Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales

http://www.persee.fr/showPage.do?urn=arss_0335-5322_2000_num_134_1_2690

Zur Klassifizierung Obdachloser. Das Verbundsystem der Beherbergung obdachloser Personen in Paris ist durch eine ausgepragte Hierarchisierung gekennzeichnet. Nach einer summarischen Darstellung ihrer wesentlichen Merkmale, und namentlich ihrer Zweiteilung in einen offenen und einen geschlossenen Bereich, untersucht der Artikel unter Verwendung des (okonomischen, symbolischen, physischen usw.) Kapitalbegriffs in erster Linie die Formen der Auswahl und Zuweisung der Betroffenen, um besser die Aufteilung obdachloser Personen innerhalb dieses Rahmens zu verstehen. Abschliesend fragt der Beitrag nach den Bedingungen des Austritts aus dem Verbundsystem der Beherbergung, indem er die Schwierigkeiten, mit denen Obdachlose konfrontiert sind, auf das allgemeinere Wohnungsproblem der unteren Klassen der Bevoolkerung bezieht.

On considère généralement que les pratiques musicales amateur procèdent d'un goût préalable pour le style joué. Dans un tel schéma, la pratique d'une musique découlerait de l'écoute intensive d'un genre spécifique, définissant le musicien ordinaire comme un fan passé de l'écoute à la pratique. La musique d'harmonie, qui constitue un pan important quoi que peu valorisé et étudié de la pratique musicale amateur, invite à remettre en cause la détermination de la pratique par le goût. Ceux qui la pratiquent l'écoutent peu, voire pas du tout, et d'autres raisons que des affinités stylistiques préalables les conduisent à en jouer. L'exploration du recrutement social des musiciens, de leurs univers culturels et de leurs styles de vie et la mise au jour des différences et différends stylistiques au sein des orchestres révèlent des rapports complexes entre le goût et la pratique qui mériteraient, au-delà de cette musique « populaire », d'être systématiquement interrogés même dans les univers culturels qui se donnent d'emblée comme régis par des préférences esthétiques. (avec J.-M. Méon et E. Pierru)

Over the last fifteen years, many publications have analyzed the transformation of the universities in relation with the economy. In Europe, the Bologna convention and the creation of a common Licence–Master– Doctorate (LMD) curriculum for European universities have been much discussed. In the USA as in Canada, critical voices have denounced the subordination of higher education to “market” forces (in particular at the doctoral level) and warned against the declining autonomy of fundamental or “disinterested” research. The aim of this paper is to show that the various positions taken on the issue of higher education reform are implicitly based on a confusion between the logic of the scientific field and that of the academic field. The recent attempts to transform graduate programs as well as the career counseling of graduate students bear witness to the increasing autonomy of the academic field from the scientific field. The former monopoly of the latter over the definition of the legitimate graduate and post-graduate curricula is thus disappearing.

Le recrutement des patrons des trois grands groupes chimiques allemands de l'après-guerre peut être considéré comme idéal-typique d'un "modèle allemand". L'hétérogénéité sociale et géographique de leurs origines trouve sa limite dans l'exclusion des milieux populaires liée aux exigences académiques élevées. Leur absence de lien familial avec les dirigeants précédents est compensée par une exigence d'une fidélité ancienne à l'entreprise qui garantit leur conformité. Leur notorité est construite par leur fonction, la presse contribuant à identifier l'entreprise à la personne qui a le titre de président du directoire. Le successeur est choisi par cooptation dans des filières étroitement régulées. La durée du mandat est strictement encadrée pour empêcher une appropriation trop personnelle du pouvoir. Même si la position de patron permet l'acquisition d'un capital individuel important, le statut obtenu de "personnalité du monde des affaires" reste lié à la fonction principale dans l'entreprise. Il ne lui survit pas durablement et se transmet à un "dauphin" qui n'est pas un héritier du sang. Ce système permet à la fois l'appropriation des avantages du pouvoir par un cercle restreint de dirigeants et le détachement de l'organisation par rapport aux aléas individuels. L'exigence professionnelle, que l'on retrouve à un degré plus ou moins fort selon les secteurs, protège le milieu des pressions extérieures, qu'elles soient bancaires ou politiques. Elle lui permet de garder la maîtrise interne de son recrutement.

