Contenu du sommaire : An annual english selection

The aim of this paper is to examine whether a long-term trend can be identified in the mobility regime of French society from the middle of the century. It begins with a review of the international literature on temporal trends in social fluidity within modern societies. Analysing recent French research which has concluded that inequality of opportunity has remained unchanged in France during the last two decades, the paper argues that such a conclusion can only have resulted from the use of insufficiently powerful statistical techniques. The second part of the paper analyses father-son and father-daughter mobility tables drawn from national representative surveys carried out in 1953, 1970, 1977, 1985 and 1993 (N=35,741 for males and 18,484 for females). The use of log-linear and log-multiplicative models reveals that the statistical association (as measured with the logarithm of the odds ratio) between social origin and destination has declined steadily by 0.5 % a year over a period of forty years. This finding highlights a slow but continuous trend towards a reduction in inequality of opportunity from the middle of the century. Of the twelve million French men and women between the ages of 35 and 59 who were in employment in 1993, nearly half a million would have belonged to different classes without this forty year increase in social fluidity. The paper concludes that the thesis of temporal invariance in the intergenera- tional mobility regime cannot be maintained for France, but that the reasons of this change still remain to be ascertained.

Because it involves objectifying esthetic preferences in official records, parents' choice of name for their newborn child is one of the best materials for empirically testing the classical hypothesis of vertical social diffusion of taste. The present study is based on a representative sample (N=367,000) of first names of persons born in France between 1930 and 1988. The proportion of innovative choice (i.e., choice made at the very beginning of the diffusion process) in the various socio-occupational categories provides an indicator for a temporal hierarchy of taste. This hierarchy, which corresponds closely to the nomenclature of socio-occupational categories used by the French national statistics institute Insee (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques), tends to become compressed over time. To grasp the full meaning of the temporal stratification of taste, the hierarchy obtained with this indicator is compared to those for the various standard dimensions of social stratification.

The division of a country's population into occupied and unoccupied persons -a distinction that stands as the common foundation for socio-occupational classifications that vary from country to country- seems so widely used and generally accepted as to be almost invisible. The strangeness of this solid construct, however, invites us to examine the long and difficult process that culminated, in the late nineteenth century, with the adoption of a definition of "being occupied" based on a single criterion : the marketability of a person's labor. This neglected aspect of census history enables us to shed light on the nature and diverse national rhythms of a development which it is not excessive to regard as a revolution in statistical representations of work.

This article examines the conditions under which, in June 1975, a marginalized, stigmatized population -the prostitutes of the French city of Lyon- took the step of collective action, occupying a church for more than a week to protest against police repression. It highlights the difficulties these politically inexperienced women encountered in mobilizing, namely preventing defections and choosing an appropriate mode of action ; difficulties they were able to surmount thanks to resources provided by outside supporters endowed with practical knowledge in matters of collective action (activists in a group with close ties to the broad movement known as catholicisme social and feminists). Despite this assistance, however, the prostitutes' mobilization quickly declined and soon expired, in part because of the leaders' defection.

For many years, measuring crime on the sole basis of computations of the operations of the public agencies in charge of its control implied great implicit confidence in the adequacy of their action to expectations for safety-maintenance. Over the last thirty years, all comparable countries have gradually come to resort at least partially to surveys, revealing their increasing doubts about this adequacy. In 1996 the Insee [the French national institute for statistics} inserted a module on victimisation in its survey of the living conditions of households, thus yielding an opportunity to measure medium-term variations from one decade to another, for the first time in France. Comparison of these findings with the only national survey available so far (Cesdip, 1986) shows how different the picture is for violence and property offences, in terms of numbers and of trends. It is also possible to evaluate the extent -variable, depending on the kinds of victimisation- to which official statistics still reliably account for trends as well as for orders of magnitude. Aside from its methodological teaching, this analysis modifies and clarifies present controversies over crime.