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Everyday Resistance
French Activism
in the 21st Century
Edited by
Bruno Frère
Marc Jacquemain
Everyday Resistance
Bruno Frère • Marc Jacquemain
Editors
Everyday Resistance
French Activism in the 21st Century
Editors
Bruno Frère Marc Jacquemain
FNRS, Faculty of Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Liège University of Liège
Liège, Belgium Liège, Belgium
Based on a translation from the French language edition:

Résister au quotidien ? by Bruno Frère and Marc Jacquemain
Copyright © PRESSES DE LA FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES
POLITIQUES 2013
All Rights Reserved.
Translation by Josh Booth.
ISBN 978-3-030-18986-0 ISBN 978-3-030-18987-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? 1

Marc Jacquemain and Bruno Frère
2 Undocumented Families and Political Communities:

Parents Fighting Deportations 21
Damien de Blic and Claudette Lafaye
3 From Indicting the Law to Conquering Rights: A Case-

Study of Gay Movements in Switzerland, Spain
and Belgium 45
Marta Roca i Escoda
4 Fighting for Poor People’s Rights in the French Welfare

State 75
Frédéric Viguier
5 The Plural Logics of Anti-Capitalist Economic

Movements 97
Éric Dacheux
6 The Free Software Community: A Contemporary Space

for Reconfiguring Struggles? 117
Gaël Depoorter
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Associations for the Preservation of Small-Scale Farming

and Related Organisations 145
Fabrice Ripoll
8 Ordinary Resistance to Masculine Domination in a Civil

Disobedience Movement 175
Manuel Cervera-Marzal and Bruno Frère
9 A Zone to Defend: The Utopian Territorial Experiment

of Notre Dame Des Landes 205
Sylvaine Bulle
10 “Politics Without Politics”: Affordances and Limitations

of the Solidarity Economy’s Libertarian Socialist
Grammar 229
Bruno Frère
11 Is the “New Activism” Really New? 263

Lilian Mathieu
12 Conclusion 281
Bruno Frère and Marc Jacquemain
Index 299
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Sylvaine Bulle is Professor of Sociology at the National School of Paris

Val de Seine. She is a member of Cresppa-LabTop (Centre de Recherche
de sociologie politique de Paris, Laboratoire Théorie du Politique), part
of the University of Paris 8 and Paris 10.
Manuel Cervera-Marzal has a PhD in political science. He is currently a
postdoctoral researcher at Aix-Marseille Université (DICE, UMR 7318,
LabexMed) and at the FNRS (University of Liège).
Éric Dacheux is Professor of Information and Communication Sciences
at Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) (Clermont Fd) where he founded
the research group “Communication and Solidarity” (EA 4647). He is
a member of the management committee of RIUESS (Interuniversity
Network of Social and Solidarity Economy Researchers) and supervises
doctoral theses on communication problems encountered by ESS actors.
Damien de Blic is Associate Professor in Political Science at University of
Paris 8 (Saint-Denis) and is affiliated to the Center for Sociological and
Political Research in Paris (CRESPPA-LabTop).
Gaël Depoorter has a PhD in sociology, and is a researcher at CURAPP-
ESS (UMR 7319) at Picardie Jules-Verne University (Amiens, France).
He is associated with GERiiCO at the University of Lille (France) where
he teaches in the Department of Information and Communication.
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Bruno Frère is FNRS senior research associate and Professor at the

University of Liège, Belgium, and at Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne, France.
He is the author or editor of, among other works, Epistémologie de la
Sociologie (with Marc Jacquemain, 2008), Le Nouvel Esprit Solidaire
(2009), Résister au Quotidien (with Marc Jacquemain, 2013), Le Tournant
de la Théorie Critique (2015) and Repenser l’émancipation (to be pub-
lished in 2020, with Jean-Louis Laville).
Marc Jacquemain is Professor of Sociology at the University of Liège,
Belgium. He is the author of La raison névrotique (2002) and Le sens du
juste (2005). He is co-editor of, among others, Epistémologie de la sociolo-
gie (with Bruno Frère, 2008), Résister au Quotidien (with Bruno Frère,
2013) and Engagements actuels, actualité des engagements (with Pascal
Delwit, 2010).
Claudette Lafaye is Associate Professor in Sociology at University of
Paris 8 (Saint-Denis), and is affiliated to the Laboratoire Architecture Ville
Urbanisme Environnement (LAVUE).
Lilian Mathieu is a sociologist. He is senior researcher in the CNRS
(National Center for Scientific Research) and a member of the Centre
Max Weber in the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon, France.
Fabrice Ripoll received his PhD in social geography from the University
of Caen (France) in 2005. He is Maître de conférences (associate profes-
sor) of social geography at the Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne University
(France) and at the Lab’URBA. He just obtained accreditation to super-
vise (doctoral) research (HDR).
Marta Roca i Escoda is a sociologist, and lecturer at the Institute for
Gender Studies of the University of Lausanne. After graduating in sociol-
ogy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, she wrote her PhD dis-
sertation in sociology at the University of Geneva, entitled “Mise en jeu et
mise en cause du droit dans le processus de reconnaissance des couples
homosexuels”. She is also an associate researcher at the Research Group
on Public Action (Free University of Brussels).
Frédéric Viguier is a sociologist and clinical associate professor at
the Institute of French Studies, New York University. His research inter-
ests focus on inequalities in France and the Francophone world, how they
are perceived and represented, and how they are addressed by social poli-
cies and policies of educational democratization.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Let a Thousand

Flowers Bloom?
Marc Jacquemain and Bruno Frère
The societies of Western Europe—“Old Europe”, as George W. Bush’s

Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, called it—have lived for three full
decades through what one might call a “crisis of social conflict”. That
doesn’t necessarily mean that the level of conflict has become lower—even
if the hypothesis seems true for a fraction of this period—but rather that
the conflict has become less structured and so less easy to grasp. In a
recent work on new critical thought, sociologist Razmig Keucheyan
(2014: 4) summarises the situation in a formula we can easily agree with:
“Today’s world resembles the one in which classical Marxism emerged. In
other respects, it is significantly different—above all, no doubt, in the
absence of a clearly identified ‘subject of emancipation’”.
In both its Marxist and social-democratic tendencies, the historic
workers’ movement drew on a considerable symbolic resource: a teleology
in which the proletariat, a special actor, had a “natural” calling to the
M. Jacquemain
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
e-mail: Marc.Jacquemain@ulg.ac.be
B. Frère (*)
FNRS, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
e-mail: bfrere@ulg.ac.be
© The Author(s) 2020 1

B. Frère, M. Jacquemain (eds.), Everyday Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7_1
2 M. JACQUEMAIN AND B. FRÈRE
universal. Its emancipation was supposed to emancipate the whole of

humanity, and the question of what form the resultant classless society
would take could be left to future generations. To be sure, this teleology
posed significant problems. What should be done, for example, about the
desire for national emancipation, about the rejection of colonialism and
sexism? But it nonetheless provided a compass, a “red thread” which
allowed all forms of resistance to be linked at least on the level of the
imagined. This vision of the world has now lost its relevance because capi-
talism’s “displacements” have “defeated” the historic actor with universal
calling by denying it a clearly identifiable adversary (Boltanski and
Chiapello 2005 [1999]), leaving only a landscape strewn with injustices
that are deeply felt but difficult to identify and to denounce, and still
more difficult to link together. Institutions evade responsibility for and
refuse to describe the multiple injustices whose victims are the weak
(Boltanski 2011 [2009]). The weak then experience an “indignation”
without a target; they might even feel culpable if they accept that their lot
is inscribed in the nature of things, or in the world itself, to use Luc
Boltanski’s terminology again (2011 [2009]). Responsible for their own
fortune, they only get what they deserve.
But the injustices persist. Even when they become difficult to theorise,
even if reality tends to conceal itself, all the indicators point towards their
having worsened over the last three decades. During that time, the atten-
tion of political scientists and sociologists has been drawn increasingly to
situated and often monothematic practical demonstrations of resistance to
injustice. These forms of resistance were not all born yesterday, as Lilian
Mathieu and Bruno Frère observe in their chapters. Some of them have
even been around for several decades. But they all benefit from increased
visibility now that the “tide” of totalising and politicised social critique,
that of the historic workers’ movement, has been partially taken out of
circulation.
The social-scientific literature of the last 15 years has often described
these practical forms of resistance in terms of a transformation of engage-
ment (Ion et al. 2005; Jacquemain and Delwit 2010; Vassallo 2010; Tilly
and Wood 2013). The “total activism” that developed within the tradi-
tional workers’ movement was said to have been replaced by a “distanced”
engagement: activists now fought for a specific cause and for a given time;
they refused to “sacrifice themselves” for the cause; selfish and altruistic
motivations coexisted. This last point is, without doubt, one of the most
controversial: in the classical conception of commitment as defended, for
1 INTRODUCTION: LET A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOM? 3
example, by Hirschman (1982), invoking personal, selfish, reasons for

commitment destroyed the value of even public engagement.1
But we cannot even be sure that these characteristics of contemporary
modes of activism are new (Kriesi 1995) or not (Pichardo 1997)—an old
question that is still actively debated (Peterson et al. 2015). There is no
doubt that, as Snow and Soule remind us, there are differences between,
for example, the cultural struggles of LGBTQ+ and ecological
movements—which want to secure procedural rights and protect life-
styles—and the “older movements” (trade unions, etc.)—which are ori-
ented towards labour and correcting distributional inequities (2010: 236).
This seems to be particularly true in the case of France, where some have
no hesitation in talking about “new citizenship” or “new associativeness”
in the public sphere—which differs dramatically from formalised struc-
tures such as parties and trade unions (Waters 2003: 147, 21). And this
kind of distinction even inspires the thoughts of critical philosophers
(Fraser and Honneth 2003). On the other hand, as Lilian Mathieu sug-
gests, some claimed novelties may consist more in an effect of “belief”, in
a displacement of the sociological gaze, than in a transformation of reality.
Besides, one can easily imagine that it is not just the social sciences that are
responsible for this displacement—that the activists themselves engage in
storytelling that foregrounds those forms of activism that are socially val-
ued at a given point in time. Thus, the existential difficulties linked to
activist engagement certainly afflicted the workers’ movement of the
1920s, just as they afflicted the activist movements of the 1960s, as auto-
biographical memoirs attest. But today they are without a doubt easier to
integrate explicitly into the canonical account of activist experience.
This is why the texts assembled here do not seek to address this ques-
tion of novelty. They present a sample of experiences all of which provide
evidence of forms of collective resistance to injustice in our cognitive2
(Moulier-Boutang 2011) and connectionist (Boltanski and Chiapello
2005 [1999]) capitalist societies. What these texts have in common is that
they all—to different degrees—privilege a pragmatic approach: they set
out to describe this resistance through actors’ concrete practices, recon-
structing the rules that these actors set themselves in order to decide on
the legitimacy of their own engagement. For pragmatic sociology, the
sociologist cannot claim to know the reasons for actors’ concrete practice
better than the actors themselves—and this is because the sociologist does
not necessarily have access to a privileged viewpoint. This work thus sees
itself as very different from a sociology that “unveils”, whose ambition is
to free hidden reality from domination so as to better combat it (Boltanski

and Thévenot [1991] 2006; Frère and Laville forthcoming; Frère and
Jaster 2018). It also distances itself from a sociology that is too
“generalising”—a sociology that aims to sketch a universal model of activ-
ism today. Yet, the chapters collected here are united by a common
hypothesis: that committing to a cause implies a fundamental moral ability
to be outraged by injustice. But this ability can be deployed at very differ-
ent levels of generality. It is through the empirical analysis of practices and
justificatory discourses that we must uncover the logic of each of these
forms of resistance—the moral grammar of an indignation that although
effective may struggle, even refuse, to “rise to generality”, to acquire a
theoretical justification (Boltanski [2009] 2011).
The examples taken up in this book constitute a sample of practices
because they by no means include all instances of resistance to contempo-
rary injustice. Common to all of them is their focus on France or, more
accurately, the French-speaking world, following in the footsteps of exist-
ing well-known studies (Cerny 1982; Duyvendack 1995). Why focus on
France? Probably for the reasons highlighted by Waters (2003: 2):
France provides a particularly rich and fascinating setting in which to observe

social movements. This is after all a nation defined historically by mass popu-
lar uprising, whose values, principles and ideals have been fashioned by a
deep-seated revolutionary tradition. French culture was created through
dissent, through constant challenges to the status quo. From the Revolution
of 1789 and the Paris Commune of 1871 to the more recent events of May
1968 or the ‘big strikes’ of 1995, the course of French history has been
punctuated by moments of profound social and political upheaval. More
than with any other European country, conflict lies at the heart of French
political life and is woven into the very fabric of society, symbolising for
many the ideals of popular resistance, democratic change and the struggle
for justice.3
On the wide spectrum of social movements that can be classified as

