Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La cause du peuple

1998; Presses de Sciences Po; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3406/xxs.1998.2753

1950-6678

Michelle Perrot,

Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender

The People's Cause, Michelle Perrot. The idea of direct intervention, which goes back to Early Modem times and thrived during the Enlightenment, is at the root of political commitment. It remained, however, restricted in scope and more attentive to he rights of Man than to social concerns. In the course of the nineteenth-century, by contrast, the social question came to the fore as writers tended to eulogize the People. But the autonomy of the workers movement, readily anti-intellectual, confined nineteenth-century writers to the secondary role of "road companions", which in turn freed them for the task of upholding justice, as in the Dreyfus Affair. All these mutations, of causes, actors, projects and behaviors, outlined complex configurations reflecting changes in attitudes to time, to space and to ways of envisioning the future. Nineteenth-century experiences help us to better understand the various forms, both fleeting and vigorous, of contemporary commitents.