourses and beliefs. The present study is rooted in the Nantes region in the 1970s, against the backdrop of a dense industrial fabric, ruled over symbolically by families in economic decline, and strong social and trade union protests (Pavis & Rousseau 2024). As the first signs of the economic crisis began to show, a discourse of “necessary economic modernization” encouraged the city to enter the battle of international competition by attracting varied industries and new investments, diversifying energy sources, increasing the density of transport networks, promoting the development of applied higher education, redeveloping the port, ending the strikes, etc. While this discourse was propagated via many national and local channels, in Nantes one individual in particular sought to embody it and turned it into his cause. He was an industry actor, a “self-made man,” who became involved in a Parisian sector-based federation in the mid-1950s. Twenty years later, when he was made President of the Nantes Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie [CCI, Chamber of Commerce and Trade1], he founded a “Club de réflexion” or “Thinkers’ Club” which aimed to renew the city and gave him a voice in the local press. Flanked by his allies, also discussed in this article, he campaigned to turn Nantes into a major urban centre open to economic and technological renewal. This approach, linked also to political ambitions, seems to have formed part of a typical process of acquiring notability (Briquet 2012). For this “nouveau riche” at the head of the local CCI, the club he created was at once a space of worldly sociability, somewhere he could demonstrate his concern with contributing to the public good, and a form of currency (being co-opted to the group or invited to its dinner-debates served as a form of allegiance). His modest origins and lack of formal qualifications mean that his acquisition of notability resembles the trajectories of company directors who become presidents of football clubs (Schotté 2016) insofar as they also transform a strictly economic position into an honorific position in the latter stages of their careers. However, he also stands apart from them in terms of the forms of state capital that contributed to his business success and the intellectual ambitions he invested in his club.

• 2 This reconstruction of his trajectory is based on various sources: Bernard Le Nail, Dictionnaire b (...)

4Jean Régent2 (the name by which this man went until the early 1970s) came from a modest family. He was the son and grandson of blacksmiths on his father’s side, and of a sailor and a housewife on his mother’s side. He was born in 1924 in a small fishing port on the Atlantic coast and benefited from the particularly well-developed technical teaching offered in the city of Nantes (Suteau 1999) until the war interrupted his education. He worked as a metal worker, took evening classes, and enrolled in the Liberation Army. After the war, he trained at the École du Génie in Angers, a military engineering school where he became a training officer, and he got married. When he returned to civilian life, armed with his military title and the specialist technical skills learned from military engineering (Hamelin 2000), he changed tack and began working in the fast-growing sector of public sanitation and the concrete products industry. In 1952, after four years of varied experiences, he was made manager of a company with thirteen employees located near Nantes called “Ouest-assainissement” of which he went on to become part owner. In 1955, he enlisted the services of a civil engineer, allowing him to launch an engineering consultancy specializing in wastewater treatment for small communities and fostering communication with various public and private sector contacts.

• 3 The “Plan Construction” or “Building Plan” was a 1971 government initiative designed to revise bui (...)
• 4 The “Mairie” or Mayor’s Office is an elected municipal decision-making body, roughly equivalent to (...)

5At the age of thirty-one, Régent’s upward mobility, both social and professional, resembled that of the sons of craftsmen with technical expertise who became small employers after the war (Amiot 1991). What distinguished from the latter, however, was his investment in a strategic sector that enjoyed state support. Régent joined two national professional organizations which opened up greater economic, social, and cultural horizons to him: the Association professionnelle pour l’accroissement de la productivité dans l’industrie des carrières et des matériaux [Aprocem—Professional association for increased productivity in the quarrying and materials industry] and the Fédération des fabricants des produits en béton [Federation of manufacturers of concrete products] of which he became the President in 1960. In parallel, his company reached national standing. Over the following decade, Régent’s recognition increased: he was elected to regional positions in broader areas, was part of a Plan-Construction3 committee, and was awarded the Légion d’honneur. When he was elected to the Nantes CCI in 1976, Régent was foregrounded by the local press as an outstanding figure (see Figure 1). He held a number of honorary titles at both national and regional levels and headed the Service opérationnel d'assainissement en France [SOAF—Operational service for sanitation in France], an industrial group with over 500 employees, including five factories across France as well as a consultancy and research centre. This is when he founded the Club Kervégan, spoke out in the press, and tried to take over the Nantes’ Mayor’s office4.

• 5 ANR 12-BSH1-0015-01 Sombrero – The biographical consequences of activism. Life course, networks an (...)

6My interest in the Club Kervégan and its founder stems from broader research looking at employer reconfiguration in the 1970s and 1980s in the Nantes region. This initial project sought to piece together the field of local employers, beyond just professional organizations, as part of a broader decisional system. My aim was to identify and objectivate this population, as well as to grasp the social principles underpinning their individual and collective logics of action within the business world and beyond. Data was collected systematically from archives and biographical dictionaries. I also studied the Nantes region in the 1970s, as part of a collaborative project which decentred the perspective towards the left-wing, looking at the biographical consequences of far-left, feminist, and trade-union activism.5

• 6 Jean Régent, who went on to call himself Jean-Joseph Régent, drew on the PhD thesis by the geograp (...)