belonging to the European “new left”—which demand global justice
while pointing to an almost stunning diversity of candidates for emancipa-
tion (Flesher Fominaya and Cox 2013)—those who were at the origin of
the alter-globalist movement in the 1990s and 2000s are today well known
and have captured the attention of all the specialists (Sommier and Fillieule
2013: 48). Thus, we no longer focus on droits devant or AC! (who fought
for the rights of the unemployed), ATTAC (the Association for the
Taxation of Financial Transactions) or José Bové’s confédération paysanne,
who were among the era’s central actors (Morena 2013). Even if the alter-
globalist tendency is no longer there to unify the movement, the fact
remains that in its margins—or a short time after its decline—forms of
struggle were born that are less well known and have less media presence.
But it is probably they who are aiming to keep the spirit of this “new left”
alive today. And it is them who we focus on in this collection.
Remaining within this geographical frame, which has no pretensions
towards universality, the examples described here clearly show both the
diversity of contemporary forms of left-wing engagement in France and
their vitality at very different scales. All these forms of engagement are
unfolding at a conjuncture which could be described, from a more macro-
sociological point of view, as a phase of “resilience”: even if it has really
become more difficult to think about, and a fortiori to organise, social
contestation during the last 30 years, the “black hole” of the 1980s—dur-
ing which the discourse of “triumphal” capitalism convinced even (and
sometimes primarily) those who lost most from it of its truth—has none-
theless come to a close.4
Even if the books’ chapters do not explicitly endorse this description of
the present, most of their authors seem to see in it a plausible outline of
the global context in which current forms of engagement are situated. With
the fundamental resource of a totalising narrative schema no longer at
their disposal, it is logical that these instances of resistance should do two
things: first, that they should look to concrete situations for resources; but
second, that they should once more pose themselves—but with noticeably
greater difficulty than in the past—the question of the “rise to general-
ity”5—the question of how to move towards a political demand for social
transformation.
Though the forms of resistance presented here may be diverse in terms
of their focus and their mode of organisation, it is nonetheless possible to
make connections that point towards potentially generalisable logics. By
beginning with these experiments studied in their particularity, it is possi-
ble to pose questions that concern all of them. Three points, in particular,
are worth mentioning, all of which seem even more striking than during
the zenith of anti-globalisation.
In the absence of an immediately available “horizon of expectations”,
how can indignation express itself and what role do the pressures of neces-
sity play? How can resistance arise from the brute experience of injustice
and to what extent does this experience constrain the form in which resis-
tance expresses itself?
How do these instances of resistance position themselves in relation to

institutions and in particular to the state? Is it a question of opposing the
established authorities, of adapting to them, of enrolling them as allies, or
some of all these things simultaneously? How can these problems be
resolved in the face of a state whose boundaries have become increas-
ingly elusive?
What resources can these forms of resistance mobilise in a period that
appears hostile to them? Are there some themes that lend themselves bet-
ter than others to transforming local resistance into global critique?
The Pressures of NecessiTy

The impact of necessity—and even of urgency—is a topic common to
most of the engagements described here. In their study of the Réseau
Éducation Sans Frontières (RESF, the Education Without Borders
Network), Claudette Lafaye and Damien de Blic (Chap. 2) show how
parents and teachers discover that the threat of expulsion has suddenly
disrupted the “everyday and unremarkable” worlds of students and their
parents. Here, moral indignation reaches its maximum; this moral register
is a powerful “boost” to a highly committed type of activism that consists
of regular support and presence. In the case of the RESF, it is easy to
imagine that “there is no room for asking questions”: a strong activist
response is almost inevitable because it is difficult to “pass by” something
that happens to someone who—because they belong to a “community”
(whether centred around the neighbourhood or schools)—is already com-
pletely endowed with the attributes of an individual. The example of the
RESF brings this logic of necessity—which involves a commitment that
almost “goes without saying”—into sharp focus. In this case, actors stick
closely to moral indignation and, if they move away from this indignation
(towards the more abstract register of the civic city, which questions the
legitimacy of current immigration policy), the activist response loses its
legitimacy. This allows the RESF’s activism to be locally effective; at this
scale, weak generalisation allows allies to be enrolled more easily (in par-
ticular civil servants, who would be much more reticent if confronted with
more militant language). But its critical potential is thereby diminished.
Though the RESF reveals the pressure of necessity particularly clearly,
this pressure is present in many other cases. The transformation of homo-
sexual activism under the pressure of the emergence of AIDS, described by
Marta Roca i Escoda (Chap. 3), provides a paradigmatic example of this.
Urgency forced homosexual associations to totally reorient themselves,

partly by re-centring themselves around serving the community (leaving to
one side the more radical critique of normalising society), and partly by
committing to a policy of active collaboration with the state to promote
information, support and prevention. While the epidemic took a heavy toll
on the homosexual community, this dramatic moment was also paradoxi-
cally the occasion of a real victory. Every piece of research conducted dur-
ing the last 30 years, in Europe as well as in the United States, has shown
the progressive “social normalisation” of homosexuality: homophobia has
of course not disappeared but it has ceased to be the dominant social norm.
In what seemed like a struggle for its survival, the homosexual commu-
nity—particularly in France and North America—gained a form of recogni-
tion, notably thanks to the construction of a “counter-expertise” which
impressed even the medical world (Collins and Pinch 2001). Although
driven by the pressure of the most extreme necessity, homosexual activism
thus achieved a particularly effective “rise to generality” by expanding the
frontiers of “common humanity”: in certain countries, in less than a life-
time, the state’s engagement with homosexuality transitioned from moral-
ising penalisation to the promotion of a vigorous anti-discrimination policy.6
The solidarity economy, addressed by Éric Dacheux and then Bruno
Frère (Chaps. 5 and 10), draws on the same idea of a fight for survival.
What neither André Gorz (2001: 205–214) nor Holloway (2010: 69–70)
seem to recognise when they criticise the solidarity economy is that it has
not arisen from the theories of authors who write about it but has emerged
from necessity pure and simple. The solidarity economy has emerged
because without it living conditions would seriously deteriorate. This
observation holds as much for self-managed cooperatives in Argentina as
it does for some local exchange services in France, as well as citizen bank-
ing schemes that have developed throughout the world. Perhaps it is true
that, as Marx’s Capital says, “the realm of freedom really begins only
when labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends. It lies
by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper” (Marx
1981 [1867]: 958–959). The realm of freedom really begins when the
rule of immediate physical needs comes to an end. But here and now these
needs are visible, and there is no other option but to fulfil them and to
take every step possible to “get by”.
These texts clearly show how activist engagement arises or transforms
itself under the impact of necessity: what can appear heroic in ordinary
contexts can become ordinary in heroic contexts.7 But at a more “banal”
level, necessity is omnipresent as a cause of engagement: it is, again, the

contact with profound poverty that allows Agir Tous pour la Dignité
(ATD) Quart Monde (All Act for Dignity Fourth World), studied by
Frédéric Viguier (Chap. 4), to demand that its members engage in a form
of activism that verges on asceticism. As Fabrice Ripoll explains (Chap. 7),
repeated food security crises provided the Associations pour le Maintain
de l’Agriculture Paysanne (AMAPs, Associations for the Protection of
Paysan Agriculture) with the social need that their survival depends on.
And it was the desire to take control of their own professional and techni-
cal environment that led programmers to establish the free software com-
munity, according to Gaël Depoorter (Chap. 6). All these movements’
critiques vary in their levels of reflexivity and radicalism; but remaining in
touch with a form of immediately recognisable “need” seems to be a cen-
tral element of the birth and longevity of the engagement they involve.
Certain “vital” experiences retain their ability to fuel indignation, even if
the transition from indignation to critique (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005
[1999]) has become more fragile for the reasons outlined above. To the
question of knowing “how is one to continue believing in the feasibility of
socialism, when the facts have brutally and repeatedly invalidated the
idea?” (Keucheyan 2014: 30), it becomes possible to respond: resistance is
possible without reaching the threshold of belief. For that reason this resis-
tance remains fragile, whether it is supported by different “horizons of
expectations” or unsupported by any such horizon. So it is difficult to
make it permanent. But the pressure of necessity constantly reactivates it.
AN Ambiguous relATioNshiP To The sTATe

In the various types of engagement we have before us, the relation to the
state (envisaged in its broadest sense as a public authority) is ambiguous,
to say the least. The state is by turns an adversary and a tutelary power,
depending on the circumstances, and sometimes both at the same time.
The example of the homosexual movement is, without doubt, the most
revealing in this regard. Immediately following the Second World War, the
state was in some sense “out of the picture”, doubtless because the idea of
homosexuality’s social normalisation seemed relatively inaccessible. The
movements that emerged consequently appeared more inward-looking;
they were less activist groups than “circles” of sociability within a com-
munity that saw itself as discreet. The conjuncture of the 1970s rendered
the prospect of normalisation more concrete. At this point, the most
conservative states (such as Francoist Spain) appeared as clear adversaries

through their preservation, and even their strengthening, of repressive
laws that were losing support among the general population. Finally, at
the start of the 1980s, AIDS came along and practically inverted the prob-
lematic, turning the homosexual movements into allies of a state pressured
into acting against the epidemic in a manner that was preventative as well
as curative. If, as seems to be the case, this (inevitable) alliance ended up
benefiting the homosexual movement—at the very least by drawing atten-
tion to the issue of homosexuality’s legal normalisation—this has not nec-
essarily been the case for other forms of resistance.
Thus, anti-poverty movements such as ATD Fourth World are described
by Frédéric Viguier as “an instrument for controlling the working classes”;
he describes the “cause of the poor” as constituting a space “much less
external to the state than it is normally represented as being”. The ques-
tion of who benefits from an alliance of this kind is much more problem-
atic here. By declaring that the transformation required depends on “work
on the self by the poor”, movements like ATD propagate what might in a
very general sense be called “the dominant ideology” of network capital-
ism, which extends demands for individual responsibility and “limitless
activation” even to its outsiders. The pressure of necessity fuels resistance
but, at the same time, it integrates this resistance into a type of global
social policy that sustains poverty. This is why, citing Bourdieu, Frédéric
Viguier refers to “the left hand of the state”, which may try to offer an
ultimate “safety net” but which does so by favouring aid over insurance,
thus relieving capitalism of any responsibility for the least productive part
of the workforce.
The relation to the state is therefore very problematic. For most activist
associations, no matter what their cause, it would be untenable to refuse
to collaborate with the authorities—but forming such an alliance comes at
a heavy cost because it hampers the development of critical thought. In
particular, these associations tend to block “civic” tests8 centred on the
model of making political demands in the public sphere, as demonstrated
by their hostility to the idea of occupying the banks of the Canal Saint-
Martin in Paris.
This refusal to “rise to political generality” is common to various forms
of resistance, including those that confront the power of the state head-
on: it is seen in both the solidarity economy and the RESF, whose activists
dismiss any critical reflection on immigration policy as this would in some
sense “pollute” their existential commitment to serve real flesh-and-blood
people. This raises the risk of a “Sisyphean effect”, whereby any partial
victories are achieved only at the price of refusing to interrogate sys-
temic effects.
This dilemma is not new. The entire history of the 20th century work-
ers’ movement can be read along the same lines: that of the dialectic
between the mobilising and demobilising effects of partial victories. The
workers’ movement at least proposed a theorisation of the state’s role.9
But this theorisation has become difficult today, while the state itself has
become evanescent: one the one hand, it ceaselessly reaffirms itself through
symbols and its repressive authority,10 but on the other, it constantly weak-
ens the distinction between the public and the private, borrowing its man-
agerial forms of control from capitalism. On the one hand, it reminds
actors of their “sovereignty”, while on the other, it partly incorporates
these social actors to make them into its subcontractors: the state thus
becomes, according to Zaki Laïdi’s neat formulation (2007), a “fractal
state” that must negotiate with parts of itself.
What results is really a “game with the rules” (Boltanski 2011 [2009]):
actors find themselves in a system full of blurred lines where the state
appears as much as an ally as it does as an adversary, and sometimes, as
mentioned before, both at the same time, depending on the circum-
stances. Perhaps this situation is impossible to clarify today in France given
the plasticity of institutions, which are both increasingly fragile and quick
to claim their “sovereign power” over the weakest actors. But this lack of
clarification appears, on the whole, as a weakness, liable to lead activist
engagements to a kind of recurrent impotence.11 Like Sisyphus pushing
his boulder, critique, in this case, must always be begun again.
A cAPAciTy for subversioN?

