The region of Lorraine in France witnessed the collapse of the steel industries in the late twentieth century, causing massive job losses and social devastation. Daewoo Electronics, a division of one of the great Korean conglomerates of the 1980s and 1990s, came to Lorraine in eastern France in 1987. They were lured there by generous French government subsidies and the chance to enter the European market. They opened three factories in consumer electronics and components, and also nearly acquired Thomson Multimédia, a state-owned consumer electronics factory, from the French government “for a single symbolic franc.” The resulting uproar, from political opponents and Thomson and Daewoo employees, ended the deal and soured their relationship with France. Daewoo employed just over a thousand people before they closed in 2003, a result of the collapse of the entire Daewoo Group. This article places this sequence of events, widely covered in the media, in the context of French anxiety about globalization, the loss of industrial substance, and France’s place in a changing world. It is suggested that this episode, occurring at a critical juncture in the transformation of industrial capitalism into a service and digital economy, illustrates the difficulties of this period and the media coverage of factory closings.

The region of Lorraine in France witnessed the collapse of the steel industries in the late twentieth century, causing massive job losses and social devastation. Daewoo Electronics, a division of one of the great Korean conglomerates of the 1980s and 1990s, came to Lorraine in eastern France in 1987. It was lured there by generous French government subsidies and the chance to enter the European market. It opened three factories in consumer electronics and components, and also nearly acquired Thomson Multimédia, a state-owned consumer electronics factory, from the French government “for a single symbolic franc”. The resulting uproar, from political opponents and Thomson and Daewoo employees, ended the deal and soured its relationship with France. Daewoo employed just over a thousand people before it closed in 2003, a result of the collapse of the entire Daewoo Group. This article places this sequence of events, widely covered in the media, in the context of French anxiety about globalization, the loss of industrial substance, and France’s place in a changing world. It examines the process of privatization, and the ways in which it went so badly wrong in the Thomson case. This episode occurred at a critical juncture in the transformation of industrial capitalism into a service and digital economy.