Contenu du sommaire : Statuts sociaux - Stratifications - Identités

The Making of Ancient Greek City-States : Status, Class, and the System of Land Tenure. A distinction is usually drawn between two opposite notions of Archaic Greek societies, based either on a legal and static definition of status or on a personal and fluid notion of status linked to diversified strategies of social distinction. This article seeks to move beyond this opposition by examining the history of status groups in the Archaic period. It analyzes the most important moments within the complex historiography devoted to this subject and provides a history of status groups during the formative period of the city-states. The creation of new status groups was an essential feature of the city-states' history and was primarily linked to indebtedness and war. Although statuses were collective and often imposed from the outside, they nevertheless display a historical development that is central to the formation of city-states. In the seventh century BCE, the aristocracy created new groups in response to the need for a workforce. The resulting conflict led to an evolution of the systems surrounding access to land and food. This reorganization of entitlement, which was how communities responded to the social and economic crisis they faced, was in turn based on the creation of new status groups. Social conflict led to the definition of a new system of status groups.

The Working Statuses of Slaves and Freedmen in Major Roman Harbors Between the First Century BCE and the Second Century CE This article investigates the work identities of slaves and freedmen involved in Roman harbor economies between the first century BCE and the second century CE. Textual evidence (epigraphic or belonging to the manuscript tradition) reveals the great diversity of these social categories. This heterogeneity was related to the level of technical difficulty involved in the tasks that were performed and thus to workers' professional skills, as was the case in other urban economies. Nevertheless, factors specific to harbor economies, particularly with regard to long-distance trade, were also important. The opposition between unskilled workers and trusted agents represents only a part of this broad spectrum. The complexity that can be observed lies in the lack of concurrence — and even in the dissonance — between the legal, social, and working statuses of individuals.

Hierarchies of Medieval Craft Labor Between History and Historiography Philippe Bernardi's book Maître, valet et apprenti au Moyen Âge. Essai sur une production bien ordonnée examines the traditional triptych of master craftsman, servant, and apprentice, which is considered characteristic of medieval production. His analysis focuses on “labor statuses,” deliberately moving away from a conception of social statuses that is too strictly legal and too rarely linked to a reflection on production — beyond the schematic model of the three orders, in which production is confined to the group of “those who work” and therefore only plays a minor role in the constitution of the social order. The originality of Bernardi's approach lies in systematically and symmetrically working on two planes : he explores his object, labor hierarchies, both historically — based on the archives from thirteenth– to fifteenth-century Provence — and historiographically, reflecting on the interpretative models that have been applied to the same archives since the nineteenth century. Applying the tools of the history of science to medieval history, he uncovers the mechanisms that have shaped our knowledge of medieval society since the nineteenth century and shows that the master-servant-apprentice triptych is first and foremost a representation that made its way from normative sources to historiography but does not account for medieval production as it appears in the sources on practices. Going beyond this normative view, Bernardi shows how labor statuses were mostly relational, working as a series of binary oppositions — a reality concealed behind a historiographical discourse traversed not only by intellectual experience and critical thinking, but also by beliefs, values, and forms of activism.

The History of Socio-Economic Classifications in France Reconsidered Resulting from a process that began in the nineteenth century, French socio-economic classifications (code des catégories socio-professionnelles) were elaborated between 1951 and 1954 and have not been modified much since. Without a strong theoretical framework and conceived according to a realistic approach, it embodied the social classes as described by post-war society. During a period of “reworking” (1978-1981), it became an exciting topic of sociological exploration, providing a representation of Pierre Bourdieu's two-dimensional social space and the subject of experimentation for Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's pragmatic sociology. During a period of “renovation” (1995-2001), administrative caution toward any changes contrasted with the evolution of labor-law categories and the goal of analytical purity backed by econometrics. The history of this classification provides an account of a statistical tool that was meant to remain unchanged when neither the institution ensuring its management, the ordinary or legal categories to which it refers, nor the sociological theories and practices themselves remain unchanged.

Elites in the Early Middle Ages : Identities, Strategies, and Mobility When assessing status within societies of the early Middle Ages, it is necessary to set aside juridical classifications and instead employ concepts derived from political sociology, whereupon the notion of an “elite” can encompass any individual occupying an elevated social position within his or her community, be it through wealth, power, or culture. Using textual and archaeological sources, historians can seek out the processes of distinction and social recognition that were characteristic of elites throughout the early Middle Ages (sixth-eleventh centuries). The Carolingian period shows signs of increasing hierarchical practices, which led individuals as well as groups to devise strategies for bolstering their position and forestalling the loss of social status. Within the framework of these processes of social mobility, one can examine elites at various levels and from different chronological and regional perspectives while also avoiding an overly structural analysis.

The People Are the City : The Idea of the Popolo and the Condition of the Popolani in Venice (Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries) Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian society is generally described according to the tripartition between patricians, citizens, and popolo. This article seeks to examine the popolo and the popolani of Venice, combining a terminological and conceptual study of these categories with a sociological analysis of the individuals who belonged to them. The history of how these social groups came about reveals the complex definition of the popolo in Venice between the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the early modern era. A consideration of the popolani's “condition” involves analysis of how they established who they were and the framework of ther action, according to the associations, spaces, and institutions in which they interacted.

On the Construction of Confessional Identities in Eighteenth-Century Germany Christophe Duhamelle's book La frontière au village. Une identité catholique allemande au temps des Lumières is part of the rich field of studies devoted to confessionalization in the Holy Roman Empire. Concerning this paradigm, however, the book is innovative on at least three levels. It moves away from a macro-historical point of view, which tends to favor an overarching perspective, in order to instead analyze confessional identity as both an interaction and a constant tension between attempts at standardization imposed from above and appropriation by the communities themselves. The guiding thread is not the confessional norm, but the exploration of the clues that reveal how individuals claimed membership within a community Discontinuities and areas of uncertainty persist along the boundaries between Catholics and Lutherans. Confessional identity is characterized by its specular nature and feeds off of what it borrows from its opponents. Duhamelle's study covers the second half of the eighteenth century, whereas the sixteenth and the begining of the seventeenth centuries had previously been favored. Lastly, Eischsfeld, exclave of the archbishopric-electorate of Mainz, was a rural territory, while most studies have essentially been devoted to towns.