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The struggle over mental health and its responsibility in the French energy sector. The article studies the issue of the employees' mental suffering in the French energy companies EDF-GDF between 1985 and 2008. It is based on the thorough analysis of the minutes of a national committee of health and security at work. The paper wishes to show that the rise of the theme of workers' mental health during the period cannot be understood without paying attention to the already existing debates on accident responsibility, to the people who summon this theme, and to the argumentations made possible by summoning this theme.L'article analyse le traitement de la souffrance psychique des salariés au sein des entreprises Electricité de France-Gaz de France entre 1985 et 2008, à partir d'un dépouillement exhaustif des procès-verbaux d'une instance nationale. Il entend montrer que l'émergence et les problématisations du thème de la souffrance psychique sur la période ne peuvent être comprises sans faire attention aux débats préexistants sur la responsabilité des accidents, à l'identité des personnes qui le mobilisent, et aux argumentations qu'il permet

When it comes to occupational injury, disease, and fatalities, criminal prosecution and punishment is the exception. This paper focuses on three loopholes in legal strategy that make it difficult for determined social movements and committed prosecutors to secure conviction against corporate executives: they are the notions (1) that “modern” industrial risk is by essence impersonal and diluted, making the assignment of individual responsibility difficult or impossible, (2) that industrial hazard is foreign to any notion of intention, fault or responsibility, (3) that the certainty of the causal link between exposure and damages must be established for each victim on a purely individual, rather than statistical, basis. I describe how Italian prosecutors sought to circumvent these loopholes in the Eternit asbestos maxi-trials. Although there appear to be solid legal workarounds for the first and second loophole, the third one remains problematic, calling for urgent political and legal imagination.

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