Social statuses existed before the social sciences. When scholars began to develop this concept in the nineteenth century, they were drawing on the juridical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, more broadly, the vocabulary used by social groups to define themselves across time and space. From this moment forward, social statuses occupied a central position in the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These scholars were aiming to describe and explain the dynamics of human societies, but they also participated in framing the debates at the heart of the social sciences—as attested by the recurrent disputes between a Marxian notion of class and a Weberian conception of status groups, particularly among readers with tacit political motivations. Max Weber played a fundamental part in the success of the concept, taking the juridical aspect and the idea of society as a body, inherited from the ancien régime, and adding a specifically sociological content relating to the hierarchy of social prestige, which is neither directly inherited (as with castes) nor purely economic (as with classes). In truth, this definition was rarely applied stricto sensu by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but it did allow for the elaboration of a concept that could delimit groups of individuals sharing legal and symbolic characteristics within a given society, and that could incorporate the categories used by social actors themselves into historical analysis. Thus, during the 1960s, it was around the notion of status that interpretations of the ancien régime as a society of orders or a society of classes took shape, while anthropologists began to consider notions of emic and etic. From the 1980s, however, the concept of social status receded into the background as the idea of a global interpretation of society by the social sciences was called into question.

This article provides an overview of how humanism evolved into a “cultural movement” in Italy during the pivotal years between 1400 and 1430. It examines the very notion of “movement” as a specific and challenging concept for intellectual history. It also identifies a significant threshold effect that resulted from related memorial, sociological, and literary processes. The emergence of a collective consciousness grounded in a reflexive relationship to history, the development of practices and references connected to the creation of a dynamic form of sociability, and the establishment of several distinctive markers of inclusive identity all converged to produce a powerfully symbolic “space of possibles” based on the paradigm of the “return to antiquity.” The development of an enduring cultural phenomenon was at work through the circulation and interaction of ideas, social practices, and elements emerging from the collective imagination. This phenomenon flourished well beyond the works of the period’s major authors and created a certain “topicality.”

This article attempts to bring together religious history and the history of the public sphere. It proposes to reinterpret the historical significance of doctrinal controversies by examining the relationship between a regime of publicity and an ecclesiastic regime. For instance, seventeenth-century French theological controversies were characterized by the frequent publication of letters, which indicates just how strongly the religious legitimacy of a given controversy was called into question. The publication of letters appears to have offered a means of responding to the destabilization of publishing practice caused by these controversies. It also attests to both the religious refusal to transform the church into a public sphere and how the ecclesiastic aspect of doctrinal controversies made them difficult to resolve. The relationship between publicity and religion thus appears particularly relevant for both historians of early modern Catholicism and historians of the public sphere.

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

In recent years, a new historiographical trend has focused on archives not as mere repositories of sources, but as objects of inquiry in their own right. Particular attention has been paid to how their continually evolving organization and management reflect the political presuppositions of the institutions presiding over them. This article acknowledges this archival turn and provides an example drawn from the famous case study of the Venetian chancery between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, at a time of substantial developments in the management of archives. It proposes a more inclusive and socially contextualized approach in order to demonstrate that archives were not just tools of power but also sites of economic, social, and political conflict. A close reading of the very document that led to the institutional view of the Venetian archive as the “heart of the state” reveals that the patrician rulers worried about both the fragility of their archive and the reliability of the notaries in charge of it. This perspective helps to explain the exalted representation of the archive in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era—a representation that, taken at face value, continues to inspire historical analysis today—by illuminating the practical difficulties surrounding archival methods at the time. The history of archives emerges as a promising field of inquiry precisely because it can shed light on both the history of the state and the social context in which the state’s actions had to be negotiated.

Hispanic-American societies of the colonial period are traditionally described as being hierarchized along a system of racial classification. Indeed, the Spanish term casta has been translated as race for that very purpose. Considering both terms as synonymous, however, leads to a conflation of colonial categories and contemporary concepts, thus simplifying a highly complex and lengthy process.

This article focuses on the distinctly colonial elements that contributed to transforming a notion derived from nobiliary terminology into a science of phenotypes. The study of this visual culture and vocabulary, initially rooted in Mesoamerica, reveals the regional and interimperial dialogue that established a Euro-American space of shared conceptual creation.

This article focuses on the influx and circulation of foreign objects in the Soviet Union during the 1940s in order to investigate the specific role of these objects during World War II. It reveals how the distribution of humanitarian aid intersected with both the (non)recognition of the genocide of Soviet Jews during the Nazi occupation, and with Stalinist social hierarchies. It explains why erasing the origins and precise circumstances through which these objects entered Soviet homes could in turn be used to hide the abuses that the Red Army perpetrated against their defeated enemies. Finally, it revises the image of a Soviet society that discovered luxury and Western modernity for the first time during the war by reconsidering the place and the trajectories of these objects in Stalinist material culture of the interwar period.

