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.

Afin de contribuer à l’historicisation de « la condition écologique des classes sociales », cet article esquisse des possibilités de conjuguer des approches d’histoire populaire et d’histoire environnementale. Après avoir interrogé la faible prise en compte de la crise écologique dans les récentes histoires populaires de la France, il invite à puiser des outils conceptuels dans la littérature internationale pour affiner un regard environnemental sur l’histoire des groupes subalternes dans la société française du second xxe siècle

Unlike the paragons of ecological modernization, techno-solutionism or partisan political ecology, the ethos of those involved in grassroots environmentalism is often characterized by a relative modesty in the way they describe their relationship with ordinary nature. This attitude is the antithesis of the spectacle of the saviour-of-the-planet syndrome (from television producers turned ministers to digital multi-billionaires who constantly set themselves up as enlightened heroes of the ecological cause). What's more, the stranglehold of constraints on the environmental possibilities of post-war fishermen in Sète has not been loosened for the working classes of the 21st century. Nonetheless, certain sections of the working classes continue to have a unique relationship with the environment, driven primarily by the definition of “essential needs” against the industrialization of superfluous production, as well as by the organization of conditions for a dignified subsistence.