Contenu du sommaire : La semaine

Modern subjects live by the week. Though it is neither anchored in the observable world nor nested neatly into any larger calendar unit, the anomalous institution of the seven-day week forms an indispensable framework for reckoning time in most of the modern world, with broad implications for ordinary experience and temporal consciousness. Strikingly, the week unsettles the critical dichotomies that organize scholarly studies of time and fits awkwardly into conventional narratives of the history of timekeeping. Sociologists, historians, and cultural critics distinguish older experiences of time as natural, cyclical, and heterogeneous from modern, Western experiences of time as artificial, linear, and homogeneous. Weeks conform to neither side of that divide; they are artificial cycles that nonetheless impose heterogeneity on the days that comprise the series. The week defies easy historical classification too. It is on one hand a very old tracking system invoked by traditional critics of 24/7 secular, consumer society as a bulwark against the encroachments of modernity. But it is also a mechanical device that has proven especially congenial to market relations, capitalist reorganization of labor, the demands of long-distance communication, and the logic of impersonal society.Weeks also do quite different kinds of work, well beyond their imposition of regular bimodal cycles of work and rest. Drawing on and introducing a larger study of the historical development of the modern week in the United States, this essay offers a taxonomy of the four different ways in which weeks organized temporal experience in a set of North American societies that were unusually attached to seven-day timekeeping.

From the French Revolution to the Second World War, several attempts to redistribute social time see the light of day or are simply sketched out, in France but also in the Soviet Union or even in the old Muslim empires in the process of modernization. This article traces the history of these attempts, explains their motivations but also the resistance encountered by these policies which upset social organization by trying to escape the religious frame of reference. It noted the ultimate failure of most of these experiments, which remained limited in time (a dozen years in France as in the USSR) and struggled to move from the political sphere to the realities of popular life.

True "hell" according to the title of the work that Raphaëlle Bacqué dedicated to the prime ministers of the Fifth Republic, Matignon is subduing its occupants at a breakneck pace. The study of Pierre Mauroy's agendas and of the Prime Minister's aide-de-camp journal allows us to see that the week of this Prime minister who is also mayor of Lille is very structured with recurring meetings established with his ministers, the Head of State, his collaborators or in the National Assembly. Urgency can obviously be imposed, in particular during major economic decisions (devaluation of June 1982, “turn of the rigor”), structural reforms, but more than a upheaval of the organization it is an agenda which lengthens, taking advantage of the gaps left vacant. The originality of Pierre Mauroy's week at Matignon lies in his weekends, he devotes almost all of it to a return to his city of Lille, where he continues to assume the duties of mayor. This ubiquity between Lille and Paris is made possible by exceptional logistical means.

Over several centuries, we witness the establishment of a school time in which the units of counting are plural, but which is partially autonomous from the time of religious life and that of economic life, seeking to reinforce pedagogical efficiency. If the hour became a major unit of account, the week asserted itself from the 19th century onwards, first in secondary and then in primary schools, as an essential reference which organized the school year, served as a framework for the creation of timetables and for the management of teachers' services. However, there are always different durations such as the month, quarter, semester, which play a significant role, while the notion of year remains essential to structure the student's school career. The week is subject to multiple issues that may conflict, at the intersection of the logic of respect for the rhythms of the child and the adolescent, the organization of family leisure activities and economic interests, as revealed by the recent tensions surrounding the « four-day week ».

The organisation of a daily and weekly routine in the asylums and psychiatric hospitals was preceded by a structural planification within the public institutions which established themselves as “cities within the city”. These therapeutic ‘towns' housed children, women and men, most of whom came from situations of social perdition. With a view to their eventual return to society, the first therapy was the imposition of a work schedule. Daily work punctuated with leisure time, those residents declared to be able-bodied found their weekly schedule based on that of the millions of french workers. However, those residents placed in isolation for behaviour found their days, weeks and months stretching out into an endless emptiness, leading to the loss of bearings and of previously acquired routines...

In the late nineteenth century, a lot of successful magazines for girls are edited by French publishers specialized in school books. This paper explores how these magazines' weekly format promotes new time standards for girls at the turn of the century. With the advent of the weekly work schedule, the working time is increasingly controlled by public institutions. Illustrated magazines of this period reveal the pressure exerted by new rhythms towards young girls at school and at home. As children and as women, young readers are doubly dominated. Needlework, a big part of their education, contribute to the constitution of the little girl as a « periodical living being » enclosed in a cyclical rhythm.

This article deals with the management of the time in weekly news magazines which are at risk of being behind the daily newspapers and the other media (radio, television). The article presents the two historical French models of weekly news magazines, the "reading weeklies" and the "photographic mirrors" until the introduction of the newsmagazine format in 1964. It shows the poetic processes invented by the weeklies to compete successfully with the daily newspapers and other media: eventialization, editorialization, illustration. Finally, the paper insists on the presence of a weekly news cycle alongside the weekly news, with a recursive treatment of the news that accompanies the new collective and professional rhythms of the week, that builds communities and conveys lifestyles.

The invention of the sports week accompanied the transformation of physical exercise as much as that of social time. During industrialisation and urbanization times, the traditional games, often violent and linked to the religious calendar, disappeared, as did the porous time of work. Sports developed to compensate for the intense and gruelling workload. The football week was initially confined to Saturdays and Sundays, while horse-racing and cycling events were held over the weekend. The weekly sport time is as much a time for oneself as a place of control and edification for pedagogues, the clergy, the army, the employers and totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. The technological and social transformations of the second twentieth century have resulted in the dilatation of the sports week in which the participation of women and seniors is increasing. Sport is part of the partially porous time of the postmodern week.

The tragic episode of the end of May 1871, where republican troops of Versailles entered the rebel city of Paris to put an end to the Commune experiment, was classically named la semaine sanglante (the bloody week). This paper interrogates the graphic choice in the use of upper, lower cases and quotation marks in the writing of the syntagm. In a discourse analysis methodology, historians work a heterogeneous corpus constituted of literary and political texts, newspaper articles and historiographic analysis covering the wide period from May 1871 to 2021. This exploratory study does not claim exhaustivity and requires to be continuated by the constitution of an English corpus, in particular.