Recent scholarship has often remarked on the opposition between two conceptions of Archaic Greek societies, relating either to a legal and static definition of status or to a notion of status as personal and fluid, linked to diversified strategies for obtaining social distinction. This article seeks to move beyond this opposition by examining the history of status groups in the Archaic period. After analyzing the key stages within the complex historiography devoted to this subject, it goes on to provide a history of status groups during the formative period of the city-states. The creation of new status groups was an essential feature of the city-states’ history and was primarily linked to indebtedness and war. Although statuses were collective and often imposed from the outside, they nevertheless display a historical development that is central to the formation of city-states. In the seventh century BCE, new groups were created in response to the aristocracy’s need for a workforce. The resulting conflict led to an evolution of the systems regulating access to land and food. This reorganization of entitlement, which was how communities responded to the social and economic crisis they faced, was in turn based on the creation of new status groups. Social conflict led to the definition of a new system of status groups.

This article investigates the working identities of slaves and freedmen involved in the economies of Roman ports between the first century BCE and the second century CE. Textual evidence (from manuscripts to more diverse epigraphic productions) reveals the great diversity that predominated within these social categories. This heterogeneity was related to the level of technical difficulty involved in the tasks that were performed and thus to workers’ professional skills, as was the case in other urban economies. Nevertheless, factors specific to port economies, particularly with regard to long-distance trade, were also important. The opposition between unskilled workers and trusted agents represents only a part of this broad spectrum. The complexity that can be observed lies in the lack of correspondence—or even the dissonance—between the legal, social, and work statuses of individuals.

To what extent was the Soviet state able to control (and oppose) the process of social exclusion and to what extent was Soviet society ready to integrate social outcasts? This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing the phenomenon of begging in the Soviet Union between the 1940s and the 1960s. The article begins by studying the phenomenon of begging as a reaction to poverty, serving as a survival strategy for the lower social classes who were excluded from society due to poor standards of living. A brief historical overview of the campaign to combat begging in the the USSR from the Revolution of 1917 until the mid-1950s shows both the continuity and shifting perspectives of state reaction to this social problem. This article also analyzes begging, which was an important social phenomenon in the USSR after World War II, through the specific biographies of actual beggars. The article concludes with an examination of the public discourse on poverty in the 1950s and early 1960s, which reveals how both society and the state viewed the issue.

Employing Norbert Elias’s notion of figuration and referring to models based on the relational nature of power (patron-client, entrepreneur and big-man relationships), this article highlights how the relationship between the elite and the lower classes played a crucial role in the establishment of local power in Rome. The high degree of social mobility amongst the Roman elite made the neighborhood a politically open space: an official list of the aristocracy’s members was not available until the eighteenth century, and the Statute of Rome (1580) simply defined eligible candidates for local offices as “illustrious men of the neighborhood.” In this context, strong territorial connections were key when it came to gaining local power. An interconnected network of relationships linked the lower classes and noble families vertically. Through judicial sources, notarial records, and account books, this article presents the highly personalized nature of exchanges between the elite and the lower classes in addition to the complex web of economic transactions and social relations which was essential to creating a local network of clients.

Prior to the massive wave of emigration to South America during the nineteenth century, inhabitants of rural communities in the western French Pyrenees emigrated in large numbers to Saint-Domingue and other Caribbean islands. This article examines the connections between migratory movements and the organization of these communities into “house societies” (Lévi-Strauss) in which the continuation of the “house” was paramount and no new “houses” could be founded. Adopting a microhistorical approach, it analyzes the complex role of inheritance rights in the decision to emigrate and reconstructs the networks that made emigration possible. Unlike the traditional belief that sons were forced to leave because they were deprived of their share of inheritance, the family unit fully supported the emigration of its younger members. This article also argues that emigration simultaneously resulted from and undermined the “house system.”

This article examines the cultural shaping (through film and theater) of urban identities in Gorna Džhumaja, a border city located in Pirin Macedonia, at the dawn of Socialism. In a region that was at the center of Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Greek national conflict, thus rendering its future unpredictable, the establishment of Socialism between 1944-1948 coincided with intense social and national engineering. Developments in the domains of cinema and theater offer a heuristic lens through which to view these processes, notably because of the educational and political role they were attributed. Exploring changes in the cultural environment, designated toponyms, and everyday life of cultural institutions offers new insight into the complex interplay between the pre-Socialist and Socialist periods. It also provides an oblique view of how the Socialist city was fashioned through theatrical tours and ambulant cinema. Socialism thus emerges, beyond sovietization, as a product of transnational circulation.

This article reconsiders the so-called “dangerous classes” by focusing on the historical origins of the Neapolitan camorra, one of the world’s major criminal organizations. In the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples, the term camorristi referred to marginalized individuals and extortionists who operated in prisons, gambling halls, and brothels. During the turbulent period of Italian unification, such figures were increasingly seen as belonging to a legendary, omnipotent, and influential sect: the camorra, an organized secret society with its own hierarchy, customs, and jargon. This image eventually permeated Italian society. This article examines the reasons behind this evolution by focusing on the (mainly literary) texts and (essentially political) dynamics behind it, which reveal a process of criminalization and folklorization. Such a discursive transformation had a major impact on the Italian collective imagination, one that persists today.