Contrary to the engagements we have just been talking about (deporta-
tions, poverty, etc.), which have struggled to “rise to generality”, in other
cases a similar phenomenon has come to light that gives more reason for
optimism: forms of engagement that are not a priori anti-capitalist, even
behaviours that are not experienced a priori as forms of activist engage-
ment, can produce what we will call “non-intentional critical effects”.
We have in mind, first, the AMAPs analysed by Fabrice Ripoll. As his
chapter clearly shows, their success is partly due to the plurality of registers
of commitment they have mobilised. One can join an AMAP either
because of solidarity with rural communities or because of a more general
desire for an environmentally-friendly form of production. But also

because of motivations that are more easily accessible to “ordinary peo-
ple”, that is, a desire to eat food that conforms to one’s own dietary pref-
erences, whether this desire is generated by fear of certain foods
“contaminated” by chemicals (fertiliser and other pesticides), or by a taste
for certain flavours. “Moral and political” commitment can thus be mini-
mal, to begin with. This plurality of registers can of course serve to weaken
associations (e.g. when a minority of “activists” carry out collective tasks
for a majority of “consumers”). But it is also a strength that allows people
with commitments that are very different in nature and intensity to come
together. The “consumer” who primarily acts according to a “selfish”
logic (for their health or to save money) nonetheless provides support for
the group by increasing its critical mass. Thus, one can commit oneself
without really claiming to perform an act of commitment in the traditional
sense. The logic of the AMAPs acts as a “transmission mechanism”
between the initial investment and the collective result.
The same mechanism is at work, in an even more explicit way, in the
“free software community” analysed by Gaël Depoorter. The “founding
narrative” of Richard Stallman (Stallman and Williams 2010) appeals to an
“existential experience of frustration”: seeing yourself excluded from proj-
ects to which you yourself have contributed. The justification for free soft-
ware may rest on a critique of capitalism (the rejection of the private
appropriation of collective intellectual work), but this justification does
not a priori presuppose a higher level of critical engagement. It rests on
“an improbable hybrid of an academic ethos and primitive communism”
and above all involves itself in practical activity: the resolution of problems
and the sharing of knowledge. Christophe Lejeune (2009) has clearly
shown how “the spirit of engagement” among digital communities
invokes mutual technical support and not “abstract” critical distance with
regard to the internet’s commercialisation. This spirit is translated by the
imperative “Do it yourself!” It is particularly well illustrated by the use of
the term troll, a (dis)qualifier used to ridicule disputes judged nonessential
(not linked to the resolution of problems) in dedicated forums. On read-
ing these interactions, any taste for polemic—which is very common in
certain spheres of critical engagement—must be pushed aside in favour of
a “virtuous practical register pacified by a weaker level of reflexivity”.
By concretising this practical register, “viral” tools such as the GNU
General Public License enable these communities to mobilise resistance
even more robustly through the “transmission mechanism” effect
mentioned above in relation to the AMAPs: “All software using all or part
of a development protected by this licence must de facto apply its rules,
thus enabling the construction and permanence of an alternative praxis”.
Free software communities are at the heart of what Yann Moulier-
Boutang (2011) calls the “cognitive” productive mechanism of capitalism.
Without appearing to affect this mechanism, free software is thus a practice
with “high subversive potential” due to the very nature of its object. Moulier-
Boutang summarises the problem very simply:
At the very moment when the market seems to have consolidated its posi-
tion, historically eliminating socialism as an alternative to the production of
material goods outside the market, the quantity of goods, of information
and of knowledge which present all the characteristics of collective goods
becomes so significant that the basic justification of private appropriation
becomes increasingly acrobatic and largely inoperative.
This analysis seems to echo the Marxist idea that the development of the
“collective intellectual worker” will end up rendering the relations of capi-
talist production suboptimal.
Of course, this development is in no way necessary. Capitalism has amply
demonstrated its ability to incorporate critique and turn its weaknesses into
instruments of its own transformation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005
[1999]). But the fact remains that there is a decisive ongoing battle around
the private appropriation of the means of intellectual production—in particu-
lar, on the internet—and that, ten years after Moulier-Boutang was writing,
the struggle continues. The practice of free software thus contests the global
logic of capitalism almost “by default”—that is, without the need for a higher
level of reflexivity. Free software actors cannot be suspected of naivety: they
know very well the level at which the game is being played. But it is important
to note that they do not need to know this for the critique to be effective: Do it
yourself! is itself a radical questioning of capitalism because it weakens its hold
on a sector that is crucial to the future development of productive activity.
Saying this is not to promote the possibility of “bringing about the
revolution without knowing it”. Nonetheless, practices of resistance that
enjoy this privilege, which is usually reserved for capitalism itself, are
developing: we are seeing the emergence of a capacity for subverting capi-
talism through the simple effect of contagion. Even if we will not be able
to dispense with reflexive self-transformation within this process of trans-
formation, certain slopes will be easier to climb than others. Both the
AMAP and free software experiments give us examples of the relevance of
practices that in a sense “spontaneously” access a higher level of generality.
The DifficulTies of “PrAcTicAl uToPiA”

Across the different experiences examined, one theme regularly recurs: the
difficulty of translating the transformational aims of those involved in acts
of “ordinary” resistance into a “coherent praxis”.
Thus, Manuel Cervera-Marzal and Bruno Frère (Chap. 8) provide a
detailed analysis of the relationships that arise in an activist collective based
on general civil disobedience, Les refuseurs. This group of around 50
members, which surrounds a “hard core” of around 20 people, organises
acts of disobedience on a wide range of themes. Its members are mostly
students or young activists with high cultural capital, but who have rela-
tively precarious lives.
On the basis of participant observation and discussion with the mem-
bers, Cervera-Marzal and Frère demonstrate the “omnipresence” of a
latent sexism that is translated in multiple different ways. To begin with,
there is what one could call a “differentiated reward” from activism: in a
way that is not made explicit, the women are regularly given “execution”
tasks and much less often the task of coming up with actions.
“Differentiated” reward thus doubly disadvantages them: the tasks are
materially less pleasant (cleaning, cooking and purchasing materials) but
are also the least symbolically rewarding. Thus it is the male members of
the group who take charge of “mediatising” the group’s actions, both
through contacts with the media and by publishing on social networks.
To this sharing of tasks, which is implicitly but clearly gendered, can be
added the domination of women in the group’s “discursive space”.
Cervera-Marzal and Frère thus use examples often not perceived by the
group (at least by the men) to show how speech is systematically unbal-
anced to the detriment of the women, who are either not heard or are
even “snubbed”. A female activist explained at length how she experiences
this “gendered” way of addressing women, who are subjected to palpably
harsher treatment than men.
These observations are not new: since the start of the 1970s, sexism has
been summarily denounced by the female members of revolutionary
groups and the issue has accompanied the success and then the decline of
these groups throughout history. The “resistance” of the 2010s is still
struggling to come to terms with this contradiction and, from this point
of view, it is firmly “ideologically embedded” in “mainstream” society.
Elsewhere, the “Zone à Défendre” (ZAD: ‘Zone to Defend’) studied
by Sylvaine Bulle (Chap. 9) is a success but struggles to accommodate very
different forms of “occupation”. The ZAD occupies the site of a proposed

airport at Notre Dame des Landes near Nantes in western France. Its
occupants might be divided into three principal groups: the few farmers
who were there from the beginning; the “activists”, young politicised
intellectuals who are often influenced by situationist ideas; to whom have
been added a number of young people who have radically broken with
their previous lives and are running away from the “normality” of capital-
ist work and consumption. The cohabitation of these three groups takes
place largely informally: though each agrees to the rejection of capitalism
and the need to “defend the zone”, no organisation has really come along
to “head” the occupation and give it a common strategy. The occupants
interviewed all stress the principle that “no-one can tell anyone else what
they should do”. For all the residents, the ZAD is both a place of retreat
and a place of attack: it is both a question of “fleeing” from capitalism and
fighting it, even if the predominant tendency differs from person to person.
More than just a “cause” in the classical sense, the Zone à Défendre is
thus an attempt to construct a practical or a real utopia (Wright 2010) that
provides a great deal of room for individual autonomy and for non-
institutionalised ways of resolving conflicts. In place of the model and the
constraints of a largely urban capitalism, the Zone substitutes the paradigm
of “inhabitation” in a way that cultivates and protects the place inhabited.
So has the ZAD been victorious in the end? At the time of writing, the
government of Emmanuel Macron has just announced the abandonment
of the airport project. It is not known what the “territory”—which has
been designated as such for decades—will become. Doubtless, the French
state would like to reassert its authority by evicting the occupants. But the
symbol remains strong.
Finally to the third aporia of “practical utopia”: the question of the
actors’ legitimacy. This is highlighted in Bruno Frère’s chapter on the soli-
darity economy (Chap. 10), “politics without politics”. The notion of
“representativeness” is always leaving by the door (since the political ethos
of new forms of resistance is a priori distrustful of delegation) only to re-
enter through the window: since as soon as someone speaks, they must
necessarily speak in the name of (a group, a cause, an association, etc.). The
dispute about legitimate representation is thus both inextinguishable and
insoluble, as was again experienced by activists of the still-born movement
Nuits Debout.12 How can all speak with the same voice when all voices
must be able to express themselves? How can several voices speak without
this resulting in an unproductive and unpleasant cacophony?
The accusations of “illegitimacy” levelled against each other by the

MES (Movement for the Solidarity Economy) and “Les Pénélopes” (a
group seeking to combine feminist solidarity economy initiatives) expose
the impasse: each contests the other’s pretension to legitimacy in the name
of symmetrical arguments drawn from the same political “grammar”.
This difficulty is linked, as Bruno Frère shows, to an inability to address
the issue of power head-on. One might thus ask whether this demon-
strates a problem with the very concept of “practical utopia”, whose two
terms are to some extent inherently antagonistic.
These three chapters clearly show that even though concrete resistance
to capitalism has not disappeared—far from it—perspectives on how to
leave capitalism behind remain extremely vague. Many characteristics are
shared by the “old” and the “new” social movements (we must insist on
the quotation marks) as Mathieu points out (Chap. 11). And this remains
true even when it comes to the difficulties they experience in concretely
defining the post-capitalist utopia that they aspire to.
everyDAy resisTANce?
If we take the utopian hopes (in the non-pejorative sense) historically
prompted by the workers’ movement as a reference, then the past three or
even four decades appear quite naturally as a period in which social critique
was defeated. Those whose intellectual and activist socialisation began in the
period that followed the post-May 1968 turmoil share the same experience
of a constantly reiterated disillusion. But the fact that it is difficult to iden-
tify critical thought that is both effective and “totalising” does not signify
that the page of activist engagement has been turned. To convince ourselves
of this, we must no doubt change our perspective and seek out less the
“grail” of a possible new utopia than daily forms of struggle against injustice.
Doubtless, not all paradigms in the social sciences are equally capable of
“changing our perspective” in this way. By bringing our attention to the
concrete experiments taking place today, as imperfect as they may be, and
to the immanent conditions of their legitimacy, the pragmatic approach in
sociology and political science shows that—at a globally unfavourable con-
juncture—there is resistance everywhere, all the time and in various differ-
ent forms; sometimes this resistance even achieves victories.
In sum, even if the notion of “everyday resistance” is not new (see e.g.
Scott 1987), it takes on a reconfigured meaning today. As it appears in the
different chapters of this book, it comes close to the definition given by
Stella Vinthagen and Anna Johansson (2013) in their impressive review of

the literature:
(1) Everyday resistance is a practice (not a certain consciousness, intent,

recognition or outcome; (2) It is historically entangled with (everyday)
power (not separated, dichotomous or independent); (3) Everyday resis-
tance needs to be understood as [just as] intersectional as the powers it
engages with (not one single power relation); and as a consequence (4) It is
heterogen[eous] and contingent due to changing contexts and situations
(not a universal strategy or coherent action form).
As these two authors also note, everyday resistance is not necessarily

explicitly conceptualised as resistance by the actors themselves. It may be
seen first of all as a “survival” or “emergency” practice. This is true of the
Education Without Borders Network and the AMAPs, as well as ATD
Quart Monde. Everyday resistance is thus really a practice before it is an
intention or a strategy. This is also how the free software community can
be defined. But whatever it is, resistance is always engaged in a relation
with “power” in one form or another—where “power” is understood in
Foucault’s sense as immanent and relational: power and resistance define
and are intertwined with each other. This is why resistance is really “inter-
sectional”: as Vinthagen and Johansson again stress, the criteria of domi-
nation are multiple and the same actors can occupy dominant or dominated
positions depending on the criterion chosen. The analysis of sexist prac-
tices within activist groups conducted by Manuel Cervera-Marzal and
Bruno Frère clearly illustrates this ambiguity of positions. And as a conse-
quence, everyday resistance is truly heterogeneous and contingent.
So again, we can only agree with Vinthagen and Johansson (2013):
Everyday resistance is a type of act available to all subaltern subjects, all the
time, in some form or another. But not all will resist. And even those who
do resist only do so sometimes and in relation to some system of domina-
tion, while they might utilize other positions of dominance available to
them. When they resist they will not always affect power; sometimes they
will even strengthen power or create new forms of power techniques.
All the texts presented here help us to better grasp the strengths and weak-
nesses of the forms of resistance at work—as well as their grips on the
reality of unremitting injustice. It is not a question of renouncing global
constructions, but of recalling that such constructions will not be able to
develop in empirical ignorance of effective forms of resistance: if it really is