7In addition to this background work providing contextualization, research was also conducted on everything concerning Régent, his company, the SOAF, the Club Kervégan which he founded, and the professional organizations in which he was involved, from the mid-1950s (when he earned his stripes in Paris-based professional organizations) through to the late 1980s (when he made a failed attempt to become Mayor of Nantes). While I was unfortunately not able to interview Régent himself, who died in 2009, I did interview ten business leaders and members of the Club who knew him. I also collated all later testimonies and written accounts. However, with a view to limiting reconstruction bias, I focused primarily on collecting data contemporary to the activities analysed. These data come largely from local archives (funding applications), but also to a lesser extent from regional and national archives (the anti-pollution fight and the Plan-Construction, respectively), as well as libraries (grey literature on the industrial economy, essays about local life, the Club Kervégan’s publications, and the writings of social psychologists working at Aprocem). Régent’s speeches and media interventions were collated from the general and economic press, both local and national, with systematic searches performed on the digitalized regional publications Presse Océan and Ouest-France. The publications of the professional organizations in which Régent was active, especially Produits en béton and Bétons industriels, were also combed through manually. These investigations allow considerable rectifications to be made to the official history of the Club Kervégan6 and its founder, even though some grey areas remain in the period studied, that is the 1950s to the 1980s.

• 7 Jacques-Henri D’Olier, “L’activité d’APROCEM,” Le Moniteur des travaux publics et du bâtiment, 196 (...)
• 8 Ibid., p. 33.

12Between 1953 and 1959, the CGP, funded by American aid, was “at the heart of the fight to increase productivity, since it dispensed grants and loans, provided technical and financial support to various sector-based centres of productivity” and made experts available (Boulat 2008: 391). At Aprocem, which was made up of small and medium-sized enterprises manufacturing aggregate or concrete whose activity depended on the building and public works sector, inter-company working groups were run by engineers, economists, and psycho-sociologists. The journal of reference, Le Moniteur des travaux publics et du bâtiment, drew up an assessment of the organization. A pilot group was created made up of leaders of heterogeneous businesses who wanted to advance studies in the quarrying and materials industry and who were determined to develop their companies and prepared to invest. Together, they scrutinized the sector, their companies, and their technical, financial, and marketing organization in order to rationalize the mass production of innovative and less costly products. Taking a “action research” approach, they fostered “the necessary emulation to sustain the effort and develop the norms of change conducive to evolution.”7 Expertise in group dynamics played a role that was considered crucial: “sociology is indispensable in order to allow sometimes obvious ideas, theories, and working or accounting methods to circulate from one group to another in companies, where they can find resonance, be adapted, and be perfected. In this way, the human group that is a company is made capable of becoming aware of its own structure and becomes able consciously to improve and adapt to outside circumstances.”8

• 9 Jacques and Maria van Bockstaele, who were born respectively in 1924 and 1927, trained in social p (...)
• 10 On the Paris and Samois seminars, see: Jacques van Bockstaele, Claude Faucheux and Robert Pagès, S (...)

13The van Bockstaele couple, who were involved in the professional organization in 1956, were part of the small French group trained in social psychology that had travelled to the U.S. on a revelatory journey thanks to a “productivity mission” and was fascinated by the life of small groups (Ohayon 2006).9 Jacques van Bockstaele participated in the first two seminars that used group dynamics in France. The work he and his wife did at Aprocrem was based on three ideas: the indissociable nature of the “actor-observer” position, the awareness produced by analysing relations as they take place, and the idea of collective self-analysis by introducing the objectivation of lived experience.10

• 12 Jacques van Bockstaele and Maria van Bockstaele, La Socianalyse, op. cit, p. 45.
• 13 Jean Régent, « Industrie : an I », Produits en Béton, 1960, 1, p. 5.

15The close relationship built between the socioanalysis group and Aprocem in the late 1950s created a particular configuration of interdependence between the consultants and their clients. On the one hand, the socioanalysis group, that is to say the van Bockstaele couple, aimed to conduct research while also making a living from it. They were researchers involved in the theoretical debates of social psychology, but also a couple in their thirties in an unstable situation who had discovered the potential of the social demand for group dynamics via the Samois seminar.12 They did not have PhDs or the prestigious agrégation teaching qualification, and they were not activists; in order to continue to support themselves and to continue to believe in their work, they needed clients who were willing to comply with their experiments in the long term. On the other hand, the active members of Aprocem, won over by the rallying rhetoric of the productivity movement, believed that their sector had to undergo profound change in order to deal with the major economic and social transformations with which they were connected, to win new markets, and to contribute to “the progress of the Nation.” However, they required help in order to intervene in the economic arena in a structured manner. Participating in the van Bockstaele seminars, where they discovered a world combining rationality and emotion, analysis and action, convinced them of the benefits of psycho-sociological tools for acting both upon their environment and themselves.13

• 14 Jacques van Bockstaele and Maria van Bockstaele, La Socianalyse, op. cit, p. 51. In 1959, the van  (...)
• 15 The following account of this experiential aspect of psycho-sociology, written by a philosopher wh (...)

