Julian Mischi

Contested rural activities: Class, politics and shooting in the French countryside

This article illustrates the impact of environmental protection measures on social attitudes and political behaviour in rural France through the prism of hunting. Fieldwork was conducted in France’s second largest wetland, La Brière Regional Natural Park. Locals mobilize a claimed tradition of hostility toward a vaguely defined ‘them’ in order to protect their rural and collective rights. The European Union and the European ruling class have become another face of the threat against the rural way of life of the local working class. As this population felt growing pressure from industrial economic impoverishment and a rural sociability crisis, support for the pro-countryside political party ‘Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions’ rose. This article depicts hunters’ growing concern over EU directives for the conservation of wild migratory birds, and then examines the mobilization and discourse of locals against some aspects of the policy of nature conservation.

Working-class politics and cultural capital: Considerations from transformations of the French left

Cultural capital is a relevant and useful concept for analysing working-class activism, provided that it is not reduced to educational capital and particular attention is given to its incorporated forms. Workers acquire resources from activism that may compensate for their paucity of formal educational qualifications, thus allowing them to build an activism-based cultural capital. From this perspective, the activities of workers who become full-time union officers may be considered as activist work, calling on specific skills and offering possibilities for social ascension that set them apart from their former peers still doing manual work. This analysis of such activist promotion is based on long-term fieldwork among unionised railway workers in a rural town in France. This case study addresses transformations in the worker-activist profile, notably in changed logics for forming activism-based cultural capital and weakened ties drawing activists into the political field. Approaching left-leaning activism ‘from below’ ultimately sheds light on how it is being reshaped and the ever-greater separation of trade union and political party spheres. The study also elucidates the expanding divide between the working classes and political elites that can be observed in many European countries, especially in rural areas.

Apprendre à travailler: The uneasy journey of counter-school culture in the country of cultural capital theory

This paper retraces the journey of Learning to Labour in the French intellectual landscape, by examining the context in which we had this book translated in 2011. We first analyse the slow importation of Willis’s research in France (the originality of the counter-school culture concept is highlighted in light of Bourdieu’s theoretical emphasis on the role of cultural capital in social reproduction) and the conditions that made a French translation possible 30 years after the original’s publication. We then discuss the ways in which this 2011 translation, entitled L’école des ouvriers, collided with French debates on the role of school and the then prevalent postmodern theories. We end by discussing the uses of Willis’s work in contemporary French sociology.

Engagement et désengagement militant aux usines Peugeot de Sochaux dans les années 1980 et 1990 : Pourquoi la « Chronique Peugeot » de 1984-1985 parue dans Actes s'est-elle interrompue ?

Dans les annees 1984-1985, une « Chronique Peugeot » est publiee dans Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, signee des noms de Michel Pialoux, sociologue, et de Christian Corouge, ouvrier specialise et militant CGT a l’usine Peugeot de Sochaux. Ce texte revient sur les raisons pour lesquelles cette chronique s’est interrompue et sur les difficultes structurelles qui peuvent surgir lorsqu’une collaboration se noue entre ouvriers et intellectuels. La rencontre de Christian Corouge avec les cineastes du groupe Medvedkine au debut des annees 1970 a nourri chez lui un rapport ambivalent a la culture : des marques de respect de la culture legitime s’accompagnent d’expressions de rejet de la culture telle qu’elle fonctionne dans la vie ordinaire pour disqualifier les pratiques ouvrieres. L’analyse de certains moments-cles de sa trajectoire et la presentation d’extraits d’un entretien recent permettent de comprendre les tensions de l’engagement (et du desengagement) d’un syndicaliste tiraille entre les effets de l’elevation de son capital culturel et politique et le maintien de sa position socioprofessionnelle.