The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc looks at one of the earliest examples of a region and an industry (woolen textiles) that had successfully mechanized only to submit, in the later nineteenth century, to the ravages of deindustrialization.

In contrast to the explanations of both economic "realists," who attribute deindustrialization to market forces and economic geography, and regional nationalists, who see a betrayal of Lower Languedoc by its bourgeoisie whose investments took the easy path to the vine rather than staying the course with industry, Johnson shows that woolens production remained vital through mid-century. The dimension that must be added, he argues, is the political. Workers in Languedoc developed a powerful labor and democratic socialist movement against an intransigent class of employers. That movement rocked the region, as well as the nation, from 1848-1851. Dramatic as it may have been, this upheaval also proved to be the catalyst stimulating the disfavor of the French state and the consumer alike, and the ineluctable process of decline set in.

By 1920, Lower Languedoc clung tenuously to a single-crop economy, the ubiquitous vine.