The commercialization of university research findings is not wholly new. Nevertheless it has risen sharply in the last 30 years in the industrialized world, particularly in North America. The US is clearly a driving force in this boom: anxious to preserve a threatened economic and technological primacy, US federal authorities quickly created instruments for a more systematic exploitation of the innovative potential of their universities, among which legislation concerning intellectual property and research such as the Stevenson-Wydler and the Bayh-Dole Acts. The American university experience and the Bayh-Dole Act became widespread mandatory references – some would say infaillible incantations – often cited yet not always examined. However the effects of the Bayh-Dole Act on increasing technology-transfer activities in universities have rarely received the empirical study they deserve; furthermore, fascinated by the US example and convinced of the effectiveness of its legislation, several countries are seeking to set up juridical frameworks modeled on the American acts. Canada’s situation can help shed light on this issue. Using in particular the figures published by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), the present article demonstrates that not only has the commercialization of research findings developed in Canada without the adoption of a specific juridical framework, but also that, in this area, Canadian institutions have shown a dynamism comparable in many respects to that of the American universities. In this regard, the analysis shows that the impact of the Bayh-Dole Act on the commercialization of university research findings has been greatly overestimated. In their conclusion, the authors attempt to explain why so much importance has been given to this governmental initiative in spite of the empirical evidence.

Balzac raconte dans Ferragus l’ascension et la disparition des époux Desmarets dont la trajectoire au sein de la bourgeoisie d’affaires parisienne, sous la Restauration, illustre trois formes entrelacées de capital symbolique : le crédit professionnel, la confiance conjugale et l’honorabilité mondaine. Cette fable sociale constitue une véritable sociologie-fiction de la confiance, et permet une analyse socio-historique des conditions d’émergence d’une catégorie particulière de bourgeois parisiens : les agents de change, ces officiers ministériels et commerçants investis du monopole de la négociation des titres admis à la cote officielle de la Bourse de Paris. In the short novel Ferragus, Balzac tells of the rise and fall of the Desmarets couple. Their trajectory within the Parisian commercial bourgeoisie under the Restauration period illustrates three interwoven forms of symbolic capital: professional reputation, matrimonial trust and social honor. This social tale is a true sociological fiction about trust, and it makes it possible to analyze the social and historical emergence of a specific subset of Parisian bourgeois: the traders, i.e. ministerial officers and merchants who enjoyed a monopoly over the trade of stocks officially quoted at the Paris stock exchange. oui

The superviser’s paradox Control has become an instrument of social policy, to the extent that the procedures that define it are in turn playing a role in meeting the objectives that they serve. By focusing on one of these procedures (home visits to beneficiaries of social safety nets), this article analyzes a specific form of bureaucratic interrogation. By describing its characteristics, its modalities and its uses, it seeks to clarify the contemporary institutional treatment of socially assisted persons. The constraining force of the institution and of its rules is combined with uncertainty regarding the situation of the controlled population, the modalities of the control itself, and the rules mobilized in its exercise. The paradox of a control justified by stable legal rules, yet plagued by uncertainty and the discretionary power of its rank-and-file officers, reveals a broader framework for the governance of the poor. It is built upon the combination of multiple individualized relationships that are more or less coordinated but nonetheless rooted in a structural logic, where the economic injunction to find a job overlaps with a moral project aiming at redressing the habituses that do not conform with the requirements of the labor market and/or with those of the assisting institution.

Incl. notes, résumé. Dès sa nomination à la présidence de Harvard en 1934, James Bryant Conant invita à rompre avec les procédures de sélection alors en usage: l'université, dont la mission consistait à identifier et à former la future élite du pays, devait s'attacher davantage au seul mérite intellectuel dans le recrutement de ses enseignants et de ses étudiants. Conant comptait sur son programme de bourses nationales pour corriger les inégalités économiques et assurer l'égalité des chances - et non un accès généralisé au supérieur qui ne pouvait s'accorder avec son élitisme et sa vision très hiérarchisée du monde social. Egalité des chances et mobilité sociale accrue doivent remédier à la conscience de classe que risquent d'engendrer le durcissement des divisions sociales et l'apparition d'une aristocratie héréditaire de l'argent: seule la troisième voie d'un radicalisme spécifiquement américain attaché à la fluidité sociale préviendra les maux engendrés par le «féodalisme industriel» qui sévit en Europe, sans remettre en cause le principe de la libre entreprise.