Philippe Bernardi’s Maître, valet et apprenti au Moyen Âge. Essai sur une production bien ordonnée, examines the traditional triptych of master craftsman, journeyman, and apprentice, considered to be characteristic of medieval production. By focusing on “work statuses,” Bernardi moves away from an overly narrow legal approach to social status, in which production tends to go largely unanalyzed or else is considered only in curtailed form—as in the model of the three orders where, applying solely to “those who work,” forms of production play only a minor role in social ordering. The originality of his approach lies in the way he constructs his object of study: work hierarchies. These are systematically addressed both in historical terms, on the basis of medieval archives (using the example of Provence in from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century), and in historiographical terms, by examining the models according to which these archives have been interpreted since the nineteenth century. Applying tools drawn from the history of science to medieval history, Bernardi thus uncovers the mechanisms that have shaped our knowledge of medieval society since the nineteenth century, showing that the master-journeyman-apprentice triptych is a representation originating in normative sources that has become a historiographical model, but which does not account for medieval production as it appears in sources relating to practice. Moving beyond this normative view, Bernardi shows that work statuses were mostly relational and functioned as a series of binary oppositions—a reality concealed behind a historiographical discourse woven not only through intellectual experience and critical thinking, but also by beliefs, values, and forms of activism.

Using contemporary accounts, letters drafted by former slaves, and the memoir written by Toussaint Louverture shortly before his death, this article attempts to recreate the language spoken by Haitian revolutionaries and, in particular, Toussaint Louverture. Detailed historical and linguistic analysis of these sources shows that Louverture wrote predominantly in French, only employed Kreyòl orally (especially when addressing a working-class audience), and rarely used the Ewe-Fon language of his Arada ancestors. His memoir suggests that Haitian Kreyòl, which some linguists think is derived from African languages, was more influenced by archaic, popular, or regional variants of French. Louverture’s preference for French also reinforces theses that describe him as a moderate figure inclined toward the European model.

The Lakota leader Sitting Bull was first buried on the Standing Rock reservation, only to be disinterred and re-buried sixty years later. A historical study of these graves leads less to the commemoration of a great man than an opportunity to reexamine colonialism within America. While American colonial power was a fragile one and challenged by some, it was also deeply rooted in the symbolic interactions that took place on and around the reservations, which involved depriving people of land, singling out certain segments of the population, and Americanizing people’s belief systems. While this attempt at internal colonization has been considered a massive failure due to the resistance of native populations, this article seeks to lend nuance to this interpretation and analyze the situation in all its complexity

In early modern Catholic Europe, certain theologians imagined and legitimized the possibility that one monopoly could be fought by an equal and opposite monopoly. Market dynamics were thus described in terms of the theory of resistance derived from political thought. During the Old Regime, it was necessary to defend the market and its actors from monopoly, which was associated with hoarding and meant to create scarcity and higher prices. A monopolist could be either a single merchant or a group of them, and there was no distinction between buyers and sellers who behaved in such a way. Monopolistic behavior was usually referred to as a “conspiracy,” which carried obvious political connotations. It was both a crime and a sin in addition to being considered an act of violence and one of the primary means of violating the principle of commutative justice. Nevertheless, many thought that it was morally acceptable to neutralize a monopolistic action with a similar one. This idea was not restricted to the field of theology and was also taken up by jurists. Thus, the market was no longer simply a place of rules and a forum where goods were valued, but also a space where it was possible to defend oneself against those who manipulated it by applying the very same criminal tactics.

This article examines two sets of private family archives and the diaries they contain. The authors included items from their own archives throughout their texts. What was their goal in inserting photographs, fragments of letters, official documents, and private papers into these texts? Can this practice shed light on the mechanisms of construction and preservation of family identity as well as on communication within families in the Soviet Union, a perspective that has otherwise remained inaccessible using other sources?

The result of a process begun in the nineteenth century, the French system of socio-professional classification (code des catégories socio-professionnelles) was drawn up between 1951 and 1954 and has only been slightly modified since. With no strong theoretical framework and conceived according to a realist approach, it gave substance to social classes in the description of postwar society. During a period of “reworking” (1978-1981), it became an exciting topic of sociological exploration, furnishing a representation of Pierre Bourdieu’s two-dimensional social space and serving as a laboratory for the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. In a subsequent period of “updating” (1995-2001), administrative caution regarding changes contrasted with the evolution of categories used in labor law and the goal of analytical purity underpinned by econometrics. The history of this classification details the peculiar position of a statistical tool for representing the social world, ostensibly static amidst constant changes to the institution that managed it, the actors who used it, the social categories—everyday or legal—to which it referred, and, finally, the sociological theories that gave it a conceptual grounding.