[en] The paper presents the purpose of the "Virtual Factory" research program which is to reconstitute a three dimensional representation of significant industrial plants such as the Renault automobile factory of Boulogne-Billancourt located in the close suburbs of Paris and recently demolished. We give the example of the C5 workshop where the assembly lines were introduced by the end of World War I. The goal is both a study in industrial history of the assembly lines, and an archaeological project aiming at the virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges. The idea is not to make up for this industrial disappearance, but to create a new means of informing the relatively unknown history of workers and workshops. Beyond the virtual representation of a building or of machines and conveyors, the aim of the program is to exploit the original information brought by series of visual documents. Companies such as Renault have been mass producers of images. In the first 50 years of its history, Renault made 70,000 pictures, shot numerous documentary films and drew 45,000 implementary plans of the Billancourt factory. These sources are different from the huge written archives of the direction, and from the published literature on industrial organization. Visual documents present another point of view that has never been systematically used by historians. The stake is important because visuals show things that no writing talks about. This perspective is central because the critical methodology of this historical utilization is still to be elaborated. The digital means of this program are essential as they give the possibility of confronting a large number of informal, unwritten records, in order to renew our knowledge on the technological and social history of people who did not leave classical historical traces. In this perspective the archaeological approach teaches how to deal with subtle indications and signs when there is no written evidence. They help question these acknowledged discourses with the perception of what was actually taking place in the workshops

[fr] L'article présente les fondements du programme de recherche " Usines 3D ", soutenu par l'Anr Corpus, qui a commencé par reproduire en images de synthèse l'atelier C5 des usines Renault de Billancourt dans lequel les premières chaînes d'assemblage des châssis ont été introduites à la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale. Ce cas particulier sert de prototype à un programme plus vaste visant à reconstituer quelques usines remarquables du patrimoine industriel international. Le but principal est de documenter l'histoire sociale et technique d'une partie relativement mal connue du travail ouvrier, de rendre plus intelligible les routines discrètes de ceux qui ne laissent pas de textes. Au-delà des sources classiques de l'histoire, nous étudions ce que montrent des corpus d'images (fixes et animées) afin d'offrir un nouvel éclairage sur le sujet et d'accéder, par l'analyse iconographique et l'outil informatique, à de nouvelles connaissances historiques. L'enjeu épistémologique est double. Il s'agit d'une part d'élaborer une méthode d'analyse des sources visuelles. D'autre part, le programme passe par une mise en valeur d'un patrimoine industriel souvent menacé de disparition. La reconstitution en 3D ne cherche pas à compenser cet effacement, mais à servir d'outil d'analyse historique tout en étant réceptive aux attentes des villes de tradition industrielle demandeuses de repères concrets et de moyens de transmission des mémoires du travail.