life that determines consciousness, then theorisation can only be emergent
and the efficacy of local forms of resistance will clear the path towards less
dismal horizons of expectations.
This empirical work of identifying “grips” is more indispensable than
ever. It is the necessary condition for rearming an effective critique, that
is, a critique that dares to be radical but does not mistake its dreams for
realities.
NoTes
1. Hirschman notably gives the example of the person who, during a war,
allows fugitives to pass to the free zone. He pointed out that it would make
no sense to justify their commitment by claiming both that they acted out
of patriotism and that their action also brought them financial gain.
2. In the sense that knowledge (distributed) becomes the principal means of
production, which, as Marx anticipated, makes the individual appropria-
tion of the means of production into a brake on the development of the
productive forces.
3. “Despite recent prophecies to the contrary, instances of protest continue
to occur with greater frequency and intensity in France than almost any-
where else. There are more demonstrations, strikes, occupations, marches
and petition movements in France today than in most other European
societies and conflict is widely accepted by French citizens as a normal,
almost banal, occurrence” (id.).
4. We should note that all these texts were written, for the most part, before
the 15th of May movement in Spain and its “aftershocks” in several
countries.
5. Following the tradition that has spread within pragmatic sociology, “rise to
generality” denotes the process whereby arguments are universalised,
through which actors seek to construct agreement or to extend their
alliances.
6. The example of Belgium illustrates this transition particularly well.
7. The inverse is obviously true, as all revolutionary experiences demonstrate.
8. By “civic test” we mean a confrontation with political authorities in the
public sphere (see Boltanski and Thévenot [1991] 2006).
9. Or, more precisely, several theorisations, since it was often on this question
that the movement was divided. These theorisations described the state as
either the dominant classes’ instrument of oppression or the expression of
the popular will (via universal suffrage)—or both.
10. In this respect, the “truth tests” spoken of by Luc Boltanski (2011 [2009])—
solemn and ritualised reaffirmations of the legitimacy of institutions, which are
tending to lose their influence—could experience a second youth as capital-
ism’s legitimacy weakens: the return to the foreground of the topic of “national
identity” in many European countries is evidence of this happening.
11. In the context of the United States, Nina Eliasoph’s very good book
(2010) can serve as a theoretical counterpoint to most of the experiences
presented here.
12. Nuits Debout was a major contestatory social movement that sprang up in
the outdoor public spaces of most big cities in France. It began on 31
March 2016 following a protest against the “loi travail”. This law aimed to
revise the Labour Code to give businesses greater room for manoeuvre in
recruiting and, above all, laying off workers. The movement quickly came
to involve groups working on many different kinds of issue and so a “con-
vergence of struggles” was suggested. Its focus consequently expanded to
the general contestation of political, cultural and economic institutions. In
the absence of any leader or spokesperson, Nuits Debout was organised
through self-managed thematic groups. Decisions were made by reaching
consensus during general assemblies, following the Ancient Greek model
of direct participatory democracy. The movement occasionally even
stretched beyond French borders, but it subsequently waned until its even-
tual demise in summer 2016—at least in its initial form of mass gatherings
and debates in public spaces (see Wikipedia). For more on Nuits Debout,
see Gaël Brustier, 2016, Nuit debout: que penser?, Paris: Le Cerf.
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CHAPTER 2
Undocumented Families and Political

Communities: Parents Fighting Deportations
Damien de Blic and Claudette Lafaye
Since 2004, hundreds of local committees linked together in a vast

network—the Réseau Education Sans Frontières (Education Without
Borders Network or RESF)—have sprung up across France, most often
emerging out of schools. Between autumn 2005 and spring 2006, they
proliferated particularly quickly. In most cases, these local committees are
not formal organisations; in the absence of statutes, of membership, of
paid subscriptions, of elected presidents and of mandated representatives,
their structure is weak and their contours are infinitely variable. Each local
committee tenaciously demands the regularisation of the undocumented
families and young adults who have come to its attention. Less than a
decade after the hunger strikes of the undocumented migrants (the sans-
papiers) of Saint-Bernard (Siméant 1998; Blin 2005), and the mobilisa-
tions around those whose bid for legalisation was dismissed by Minister of
the Interior Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s regularisation bill,1 the question
of the sans-papiers has once again risen to public prominence.
Clearly, this re-emergence must be placed in the context of the hardening
of public policy concerning migrants since 2002 (Rodier and Terray
D. de Blic (*) • C. Lafaye

University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France
e-mail: lafaye@ehess.fr
© The Author(s) 2020 21

B. Frère, M. Jacquemain (eds.), Everyday Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7_2
22 D. DE BLIC AND C. LAFAYE
2008). While it is possible to identify the beginnings of selective policy as

early as 1945 (Brun 2013) and repressive policy in the 1970s (Lochak
2007), the decade of the 2000s was characterised by a proliferation of laws
and regulations that deliberately restricted foreigners’ ability to remain
legally in the country,2 and by an overhaul of administrative and policing
practices. Notably, from 2003, a new style of administrative management
emerged that was fixated on quantitative objectives to deport illegal immi-
grants, and on the implementation of these objectives through successful
deportation (Spire 2008; Cette France-là 2012). The resulting deporta-
tions have affected undocumented immigrants who were previously
spared: on reaching their majority, high school students receive orders to
leave France; fathers and mothers are arrested on café terraces, at the exit
from the metro, in the street and even on the way to school, and so on. It
is around this newly vulnerable population that the RESF initially formed
and has developed and pursued its activities to this day.3 Even if, by creat-
ing a multi-year residence permit, the latest law concerning the residence
of foreigners (dated March 7, 2016) demonstrates the intention to attract
legal and highly skilled immigrants, it also reinforces the fight against ille-
gal immigration. This leads both to the perpetuation of local RESF collec-
tives and to their reactivation as soon as a pupil’s parent or a young adult
is targeted by a deportation measure.
Several traits distinguish the RESF mobilisations from the mobilisations
of sans-papiers that preceded them (Siméant 1998) as well as those that
emerged several years later (Barron et al. 2011, 2014, 2016; Jounin 2014).
First, by forming around children, around students and around families,
the RESF gave birth to a new image of the sans-papiers—one very differ-
ent from that of the single worker that had hitherto predominated and
which would reclaim the public sphere from 2008. Second, these mobili-
sations involved—in Paris at least—not the sans-papiers themselves and
their traditional supporters, but mainly regular citizens who did not neces-
sarily have much experience of the cause of the sans-papiers or even of
activism4 (Blic and Blic 2006). While these people were not the only ones
to mobilise, they would go on to stamp this mobilisation with an identity
that helped keep traditional activists at a distance, as we will see later.
What drove ordinary citizens, teachers, students’ parents, sometimes
even just neighbours, to mobilise on behalf of the sans-papiers? What is
the nature of the “good” that they set about defending? Can we describe
the experience and the emergent actions of these local committees—
which in Paris almost all grew out of an encounter with a family living
2 UNDOCUMENTED FAMILIES AND POLITICAL COMMUNITIES… 23
sometimes in the same building, who the committee members discovered,

often with astonishment, to be undocumented and directly threatened by
deportation—as a process of politicisation? This last question is worth ask-
ing because these mobilisations exhibit a specific character—a character
that this chapter seeks to clarify. The RESF’s mode of engagement and
mobilisation questions both our usual and our scholarly conceptions of
citizen engagement, which are both normative and restrictive, having
been inherited in particular from the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
This philosophy has moulded the ideal of a detached and objective citi-
zen. It has promoted the construction of the public sphere as a domain of
political discussion whose genealogy has been written by Jürgen Habermas
(1989 [1962]). As significant as it remains, this ideal is nonetheless capa-
ble of allowing other ways of being a citizen and of doing politics to
emerge, to which the sociologist should remain alert. This is what the
RESF activists show us by not constructing a cause in the usual way by
de-singularising and generalising—processes that characterise the regime
of denunciation and public justification5 (Boltanski 2012 [1990];
Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991]). The encounter with families,
which is the origin of engagement in the network, seems to constitute an
experiential base that grounds a critique not just of the administration’s
treatment of undocumented immigrants, but also its treatment of tradi-
tional activism. This double critique is characterised by a reluctance to
understand the sans-papiers’ situation in terms of general political catego-
ries. Through this reluctance to generalise, committee members experi-
ence a mode of politicisation that takes on a paradoxical form: it is realised
through the anchoring of committees in their immediate environment,
through their attachment to something like a “community” which reveals
itself to them when they feel it is threatened with the amputation of one
or more of its members. It is the making visible of this community that
seems to constitute the originality of the RESF activists’ politics—and it is
this making visible that will allow us to situate their politics with respect
to activist movements in general.
The research that grounds this hypothesis took place in Paris: over sev-
eral years, we undertook “observant participation” in the life of two local
RESF committees established in 2005 and 2006, in the 20th and 11th
arrondissements, respectively. Against an imprecise or weak use of the
notion of “observant participation” (Wacquant 2010; Schnapper 20116),
we want to signal here that neither of us initially intended to study these
two local committees. We were originally engaged as citizens—rather than
as researchers—when we learned that parents of students at our own chil-

dren’s school had just been expelled or were being threatened with
expulsion. Following the example of Dominique Schnapper (2010, 2011),
we were thus “first of all part of the group before observing it”, even if, as
sociologists engaged in activism, it was difficult for us to break out of a kind
of detachment due to our professional habitus. But it was only in a second
phase that the research plan took shape, through numerous exchanges
where, as colleagues, we recounted and compared our respective experi-
ences. This comparison was crucial, not only for formalising a line of ques-
tioning but for the activity of observation itself: it was this that sharpened
our gaze and which, beyond note-taking, made it easier to distance our-
selves while warning us simultaneously of the inverse problem of becoming
too detached. The approach we adopted, in fact, has affinities with the
pragmatic sociology in which this chapter is embedded. Contrary to a per-
spective that explains activist indignation through causal explanations
which escape the actors themselves—due to their socialisation, dispositions
or trajectories—we follow the example of Lilian Mathieu’s analysis of a
departmental committee of the provincial RESF (2010), understanding
the actors’ experience of engagement by examining its impact on their civic
and political activity. In other words, experience and indignation are not
enigmas that we set out to resolve, but points of departure that we propose
to examine to the extent that they play a part in reshaping activist practice.
Parallel to our observation of the two local committees in which we
participated and, again, in pursuit of detachment, we collected written
sources and conducted interviews with people involved in other local
committees. That of Paris’ 10th arrondissement thus became the object of
a specific investigation. Around ten further interviews with members of
other local committees in Paris and its suburbs—all of whom were enrolled
in an undergraduate sociology course on collective action7—allowed us to
control our observations and to better contextualise certain traits of
engagement in the RESF.
EngagEmEnt anchorEd in thE Particularity

of an EncountEr
Our observations of the two local committees in Paris’ 11th and 20th
arrondissements and our supplementary interviews show that, for most
people, engagement in the RESF is rarely born out of the desire to defend
a cause. Usually, it stems from concern about particular situations they are
confronted with that have emerged in schools. This is indicated by the fact
that the interviewees never account for their engagement without placing
significant emphasis on life stories and on encounters, insisting on their
irreducibility. Their engagement is most often disconnected from any
prior awareness of the sans-papiers’ cause.
Odile relates that she lacked any such awareness: “For me, the sans-
papiers were the stowaways, Sangatte8 and all that … I hadn’t realised. I
didn’t know that it was possible to fabricate sans-papiers. Then you realise
what that means, ‘to fabricate sans-papiers’”. It was the same for Roselyne:
“For me, a sans-papiers was someone who hid themselves. I had heard
them speak once or twice on television, but it wasn’t something that
interested me”.
It is thus precisely because prior characterisations of sans-papiers exist—
whether, from the state’s point of view, as stowaways, or, from the collec-
tives’ point of view, as workers—that the discovery of sans-papiers in one’s
immediate and, in the case of the school or of one’s apartment block, most
familiar environment, is a shock for these future activists; an expectation of
otherness is unsettled by the discovery that a sans-papiers can be a stu-
dent’s parent and/or a neighbour.
Étienne became involved in the local RESF committee of his son’s
school group on the day when Karima, his landing neighbour, came knock-
ing on his door, distraught, holding the deportation order that she had just
found in her mailbox. That day Étienne discovered that this mother of a
Moroccan family who had lived in France for 14 years—and who he knew
well since she had lived in the same building as him for several years—was
undocumented. He was shocked and is still forever repeating to the mem-
bers of the local RESF committee that on that Christmas Eve in 2005 he
welcomed into his living room “Karima, who lived opposite me, who had
been in France for fourteen years, whose husband [partner, in fact] was
here legally … How was it possible to send her back to Morocco?” During
the neighbourhood residents’ four-week mobilisation, which resulted in
Karima’s regularisation, a greatly agitated Étienne struggled in all senses;
he returned again and again to Karima’s situation, which he had never
imagined possible, and to the need to prevent “this ignominy”. His voice
choked by indignation, this is how Étienne invariably concludes the story
that he repeats to anyone who will listen: “and you realise what the prefect9
has dared to write: ‘In this case, there is no disproportionate infringement
of the right of the party concerned to family life’”.
Pierre explains that in his case the question of the sans-papiers arose via
his son Félix, who was 12 in 2005, and who told him the story of his
school friend Sonia. Sonia’s mother arrived one day “in tears” at the
school, explaining that her daughter was sleeping badly, that she herself
had fainted several times and that the whole family was living in fear of
deportation. Pierre remarks that “it’s then that you become aware of the
thing. If you spoke to Sonia’s parents, you’d know that they had fled
Algeria so their daughter didn’t have to wear the veil, that they had been
in France for seven years”.
In contrast to many others, Aurore, a primary school teacher, was
already concerned about the problem of the sans-papiers: she had partici-
pated in the protests against the Pasqua laws of 1986 and 1993.10 But
when a teaching assistant came knocking at her classroom door and held
out a document which read “Thomas’ father is in detention. He must
leave the country within fifteen days”, she was shaken: “A child in my class
was in that situation and I knew nothing about it […]. Total shock. I was
in front of my students and I wasn’t expecting to read that at all. The emo-
tion rose in me very quickly and I felt myself becoming angry and tearful.
I turned my back to my students so they wouldn’t see me … and got my
breath back”.
The theme of irruption and of becoming conscious recurs throughout
the interviews. The impulse to engage is almost always described as a sud-
den swerve. So Odile, Étienne, Pierre and Aurore opened their eyes onto
a present reality within arm’s reach—a reality that until that point they had
been living alongside without seeing and which, suddenly, entered into
their life in such a way that they could no longer ignore it without feeling
concerned. It was a “shock”, as Aurore said, that they just had to “absorb”
(encaisser), to use the term coined by Joan Stavo-Debauge (2009).
Jeanne: “At that point one isn’t aware of anything”; Odile: “I hadn’t realised
[…] All that, clearly, one knows nothing about at the time, one just finds
oneself plunged into it. Though I had been a history and geography teacher,
giving courses in civic education, this was far from what one teaches in class!”
The moment of engagement was not usually prompted by reflection or fed