16This reciprocal adjustment gave the members of the socioanalysis group a comfortable way of adopting the role of expert consultants, which was new to them, with clients who valued being actors in their own change and who were in search of “human experience.” They were able to position themselves as researchers more than as consultants with these clients. However, this came at the cost of their disqualification in the field of social psychology (Ohayon 2006: 315–318). According to the couple, the theorization of socioanalysis that resulted from their seminars at Aprocem led them to “abandon experimental social psychology in favour of a sociology of intervention.”14 Conversely, the managers involved in the organization constituted a collective that was prepared to play along with the specialists as long as they believed this was of benefit to them in running their businesses. And indeed, socioanalysis was a powerful experience for them,15 disrupting established hierarchies, uniting the group, and revolutionizing their perception of the business world.

• 16 Presse Océan, “Avis de décès” column, 22 October 1975.
• 17 At the time, he lived between Paris and Nantes, did not have any children, and would divorce a few (...)

17What did being part of this productivity association mean for Régent? Two factors may have contributed to his involvement in the professional organization: first, he was brought up by a craftsman father who was very active locally as a municipal councillor and a firefighter,16 and second, he worked in a professional domain that was socially open and in which collective action was common since markets were above all negotiated with public representatives (Barjot 1991). The fact remains, however, that there was nothing self-evident about a man from Nantes joining a Parisian professional organization and his “biographical availability” (Offerlé 2015: 98) in the mid-1950s sheds some light on why he did.17

• 18 “La production en France,” Produits en béton, 2, 1961, p. 19-28.
• 19 ADLA 1295 W 277 and 248 W 204.

19Like today’s activists in the Centre des jeunes dirigeants [Centre for young business leaders], who test “mirror groups,” train to be employers in a both benevolent and demanding environment, and then engage in employer representation with a “humanist” vision of the economy (Ciccotelli 2015), Régent became involved in the inter-company working group and learnt, more or less at the same time, how to run an industrial company and represent a profession. In 1957, he became the Secretary-General of Aprocem and, three years later, President of the young Fédération des fabricants des produits en béton [Federation of manufacturers of concrete products], affiliated to Uni, which brought together the hundred or so managers of businesses that manufactured pipes, slabs, and other prefabricated elements and that employed more than fifty employees, that is to say the fraction that was industrializing.18 In his Nantes-based company, Régent adopted the conquering stance advocated by both organizations. Ouest-assainissement, now a société anonyme [similar to a limited liability company] benefiting from funding, developed its prefabricated treatment units across the whole of France, while also continuing to manufacture pre-cast concrete. Its number of employees and revenue increased tenfold between 1953 and 1961.19

• 20 Jean Régent, « Industrie : an I », paper cited, p. 5.

20Régent became part of a group of business leaders with a collective interest in transforming an artisanal sector dominated by the constructors who used their products into an industry backed by the public authorities. Their economic battle required a strong cohesion to increase research and development, make full use of economic studies, and be a driving force in planning and, above all, standardization within the sector. Along with the other members of the group, in the mid-1950s the young company director discovered and gradually adopted a unique rhetoric and practice drawn from socioanalysis. He redeployed this knowledge in his role as an employers’ representative; when he took over the federation, Régent20 developed an ambitious rallying discourse in a speech with revolutionary overtones:

• 22 AN 19820102 1(2). AN 19980053-6 (5). This national committee with thirty-three members including t (...)
• 23 “La légion d’honneur du président Jean-J. Régent,” op. cit.

24The early 1970s proved rich in rewards for Régent. First of all, as President of the Fédération française de l’industrie du béton [French Federation of the Concrete Industry], he was appointed to the Steering Committee of the Plan-Construction presided by the high-ranking civil servant Paul Delouvrier, thus benefiting from the economically liberal bent of the Plan prior to its decline (Margairaz 2011). This body, which met regularly over six years, aimed to develop better adapted housing, stimulate innovation, reduce costs, and consolidate France’s position on international markets. It promoted the notion of “living environment,” linking together manufacturers and consumers, market and politics, and allowed a societal discourse unburdened of its technical aspects.22 Then, on a more personal level, he was awarded the Légion d’honneur, by the Minister of Industry in person.23 It is at this time that he reverted to using his birth name, “Jean-Joseph,” which presented the advantage of being more dignified and of marking his paternal filiation. When he received this honour from the Republic, he mentioned the effects of social conditioning and indirectly defined himself as belonging to a meritocratic elite:

• 25 For example, SOAF no longer limited itself to the market for small wastewater treatment plants but (...)
• 26 Régent dismissed the former director of the CCI and appointed a director with considerable capital (...)