Incl. notes, résumé. Outil de rationalisation du travail pour les cadres et, plus généralement, pour tous ceux qui peuvent jouer avec la multipositionnalité de leur identité professionnelle, la micro-informatique a pu être perçue au contraire par les salariés les plus dominés comme un instrument ambivalent pouvant selon les cas contribuer à la reconnaissance de compétences non consacrées ou à des conduites d'auto-exploitation d'autant plus tentantes qu'elles étaient la condition de reclassements professionnels importants. Pour les utilisateurs qui occupent un emploi subalterne, jouissant de peu d'autonomie, l'informatique représente en effet un «plus» qui leur permet de mettre en valeur des caractéristiques biographiques liées à un parcours scolaire, une histoire familiale, des expériences professionnelles, ensemble de caractéristiques certes singulières mais ayant en commun d'être distinctives par rapport aux propriétés de ceux qui occupent des postes équivalents, et qui sont au principe de qualifications utilisables. Sa diffusion principalement par l'intermédiaire du monde du travail apparaît comme une conjoncture dans laquelle ces propriétés, jusque-là invisibles ou considérées comme inutiles, deviennent pertinentes et peuvent de ce fait se transformer en qualités professionnelles. Pour cette génération confrontée à son apprentissage à l'âge adulte, elle a été l'occasion de la cristallisation d'une compétence réelle qui n'avait pas trouvé à s'employer ou qui avait pu passer totalement inaperçue.

Reproduktionsstrategien und Arten der Beherrschung Um besser zu verstehen, wie die soziale Ordnung sich perpetuiert, wird sinnvollerweise eine ubersicht des Systems der Reproduktionsstrategien (Strategien biologischer, die Nachfolge oder die Erziehung betreffender Investitionen, solche okonomischer oder sozialer Investitionen, Strategien des Heiratens oder symbolischer Investitionen, solche sozialer Positionierung) und des Systems der Reproduktionsmechanismen (Arbeitsmarkt, Nachfolgerecht, Eigentumsrecht, schulische Einrichtungen) erstellt. Zahlreiche, aus ganz unterschiedlichen sozialen Bereichen herausgegriffene Beispiele, wie die Weitergabe von Vornamen in Kabylen oder im Italien der Renaissance, oder die hausliche Politik der Bauernfamilien, lassen die sehr tiefgehenden Unterschiede zwischen denjenigen Gesellschaften deutlich werden, in denen die Einrichtungen zur Reproduktion und die durch sie hervorgerufenen Reproduktionsstrategien in den objektiven Gegebenheiten der sozialen Struktur keinen anderen Ansatzpunkt als die Familienstrukturen als wesentlichem, wenn nicht gar ausschlieslichem Instrument der Reproduktion finden, und denjenigen Gesellschaften, in denen diese sich auserdem auf die Strukturen eines organisierten Staates stutzen konnen, deren wichtigste — unter dem Aspekt der Reproduktion - diejenigen der schulischen Einrichtungen bilden.

"Revenant sur la marginalisation et le manque de légitimité des enjeux sociaux dans le contexte de l'élargissement, cet article suggère de les mettre en relation avec la position occupée, au sein de la Commission, et plus généralement dans l'espace politique européen, par les services de l'administration communautaire en charge des affaires sociales. À partir d'une enquête conduite auprès de ces agents pendant la préparation des négociations d'adhésion, il observe comment la situation de domination relative de ces services sur les plans institutionnels, matériels et symboliques est perçue et incorporée par leur personnel et oriente leurs modes de mobilisation. Conformisme institutionnel, logiques d'autocensure, ou encore relecture à la baisse des ambitions originelles de l'UE dans ce domaine vont faire obstacle à la défense d'un modèle social européen opposable aux pays candidats. À travers leur intériorisation de l'illégitimité de l'Europe sociale, ils contribuent ainsi à son non avènement."

Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology’s particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.

L'étude de la collaboration scientifique à partir de la publication se développe depuis une quarantaine d'années. Souvent considérée comme un indicateur (notamment de productivité), elle est ici saisie en se focalisant sur les pratiques de signature et ce qu'elles révèlent. Considérant un corpus d'articles dans trois disciplines, l'analyse se déploie à un double niveau : interdisciplinaire, et international pour une même discipline. Ce travail, inscrit dans une perspective diachronique, tente de cerner les multiples dimensions qui lient les textes à leurs contextes historique et disciplinaire. Dans ce façonnage complexe, l'entrée par les diverses pratiques de signature permet de reconsidérer le statut analytique de la publication scientifique, et de poser la question des frontières entre disciplines en d'autres termes.

