Social Movements And Protest In France

Contemporary France has witnessed a rise of new forms of social movement, mobilising around new causes and articulating changing demands. Sarah Waters examines the new generation of movements in the last decade, from anti-racism and the movement of the unemployed to solidarity or the associations of the 'Sans' . She argues that emerging movements share a profoundly civic dimension: these are movements about rights and are concerned with who has rights and what those rights are. They manifest a desire to reinvent citizenship in the present day in relation to a new set of social struggles and conflicts.

This lively textbook integrates theory and methodology and includes contemporary examples, case studies and debates to encourage critical engagement.

Explains the character of contemporary protest politics through a micro-mobilization analysis of participation in street demonstrations.

In the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s, France, like other European countries and the United States, was rocked by a new wave of social movements. The early development of a strong antinuclear movement during the 1970s made France the prototypical country for new social movements (NSMs). However, in the 1980s, these French NSMs experienced a strong decline. In this book, Jan Willem Duyvendak compares the surprising development of these NSMs in France—for peace, the environment, an end to nuclear technology, solidarity, squatters' rights, women's rights, and gay rights—to the development of similar campaigns in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Although all of these countries share more or less the same economic characteristics, they have different political traditions. Duyvendak finds that by the 1980s, the new social movements were weaker in France because of France's tradition of "old" political conflicts. He concludes that because France was still beset with political splits between center periphery and urban-country as well as religious and class strife, the development of French society during the 1980s took place at the expense of these new social movements

Using ethnographic field data from the Larzac plateau in Southern France, Alexander and Sonia Alland document one of the longest and most successful popular protests in modern French history - the Larzac movement. More than a record of events, the book describes the transformation from the early 1970s of rural defiance into a symbol of left-wing action for France and the world. This revised edition examines the activities of the movement since 1995, including the demonstrations at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation, the 'great hamburger war' against McDonalds, and the broadening of the movement to embrace struggles elsewhere, such as the anti-nuclear protests in French Polynesia. Particular attention is paid to the charismatic Jose Bove, who has become the figurehead and focus of the campaign during this period. This account will be of particular interest to anthropologists and historians of contemporary France and Europe as well as students of protest and social movements, and of contemporary politics in general

Bringing together over forty established and emerging scholars, this landmark volume is the first to comprehensively examine the evolution and current practice of social movement studies in a specifically European context. While its first half offers comparative approaches to an array of significant issues and movements, its second half assembles focused national studies that include most major European states. Throughout, these contributions are guided by a shared set of historical and social-scientific questions with a particular emphasis on political sociology, thus offering a bold and uncommonly unified survey that will be essential for scholars and students of European social movements.

"Supporting a Movement for Health and Health Equity" is the summary of a workshop convened in December 2013 by the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity and the Elimination of Health Disparities and the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement to explore the lessons that may be gleaned from social movements, both those that are health-related and those that are not primarily focused on health. Participants and presenters focused on elements identified from the history and sociology of social change movements and how such elements can be applied to present-day efforts nationally and across communities to improve the chances for long, healthy lives for all. The idea of movements and movement building is inextricably linked with the history of public health. Historically, most movements - including, for example, those for safer working conditions, for clean water, and for safe food - have emerged from the sustained efforts of many different groups of individuals, which were often organized in order to protest and advocate for changes in the name of such values as fairness and human rights. The purpose of the workshop was to have a conversation about how to support the fragments of health movements that roundtable members believed they could see occurring in society and in the health field. Recent reports from the National Academies have highlighted evidence that the United States gets poor value on its extraordinary investments in health - in particular, on its investments in health care - as American life expectancy lags behind that of other wealthy nations. As a result, many individuals and organizations, including the Healthy People 2020 initiative, have called for better health and longer lives.

This lucid and wide-ranging survey is the first study in English to identify a distinctive urban phase in the history of the early modern crowd. Through close analysis of the behaviour of protesters and authorities in more than fifteen seventeenth-century French cities, William Beik explores a full spectrum of urban revolt from spontaneous individual actions to factional conflicts, culminating in the dramatic Ormee movement in Bordeaux. The 'culture of retribution' was a form of popular politics with roots in the religious wars and implications for future democratic movements. Vengeful crowds stoned and pillaged not only intrusive tax collectors but even their own magistrates, whom they viewed as civic traitors. By examining in depth this interaction of crowds and authorities, Professor Beik has provided a central contribution to the study of urban power structures and popular culture.