Les Associations d’élèves et d’étudiants: Entre socialisation et apprentissages (XVIe – XXe siècle)

Abstract

This volume—the fruit of academic conferences held in 2015 and 2016—includes eleven essays on the history of student networks, associations and institutions between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. It is organized around three broad themes (socialization, apprenticeship and agency) and is presented in three sections: the first focusing on student associations attached to early modern collèges, the second on student life ‘between school and city’ and the last on professionally oriented student and alumni networks. Throughout the volume, the authors emphasize ways in which student life is at once oriented towards the world beyond the schoolyard walls and, at the same time, operates at a distance from that world’s broader social relations. Sharing in an emerging historiographical trend, the contributors to this volume try to move beyond the prescriptive decrees and normative regulations imposed upon students, hoping to understand better the students’ own experiences, expectations, ambitions and actions. In general, this leads them to focus on venues that operated on the ‘margins’ of schools, arenas in which students organized, governed or regulated themselves, often with the sanction of political and pedagogical authorities (explicit or otherwise). As ‘organs of autoregulation’, these associations allowed students to articulate and enforce collective values, norms and goals.