Henry Fayol (1841-1925): State Reform as Entrepreneurship This article analyzes the trajectory of Henry Fayol, who embarked on a project of state reform during the First World War, designed industrial management tools, theorized commandment and authority, and never ceased offering consulting services to the management of private and public companies alike. It explores the structural causes explaining the limited success that his suggestions for reform met when they were applied to the state, and it identifies the conditions that enabled engineers and rationalizing managers to be considered as reliable counsels for state reform twenty years later. The liberal individualism to which Fayol and his disciples subscribed is one of the reasons for the withering of this movement at the end of the 1920s. The disconnect between the liberal and the managerial critiques of the state seems to be one of the conditions for the intervention, within the state, of experts coming from the state but subsequently offering their services to the private sector.

It is often said that the triumph of Dumas' Le chevalier de Maison-Rouge. Un episode du temps des Girondins was a precursory sign to the 1848 revolution. Yet, in the year prior, critics showed entirely different opinions; conservatives were enthusiastic, whereas republicans hid poorly their reservations towards a play that, according to them, ridiculed the revolution and the Parisian sans-culottes. The enormous success of this play therefore forces the question: had they seen the same play? What had the censors and critics missed? And on the other hand, what was it that seduced the lower-class Parisian public?

Theater and Revolution on the Eve of 1848: Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge It is often said that the triumph of Dumas’ Le chevalier de Maison-Rouge. Un épisode du temps des Girondins was a precursory sign to the 1848 revolution. Yet, in the year prior, critics showed entirely different opinions; conservatives were enthusiastic, whereas republicans hid poorly their reservations towards a play that, according to them, ridiculed the revolution and the Parisian sans-culottes. The enormous success of this play therefore forces the question: had they seen the same play? What had the censors and critics missed? And on the other hand, what was it that seduced the lower-class Parisian public?

Looking back at 1848. Universal suffrage between the illusion of «something new» and «nothing new». Before becoming the set of legal provisions defining the juridical status of electors, or the political philosophy that justified it, «universal suffrage» was a concession designed to manifest a change of regime, agreed to by an irregularly invested government threatened by popular unrest. These circumstances must be the starting point if one wishes to understand what it was to become: a set of legal provisions fought over by lawmakers, a philosophy fought over by the learned and the cultured, an institution that remains, each time it operates, the battlefield of political parties. The present article reviews the singular circumstances that reveal the importance of mobilizing State personnel (presented here through the figure of Tocqueville) for the large-scale implementation of a procedure whose participants have no more reasons to hope for the best than to fear the worst. The happy outcome of the elections of 23 April 1848 for the political personnel already in place under the July Monarchy was thus a welcome surprise that revealed (particularly through the vote ratifying the lists put up by the electoral committees, by the peasants) that this institution can be the best defense against their elimination.

Theater life in the second half of the 19th century was marked by a proliferation of hybrid and parodic genres. During a period when the struggle for freedom of expression was gaining ground, such genres constituted commentary on multiform contemporary urban affairs, and in particular, on those of capital cities, centers of political combat. Although founded in stereotypes and repetitive theatrical conventions, the revues d'actualites occupied a constant and sometimes growing place in seasonal theater programs, as well as in new rival shows. Analyzing a series of revues presented in Paris in the second half of the 19th century and a more restrained sampling in Brussels, this article demonstrates how such shows borrowed from registers both trivial and serious, freely approached most themes without infringing on certain self-limitations, and exposed the central forces and motors of mainstream culture at a time when it was being shaken by changes in the social and urban landscapes. Liberated from conventions of realism and fixed roles in traditional genres, this type of theatrical representation spread to a broad public and was that much more appreciated and caustically effective in comparison to the fading other genres. Inversely, when censorship relaxed, the revue ceded its derisive function to spectacle or voyeurism. The delayed evolution between Paris, a city liberated earlier from conformism, and the more constrained public space of Brussels, emphasizes how much this parodic genre depends on political, moral and religious context in order to maintain its critical efficacy.

