The Deffrenne textile factory, in the North of France, was famous in the late 1970s when workers occupied it, before organizing a takeover in a "self-management" spirit. In the wake of the Lip experiment, such industrial conflict has been depicted as typical of the blue-collar worker insurgency of the "radical Seventies". Yet, such interpretation conceals the key role played by other actors: white-collar workers within firms and professional intellectuals outside. If the radicalization of many professionals (lawyers, physicians, etc.) has been widely documented, scholars have less studied the counterparts of these "militant experts" within firms. Based on a monograph of the Deffrenne conflict, our paper aims at filling that gap. For that purpose, a life spheres approach appears to be particularly fruitful, as it allows to explain how the radicalization of workers, be they white- or blue-collar, met and actually intertwined with that of professional experts.
