In 1990, Jacques Revel, then editor of Annales, wrote to me that an article I had submitted to the journal had provoked the most bitter debate in the history of the editorial board. In the end, the committee rejected it and I published it the following year, in the Journal of Social History (1991): "Social and geographic mobility in early modern France". As soon as the article appeared, French colleagues, especially Alain Croix and Jean-Pierre Poussou, began to argue the "mobility-sedentariness" question in modern French society. The annalists' basic documentation, underlining an immobile society, was civil status, and especially endogamy rates. But if we interrogated other sources - tax rolls, registers of domicile transfers (Normandy, Champagne), fire research (Burgundy) - what would be the answer? Foucault has highlighted the rupture that exists in the modern era between descriptions of society by modern elites, who emphasize mobility - which they fear - and the reality of an immobile society. Naturally, he drew on the data of the best specialists of his time: the annalists. But what if the annalists were wrong? If modern France, as the elites of the time claimed, really was a mobile society, what then of Foucault's analysis of the birth of the repressive society?
11:00 - 12:00