by political debate. Odile felt it necessary to clarify that thanks to her job
she was a priori intellectually armed to see and to know. “One just finds
oneself plunged into it”, she explained, while others said: “One is caught
by it”, “One finds oneself taken…”. The expressions employed as well as
the recurring use of the passive voice convey that some kind of subjection
is at work. Systematic recourse to the personal pronoun “one”, which
linguists characterise as denoting a “non-person”, also expresses a loss of
control over the situation (Pollak 1990, pp. 239–241). But it additionally
signals that those who report this feeling are not the only ones to have
experienced it, that this is a common or at least a shared feeling.
Engagement results from some kind of reality imposed on people inde-
pendently of their will, which obliges them, morally and politically, in a
manner different to ordinary activism.11 Aurore’s case is interesting in this
regard: it highlights the inherent difference between classical activist
engagement—a prior sensitisation, participation in protests—and this new
type of engagement grounded in the shock of a discovery: a child in her
class is in this situation and it is something that she knew nothing about.
Urgency—whether the urgency of filling in a request for regularisation
before the deadline of Sarkozy’s bill of June 2006 or of that which follows
an arrest—plays an essential role in the form that mobilisation takes.
Significantly, it explains why engagement in the RESF always remains
anchored in the particularity of lived histories. The urgency of the situa-
tion is due to its potential irreversibility. This is not a question of the pro-
gressive deterioration of a situation or dynamics of precarisation, but of
decisions whose effects are tangible: whoever is deported to Mali or China
will never be seen again.12
As shocking as it is when the prefecture argues, against all the evidence,
that a deportation order does not disproportionately infringe the right to
family life, it is the violence of the act of deportation (or even its threat),
more than the attack on family rights, that seems to constitute one of the
principal motives of engagement on behalf of the sans-papiers. There is a
scandal, but a scandal which has to do not so much with the violation of
an indisputable norm than with the feeling of an enormous disproportion
between the state’s motive for action (administrative irregularity) and the
violence of the sanction (particularly imprisonment, or its possibility, and
deportation).
“When it’s your kid’s boyfriend who’s at risk of leaving”, Aurore
explains, “it’s a violent shock, and then you no longer think. The evidence
is there: this child cannot leave”. “When we collected signatures for the
petition to free M. K.”, Odette recalls, “people asked: ‘What did he do to
end up in prison?’ Naturally, detention, prison—it’s the same thing. So we
replied ‘He hasn’t got his papers in order’. People didn’t believe that it
was possible to be in detention because of problems with papers”.
The story of engagement springing from one or more encounters with

undocumented families is the story of these encounters constituting an
experiential base—one that feeds not just a critique of the treatment that
the administration reserves for undocumented people but also a critique
of classical activism. This double critique emerges in the expression, in
various forms, of a reluctance to generalise.
thE format of critiquE: rEluctancE to gEnEralisE

The RESF members’ core activity consists of taking responsibility for each
sans-papiers who comes to them and seeking their regularisation, despite
the difficulties of doing so. It is less about demanding new rights—such as
the right to free movement of people, emphasised by the sans-papiers who
mobilised in the 1990s (Mouchard 2002, 2009)—than about being alert
to the difficulties of undocumented people and accompanying them in
their interactions with the administrative and judicial authorities. In the
activists’ statements, the latter are subjected to recurrent critiques. These
are often—as with the expression of motives for engagement—tied to the
narration of lived experiences.
Hélène: “I received a man who was Chechen and he explained that he had
been rejected by OFPRA [Office français de protection des réfugiés et apat-
rides / French office for the protection of refugees and stateless people]
because they had asked him how he left his country. He explained every-
thing, in great detail, and they retorted: ‘You’re lying, your account is too
precise. It’s something you’ve learnt!’ It’s astounding!”
When RESF members accompany families applying for regularisation or

responding to a summons to the police headquarters, this always generates
indignant accounts of the sans-papiers’ bureaucratic treatment. These
often circulate on email lists and blogs:
Z., mother of an Armenian family, turned up at the police headquarters last

week, her residence permit having come to an end.
The person at the counter responded that her department had no trace
of the dossier requesting a new permit that our friend had sent. In spite of
this, Z. produced the registered post receipt; the clerk took it, disappeared
into a backroom and returned a minute later saying: ‘Sorry, I’ve just lost
your receipt’
Entirely without qualms!
(Fortunately, Z. said laughingly that where other women have lipstick in

their bag, she has photocopies, and her request for renewal would not stop
there!)
We already know about the interminable all-night queues to try to obtain
the famous papers, and the numerous arrests at the counter (sometimes
accompanied by the employee’s laughter), but that13 …
The story, the testimony and the anecdote seem to be the privileged con-
duits for the RESF activists’ critique of police and administrative practices.
Contrary to what Luc Boltanski (2012 [1990]) shows, critique does not
embed itself in an argument that links a case to a cause but is mixed up
with the richly documented account of a lived situation. But this recalls
neither clinical diagnosis nor juridical testimony which, as Michaël Pollak
(1990, p. 189) highlights, works to eliminate all emotion. The narratives
of police and administrative practices are never entirely detached: the emo-
tion is palpable in the interviews conducted. Hélène, as we have seen,
allows traces of her emotions to show through by concluding her anec-
dote with “It’s astounding!” The narrator of the interaction at the police
headquarters introduces commentary on her narrative: “Entirely without
qualms!”, “… but that …”.14 If the reluctance to generalise appears as a
constant in the interviews with RESF activists, does this reluctance neces-
sarily make it impossible to subsume the critiques and indignations that
are lived and recreated in a personal mode under more universal catego-
ries? Even if the RESF activists’ modes of engagement depart from forms
of politicisation and action privileged by unions and political activists,
denying them a political character does not do them justice.
It is June 2007, and a local committee of Paris’ 20th arrondissement is
meeting. Around 15 participants are sitting on a circle of chairs in the
middle of a nursery school. Once the cases of all the families being helped
by the committee have been reviewed, the discussion turns towards the
actions anticipated for the start of the next school year. Pascale, a union
activist and teacher at the school known to most of the participants, invited
herself to the meeting; she has been following its activities from a distance.
Without holding back, she begins to speak: “Taking into account the
political situation and the current power relations, which as everyone
knows are unfavourable, the most urgent thing is to establish a common
front of resistance, on the one hand with the union activists, on the other
hand with political activists . . .”. Sabine cuts her off immediately and dryly
retorts: “It’s first of all at school that the families come and describe their
situation. Who from the front of resistance is going to be there every

morning at the schools to talk to the families?” “You have to be there in
the morning”, Angèle affirms.
This situation is interesting because it presents us with two modes of
engagement in an almost caricatured form. On the one hand, there is a
civic engagement shaped over more than a century of social conflicts in
which the state, on threatening collective solidarities, has been understood
as an adversary. This adversary is seen as something that must be fought—
as something against which organised collectives must unite and make
their struggles converge in order, as Pascale says, to establish a common
front of resistance. On the other hand, there is an emerging form of
engagement constituted primarily from localised and situated ties—ties
centred on the school, on one’s building, on one’s street and all the famil-
iar people who pass along it every day, around which links of solidarity (in
this case particularly of attachment) crystallise and gradually spread. This
form of engagement also implies being constantly present (“being there in
the morning”), in order to reinforce the trust generated by familiarity. In
a sense, it is congruent with the situation of the sans-papiers. With the
security of their living arrangements, the continuity and health of their
family relations and the ties they have formed with their surroundings all
under threat, those without documentation are offered whatever support
will make their everyday existence more secure.
These two modes of engagement can coexist peacefully. The notion of
solidarity allows movement between them; both are demanded by the
pamphlets, petitions and the coloured banners attached to the schools’
pediments (“Solidarity with the sans-papiers families”, “Parents from here
who have come from elsewhere, solidary neighbourhood”). While for
some this is about demonstrating collective solidarity with the sans-papiers
in general, for others it is about showing their attachment to the neigh-
bours and families they have become close to. It also seems likely that
some RESF activists engage in both ways.
The rarity of confrontations is also due to the fact that when the most
experienced activists engage, they keep their allegiances quiet and gener-
ally conform with the format of the local RESF committees. This is signifi-
cantly different from the way in which the sans-papiers’ cause was
constructed from the start of the 1970s (Siméant 1998).
This is true, for example, of Catherine, a teacher in a suburban school
who took part in the sans-papiers’ own collective action in the 1990s. In
contrast to most of the participants we encountered or interviewed, it was
on the basis of her previous engagements that she joined the local commit-
tee of her daughter’s school in the 20th arrondissement. Nothing marks
her out, however, from the others: she carries out her duties, accompany-
ing families to the prefecture, and takes care of one family in particular
whose legal, social and humanitarian situation is particularly testing and for
whom the school, the local committee and Catherine are the only anchors
(a Malian family that goes from shelter to shelter). At the local committee
meetings, Catherine intervenes relatively little and never states her previ-
ous experience, though on several occasions she can be heard saying to her
neighbours, in asides: “The RESF is very different as a form of activism. It
has nothing to do with classical activism, that’s something else . . .”
The case of Vanessa is a little different: a PhD student and activist
engaged on several fronts, she too has experience of the collectives of sans-
papiers, who she actively supports. When an RESF committee was set up
in the nursery school of the Paris suburb where her daughter goes to
school, she began participating straight away, she explains: “To lend a
hand, help them to organise, feed them information, addresses, write peti-
tions, but all the while respecting their way of doing things. Even if their
political direction is uncertain, it’s always better that there are people who
mobilise than people who do nothing” (our italics).
As soon as political or union activists adopt the same mode of engage-
ment as the RESF militants, negative prejudices towards them fall away
and judgements are revised:
Pierre “I, for example, had assumptions about F. [a local politician] in par-
ticular. In fact, I was truly astonished at his involvement, which was not just
an electoral strategy. [. . .] You realise that even the guy who’s a caricature
can have those emotions, that he’s a man like any other. [. . .] I discovered –
and it was almost a pleasure – the political world at its most virtuous and the
value of doing politics in its most noble and useful form [. . .] By stepping
into it, they [the politicians] became aware, as we did, of a reality. Once
you’ve become aware of this reality, you can no longer wash your hands of it”.
This revision of judgment about politicians, and more generally about the
world of municipal politics, is due to their ability to “involve themselves”,
to “step into it” and to “no longer be able to wash their hands”. To not
remain suspended above reality, in other words, understanding the
situation from a detached position—which the elite education and politi-
cal mandate of the politician in question, F., might predispose him to do.
The politicisation of the question of the sans-papiers itself, which is

revealed in these situations, remains problematic for the people concerned.
This problematic character is also revealed through a rejection of the
vocabulary spontaneously adopted by political activists. Various activists
from both the moderate and the extreme Left on the lookout for emerg-
ing mobilisations are attracted by the local committees’ weak structure,
their visibility in the political landscape and their open meetings. Jeanne
suggests as much when she describes the early days of the RESF in her
10th arrondissement neighbourhood:
Of these activists, none except D. [French Communist Party secretary in the

