Contenu du sommaire

An infernal couple with problem relations, Michelle Perrot. « Between the social body and individuals, there should be only a vacuum », said Le Chapelier during the Revolution : all contemporary difficulties in the relations between the masses and individuals come from this real or supposed vacuity. Through fascism, communism or even in democratic societies, the twentieth century has long wanted the individual subjected to the promises of the collective. Until conquering individualism returns, without setting this old antagonism.

From mass worker to flexible worker, Jean-Paul de Gaudemar. Starting with the imperatives of productivity in industrial societies since the 19th century, the author examines the emergence of taylorism, then of the labor movement, and the progress of individual skill acquisition through education. He considers the need for flexibility, as common now in the office as in the factory, and thus gives a historical answer to the main question : how has the relation of the masses to the individual been expressed in terms of labor economy ?

Trade union crisis, working class crisis or wage-earner crisis ? Jacques Capdevielle. French trade unionism, as that of other developed countries, is in dire straits. While the diagnosis is generally agreed upon, the quest for causes and remedies is difflcult. Trade unionism is confronted with a real revolution, caused by a structural mutation of labor which began about 20 years ago. In its daily life, if not in the factory, the working class has been diluted within the wage earning class, and this dilution both integrated and split it : two convergent factors, in any case, which made it lose its specificity. As if this phenomenon was not complex enough, its analysis was hampered for a long time, at least in France, by the reference to a mythical working class.

Family spirit in Nanterre, Martine Segalen. Using a study describing family relations in an urban environment in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), 1840 to 1980, the author, as an anthropologist demonstrates that between the masses and the individuals the family played a singularly complex and strong part. In that old industrial suburb, destined to massive immigration and to the change from manufacturing to services, family networks stimulated solidarity and sociability. The family, between the couple and the relatives, has never been the secret chilly refuge of self-centered individuals.

On the right usage of the feminist, Geneviève Fraisse. The difficulty in looking for the meaning of the relation between individual feminists and women as a group lies in the fact that adherence to feminism happens within a group, but also at its edges or even outside it. And the difficulty in defining feminism as a movement is reinforced by the problem of representativeness. To appoint representatives, a group must be constituted not only as a collectivity, but also as a set of subjects. The constitution of women as subjects is then at the very heart of thinking on individual feminists.

From Sartre to Hobbes. Liberty and guardianship, Gil Delannoi. Taking the evolution of Jean-Paul Sartre's political and philosophical thought as a guideline, the author discovers in turn individuals drowned in the mass in the 1950s and 1960s and then a simultaneous liberation of individuals and masses in May 1968. He concludes, rereading Hobbes, by examining one of the solid roots of the hedonist individualism which runs across our societies : the tutelary state.

The Revolution, sick of the Vendée, Claude Langlois. Carried by the constantly revisited memory — « Vendée, a region of memory » supported by scholarly disputes and debates among schools of thought, simultaneously exorcised and fed by academic research, the Vendée issue is back. Under various aspects, it has become an issue of contemporary history. The two aspects which are debated today — a debate colored by the media — concern as much the final years of our millennium as the twilight of the 18 th century : for both the number of victims and the labeling of the phenomenon - and in the background the polemic on « genocide » — the author shows just how much is due to Zeitgeist.