La Conquête du temps libre

In all his history, man has never worked as much as in the last hundred years. Among all the European countries Switzerland remains that where people works most. This position, sometimes envied, of the "champion of hard work" has obviously its inconveniences. The Swiss have less spare time than other elsewhere. Their struggle for remunerated spare time for all was a long and difficult one. It is only recently that this idea has been accepted as a legitimate right. For the generation who lived through the mutation to a leisure civilisation it was necessary to reinvent a whole new attitude to life. This is the story told by those who lived through this change and were largely responsible for it.