25Finally, he was elected President of the Nantes CCI in 1976, thereby joining the closed social circle of the city’s trade body, after a brief term as associate member in 1970 and then as Vice-President in 1974. Several hypotheses, which are not mutually exclusive, can explain the fact he set aside his national ambitions and seemed to fall back on a local strategy. It is possible, given his low level of initial resources, that he had reached a glass ceiling by running national organizations specializing in precast concrete for twenty years and that he could not hope for any greater national success. It is also probable that his positions of responsibility showed him the potential of a role within the trade body of an industrial region, whether or not this was a case of making a virtue of necessity. As well as opening up new prospects of profitability for his group,25 this position in the CCI enabled him to contribute to a public service mission, but above all to influence events by acting upon regional economic policy, for which he had ideas. In the 1970s, presiding over a chamber of commerce in a “market city” (as opposed to a “welfare city”), with the support of an in-house strategic director,26 offered opportunities for influencing international attractiveness, local infrastructure, and research and development by working hand-in-hand with elected representatives (Jouve 2002).

• 27 André Bovar, La Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Nantes (1700-1987), Nantes, Éditions CID, 19 (...)
• 28 See Bernard Le Nail, Radiographies financières d’entreprises de Loire-Atlantique, CCI Nantes-CCI S (...)

In the 1970s, the Nantes CCI remained a space run by employers from an established inner circle (in trade, the food-processing industry, and the metallurgical industry). The CCI was housed in the Palais de la Bourse, a late-eighteenth century neo-classical building in the heart of the city, whose interior had been renovated with great opulence in 195627 (with an aesthetic reminiscent of the colonial past). This location marked the symbolic continuance of the traditional economic bourgeoisie, despite the fact that their actual economic power had considerably declined (Fiérain 1977). First, the creation of the autonomous port of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire in 1966 had forced Nantes’ employers to engage in a dialogue with the administrative authorities and to share its presidency with their Saint-Nazaire counterparts. Second, the greater concentration of the large industrial groups had undermined them: many were now joining large French or foreign groups or opening up their capital structure and even losing their majority control. In the different bodies of employers’ representatives, these business owners shared power with salaried managers, particularly from the shipyards and major metallurgical companies.28

• 29 ADLA 6ET4 CCI Élections 1976. Interview with Michel Decré conducted 5 November 2013.

27On an economic level, some of the representatives of the hereditary business owners had taken on board the fact that they had to make room for outsiders. These “converted conservatives” had reoriented their practices in the 1960s in order to maintain their economic and social power (Bourdieu & Boltanski 1976: 42). This was particularly true of Lionel Cossé (a civil engineer trained at the prestigious Ponts et Chaussées school) who sold the family group Biscuiterie Nantaise (BN) to an American leader in the field while retaining his position as director; Michel Decré (no qualifications), the heir to the eponymous department stores, who went into the food-processing industry and supermarket sector; and Gilles Bouyer (an engineer from the École Supérieure des Travaux Publics, or Higher School for Public Works) who set up a regional branch of the Phénix prefabricated housing group. Decré and Bouyer, who were brothers-in-law, became involved in the Centre des jeunes dirigeants and contributed to rejuvenating the employers’ organization after the “shock” of 1968. In collaboration with the Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale [Delegation for territorial planning and regional action], they sought to draw new companies to the area by founding the Ouest-Atlantique organization in 1970. Régent, who was not part of this inner circle, was an ally for them in their endeavour to strengthen this policy of industrial renewal. The other dominant employer pole, the salaried managers of the industrial groups, was also favourably disposed towards him.29

• 30 Since Camous had been Olivier Guichard’s chief of staff when he was Minister for Industry, and the (...)

28On a governmental and political level, the profiles of Paul Camous at the Préfecture (from 1973 onwards) and Oliver Guichard at the Conseil Régional (from 1974 onwards), both champions of regional planning, were in harmony with Régent’s as the head of an innovative business. The Camous-Guichard duo30 needed reliable intermediaries to continue the State’s drive for decentralization and modernization in the balanced economy of this city which had been particularly affected by the economic crisis. The same was true of Paul Delouvrier, whom Régent had met on the Plan-Construction committee. This senior civil servant, who had become the President of Électricité de France (EDF), was in charge of the nuclear power programme for the Loire estuary. Régent, who had been shaped intellectually, economically, and politically by modernizing schemes, served as an ally when it came to justifying the renewal of the industrial fabric of the Basse-Loire region, from Nantes rather than from Paris.

• 31 Archives régionales des Pays de La Loire (ARPDL) 36W275.
• 32 In 1973, SOAF joined forces with AIR (Antipollution industrie recherche—Antipollution industry res (...)

29Régent’s nomination in 1975 as Délégué régional pour la lutte contre la pollution [regional delegate for the fight against pollution] was symptomatic of the new system of political and economic inter-reliance.31 In nominating Régent, Guichard and Camous incorporated national theories about the “environment” by drawing not on associations but rather on a “local” industry actor, specialized in wastewater treatment and “planning living environments,” thus laying the ground work to put in commission a nuclear power plant producing “clean energy” on the outskirts of Nantes. Régent, who embodied regional environmental policy as the “Region’s Mr Clean,” raised the profile of his role and his sector in the eyes of the general public and had a key advantage when it came to positioning himself in the new industrial pollution control market in this reconfigured estuary.32

• 33 This argument draws on cross-referenced interviews with Michel Bodiguel, Philippe Sourdille, Claud (...)
• 34 Régent readily referred to himself as a radical-socialist, a party that became more right-wing dur (...)

