sites in Barriol (a district in Arles) employed around 200 workers in the period between the world wars. In the 1930s, the metal-working company Constructions métalliques de Provence (CMP) set up shop in Arles and became one of the most important enterprises in town. In addition to these major businesses, there was a paper mill specializing in newsprint (most notably supplying the daily papers in Marseille), a shop that made cardboard packing boxes, and agribusiness factories that produced canned fruits and vegetables.
In the 1960s, 32 percent of the active members of the workforce were employed as laborers in industry (6,000 in 1962) or as employees in industries or businesses (2,000). In the 1960s, the proportion of middle-level managers and executives also rose (from 754 and 389, respectively, in 1954, to 1,075 and 616 in 1962). Conversely, handicrafts declined: there were fewer than 500 craftsmen in the early 1960s. The population grew owing to both increased birth rates and immigration: in 1962, there were 42,000 inhabitants, of whom 84 percent were “French by birth.” Immigrants from Italy, predominant in the first half of the twentieth century, came to work in industry; later, immigrants from Spain worked mainly in the rice fields in the Camargue. This workforce, chiefly laborers, was primarily male: in 1962, of 20,000 women, only 8,682 (24 percent) were employed, a proportion far below the national average.
The city’s industrial decline began in the second half of the 1970s, and factory closures multiplied in the 1980s. Most crucially, the railroad shops were shut down in 1984, and the metal-working factory CMP was downsized and renamed Constructions métalliques et préfabrication d’Arles: it maintained its boiler-making shops but had only sixty salaried workers. The local economy had already lost 2,000 jobs by the early 1980s, and the losses increased in the following decades (5,000 jobs lost between 1980 and 2000). For example, Rivoire et Carret-Lustucru, a rice-processing factory created in 1952 that had had 140 employees, ceased production after the floods of 2003.
This situation led to unemployment and poverty. In 2001, the number of recipients of financial aid from the government (in the form of “minimal revenue for insertion” into the economy, RMI) rose in the commune to 2,043, or 10.5 percent of the eligible population. With an unemployment rate of around 15 percent (the highest in the Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur region), for the most part, according to INSEE, “pockets of high economic insecurity” were concentrated in the city. Of the residents of Greater Arles, 27 percent lived in districts covered by “municipal policy”; these included large “sensitive urban zones” in which a third of the population had an average taxable income of 5,700 euros per household. The available jobs were primarily seasonal (in agriculture, especially rice and fruit harvesting, agribusiness, and tourism); they required little skill or training and offered very low wages. Economic inequality in Arles was quite pronounced, as tax data make clear: the gross earnings of the top 10 percent were seven times higher than those of the bottom 10 percent).93 In Arles, as in other regions, the industrial decline went hand in hand with the growth of the far right: Marine Le Pen won 25 percent of the votes in the 2012 presidential election.
In the face of this decline, the initial response was industrial, with noteworthy improvements to the port on the Rhône in the early 1990s, financed by the Compagnie nationale du Rhône: the goal was to provide harbor facilities that could accommodate 3,500-ton ships, and also to equip an industrial zone intended to support the installation of new enterprises on the site. However, only seven such businesses had been established by the early 2000s.
During the same period, the city of Arles sought to develop municipal activities in the arts, culture, and tourism. Hard hit by the departure of its principal industries, the city experienced major financial difficulties and had to find new resources. In the domains just mentioned, the city had what administrators call “assets” – masterpieces including ancient ruins (the amphitheater, the Roman theater, the Alyscamps necropolis) and religious buildings (the Saint-Trophime cloister dating in part from the twelfth century). Ninety-two sites from different periods have been included on the official list of historical monuments since 1976. But their power of attraction comes in part from the work of heritage creation that has been under way in Arles for more than a century. This work owes a great deal to the national recognition won by late nineteenth-century regionalist writers, especially Alphonse Daudet and Frédéric Mistral, who highlighted local traditions that had been revived in a spirit similar to the one that animated folkloric ethnography during the same period. These traditions were embodied most notably in the Félibrige association, which sought to preserve Provençal and establish it as a literary language. In this context, a number of folk festivals and events were brought back to life or invented. The heritage of which Arles can boast is thus constituted not only by ruins and monuments but also by the names of artists whose fame is associated with the city. Vincent Van Gogh, the most prominent among them, produced numerous paintings during his residency there in 1888 and 1889.
Bullfighting has also played an important role in the city’s heritage creation, not only because of the associated festivals whose folkloric dimensions are intensified by their organizers but also in that it has attracted intellectuals and artists; this was especially true from the 1930s through the 1960s, when writers and painters saw this entertainment as a pinnacle of popular art, at once savage and ancestral. While the folkloric preoccupations of regional writers (for example, Charles Maurras, who won the Félibrige prize for an elegy dedicated to the Provençal poet Théodore Aubanel) and regionalist painters (Yves Brayer, for one) made Arles an attractive destination for people with right-wing tendencies (when he visited Arles in 1940, Marshal Pétain mingled with the gardians, local herdsmen who symbolized the return to the land and to traditions), the folkloric aspects of the arena, with its bulls and bullfighters evoking Spain (and the Spanish Civil War), made Arles attractive to left-leaning visitors as well. The fact that the Confédération générale du travail (CGT, a major labor union) and the Communist Party have deep roots in Arles, and the fact that the city’s residents have generally voted on the left, at least until the 1980s, helped to draw artists such as Jean Lurçat and Ossip Zadkine (the Réattu Museum had exhibits of both painters in 1953), and especially Picasso, an aficionado of the feria (he was photographed in 1959 in the arena alongside Jean Cocteau and the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín). Like Cocteau, Picasso stayed at the Nord-Pinus Hotel, which helped ensure the fame of that establishment. The photographer Lucien Clergue was a major factor in the “artification” of Arles: he made it a center for photography – a “middlebrow” art whose aesthetic worth has been increasingly recognized during the last several decades – first by ensuring the opening of a photography section in the Réattu Museum as early as 1965, then by setting up an international summer photography festival in the 1970s; these gatherings, now known as the Rencontres d’Arles, increased significantly in scope starting in 1982.
The city has invested in cultural facilities such as the Mediathèque in the Espace Van Gogh and the Musée de l’Arles antique, a major archeological museum; it also sponsors cultural events – among others, a festival devoted to popular music (Les Suds), another featuring harpists (Journées de la harpe), and readings in the Saint-Trophime cloister; along with the Rencontres d’Arles, these events draw around 300,000 visitors each year. With the city’s support, numerous cultural associations have been created, and their widely varied activities range from the protection of Arles’s heritage to the plastic arts and theater.94 One objective of these cultural associations is obviously to attract establishments and enterprises that can stimulate the city’s economic activity and create jobs. The publishing house Actes Sud set up shop in Arles in 1978, and the music publisher and distributor Harmonia Mundi did the same in 1983. A school for advanced study in photography opened in Arles in 1982 in a sumptuous private residence that the city had purchased from its owners in 1978. Similar stories can be told about PRIDES (a regional association that promotes collaborative economic development), subsidiaries of book and music publishing houses, and other industries promoting culture and heritage. The publishing and audiovisual sectors, along with the arts (including the performing arts), account for some 1,000 jobs. But these new positions, while they attract white-collar workers and managers, have not sufficed to bring unemployment down to a level equivalent to the regional average. The loss of jobs in industry has not been compensated either by second homes, a sector where there has been a significant
