Were there workers in Nantes during the 18th and 19th centuries?

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, Nantes is a great industrial and working class town. Its industrial development is fully in line with the original French industrialisation process. The identity of the working class, based on skills and autonomy, is thus spared. Do the female workers take part in the shaping of this identity? Are they directly affected by the industrialisation process? How do men and women build their relations? To answer these questions, extreme care is required in so far as different sources shed opposite lights on these issues. Although, it seems that the industrialisation process also brings about a depreciation of women work. However, unlike the industrialisation process, the driving forces behind this depreciation process prove a complex phenomenon (the employer's hope of a greater subordination adds to the workers' deskilling), so do the ways (an increase in spread production work responds to the workers' deskilling in machine - run manufactories), the actors (employers' motives and workers' reactions hang together), and its reach (relations between gender and qualification prove very complex).