35Until 1979, the Kervégan Club served as a space for informal exchange focused on the future of the Nantes region. It gave the director of SOAF the opportunity to surround himself with influential local actors who recognized his legitimacy and helped to extend it.33 In the absence of any dynamic groupings in Nantes such as comités d’expansion [economic growth boards]—unlike Bordeaux (Lagroye 1973) and Rennes (Fournis 2010)—Régent was able to found a club based on a political and economic cause that was fairly commonplace but at the same time locally relevant, namely the “development of Nantes,” thus bringing him into contact with individuals who were both interested in this issue (for contrasting reasons) and useful for its promotion (thanks to their varied attributes). The initial group was made up of six people. They were all men (the presence of women seemed entirely incongruous in this circle devoted to the local economic and political future), with Catholic socialization (characteristic of Western France), and holding various professional positions linked to the economic sphere: a local director of a national public works group, the head of a medical clinic, a permanent representative from the regional BTP federations, the CEO of a company of architects and engineers, a local economic journalist, and the director of the Nantes CCI. They all shared certain characteristics (with one exception, who soon left the group): they were much younger than Régent, which produced an asymmetrical relationship; they came from large cities in North-West France but had all been trained in Paris or Lyon; they all had high-level academic qualifications. They were also all young adults committed to their professional careers when they moved to or returned to Nantes. While they came from contrasting social backgrounds and their political leanings ranged from the right to the centre-left,34 they all saw themselves as “parties tightly bound up with the future” as opposed to those who were “chained to the past” (Bourdieu & Boltanski 1976: 52) or to those who advocated disrupting the established order. Régent relied in particular on Philippe Sourdille and Michel Bodiguel, two men from Nantes working in areas that were quite remote from building and public works. They provided him with the resources he lacked, especially thanks to their intense, long-lasting commitment to this symbolic endeavour.

• 35 See the biographical text written by Sourdille in 2015 when he was awarded a North-American honora (...)
• 36 Jacques Sourdille, who was a resistant, a doctor engaged in international organization, and a poli (...)

Philippe Sourdille was born in 1939 and brought strong social capital and political experience to the Club. At 38 years of age, he was the head of a renowned health care establishment. While he had continued in the family tradition of ophthalmology, he had trained and initially practised in a hospital in Lyon until he was 31. In 1970, however, he returned to Nantes and joined the Sourdille clinic where he devoted himself to his professional career, attaining national and international recognition in his speciality.35^. In early 1970, he stepped actively into local life by running in the municipal elections, following in the footsteps of another doctor in his family who had gone into politics.36 It should be noted that, at this time, André Morice, who had been Mayor of Nantes for two terms (from 1965 to 1977), was heading a coalition ranging from independents to the French section of the Workers’ International, united by their anti-Gaullist stance. Despite being very conservative in the national political world (as a Minister and député in favour of maintaining a French Algeria), in Nantes the Mayor continued to be perceived as a secular left-wing figure. In 1977, he expanded the coalition to his former Gaullist and Giscardian adversaries, whilst, on the other side of the aisle, Alain Chenard ran for office under the aegis of the Parti socialiste [PS—Socialist Party], alongside radicals and communists (Petaux 1982). Claiming allegiance to the left-wing Gaullist Michel Jobert, Sourdille intended to offer an alternative option different from both the traditional bourgeoisie, prepared to make any compromise to protect itself, and the Socialist coalition. After having won 12% of the vote but given no instructions to his supporters for the second round, he was accused of having contributed to the victory of the Socialist mayor. In his analysis, Jean Petaux (1982: 118) rightly emphasizes the continuity of the doctor’s actions with those of one of his predecessors from an old family of notaries, who had also led a third-party list in 1965. His sudden political engagement was also informed by a deep Gaullist conviction and by the fundamental role of Catholicism in his relationship to the world. Altruism, spirituality, commitment, freedom, and duty, as well as a rejection of extremes, were all values that underpinned his “taking action” with a centrist political party (Fretel 2004b). Sourdille was an important ally for Régent’s project to create a distinctive club and/or para-political organization.

• 37 See Duval 2004; interview with Jean Amyot d’Inville, conducted 6 June 2013.
• 38 Henri-Jean Dutertre, Un parcours parmi tant d’autres, Nantes, Éditions Opéra, 1995.

