Cellatex SA is a former French rayon spinning company, founded in 1981 on the basis of a business established in 1902 in Givet, Ardennes (France), and liquidated in 2000.

The closure of Cellatex marked the end of a chemical and textile industry in France, born of innovative approaches in the late 19th century, which prospered between the wars and during the Trente Glorieuses.

In the mid-19th century, changes in clothing habits and difficulties in silk supply, following the outbreaks of pébrine and flacherie diseases,[note 1] heightened the interest in this research.

[1] A Frenchman, Count Hilaire de Chardonnet, Louis Pasteur's assistant in his research into silkworm diseases[2] perfected the first industrializable process for dissolving cellulose, passing the resulting product through a spinneret and solidifying it at the end.

The same group of shareholders joined forces with Lyon dyers, the Gillet family, to set up another company using the same process, "Soie Artificielle d'Izieux", in Izieux [fr] near Saint-Chamond.

[10] From 31 August 1914 Givet found itself in occupied territory, and the plant was transformed into a hospital and a fat, margarine and canned food factory.

In June 1919, the company's management sent a delegation to Germany to try to recover the equipment requisitioned by the occupying forces during World War I, with the help of the services of the Ministry of Industrial Reconstruction, set up in Wiesbaden specifically for this purpose.

The scarcity of bombyx silk, and the development of luxury and faux-luxury in all social classes, created a dynamic for viscose (later called rayon) production.

When Georges Simenon described a plant in Givet in 1932, in his novel Chez les Flamands, he was clearly inspired[14] by the artificial silk factory on rue du Bon Secours.

Making artificial silk thread from sheets of wood pulp was hard work, in heat, humidity, acids and the "rotten egg" smell of hydrogen sulfide.

In 1959, Soie Artificielle Givet-Izieux merged with Viscose Française (which had acquired the Grenoble plant) to create Compagnie Industrielle des Textiles Artificiels et Synthétiques.

The holding company took long-term strategic decisions and the divisions implemented them, and employee representative bodies were limited to comparatively divided legal entities to embody the checks and balances.

[27] Still, since the Seveso disaster in Italy in 1976, public authorities and companies had become increasingly aware of their responsibilities with regard to chemical risks, and the Rhône-Poulenc group was no exception.

Faced with increasingly fierce competition, the Rhône-Poulenc group adopted a strategy of retrenchment, hardly innovating and no longer renewing its industrial base, despite the concentration achieved.

[13][note 7] In 1982 the factory manager's house near the cité Viscose was bought by the commune of Échirolles and turned into a museum, the Musée Géo-Charles, dedicated to the sporting arts.

It was the last rayon company, working from paper pulp, for eighteen plants in France operating this industrial sector twenty years earlier.

[31] On 5 July 2000, with their employer nowhere to be found for almost a year, Cellatex employees were informed that their company had been declared bankrupt by the Charleville-Mézières Commercial Court.

[32] On 17 July, the employees dumped acid into the Meuse river, not enough to keep it in the drainage channels and avoid major pollution,[33] but enough to show their determination, make an impression and keep up the pressure on the public authorities.

The act was criticized by a large part of the French political class, including those on the left, given that power at the time was held by the Socialist Party.

Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement declared: "It is not acceptable that, whatever the difficult situation, employees should take the neighboring populations hostage, any more than the residents of the Meuse, in France, Belgium or Holland, by spilling sulfuric acid into the river".

Denis Baupin, national spokesman for the French Greens, also reacted: "Of course, we understand the despair of workers who are victims of the liberalization of the textile sector, but by destroying a river, the common property of all citizens, they are stepping outside the democratic expression of their demands".

[34] The French Minister for Employment and Solidarity, Martine Aubry, disagreed, stating that "the despair of men deserved to be heard", adding that action should be taken instead of making declarations.

In the absence of the company's shareholder, who had disappeared, government departments, notably the teams of Jean-Claude Vacher, Prefect of the Ardennes, assisted by the Ministry of Labor and Solidarity, were on the front line in the search for solutions.

"As a preamble to Wednesday evening's meeting, representatives of the Ministry told us that they considered the dossier to be insufficiently reliable", explained a spokesman for the former Cellatex employees.

[37] The liquidation of Cellatex led to the implementation of a plan for the Ardennes[38] and a project to revitalize the Givet employment area,[39] with mediocre results.