This article illustrates the impact of environmental protection measures on social attitudes and political behaviour in rural France through the prism of hunting. Fieldwork was conducted in France's second largest wetland, La Brière Regional Natural Park. Locals mobilize a claimed tradition of hostility toward a vaguely defined 'them' in order to protect their rural and collective rights. The European Union and the European ruling class have become another face of the threat against the rural way of life of the local working class. As this population felt growing pressure from industrial economic impoverishment and a rural sociability crisis, support for the pro-countryside political party 'Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions' rose. This article depicts hunters' growing concern over EU directives for the conservation of wild migratory birds, and then examines the mobilization and discourse of locals against some aspects of the policy of nature conservation.

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Pour appréhender la complexité des attitudes politiques en milieux populaires dans la période contemporaine, période marquée par un affaiblissement des organisations de représentation des mondes ouvriers, il est fécond de passer par l’observation de pratiques sociales qui ne semblent pas directement politiques, à l’instar des activités liées aux loisirs. À partir d’une enquête menée auprès d’un groupe de chasseurs, pour la plupart salariés de l’industrie, cet article analyse le passage à l’action collective d’individus qui sont d’ordinaire exclus de la scène politique. Il montre ainsi comment les nouvelles réglementations européennes conduisent à la politisation d’une activité sociale. La démarche ethnographique permet plus largement d’éclairer certains aspects, à la fois pratiques et symboliques, du rapport des classes populaires au politique. La mise en évidence d’éléments de permanence et de transformation d’une certaine conflictualité ouvrière conduit en particulier à nuancer l’image d’une démobilisation massive de ces milieux.

Partisan Work among the Working-Class and Labour Modes of Social Relations: Local Observations of the Communist Politicisation Julian Mischi The implantation of political parties simultaneously contributes to structuring collective practices in labour communities and to hiding them, as party actions bring along both homogenisation and compétition. While it is useful to analyse parties within the social groups that back them, it is just as essential to distinguish between activist modes of social relations and overall working-class modes of social relations. The analysis of the French Communist Party (PCF) in local areas highlights the ways in which the party works towards the émergence of labour modes of social relations, which in turn transform the party's own forms of expression. Though the party makes great use of control tools and ensures that the partisan link takes precedence over other forms of social relations, the Communist party must take into account working class forms of social relations at the local level, which can escape its control, even in communist strongholds. A socio-historical approach, moreover, shows that a crisis in traditional solidarity networks (familial, territorial or professional) can have positive repercussions for the PCF which then appears as an ideological vehicle for maintaining that threatened social cohesion.

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