Like other cities, Bordeaux discovered the phenomenon of electricity by the end of the nineteenth century and tamed it during the first third of the twentieth century. Here, as elsewhere, one could follow the stages in the diffusion of the uses of electricity. But tackling the history of the electricity industry in Bordeaux means, perhaps more than elsewhere, getting involved with the evolution of the governing bodies which have dominated the process of electrification. Indeed, Bordeaux presents the case, very rare in France of a town which has known several juridical changes in the development of generation and distribution of electricity. From the start, until 1919, the construction of the network and its exploitation were taken care of by private companies. At this date, the Council appropriated the means of production and of distribution of electricity; the authority which was created then remained in existence beyond the general nationalisation of 1946, until 1956, when the city entrusted its electricity supply to the national company Electricité de France (EDF). How can these statutory changes be explained? We shall see that they can primarily be accounted for by shortcomings in the supply, whoever the operator may have been at the time. Indeed, in this field, supply first created demand and thus engendered the first faltering attempts in electricity. But, then, on several occasions, the electric power supply hit financial and technical snags. The change of juridical status then appeared as the solution to the people in charge.

In comparative Labour history there is a long tradition of adhering to a typology of labour movements which distinguishes south-western European, ‘Latin’ labour movements (France, Spain, Italy) from north-eastern European labour movements (Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, east and south-east Europe) and invokes a third category: Anglo-American labour movements. The British Labour Party is usually subsumed under this latter category, whereas the German SPD is regarded as the spiritual leader of the second. Insofar as these comparisons explicitly deal with the time before the First World War, their argument is indeed a strong one. After all, the SPD was the largest socialist party in the world before 1914, at a time when the Labour Party did not even allow individual membership. At least in its organisational strongholds, the SPD resembled a social movement providing for its members almost ‘from cradle to grave’. The Labour Party, by contrast, is often portrayed as a trade union interest group in parliament with no other purpose than electoral representation. Where the Labour Party avoided any ideological commitment before 1914, the SPD had at least theoretically adopted Marxism as its ideological bedrock after 1890.

Little more than a decade after having lost the Second World War, the society of the western part of Germany, the Federal Republic, had changed fundamentally in the eye of the observer. The economic expert Henry C. Wallich was not the only one to speak of the ‘German miracle’. Not only had the previously achieved industrial standards long been regained and surpassed, but also a boom had set in – as in all of Western Europe – which came to an end only in the 1970s. Simultaneously, both economy and society had been modernised in the process of reconstruction. The transition to a new stage of modernity, ‘society in affluence’, was discussed animatedly. The emergence of new leisure lifestyles in particular was considered a mark of present times. However, in current reviews it is often forgotten that the West German society of the 1950s was to a far greater extent determined by continuity with the interwar period and by the consequences of the war and post-war years than a first glance at the spectacular novelties suggests.