Michel Bodiguel was born in 1936 in Nantes. He inherited a less legitimate position than that of Sourdille in terms of composition and filiation. He was brought up by his aunt, who ran a grocery shop, and enjoyed the support of a substitute father. Having worked in industry in Dakar, he went on to become an engineer in the merchant navy. During his military service in Cherbourg, he founded a journal and then, in 1962, he entered the field of the media which was, at the time, very open, especially in the area of economics.37 He became a journalist for La Presse de la Manche, then worked freelance for Le Monde and was employed by the radio station Europe 1. He wanted to return to the Loire-Atlantique region and took up a job at the local newspaper Presse Océan in 1967, where he capitalized on both his qualifications as an engineer and his conservative dispositions. The stance he took in May ’68, when he joined the Cercle d’action civique [civic action circle] which organized a counter demonstration,38 earned him trust in economic circles, without cutting him off from some left-wing activists with whom he had shared experiences in the Jeune chambre économique [Junior Chamber of Economics]. His early engagement in horse-riding also gained him entry into the closed world of the aristocracy. Bodiguel had been embedded in local political and economic networks for ten years and was valued at his newspaper. He was therefore able to help Régent spread his ideas more broadly and to embody the economically liberal, modernizing third way.

• 39 Jean-Joseph Régent and Virginie Frappart (eds.), Rue Kervégan, op. cit., p. 106.
• 40 Jean Breteau et Jean-Jacques Potiron, Nantes, le petit théâtre, op. cit.

36Alongside the unfortunately undocumented activities of the Club de réflexion during its first three years of existence—“debates in working groups focused on the burning issues of the region’s economic and social development”39—Régent was also able to cultivate a wider audience thanks to the Presse Océan journalist. Up until the mid-1970s, Régent was only mentioned in the local press in the business section, when referring to his regional work in the concrete industry, his company, or his Légion d’honneur award. Bodiguel, however, gave Régent personalized media coverage, writing a lyrical “portrait” focusing on his background and his passions, interviewing him, and increasingly quoting him in his chronicle of local economic and political life. This support was only possible with the agreement of the newspaper’s CEO, a former industrialist who had come to the press through the resistance and who gave Régent the rare opportunity to publish editorials in his own name.40 In his writings, Régent drew upon what could be referred to as the rhetoric of neutral places. This discourse, which had been disseminated since the post-war period, was intended to guide action within society. It was both informative and performative, exalting expertise and technology, modernity and science, morality and economics, and it drew on a small number of generative schemes: past/future, closed/open, blocked/unblocked, immobile/mobile (Bourdieu & Boltanski 1976: 39).

• 41 Bodiguel’s private archives: preparatory documents for the articles published in Presse Océan, 21  (...)

37In 1977, Régent was asked by Presse Océan to answer the question “is Nantes in a position to truly play its role as the capital of regional development?,” to which the company director responded in a long text prepared ahead of time thanks to index cards and an overall framework devised together with the journalist. His reflection (the term was repeated several times) relied on “global comparison” and drew on a recently published essay by the economic journalist Marc Ullmann. Régent argued that “awareness [was] necessary” in order to identify “strengths” and “promising projects,” and “not continually to be against all change.” Similarly, “a change in attitude” was also “necessary”: “pessimism” had to be “rejected,” “strength and means” mobilized, rather than expecting everything of the State. Science and faith were not antithetical: “economics requires lucidity and rigour,” a “rational approach to problems,” while at the same time being based on “faith in leading projects.” According to Régent, “in order to blossom” the economic pathway he traced out “needed a social consensus, which does not seem to exist for the moment.”41 This stance stood out since, nine years after what had been a particularly virulent May ’68 in Nantes, relationships between employers’ representatives and salaried workers were still paternalistic and conflictual. The former were largely absent from the press and only communicated with prefectural, political, or sometimes religious authorities.

• 42 Between 1968 and 1982, the number of executives and higher intellectual professions doubled, risin (...)

41From 1979 onward, the Club Kervégan, which had around fifty members at the time, took on a more “worldly” nature, organizing three or four dinner-debates per year. It encouraged the circulation of ideas among multiple networks, combined sociability and intelligence, and co-opted its members, all of which was always orchestrated by Régent, and in these ways, it combined different features of the “neutral place.” As the bourgeoisie changed, with Nantes becoming a regional capital,42 leading figures from the worlds of business, government, higher education, and research began to meet there, and the temporal pole grew stronger with the development of the university hospital, institutes of applied sciences, and engineering and business schools.

• 43 Jean-Joseph Régent and Virginie Frappart (eds.), Rue Kervégan, op. cit., p. 118.
• 44 This project, planned for Le Pellerin (approximately twenty kilometres away from Nantes), dates ba (...)

42The club’s guest speakers, through their varied fields of expertise and political opinions, contributed to making it a neutral place (Bourdieu & Boltanski 1976). Between 1979 and 1983,43 around twenty people spoke at the club, whether members or not, and a third of them came from the economic sphere. Not all of them were the local directors of large groups located between Nantes and Saint-Nazaire; they included, for example, Jean Garnier, who trained in marine engineering after having attended the Polytechnique, was now director of a shipyard, as well as very close to Régent, and who spoke about “industrial reconversion.” Others included the CEO of the Larfarge-Coppée group, whom Régent had frequented at the concrete federation, and an engineer working for EDF who gave a talk about the local project for a highly contested nuclear power plant.44 The President of the CCI also invited his alter ego, Henri Baron, to speak. Baron was a heterodox representative of the Loire-Atlantique Chamber of Agriculture and a Socialist Party activist.

