Wasn't the Vichy regime as productivist in its interventionist logic as it was traditionalist in its rhetoric? Could France have modernized without the resources of its colonial empires and its unequal trade with the rest of the world? Who were the actors behind the first protests against the productivist "Great Acceleration," well before 1968? How were the environment, then sustainable development and ecological transition, constructed as objects of public action? What were the real effects on living conditions in France and on the state of the planet? What institutional, economic, or cultural barriers have delayed or prevented the greening of French society? When and how did environmentalist thinking and struggles intersect (or not) with social issues, gender issues, and anti-colonial struggles? This book provides illuminating answers to these questions and many others. Renewing our understanding of recent decades, it transforms and enriches the classic narratives of contemporary French history with its "environmental perspective," enabling us to better envision the future.

This article shows how the environmental issue has blurred the traditional opposition between the scales of action of capitalist actors. In the autumn of 1968, the French government announced its plan to build an oil refinery in the far west of France (Brittany), although oil companies were unanimously hostile to this project. Yet, the project was an answer to the demands by the elites of this peripheral region to build an 'industrialising industry', a concept borrowed from economists working in a postcolonial context. A refinery was seen as an opportunity to petrolise Brittany and bring this region into a modern era whose features were closely linked to the use of fossil fuels. Whit memories of the Torrey Canyon oil spill (1967) still vivid, some business and farming leaders questioned the suitability of this infrastructure. The protest was supported by fishers' and oyster-farmers' organisations. Their claims led them to collect international data regarding oil pollution and to draw attention to the weakness of the public authorities' knowledge on the eve of the invention of an environmental administration. In the meantime, fishers' organisations shaped their own kind of popular environmentalism and eventually put forward a counterproposal for the social and ecological future of the harbour.

In order to contribute to the historicization of "the ecological condition of social classes", this article outlines the possibilities of combining popular history and environmental history approaches. After questioning the lack of attention paid to the ecological crisis in recent popular histories of France, it invites us to draw conceptual tools from international literature to refine an environmental perspective on the history of subaltern groups in French society in the second twentieth century.