Relégation au village

• Published in: SociologieS 2010-12
• Main Author: Nicolas Renahy
• Format: Article
• Language: fre
• Subjects: boundary; Bourgogne; rural environment; social inequalities; stratification; working class
• ISSN: 1992-2655

Arguments demonstrating the individualisation of western societies, or the exclusion of those who stay on the margins of a vast middle class homogeneous life style, have no doubt allowed the move away from the rigid interpretations inherited from Marxism. However, these arguments resist today in spite of the facts and they are even keenly contradicted by the renewal of stratification studies on social inequalities. Analyzing the working population of an industrial village in Bourgogne during the 1990s, the author was able to measure not only the continuing socialising force of the workers over its youth but also the slow processes entailing the loosening of a framework long time stabilised around a single metallurgic industry, and thus provoking a crisis in the reproduction of this working class world. It is this crisis which the present article treats. First, the forms that the industrial presence in the village developed are clarified in order to show that this presence was never comparable to that of a bastion of big industry – the local population was not structurally different from that of its immediate rural environment. Secondly, an example of a craftsman’s family history shows the close interrelations between factory and social structures being more classically rural, more favourable to the constitution of autochthony, the popular interpretation of social capital.