Suicide as Protest in the French Workplace

Abstract

France has experienced a sharp rise in work-related suicides in the 2000s with unprecedented numbers of workers choosing to kill themselves in the face of severe pressures at work. Drawing on testimonial material linked to recent suicide cases, this article examines the ‘social meanings’ of these suicides as defined by suicidal individuals themselves. Suicide and its causes have long been a central preoccupation of French theorists since Emile Durkheim's Le Suicide (1897). Recent suicides share a communicative, expressive and vindictive purpose and seem to contradict Durkheim's classic sociological definition of suicide. In a context of deteriorating working conditions and a collapse of collective forms of mobilisation, recent suicides may represent a new and extreme form of protest.