• 45 Christiane Mercier, Denise Grail, and Christian Galant, “Christiane Mercier : témoignage,” Archora (...)

43Almost a third of the speakers held a position in various fractions of the temporal pole of higher education and research, with the exception of one specialist in embryology. Christine Mercier, a starch specialist, was the only woman invited to speak at the Club Kervégan in almost twenty years. At the time, she was the scientific director of the Centre de recherches agro-alimentaires [Centre for agri-food research] in Nantes, which aimed to develop new food products for human consumption.45 Also invited were the former director of the École Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique [National higher school of mechanics], one of Régent’s close associates now President of the University of Nantes, accompanied by his Vice-President, who was a chemist by training and active in bringing academia and business closer together. The administrative pole was also well represented, with the two recteurs [chief education officers] appointed before and after the political changeover in 1981.

• 46 « Ne leur dites pas qu’ils sont de droite », La Tribune, 166, 30 mai au 5 juin 1985, in Jean-Josep (...)

45The club’s elitist and modernist dimensions operated essentially through its recruitment, its stated intellectual aims, and its ways of framing discourse. Becoming a member of this club meant thinking of oneself as just as distanced from the working-class world and its Marxist intelligentsia as from the traditional conservative bourgeoisie and its institutions. This led members to view themselves as a thinking elite building the future together and to traduce both extremists and “reductive” or even destructive groups. One member, an engineer trained at the prestigious Ecole Centrale interviewed by La Tribune in 1985, expressed his sense of superiority in the following terms: “I participate in order to deepen my thinking and shore up my ideas. It requires being fairly cultured. A manual worker from Dubigeon who’d come along might not have the necessary intellectual tools.”46

• 47 Interview with Jean and Jeannette Branchet, conducted on 14 January 2014.
• 48 Interview with Roland Rousseau, conducted on 16 September 2016.

46The self-segregated distinction provided by Kervégan was even stronger than that of the Rotary Club or the Lions Club. The latter, organized according to districts, were described as traditional circles of bourgeois sociability in stark opposition with this new circle perceived as intellectually demanding and culturally open. One highly qualified couple with a passion for contemporary art who had just moved to Nantes stated, in an interview, that they participated with much more enthusiasm than at the Lions club, which they had soon left.47 Conversely, the autodidact leader of a building and public works company left the Kervégan group quickly, despite the fact he had helped to found it, joining a new Rotary Club in Nantes instead. He criticized Régent’s ambition as “blowing grand ideas about” like a “windmill.”48 He felt his place was neither in the historical Rotary Clubs run by the old money families, nor in Régent’s new circle. As Cousin and Chauvin put it (2010: 133): “Much of the effectiveness of social capital [in circles] derives from the distinctive value of the form in which it is presented and represented, that is, from the position of this form within a space of possible forms.”

• 49 Michel Bodiguel, « Pays de la Loire : le parvenu de Nantes », L’Express, 4 January 1980.
• 50 « Au revoir Jean-Jo. La droite perd un candidat », APL, March 1981.

48Twice, in 1983 and 1989, the Club Kervégan accompanied Régent in his attempts to attain municipal power. As we have seen, the group was founded when the socialist Alain Chenard became Mayor of Nantes. From 1979 onwards, it developed its activities and gained greater visibility under the leadership of the President of the Nantes CCI who had also taken up the presidency of the autonomous port of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire, a crucial position at a time when new industries were settling in the Loire estuary and the Saint-Nazaire shipyard was in a dominant position. Bodiguel’s media strategy intensified during this period. “JJR” as he was sometimes known in the press (in the same fashion as Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, known as JJSS), repeatedly criticized the Socialist mayor’s “ideological stagnation.” In his “Propos d’action” published fortnightly in 1979 and 1980, Régent outlined a political direction for Nantes: in favour of strategic investments (the Cheviré bridge, the Pellerin nuclear power station, etc.), against maintaining the Nantes shipyard at all costs, and in favour of “a pioneering, as opposed to a welfare, mentality.” In January 1980, he made his first appearance in the national broadsheet press, selected as one of “the 22 regional figures who matter.” Bodiguel, a correspondent for the weekly magazine L'Express, wrote prophetically: “The Nantes establishment is already willing to forget the misdemeanours of the ‘parvenu’ and is dreaming of seeing this man of steel drive the Socialist-Communist coalition out of the Mayor’s office.”49 And it seems that Régent did succeed in being accepted as a candidate for the right in the March 1983 elections.50

• 51 This version of events was reported by sources close to Régent (interviews with J.-M. Jolivel, con (...)

