SOCIOLOGY. “French Youth”, by Fabien Truong
For five years, Fabien Truong roamed the suburbs of the Republic as a high school teacher. He saw students with the same learning difficulties, the same hopes of social ascent through school and, often, the same disappointments. For another five years therefollowing, he regularly followed the careers of some twenty students, children of handlers, workers or grocers born in the suburbs to mostly immigrant parents.
He then not only questioned them regarding their school trajectory. Self-presentation, family support, odd jobs that can or cannot be found, friendships that are made at the library or religious values are just as important. The sociologist describes the way in which these students construct a “dignity badge” likely to be opposed to the stigma of their origin. The tricks are permanent to hide the lack of money or the reluctance to drink alcohol when you go out in the evening with comrades. Religion is often an ally of success when it helps to enter into the asceticism of body and mind made necessary by this total experience that is social mobility.
The interest of the survey is to introduce us almost physically into the lives of these young people. We understand, for example, their need to build groups of peers who can protect them from the frequent disappointments that studies bring. Progressing in understanding the relationship they have with the school, Fabien Truong concludes his book on a pessimistic note. By favoring the most economically “profitable” paths, young people from the suburbs also expose themselves to job insecurity and domination in their future life. The school of the Republic has lost, according to him, the battle it is waging once morest the “economic realism”. Mr. Bn
“French Youth. Bac + 5 made in the suburbs”, by Fabien Truong, La Découverte, “Pocket”, 320 p., €12.50.
HISTORY. «S. P. Q. R.», by Mary Beard
The enigma that “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, to use the classic formula of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), has long obsessed the historians of ancient Rome. Such is not the case of Mary Beard in this vast panorama where she rather intends to report, from the most recent knowledge, on this other mystery, no less tough: the transformation of“a perfectly ordinary little village” at the center of the world, and the extraordinary longevity of an empire that shaped three continents. A program that the British historian accomplishes with joyful virtuosity and rigor. Fl. Go
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