Contenu du sommaire : Cultures ouvrières

In his seminal work Autonomie ouvrière, Jacques Julliard intended to demonstrate how workers' professional and political autonomy had led to a cultural autonomy during the revolutionary syndicalism period. Although published in 1988, at a time when cultural history was booming, his work acknowledged that it did not make use of these new tools. This article therefore intends to seek the various historical illustrations of this cultural autonomy, rather than the cultural origins of autonomy. This will lead us to consider three mains aspects: the literary culture of le Père Peinard, the practical culture of strike and sabotage and the cultural learning exemplified by workers' self-education.

Few working-class children attended vocational education during the second industrialization. Workers' attitudes towards training, however, evolved in relation to economic and social changes as well as technical transformations. At the end of the 19th century, despite the lack of massification of this education before the 1940s and the limited participation of working-class representatives in the governance of vocational education institutions, there was a gradual and pragmatic redeployment of technical culture within the workers' culture, through a wide variety of experiences, from courses for locally organized workers to labour scholarships including vocational education.

Working-class writings often originated from self-taught writers. The access to “legitimate” culture sometimes took place through a mentor or scholarly institution. But the trade union movement implemented/created its own modes of training. Workers, women as well as men, therefore took the pen to write a whole variety of texts (poetry, stories, testimonials, newspaper articles, etc.) which were organized around three main polarities: daily writings, biographical narratives or militant texts. They thus responded to multiple functions: they were not only aimed at teaching, but also constituted modes of struggle and could include a literary ambition.

The article investigates social surveys produced by social services during the interwar period as a tool to comprehend consumption cultures among working-class youth. It focuses on the case of the Social Service of Endangered Childhood (Service social de l'enfance), a private organisation of social workers created in 1923 in order to assist children's courts. The article is based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of three hundred of their files. In a first part, we examine what is at stake when using social surveys as a source for studying working-class way of life, by analysing how social workers evaluated the families under their care and passed judgement on their consumption habits. Then, we show how the work of teenagers played a key role in working-class family budgets during the interwar period. Finally, we turn to how young workers built their autonomy through developing their own practices of consumption and consumption cultures.

Jazz emerged and then developed as the sucker of an orpheonic musical practice, that of the popular music societies which, mainly in New Orleans, resembled European musical societies based in industrial cities, by their use of uniforms, their urban activities and especially by their repertoire full of military marches. But then something happened. The collective ethics of Orphéon choral societies gave way to soloists who took some liberty with the music written on their music stand. With improvisation, Jazz was born and a vertiginous musical boom was to follow. An artist world was substituted for a working-class world. This article examines the moments when these two practices were still intertwined.

By revisiting one of Mass Observation's ethnographical studies, this article aims to provide an analysis of the forms of representation, “folklorization” and reappropriation of cockney culture at play in the Lambeth Walk dance craze of the summer of 1938. It examines the social circulations of the cockney, coster and Pearly King archetypes – from the music-hall play to the imitations enacted by dancers, and to the streets of Lambeth. Indeed, little scholarly attention has been given to the attitudes of Lambethians themselves to the representation of local culture, yet Mass Observation's investigators' fieldnotes offer rich insights on these issues.

British sociologist Richard Hoggart (1918-2014) is today an authority in social sciences. The uses of his work in France allow for an examination of the forms taken by working-class culture, but also of the perceptions and uses of this notion by the intellectuals. Indeed, if his work highlights the historicity of the concept of working-class culture, the discourses and analyzes that surround it also reflect it in their own way. Initiated in the 1950s, disseminated in the 1960-1980s, commented on later, his work is, in fact, at the heart of very political questions about the durability or transformation, the centrality or, on the contrary, the marginalization of the culture and the identity of the working-classes, in the dual context of the triumph of mass culture and deindustrialization.