49However, the Club Kervégan’s leader did not in fact run for those elections, weakened by his company’s bankruptcy in early 1981 which had been fomented by his “conservative” opponents. Régent’s increasing notoriety, as he resolutely agreed to share management of the port with Saint-Nazaire and openly stated his ideas on society and morality, riled an influential portion of the economic bourgeoisie. It seems to have been Bernard Mallet, the President of Nantes’ Tribunal de commerce [Trade tribunal], an insurance broker and militant Royalist, who precipitated his demise. In 1980, when the SOAF found itself in difficulty, the bankers and public funders which had until then always supported the company suddenly refused to provide any more funds.51^. Régent stepped down from his different posts and refocused his attention on his role of company director, which he had been neglecting in favour of his many public activities. This setback, which highlights the intensity of the struggles that were playing out in the local decision-making system, shows that converting economic capital into symbolic capital is not without risk and can prove counter-productive for a company director who lacks social capital. After this abortive attempt, Régent did not abandon the Club Kervégan, quite the contrary. He energized his rear base and increased the number of dinner-debates, but put his political ambitions on hold until the mid-1980s.

• 52 Cahiers du groupe Kervégan, 1984, 1, p. 12.
• 53 Ibid., p. 64-70.

50As the Mayor’s office shifted to the right in 1983, the Club Kervégan created two strategic tools to support its founder’s political ambitions, now that his company was back on its feet. First, as culture was becoming a political and economic issue, the Club created an organization intended to point towards the “Kervégan foundation for the development of the sciences, the arts, and technology,” and turned this into a local event. It was reported by Presse Océan, which began covering the lecture-debates organized by the circle—now referred to, erroneously, as the Kervégan Foundation—as well as the Club’s financial support of a literary publisher. Second, the Club began distributing the Cahiers du groupe Kervégan, a journal which produced three disparate issues. In what was often quite heavy-handed language, the publication showcased the group’s ambitions since its creation, its analytical capacities, and its cultural pretentions. Whether discussing history and identity, economics, or culture in Nantes, the Club’s spokesmen described a “march of history” and indirectly framed themselves as the catalysts of necessary local change: “Today, the city has been enriched by new forces deriving from the renewal of its administrative and economic management, and from its new activities. Thanks to the contribution made by their abilities, they provide very strong potential for change. This is significantly transforming the social balance and the authorities. Although the resulting changes in mentalities and social systems are slow, a major transformation has taken place over the last twenty years, the full consequences of which are not visible in formal bodies.”52 They pointed to the political transformations that needed to take place: consolidating Research and Development, maintaining a great football team, improving communication, bringing forward the construction of road infrastructure, creating an Atlantic Centre for International Trade, etc.53

• 54 Alain Besson, Jean-Marc Ayrault. Une ambition nantaise… Nantes, Coiffard, 2004.
• 55 « Le parti de Nantes », La Lettre de Kervégan, 4 October 1988.

52The blurring of ideological lines was reinforced by political alternations that ran counter to each other between the local and national levels: the Club opposed the left-wing coalition at the Mayor’s office before 1981 and were just as opposed to the right-wing elected in 1983. In 1985, for example, the last issue of the Cahiers du groupe Kervégan contained numerous criticisms of municipal cultural policy, which it denounced at both local and national level. This was also the period when more members labelled as left-wing were co-opted. Three years later, when Régent had secured a crucial political and economic advantage (an International Atlantic Zone liberalizing trade beyond the European Economic Community), and when his various economic and cultural activities were being particularly well covered by Presse Océan, he prepared to run for the municipal elections with Guichard’s support and created the “Parti de Nantes” [The Nantes Party].54 He justified this in a new pamphlet entitled La Lettre de Kervégan.55 However, he was not embedded in party politics and Pierre Méhaignerie, the elected deputy representing Ille-et-Vilaine for the Centre des démocrates sociaux [CDS, the Social Democratic Centre party] and a follower of Raymond Barre, rejected his request for support. These reversals inevitably created tensions within the original group, but did not shake Régent’s leadership.

• 56 Ouest-France, 8 August 2009.

53In 1989, Jean-Marc Ayrault, a young PS Deputy who had already served as the Mayor of Saint-Herblain and was redefining himself politically, was elected as Mayor of Nantes. Régent definitively set aside his political aspirations and “Kervégan” became an autonomous circle. Over time and as a result of the local changeover, its successive partisan positions made way for political neutrality, especially as the PS Mayor, during his second term of office, made Régent the president of a body looking at the region’s future in line with his intellectual ambitions. From the early 2000s onwards, the Club, which was now an “Institute,” became known beyond Nantes and was described as a “think tank.” Nantes had become a regional capital that was striving to establish itself as a European city, and the Club’s activities could only contribute to its recognition. In just a few decades, the “Club de réflexion,” which, at its inception had in many ways been a sign of Nantes’ “backwardness,” had come to be seen as avant-garde. When its founder died in 2009, Ouest-France, which had given very little coverage to the former company director’s activities, ran the headline “Death of the intellectual Jean-Joseph Régent.”56 The Club Kervégan was a “going concern” that had failed to take over the Mayor’s office, but succeeded in transforming itself into a “respectable institution” (Hughes 1984).