in the 1970s and early 1980s, is an enquiry concerning more than 5,000 workers in the Fos-sur-Mer zone and numerous businesses (steel industry, petrochemical industry, metallurgy, etc.) and aiming at demonstrating how lifestyles contribute to the creation of different types of workers. Classe ouvrière et social démocratie : Lille et Marseille, co-written with Jean Lojkine et alii (1981), has been reviewed by Madeleine Rebérioux in Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, and by Alain Bergounioux in Le Mouvement social : bulletin trimestriel de l'Institut français d'histoire sociale. Rebérioux points out that the book results from the collective work of a team of five sociologists. Although the share of each researcher is not specified, Bleitrach's analyses — as already outlined in L'Usine et la vie — are recognizable. By choosing as the subject of their research two large towns run by socialists for nearly a century, the co-authors barely conceal their thesis: the reformist movement has managed to contain workers' struggles within the factory or in urban ghettoes by means of specific municipal policies and an array of local societies geared to dealing with every aspect of daily life outside work. The urban municipality run by social democrats is construed as a place where a mode of political control which emerged in the late 19th century was meant to channel the revolutionary movement within the framework of a Republican consensus. For Bergounioux, Classe ouvrière et social démocratie provides, as a socio-political study, a valuable insight into the evolution of the two municipal policies and the complex role of modern community workers although its intent is predominantly political. As recent legislative elections have shown, a number of communist-run local councils too, have been affected by electoral attrition. An analysis, albeit brief, of the "hegemonic system" of communist municipalities would not have been amiss and would have made a number of pages look less accusatory. The authors start from the assumption that socialism (social democracy) follows a predetermined political pattern, at once expressing and betraying the working class, whose struggle is fully revealed only by the communist party. Classe ouvrière et social démocratie is also mentioned by Pierre-Paul Zaho in "D'impossibles notables ? Les grandes familles de Marseille face à la politique (1860-1970)". Zaho observes that Bleitrach and Lojkine claim that in Marseille "an explicit or tacit pact depending on the period, ensures that the control of economic power and urban management goes to the