ABSTRACT
Christian Chevandier has written a history of occupations, a history of professional groups, and a “history of men and women working in France in the industrial era”. Given that cultural history, as a social history of representations, is a kind of social history, he wonders if this social history is in a way a cultural history. The quantitative dimension was primordial in his 1991 thesis, devoted to railway repair workshop employees near the city of Lyon from the turn of the century until nationalization in 1947. But the central subject, with representations taking an essential place, actually fell somewhat into the category of cultural history. Later, he wrote the biography of a novelist, an unusual task for a social historian who deems the quantitative approach to be essential. Of course, his research is a cultural history one, as it is also a political one. However, he believes that for a social history of labor, that is to say, a history of working men and women, it is with economic history and history of technology that contacts would be more fruitful.
