Contenu du sommaire

The Jewish Identity. The Rabbinical tradition, whose origins remain obscure, is based on the close relationship it asserts between the sacred text and practical life. It therefore relies on commentary in order to adapt and also perpetuate religious authority. This structure presupposes the existence and the relative autonomy of specialists in reading, who are neither priests invested with divine right, nor a caste, nor members of a privileged group, but who are distinguished by study and book-learning. Thus the Hasidim, in the Middle Ages, practised an original form of piety which was neither heretical nor subordinated to a hierarchy, and did not form a monastic association. The Kabbalah probably arose in scholarly circles of this kind, in Provence. In Judaism, the boldest mysticism has only ever revived the authority of the tradition, deliberately or not. In a society in which science plays a distinctive role and whose lowest degree is referred to as «ignorance», the Rabbi is a moral guide and a judge. Intellectual activity, in the history of Judaism, can thus be seen as an essential factor in maintaining the group. Until well into the ninteenth century, the distribution of cultural capital determined the internal structure of communities and the role of certain great families.

North and South : a Contribution to Analysis of the "Montesquieu Effect". The paradigmatic case of Montesquieu's «climate theory» is examined so as to describe the logic of the «Montesquieu effect». This is the effect of truth or scientificity that is procured in the social sciences, as it was in the natural sciences in earlier periods, by superimposing two principles of coherence : the surface coherence of the rhetoric of scientificity (partly based on borrowings from more advanced sciences) and the deep coherence of mythical logic. The mythological «scientificity» that is produced in this way presents in a misrecognizable form a complex of sexual and social phantasms (North/South, cold/hot, tense/relaxed, etc.) which crystallize in the metaphor of the metal spring and the image of the seraglio.

Social Science and Division into Regions. A Note on Two Debates (1820-1920). Is the region an appropriate framework for studying social facts ? French geographers and historians used to take this for granted, but the validity of regional units has been challenged by other social scientists, at two historical moments. Between 1820 and 1840, the science of social statistics was initially built up in opposition to 18th-century conceptions of the region and the «natural» area. Identifying the reasons which lie behind the differences recorded in the statistics of the departements requires using other analytic spaces, organizing the data into areas which correspond to the real contrasts within the French nation. In the early 1900s, a debate opened up between, on one side, the geographers and historians, who defended regional monographs, and, on the other side, the Durkheimian sociologists, who denied the regional framework any relevance and argued for morphological and comparative studies. This debate reactivated the opposition between two ways of understanding spatial division in the social sciences. These methodological differences over the definition of the legitimate spatial unit correspond, within the intellectual field, to the hierarchies between disciplines, different strategies to win legitimacy, and the different relationships (scientific, political and ideological) with the object of study itself.

French Regions and Regional Consciousness. This critical note examines, with reference to the 1974 Strasbourg conference on «Regions and Regionalism», the various problems raised by the use of these notions in French historiography. Nineteenth-century regionalism has to be seen as being essentially an attempt by the notables to perpetuate an elitist local culture, which therefore lacked any real political dimension. For the non-French-speaking lower classes, on the other hand, access to the dominant language, which they obtained through social changes rather than educational policy, meant a chance to escape from the hold of the notables. So the social forces capable of leading a regionalist movement were held in check and were generally prepared to compromise with the central authorities in accordance with their own understanding of their local interests. The bases of regional consciousness therefore seem, now as earlier, to be social or ideological rather than political. The main factors in the creation of supra-local consciousness are migratory movements, which bring to light relations of dependence, regional stereotypes, which create a collective identity, and regional symbolic activities (the press, sport), which favour the structures of awareness of the immediately surrounding area by effacing other types of conflicts.

The Invention of Brittany. The Social Genesis of a Stereotype. Just after the French Revolution, when the provinces were disappearing as political entities, they emerged as cultural objects. In the case of Brittany, codified representations were built up on the basis of elements taken from the material rural culture (houses, costume, etc.), the Breton language, the race and the climate, and they then crystallized into stereotypes. Their ideological and political charge changed according to the position of the different generations of writers in the literary field and the position of their readerships. The evolution of the regional stereotype is very directly linked to the changing image of the peasant in general. The peasant was «discovered» under the Consulate and the Empire ; a sinister image was developed during the Restoration ; this gave way to a more attractive and also more conservative image in the second half of the 19th century ; a derisory dimension appears at the height of emigration from the countryside after 1880. However, the regional stereotype is not totally reducible to the general image : rural life is much more de-realized, more readily turned into a spectacle, in the case of regional stereotypes, which can more easily be made to carry stable political and ideological connotations. Brittany, for example, has received particular attention from successive generations —legitimists after 1830, con- servative republicans after 1870, recent emigrants around 1900, petty-bourgeois Bretons in the 1930s, and now post-1968 «neo-regionalists»— who have built up the utopian image of an agrarian society without a history and without conflict.

Identity and Representation. The need to carry out an epistemological and sociological critique of social science concepts is particularly acute in the case of a notion such as the region. The definition of the region is fought over by specialists from different disciplines, and it is also a focus of struggles in social reality. Regionalist and nationalist demands are a particular case of the symbolic work through which it is possible to transform the social meaning of properties such as the stigmata linked to geographical origin, which are often described as social destiny.