Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Dérogeance and commerce/trade
Dérogeance is a tool for public qualification and disqualification that the French Ancien Régime used for setting the perimeters of the noble being, but its classificatory consequences went beyond its original intended reach. Trade, an activity leading to the application of dérogeance, reacted through the intervention of its primary designated actors, the merchant corps, which tried to shift the socio-economic indignity to craftsmen's communities. Ultimately wanting to organize the social categories likely to participate in the State, the monarchy at the time used dérogeance as a way to include and exclude.

« The enterprising self » a new way of politically managing the working classes ?
Based on a study crossing two branches of policy, aiming to make « everyone a business-owner » and « everyone a home-owner », this article comes back to changes in how the working classes are dominated. The socio-historical analysis of these policy programs reveals their gradual expansion to the lowest fractions of the social space, where owner-occupation and self-employment are established as forms of private insurance and a moral necessity for confronting the « crisis ». The injunction to independence thus shifts the site of the exercise of economic domination to the private sphere, contributing to its increasing invisibility. Following this, the ethnography of domestic practices of new property owners and self-employed people reveals the hold that accounting logics have over everyday life and the amplitude of the capital-building work necessary to grow the worth of legal property titles. The article more generally highlights the forms of dispossession, both material and symbolic, experienced by these new owners, who are transformed into « entrepreneurs of themselves ».

Great cause, little screen
This article lays out the development of disabled persons' visibility on French television, based on a statistical survey of the National Audio-Visual Institute archives and interviews with the relevant journalists and their information sources. By showing how various situations of handicap benefit from very unequal levels of representation, it allows us to understand the general principles behind the construction of public problems in the mainstream media while shedding light on certain changes in journalism.

The « experience » of aging
This article examines aging using the calendar/journal of an 87-yearold man, a former human resources employee, begun while he was living in his own home and continuing after his move to a retirement home. Beginning with a critique of approaches to experience of aging, the article analyzes the informant's writings by resituating them in their social contexts and connecting them to the survey situation, in order to understand the range of possibilities available to the elderly in relation to the frames that constrain them.

Are they French enough ?
This article examines French citizenship in the French Overseas Departments and asks whether or not citizenship in Réunion was equal to citizenship in the Metropole. Analysis of local and national laws and statutes demonstrate that political and social citizenship of the type practised in Metropolitan France was effectively unattainable for Réunion Islanders, despite the formal rights accorded after slave emancipation in 1848 and the 1946 law creating the Overseas Departments.

The feminists' quest
How to go about finding people who participated in a loosely organized social movement decades ago for a study that depends on finding all participants, not only those who were the most visible or those who are still active ? Based on a study of the 1970s feminist movement, this article presents the techniques we used for composing and recruiting the research participant population and the issues raised in the process, and offers a wider consideration of how various data gathering methods work together.

With whom are we writing history
How many published eyewitnesses have the attentions of specialists in the First World War ? What proportion do they represent of the sum of « available » authors ? And most importantly, who are they ? Based on a tally of French witnesses mentioned in the indices of academic texts devoted to the world of combatants, this article aims to evaluate the size and uses of the corpus of authors actually shared by researchers. At the end of the analysis, the article shows both the bourgeois nature of the common textual content used in French historiography in the 2000s, and how narrow it is : of a total of sixty witnesses, nearly all came from the learned elite of the Belle Époque. The article concludes in evoking some of the problems this overrepresentation of upper-class authors raises in writings about the conflict.