Books & ideas

Through the Dusty Window of a Furnished Room

Jean-François Laé — 2025-11-18T08:30:00Z

Condensing the history of migration into the space of five buildings in the industrial suburb of Saint-Denis, Fabrice Langrognet gives voice to unexpected archives. These tell us much about the coexistence of multiple and diverse foreigners united by precarity and uncertainty.

The Language of Exclusion in Medieval Europe

Julien Le Mauff — 2025-09-25T07:00:00Z

Drawing on textual sources and the history of language, Jean-Louis Roch highlights the ambivalence of charity in the Middle Ages and traces the desacralization of the figure of the poor at the dawn of modernity.

The Poor of the Ancien Régime

Jean-François Laé — 2024-11-07T08:52:00Z

Under the Ancien Régime, salaries were not enough to live on. Many people had to combine activities to make ends meet. Laurence Fontaine paints a vivid picture of this reality.

The Police Between Violence and Literature

Christian Chevandier — 2024-11-05T08:00:00Z

Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city's lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.

Towards a consumer society

Danièle Fraboulet — 2023-10-17T07:00:00Z

Rising salaries and greater recourse to selling on credit, along with the First World War, transformed working-class consumption habits between 1880 and 1920. While covering topics ranging from deprivation to appropriation, a new book proposes to trace the “social lives of objects.”

Verify and punish

Nicolas Duvoux — 2023-04-19T12:29:21Z

Increased eligibility checks by social welfare agencies have led to greater severity towards low-income, economically insecure populations, as the sociologist Vincent Dubois shows thanks to a unique synthesis of different critical traditions in the social sciences.

Climate Hope

Pierre André — 2022-11-10T12:37:46Z

Even though scientific data give us grounds for pessimism, philosopher Darrel Moellendorf shows that hoping for climate justice is not vain. To mobilize hope, he puts mass mobilization, technological progress and realistic utopia forward.

Classes without wealth

Nicolas Duvoux & Senmiao Yang — 2022-09-14T07:43:39Z

As inflation takes its toll on household budgets, asset reserves will make all the difference. How will those who do not possess them manage? There is an urgent need to address the measure of this structural inequality across social classes and age groups.

The Seeds of Inequality

Georges Felouzis & Barbara Fouquet-Chauprade — 2021-07-12T07:00:00Z

Poverty and great social inequality are being created at this very moment in the routines of small children. Talking, eating, socializing, taking care of oneself, keeping oneself clean, dressing, obeying, and learning: children's sociological future is determined by the adoption of even the most trivial of habits.

Delhi, a Bourgeois City

Marie-Hélène Zérah — 2021-05-31T07:00:00Z

Efforts to make Delhi a “global” city have gone hand in hand with the destruction of nature and the commons, as well as the relegation of the poor to the periphery. The development of this metropolis attests to the urgency to reconcile ecological justice and social justice.