Toward the end of the 19th century, theatergoing became expensive and elitist in Europe, but quite the opposite was the case in Barcelona, where theater access opened to audiences of laborers. Often illiterate, these laborers assiduously frequented "public" theaters and community halls, even reproducing most of the popular plays among themselves in amateur societies. Adepts of "serious" theater (in three or more acts), musically accompanied or not, members of these milieus also appreciated more and more short and commercial plays produced in Madrid. Such diverse tastes permitted them to become part of a culturally bilingual and socially shared space. Theatrical "recreation" in popular circles had first been promoted by various social reformers, but became progressively political. In the conflictual context of turn-of-the-century Barcelona, the new worker public mobilized through theater to demand access to real political representation and to a "free" culture.

Soup Kitchen: Philanthropic supervision meets working class budgets (London, 1875-1906) The supply of charity meals – dinner tables and soup kitchens – that flourished in London in the last quarter of the 19th century hindered the practical control of charitable activities and the moral control of the working classes that agents from the world of philanthropy strove to establish. It represented everything against which they were fighting: outdoor relief (monetary or in kind) and indiscriminate charity encouraged the poor’s dependency and deprived them of the economic rationality essential for managing their household budgets. The confrontation of the philanthropists’ practices and representations with working-class budgets and practices also showed that these forms of distribution were largely incompatible with working-class habits. Nevertheless, they shifted the boundaries of the categories used by philanthropists and upon which a specific modus vivendi was built, highlighting the ambiguous position of the consumer market as an intermediary in the relations between philanthropy and the working classes.

The supply of charity meals - dinner tables and soup kitchens - that flourished in London in the last quarter of the 19th century hindered the practical control of charitable activities and the moral control of the working classes that agents from the world of philanthropy strove to establish. It represented everything against which they were fighting: outdoor relief (monetary or in kind) and indiscriminate charity encouraged the poor's dependency and deprived them of the economic rationality essential for managing their household budgets. The confrontation of the philanthropists' practices and representations with working-class budgets and practices also showed that these forms of distribution were largely incompatible with working-class habits. Nevertheless, they shifted the boundaries of the categories used by philanthropists and upon which a specific modus vivendi was built, highlighting the ambiguous position of the consumer market as an intermediary in the relations between philanthropy and the working classes.

How can one explain the legitimization of European colonial conquests in Africa at the end of the 19(th) century, when most of these explorations turned out to be either hazardous and failure-prone enterprises, or irrational foreign policy moves? By focusing on Hubert Lyautey and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in France and Henry Morton Stanley in Great-Britain, this article suggests that the enthusiastic support and the trust that these charismatic figures enjoyed among large swathes of the population played a crucial role in providing this legitimacy. By managing to embody the exemplary figure of the colonial hero in their respective countries, during a period of peace that saw the generalization of literacy and the development of far-reaching commercial circuits for the printed press, they played an important role in the shift of a public opinion that was initially indifferent if not hostile to imperialist project. Their celebrity and their feats were relayed and amplified through the new mass media (cheap mass-produced journals or best-sellers such as Stanley's), the commercialization of consumption goods (proliferation of images and objects representing Brazza and his expeditions), or honorary distinctions that increased their political clout (election to the French Academy for Lyautey, to the Parliament for Stanely). The success of this unprecedented cultural reference is confirmed by the study of personal diaries and letters, which offer a glimpse of the admiration and the devotion that these men aroused among the public.

Charisma and the construction of imperial heroes in Great-Britain and France, 1880-1914 How can one explain the legitimization of European colonial conquests in Africa at the end of the 19th century, when most of these explorations turned out to be either hazardous and failure-prone enterprises, or irrational foreign policy moves? By focusing on Hubert Lyautey and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in France and Henry Morton Stanley in Great-Britain, this article suggests that the enthusiastic support and the trust that these charismatic figures enjoyed among large swathes of the population played a crucial role in providing this legitimacy. By managing to embody the exemplary figure of the colonial hero in their respective countries, during a period of peace that saw the generalization of literacy and the development of far-reaching commercial circuits for the printed press, they played an important role in the shift of a public opinion that was initially indifferent if not hostile to imperialist project. Their celebrity and their feats were relayed and amplified through the new mass media (cheap mass-produced journals or best-sellers such as Stanley’s), the commercialization of consumption goods (proliferation of images and objects representing Brazza and his expeditions), or honorary distinctions that increased their political clout (election to the French Academy for Lyautey, to the Parliament for Stanely). The success of this unprecedented cultural reference is confirmed by the study of personal diaries and letters, which offer a glimpse of the admiration and the devotion that these men aroused among the public.