10th arrondissement] were in a political party to my knowledge. There were
even some people from the extreme left, but they quickly veered towards a
globalising discourse, which wasn’t very well received. I remember an inter-
vention by X. [from the LCR15] who, in a meeting of the support commit-
tee, spoke to us about the evolution of capitalism and the causes of migration
from China. [Laughter.] It was completely out of place. For us it was raw
emotion and injustice that got us moving; we didn’t want political discourse,
even if the problem of the sans-papiers is really a political one. The most
active people in the RESF are those who are not politically engaged, doubt-
less because of a lack of time.
The use of general categories and an overarching discourse is a unifying

element of political meetings and is a necessary detour for any activist for-
mation. But recourse to this kind of argument (in this case, about “the
evolution of capitalism” and “the causes of migration from China”) in a
meeting of a local committee falls flat because it is unable to resolve the
problems that confront the activists (in this case reviewing how the situa-
tion of the sans-papiers families in the neighbourhood has developed).
This way of doing politics is rejected because of its disconnect from the
urgency of the situations that need addressing here and now.
Reluctance to translate both the sans-papiers’ situation and the RESF’s
fight into general political categories must also be examined from the
point of view of what the activists feel has been lost. While the usual politi-
cal discourse and its accompanying general categories are challenged
forcefully, Odile recognises, even demands, a political dimension to the
question of the sans-papiers and to the struggle she is involved in—a polit-
ical dimension that gives emotion a place. But what is lost in ordinary
politics is not just emotion or the affective, it is also the people for whom
and in whose name the activism exists in the first place.
Aurore: “When you’re a member of a [political] party, go on strike, on a

protest … It’s even more impersonal! I don’t know how to say it … There
[in the RESF], it’s fighting for someone who is there, who is real”.
“Politicising” the question of the sans-papiers is, therefore, a matter of

finding ways of foregrounding what the particular situations that have
provoked the “shock” of encounter have in common, as well as what they
owe to national political decisions—laws about foreigners’ right to remain,
the fixing of national deportation quotas, and so on—without thereby
transforming these policies’ victims into an aggregate. “The figures have a
face” is a slogan used in various circumstances by the RESF. It not only
attests to this concern not to dehumanise the cause of the sans-papiers but
also serves as a critical reminder: do not forget that behind the police fig-
ures (of the rejected, of the “nonsuited”, of the deported, etc.), there is
very real suffering that the numbers tend to abstract.16 Approaching the
question of the sans-papiers from the outset through the category of capi-
talism, for example, would be to submit to this logic in some way. It might
also cause us to forget the responsibility that falls to each of us, here and
now, to the sans-papiers present in flesh and blood.
The work taken on by the RESF of producing sans-papiers’ regularisa-
tion dossiers introduces a tension between, on the one hand, the dread of
dehumanisation and concern for the particularity of each person and, on
the other, bending to treat people administratively in the format expected
by the authorities. This work is never anodyne—at least not the first
time—and those who do it experience a certain unease. The activists travel
backwards from the encounters and the people they have often become
close to towards a series of administrative items that condense their lives
into a specific form: that of the ten-digit registration number, of deeds,
certificates, declarations, attestations, bills, “proof of life in France”
demanded by the authorities. The insistence on personal attachments,
which recurs in the interviews, can thus be interpreted as opposition to the
quantifications produced by both administrative logics and by prematurely
progressing to universal categories.
So what type of politicisation is compatible with concern for the particu-
larity of cases and of “real” people? It is not uncommon for the defence of
individual cases by a mobilised group to prevent the construction of a collec-
tive cause. Éric Agrikoliansky (2003) has shown how the Human Rights
League’s (LDH) use of recours hiérarchique (hierarchical appeals)17 to
defend cases brought before it could obstruct their politicisation. So even
while it publicly denounced the Pasqua laws as contrary to the fundamental
principles of republican law, when the LDH defended individual cases

related to the stay of foreigners, it submitted evidence of the exceptional
character of each victim’s misfortune, mobilising the register of pity more
than that of general principles. This seems to have resulted from experience
interacting with the administrative authorities, insisting on the suffering of
the victims having proved itself more effective than using “generalising rhet-
oric” (Agrikoliansky 2003, p. 78).
When the RESF activists address letters to the authorities, they have no
hesitation in asking the prefect to give the foreigner concerned “excep-
tional” regularisation (regularisation “à titre exceptionnel”), citing
“humanitarian” reasons—this strategy having succeeded on several occa-
sions. But while the concern to “save the victim” is doubtless no less
important for the RESF activists than for the LDH activists, their empha-
sis on individual situations and the suffering linked to them does not just
have a strategic purpose; as conveyed by petitions, pamphlets, emails,
blogs and so on, it is intended to make the public at large aware of the
sans-papiers’ situation. Publicising an accumulation of distressing situa-
tions, far from sacrificing the political symbolism of each one, tends on the
contrary to amplify it. Tensions between, on the one hand, concern for the
respect of people’s individuality and, on the other, the possibility of the
activists not remaining confined within a “case-by-case” logic—which
would prevent any translation into civic categories—end up being dis-
solved in the constant operation of making visible the nature of the com-
mon good attacked by deportations.
a community madE VisiblE

The new social movements’ paradigm has highlighted the extent to which
collective action is concerned with identity: student, feminist, regionalist
and antinuclear demands all collect around the formation of a specific
collective identity articulated through the identification of objectives and
the designation of adversaries (Touraine 1981). Here collective identity
is thought of as a process in the making, in the very movement of mobil-
ising and of opposing other collectives (Melucci 1995). This grants the
opposition between “us” and “them” the power to structure collective
action (Polletta and Jasper 2001), leaving to one side other ways of con-
structing the identity of the mobilised group. More recent work has,
therefore, emphasised the parallel development of the visibility of the
problem raised and of the collective identity of the group that brings it
into the public sphere: the cause defended and the identity of the group
emerge less from a dynamic of opposition between “them” and “us” than
from the group’s constant work of making both things—cause and group
identity—sufficiently visible that they come to exist in both their own and
others’ eyes (Bleil 2005). Attending to visibility can improve our analysis
of collective action as long as we ask what is being made visible in a sys-
tematic way. Thus, in the case that concerns us, it is not the mobilised
group’s collective identity that has been the object of the political work
of making visible, but something else—something like a “community”. It
is this constant movement to include both the sans-papiers and the activ-
ists in the same affected community that we are going to examine.
What do the RESF activists tell us? “They are here, among us”, “They
pay taxes”, “They enrich France”, “Their children were born in France”,
“Their children are the friends of our children”, “They are our neigh-
bours”.18 A February 2007 petition by RESF Paris entitled “We remain by
their side” began: “For months, teachers, parents of school pupils, pupils
themselves, students and numerous citizens, in their tens of thousands,
have been protesting, signing petitions, taking themselves to the authori-
ties to express their anger against a policy that is shattering their lives, the
lives of their pupils, of their friends, of the friends of their children”. These
shattered lives are not just those of undocumented families but are inextri-
cably also those of whoever is engaged in their cause. This suggests that it
is not just a person or a family that is affected by deportation or its threat,
but a type of community constituted by the sans-papiers and those who
protest against their expulsion.19
How does this community—for which those involved consider them-
selves responsible—take shape and enable itself to be seen? It should be
remembered that the RESF formed within state secondary schools before
spreading out into primary schools. Even if France’s republican schools
have not yet become pluricultural spaces, they nonetheless appear to be
among the few places where real encounters between sans-papiers and
ordinary citizens are possible. Because of the school’s republican sanctity,
here the sans-papiers parents are not immediately identified as such, but
first of all as parents of pupils. The dynamic of mobilisation rests not so
much on the particular emotional charge produced by the vulnerability of
children or adolescents, even though this may be a factor, but on the exis-
tence of an environment that allows the coexistence of French parents, of
immigrant parents in a regularised situation and of sans-papiers parents
who cannot a priori be identified as such (Blic and Lafaye 2015). In ordi-
nary times—that is, in the absence of threat—everyone goes about their
lives without necessarily attending to the lives of others, embedded as they
are in diffuse relations of sociability (Barbichon 2001) and sometimes

forging links of affinity or assistance whose vectors are often their children.
Over the years, in the same schools, the sans-papiers families have proba-
bly integrated themselves silently into French society. What stokes “the
subjective feeling […] of belonging to the same community” (Weber
1978 [1922], p. 78) and irreversibly brings this community into existence,
mobilising those who recognise it, is, one the one hand, the emergence of
a threat and, on the other, the fact that the threatened person turns to a
teacher, another parent, one of their neighbours. The school institution,
moreover, provides support: what until now has been the rather abstract
notion of “school community”20 becomes tangible and finds itself embod-
ied. This happened in January 2006 on a “Dead Schools” day. Teachers,
parents, canteen staff and children, together numbering several hundred,
assembled in front of the four schools of the school group21 attended by
Karima’s children, before setting off on a march towards the prefecture to
demand and obtain their regularisation.
The revealed community did not efface but rather reconfigured previ-
ous lines of separation. Members of parent associations attended the two
local committees we observed. In one of the schools, the RESF commit-
tee and the parents’ association constantly reinforce each other, helping to
strengthen their respective activist forces: members or supporters of the
FCPE22 engage in the RESF committee and willingly give time that until
now they had not found for the parents’ association, while the active
members of the local committee participate in the FCPE. At certain times
(elections of parent representatives, preparation for school councils, etc.),
however, this dynamic comes up against tensions within the local FCPE
council, and the RESF committee is reproached for taking up all the space
and energy. Within the school group, a local association of parents has
also established itself alongside the FCPE.23 By bringing together several
members of both associations, the creation of the RESF committee has
shaken up established divisions: former rivalries are put on hold, but the
internal functioning of each association is affected by these parallel invest-
ments. During their respective meetings, it is frequently recalled that the
very real difficulties encountered by the sans-papiers families are not the
only difficulties affecting the school group and that it is necessary to
engage on other fronts as well. The parents who voice this argument
understand that doing so carries the risk of tearing apart this community
for which they too feel responsible.
The creation of the RESF committees also demonstrates the existence
of two different forms of affiliation to the community permitted by the
school: an affiliation of a civic nature that mobilises the values of republi-

can solidarity and which demands the right to education for all children;
and an affiliation founded on the much more basic level of a community
of neighbours disturbed to its core when it discovers both the legal status
of, and the threat that weighs on, one or more of its members. These two
forms of affiliation cohabit: in one sense, because they encourage both the
RESF activists and other activists familiar with the sans-papiers’ collectives
to participate in common projects24; in another, because they can coexist
within the same person. They also allow the converse of the process of
generalisation: engaging in the name of already established civic and activ-
ist principles and accepting that these will fade into forms of activism that
favour more personalised and localised support. For example, Catherine,
the secondary school teacher mentioned earlier, joined the local commit-
tee of her daughter’s school because of political and unionist convictions
and also previous engagements in the sans-papiers collectives. She took
responsibility for a Malian family who, denied work and a fixed address,
found itself in great material and psychological distress. Through her care
for this family, Catherine became so involved that she was left exhausted.
Thanks to its ties to the school, the RESF is born into and remains
anchored to the daily life of the actors: once they are known about, the
sans-papiers are encountered each day as classes begin and end, and this
clearly provides a strong experiential base on which the RESF’s mobilisa-
tion can build.
The parrainages républicains25 organised in Parisian town halls play an
important role in giving activism around the sans-papiers this territorial
rootedness, leaving a place for the affirmation of republican and universal
values. They thus also participate in the political work of the RESF. The
institutional dimension, not to mention the formality of these ceremonies
(the presence of the mayor and numerous elected representatives, a cele-
bration in the room where marriages and official functions take place),
makes these into important moments of remobilisation. But the ceremo-
nies’ success can also be explained by their successful mediation between
the particularity of encounters with sans-papiers and certain civic formats:
these public ceremonies allow the demonstration of a collective solidarity
with the sans-papiers in general, by showing their attachment to neigh-
bours and to the families with whom their ties have been strengthened.
The republican auspices under which this commitment is made thus offer
a mechanism of politicisation that is faithful to those first encounters.26
The theme of “neighbourliness” has thus gradually gained ground, ges-
turing towards a reconfiguration of the question of the sans-papiers (which
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Fig. 5. Types of spears.
Others devote much attention to the shaping of the spear by

