Introduction
The Introduction opens with evidence of the extent to which questions of employment, precarious and flexible labour have come to dominate the French political, cultural, and intellectual agenda since, broadly, the beginning of the new century. It then argues that this is itself evidence of the extent to which the shift to post-Fordist forms of accumulation is posing a fundamental challenge to established notions of French national identity and republican citizenship as these were institutionalised in the postwar compromise. A summary of the book’s content follows which clarifies how it seeks to probe more deeply into the precise nature of these phenomena and the diverse ways in which French filmmakers and authors have sought to represent them.