About

A quarterly publication founded in 1960 by Jean Maitron, and headed from 1971 to 1982 by Madeleine Rébérioux, Le Mouvement Social is published with the collaboration of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and distributed in coordination with the Centre National du Livre. From its founding to 2007, the Éditions Ouvrières (later Éditions de l’Atelier) published the journal and the eponymous book series started in 1972. In a new stage of its publishing life, the Mouvement Social is now printed by the Éditions de La Découverte.

Le Mouvement Social addresses recent developments in social history. The journal’s initial focus on the history of collective movements and professional organizations has since been broadened to include other fields of social history and beyond: the history of labor and the economy; the social history of politics, policy and the state; cultural history and the history of representations; the history of gender relations, immigration and mobility. The journal covers the contemporary period broadly defined, from the first years of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first.

The journal’s objective is to promote a pluralist social history, located at the intersection of the economy, sociology, ethnography, anthropology, demography, political science, and the law, all of which offer avenues of approach and analytic tools. One of its missions is to foster interdisciplinary dialogue.

The journal welcomes studies dealing with all geographic and cultural fields. Keeping with recent historiographic developments, Le Mouvement Social promotes comparative studies as well as works treating foreign countries, especially those varying the scale of observation between the local and the global.

Finally, Le Mouvement Social remains a locus of contest and debate on a large range of social-scientific approaches and historiographical renewals. To this end the section “Controversies” allows dialogue between perspectives generated by a recent work or issue (recent examples: 14-18, Rediscovering the War, the history of black people in France, etc.).

Past Theme Issues:

  • Women and Transformations in Work in Japan, no.210 (January 2005)
  • The Organization of the Intellectual Professions, no.214 (January 2006)
  • Service Relations: Trades, Public Services, and Unions, no.216 (October 2006)
  • Culture and Politics (April 2007)
  • Investigating War (January 2008)
  • Crafting Authority in Nineteenth-century France (April 2008)
  • Refugees (October 2008)

All new issues of Le Mouvement Social are now available online simultaneously on CAIRN and on Project MUSE.