scraping and rasping its surface. Exceptionally straight and
smoothed mulga spears were made by the Barcoo natives of the
Durham Downs district and by the Dieri (b), whilst on the north coast,
the Crocker Islanders’ spears are deserving of the same comments;
the latter, in addition, are decorated by a few delicate engravings in
the form of circumferential rings and wavy longitudinal bands
composed of short parallel transverse lines. The Arunndta groove
the spears lengthwise with a stone adze.
An improvement on this type is rendered by the cutting of a
pointed blade at one end of the spear (c). Some of the best
specimens come from the eastern Arunndta in the Arltunga district.
The blade is symmetrically cut, sharply edged, and smooth; the
remaining portion of the spear is grooved longitudinally throughout
its length.
All the above-mentioned types of spear are thrown by hand.
A straight, single-piece, hard-wood spear is made more effective
by splicing a barb on to the point with kangaroo or emu sinew (d).
The barb being directed away from the point, the spear cannot be
withdrawn without forcibly tearing it through the flesh of the animal or
man it has entered. The natives living along the Great Australian
Bight, from Port Lincoln to King George Sound in Western Australia,
used to make this the principal weapon; the spear was up to twelve
feet in length, perfectly straight and smooth, and was thrown with a
spear-thrower.
A rare and perhaps unique variety was found at Todmorden on the
Alberga River in the possession of an Aluridja. It was a simple, one-
piece, bladed spear, like that described of the Arltunga natives, but it
had two wooden barbs tied against one and the same side of the
blade with kangaroo sinew, one above the other, at distances of
three and six inches, respectively, from the point.
The hard-wood spears may have the anterior end carved, on one
or two sides, into a number of barbs of different shape and size. The
simplest and most rudimentary forms were to be met with among the
weapons of the practically extinct tribes of the lower reaches of the
River Murray, including Lake Alexandria. The shaft was of mallee
and by no means always straight and smooth; its anterior end, for a
distance of from twelve to eighteen inches, had from five to six
medium-sized, thorn-like barbs or spikes, which were directed
backwards and cut out of the wood, on one or two sides. More rarely
one would find spears with a three-sided serrature, consisting of
something like two dozen small barbs, directed backwards,
extending in three longitudinal lines over a distance of about fifteen
inches; at the top the serrated lines merged into a single strong
point. Vide Fig. 5, e, f, and g.
PLATE XXIV
A “boned” Man, Minning tribe.
“He stands aghast, with his eyes staring at the treacherous pointer, and
with his hands lifted as though to ward off the lethal medium....”
The most formidable weapons of this kind are those still in daily
use as hunting and fighting spears on Melville and Bathurst Islands
(h). The head of this type has many barbs carved on one side, and
occasionally on two diametrically opposite sides. There are from ten
to thirty barbs pointing backwards, behind which from four to eight
short serrations project straight outwards, whilst beyond them again
occasionally some six or more small barbs point forwards. The
spears have a long, sharp, bladed point. The barbs are
symmetrically carved, and each has sharp lateral edges which end in
a point. The size of the barbs varies in different specimens. Many of
the spears are longitudinally grooved or fluted, either for the whole
length or at the head end only. Usually these weapons are
becomingly decorated with ochre, and may have a collar of human
hair-string wound tightly round the shaft at the base of the head.
Some of the heaviest of these spears are up to sixteen feet long,
and would be more fitly described as lances.
The most elaborate, and at the same time most perfect,
specimens of the single-piece wooden spears of aboriginal
manufacture are the ceremonial pieces of the Melville Islanders.
These have a carved head measuring occasionally over four feet in
length and four inches in width, consisting of from twelve to twenty-
five paired, symmetrical, leaf-shaped or quadrilateral barbs, whose
sides display a remarkable parallelism. The barbs are surmounted
by a long tapering point emanating from the topmost pair; and very
frequently one finds an inverted pair of similar barbs beneath the
series just mentioned. Occasionally, too, the two pairs opposed to
each other at the bottom are fused into one, and a square hole is cut
into the bigger area of wood thus gained on either side of the shaft
(i).
The structure may be further complicated by cutting away the point
at the top, and separating the paired series of barbs by a narrow
vertical cleft down the middle (j).
We shall now turn our attention to spears whose head and shaft
are composed of separate parts. In the construction of these, two
principal objects are aimed at by the aboriginal, the first being to
make the missile travel more accurately through space, and in
accordance with the aim, the second to make the point more cruel
and deadly. Whereas, with one exception, all the single-piece
spears, so far discussed, are projected or wielded with the hand
only, in every instance of the multi-pieced spears, a specially
designed spear-thrower is used for that purpose.
The native has learned by experience that weight in the forepart of
the spear will enable him to throw and aim with greater precision.
One has only to watch the children and youths during a sham-fight to
realize how well it is known that the heavier end of a toy spear must
be directed towards the target whilst the lighter end is held in the
hand. Green shoots of many tussocks, or their seed-stalks, and the
straight stems of reeds or bullrushes, are mostly used. They are cut
or pulled at the root in order that a good butt-end may be obtained,
and carefully stripped of leaves; the toy weapons are then ready for
throwing. One is taken at a time and its thin end held against the
inner side of the point of the right index finger; it is kept in that
position with the middle finger and thumb. Raising the spear in a
horizontal position, the native extends his arm backwards, and,
carefully selecting his mark, shies his weapon with full force at it.
The simplest type of a combination made to satisfy the conditions
of an artificially weighted spear is one in which the shaft consists of
light wood and the head of heavier wood (k). Roughly speaking, the
proportion of light to heavy wood is about half of one to half of the
other. The old Adelaide tribe used to select the combination of the
light pithy flower-stalk of the grass-tree with a straight pointed stick of
mallee. The western coastal tribes of the Northern Territory construct
small, and those of the Northern Kimberleys large spears composed
of a shaft of reed and a head of mangrove; the former being four or
at most five feet long, the latter from ten to twelve. The joint between
the two pieces is effected by inserting the heavier wood into the
lighter and sealing the union with triodia-grass resin or beeswax. The
Adelaide tribe used the gum of the grass-tree.
The River Murray tribes used to make the point of the mallee more
effective by attaching to it a blade-like mass of resin, into both edges
of which they stuck a longitudinal row of quartz flakes.
The Northern Kimberleys natives accomplish the same object by
fixing on to the top end of the mangrove stick a globular mass of
warm, soft resin, in which they embed a stone spear-head (l). In
certain parts of the Northern Territory one occasionally meets with a
similar type of spear, but such in all probability is imported from the
west.
The popular spear of central Australian tribes consists of a light
shaft fashioned out of a shoot of the wild tecoma bush (T. Australis),
which carries a long-bladed head of hard mulga wood. The junction
is made between the two pieces by cutting them both on a slope,
sticking these surfaces together with hot resin, and securely binding
them with kangaroo tendon. The bottom end is similarly bound and a
small hole made in its base to receive the point of the spear-thrower
(m).
As often as not the blade has a single barb of wood bound tightly
against it with tendon.
It is often difficult to find a single piece of tecoma long enough to
make a suitable shaft, in which case two pieces are taken and neatly
joined somewhere within the lower, and thinner, half with tendon.
The shoots, when cut, are always stripped of their bark and
straightened in the fire, the surfaces being subsequently trimmed by
scraping.
A very common type of spear, especially on the Daly River, and
practically all along the coast of the Northern Territory, is one with a
long reed-shaft, to which is attached, by means of a mass of wax or
gum, a stone-head, consisting of either quartzite or slate, or latterly
also of glass. The bottom end is strengthened, to receive the point of
the thrower, by winding around it some vegetable fibre (n).
The natives of Arnhem Land now and then replace the stone by a
short piece of hard wood of lanceolate shape.
If now we consider the only remaining type—a light reed-shaft, to
which is affixed a long head of hard wood, with a number of barbs
cut on one or more edges—we find a great variety of designs. The
difference lies principally in the number and size of the barbs; in
most cases they point backwards, but it is by no means rare to find a
certain number of them pointing the opposite way or standing out at
right angles to the length of the head. These spears belong
principally to the northern tribes of the Northern Territory.
The commonest form is a spear having its head carved into a
number of barbs along one side only, and all pointing backwards (o).
The number ranges from three to over two dozen, the individual
barbs being either short and straight or long and curved, with the
exception of the lowest, which in many examples sticks out at right
angles just above the point of insertion. The point is always long and
tapering. These spears are common to the Larrekiya, Wogait, Wulna,
and all Daly River tribes.
PLATE XXV
1. Dieri grave, Lake Eyre district.
2. Yantowannta grave, Innamincka district.

The same pattern of barbs may be found carved symmetrically on
the side diametrically opposite, or, indeed, it may be cut in three
planes.
An elegant, but rare, type is found among the weapons of the
Ponga Ponga, Mulluk Mulluk, and Wogait tribes on the Daly River. Its
hard-wood head is long and uniformly tapering from its point of
insertion to its sharp tip. On one side there are very many small
barbs, diminishing in size from the shaft upwards; as many as one
hundred barbs have been counted; they point either slightly
backwards or at right angles to the length (p).
A spear in use on the Alligator River, and in the districts south and
west therefrom, has the barbs along the edge of the anterior moiety
directed backwards, whereas those of the posterior portion point
forwards. And occasionally one finds the barbs arranged
asymmetrically on two sides of the spear-head.
Finally, a rather remarkable type will be referred to, which belongs
to the Arnhem Land tribes, or rather to the country extending from
Port Essington to the Roper River, including Groote Island and
smaller groups lying off the coast. It is a neat and comparatively
small spear, about eight feet long on an average. The head, instead
of possessing a number of barbs, has a series of eye-shaped holes
cut along one of its sides, which give the impression of being so
many unfinished barbs, or so many barbs with their points joined
together (q). The major axes of the holes are parallel and directed
backwards; there may be up to thirty holes present. Occasionally
there are a few real barbs cut near the shaft end of the head; or a
number of incomplete barbs may there be cut with their axes turned
towards the front of the spear. The point is always sharp and stands
back somewhat from the level of the uncut barbs.
For special purposes, like fishing, two or three of the simple-
barbed prongs are frequently affixed to a reed shaft with beeswax or
resin, and vegetable fibre. This combination is met with all along the
coast of the Northern Territory. The natives know very well that the
chances of stabbing a fish with a trident of this description are much
greater than with a single prong. As a matter of fact, a barbed spear
with less than two prongs is not normally used for fishing purposes,
yet a plain, single-pronged spear is often utilized when there is none
of the other kind available.
The Australian aboriginals do not poison their spears in the
ordinary sense of the word, but the Ponga Ponga and Wogait tribes
residing on the Daly River employ the vertebræ of large fish, like the
barramundi, which have previously been inserted into decaying
flesh, usually the putrid carcase of a kangaroo, with the object of
making the weapon more deadly. The bones are tied to the head of a
fighting spear. This is not a general practice, however, and the spear
never leaves the hands of the owner. The natives maintain that by so
doing they can kill their enemy “quick fella.”
CHAPTER XXII
SPEAR-THROWERS
Principle of construction—How held—Some of the common types described—

Other uses.
To assist in the projection of a spear, the aboriginal has invented a

simple apparatus, which is commonly referred to as a spear-thrower
or wommera. In principle it is just a straight piece of wood with a haft
at one end and a small hook at the other. In practice the hand seizes
the haft, the hook is inserted into the small pit at the bottom of the
spear, and the shaft is laid along the thrower and held there with two
of the fingers of the hand, which is clasping the haft. In this position,
the arm is placed well back, the point of the spear steadied or made
to vibrate, and, when the native has taken careful aim, the arm is
forcibly shot forwards. The missile flies through space, towards its
target, but the thrower is retained by the hand.
One of the simplest types was made by the tribes living along the
shores of the Great Australian Bight. It consists of a flat piece of
wood, about three feet long, roughly fluted lengthwise and slightly
sloped off at either extremity. At one end a mass of resin forms a
handle, in which, moreover, a quartzite or flint scraper is embedded.
At the other end a wooden peg is affixed with resin against the flat
surface of the stick. Both surfaces of the implement are flat or slightly
convex; at Esperance Bay they are rather nicely polished, the wood
selected being a dark-coloured acacia. Towards the east, however,
as for instance at Streaky Bay, the inner side, i.e. the one bearing
the hook or peg, becomes concave and the outer side convex. On
Eyre Peninsula, the old Parnkalla tribe made the spear-thrower
shorter but wider, and its section was distinctly concave.
Northwards, through the territories of the Kukata, Arrabonna,
Wongapitcha, Aluridja, Arunndta, and Cooper Creek tribes, the
shape becomes leaf-shaped and generally of concave section, with
a well-shaped haft and broad flint scraper; the peg is attached with
resin and sinew. Within this same area, another type is less
frequently met with, which is of similar shape, but flat; it is really used
more for show purposes, and for that reason is usually decorated
with engraved circles and lines, which during some of the
ceremonies are further embellished with ochre and coloured down.
The last-named is the prevalent type, which extends westwards as
an elongate form through the Murchison district right through to the
Warburton River, where it is again broader. In both the areas
mentioned, the inner surface of the spear-thrower is deeply incised
with series of parallel, angular bands made up of transverse notches.
In the south of Western Australia, the shape remains the same, but
the incised ornamentation disappears.
Yet another variety comes from the old Narrinyerri tribe and from
the lower reaches of the River Murray, where it was known as
“taralje.” It is a small, flat, spatulate form, elongated at both ends, the
lower (and longer) prolongation making the handle, the upper
carrying a point of bone or tooth deeply embedded in resin. The
inner side, against which the spear is laid, is flat, the outer surface
being convex. The handle is circular in section and is rounded off at
the bottom to a blunt point. The convex side is occasionally
decorated with a number of pinholes, arranged in a rudely
symmetrical pattern.
All through the northern districts of the Northern Territory and the
Northern Kimberleys, the principal type is a long light-wood blade,
tapering slightly from the handle end to the point and having
comparatively flat or slightly convex sides. A handle is shaped by
rounding off the ends and cutting away some of the wood
symmetrically on each side, a few inches down. A clumsy-looking
peg is attached to one of the flat surfaces at the opposite, narrower
end with beeswax. The peg is made big on account of the instrument
being exclusively used to propel the reed-spears, which are naturally
hollow, and consequently have a large opening or pit at the bottom
end. This type of thrower is nearly always decorated in an elaborate
way with ochre. When used, the thrower and spear are held by the
right hand in such a way that the shaft of the latter passes, and is
held, between the thumb and index finger, the remaining fingers
holding the handle of the thrower. Vide Plate XIV, 2.
A spear-thrower used exclusively for projecting the small variety of
reed-spear is known to the Larrekiya, Wogait, Wordaman, Berringin,
and a few other coastal tribes of the Northern Territory. It consists of
a rod of hard wood, four feet or so in length, tapering a little towards
either end. A lump of resin is attached to one end, and, whilst warm
and plastic, is moulded into a blunt point, which fits into the hole at
the bottom of the spear. At about five inches from the opposite end,
a rim of resin is fixed, and from it a layer, decreasing in thickness, is
plastered around the stick to near the extremity. When using this
thrower, the hand is placed above the resin-rim, and the shaft of the
spear is held by the thumb against the top of the middle finger,
without the aid of the index finger. In addition to this, its principal
function, the thrower is often used for making fire, the native twirling
its lower point against another piece of wood.
A variety of the above type is found in the Gulf of Carpentaria
country, on the MacArthur River, which has a tassel of human hair-
string tied with vegetable fibre immediately below the rim of resin
around the handle.
One of the most remarkable of all spear-throwers is made by the
Larrekiya, and other Northern Territory tribes, consisting of a long,
leaf-shaped, and very thin, flexible blade, flat on one side and slightly
convex on the other. The peg is pear-shaped, and is fixed with
vegetable string and beeswax. The handle is thick and cone-shaped,
and covered with a thin layer of resin or wax. It is ornamented with
rows of small pits, which are pricked into the mass while warm with
the point of a fish bone or sharpened stick. The instrument is so thin
and fragile that only experienced men dare handle it. At times the
blade is curved like a sabre.
In addition to serving as a projecting apparatus, most of the hard-
wood spear-throwers with sharp edges are used for producing fire by
the rubbing or sawing process; those of concave section also take
the place of a small cooleman, in which ochre, down, blood, and
other materials are stored during the “making up” period of a
ceremony.
Any of the flat types of spear-thrower may be used for making fire
by the “sawing process.” The edge of the implement is rubbed briskly
across a split piece of soft wood until the red-hot powder produced
by the friction kindles some dry grass which was previously packed
into the cleft. The spark is then fanned into a flame, as previously
referred to (page 111).
CHAPTER XXIII
BURIAL AND MOURNING CUSTOMS
Customs depend upon a variety of circumstances—Child burial—Cremation

