How Do Rural Popular Groups Mobilized? Investigation about Local Resistances Against the Closings of Classes in the French Context

The contemporary reform of the State, in France as in other democratic countries, has various implications on the lifestyles of the populations. It induces for example a reduction of the school offer in the rural contexts. For mainly economic reasons, the pupils are concentrated in the same schools - “school poles” - which often constrain the families with important daily displacements. In parallel, this school concentration induced the closing of proximity small schools of campaign. Then changes of the public services of education are often the occasion of collective actions protesters which enable to question, in an exemplary way, the relationships of the civil society and the State to the prism of these collective resistances. Empirical investigations were conducted on this question in French rural spaces. The ethnographic investigation is based on observations (close to the institutions and social groups), with about forty interviews (with varied elected members, different administrative officers, and parents of various social backgrounds, militants or not), on archives (administrative and from associations of parents). From these materials and by comparing different cases (closing of class or not, maintenance of closing or reopening further to local mobilizations, etc), this study underlines how particularly marginalized groups as the rural popular groups can attempt to resist collectively to the political reforms and the under State control power by taking support on the experiences of their daily life. The analysis of the release of these mobilizations, dynamics of their progress (repertoire of action, etc), and their conditions of success (or failure) shows that the most deprived populations as the rural popular families succeed to be opposed collectively to the State only while being combined with other more favored social groups (like farmers or teachers) and leaning on political supports (local elected members).