ABSTRACT
This chapter understands how 'ordinary' citizens perceive their citizen role. The theoretical definition of citizenship concentrates too much on the relationship between citizen and government. The citizen has inherited his citizenship from his ancestors just like the rest of his patrimony. The word citizen has two antonyms: outsider – someone who does not belong to any political community, and subject – someone who belongs to a political community but not a democratic one. The concept of the family as far as the 'scrupulous' model is concerned is to all intents and purposes quite different from the family which is the basis of the 'inherited' citizenship model. The 'scrupulous' model reminds us in many respects of the conception of society that Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed in the Social Contract. The people interviewed cannot simply be slotted into one category or the other – with is rather fortunate, otherwise the tensions that exist within French society would be insurmountable.