disavowed—Interment—Graves differently marked—Carved tomb-posts of
Melville Islanders—Sepulchral sign-posts of Larrekiya—Platform burial—
Mummification of corpse—Skeleton eventually buried—Identification of
supposed murderer—Pathetic scenes in camp—Self-inflicted mutilations—
Weird elegies—Name of deceased never mentioned—Hut of deceased
destroyed—Widowhood’s tribulation—Pipe-clay masks and skull-caps—
Mutilations—Second Husbands—Collecting and concealing the dead man’s
bones—Treatment of skull—Final mourning ceremony.
The burial and mourning ceremonies, if any, attendant upon the

death of a person, depend largely upon the tribe, the age, and the
social standing or status of the individual concerned. Old people who
have become “silly” (i.e. childish), and who in consequence do not
take an active part in any of the tribal functions or ceremonies, are
never honoured with a big funeral, but are quietly buried in the
ground. The reason for this is that the natives believe that the
greater share of any personal charms and talents possessed by the
senile frame have already migrated to the eternal home of the spirit.
As a matter of fact, the old person’s spirit has itself partly quitted the
body and whiles for the most time in the great beyond. For precisely
the same reason, it often happens that a tribe, when undergoing
hardship and privation brought about by drought, necessitating
perhaps long marches under the most trying conditions, knocks an
old and decrepit person on the head, just as an act of charity in order
to spare the lingering soul the tortures, which can be more readily
borne by the younger members. These ideas exist all over Australia.
When infants die, they are kept or carried around by the mothers,
individual or tribal, for a while in a food-carrier, and then buried
without any demonstration. The extinct Adelaide tribes required of
the women to carry their dead children about with them on their
backs until the bodies were shrivelled up and mummified. The
women alone attended to the burial of the child when eventually it
was assigned to a tree or the ground.
But at the demise of a person in the prime of his or her life, and of
one who has been a recognized power in life, the case is vastly
different. Both before and after the “burial” of the corpus, a lengthy
ceremony is performed, during which all sorts of painful mutilations
are inflicted amongst the bereaved relatives, amidst the
accompaniment of weird chants and horribly uncanny wails. Before
proceeding with the discussion of the attendant ceremonies,
however, we shall give an outline of the different methods adopted in
Australia for the disposal of the dead.
Cremation is nowhere practised for the simple reason that the
destruction of the bony skeleton would debar the spirit from re-
entering a terrestrial existence.
The spirit is regarded as the indestructible, or really immortal,
quantity of a man’s existence; and it is intimately associated with the
skeleton. The natives tender, as an analogy, the big larva of the
Cossus or “witchedy,” which lies buried in the bark of a gum tree. As
a result of its ordinary metamorphosis, the moth appears and flies
away, leaving the empty shell or, as the natives call it, the “skeleton”
of the “dead” grub behind. It is a common belief on the north coast
that the spirit of a dead person returns from the sky by means of a
shooting star, and when it reaches the earth, it immediately looks
around for its old skeleton. For this reason the relatives of a dead
man carefully preserve the skeletal remains, carry them around for a
while, and finally store them in a cave.
PLATE XXVI
1. Aluridja widow.
2. Yantowannta widow.
Stillborn children are usually burnt in a blazing fire since they are
regarded as being possessed of the evil spirit, which was the cause
of the death.
The simplest method universally adopted, either alone or in
conjunction with other procedures, is interment.
Most of the central tribes, like the Dieri, Aluridja, Yantowannta,
Ngameni, Wongapitcha, Kukata, and others, bury their dead, whilst
the northern and southern tribes place the corpse upon a platform,
which they construct upon the boughs of a tree or upon a special set
of upright poles. The Ilyauarra formerly used to practise tree-burial,
but nowadays interment is generally in vogue.
A large, oblong hole, from two to five feet deep, is dug in the
ground to receive the body, which has previously been wrapped in
sheets of bark, skins, or nowadays blankets. Two or three men jump
into the hole and take the corpse out of the hands of other men, who
are kneeling at the edge of the grave, and carefully lower it in a
horizontal position to the bottom of the excavation. The body is made
to lie upon the back, and the head is turned to face the camp last
occupied by the deceased, or in the direction of the supposed
invisible abode of the spirit, which occupied the mortal frame about
to be consigned to the earth. The Arunndta quite occasionally place
the body in a natural sitting position. The Larrekiya, when burying an
aged person, place the body in a recumbent position, usually lying
on its right side, with the legs tucked up against the trunk and the
head reposing upon the hands, the position reminding one of that of
a fœtus in utero.
The body is covered with layers of grass, small sticks, and sheets
of bark, when the earth is scraped back into the hole. But very often
a small passage is left open at the side of the grave, by means of
which the spirit may leave or return to the human shell (i.e. the
skeleton) whenever it wishes.
The place of sepulture is marked in a variety of ways. In many
cases only a low mound is erected over the spot, which in course of
time is washed away and finally leaves a shallow depression.
The early south-eastern (Victorian) and certain central tribes place
the personal belongings, such as spear and spear-thrower in the
case of a man, and yam-stick and cooleman in the case of a woman,
upon the mound, much after the fashion of a modern tombstone. The
now fast-vanishing people of the Flinders Ranges clear a space
around the mound, and construct a shelter of stones and brushwood
at the head end. They cover the corpse with a layer of foliage and
branches, over which they place a number of slabs of slate. Finally a
mound is erected over the site.
The Adelaide and Encounter Bay tribes built wurleys or brushwood
shelters over the mound to serve the spirit of the dead native as a
resting place.
In the Mulluk Mulluk, when a man dies outside his own country, he
is buried immediately. A circular space of ground is cleared, in the
centre of which the grave is dug. After interment, the earth is thrown
back into the hole and a mound raised, which is covered with sheets
of paper-bark. The bark is kept in place by three or four flexible
wands, stuck into the ground at their ends, but closely against the
mound, transversely to its length. A number of flat stones are laid
along the border of the grave and one or two upon the mound.
In the Northern Kimberleys of Western Australia, when an
unauthorized trespasser is killed by the local tribes, the body is
placed into a cavity scooped out of an anthill, and covered up. In a
few hours, the termites rebuild the defective portion of the hill, and
the presence of a corpse is not suspected by an avenging party,
even though it be close on the heels of the murderers.
The Dieri, in the Lake Eyre district of central Australia, dispense
with the mound, but in its place they lay a number of heavy saplings
longitudinally across the grave. Their eastern neighbours, the
Yantowannta, expand this method by piling up an exceptionally large
mound, which they cover with a stout meshwork of stakes, branches,
and brushwood lying closely against the earth (Plate XXV, 1 and 2).
One of the most elaborate methods is that in vogue on Melville
and Bathurst Islands. The ground immediately encompassing the
grave is cleared, for a radius of half a chain or more, and quantities
of clean soil thrown upon it to elevate the space as a whole. The
surface is then sprinkled with ashes and shell debris. The mound
stands in the centre of this space, and is surrounded by a number of
artistically decorated posts of hard and heavy wood, or occasionally
of a lighter fibrous variety resembling that of a palm. Each of the
posts bears a distinctive design drawn in ochre upon it; several of
the series in addition have the top end carved into simple or
complicated knobs; occasionally a square hole is cut right through
the post, about a foot from the top, leaving only a small, vertical strip
of wood at each side to support the knob (Fig. 14). The designs are
drawn in red, yellow, white, and black, and represent human, animal,
emblematical, and nondescript forms.
The Larrekiya erect a sort of sign-post, at some distance from the
grave, consisting of an upright pole, to the top of which a bundle of
grass is fixed. A cross-piece is tied beneath the grass, which projects
unequally at the sides and carries an additional bundle at each
extremity. The structure resembles a scarecrow with outstretched
arms, the longer of which has a small rod inserted into the bundle of
grass to indicate the direction of the grave. Suspended from the
other arm, a few feathers or light pieces of bark are allowed to sway
in the wind and thus serve to attract the attention of any passers-by.
When the body is to be placed upon a platform, it is carried, at the
conclusion of the preliminary mourning ceremonies, shoulder high by
the bereaved relatives to the place previously prepared for the
reception of the corpse. A couple of the men climb upon the platform
and take charge of the body, which is handed to them by those
remaining below. They carefully place it in position, and lay a few
branches over it, after which they again descend to join the
mourners. The platform is constructed of boughs and bark, which are
spread between the forks of a tree or upon specially erected pillars
of wood.
The Adelaide tribe used to tie the bodies of the dead into a sitting
position, with the legs and arms drawn up closely against the chest,
and in that position kept them in the scorching sun until the tissues
were thoroughly dried around the skeleton; then the mummy was
placed in the branches of a tree, usually a casuarina or a ti-tree.
Along the reaches of the River Murray near its mouth, the
mummification of the corpse was accelerated by placing it upon a
platform and smoking it from a big fire, which was kept burning
underneath; all orifices in the body were previously closed up. When
the epidermis peeled off, the whole surface of the corpse was thickly
bedaubed with a mixture of red ochre and grease, which had the
consistency of an ordinary oil-paint. A similar mummification process
is adopted by certain of the coastal tribes of north-eastern
Queensland.
The Larrekiya, Wogait, and other northern tribes smear red ochre
all over the surface of the corpse, prior to placing it aloft, in much the
same manner as they do when going to battle. The mourners,

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Everyday Resistance French Activism

in the 21st Century Bruno Frère Marc

Visual Activism in the 21st Century Art Protest and

Exploring Ibero-American Youth Cultures in the 21st

Cities of Change Addis Ababa Transformation Strategies

21st Century Economics Economic Ideas You Should Read

Mathematics in the 21st Century 2022 Edition Scientific

Rethinking Warfare in the 21st Century 1st Edition

Native America in the 21st Century 1st Edition Jerry

Corporate Sustainability in the 21st Century 1st

Based on a translation from the French language edition:

ISBN 978-3-030-18986-0 ISBN 978-3-030-18987-7 (eBook)

1 Introduction: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? 1

2 Undocumented Families and Political Communities:

3 From Indicting the Law to Conquering Rights: A Case-

4 Fighting for Poor People’s Rights in the French Welfare

5 The Plural Logics of Anti-Capitalist Economic

6 The Free Software Community: A Contemporary Space

7 Associations for the Preservation of Small-Scale Farming

8 Ordinary Resistance to Masculine Domination in a Civil

9 A Zone to Defend: The Utopian Territorial Experiment

10 “Politics Without Politics”: Affordances and Limitations

11 Is the “New Activism” Really New? 263

Sylvaine Bulle is Professor of Sociology at the National School of Paris

Bruno Frère is FNRS senior research associate and Professor at the

Introduction: Let a Thousand

Marc Jacquemain and Bruno Frère

The societies of Western Europe—“Old Europe”, as George W. Bush’s

© The Author(s) 2020 1

universal. Its emancipation was supposed to emancipate the whole of

example, by Hirschman (1982), invoking personal, selfish, reasons for

to free hidden reality from domination so as to better combat it (Boltanski

France provides a particularly rich and fascinating setting in which to observe

On the wide spectrum of social movements that can be classified as

How do these instances of resistance position themselves in relation to

The Pressures of NecessiTy

Urgency forced homosexual associations to totally reorient themselves,

level, necessity is omnipresent as a cause of engagement: it is, again, the

AN Ambiguous relATioNshiP To The sTATe

conservative states (such as Francoist Spain) appeared as clear adversaries

A cAPAciTy for subversioN?

desire for an environmentally-friendly form of production. But also

The DifficulTies of “PrAcTicAl uToPiA”

different forms of “occupation”. The ZAD occupies the site of a proposed

The accusations of “illegitimacy” levelled against each other by the

Stella Vinthagen and Anna Johansson (2013) in their impressive review of

(1) Everyday resistance is a practice (not a certain consciousness, intent,

As these two authors also note, everyday resistance is not necessarily

develop in empirical ignorance of effective forms of resistance: if it really is

Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or Recognition? London: Verso.

Undocumented Families and Political

Damien de Blic and Claudette Lafaye

Since 2004, hundreds of local committees linked together in a vast

D. de Blic (*) • C. Lafaye

© The Author(s) 2020 21

2008). While it is possible to identify the beginnings of selective policy as

sometimes in the same building, who the committee members discovered,

as researchers—when we learned that parents of students at our own chil-

EngagEmEnt anchorEd in thE Particularity

The moment of engagement was not usually prompted by reflection or fed

The story of engagement springing from one or more encounters with

thE format of critiquE: rEluctancE to gEnEralisE

When RESF members accompany families applying for regularisation or