“Beaches are not lawless !” How is it possible to combine the imposed hedonism of beach settings and the necessity to maintain urban order ? This is the question that authorities in charge of supervising Los Angeles beaches have had to address throughout the 20th century. At the intersection of the history of policing and the history of seaside leisure, this article analyzes the way in which authorities, users and owners have negotiated the seaside order from the beginning of the 20th century – when the littoral was considered a sort of free-for-all space remote from the authorities’ gaze – until the 1970s, when the beaches, under the pressure of urban expansion, became part and parcel of the city. On the basis of different archives (press, municipal archives, etc.) the article shows that despite a regime of “seaside tolerance” throughout the century, the increasing urbanization of the beaches has meant a restricted access for the lower middle classes, and for sexual, ethnic and racial minorities.

The many institutional devices designed between the two world wars in order to impose “peace by law” are rejected by most authors as naïve expressions of the good intentions of European democracies. To the extent that “the spirit of Geneva” has become a sort of negative myth of international politics, this has impaired research into the conditions in which these sophisticated legal mechanisms came to represent an unprecedented and fundamental model, which still informs our conception of multilateral relations. This article proposes to study how a transnational community of international jurists cultivated and attracted politicians and/or national bureaucracies to this complex machinery in order to insert state interests in this system of objective constraints. Owing to the intensity of the post-war diplomatic negotiations, negotiators managed to establish a set of legal positions relatively autonomous vis-à-vis national authorities. By relying at times on learned arguments, at times on political clout, by acting at the national or international level, they alternated the promotion of an international legal order free from the interference of state sovereignty and a renewed loyalty to their own governments. Thanks to this subtle double game, they imposed their juridical purposes as a central stake of international politics during the interwar period.

A retrospective of documentaries about the work of the director Henri Storck focusing on its militant dimension provides the opportunity to replace this work in the context of the 1930s. The most famous of his short films, Misère au Borinage, has since remained a reference in the field of socially committed documentaries. Shot in 1933 with the collaboration of Joris Ivens, this silent movie (later to become a talkie) reveals the misery in which lived the minors of the Wallon region; a misery caused by the dramatic worsening of the economic situation and the ruthless repression exercised by the employers following workers protest movements. Besides its aesthetic qualities, its emotional power or its role as a historical document, it raises the issue of the relation between fiction and reality in documentary movies. The setting is real, the characters are real, and the poor that appear on the screen are those who lived in the terrible conditions that Storck is documenting, and yet this is an “organized” documentary. Although it was certainly imposed by the cumbersome cinematographic machinery, the principle consisting in organizing the takes has remained one of the pillars of the documentary rhetoric, which has since been refined not by abandoning this principle, but by reclaiming it. The study of Henri Storck’s documentaries also raises the question of the political impact of socially committed movies, and points at the risks of an anachronistic interpretation of images that need to be replaced in their historical context.

A retrospective of documentaries about the work of the director Henri Storck focusing on its militant dimension provides the opportunity to replace this work in the context of the 1930s. The most famous of his short films, Misère au Borinage, has since remained a reference in the field of socially committed documentaries. Shot in 1933 with the collaboration of Joris Ivens, this silent movie (later to become a talkie) reveals the misery in which lived the minors of the Wallon region; a misery caused by the dramatic worsening of the economic situation and the ruthless repression exercised by the employers following workers protest movements. Besides its aesthetic qualities, its emotional power or its role as a historical document, it raises the issue of the relation between fiction and reality in documentary movies. The setting is real, the characters are real, and the poor that appear on the screen are those who lived in the terrible conditions that Storck is documenting, and yet this is an "organized" documentary. Although it was certainly imposed by the cumbersome cinematographic machinery, the principle consisting in organizing the takes has remained one of the pillars of the documentary rhetoric, which has since been refined not by abandoning this principle, but by reclaiming it. The study of Henri Storck's documentaries also raises the question of the political impact of socially committed movies, and points at the risks of an anachronistic interpretation of images that need to be replaced in their historical context.